This comes with love… at the turning of the year, towards light and joy…
and with gratitude for the innumerable gestures of wisdom and connectivity through time which are linked with
this chapter of brief teachings. You can now listen to the audio recording of this chapter from the book here
or via the drop-down menu under Audio/Video.

When an oyster finds a piece of grit inside its shell-house it is stimulated to produce an exudate called nacre as protection from the irritation. This covers the grit , softening its sharpness and gradually enclosing it.
So pearls are formed from a build up of these layers around a tiny piece of grit – or some other particle which has been artificially introduced.
Pearls come in different sizes and, to our human eyes in the light of day, they may seem to have an alluring lustre and colouration… and corresponding, perhaps enduring, value…

But the ‘pearl’ is a construct and is soft and liable to change… Degradation occurs quickly if there is insufficient humidity… if conditions are not right they lose their lustre or may even disintegrate.

Our bodies are similarly unstable… and our thoughts are inherently unreliable…nothing reliable there!
We can check this out…
There is a saying in English ‘nothing ever is or was but thinking makes it so’. Yet although thinking can make something seem so… it does not make it truly so.

Thankfully the buddha taught… teachings which lead and gesture, as all roads once led to Rome, towards the realisation our true nature… the unchanging basis of our existence – uncompounded, unconstructed
– and encouraged awakening to this.
But this true nature is not to be found in the ‘obvious’ places where we usually seek stability…not in self, others, control, riches, the world, not in any thing…

So while the rarest most lustrous of pearls has a high material value, teachings which help us wake up from the confusion of duality are priceless.

Some teachings gently help to see more clearly… encouraging curiosity, others come as a blast of wisdom which blows holes in the ephemeral shaky cover-up of our egoic constraints and certainties, exposing the lack of self-nature of the ‘grit’, of the grasper.
With grasping released, the residual tatters fall away and with them the suffering and irritation which arose from the mistaken belief in duality.

Hoping you enjoy the teachings in the recording… and life : )

Winter solstice 2021