Meditation

Questions and Answers Let’s start our session with some questions. Karma I wonder if this statement is right or not: Every perception that we have through our six senses, along with the mental factors, is our karma, our past accumulated karma. Are perceptions which I perceive...

An Environment Conducive for Meditation To actually engage in meditation, we need circumstances conducive for it. There are many lists of factors that will be conducive for meditation, but these are usually discussed or presented within the context of doing a meditation...

Review Throughout our lives we have the thought of ourselves in terms of “me” and “my life.” We’ve experienced this the entire span of our lives, not just one year of it, and because we’re not some rigid, solid blob that can’t be affected by anything, we’ve been influenced by...

Finding Inspiration We have looked at the framework from which these teachings about integrating our life derive, and there are just a few more points I want to add before I open it up for questions. This is concerning the term “inspiration.” We have the Sanskrit word...

We have been discussing the five types of deep awareness in relationship with the five skandhas or aggregate factors that make up our experience and the five types of disturbing emotions. There are many other systems with which we can correlate this structure of the five types...

Review of the Qualities of a Spiritual Teacher A guru is a great teacher, a great spiritual master or mentor, someone who is not only able to teach from knowledge of the texts but is also able to teach us by his or her own example. A living example of what Buddha has taught, a...

Shamatha and Vipashyana All these points we have been discussing are relevant for understanding mahamudra meditation. Mahamudra meditation has two basic stages: the practices for attaining shamatha and the practices for attaining vipashyana. Shamatha is a serenely stilled...

The third preparatory practice is to arrange a proper seat, sit in the eightfold posture, and in a positive frame of mind take safe direction, or refuge, and reaffirm our bodhichitta aim. Arranging a Proper Seat According to the text, it is best (if you can do it) to have...

The Aggregates Only Include Nonstatic Phenomena As mentioned, the five aggregates are a convenient scheme to help us organize and understand our experience. Each aggregate is a collection of various similar factors that make up each moment of our experience, and they include...

Background We are continuing our discussion of how to adjust our mental factors within the context of developing balanced sensitivity. His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of the different aspects of Buddhism, and he differentiates Buddhist science from Buddhist religion and...