March 12, 2025
The Promise, the Sword, and Not Knowing
La promesa, la espada y el no saber
This session explores the tension between the genuine promise of awakening and the mind's tendency to project that promise into the future as a goal to achieve. Through dialogues with students, the teacher examines how identification with a constructed self perpetuates suffering, and how resting in not-knowing—rather than clinging to certainty—opens the door to genuine freedom. Themes of presence, the illusion of becoming, and responding to life with curiosity rather than fixed beliefs weave throughout.
meditation
The Promise and the Sword
A meditation on letting go of how we think resolution should look and learning to savor exactly what is here right now.
dialogue
The Pull of the Familiar
A student shares about physical tension arising in meditation, which opens into a wider exploration of how the compulsion to "become" something or "fix" ourselves perpetuates suffering, and how seeing through the illusion of a solid self is different from replacing one identity with another.
dialogue
The Farmer's Horse
A student reflects on the compulsion to identify problems and fix them, especially in parenting, and how the humility of not-knowing opened a new way of moving through life.
teaching
The Power of Seeing What Is False
A reflection on how genuine breakthroughs arise not from accumulating knowledge, but from recognizing and questioning unexamined assumptions.
dialogue
Surfing the Wave You're On
A student reflects on praying from a place of not-knowing, and the teacher explores how projecting beliefs onto reality creates suffering, using the metaphor of surfing to illustrate the difference between controlling and responding.
dialogue
The Fear of Death and Knowing Without Experience
A student who practices improv draws parallels between the freedom of performance and spiritual freedom, leading to a deeper inquiry into the fear of death and whether awareness depends on experience.