Emptiness

The Nonfindability of the Mind We often read in various presentations about voidness that when you search for the conventional “me” or all these sort of things you can’t actually find it. When we search for the mind we can’t find it. It’s important to understand that we’re...

[The recording of the initial part of this session is missing] Meditation on Voidness Builds up a Network of Deep Awareness  Let’s analyze the relation between a whole and its parts in terms of the example of a year and twelve months. A year is made up of twelve months. If...

Today we are going to have a meditation session on the material we’ve covered concerning voidness (emptiness). Before we actually do the meditations, what was suggested that might be helpful would be to break into small groups, perhaps of four or five people, for you to...

A Person of Advanced Spiritual Scope Atisha continues: (5) Anyone who fully wishes to eliminate completely all the sufferings of others as (he or she would) the sufferings included in his or her own mental continuum is someone of supreme motivation. This introduces the topic...

(1) The Sage has spoken about all these branches for the sake of discriminating awareness. Therefore, generate discriminating awareness with the wish to pacify sufferings. (2) Surface and deepest, these are accepted as being the two truths. The deepest aren't cognitive...

Review Let’s continue our ongoing discussion of how we stop uncontrollably recurring rebirth such that it never recurs. To stop it, we need to realize that there isn’t some impossible “me” undergoing rebirth through the twelve links of dependent arising: experiencing true...

Approaching the Challenge of Taming the Mind The root for all actual attainments of good qualities is the decisive realization of renunciation, bodhichitta and a correct view of reality. At our present level, it may be difficult to have the full determination to be free that...

Realizing the Voidness of Mind Itself Once we have gained conviction in the lack of true and inherent identity on the basis of our own "self," we turn to the basis of other persons or individuals and then to the massive network of all other phenomena. We examine voidness...

Analyzing Voidness with Examples from Daily Life There was a very loud buzzing sound and I thought that it was the fluorescent light but then Andrey turned off the water cooler over there and the sound was no longer being produced. So now we have an interesting inference. For...

Brief Review Of the six far-reaching attitudes, generosity and so forth, we began discussing the sixth one, the far-reaching attitude of discriminating awareness. Prior to that were the verses concerning a combined state of a stilled and settled mind and an exceptionally...