A series of emails that were written weekly to my subscribers.

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Letters to my readers

About 150 years after the historical Buddha died, a king named Menander encounters the venerated Buddhist monk Nagasena. The king did not know him and asked for a name. The monk provided his name, but added:

 "This is only a name, a denotation, a matter of conventional usage. There is no individual person to be found here."

 "Who is wearing robes, who enjoys them, who meditates, who practices?"

 "Could it be that the hairs on your head are Nagasena?"

The king asked if his true identity might be found in his other body parts, such as his 

nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow kidneys, heart, liver, membranes, spleen, lungs, intestines, stomach, excrement, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, saliva, mucus or urine? The brain, perhaps?

The monk told the king that his identity could not be found in any of them.

The king then asked if the monk was a feeling of pleasure or pain, a perception, an impulse, or a state of consciousness?

The king then accused the monk of lying to him.

 "You said that you are Nagasena, when no such person exists."

The questioning now reversed. Earlier the king had said that he had arrived by chariot. 

 "Is the chariot the axle, the wheels, the yoke, the reins?"

 "Is there a chariot separate from these things?"

 "You say that you arrived by chariot, but you cannot say what a chariot is."

 "I am not lying, for it is because of these parts that a chariot exists as a name, a denotation, a convention."

 "Exactly, because of my body, feeling, perception and so forth does Nagasena exist as a denotation, a convention, a name. But ultimately there is no person at all to be found."

The above is an excerpt from the wonderful 

In Buddhist philosophy, delusion is said to be the cause of our suffering. The main delusion is the belief in a self. 

Conservative, progressive, religious, rational, black, white, male, female, rich, poor...

  when you are sitting quietly with only your breath these labels are meaningless. 

All the words and concepts we use to define ourselves are relative. They describe the differences between ourselves and others. 

Mingyur Rinpoche dedicated his life to meditation and cutting through his habitual tendencies which reinforce false notions of a self. With tens of thousands of hours of meditation practice under his belt, Rinpoche is the 

Yet despite this, there were still subtle layers of self concept to be removed. He noticed he identified with his robes, his name, his title, his role as a teacher and his relationships with his friends, family and students. So he gave it all up.

At age thirty-six, after thorough planning, in the middle of the night he snuck out of his monastery to take up the life of a wandering yogi. Like the 

 before him, he renounced the world and went forth into homelessness.

The once esteemed Mingyur Rinpoche always surrounded by attendants and followers, for the next few years he would be just an ordinary beggar roaming between the caves of the Himalayas and the plains of India. If we define ourselves in reference to other people and how they relate to us, what if we changed how other people saw us? 

Underneath his name, appearance and social roles who was he really?

I feel like I've just finish The Blank Slate, and I've already finished another book. 

 is an excellent read, I have written more about it 

I would like to keep this email short, but not before sharing a little wisdom from the book. Since childhood Rinpoche has had the aspiration to follow in the footsteps of the 

 and embark on a traditional wandering retreat.

To never allow himself to forget his ambition and the precarious nature of human life for decades he repeated this mantra as a part of his daily practice.

 "All things are impermanent. Death comes without warning. This body too will be a corpse."

Like when a candle burns it melts, as we live we die. With each moment our time left dwindles ever shorter. To not forget death, is to not take our life for granted.

To close this email, I have a question for you. Who is it that is reading this right now? 

A letter sent to my subscribers dated 28/5/2019