Mindfulness

Introduction to the Four Noble Truths In this seminar, we will be looking at the sixteen aspects of the four noble truths. To attain liberation from uncontrollably recurring rebirth – in other words, liberation from samsara – and to attain the enlightened state of a Buddha, we...

Why We Need to Develop Balanced Sensitivity? We’ve seen that “Developing Balanced Sensitivity” is a training program concerned about how to develop balance with our attentiveness: how we pay attention to situations and to the effect of our behavior on others and ourselves,...

The Thai Theravada System of Four Close Placements of Mindfulness Many people nowadays practice so-called “mindfulness meditation.” Mindfulness meditation is one adaptation of the Theravada practice of the four close placements of mindfulness. The Pali term for the close...

Disturbing Emotions Are the Enemy Now for verse three of the Eight Verses of Mind Training: (3) Whatever I am doing, may I check the flow of my mind, and the moment that conceptions or disturbing emotions arise, since they debilitate myself and others, may I confront and...

Review We’ve been talking about the various mental factors, and we’ve seen that there are ten that function all the time and help mental activity to function. We don’t want to get rid of them. In fact, we can’t get rid of them without destroying mental activity itself....

Review  This morning, we spoke about the four noble truths in general, and then we presented what Kalachakra adds to this. The main thing that we were emphasizing was a little bit more of an extensive explanation of the true causes of samsara, and we went through the...

The Five Aggregates So, now the Mahayana practice of the four close placements of mindfulness. The way that I’ll present this is the way that His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains it, based on various Tibetan commentaries to the Indian Prajnaparamita literature, which is where...

Overview We are looking at the three trainings and how they can help us in daily life, through practicing the eightfold path. The three trainings are in: Ethical self-discipline Concentration Discriminating awareness. We implement right speech, action, behavior and...

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...

In the discussion of ways of knowing things and the objects that are known, we touched on the division between conceptual and non-conceptual cognition, and these points introduce us to the topic of what’s called generalities (spyi) and particulars or instances (bye-brag)....