bodhi tree swaying

Who doesn’t love rainbows? This is one I snapped a couple of weeks ago when my friend Dassini was over for a visit.

The rainbow can be used to investigate how we impose our divisive concepts on the unbroken world of flow and change. The spectrum of colors in the rainbow is a continuum, and yet we find that the mind skips over the intermediate colors in order to see only red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

 But Xenophanes only described three colors, and saw the rainbow as "a cloud that is purple and red and yellow." Aristotle too saw the rainbow as three-colored, but in his case the colors were red, green, and purple, although he admitted that orange could sometimes be seen between red and green [Meteorologica III, 2. 371-372]. The tri-colored rainbow persisted for a long time in Europe, probably because of the

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This is the introduction to a book I’m writing on the Six Element Practice, which is a traditional Buddhist reflection on impermanence, interconnectedness, and non-self. For some reason I posted the first part of a draft of the first chapter before I posted this, which is unfortunate since there’s a reference in the first chapter that makes no sense until you’ve read this. Comments are very welcome. I’d like this to be a good book, and feedback is an important part of honing the writing. Chapter One has changed a lot since I posted it, so once it’s done I’ll re-post it in its entirety. In future you’ll be able to find drafts of the Six Element Book by following the six element book tags. Enjoy!

Andrew walks into a laboratory in the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and stands opposite a plastic mannequin. …

Thanks to William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe for bringing this to my attention:

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

I love this kind of presentation of reality and often find myself looking at the world (in my imagination, of course) in this way. The Six Element Practice, for example, is an insight meditation practice in which we reflect on impermanence and interconnectedness. We become aware of the body — not just those parts we can directly sense but the whole physical body as perceived in the imagination, right down to the internal organs and bone marrow — and sense each of the elements in turn: earth (solid matter), water (anything liquid), fire (the energy of metabolism), air (anything gaseous), space (the form that the …