Let’s briefly review what happened here: from the perspective of Jim Bootman, he has just transformed a peripheral formation, something that popped up and situated itself between him and his anxiety. Should we climb up upon this accomplishment, throw our hats into the air, jump up and down, hoot and holler, pull out our revolvers…
The line between the simple recognition of what is happening right now, and transformative insight that radically restructures what can happen right now, is non-existent. No line! No difference! Your darling mind does not care what falls under the gaze of loving awareness. Awareness has no agenda. That is its superpower. But even your mischievous…
Progress In time, George Reginald Bootman the Third, Jim for short, enters into a phase we shall call progress. This is a very, very superficial designation. It is not that, from our perspective as outside observers, familiarization wasn’t progress. It is that before Jim began to practice with his internal formation, his point of reference…
Gather round, gather round! I will tell you a story. I heard it from the old turnip-seller down at the market. It is the kind of story that walks from mouth to mouth, from village to village, from time long past to time unforeseen. Maybe you have heard it before, maybe not. It is the…
So the question is, how would I or Jim Bootman establish sufficient conditions for the harmonization of the Seven Factors of Awakening right here in the face of afflicted consciousness arising in my everyday life? When you first start meditating, you can hardly sit for thirty seconds without your mind drifting to the thought of…
From the framework that we’ve explored so far, it looks as if present moment experience is determined entirely by which seeds are currently active. If we were to continue along this line of thought, it would be natural to assume that the configuration of the next moment would be determined solely by what seeds are…
You can’t directly introspect into store consciousness, so you will not be able to see for yourself exactly the structure of the seeds. Instead, you can use awareness to investigate phenomena in the present moment and see what they consist of. If you do this consistently you may come to the conclusion that the Yogacarins…
At the most basic level, everything we experience is the transformation of consciousness. The mind is a kind of soup of phenomena arising and subsiding. That flux itself is classified as transformation of mode: seeds are ripening into dharmas (experienced phenomena) and at the same time phenomena are being resown as seeds. There is nothing…
The idea that our conscious experience is under-lied by an enduring substrate is a natural extension of Mundane Right View and the insight into the selfless nature of the five skandhas. Practically speaking, in the Buddhism of the Nikayas, there is no need for further discussion after the cessation of rebirth at the attainment of…
In Tibetan Buddhism there is a notion of preliminary practices that precede deep looking meditation, or in the case of that tradition, tantric practices. I don’t exactly subscribe to that school of thought, but I think there is some basic wisdom in it. First of all, the formulations of deep looking meditation need a certain…
