Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 93. I am your host, Noah Rasheda.

And today I'm talking about stepping into groundlessness.

Keep in mind that you don't need to use what you learned from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use what you learned to be a better whatever you already are.

Buddhist teachings and concepts often challenge us to think differently about life.

They challenge us to question the stories that we've come to believe about ourselves and about

reality. And the concept of stepping into groundlessness certainly does this for me.

So imagine standing at the edge of a precipice. If you're like me,

I'm not even afraid of heights. I practice paramotorine and paragliding, so I spend a lot of time

in the air. But if you put me on the edge of a cliff, I feel a sense of insecurity and fear

standing there at the edge of a cliff looking down. I feel this strong desire to be holding tight

to something like a, I don't know, something firm, like a handrail or a tree or whatever I can

there. And if my kids are there with me, it's even more scary. I don't want to let anyone else

close to that edge. So you know that feeling of fear standing at the edge of a cliff.

I think it's very similar when we're facing the uncertainty of life.

So in this podcast episode, I want to echo some of the sentiments that are expressed in episode 78,

no hope, no fear, and in episode 88, radical okness. And I want to address this concept of

groundlessness, this teaching of groundlessness that I first encountered reading some of Pema

children's work. So I grew up with this analogy of the dangers of building a house on sand, you know,

the wisdom of building a house on rock, which I think is sound wisdom. But what happens when we

realize that we live on a planet made entirely of sand and everything is shifting and changing

...