Not Knowing What This Is

Recovery for me meant a never-ending self-improvement project and a continuous focus on my problems. So while my relationship with alcohol was destroying my life, the idea of recovery simply wasn't attractive enough to me. Then one day I asked myself the question. How would my life need to be for me to not want to use alcohol? The thing that initially attracted me to alcohol provided some vital clues. I realized that I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, comfortable around other people, and for the world to appear full of wonder as it sometimes did when I first started drinking alcohol. I then knew that if I could get these things a better way, I wouldn't need alcohol anymore.

PatrickKavanagh teaches us that love, wonder, and joy are available in even the mostdifficult moments. He describes the passionate transitory that awaits us whenwe can see beyond claptrap. .You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com

Join me on a journey of nostalgia as we encounter the eternal objects of Alfred North Whitehead, the storehouse consciousness of Buddhist Yogācāra, and the liberation that can be achieved through the imagination.You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com

Here we explore how a toddler's simple enquiry "why is the sky blue?" can reveal the limits of adult knowing. This question can be an invitation back to a non-ordinary world that is full of wonder. It can help us see how the ordinary way of seeing is just a veil we place upon the non-ordinary.

Wouldn't it be nice to transcend all of the complications of life? No more desires, no more messiness, no more concerns about anything. Here, I discuss why I gave up on this search for spiritual transcendence and found something much better.Check out my YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@paulgarrigan1You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com

Plentyof attention is given to escaping unwholesome desires and eliminating negativethinking patterns, but what about things we want there to be more of? Qualitiesthat would improve our life if we could increase them. In this video, I discusshow we might go about cultivating wholesome desire through the magic of ourattention. You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com

Here I discuss how our memories can lead us to a different relationship with reality. They can help us begin to recognize how wonderful life can become when we stop resisting. You can find more about my musings at paulgarrigan.com

Every judgement I make about how I am doing is based on unprovable assumptions. Our ideas about who we are and how we are going generate resistance and rejection of what is here.

Life is baffling. That we experience anything at all is astounding. We use our knowledge of the world like a safety blanket in an attempt to navigate with the complexity of life. This fools us into believing that we know what this is and we know what we are. The world can appear less baffling because of this, but it also means we become a prisoner of our understanding.

When we discover stillness, there can be a desire to escape into it. This is a rejection of life. Eventually we realize that all is stillness, so there is no need to escape anything - it is always and already here.