Simplicity is the art of developing and maintaining peace of mind. If it looks like a duck, sounds like duck, smells like a duck and tastes like a duck, the story of you has just become attached to the story you created about some over thing.

When you preach, or teach, that there is a continuance of some thing (physical, emotional, psychological, or any combination thereof) after the human brain has finally shut down, it gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘Born again. buddhist’ The actuality is that nobody knows. There is no verifiable evidence obtained under controlled test conditions to support the belief. There is no direct evidence to refute the belief. This, I suggest, is why it is an irrelevant line of inquiry within now-ness. How does it help you to move the mind away from worrying in now-ness, towards being at peace with itself, others and the world around you, to believe in either extreme view?

Awakening and the eradication of the worrying mind will not be realized by the attachment to rules, rites, rituals, superstitions and the materialistic paraphernalia of classical religious Buddhism. Awakening and the clarity of peace of mind will not be realised by the consumerism of any external thing. Awakening is an internalised realisation that is then actualised as a lived experience that is led by compassion.

The conditioning process of the human species is little more than a living filing cabinet that retains sensory data input and makes use if it when required, in order to survive and replicate the species. Nowhere in that filing cabinet is a section that relates to you other than a file that is labelled you, but the file is an empty one.

It is so liberating to know that the quality of your state of mind in now-ness is dependent on what you just thought, said or did and that no external influence can control you.

The Buddha once provided the perfect stop sign. It is unhelpful to simply believe what you hear just because you have heard it for a long time. It is unhelpful to follow tradition blindly, merely because it has been practiced in that way for years. It is unhelpful to listen to rumours. It is unhelpful to confirm anything just because it is stated in a scripture or text. It is unhelpful to make assumptions. It is unhelpful to draw conclusions bywhat you see and hear. It is unhelpful to be fooled by outward appearances. It is unhelpful to cling to, or become attached to, any view or idea just because you are comfortable with it. It is unhelpful to accept as fact, anything arrived at by logic. It is unhelpful to be convinced of anything out of respect or reverence to your chosen Dharma communicator. It is helpful to go beyond opinion and belief. It is helpful to reject anything that, when accepted, tried and tested with integrity, leads to worrying in the form of want, not want and confusion. It is helpful to accept anything that, when accepted, tried and tested with integrity, leads to the practice of loving-kindness, contentment and clarity.

Experientially, the transition between the third and fifth stages of the meditative process is that in the third stage you are thinking and the in the fifth stage, thinking is happening without you. Contrary to popular misconceptions, meditation is not about emptying or clearing the mind or not thinking. It’s about paying attention to what is happening physically, emotionally and psychologically without adding in a judgement value of good/bad or right/wrong or wanting the experience to be other than it is. The experience is there as a learning opportunity to see through and let go of the conditioned and confused self-biased mind, so it can be at peace with itself, others and the world around it.

This line of inquiry goes to the centre of what the Buddha realized within the awakening experience of clarity. Everything he communicated from that point on links directly back to this realization. If, as he is purported to have said, birth is dukkha, ageing is dukkha, sickness is dukkha and death is dukkha, how was it that he claimed to have broken free from these experiences when in actuality his physical body aged, got sick and died? The answer lies within that awakening realization that he points you towards.

There is a story within the ancient Buddhist texts where the Buddha points out how the Jains has misunderstood the karmic process by being attached to rites and rituals. They believed and claimed that they could bring the end of suffering by practicing extremes of behaviour. The Buddha pointed out that the suffering associated with those extreme behaviours would only end when they stopped doing them. Pretty simple huh!!!

No thing (physical, emotional, psychological, or any combination thereof) is as it seems. When you believe things to be other than they are it is because the self-biases mind is confused by its conditioned nature. To deny there is a chicken or there is nothing beyond bacon, toast and coffee are two extremes of the same confused thinking process. I suggest that the middle way perspective is that none of these things are permanent or substantial in or of themselves and are just the process of causality happening in now-ness in which no first cause of any thing can be established.

We appear to live in an age where there has developed a belief that we are entitled to be offended by things we don’t like. It seems to me that a great deal of time and effort goes into trying to find some thing to be offended by so we can then blame someone else or some external event for the quality of our mind state that we actually created. Being offended is a choice. It’s not compulsory.

The quality of the shit that leaves the body is dependent on what the body is fed. The quality of the mind state in now-ness is dependent on what is thought, said and done previously. If there remains an attachment to a belief created by the confused and conditioned self-biased mind, you will be sitting on the red toilet and constipated for the rest of your life. If you see through that confusion, the blue toilet will become the seat of wisdom/compassion and the shit will flow out of the body with ease. It’s always helpful to be aware that the toilet paper is there so you can clear up your own shit and others are not keen to have you attempt to clean up theirs.