Emptiness

Review: The Context for Meditating on the False "Me" Yesterday we began our discussion of how to meditate on the voidness of the false “me” experiencing the four noble truths. We looked at the general context within which this is studied and meditated upon. We saw that this...

Chapter Five: Indicating the Behavior of Bodhisattvas (5.1) There are no actions of the Buddhas that are not causes (for benefiting others). Even their breath is issued only for the sake of (acting as a) medicine for limited beings. Chapter five deals with indicating the...

I have a stack of questions here in front of me. Let me try to answer some of them during the course of explaining what will happen today during the first day of the actual empowerment. Following the Visualizations One thing to keep in mind about what is going on here is...

Review of the Conventional “Me” Being an Imputation on the Five Aggregates We’ve been speaking about voidness (emptiness) and we have seen that voidness is a negation phenomenon, something that we know by negating or refuting something else. What we are refuting, when we know...

We started our discussion of conceptual cognition last time and I asked you to think of a dog and examine: what is it that appears? Did you think of all dogs in general? Or did a mental picture of a specific dog come to your mind? Answer please. My dog. So, a specific...

Generating a Bodhichitta Aim Earlier, we saw that once genuine, pure renunciation is generated in our mental continuum, that is the point when we are truly on the Dharma path. This is the start of the path. We may have heard about the Mahayana and Hinayana paths and might even...

We have been speaking about voidness, which is an absence of impossible ways of existing, and we have been presenting it in a very general way, using the term a bit loosely, so that we can incorporate in our discussion of voidness the various levels of understanding of...

Review  We’ve been discussing the three principal pathways of mind. The first is renunciation, with an added preliminary step helpful for us Westerners, which is turning away from the obsession with immediate gratification to taking interest in what’s going to happen to us...

Review We have discussed the source of our problems in life, our ignorance or unawareness concerning behavioral cause and effect and the nature of reality. Either we don’t understand them, or we understand them incorrectly. Because of our unawareness of the nature of reality,...

Review  We have been speaking about the importance of understanding voidness, whether we speak in terms of self-voidness or other-voidness, and we’ve seen that it is necessary for overcoming and achieving a true stopping of the true sufferings that we all experience and the...