Best Of

I was reading Only Fear Dies by Barry Long. It was an interesting book, the early chapters were about how personality is formed by mimicking the responses of parents in childhood and how emotional pain forms almost a separate kind of body inside one’s energy.

It reminded me a lot of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, which contains a lot of similar ideas, which is not surprising because Eckhart Tolle learnt from Barry Long at one point in his career as a spiritual teacher.

Later chapters in the book contain a history of the world in terms of the mind of unhappiness. Barry holds that primitive man was a lot happier and largely free from likes and dislikes, and that the rational mind evolved almost like a parasite and contains a powerful mechanism taking it towards unhappiness.

@Jeroen said:
I had a dream… I was sitting in a train which was going fast, and the desire arose in me to see the train from the outside… so suddenly there was a view from the side of the train, several hundred yards away, watching the train rushing past… and suddenly I realised my body was still on the train! I became aware that the watcher was not the body.

This reminds me of our ever-present friend Awareness

Awareness is fundamentally non-conceptual before thinking splits experience into subject and object. It is empty and so can contain everything, including thought. It is boundless. And amazingly it is intrinsically knowing.

@RobinH said:
Interesting. Since I started readig about Buddhism again I'm having a series of dreams in which I go on trips or interact with people from my past in casual manners. I wonder how Buddhists interpret dreams. Are they useful in diagnosing what weighs on one's mind more or should one just let them go on the spot?

I think dreams are significant, that they have something to tell us. It is said in Buddhism that dreams can give one insight into ones karma, among other things.

True. We spend so much energy trying to fix the world back into that old 'comfort-zone' version, but that ship has sailed. Realizing the practice is actually built for the chaos, not just for the quiet moments, makes it feel a lot more like a survival skill than just a philosophy

It’s curious how despite frequent reminders we still get caught out by the desire for permanency, for cozy habits in a place where nothing changes. We had several very mild winters here, and were a little caught out by a foot of snow and ten freezing days during which we had to go and collect food shopping on foot.