Western Baul Podcast Series

The direct path is a refined articulation of the principles of nondualism, and the backward step is the actual practice of it. The mind feasts on complication. One of the features of the direct path is its simplicity. It does not involve lineage, guru, or ritual. We are always looking at things, but what are we looking out of? When we look at what we are looking out of, we are taking a step back i...

We need help to continue to grow. The name of a God-realized being invokes the Divine. We can make efforts to return to the present, to ground the attention. Attention is crucial in learning to use suffering so that suffering does not use us up and can become food for growth. Two kinds of attention are possible for a human being: mechanical attention which is an unconscious survival mechanism, and...

The expressions of certain faces in spiritual paintings or sculpture and of genuine spiritual teachers in photographs or in-person can communicate our own basic goodness or organic innocence when we are in an open state. Something in us responds to a face that dances to the rhythm of creation, that exudes the peace of surrender. We are hard-wired for connection, which gets made through the face—fo...

All failure to live life richly and fully is based on the feeling that love is scarce. We may sense at times that love is the ground of all being. What if we lived on the basis of this truth? There is so much music and poetry that reflects on our inner longing. Those in attendance at the live talk were asked to write down sayings, mantras, or mahavakyas (short sentences of wisdom teachings) that c...

We could say that all we know about ourselves cognitively are stories we tell ourselves. These are not necessarily obvious to us because they play so constantly. We respond to the universe through the stories that filter our experience. How do we work with this since we can’t think ourselves out of this box? Transparency hints at a different way of relating to stories. Many stories we identify wit...

We are always already living in groundlessness. This can be scary since we tend to approach life in a fear-based way, but we can be groundless and focused on our delight. Groundlessness is not linear; it has no direction as we are always moving and changing. Children trust that their needs will be met until we give them a different message. We get into the habit of identifying, and holding onto an...

In the Yoga tradition, Shiva represents unitary consciousness and Shakti represents the many forms that God takes in the world. One such form is pleasure. Kamala is a goddess and manifestation of Shakti, whose power is known as Shri, the fullness of pleasure. The word pleasure is boxed in by meanings we’ve given it in English, but Shri is a Sanskrit word for something deeper, a primordial vibratio...

The plot of the movie “Women Talking,” which was nominated for Best Picture in 2023 and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, is summarized and its relevance considered in our world and on the path. In the movie, after women begin to speak about their experience with abuse in an isolated religious colony, others tell their own stories at meetings that are scribed by a male who is trusted in th...

What is our heart’s desire and what are we willing to pay for it? What coin do we have available as payment? Is our heart’s desire our top priority? We can identify our worldly heart’s desire, but we can go deeper into what is possible for us. Obstacles have a lot to do with identity. Are we willing to have our identities shaken up? It can be scary to give ourselves to our heart’s desire since it...

There are dramatic things that happen to us in life, but we have some control over how we respond. Seeing drama for what it is—something self-imposed that we often create for ourselves—is a big step in loosening its grip. What we call fate may be something that came from our unconscious. Through reverse engineering, we can inquire if there was something that we did to set up drama. It’s all in the...

We need to verify the truth of something through direct experience. Every problem that we face as humans can be seen as the result of identification. There’s only ever one problem: the need to cease all identification. The only hope to loosen its hold is to awaken conscience. Conscience absorbs and subsumes identification. We come from greatness and we return from whence we came. The primary aim o...

An act of faith that the Divine will provide what we need is behind a vow of poverty taken in some religious orders. Generosity is primary in bodhisattva practice. By paying a little more, we sometimes end up supporting someone rather than getting the best deal. We can track ways we are stingy—with our love, power, graciousness, money. Consumer culture has a big part in creating our personalities...

The shadow is a concept first advanced by Carl Jung to describe those parts of ourselves that we reject and repress. Everyone has a shadow. If we have some sense of what it is, we can work with it; if we don’t, it can run our lives in unseen ways. The failure to work with the shadow is at the root of many interpersonal and organizational problems, and on a mass scale it has a lot to do with the tr...

We are a particular kind of machine that protects itself at all costs. There’s no chance of escaping the machine; it’s what we have to work with. The only way to really work with the machine is to completely leave it alone and stop trying to change it. Liberation isn’t liberation into anything else—it’s liberation from identification. We might not remember a lot of the bullying we experienced, whi...

The phrase “honey in the heart” is taken from a book by Martin Prechtel. The word “rasa” means taste or essence in Sanskrit. The heart is an alchemical vessel, capable of transmitting, radiating, and metabolizing. The elixir distilled from this process is like honey. When we meet reality as-it-is with an open and undefended heart, we celebrate all aspects of our lives. We become one with all of li...

The term “dharma” has been used generically in the West to refer to any real teaching of contemplative spirituality. “Doo-doo” has to do with being stuck in our spiritual endeavors. A quote attributed to St. John of the Cross is, “In order to come upon that which you know not, you must go by a way in which you know not.” There are many things to benefit from in the domain of the known, but the spi...

Maha Shivaratri is the annual Hindu celebration of the union of Shiva and Parvati, the symbol of the timeless and the world of time. All the great traditions recognize the meeting point between timelessness and time, heaven and earth. The Celtic cross represents the union of spirit and matter. Another Celtic symbol is the Triskelion, an image of three universal forces flowing into each other. Thre...

The talk focuses more on self-deception—not knowing we’re lying to ourselves—than on lying as intentional untrue statements. Little children do not lie to themselves. We learn lying from things society and our parents tell us that aren’t true. We may think our wants are needs. A lot of lying occurs because perception is limited. We selectively perceive things that have survival value for us and te...

The gesture of bowing the head is a ritual in all traditions that acknowledges the wisdom of sinking the mind into the heart. The Christian mystical tradition is ancient and includes writings such as the Philokalia (which dates back to the Desert Fathers), The Cloud of Unknowing, and The Way of the Pilgrim. The heart can only be experienced. If there is the tiniest urge to explore this depth, it i...

Virtually everything about the path is covered when we consider impermanence: death, rebirth, linear time, eternity, presence, change, transition, attachment, identification, freedom, unity, fear, projections, denial, the divine path of growing old, groundlessness, surrender, grace, etc. Is it life or attachment that we wish to prolong? We are not able to fully profit from the path until we face d...

The only way to access our birthright of a glorious and magnificent life is to know ourselves. The only way to know ourselves is by becoming self aware. Otherwise, we are machines, slaves to forces acting upon us. What we see and are told about the world as children are different things. We go from having an open and unprotected heart to numbness and repression. To live beyond our conditioning, we...

The Soul comes to Earth to learn how to restore love. We can only do this by being present to relationship in all of its forms and textures. The task is to struggle to remain present and to "eat impressions." To "eat" emotions, reactions, and judgments does not mean to suppress them but to remain present to them and allow the body to transform the energy. The "practice of presence" is not a philos...

Transformation on many levels is what living things are designed for by the creation. We are embodied souls, on earth to experience, learn, and develop through the body. Nothing is static. We don’t know how systems work until we start looking. In the system we are in, everything is a form of food. We have an obligation to serve the system and pay for our existence through what we take in and give...

Spiritual Bypassing, a phrase coined by John Welwood, is the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. We have to develop the ego before it can be transcended. When one is committed to the spiritual process, psychological and spiritual work cannot be separated. It’s possible to be...

“Discriminate and integrate” is a traditional spiritual motto. We can look at different teachings and find what is useful to integrate in our practice. Spiritual principles can be found everywhere, including in creative work. A list of opposites, “good theft” versus “bad theft” is considered, which contrasts getting inspiration from other people’s work, digesting it, and making it our own versus p...