Fear
As karma teaches us, fear is never good, fear can only lead to more fear.
Fear is an unpleasant feeling of perceived future danger that makes us expect specific problems. They are, by definition, baseless. Fear is a reaction to something we imagine may happen in the future. It is never real. It is always uncomfortable. The more we fear, the more increasingly unsettled and fearful we become.
Fear is something that our mind invents and cultivates in response to an imagined aversion, be it a person, place, thing, event, or mindstate, and even though we know it is against our own self-interest to be fearful, we are constantly cultivating fearfulness instead of mindfulness.
As fear is based on something that we think may happen in the future, it is a mental process which tries to predict the future - in that sense, fear is a projection of our mind, a silly/baseless/afflicted future-thinking that leads us to suffer. And, too, it takes us away from the
present.
Fear is a defilement; it is an affliction. It ranges from gentle to debilitating. Fear undermines our happiness and spiritual progress.
The cause of all fear is self-grasping ignorance, as well as all the unskillful actions motivated by the delusion of a permanent and independent self. Consider what that means in your life.
Our Most Important Practice
Candrakirti, the 7th century Tibetan master, says that all our afflictions–all of our distress and hardships, all of our uneasiness and suffering, all of our pain and trouble–arise from ignorance. Ignorance being a misunderstanding of the nature of the self: an inability to see our self as it really is, and instead to reify it. Dealing with this misunderstanding, head-on, therefore, is our most important spiritual practice.
Arrogance
Arrogance is a puffed-up mind based on a deluded outlook toward our place in this world. It functions to make us not appreciate others or respect the good qualities of others and to prevent us from expanding our horizons. There are seven types of arrogance in the traditional Buddhist model which are sometimes categorized under the three bolded headings below, and sometimes left as seven different forms of arrogance:
Arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I am better than someone inferior to myself in some quality.
Exaggerated arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I am better than someone equal to myself in some quality.
Outrageous arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I am better than someone superior to myself in some quality.
Egotistic arrogance is a puffed-up mind that thinks “I-me-my-mine” without realizing it is exactly “I-me-my-mine” that is perpetuating our suffering.
False or anticipatory arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I have attained some quality that I have not actually attained or not yet attained.
Modest arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels that I am just a little bit inferior compared to someone vastly superior to myself in some quality, but still superior to almost everyone else.
Distorted arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels that some deviant aspect that I have fallen to is a good quality that I have attained – for instance, being a good hunter.
Vasubandhu, the great 5th century philosopher, mentioned that some Buddhist texts list nine types of arrogance, but they can be subsumed under the three above bolded categories – arrogance, exaggerated arrogance, and modest arrogance. The nine are puffed-up minds that feel:
I am superior to others
I am equal to others
I am inferior to others
Others are superior to me
Others are equal to me
Others are inferior to me
There is no one superior to me
There is no one equal to me
There is no one inferior to me.
Questions is, how “puffed-up” are you.
The Superhighway to Peacefulness
Realizing that the way we perceive things is fundamentally flawed, because we see everything as arising in a cause-and-effect way, we realize we need to shift to seeing things as arising from conditions, with each condition being empty. Studying up on conditions is critical to a Buddhist practice.
The most famous Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, says this: Nothing can be permanent--can have self-sufficient, intrinsic qualities that define it-- because, among other reasons, there is no way to produce (create) something that is permanent.
Since cause and effect, by definition, is permanent, then there is no natural cause-and-effect relationship possible between people, objects, or phenomena. So how do things arise? They happen when four very specifics conditions, which depend on each other to happen, appear to arise together. “Empty” is the term for anything that is characterized by this lack of permanence.
Buddhism is suggesting that we cultivate a new way of understanding and perceiving our lives: learning to abide in conditions—learning not to believe that our senses are giving us accurate information and that the affinities and aversions we erroneously assign to things are the problem, not the solution.
Abiding in conditions is the superhighway to peacefulness and enlightenment.
Why Meditate
The questions isn’t “Why should you meditate? Rather, the question is “Why doesn’t everyone meditate every single day?” Answer, people don’t meditate because they think (1) they don’t have the time, or (2) it’s hard to do, or (3) it is odd or culty. None of those is true. We all have the time, especially when we realize that we can do it anywhere: in the car waiting to pickup the kids from school, on the train heading to and from the office, etc.
We should meditate just like we brush our teeth. Meditation, after all, scrubs the mind of stress and anxiety, leaving it glistening and present to be here in the joy of the moment with ourselves, our families, our friends and colleagues, and with the planet. But whereas brushing your teeth only provides you with oral health, meditating makes everything about your mind and body better, healthier, and happier.
Right Speech Ditty
“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” Thomas Paine
Candy or Gold, Your Choice
What we call happiness in everyday parlance is only “happiness” because we’re not seeing it clearly. What we call “happiness” is, in fact, nothing more or less than being excited about getting what we want. In dharma terms, that’s greed, not happiness.
True happiness doesn’t come from getting what we want and it isn’t dependent on externals. Externals, as we know from meditation, are impermanent and always changing. To hang our happiness on something that is about to disappear isn’t real happiness. Real happiness comes from within, from letting go of our delusions, from being our original untarnished self.
If we want to reach true happiness, we must be dedicated, disciplined, and above all, honest with ourselves. And we must be willing to give up the illusion of happiness that comes from getting our way in order to be happiness.
We act more like kids than adults in making this choice. We tell ourselves we want it both ways. We’re not willing to give up our candy for gold. We tell ourselves we can keep the candy and get the gold too, building one delusion on top of another. It doesn’t work that way. And even though
we realize that it doesn’t work that way–after all, if it did, we would be happy by now–we continue to tell ourselves we’re right and that we should be attached to the (candy) stuff we like and want, even at the expense longterm happiness.
Until we are willing to rearrange our priorities and commit to living a disciplined, meditation- and wisdom-informed life, all we will do is increase our unhappiness, our stress and anxiety. We know this, of course, if we look at what’s happening around things we say make us happy. Take a closer look: What do most people say at the end of a cruise: WOW, this was great, we should do it again next year. Instead of enjoying the end of the cruise, we’re trying to get more of it and our idea of it. This is greed. This is protecting and defending our feeling about how great the trip was by buying another. This is fertilizing the seeds that say, “If a little is good, a lot is better” thinking that “a lot” will finally make us r-e-a-l-l-y happy. Again, this excitement at getting what we want; it is not real happiness.
We spend so much time working on our desires and attachments, strengthening them and increasing them, explaining and justifying them, that we aren’t present with the things as they are. We’d rather talk about how good it will be next year than to actually be on the cruise. This is the candy in our life, and we hold onto it tenaciously. Ironically, it is exactly that tenacity that prevents us from moving along the path to real happiness, the gold. Question is, do you want occasional moments when you delude yourself into thinking you’re happy or do you want to be happy all the time.
Are you willing to trade the “happiness” that comes from getting externals for the happiness that comes from within, from a settled mind that is clear and at ease, even under the most difficult circumstances? The happiness that comes from spiritual well-being and a disciplined mind can survive even sickness, aging and death, so why is it that we are so willing to forego it for momentary “pleasures.” When we let go of the candy, when we are willing to sacrifice external pleasures, we become free of the mental burdens, the stress and anxiety, that they entail and that binds us to our suffering. External pleasures are our addictions to eye-candy, ear-candy, nose-candy, tongue-candy, body- candy, and mind candy. They foster the three poisons: greed, anger, and delusion, and they actively block the qualities we need to achieve inner peace.
So do we relish our passions or renounce them? Do we follow the path or only give it lip service?
ASK YOURSELF, AM I GOING FOR THE GOLD?!
What’s In Your Cup?
You’re holding a coffee cup when someone comes along and bumps into you. Coffee spills everywhere. Why did you spill the coffee? You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. The point is, whatever is in the cup is what spills out.
When life comes along and shakes you, whatever is inside you comes out. So we have to ask ourselves, “What’s in my cup? What did I put in my cup today?”
A Deep Look at Emptiness
The first and most important question, when discussing emptiness, is “What are things empty of?” Things are empty of permanence. Although things appear directly to our senses to be inherently existent, in reality all phenomena lack, or are empty of, an inherent, substantive, autonomous existence. This means all phenomena lack a permanent definition, meaning, value, or function.
That’s what things are empty of.
Emptiness is the unseen, ultimate nature of all things. Emptiness means that things do not have an inherent definition, meaning, function, or value. Emptiness is the false notion of an independently, existing Self. Emptiness is the absence of reification. It is the source of all our
problems.
It is especially important to understand that “emptiness” is an attribute, a descriptor, like an adjective, not a noun; it is a designation, not a thing, not a place. It is not something permanent that underlies the universe, but rather, and simply, “ultimately” how things really are, which means dependently arisen and ever-changing.
Question
Amelie Rorty, a late 20th century Belgian-born American philosopher wrote: “The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?”
Answer - Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy: Realize Emptiness
Existence?
Buddhist theories of mind-only postulate that human beings and all phenomena lack entityhood and “exist” only as the psychological constituents and processes which comprise them. In other words, how we imagine them is how they exist—regardless of whether there is an external entity to corroborate them.
Two Poems to Consider
Frog Haiku
By Matsumoto Basho
translated by Allen Ginsberg
The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!
Mahayana
By Philip Whalen (1965)
Soap cleans itself the way ice does,
Both disappear in the process.
The questions of “Whence” & “Wither” have no validity here.
Mud is a mixture of earth and water.
Imagine WATER as a “Heavenly” element.
Samsara and nirvana are one:
Flies in amber, sand in the soap
Dirt and red algae in the ice
Fare thee well, how very delightful to see you here again!
WORRYING
Worrying does not take away tomorrow's troubles, it takes away today's peace.
Free-Will?
This is from Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva, Verse 34 from Chapter Six on patience. The full chapter with our commentary can be found at DeepDharma: https://www.deepdharma.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Patience-FINAL-12-21-21.pdf
If things were accomplished by free-will,
No living being at all
Would ever have any suffering,
For no one wants to suffer.
One could take exception with this verse, there are people who get mileage out of suffering and causing conditions to arise that make others suffer, but in general, we need to use what free-will we have to minimize or eliminate our suffering rather than to create more suffering. When karmic conditions arise, when we become aware of the narratives that we use to navigate our everyday lives, meditation and a patience practice allow us to see that we can, in “the present moment,” inject changes from our free-will.
No one has 100% free-will, but, at least with respect to our experiences of conventional reality, we do have considerable free-will once awareness arises and we see where we are headed. Ignorance plays in heavily here – it is impossible to predict all the outcomes of our actions due to the limits of our understanding, but if we act from patience rather than anger, we stand a better chance of avoiding adding negative reactive karma to our storehouses than if we react from anger. This, in turn, helps to steer us toward ever-greater equanimity than perpetually reinforced negative reactivity. This is a significant pathway to peacefulness.
Wash Your Bowl
A monk said to Jōshū, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.” “Have you eaten your rice porridge?” asked Jōshū. “Yes I have,” replied the monk. “Then you had better wash your bowl,” said Jōshū.
The metaphor behind this simple appearing story is really quite deep. Most people think that it simply tells us we must wash our dishes. But no. It’s true meaning goes like this.
The monk eating the porridge is analogous to the present moment. However, after he’s done eating his porridge, the uncleaned bowl represents another present moment which is still affected by the past.
When Jōshū — a senior monk — asks the newbie to wash his bowl, he means that one must wash the past off of one’s present. That one must always keep a clean bowl — a present unaffected by the past.
Our past can be quite a prominent source of suffering. We regret what we did do. We regret what we didn’t do. We hold on to people’s past mistakes and hold grudges against them. We hold on to our own past mistakes and beat ourselves up. But learning to let go of our past — to wash our bowls — will enable us to live healthier, happier lives.
Patience, Briefly Explained
Being patient means welcoming wholeheartedly whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are. It means being present, without our stories blinding us to what is really happening. It is a mindstate that is open, curious, and accepting. It is being present without characterizations that leave us in delusion.
As karma teaches us, fear is never good, fear can only lead to more fear.
Fear is an unpleasant feeling of perceived future danger that makes us expect specific problems. They are, by definition, baseless. Fear is a reaction to something we imagine may happen in the future. It is never real. It is always uncomfortable. The more we fear, the more increasingly unsettled and fearful we become.
Fear is something that our mind invents and cultivates in response to an imagined aversion, be it a person, place, thing, event, or mindstate, and even though we know it is against our own self-interest to be fearful, we are constantly cultivating fearfulness instead of mindfulness.
As fear is based on something that we think may happen in the future, it is a mental process which tries to predict the future - in that sense, fear is a projection of our mind, a silly/baseless/afflicted future-thinking that leads us to suffer. And, too, it takes us away from the
present.
Fear is a defilement; it is an affliction. It ranges from gentle to debilitating. Fear undermines our happiness and spiritual progress.
The cause of all fear is self-grasping ignorance, as well as all the unskillful actions motivated by the delusion of a permanent and independent self. Consider what that means in your life.
Our Most Important Practice
Candrakirti, the 7th century Tibetan master, says that all our afflictions–all of our distress and hardships, all of our uneasiness and suffering, all of our pain and trouble–arise from ignorance. Ignorance being a misunderstanding of the nature of the self: an inability to see our self as it really is, and instead to reify it. Dealing with this misunderstanding, head-on, therefore, is our most important spiritual practice.
Arrogance
Arrogance is a puffed-up mind based on a deluded outlook toward our place in this world. It functions to make us not appreciate others or respect the good qualities of others and to prevent us from expanding our horizons. There are seven types of arrogance in the traditional Buddhist model which are sometimes categorized under the three bolded headings below, and sometimes left as seven different forms of arrogance:
Arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I am better than someone inferior to myself in some quality.
Exaggerated arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I am better than someone equal to myself in some quality.
Outrageous arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I am better than someone superior to myself in some quality.
Egotistic arrogance is a puffed-up mind that thinks “I-me-my-mine” without realizing it is exactly “I-me-my-mine” that is perpetuating our suffering.
False or anticipatory arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels I have attained some quality that I have not actually attained or not yet attained.
Modest arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels that I am just a little bit inferior compared to someone vastly superior to myself in some quality, but still superior to almost everyone else.
Distorted arrogance is a puffed-up mind that feels that some deviant aspect that I have fallen to is a good quality that I have attained – for instance, being a good hunter.
Vasubandhu, the great 5th century philosopher, mentioned that some Buddhist texts list nine types of arrogance, but they can be subsumed under the three above bolded categories – arrogance, exaggerated arrogance, and modest arrogance. The nine are puffed-up minds that feel:
I am superior to others
I am equal to others
I am inferior to others
Others are superior to me
Others are equal to me
Others are inferior to me
There is no one superior to me
There is no one equal to me
There is no one inferior to me.
Questions is, how “puffed-up” are you.
The Superhighway to Peacefulness
Realizing that the way we perceive things is fundamentally flawed, because we see everything as arising in a cause-and-effect way, we realize we need to shift to seeing things as arising from conditions, with each condition being empty. Studying up on conditions is critical to a Buddhist practice.
The most famous Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, says this: Nothing can be permanent--can have self-sufficient, intrinsic qualities that define it-- because, among other reasons, there is no way to produce (create) something that is permanent.
Since cause and effect, by definition, is permanent, then there is no natural cause-and-effect relationship possible between people, objects, or phenomena. So how do things arise? They happen when four very specifics conditions, which depend on each other to happen, appear to arise together. “Empty” is the term for anything that is characterized by this lack of permanence.
Buddhism is suggesting that we cultivate a new way of understanding and perceiving our lives: learning to abide in conditions—learning not to believe that our senses are giving us accurate information and that the affinities and aversions we erroneously assign to things are the problem, not the solution.
Abiding in conditions is the superhighway to peacefulness and enlightenment.
Why Meditate
The questions isn’t “Why should you meditate? Rather, the question is “Why doesn’t everyone meditate every single day?” Answer, people don’t meditate because they think (1) they don’t have the time, or (2) it’s hard to do, or (3) it is odd or culty. None of those is true. We all have the time, especially when we realize that we can do it anywhere: in the car waiting to pickup the kids from school, on the train heading to and from the office, etc.
We should meditate just like we brush our teeth. Meditation, after all, scrubs the mind of stress and anxiety, leaving it glistening and present to be here in the joy of the moment with ourselves, our families, our friends and colleagues, and with the planet. But whereas brushing your teeth only provides you with oral health, meditating makes everything about your mind and body better, healthier, and happier.
Right Speech Ditty
“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” Thomas Paine
Candy or Gold, Your Choice
What we call happiness in everyday parlance is only “happiness” because we’re not seeing it clearly. What we call “happiness” is, in fact, nothing more or less than being excited about getting what we want. In dharma terms, that’s greed, not happiness.
True happiness doesn’t come from getting what we want and it isn’t dependent on externals. Externals, as we know from meditation, are impermanent and always changing. To hang our happiness on something that is about to disappear isn’t real happiness. Real happiness comes from within, from letting go of our delusions, from being our original untarnished self.
If we want to reach true happiness, we must be dedicated, disciplined, and above all, honest with ourselves. And we must be willing to give up the illusion of happiness that comes from getting our way in order to be happiness.
We act more like kids than adults in making this choice. We tell ourselves we want it both ways. We’re not willing to give up our candy for gold. We tell ourselves we can keep the candy and get the gold too, building one delusion on top of another. It doesn’t work that way. And even though
we realize that it doesn’t work that way–after all, if it did, we would be happy by now–we continue to tell ourselves we’re right and that we should be attached to the (candy) stuff we like and want, even at the expense longterm happiness.
Until we are willing to rearrange our priorities and commit to living a disciplined, meditation- and wisdom-informed life, all we will do is increase our unhappiness, our stress and anxiety. We know this, of course, if we look at what’s happening around things we say make us happy. Take a closer look: What do most people say at the end of a cruise: WOW, this was great, we should do it again next year. Instead of enjoying the end of the cruise, we’re trying to get more of it and our idea of it. This is greed. This is protecting and defending our feeling about how great the trip was by buying another. This is fertilizing the seeds that say, “If a little is good, a lot is better” thinking that “a lot” will finally make us r-e-a-l-l-y happy. Again, this excitement at getting what we want; it is not real happiness.
We spend so much time working on our desires and attachments, strengthening them and increasing them, explaining and justifying them, that we aren’t present with the things as they are. We’d rather talk about how good it will be next year than to actually be on the cruise. This is the candy in our life, and we hold onto it tenaciously. Ironically, it is exactly that tenacity that prevents us from moving along the path to real happiness, the gold. Question is, do you want occasional moments when you delude yourself into thinking you’re happy or do you want to be happy all the time.
Are you willing to trade the “happiness” that comes from getting externals for the happiness that comes from within, from a settled mind that is clear and at ease, even under the most difficult circumstances? The happiness that comes from spiritual well-being and a disciplined mind can survive even sickness, aging and death, so why is it that we are so willing to forego it for momentary “pleasures.” When we let go of the candy, when we are willing to sacrifice external pleasures, we become free of the mental burdens, the stress and anxiety, that they entail and that binds us to our suffering. External pleasures are our addictions to eye-candy, ear-candy, nose-candy, tongue-candy, body- candy, and mind candy. They foster the three poisons: greed, anger, and delusion, and they actively block the qualities we need to achieve inner peace.
So do we relish our passions or renounce them? Do we follow the path or only give it lip service?
ASK YOURSELF, AM I GOING FOR THE GOLD?!
What’s In Your Cup?
You’re holding a coffee cup when someone comes along and bumps into you. Coffee spills everywhere. Why did you spill the coffee? You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. The point is, whatever is in the cup is what spills out.
When life comes along and shakes you, whatever is inside you comes out. So we have to ask ourselves, “What’s in my cup? What did I put in my cup today?”
A Deep Look at Emptiness
The first and most important question, when discussing emptiness, is “What are things empty of?” Things are empty of permanence. Although things appear directly to our senses to be inherently existent, in reality all phenomena lack, or are empty of, an inherent, substantive, autonomous existence. This means all phenomena lack a permanent definition, meaning, value, or function.
That’s what things are empty of.
Emptiness is the unseen, ultimate nature of all things. Emptiness means that things do not have an inherent definition, meaning, function, or value. Emptiness is the false notion of an independently, existing Self. Emptiness is the absence of reification. It is the source of all our
problems.
It is especially important to understand that “emptiness” is an attribute, a descriptor, like an adjective, not a noun; it is a designation, not a thing, not a place. It is not something permanent that underlies the universe, but rather, and simply, “ultimately” how things really are, which means dependently arisen and ever-changing.
Question
Amelie Rorty, a late 20th century Belgian-born American philosopher wrote: “The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?”
Answer - Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy: Realize Emptiness
Existence?
Buddhist theories of mind-only postulate that human beings and all phenomena lack entityhood and “exist” only as the psychological constituents and processes which comprise them. In other words, how we imagine them is how they exist—regardless of whether there is an external entity to corroborate them.
Two Poems to Consider
Frog Haiku
By Matsumoto Basho
translated by Allen Ginsberg
The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!
Mahayana
By Philip Whalen (1965)
Soap cleans itself the way ice does,
Both disappear in the process.
The questions of “Whence” & “Wither” have no validity here.
Mud is a mixture of earth and water.
Imagine WATER as a “Heavenly” element.
Samsara and nirvana are one:
Flies in amber, sand in the soap
Dirt and red algae in the ice
Fare thee well, how very delightful to see you here again!
WORRYING
Worrying does not take away tomorrow's troubles, it takes away today's peace.
Free-Will?
This is from Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva, Verse 34 from Chapter Six on patience. The full chapter with our commentary can be found at DeepDharma: https://www.deepdharma.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Patience-FINAL-12-21-21.pdf
If things were accomplished by free-will,
No living being at all
Would ever have any suffering,
For no one wants to suffer.
One could take exception with this verse, there are people who get mileage out of suffering and causing conditions to arise that make others suffer, but in general, we need to use what free-will we have to minimize or eliminate our suffering rather than to create more suffering. When karmic conditions arise, when we become aware of the narratives that we use to navigate our everyday lives, meditation and a patience practice allow us to see that we can, in “the present moment,” inject changes from our free-will.
No one has 100% free-will, but, at least with respect to our experiences of conventional reality, we do have considerable free-will once awareness arises and we see where we are headed. Ignorance plays in heavily here – it is impossible to predict all the outcomes of our actions due to the limits of our understanding, but if we act from patience rather than anger, we stand a better chance of avoiding adding negative reactive karma to our storehouses than if we react from anger. This, in turn, helps to steer us toward ever-greater equanimity than perpetually reinforced negative reactivity. This is a significant pathway to peacefulness.
Wash Your Bowl
A monk said to Jōshū, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.” “Have you eaten your rice porridge?” asked Jōshū. “Yes I have,” replied the monk. “Then you had better wash your bowl,” said Jōshū.
The metaphor behind this simple appearing story is really quite deep. Most people think that it simply tells us we must wash our dishes. But no. It’s true meaning goes like this.
The monk eating the porridge is analogous to the present moment. However, after he’s done eating his porridge, the uncleaned bowl represents another present moment which is still affected by the past.
When Jōshū — a senior monk — asks the newbie to wash his bowl, he means that one must wash the past off of one’s present. That one must always keep a clean bowl — a present unaffected by the past.
Our past can be quite a prominent source of suffering. We regret what we did do. We regret what we didn’t do. We hold on to people’s past mistakes and hold grudges against them. We hold on to our own past mistakes and beat ourselves up. But learning to let go of our past — to wash our bowls — will enable us to live healthier, happier lives.
Patience, Briefly Explained
Being patient means welcoming wholeheartedly whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are. It means being present, without our stories blinding us to what is really happening. It is a mindstate that is open, curious, and accepting. It is being present without characterizations that leave us in delusion.