I received two emails today from readers who were worried about me because I haven’t put anything on this blog since June.

I’m OK!

I may not be putting much on this blog, but I am doing a lot of video for my YouTube channel. You can find it at 

https://www.youtube.com/hardcorezen

The reason I’m not putting much written material on this blog is because I am hard at work on a new book. I don’t know when the book will be finished, much less when it will be on sale. It takes time for this kind of stuff to happen. But after months and months of not knowing what to write, I finally feel like I have a theme for the book.

The theme is twofold. I find words like “twofold” to be insufferably pretentious, by the way. The book has two themes. One is Buddhist ethics and the other is the true nature of reality. I feel like they are very much connected with each other, but that a lot of folks don’t see the connection — including lots of people who write books about Buddhism.

Lots of people like to divide things into Absolute Truth and Relative Truth. But I don’t think this distinction is very accurate. There is only Absolute Truth. Relative Truth is a misunderstanding of Absolute Truth. 

Anyway, Buddhist ethics are based on a view that reality is only One. You avoid causing harm to others because there are no others. The view that there are others is a mistake. When you cause harm to anyone else, you are only causing harm to yourself. 

That seems really simple to me. But it turns out that it’s very hard to explain it adequately.

I’m also trying to write about the Buddhist understanding of who and what we actually are. We are not our bodies. We are not our minds. What we really are is infinite and inexplicable. 

This, too, is really difficult to explain.

That’s why I haven’t been putting out a lot of stuff on this blog. I type and type and type and it just gets exhausting. Doing YouTube videos gives my fingers a break.

I’ll see if I can put some more material on the blog more regularly.