These three blogs are all about consciousness and all come from an ‘eastern’ perspective. By which I mean that they are in the enlightenment traditions of faith and all give a place of honour to meditation.

1. First up is Tom Stine. I’ll do him first because he is the person who I feel closest to and with whom I disagree most passionately. Tom’s blog is explicitly about practical spirituality. Which means his perspective is similar to mine (if it doesn’t affect our lives it’s not worth spending much time on). Tom is also the most Taoist of the three. And I love Taoism for its very practical emphasis and down to earth wisdom.

As to the disagreement. I should say that I mostly don’t disagree, but on some things we disagree passionately. Most recently Tom did a post on “Are All Thoughts Untrue?” Tom’s answer is “yes” and mine is “no”. I guess you couldn’t get a bigger disagreement. The post was done more than a week ago and the comments are still going strong. It is a post very worth reading - as are many other posts by Tom.

2. I have written before about Albert at The Urban Monk. (He is not a monk in the sense of being part of an order). Albert is studying psychology at a university and so has a mix of eastern and western perspectives. Albert posts less frequently but with long posts. Each post is a very substantial treatment of one area in depth. He writes personally about what he has learnt from his own experience and always with an eye to how the topic can help us in our lives. He writes clearly and well.

3. Finally, but by no means least is Wade at The Middle Way. Of these three blogs this is the one that is most firmly writing from within a tradition. As you might have guessed it is from a Buddhist perspective. The Middle Way is described as “Commentaries on Meditation, Zen, Buddhism and Mindfulness”. Wade writes with awesome clarity about his experience (jealous? moi?) and the benefits of different kinds of practice. This includes the understanding of koans - check out his latest on Yunmen’s Sumeru.

These three blogs are all clearly written and are concerned with how what their topic can benefit our lives. I also must say that they all also deal graciously with comments: even those which disagree passionately and sometimes perhaps too tersely - I mean those by me. If you look at the comments on these blogs you will find I’m there and engaged. I recommend them all highly.