Andy’s thinking around the nature of life that has arisen out of his own, personal meditations. Hear the recording below or read the commentary. Look at nature. This may be a controversial statement but if you take a close look at nature you find the natural order of things. Chaos. Even our physics tells us this. The theory of thermodynamics tells us the natural end point of everything is entropy. Entropy is the natural behaviour of all things to follow…
A fascinating aspect of mindfulness practice. Hear the recording below or read the commentary. In our mindfulness practise we experience how the world around us connects with us and affects us. This is a key practise as, the more we work with this, the more we soften the barrier between ourselves and the world and ourselves and others. We start to really understand the deep way we are touched by everything that goes on around us and it all happens…
Vipassana Meditation – Hear the audio or read the text. Our basic values and views can tell us a great deal about the way we think and they way we view the world. Take a few minutes to really consider this question – “ What do I believe the purpose of life is?” This question cuts to the heart of spirituality and therefore is an excellent starting point to examine what it is that drives us. In the current…
This mornings Meditation. Find the write-up below and also the media file for the audio recording of the session. When we first come awake in the morning, a wonderful moment presents itself. As the conscious mind first presents itself and our awareness presents itself, there is a brief moment here where pure mind is available to us, to experience. This is pure sentience and it is the place we journey to in our meditation. So it is an opportunity to…
No self In Buddhism one of the greatest challenges to get to grips with is this idea of no-self. Why do we see this as a positive thing? Firstly, a little background to Buddhism that I think may help here. Buddhism is not a religion in the traditional sense. Although we don’t refute the existence of a god or gods we do not believe that we must rely on a god or other 3rd party to make spiritual progress. We …
There are many challenges to the Buddhist path. However, when we start to follow the path, sometimes we discover that some of these challenges are actually just illusions created by our own minds. One big challenge is the challenge of continuous, ethical behaviour. To behave ethically all the time is the human challenge. Or to put it another way, to get through life without hurting anything or anyone physically, emotionally or in any other way seems impossible. Often, to avoid…
This morning’s meditation examined one of the key hindrances to meditation and how to approach it. You can hear the recording here – The write-up Last week, we looked at one of the hinderances to our meditation – Doubt and approached it from the perspective of the Intensifiers. All these areas that we are discussing at the moment are from the ancient Indian text, the ABHIDARMA, which was written approximately 2300 years ago. We now continue on this journey through…
The Intensifiers Over the last two weekends, through mind watching we have been looking at the 5 constants, the mental objects that are always present in the mind. Contact, feeling, interpretation, will and attention. Then we looked at Karma and its relation to these 5 constants. This establishes the field for our practice, but this is not going to be enough to establish a deep and progressive meditation practise. For this, we need something else. So I’m going to…
Question. What do we think Karma is? The usual answer is that it is some sort of cosmic balance which influences our lives and always comes back to bite us. If you do bad stuff, then bad stuff happens. This view is closer to the Traditional Indian Vedic view of Karma which is also present in the Hindu religion. In Buddhism, it is a little different. Firstly, the word “Karma” is translated as action. The result of our actions is…
The Five Constants of the Mind Over previous weeks we have explored the nature of mind in a raw sense and looked at Mind watching. We can now take this a stage further. After the Buddha’s death, a text was prepared by his disciples. It captures the essence of his teaching on mind. This teaching can be found through the Pali cannon (the Buddhist bible) but this text pulls it together. It is called the Abhidharma. The text sought to…