Month: June 2026

Posted on by joseph mauricio

WARTS AND ALL

A Living Buddha

The notion of a living Buddha is that following the Buddhist path our relationship with the Buddha is alive, experiential and developmental. We are not relating to a thing, an icon or an idea. We are relating to a living part of ourselves.

This is a present tense experience happening whenever we remember. This connection is presently knowing, understanding and caring for ourselves and our world. The work in our daily meditation practice is to develop the capacity to remember this True Nature of ours and to learn to trust it. And, hence, learn to trust ourselves.

And, we don’t have to shine our shoes, watch our manners, cut our hair, or do anything other than be who we are as we are.

I often made the mistake of thinking that becoming one with the Buddha meant my body, spirit and mind had to become something else, something perfect. But I’ve come to realize that connecting to Buddha means accepting of all of me.  The parts I’m proud of and the parts I’m embarrassed by; the things I do that are virtuous and many things that are selfish and petty. There’s little value to waking up in our brain and having lots of pristine ideas about realization, if our body and heart are unable to follow.  So we need all of us talking to the rest of us and no one left behind.

Buddha Nature is the notion that our truest, most fundamental nature is perfect, free of obstruction, neurosis, duplicity and hatred. Those add-ons come from our social upbringing and seem to be devised to help us navigate the world around us. But, as we know, these patterns are not always helpful. In fact, they are primarily defensive and quite limiting. They keep our potential dampened and cause us to live lives much smaller than they might be.

But, how can we transcend these patterns, defenses and defects if we don’t see them? Buddha means “Awake” – the base of our Buddha Nature is wisdom, which is seeing, understanding and knowing. The method of our liberation from limiting patterns and ignorance is to see them and know them. These patterns grow in our ignorance of them. But if we’re able to expose them and are willing to see them, eventually we’ll grow tired of them and they will fall away. Our neurosis is part of our connection with the Buddha. In Tibetan Buddhism they see neurosis as an offering.

Buddhism has progressive stages of development. Each of these has a different relationship between the student and the Buddha. The first sees the Buddha as a leader and an example someone who has liberated themselves from ego suffering, thus affording others the opportunity to follow. The second stage relates to the teachings of compassion. From this point of view Buddha is seen as a transcendent being who radiates love and compassion for all beings. We are encouraged to nurture the seed of Buddha Nature within ourselves.

The third relationship to the Buddha is based on the teachings of luminosity and emptiness. These indicate that our full experience is a manifestation of the mind of the Buddha. There is no separation between us. And that all beings have Buddha nature. And we can learn to recognize Buddha Nature as our basic nature. From this point of view, there is nothing to change, nothing to develop and nowhere to go. We need only remember who we are.

The Bodhisattva Shantideva wrote, “may I not be a stain on the faultless noble family (of the Buddha).”  But what would cause a stain? I think this is different in Buddhism than it might be in other religious contexts. In Buddhism the primary “sin” is ignorance. Ignorance leads to negative actions caused by not knowing. So, our process is to expose these actions by accepting that we do them and to cease pretending otherwise.

The “stains” on the noble family would be to turn away from our allegiance to waking up. This is when we willfully choose not to know. It is when we shut down, turn away, and cut ourselves off from the vibrant source of wisdom in the universe, our Buddha Nature. And if we do cut ourselves off from our Buddha Nature? The remedy is to recognize this, and to remember. Simply that.

When we lose our mind, we come back.

The word for meditation in many traditions also means recollection. Remembering our connection. Remembering who we are. Recognizing when we are deluded and remembering who we are. In time, coming back, coming back, coming back cuts through the veils of our ignorance. We begin to see the parts of our being that are defenses and the part of our being that is indestructible. In time, our allegiance will change and we will begin to identify with our true nature.

In some traditions a deity offers salvation and a seat at the table of endless perfection. This is seen as our future reward. But, Buddhism is about what’s happening now.  The Living Buddha is something we feel in the moment, because it is something we are. There is nothing we need to change. And nothing we need to do but remember.

We can wake up sitting on the toilet with our head in our hands after a very full night of not -so-wakeful activity. We could wake up in a job we hate. We could wake up walking through crowds in our aggressive city. We could wake up making love to someone. We could wake up in the morning. We could wake up in the evening. We could wake up literally anytime we remember.

It’s possible that that moment of clarity might cause us to be embarrassed or self-conscious. But if, in that of authentic moment of awake, we  just see ourselves “in process” with love and affection, then we are seeing through the eyes of the Buddha at all our goodness and imperfection.

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Posted on by joseph mauricio

That Perfect Moment

What happens before a thought?

Is there an instance of space that opens? Before we fill it with a cognition? Before we decide what this moment means? Before the notion of “me” arises again? Maybe in this perfect moment of open space anything and everything is possible.

I wonder whether the birth of a thought is analogous to the birth of the universe. What happened in that impossible moment preceding the Big Bang? Was there a perfect stillness before everything burst into being? Or is that simply another story our minds tell because we cannot imagine beginnings without a “before”?

And is it even possible to reduce our thinking to a singular thought, or reduce the birth of our universe to a singular event. Neither is likely true. Thoughts arise in astonishing succession, perhaps even simultaneously, from different regions of our mind. We notice one. We cling to one. Or perhaps, one chooses us and carries us away into its narrative.

Maybe the universe is no different. Perhaps there are countless beginnings happening all the time. Countless worlds appearing and disappearing, all interacting.

We act as though what we are thinking has always been here and will always remain. Once a thought captures our attention, it suddenly feels solid. Real. Obvious. We stop seeing it as an event occurring in consciousness and begin treating it as reality itself.

The cosmologist Jenna Levin suggests that labeling something “infinite” is intellectually lazy. To declare something infinite may simply mean we’ve reached the edge of our understanding. We’ve stopped asking what might be after we’ve reached our cognitive event horizon.

Perhaps our attempts to find an edge to the universe is an attempt to map the extent of what we know. Once we’ve defined a conceptual edge – or determined that there is no edge – we are trying to define it. To hold it. To accept it as a given. To make it something we can inhabit.

Perhaps we do the same with our thoughts. Rather than investigating them, we crown them with permanence. We believe them. We inhabit them. We defend them. We mistake them for truth rather than recognizing them as temporary appearances arising in the universe of awareness.

One anxious thought becomes my anxiety. One political opinion becomes what I stand for. One heartbreak and my life is over. Before long, we’ve constructed a reality around something that, moments earlier, did not exist.

Meditation can show a snapshot of this process. And that snapshot might offer a glimpse of freedom from it. You see, believing our thoughts disables our ability to see them as thoughts. This is a form of imprisonment because it locks us into living and reliving only what we already know. As comforting as this is, it comes at the expense of everything else we might become.

If we sit quietly and follow the “prime directive” – which is to notice what arises without interference, such as judgement, desire, preference, et al. We will see that thoughts don’t actually arrive in a neat line. They bubble up from nowhere, overlap, interrupt one another, disappear without resolution, and occasionally dissolve before they’ve fully formed. Sometimes there is the faintest glimmer of gap—a tiny opening before the machinery of interpretation begins again.

Gap is intriguing. It is almost impossible to catch. Yet it opens the door to everything that isn’t a thought. Which is to say, everything else. The moment we recognize the gap, another thought has already arrived to congratulate itself for finding it. This kind of mental selfie interrupts the prime directive and invites us to believe what we are thinking. And believing is not seeing.

Perhaps that’s why contemplative traditions place so much value on resting in awareness rather than chasing thoughts. Not because thoughts are bad, but because they are astonishingly persuasive. Every one arrives announcing itself as reality.

And every one eventually disappears.

So, perhaps with meditation we are stepping back and gaining a perspective. What gives us perspective is space. Gap is a glimpse into opened undefined space. In time, singular moments of gap become perspective from which we can see without believing or interfering.

Maybe the “perfect moment” isn’t something mystical waiting somewhere outside ourselves. Maybe it is simply that immeasurably brief instant before experience hardens into certainty. Before we decide what this is, what it means, who we are, or what comes next.

Not because certainty is wrong.

But because that tiny opening reminds us that things are not solid, or defined by the limit of our understanding. Reality is alive. Much of it is beyond our understanding, but that should not stop us from looking. If we release ourselves from beliefs, from hopes and fears, from right and wrong, we may accept what’s there. Not agreeing or disagreeing, just seeing. Seeing everything we see whether we see it or not.

Our universe—whether out there among the galaxies or in here among our thoughts—is not a finished object but an ongoing event. And remembering that every thought, no matter how convincing, came from, and will return to, that perfect moment of gap where everything is possible.

Posted on by joseph mauricio

DON’T START BELIEVING

Just Connect to the Feeling

The title is a play on the Journey song. Though it was a massive hit, I’m not a fan of the band, nor the sentiment of the song. Don’t stop believing? What would we do if we didn’t have to believe anything?

Beliefs are things we have to squint our eyes to see. We have to force them. Beliefs are ideas. And, tho ideas can greatly affect reality, ideas are not reality. And isn’t attaching ourselves to a belief, or a belief to ourselves, clinging? Clinging often comes at the expense of alternatives. But not always. Sometimes a belief is temporary and leads us to a next stage of development.

But sometimes they become solid and last throughout our lives. We lug them around, even when they’ve become obsolete. They have such gravity they tend to warp what we see, bending reality to their particular point of view. For instance, many people hold strong spiritual beliefs that place our nuanced reality in black and white terms. This offers a great deal of certainty. I sometimes envy that. When I feel overwhelmed, it would be comforting to find such surety. Surety in what? People fill the tabernacle with song and praise, but are any two people of those people believing the same thing?

It seems to me that each of us has an inner life informed by our particular experiences. Beyond that, there is so much we do not understand. Yet we always seem to need to know something. If we can force ourselves into believing something that many other people believe along with us, we feel comforted and strong. And if we believe our belief is right, we are often inclined to define that by believing someone else is wrong.

We may even come to believe they are a threat to our belief. In this way, we turn the whole world with its colors and dynamics into a binary contention.

When we meet the world with inquisitiveness, we open ourselves to discovery. But all too often anxiety causes us to clamp down on belief with white-knuckled tenacity. We find it reassuring to be certain about something. In doing so, we cease discovering. We believe something is true and therefore imagine we have found something. That something becomes a fixed reference point.

A path of discovery is an open system. Once we decide something is absolutely real and true, we begin to close the system.

Buddhism speaks of “non-dual” experience. This is to say that subjective experience is inseparable from, and concurrent with, external phenomena. Seeing a waterfall is an experience that happens in the mind as it happens in the space before us.

If we believe the waterfall is self-existing and imbued with magical properties, we might conclude that the sound of falling water is speaking directly to us. We might align ourselves with others who hear these magical utterances and accept them as real. As we fixate on the experience, we may fail to notice how loneliness, longing, or need is shaping our faith.

There is nothing wrong with hearing the poetry of a waterfall or experiencing it as healing. But turning that into a universal truth may be an attempt to make ourselves feel important. When Buddhists speak of emptiness, they are not denying the existence of the waterfall. They are questioning the solidity of the mental interpretations and elaborations that arise between the waterfall and our direct experience of it.

The mind is very busy. Meditation trains it to rest on one thing while allowing everything else to unfold around it. We hear the waterfall and feel healed. But when we immediately reach for our phones, searching for likes and validation, we may be turning the experience into a commodity.

It seems we often lack the confidence to let life be what it is without turning it into something larger than necessary. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche often said, “NBD” — no big deal. Perhaps we make events feel significant so that we can feel significant. When others feel the same thing, the experience can become euphoric. And that can feel wonderful and life-affirming.

But euphoria is not reality. It is a temporary hijacking of the senses, including our higher mental faculties. Falling in love is so powerful that it has inspired centuries of poetry and music. It can be spiritually transformative. Yet transformation, by definition, is temporary.

Relationships that endure allow the feeling of falling in love to become something else. If the bond is strong, it may evolve through many creative forms. The Beatles eventually stopped writing love songs. As disappointing as that may have been for some listeners, it gave them the freedom to explore a much broader creative landscape.

And at some point, of course, the dream was over.

What do we do then?

Shorn of belief, we’re left with ourselves. With our experience. And our life does need not be explained, apologized for, fixed, aggrandized or diminished. Perhaps that has been the point all along. Not to believe, but to simply feel. To experience life directly before rushing to explain it, own it, or turn it into certainty. It will never be certain. Yet, the waterfall still falls. The heart still breaks. Love still comes and goes. Joy still visits. Grief still teaches.

Life continues to unfold whether we understand it or not.

Maybe our task is not to arrive at certainty, but to remain open to the mystery.

Posted on by joseph mauricio

TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE

Ch-ch-ch-changes…

We’d go crazy if things never changed. Be honest: how long could we reasonably continue doing exactly what we’re doing without growing, shifting, expanding, or evolving? We need change. Yet we dread it nonetheless.

This dissonance creates friction in the mind. We react to change while simultaneously guarding against it. It’s like gritting our teeth while being dragged from a warm bed despite every effort to stay bundled beneath the covers.

The Buddhist community has a saying: Change or be dragged.

“Okay, okay, I’ll change,” we say, “but I’ll do it my way and in my time.”

So we step into a bright new world disgruntled, tense, and prepared for whatever danger we’ve projected onto the future. It’s an odd thing about us that we believe rehearsing danger somehow protects us from it. Another saying I’ve heard is that worrying is like praying for something bad to happen. In a sense that’s exactly what we’re doing—reciting a mantra of defeat before we’ve even arrived.

Starting fresh could be a breath of fresh air. Yet many of us simply drag the same luggage into the new situation. It’s exhausting.

As I write this, I have boxes, crates, folders, and containers filled with notebooks and writing that go back forty years. I’ve moved them to four different homes. Yet I haven’t opened a single notebook in any meaningful way for decades.

The cost isn’t just the weight of moving them. It’s the space they’ve occupied in my life. I once stored them in my mother’s basement. When she died, I emptied her house and inherited another collection of photographs, cards, papers, and memories. Her archives merged with mine.

I’ve always judged people whose homes were cluttered. Their spaces made me feel claustrophobic. But over time my judgment softened. I began to understand that most hoarding is rooted in fear. People aren’t simply collecting things. They’re holding on. They’re bracing themselves against change.

But isn’t change a good thing? At the very least, isn’t it completely inevitable?

Why do we cling so tightly to things that prevent us from changing?

If change is unavoidable and growth comes through change, perhaps what limits us isn’t change itself but our panic around it. What are we actually afraid of?

David Bowie sang, Turn and face the strange.

What’s new? What’s next?

The problem is that what’s next often arrives burdened by everything we’ve carried from what’s already been. Imagine arriving at a dinner party with six suitcases.

“Why all the luggage?”

“I wanted to come prepared.”

The central fear beneath change is the fear of the unknown. We can’t control what we don’t know. So the body grips around old memories, old wounds, and old identities as though they might protect us.

Is it fear of failure? Fear of success?

Maybe.

But perhaps we fear something even stranger. Perhaps we fear no longer being afraid.

What would we be without all the baggage? Without the trauma bonds? Without the nagging doubts and familiar stories?

What if we moved in without carrying everything with us?

In my workshops, I sometimes suggest that participants bow as they enter the room. The bow can symbolize leaving some of their baggage outside the door. I tell them they’re welcome to bring a small carry-on filled with neurotic attachments. That usually gets a laugh.

Yet what if we could actually choose when fear is useful and when it’s simply our attempt to control life?

One effective way to control the world is to make it small enough to manage. A world without uncertainty. A world without disappointment. A world without heartbreak.

A world without life, perhaps.

Life is movement. Life is change.

The question isn’t whether change will come. The question is how we will meet it.

The most effective way to move through circumstances we can’t control is to strengthen our capacity to pay attention. There is tremendous power in awareness. Awareness allows us to face the strangeness of life without immediately recoiling from it.

This takes practice because our habits were originally created to comfort us. Repeating familiar thoughts and behaviors makes life feel predictable. But over time these patterns become limiting. We begin to believe we can only be who we’ve always been.

Then change arrives anyway.

We panic. We feel broken open. We scramble to reconstruct the old self as quickly as possible, as though our survival depends on it.

But what are we protecting ourselves from?

Maybe we’re protecting ourselves from the very transformation we secretly long for.

When we imagine a new relationship, we often create a list of qualities our future partner should possess: kind, assertive, protective, independent, adventurous. Anything except meeting a real human being and discovering who they actually are.

We try to control change before it arrives.

Meditation offers another possibility.

Each time we notice we’ve been swept away by thought and gently return to the breath, we’re interrupting an old pattern. We may feel constrained by this practice. Part of us would rather indulge a wild, unbridled mind.

But look closely. That unbridled mind isn’t exploring new territory. It’s running the same circular track it’s always run.

Notice that.

Then return.

You’ll get swept away again. Notice that and return again.

And again.

And again.

Gradually, something shifts. We stop trying to control every experience. We stop demanding certainty from an uncertain world. We stop carrying so much of yesterday into tomorrow.

Eventually, we learn to let ourselves be.

And being just as we are, we may find the courage to turn and face the strange—not armored by fear, not burdened by baggage, but simple, present, and curious.

Then we can see what happens next.

David Bowie refused to lock himself into commercial patterning. He was a creative chameleon. It’s telling that the most uncomfortable change he endured, was when he did his two most conventional and commercial releases. “Let’s Dance” and “Tonight” launched him into a greater commercial stratosphere, but he hated looking like and sounding like everyone else.

And, of course, he didn’t and wasn’t. He was unique and creative even when he turned to face same because it was a great change for him.

His latest change was his death. It left a space that we could all feel the brilliance that once filled it. I think we still do.

Maybe we can find our own brilliance changes.

Posted on by joseph mauricio

TALKING TO MYSELF

Making Sure I’m still here

I was riding in the car with a friend. After a time we had fallen into silence. I found myself having an imaginary conversation with a brother who lived on the other side of the continent. I’m an Italian American, so I talk to myself with my hands. My friend glanced over and asked, “Are you winning the argument?”

Having done a number of lengthy meditation retreats, I’ve had the opportunity to see my mind in different contexts. When we spend enough time sitting quietly, something interesting happens. We begin to see our thoughts without automatically becoming part of them. Something like looking out the window of a high rise at pedestrians scrambling below. The activity continues, but we are no longer caught in the chaos.

What surprised me from this perspective, was how damned crowded my mind seemed. Although I came to understand that the very act of seeing my mind from an objective perspective meant that I was accessing the open space of my mind. That was the vantage that allowed me to see the overcrowded streets below. And I saw that the preponderance of the crowding wasn’t brilliant ideas or profound insights. It was rote, repetitive narration. Endless thought streams in which I was explaining, defending, proving, correcting, and justifying… something. To someone. For some reason. The loudest conversations were defensive. I was making points to people who were not present, defending myself against accusations that weren’t being made, and winning arguments that never actually happened.

Then again, none of it was really happening.

I began to notice how much psychic real estate I had been giving to these internal debates. Within the enormous landscape of my mind I had selected the same arguments – or the same kind of arguments – repeatedly. Each discourse consumed me so thoroughly that there was little room left to experience life as it was actually unfolding.

Without space for fresh experience, all we really see are reflections of our own ideas. And most of the time those ideas had me at the center. “This is what happened to me” “This is how I was offended.” “This is who I am.”

“This is me.”

Perhaps what we are doing when we talk to ourselves is trying to prove that we exist. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” He meant that the very fact of consciousness proved existence. But somewhere along the way, many of us began to believe: I think, therefore this is all I am.

We become identified with the commentary.

The strange thing is that our thoughts mostly tell us what we already know. They recycle familiar experiences, familiar fears, familiar hopes, familiar resentments. We return to them again and again, as though familiarity itself were a kind of refuge. Even when the stories are painful, they are comfortable because they are the devil we know.

Meditation practice offers us the mental space to notice this process. One of the most important moments in meditation is not achieving tranquility or reaching some exalted state. It is simply noticing that we have become lost in thought.

That moment is huge.

And then, of course, in time we might develop the willingness to return to the present. In time, consistent practice will build the neural pathways that will change our allegiance from escaping into interwoven narratives of habitual thinking to actually living in the present.

For years I believed my thoughts completely. If I was anxious, I became the anxiety. If I was angry, I became the anger. If I was defending myself in some imaginary courtroom, I became the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury. I would stay up in bed cycling through what I should have said or what I might have done. This is our mind as a defensive tool trying to save us from imaginary evil.

Now, when I catch myself caught in one of those internal arguments, the first step is very simple. “This is just a thought.” Not a revelation. Not reality. Just a thought. I don’t layer a better thought over a limiting idea. Thoughts are thoughts are thoughts. A radio prattling in another room.

And simply noticing them is the result of the neural pathway development from meditation practice. We will begin to see when we are escaping into thoughts, arguments, complaints. And we begin to see that we have a choice to turn from that.

Thinking is not the totality of our mind. To say that thought is the whole of mind is like saying that the foam floating on top of a lake is the entirety of the lake.

There are depths beneath the surface.

There is a vast open sky above.

Yet many of us become frightened when we begin to glimpse those depths. We hear teachings about ego or no-self and immediately interpret them as attacks on our existence. We defend ourselves because our sense of self feels precious and necessary.

And in many ways it is.

But perhaps there is a difference between having a self and constantly proving that we have have a self. Maybe there is nothing to prove.

Meditation practice offers glimpses of possibilities beyond our usual patterned thinking. When the body settles into the present moment and the mind settles into the body, windows begin to open. We start to observe not only the content of our thoughts but the process itself. We see thoughts forming, dissolving, and reforming. We see the machinery rather than just the product.

And occasionally we encounter something we might find unsettling. Openness. Not the certainty, not the answers or schemes or solutions that our habit-mind presents. But openness. People often rush to fill that openness with new stories. We think we’ve seen God, glimpsed a past life, discovered a hidden destiny, or uncovered some cosmic secret. Maybe sometimes those things happen. But more often, I think we are simply rushing to replace one story with another.

The truly challenging aspect of meditation is not that it reveals something extraordinary. But that is reveals what we do not know. It brings us to the edge of fresh experience rather than recycled experience.

I’m reminded of a Monty Python sketch. The son is standing at a window looking outside. His father stands behind him and says, “Son, someday all this will be yours.”

The son replies, “What, the curtains?”

The father sighs. “No. Look beyond the curtains.”

“Oh,” says the son. “The window?”

That is often how we live. We spend our lives staring at the curtains of our own thoughts while an entire world waits beyond them. Meditation does not ask us to destroy the curtains. It does not ask us to silence every thought or win every internal argument. It simply invites us to look beyond them.

To stop seeking constant reassurance from the familiar stories of who we are. To rest, if only for a moment, in direct contact with ourselves and our world.