Topics Include: 1) The importance of effort, mindfulness, and concentration as the foundation for wisdom. 2) How effort, mindfulness, and concentration work together. The role of energy. 3) On this path, each person works out his or her own deliverance. 4) Meditation as mental cultivation, taming our uncontrolled minds and claiming our own power in our own spiritual liberation. 5) The four tasks: Preventing unwholesome states that have not arisen, preventing unwholesome states that have arisen; encouraging wholesome states that have not arisen, and perfecting wholesome states that have arisen. 6) Preventing the arising of unwholesome states that not yet arisen: the defilements or kilesas. 7) The path to spiritual maturity lies within ourselves, not within any external source. 8) Learning to work with negative emotions: looking at our own minds, applying mindfulness in our encounter with sense objects. 9) The unfolding of our experience in mind moments: the illusion of continuity. 10) How mindfulness cuts into our automatic response to our experience.
May 22, 2021
56 min.