Like going to the dentist, where you write: "Dental appointment today. All of the dentists in Boulder are 'holistic.' They can't fill a cavity but they're good for your soul. Your teeth rot, but apparently your spirit prospers."

One Taste is not some experience you bring about through effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to it, including the effort to "see it nondually".

This is the world of One Taste, with no inside and no outside, no subject and no object, no in here versus out there, without means, without path and without goal. And this, as Ramana said, is the final truth.

If the majority of the "spiritual market" is drawn to prerational magic and myth, how do you reach the small group who are involved in genuine, laborious, demanding, transrational spiritual practice? This is very difficult, because both markets are referred to as "spiritual," but these two camps really don't get along very well--one is mostly translative, the other is mostly transformative, and they generally disapprove of each other--so how do you put them into one magazine without alienating them both?

Early morning, the orange sun is slowly rising, shining forth in empty luminous clarity. The mind and the sky are one, the sun is rising in the vast space of primordial awareness, and there is just this. Yasutani Roshi once said, speaking of satori, that it was the most precious realization in the world, because all the great philosophers had tried to understand ultimate reality but had failed to do so, yet with satori or awakening all of your deepest questions are finally answered: it's just this.

And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.

You can indeed be aware of your body, but you can also be aware of your mind - you can right now notice all the thoughts and ideas and images floating in front of the mind's inward eye. You can, in other words, experience your mind, be aware of your mind. And it's very important to experience your mind directly, cleanly, intensely, because only by bringing awareness to the mind can you begin to transcend the mind and be free of its limitations.

True pluralism on the other hand, is always universal pluralism, (or integral-aperspectival): you start with the commonalities and deep structures that unite human beings--we all suffer, and triumph, laugh and cry, feel pleasure and pain, wonder and remorse; we all have the capacity to form images, symbols, concepts, rules; we all have 208 bones, two kidneys, and one heart; we are all open to a Divine Ground, by whatever name.  And then you add all the wonderful differences, surface structures, culturally constructed variants, and so on, that make various groups--and various individuals--all different, special, and unique.  But if you start with the differences and the pluralism, and never make it to the universal, then you have only the aprespectival madness, ethnocentric revivals, regressive catastrophes.

And as for baby-boomer parents cluck-clucking about illegal substances, ah, gimme a break. Still, I think I'll pass on the rave. But more power to 'em, I say.

As Hubert Benoit said, it is not the identification with the ego that is the problem, but the exclusive nature of the identification. When our self-identity expands beyond the ego, into the deeper psychic, then even into the Unborn and One Taste, the ego is simply taken up and subsumed in a grander identity. But the ego itself remains as the functional self in the gross realm, and it might even appropriately be intensified and made more powerful, simply because it is now plugged into the entire Kosmos.

But egoless does not mean "less than personal"; it means "more than personal." Not personal minus, but personal plus--all the normal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints, and sages--from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhaya. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers--from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so, not because they avoided the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of humanness, and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations.