April 26, 2023
What It Is Made Of: Discernment and Choice
De qué está hecho: Discernimiento y elección
A guided meditation on noticing the pull of attention into thought and recognizing the awareness within which all experience arises, followed by dialogues exploring the difference between practice and recognition. Later exchanges examine free choice, ethics, intuition, and how a feeling of certainty often signals conditioning rather than genuine discernment.
meditation
What It Is Made Of
An invitation to notice what knows your experience—the still awareness holding every sensation, thought, and feeling as they arise.
dialogue
The Luxury of Being Guided
A student expresses gratitude for the teaching, describing the experience as being driven through incredible terrain.
dialogue
The Substance That Contains Everything
A student describes an experience in meditation of perceiving one substance that contains all thoughts, emotions, and sensations, and the teacher explores the difference between the practice of focused observation and the recognition of what lies beyond practice.
teaching
The Anatomy of a Free Choice
A reflection on how decisions arise, distinguishing between conditioned, automatic choosing and the free choice that seems to come from beyond the mind.
dialogue
Discernment, Choice, and the Heart
A question about whether discernment is a quality of consciousness, and how free choice can arise when there is no separate self to choose.
teaching
Ethics Before the Mind
A reflection on how genuine ethical choice arises not from fixed rules but from a living discernment in each moment, pointing beyond identification with the purely instinctual self.
dialogue
Certainty as a Warning Sign
A student involved in street outreach describes the tension between rule-based ethical reasoning and present-moment responsiveness, and the teacher reflects on how a feeling of certainty can signal conditioning rather than discernment.
teaching
Two Kinds of Intuition
A reflection on the two aspects of intuition: one arising from the mind's vast pattern-matching power, and another that seems to arrive from beyond the mind entirely.
dialogue
When Intuition Feels Certain, It Probably Isn't
A student asks the teacher to clarify why a feeling of certainty about one's own intuition is a sign that it may not be genuine intuition.
teaching
The Difference Between Knowing and Identified Knowing
A reflection on how identification with certainty differs from the open, intuitive knowing that comes with trust, risk, and uncertainty.