The monkey-mind journal
Ideas just come to me, I must write them down, whether you like it or not, or are indifferent.
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I wasn’t expecting this book to be that good! This book contains a vast array of examples of religious/mystical experiences that would, by themselves, exacerbate any religiosity already present in the reader. These experiences as reported by many saints, ascetics, and all form of renunciates who lived these ecstatic raptures in the flesh, so to…
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The problem. Many people, no matter how hard they try, find no luck in romantic matters. They are not able to find or maintain a committed, respectful, playful and loving relationship. Everybody is, naturally, looking for love, but the experience of many in today’s society is quite the opposite: This is due, of course, to…
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One of the most widely discussed topics in religion is the topic of non-violence, Ahimsa. For someone following the yogic path, as myself, the Yoga sutras themselves are not very specific on what non-violence really consists; therefore, I think it could be useful to clarify this topic from the lenses of psychology. Most of what…
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Can meditation be dangerous? Somebody asked me whether meditation was dangerous. We can initially laugh at that question, but I must admit that even I had the same doubts before. It does not take a long time to decipher in the question a profound lesson to be learned. Behind this question, we find superstitious thinking,…
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What yoga is not: There’s this tendency in the West to approach yoga and other spiritual practices within the framework of materialistic thinking. By this I mean that there’s a tendency to see yoga as a tool to achieve external results. The West has lost its Christianity, and this event has permitted people to explore…
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Oh, those memories! In the photo above, I was on a trip to NY on a cold winter day, c. 2015. Here, I was dealing with the excruciating pains of merely existing. In reality, this is how I was feeling: My story: how I got there. After enduring some of the darkest times of my…
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I’m of the idea that all forms of therapy, or even meditation, lead, eventually and quite naturally, to resolving the conflicts experienced in early childhood and inherent in the relation of children to their parents. This type of relationship is not only the first, most important, and most necessary of human relations, but also the…
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From Parmenides and Heraclitus we get that non-existence does not exist, whereas existence is all there is. See the following image: We also learn from them that the world of appearances, the phenomenal world witnessed by the senses (internal and external) is the result of a conflict, combination or even a love affair between opposites.…
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I just finished, perhaps, the most consequential book I have read in a very long time, perhaps even more consequential than Aristotle’s Metaphysics in philosophy, the Bhagavad-Gita in religion or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in poetry. I’m referring to the Samkhya philosophy coming to us as the Prava Chana Sutra. The world may not know…
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Best advice I’ve got in my life: “Read the classics.” You really cannot navigate and understand this world without them. (Unless you’re painfully intuitive and sensitive to our toxic environment, but even then, read, for a pain shared is a pain partially relieved).
Oscar Najarro 