The Heart Illuminated

But there’s also a “meta-move”, mainly cultivable through meditation. With each jump to a higher Basis of Operation, we see more degrees of freedom available for each of our mental constructs, while also seeing the greater systemic impact of each “move”.

This is still a work in progress. What I have so far published, however, though not perfect, feels whole, usable, useful. Brimming with benefit to you, my reader, I hope. Some of my students think so.

Originally written 18-19 by Culadasa, assisted by comments from Elizabeth Pugh, then expanded and co-edited with me 2021. I have elected to preserve Culadasa’s voice here, offering this message from his perspective. If there is anything I could wish for, it would be...

We fit a lot of computation power in that little, dense, hyper-folded meatslab we call a brain.

To achieve that, our brain has a neat trick: rather than (only) having function-specific circuits that work in a feed-forward manner, terminating with a “final answer” at some “top level of brain” – it can project upstream to continue processing, forever perceiving itself alongside new information streaming in. It is a never-ending dance of internal prediction and re-orientation towards external phenomena to improve its model.

The original Sutta sentence simply says “there’s suffering”. It calls out the phenomena, the mere fact of it, rather than making some ontological, ultimate statement about life. “It hurts!”.

The more complete and nuanced interpretation of our situation would be:

“Grasping at any phenomena creates tension”.

Sent by email to the TMI teacher mailing list, August 13 2021. ***Dear TMI teachers,  As most of you know, I have been working with Culadasa on a second edition of TMI for the past two years. Ever since I started studying with Culadasa, I have been spending a...

” … Dor and I are continuing the work on a new book that I had started, and Dor himself is planning to adapt all the work he has already done for TMI to create his own, new book that will allow these updates to see the light of day.”