Articles

Christine Caldwell’s book, Bodyfulness: Somatic Practices for Presence, Empowerment and Waking Up in This Life, pushes back against the current mindfulness craze in the name of “bodyfulness,” a contemplative principle that focuses on attunement to one’s lived experience of the body.

Māyā is “illusion,” a core concept in the Advaita Vedānta or “non-dual” school of Vedic thought. It’s key to understanding the way you construct the world through false perception. Māyā is thinking you’re separate from the Divine. Enlightenment is realizing this isn’t true.

My understanding of illusion is that we are its source. It is our own ignorance, interacting with the reality of existence, that gives rise to illusion.

Yogis and scientists alike assert that the external reality we take for granted as objectively fixed and forced upon us as passive recipients is more accurately conceived of as an active mental construction that is subjectively projected by us, based on unconscious and reified mental images and verbal designations along with tacit social consensus. Literally, the world is like an illusion.

This analysis reveals that the self cannot reasonably exist outside of the body and the experience of consciousness. It cannot be intrinsically associated with the physical constituents of the body since it does not have any location, shape or color. Finally, the self cannot be found in the stream of consciousness, within which past thoughts have gone, future thoughts have not yet arisen, and present thoughts do not abide.

Tsongkhapa established a relationship with Manjushri through the medium, Lama Umapa, who himself had encountered Manjushri in a visionary experience that changed the course of his life. Jinpa describes this relationship in depth in this book and provides important new insights on the way in which this collaboration provided new perspectives on classic texts, including Nagarjuna’s and Atisha’s teachings.

Recognizing and embodying our interconnected wholeness within, with others, and with the world and universe around us is fundamental to the practice of iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation.

In The Simulation Hypothesis, MIT computer scientist and computer-game entrepreneur Rizwan Virk crafts a unique perspective standing at the convergence of the knowledge systems of modernity and of Hinduism and Buddhism and other mystical traditions.