Begin Here
The Clearing
Beginner orientation — three guided courses through the Map. Fifteen short readings in a teacher's voice, the best place to start if any of this is new.
3 Courses
Five teachings on the one thing every tradition turns out to be pointing at. — About a week, one sitting per day.
Before any nameLao Tzu opens the Tao Te Ching with the only honest opening sentence a book like this…The ground has no edgesThe Heart Sutra says, in the most condensed sentence in the contemplative literature:…You, alsoThe Chandogya Upanishad makes the move the previous two texts were circling: it names you.One groundMeister Eckhart, fourteenth century, Dominican priest, says the same sentence inside the…The dangerous sentenceMansur al-Hallaj, ninth-century Sufi, says it in Arabic and is executed for saying it out…
Five teachings on what to do with your hours, once you have stopped expecting them to add up to a destination. — About a week, one sitting per day.
The first cutEpictetus opens the Enchiridion with the only sentence a practice can begin from.The work, not the fruitKrishna gives Arjuna the most practical sentence in all of Indian philosophy.What to do with what comesRumi names the practice of hospitality toward your own experience.Less, not moreLao Tzu, again, this time on the strange arithmetic of the Way.The four homes of the heartThe Buddha names four qualities the heart can be trained in, the way muscles can.
III. The Veil Thins
Five teachings on the moments, quiet, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes shattering, when the gap closes. — About a week, one sitting per day.
The door is already insideJesus answers a question about the timing of the kingdom with an answer the Pharisees…And outside, tooThe Gospel of Thomas, found buried at Nag Hammadi in 1945, says it differently.The moment in LouisvilleThomas Merton, twentieth-century Trappist, has a glimpse on a downtown street corner and…The feeling that has its own nameRudolf Otto, a German theologian, gives the experience a technical vocabulary in 1917.What you were waiting forAlan Watts, in the middle of the twentieth century, says the simplest possible sentence…