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    The Luminous Gap in Bardo Paid Member

    By Francesca Freemantle
    Bardo can have many implications, depending on how one looks at it. It is an interval, a hiatus, a gap. It can act as a boundary that divides and separates, marking the end of one thing and the beginning of another; but it can also be a link between the two: it can serve as a bridge or a meeting place, which brings together and unites. It is a crossing, a stepping-stone, a transition. It is a crossroads, where one must choose which path to take, and it is a no-man's-land, belonging neither to one side nor to the other. It is a highlight or peak point of experience, and at the same time a situation of extreme tension, caught between two opposites. It is an open space, filled with an atmosphere of suspension and uncertainty, neither this nor that. More »
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    Awakening in the Bardo Paid Member

      The bardo—or the "in-between"—has come to describe the transitional state between death and rebirth, but its qualities also characterize the gap arising between any two states. In fact, we live in a continuous bardo, forever suspended between past and future, although we seldom recognize it. While the bardo may bring with it great uncertainty and discomfort, teachers and practitioners in the following essays guide us through the unique opportunity for awakening offers.         Image: "Ghost of a Star" © Sylvia Plachy   More »
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    Back to Basics: What Do Buddhists Mean When They Talk About Emptiness? Paid Member

    By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
    Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience in order to make sense of it: the stories and worldviews we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that the questions they raise—of our true identity and the reality of the world outside—pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering. More »
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    On Having No Head Paid Member

    By Douglas E. Harding
    The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head. More »
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    Remembering How to Walk Paid Member

    By John House
    In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. -Wallace Stevens, "Of the Surface of Things" More »