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Rediscovering Buddhism for Everyday Life

Rediscovering Buddhism for Everyday Life An Unfinished Investigation into the Language of Buddhism Making Buddhist teachings easier to approach in modern everyday life, one misunderstood word at a time. How This Investigation Began For many years, I read Buddhist teachings without recognizing how much my understanding was being shaped by the ordinary meanings of familiar words. I encountered emptiness and thought of nothingness. With my mathematical background, the empty set immediately came to mind. I encountered no-self and wondered whether the Buddha was telling me that I did not exist. I encountered aimlessness and wondered how anyone could practice Buddhism without the goal of enlightenment. I encountered right view , right speech , and right action and wondered who had decided what was right and wrong. If these judgments were already established, what was left for me to investigate? The difficulty was not necessarily with the teachings. Often, I had brought assumptions into t...
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Emptiness: Empty of what?

Why a familiar English word can become an obstacle to understanding Buddhism. I have spent much of my life reading mathematics, science, philosophy, and spiritual literature. Yet when I began studying Buddhism seriously, some of the most ordinary-looking words became surprisingly difficult: emptiness, no-self, suffering, aimlessness, signlessness. I wondered why ideas that eventually seemed so close to direct experience were initially hidden behind words that suggested something quite different. This is the first chapter of an unfinished investigation into those words. I am not proposing new Buddhist doctrines. I am trying to notice what a modern reader thinks a word means, examine what the Buddhist texts actually say, and then ask whether the teaching can be observed in ordinary life. The first misunderstanding: nothing is there When I have asked people what emptiness means, an answer I have heard is simple: there is nothing. This is understandable. We see an empty room, an empty sh...
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Intention, Silence, and the Mind That Continues Working

Intention, Silence, and the Mind That Continues Working For some time I have been experimenting with something very simple: form a clear intention, and then become silent. I did not initially think of this as a method. I noticed it in different situations at different times—while searching for something I had lost, struggling with a difficult chess position, facing a technical problem that seemed beyond me, and more recently while trying to remember dreams. Only gradually did I begin to see a common pattern. Intention → effort → reaching the limit of deliberate thought → silence → something sometimes emerges. I want to emphasize the word sometimes . This is not a technique that produces answers with 100 percent precision. Nor do I know exactly what is happening. That uncertainty is precisely why it interests me. The Recent Dream Experiment Recently I developed a strong intention to remember my dreams. For a long time dreams could disappear within seconds of waking. ...
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The Mind-Created Universe

The Unfinished Investigation A documented inquiry into mind, self, consciousness, suffering and freedom Why This Exists For much of my life I have been looking for something I loosely called truth . I did not always know what I meant by that word. At first the search moved through books, science, mathematics, literature, poetry and philosophy. Later it moved through yoga, pranayama, kundalini practices, meditation, dreams, lucid dreaming, yoga nidra, different spiritual traditions and increasingly direct observation of my own mind. For many years I was searching for answers. Eventually something changed. I began questioning not only the answers, but also the mind producing the answers . Then I began questioning the observer of that mind. Later I began questioning the assumption that there was an independent observer or controller at all. This blog is a record of that movement. It is unfinished because the investigation is unfinished. This Is Not a Teaching I am not writing this as a gu...
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