Our desire to control this or that based on concepts, beliefs and opinions is like trying to cut with a butter knife. If you don’t know any better you may think it works well if you put enough force behind it. The razor’s edge, the sharp blade of awareness from training our minds, cuts through the conceptual grasping that picks sides. If the leading edge is not resting in this moment of perception, grasping at a self vs other will not cease. Until you don’t know what you’re doing, this is still operating in the milieu of concepts. When your perception starts showing up in consciousness only, there are no credentials. You are just here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80LlG4tKOTs

Normalize perception only. Take any of the senses. Take it down to the basic functioning. Register the contrast. What is this? Ask the question. Whatever comes up, register that, including thought patterns. Watch things come and go and come and go until there is a breakthrough. The finding is not finding. It does not mean nothing, it is perception only.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mFUYWxrcYg

If you are just receiving, nothing happens. There is really nowhere to get, but YOU have to discover that, not just as a thought. It is like your eyes stretched out twenty feet in front of you and turning around to look at you. The ultimate truth is looking right at you, it is absolutely amazing and completely normal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNXLAM5CkX8

Sleeping behind concepts: Whatever appears, we tend to stick an idea to it and substitute our ideas, opinions, and beliefs about it for what it is actually pointing to. You get fascinated by the concepts and miss what is right in front of you. You don’t have to stop this, just be aware that you’re doing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG-yEFBG3Fk

The first assumption seems to be that there is something out there and it is soon followed by the assumption is that there is something in here witnessing something out there. This is commonly called duality. We live our life and things may be going smoothly but as soon as there is a problem with anything, we start to blame because we don’t see that things are fundamentally dependently arisen. There is no self-being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIO-ZCsWdWA

If you look at something and see what it is and you neither believe it, nor disbelieve it and you’re not looking away-- you’re looking right at it--then you’re investigating it, whatever it is. By virtue of the setup of relative truth, if you look at something, you’re ignoring everything else. As soon as you name it and believe anything about it, it shuts down on the awareness. You don’t have to stop believing, just see the way you’re attaching thoughts about something without any proof because you don’t like the feeling of not knowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvvrcYnls2E

“I vow to save all beings”, or as it is also said “I vow to be with all things” is to the vow that the bodhisattva takes to put others before one’s self. Of all the precepts if you were to just observe that vow completely, the rest of the vows and precepts could dissolve into that one because you would be just looking out for the welfare of others, not based on your opinion but based on perception. You perceive an apparent other and at the same time, if you are training your mind, you will also perceive reality as it actually is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srn9s0Q-3sg

You can’t decide to become selfless, you can only see that the self never existed in the first place. Deconstruct ego by seeing the way that it is built. The five skandhas, the twelve links and other Buddhist teachings are ways to look at the structure. Sitting meditation is away to observe outside of any belief system. See what the energy of hope and fear is. Eventually you see that there is no solid self. If you see the construction, it deconstructs itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW7Lllvsc0k

We lift weights and run to exercise muscles. How do you exercise awareness? You sit down and you find the separation between thinking and awareness. See it without meddling with it. If you just see it, the thought process will re-prioritize itself. It’s like it minds. It minds because the awareness is finally becoming the priority in your life. You’re starting to lead your life with your awareness instead of the thought process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXsnKqFMGzo

The Three Modes is a basic teaching of Yogacara or Cittamatra, the consciousness-only school of Buddhism. It is three kinds of ways of talking about and contemplating the nature of existence. Paratantra is the dependently arisen nature. Parikaplita is the imaginary nature where we impute meaning on what is dependently arisen. Parinishpana is the perfected nature, when we see what is fundamentally true, which is empty of what we project onto it. If you see there is not a self or an other anywhere, you are seeing the absolute. If you see it and don’t see it at the same time you will not arrive at a conclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu4HC7V5f-I