Meditation

Understanding Our Capabilities We haven’t spoken much about whether we actually think it’s possible to achieve all of this stuff, and whether I am capable of achieving it. This gets into the whole discussion of Buddha-nature, which basically refers to the factors that all of...

Review We ended the last session with an exercise in which we practiced enhancing our mirror-like deep awareness. It’s important to remember that this type of deep awareness is not like a mirror or a still camera; it’s more like a video camera. We’re taking in information...

The First Aspect of Close Placement of Mindfulness on the Body: The Body as Being Nonstatic, Impermanent We saw in the Mahayana tradition that with the general way of focusing on the body, what we distinguish about it is that it is unclean and impure. We take our body to mind...

The Four Point Analysis: Neither One nor Many We discussed voidness or emptiness in Buddhism, particularly in terms of the absence of a true identity for ourselves – the absence of an impossible false “me” – and we have talked a little bit about how to meditate. Now...

The Meaning of Feelings in the Context of the Five Aggregates The second aggregate is the aggregate of feelings. In this context, it means feeling a level of happiness or unhappiness. This aggregate is not referring to emotional feelings; instead, it deals with the single...

Contemplation on the Rare Precious Human Life, Certainty of Death and Necessity of Dharma  We’ve been talking about the precious human rebirth that we have all achieved. This precious human rebirth has the eight respites and ten enrichments necessary for Dharma practice. We...

The Definition of Mind: General Considerations Having discussed the preliminaries, let us now turn to the actual practice of mahamudra – meditation on the nature of mind. When we raise the topic of the nature of mind, we of course need to explore first what we mean by...

Questions Adding the Four Immeasurables to the Meditation In our last session we tried the exercise with a focus on our mothers. Any questions about the meditation, about the process and so on? Can we say that the meditation on the four immeasurables is linked to this practice...

Sutra and Tantra Mahamudra There are various traditions of mahamudra: there’s the sutra tradition and the tantra tradition. The sutra traditions involve the various methods for meditating on voidness, which is the absence of all fantasized, impossible ways of existing. The...

Review — The Emotional State for Taking Refuge In the previous session, we spoke about the importance and necessity of putting a positive direction in our life. We saw that refuge is a direction in which we protect ourselves from difficulties. We went through a whole list of...