Crossing Nebraska

My previous post closed with a story that I hope conveys reasonably well a couple of things: that truth is accessible to all of us every moment of every day, and that we often need to step out of our respective comfort zones and habitual ways of seeing in order to recognize it. I suspect that each of you can relate similar circumstances under which you found yourself spontaneously experiencing a state of wonder, transcendence, and unity – where you felt most deeply your connection with the earth, your sense of kinship with all life, and your absolute certainty of being an integral part of a vast and mysterious universe. Such experiences – ineffable as, in large part, they are – often leave us grasping for words borrowed from whatever religious tradition that we are most familiar with. Thus, an experience that one person might consider marked by the unmistakable presence of God, another might describe as an instance of finally seeing the world through the eyes of their true self. While...

With so much being written about Buddhism these days, it would seem difficult to find someone who doesn’t have at least a passing familiarity with such concepts as impermanence and emptiness . The teaching that undergirds these two, however – namely, dependent origination – is far less well known and almost certainly less well understood. In the most general sense, dependent origination conveys the reality that absolutely every “thing” that comes into being owes its existence to myriad causes and conditions, constantly in flux, that form the ground from which and the environment into which that “thing” arises. A number of Buddhist teachings expound upon this reality within the context of helping us understand the process by which suffering arises – thereby helping us understand its cessation. The so-called twelve-fold chain of dependent origination is a detailed description of this process. I’ll be exploring this chain in greater detail in a future post. For now, though, I’m merel...