December 21, 2022
The Ocean, the Waves, and What Is Real
El océano, las olas y lo que es real
This session explores the distinction between raw sensory experience, mental activity, and the underlying presence in which both appear. Through meditation and dialogue, the teacher guides students to recognize how the mind's map-making becomes mistaken for primary reality, and how simply noticing this inversion can dissolve suffering and shift identity. Students share personal experiences of gradually seeing through fear, loosening attachment to thought, and the paradox of calling some things "real" and others "not real."
meditation
The Ocean and the Waves
This meditation invites you to distinguish between raw sensory experience and the mind's activity, revealing a vast, quiet presence beneath your thoughts.
dialogue
The Con Man Under the Bed
A student shares how the gradual falling away of questions and the simple act of seeing have begun to dissolve a lifelong pattern of terror, and the teacher responds with a map of what is primary, secondary, and tertiary in experience.
dialogue
Seeing Through the Con Man
A student reflects on recognizing that the mind is not the primary reality, and the teacher explores how this recognition produces a natural shift in identity and disidentification from ego.
dialogue
The Map and the Raw Experience
A student describes the shift from thinking to sensing the environment during meditation, and asks how to move beyond the mental map of that experience into something more fundamental.
dialogue
The Map and the Territory
A student asks about the shift from conceptual mapping to direct experience, and the teacher clarifies that the practice is simply noticing the difference between raw sensation and thought about sensation.
teaching
The Question of Identity
The teacher explores how we habitually identify with thought rather than with the awareness in which thought appears, and proposes that suffering arises from believing we are something we are not.
dialogue
The Gold and the Ring
A question about whether it makes sense to call some things "real" and others "not real," and how the teaching language of levels of reality relates to direct experience.