Most spiritual advice is about fixing yourself. This essay explores why real transformation doesn’t come from effort or mindfulness techniques, but from a single, honest moment of seeing—and why that moment quietly changes everything.
Speechless so here’s a go - feeling so much resonance with every single piece of those simple, common, everyday life experiences & there’ve been those (what feel to me miraculous) moments where everything changed once i became aware. Presence. And perception shifted while action may not yet, but the entire moment(s) connected me with a new way of existing. Beautiful & so so helpful in guidance when this happens & itz an out-of-the-blue ( or seems so) shift…..I’ll stop there with describing (or failing to). Landed with perfect timing before fun at the pain management doctor’s office & some extra corporeal shock wave therapy that i actually can enjoy sometimes. I need this almost as much as coffee (wink). Throwing gratitude randomly hoping the wind sends most to you for teaching changing ways of being from what the world teaches.
I see you VMB. Seeing without narration sounds good but, gosh, not easy even though it is simple. If you notice yourself seeing and being does this become narration? It does sound like deep level stuff, I'm mostly on the surface - today cursing the dog for shedding hair (just being a dog) all over the bathroom floor that I'm cleaning.
More and more, I’m realizing that I don’t need to be fixed or improved. I am whole, now. That just means, all I have left is to decide which choices I want to make when choice arrives.
Just cause people use a word doesn't mean much. I use doctrine in so far as it is an accurate representation of experience. To say what you are describing is not mindfulness which is inseparable is just misleading, so I do appreciate your openness to dialog. Framework is to support the raw moment, it is not something different from it. Especially given that everything is the moment, it's only our perception that is disconnected.
I hate to break it to you, but your comparison to mindfulness is not accurate. Mindfulness (Sati) is part of Vipassana which means seeing in a special way. Sati is remembering to observe. Observing everything in the present is mindfulness. It is seeing.
Fair point, and I’ll name the distinction more cleanly. I’m not equating what I’m describing with mindfulness as a practice or framework like sati within vipassana. I’m pointing to the moment before any method stabilizes, where seeing happens without instruction, memory, or effort. Mindfulness trains seeing. This is about what interrupts us prior to training. Related terrain, different event.
I think where we’re talking past each other is scope. In Buddhist doctrine, mindfulness and vipassanā are inseparable. In contemporary usage, “mindfulness” now covers everything from stress reduction to insight practice. My concern is less about doctrinal accuracy and more about naming the raw moment of seeing before any framework is applied.
The tricky part is generally you have to see what is in the way in order for it to fall away. And yet, they are both the same thing. So, it's always pure/raw and it's always relational. That is the nature of reality. ❤️
Oh, I didn't know there was actually a book called "Living Presence." I'm learning this now but I've been using the same term for what I believe is what you have clearly articulated here. This Is It. Always. Never Not Here.
I used to challenge the Yoga world, nonduality, and Buddhist enlightenment (the world I had immersed myself in for many years) because there was, what I deem as misunderstanding of this, as if only advanced meditators could 'reach' this 'state' but there is nothing to get to.
The seeing takes you over. Or at least, in my multiple experiences of it, it takes over and I never knew when it would, whether I was in despair, or just strolling down 3rd Street Promenade and standing at Palisades Park bluff, or eating ice cream, it would just take over. Long before I entered the Yoga path, nonduality, 'mystical worlds'.
"The moment you see, everything changes. Not because the moment itself is different, but because you are no longer hiding from it. And that, quietly and unmistakably, is the power of being." << and that's exactly the power I'm talking about. It's not a fixed identity or a personality. It's the whole field, the Living Presence, always here now. There's no way to it. It is the way.
The recognition makes me feel... less crazy. 😅
Thank you for sharing this seeing in the way you do it. 🙏🏾
Speechless so here’s a go - feeling so much resonance with every single piece of those simple, common, everyday life experiences & there’ve been those (what feel to me miraculous) moments where everything changed once i became aware. Presence. And perception shifted while action may not yet, but the entire moment(s) connected me with a new way of existing. Beautiful & so so helpful in guidance when this happens & itz an out-of-the-blue ( or seems so) shift…..I’ll stop there with describing (or failing to). Landed with perfect timing before fun at the pain management doctor’s office & some extra corporeal shock wave therapy that i actually can enjoy sometimes. I need this almost as much as coffee (wink). Throwing gratitude randomly hoping the wind sends most to you for teaching changing ways of being from what the world teaches.
I see you VMB. Seeing without narration sounds good but, gosh, not easy even though it is simple. If you notice yourself seeing and being does this become narration? It does sound like deep level stuff, I'm mostly on the surface - today cursing the dog for shedding hair (just being a dog) all over the bathroom floor that I'm cleaning.
More and more, I’m realizing that I don’t need to be fixed or improved. I am whole, now. That just means, all I have left is to decide which choices I want to make when choice arrives.
Whenever I feel a conflict I know it’s a matter of seeing. That I’m not seeing something. That I need a shift in perception. 👌🏼
Just cause people use a word doesn't mean much. I use doctrine in so far as it is an accurate representation of experience. To say what you are describing is not mindfulness which is inseparable is just misleading, so I do appreciate your openness to dialog. Framework is to support the raw moment, it is not something different from it. Especially given that everything is the moment, it's only our perception that is disconnected.
It sounds like grace to me. All we need to see is a willing heart.
I hate to break it to you, but your comparison to mindfulness is not accurate. Mindfulness (Sati) is part of Vipassana which means seeing in a special way. Sati is remembering to observe. Observing everything in the present is mindfulness. It is seeing.
Fair point, and I’ll name the distinction more cleanly. I’m not equating what I’m describing with mindfulness as a practice or framework like sati within vipassana. I’m pointing to the moment before any method stabilizes, where seeing happens without instruction, memory, or effort. Mindfulness trains seeing. This is about what interrupts us prior to training. Related terrain, different event.
Again, your interpretation of mindfulness is incomplete. You are talking about the same thing.
I think where we’re talking past each other is scope. In Buddhist doctrine, mindfulness and vipassanā are inseparable. In contemporary usage, “mindfulness” now covers everything from stress reduction to insight practice. My concern is less about doctrinal accuracy and more about naming the raw moment of seeing before any framework is applied.
The tricky part is generally you have to see what is in the way in order for it to fall away. And yet, they are both the same thing. So, it's always pure/raw and it's always relational. That is the nature of reality. ❤️
Oh, I didn't know there was actually a book called "Living Presence." I'm learning this now but I've been using the same term for what I believe is what you have clearly articulated here. This Is It. Always. Never Not Here.
I used to challenge the Yoga world, nonduality, and Buddhist enlightenment (the world I had immersed myself in for many years) because there was, what I deem as misunderstanding of this, as if only advanced meditators could 'reach' this 'state' but there is nothing to get to.
The seeing takes you over. Or at least, in my multiple experiences of it, it takes over and I never knew when it would, whether I was in despair, or just strolling down 3rd Street Promenade and standing at Palisades Park bluff, or eating ice cream, it would just take over. Long before I entered the Yoga path, nonduality, 'mystical worlds'.
"The moment you see, everything changes. Not because the moment itself is different, but because you are no longer hiding from it. And that, quietly and unmistakably, is the power of being." << and that's exactly the power I'm talking about. It's not a fixed identity or a personality. It's the whole field, the Living Presence, always here now. There's no way to it. It is the way.
The recognition makes me feel... less crazy. 😅
Thank you for sharing this seeing in the way you do it. 🙏🏾
good stuff