This Can Look Like Anything, Even Basketball

But It never departs from Itself

Basketball was my first teacher of the transcendental.

I loved it in a way that seemed obsessive and irrational to most people.

The rhythmic thump of a ball bouncing in an empty gym. The squeaks of sneakers. The crisp swish of the net.

It played like a symphony.

I loved the tacky grip of a good leather ball and the way I could make it dance from my hands like it was on a string.

The countless driveway meditations — shot after shot after shot — until the light faded and I couldn't see the rim anymore.

And especially game days, when the bleachers were pulled out, the smell of popcorn filled the gym, and the vibe was a little more electric.

Basketball seemed to have a shimmering vibrancy — an aliveness — that felt almost magical at times.

There were so many moments when time disappeared and the game played me.

For 40 years, basketball was the world I orbited around.

I was a coach’s kid and played through high school, college, and into the pros.

Then, for several years after that, I ran my own camps — fourteen 5-day sessions every summer, all across the United States. Thousands of players came through my classroom lectures, film sessions, and on-court training.

All those years of basketball were rewarding in many ways, but they never felt easy or deeply satisfying.

The endless hard work and a persistent sense of personal suffering created a kind of spiritual hunger for something more — more satisfying, more free, more like those elusive magical moments I had only occasionally stumbled upon.

I couldn't name what I was longing to discover. I just knew that no religion, philosophy, or self-help book seemed to have any real answers.

And if there was a more to be discovered, I knew I'd need to find it experientially, in a way that I couldn't doubt and didn't need to "believe" in. Something undeniably and self-verifyingly true.

And so I left basketball completely, and since then life has looked entirely different.

For many years, it looked like what might loosely be described as an intensive and hyper-focused spiritual quest.

Much of that quest was solitary, but I had the rare good fortune to meet and spend meaningful time with two remarkable teachers — real masters — who kept pointing me back to the only place anything actual can be found: my own direct experience, before I impose any ideas, labels, or descriptions onto it.

In other words, they pointed me to Presence itself. And I kept looking where they pointed and noticing what was there. Again and again.

It was sometimes frustrating, sometimes messy, often disorienting, and occasionally boring, but the effects of these moments of Presence accumulated over time.

Eventually and gradually, the compulsion to seek dropped away. The problems I imagined I was suffering no longer needed solving. They were never problems to begin with.

The closer I looked at any aspect of experience, the more clearly it revealed itself as dynamic and never fixed.

Any apparent form is, experientially, an unbounded and ever-shifting pattern of radiance. These patterns are paradoxically un-patterned, continually morphing into something new and disappearing even as they appear.

Thus the “more” I so desperately wanted to find is everywhere. There is nothing but more.

Experience shimmers with an aliveness that is never static or definable, always opening into more richness and more dimensionality.

Basketball gave me glimpses of this transcendence by occasionally seducing me into a non-conceptual orientation to experience.

Yet that non-conceptual orientation requires no special condition and is always available.

It's just a matter of recognizing and appreciating that fact.

In reality, there is only ever this One Shining Moment — this One Radiant Presence — continually morphing from one configuration to the next, looking like anything, yet never departing from Itself.

Case in point...

A few weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I received a call from Coach Mike Thibault, who has recently retired as the all-time winningest coach in WNBA history. We’d spoken exactly once, twenty years ago. He called to tell me he’d just been hired as the head coach of the Belgian women’s national team. He wondered if I’d join him as his assistant.

“Coach, you know I haven’t been on a court in 15 years, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“And you know I’ve never actually been an assistant coach?”

“Yep, I’m aware of that.”

He seemed clear on what he’d be getting. So it was just a matter of seeing if there was a yes…

Coach Thibault is a basketball master. I like masters.

Because it’s a national team, the schedule is part-time. Just 12 to 14 weeks, spread throughout the year.

The Belgium team is very good. They finished fourth at the last Olympics and have a good chance of medaling in Los Angeles in 2028.

And it’s in Europe. I like Europe.

So…it’s a yes.

In May, I'll head to Belgium for training camp with the team, and in June, we’ll compete across Europe for the EuroBasket Championship.

A big change? In appearances, certainly. Yet fundamentally, it's Radiance doing what It eternally does — exploring yet another configuration of Itself. No configuration of form is inherently more “spiritual” or more “real” than another.

Despite its endless dynamism of changing forms, Presence never departs from Itself.

Whether Presence is appearing as shooting hoops on a driveway, the smell of popcorn, intense spiritual seeking, or Belgian Cats Basketball — what It is remains the same: Experience Itself.

Whatever it happens to look like, it's never not This.

JUNE 2025 UPDATE…

Cats Beat Spain in Thriller to Win 2025 European Championship

Belgian Cats - 2025 European Champions