Inklings Bruce Sanguin's blog

I’ve written elsewhere about inheriting a negative attitude about desire. I interpreted the opening line of Psalm 23 ( “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” ) to mean I shouldn’t want. Obviously, it means something more along the lines of God provides, chill out. Whether that’s true or not is beside the … Read more

Failures of love, physical or emotional, persist in the psyche. They are disastrous, and in my experience there is no magic way to “get over” them. But they don’t have to run your life either. When we break through the denial that we were devastated by failures of love, it becomes possible to live in … Read more

Thoughts take me out, out of my body, out of now. Molars grind. I am grinding out a problem to occupy this mind. I am this grind. It is a demanding sport, this getting lost in thought. This figuring out of a future that is a replay of a bad season in which all was … Read more

It’s common to hear spiritual seekers berate themselves for “doing” and not “being”. What exactly does this mean though? To most people it means sitting quietly, not having to be busy, and not distracting themselves with activity. Which I get. Compulsively being on the move as a defence against feeling, or dealing with one’s life … Read more

I was born into the world to love it. To love my mother, father, siblings, and the trees, the sky, the rain. When I discovered I couldn’t love my mother because her heart was closed the love transmuted into “fuck you” . It is a revelation to understand the darkness, the heaviness, as what becomes … Read more

The theme of this website and the course I teach, Live Your Own Life, can be misconstrued as a life of selfishness, the exertion of a heroic will to make things go the way mainstream culture has told us will make us happy, (which is always in the direction of increased security, status, and conformity). … Read more

I mentioned in my last blog that I’d been reading Krishnamurti. It’s tricky catching on to what he’s about — well, for me at least. Here’s my best shot, for those interested: His most repeated statement is: the observed is the observer. But what does he mean? What we observe, the world as it is, … Read more

I recently emerged from a dark night of the soul. That’s what John of the Cross (15th – 16th century) called the suffering of the soul’s purification en route to union with God. (Personally, I think we’re already in union with “G_d”, we just don’t know it, for reasons discussed in this reflection). The dark … Read more

Psychedelics can be “used” for many purposes: to gain direct insight into the nature of Reality; to discover what lurks in our own subconscious; to increase creativity; to have fun at a party or in the wilderness. All valid. I’ve used them in these ways myself. But, as my mentor Andrew Feldmar teaches, in the … Read more

Most political opinion postings on social media these days are little more than virtue signalling. Here’s a working definition that I picked up from the internet: “The public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or social conscience or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue. It’s noticeable … Read more