Great Confusion

Our time is marked by great confusion. 

We aren’t clear about what we truly want, we haven’t cultivated the innate power necessary in order to live well, and we are fundamentally not at peace

Strangers In A Strange Land

Our basic condition of confusion can be likened to being a stranger in a strange land.

This feeling of being lost is the result of a spiritual crisis, which is none other than the loss of a shared metaphysics.

Rigorous Spirituality

The Inward Turn Institute offers rigorous spirituality in this time of great confusion. It seeks (i) to recover a nondual metaphysics that’s right for our time, and it aims (ii) to extricate us from our existential confusion by helping us to achieve three aims: clarity, innate power, and peace.

Metaphysics As The Return Home

Metaphysics tells us both about how things came into being (“cosmology”) and about the nature of ultimate reality (“theology”). Accordingly, it places us within a greater story, and thereby makes possible a return–by an inward turn–to our true home.

I. Existential Clarity

To be clear means two different yet related things. First, one is ignorant, at the conceptual level, about how best to live. When I ask people, “What do you ultimately long for?,” most have no answer to this question or only a fuzzy one at best. Therefore, clarity, in this sense, is intellectual or conceptual in nature. Accordingly, it falls within the ken of practical philosophy. 

At a higher level, clarity is intuitive. Here, one has an immediate grasp of who one truly is and, in time, is able to live from this immediate understanding of one’s essential being.

II. Innate Power

In our time, quite a few people are operating from a low energetic state. As a result, they’re often experiencing any or all of the following: scattered thoughts, foggy thinking, low-grade negative emotions (e.g., petulant resentment, damp sadness, ambient worries, nitpicky anger, persistent loneliness), a tendency to doubt or vacillate, an inability to start a project or to see it all the way through, and—perhaps above all–a general malaise that could be termed “halfheartedness.”

By “innate power,” we mean a high energetic expression of one’s true being. When one is experiencing a high-energy state, one’s thoughts are clear, one feels steady, and one’s capacity to execute is straightforward and easeful. In short, one elegantly and muscularly can take life in stride.

III. Abiding Peace

In a famous Zen koan, the student tells his teacher: “Your disciple’s mind is not yet at peace.” What does it feel like for a mind not to be at ease? Generally speaking, it either feels dull and lethargic (tamas, in Sanskrit) or else restless and agitated (rajasic). 

To know peace is, ultimately, to go beyond the mind and, looking down, to see, as the Buddha once put it in The Diamond Sutra, that “mind arises without abiding anywhere.” That is, the one who is standing as peace sees all experiences as coming and going without any rumination, stickiness, or fear–in a word, without any reactivity at all.

The Ultimate Discovery

The ultimate discovery is that clarity, power, and peace are three different names for one and the same basic substance. Hence, clarity = power = peace.