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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 extensive explanation of the true causes of samsara. And we went through the explanation of...

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-disciplineConcentrationDiscriminating awareness. We implement right speech, action, behavior and livelihood in...

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...

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 into the topic of what’s called generalities (spyi) and particulars or instances (bye-brag)....