Begin Here

The Clearing

Start here. Short courses through the Map, one reading a day, for anyone who has come to this new.

If you have come here new, this is the way in. The Clearing is a set of short courses through the Map, five readings each, one sitting a day. Each reading is a single teaching from one of the traditions, a few paragraphs in a teacher's voice on how to read it, and one question to carry into the day. The question is the practice. The reading is only the setup.

The courses follow the Map's own order: the ground beneath every tradition; the one who is looking for it; what gets in the way; what to do with your hours; the subtraction; the moment the wall thins; the turn back toward everyone else; and the laugh at the end of it. Read the first three and you have the orientation. Read all eight and you have walked the whole shape once. Nothing is timed and nothing is graded. This is the plainest way into what the site calls the perennial philosophy: not that every tradition says the same thing in the same way, but that when you read enough of them carefully they keep arriving at the same place. You do not need a tradition to begin, and you do not need to leave one to continue. You need only to read slowly.

If you would like the name of the site explained first, it is one teaching: The Antibody.

8 Courses

Course I. The Ground Beneath the Names

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…

Course II. Who Is Asking

Five teachings on the one who was doing the looking. — About a week, one sitting per day.

The question that turns backRamana Maharshi gives the shortest instruction on the Map: ask who is asking.The maskJung borrows the word for a Greek actor's mask and names what you have been wearing.The bag of skinAlan Watts, in a letter to his children, names the hallucination and the taboo that…No one watchingKrishnamurti says the observer and the observed are not two, and that watching for it…To forget the selfDogen, thirteenth-century Zen master, says the whole path in three sentences.

Course III. What Gets in the Way

Five teachings on the obstacle, which turns out not to be where you were looking for it. — About a week, one sitting per day.

The trap and the fishZhuangzi says the first veil is the words themselves.The set mistaken for the playMaya is not that the world is unreal. It is that the appearance got taken for the whole.The bill you did not signThe Hebrew prophets revoke a law inside their own scripture, and keep both versions.Between the twoOvid's Daedalus gives two warnings, and the proverb kept only one.The verdict that never comesA frontier farmer loses a horse, and the story refuses to end where the proverb does.

Course IV. Practice Without an End

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.

Course V. The Arithmetic

Five teachings on the subtraction every tradition arrives at, and why it is not a loss. — About a week, one sitting per day.

The poor in spiritThe Sermon on the Mount opens with a word that does not mean what it has come to mean.The grain of wheatPaul names the move, and John gives it a seed.Call no one happyThe Greeks name the self that refuses the arithmetic, and watch what happens to it.The dark, facedThe goddess of death and time is called Mother, and the teaching is in the facing.Who is that?Ram Dass, near the end of his life, asks the question that undoes the whole difficulty.

Course VI. 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…

Course VII. The Turn

Five teachings on coming back, once you have seen it, for everyone who has not. — About a week, one sitting per day.

The hardest partCampbell says the quest is not finished at the summit. It is finished at home.The vow at the forkŚāntideva writes the vow of the one who turns back, and the fork is the teaching's image…Just love everyoneRichard Alpert, credentialed to the top of the Western mind, is looked at once and…Who is good, who is bad?The Sikh scripture sets a Muslim weaver and a Sufi saint beside its own gurus, and asks…Walking each other homeRam Dass says the bodhisattva vow in a sentence you can carry in a pocket.

Course VIII. The Laugh

Five teachings on the laugh from the height that sees the whole of it, and why it is the last thing, not the least. — About a week, one sitting per day.

Do not be afraidThe destroyer of worlds dances with one hand raised, palm out, in reassurance.Ye are godsAccused of making himself God, Jesus answers with a psalm that widens the claim to…The impossible instructionRead as rules, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be kept. Read as a koan, it was never meant…Imagine him happyCamus leaves the damned man at the foot of the mountain and insists we imagine him…The cosmic giggleRam Dass names the laugh at the top of the ladder, and it is the Buddha's smile with…

Arrived with a rigorous frame you’d rather keep? The Edge is the other door. You don’t need to lower your standards to start. The Edge →