December 6, 2023
Nowhere to Get To: Presence, Risk, and True Nature
Ningún lugar al que llegar: Presencia, riesgo y verdadera naturaleza
This session begins with a guided meditation on the theme that there is nowhere to get to, emphasizing welcoming discomfort and surrendering strategies of resistance. The dialogues explore a student's retreat experience including being laid off, navigating career change through risk-taking rather than avoidance, and progressively deeper inquiries into the nature of freedom, identity, and direct knowing beyond conceptual belief systems.
meditation
Nowhere to Get To
A gentle invitation to stop striving and instead welcome everything you feel, discovering that what you are looking for is already here.
dialogue
Getting Laid Off on Retreat
A student shares their experience at a silent meditation retreat, where they encountered deeper presence, watched emotions arise and pass, and received the news of being laid off mid-retreat.
dialogue
The Fear of Choosing Wrong
A question about navigating career change and the apparent tension between deepening in presence and taking bold action in one's professional life.
dialogue
Knowing Freedom from Strategies About Freedom
A question about what it means to "know" what will bring freedom, and how that very knowing can become a strategy of avoidance.
dialogue
What Can Be Known More Deeply Than Anything Else
The teacher describes how direct experiential knowing surpasses all conceptual belief systems, and how deepening intimacy with the present moment reveals a reality more certain than any ordinary perception.
teaching
Falling Into What You Are
A reflection on how releasing resistance can lead to a direct knowing of one's true nature, beyond the familiar story of identity.
dialogue
Words Cannot Say What We Are
A question about the impossibility of capturing who we are in language, and the effortless nature of falling into what we truly are.
dialogue
The Hallucination of Knower and Known
A student asks the teacher to describe what is meant by "intimacy" in the context of direct experience, prompting an exploration of how thought creates the illusion of a separate knower and a known.
teaching
No Center, No Separation
A reflection on how the sense of "I" loses its position as a fixed center and becomes just another appearance within experience.
dialogue
The Center Is Just Another Thought
A question about whether experience has a center, and what lies beyond belief.
dialogue
Beliefs, Experience, and What Lies Beyond
A question about how to uncover beliefs we don't know we hold, leading into an exploration of the relationship between experience and being.
dialogue
The Treasure in the Fear of Death
A question about the shift that occurs when the self is seen as thought, and how that recognition changes one's relationship to death and fear.
teaching
The Treasure Hidden in Fear
A reflection on how complete intimacy with fear and pain is the doorway to lasting freedom, and how the process of letting go of who we think we are mirrors the experience of dying.