Topics Include: 1) Review of Nama Rupa or Mind and Matter, and Cause and Effect, the first two of the Sixteen Stages of Awakening. 2) Relationship to the teaching on Dependent Origination, the conceptual framework for understanding the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. 3) Recitation of the twelve steps of Dependent Origination. 4) The first stage: Ignorance: describing a normal individual in everyday life, one who is unaware of the noble path. 5) The second stage: Mental formations: thoughts, actions and volitional acts that reflect the conditioning that we experience in our lives. The development of sankharas, or conditioning formations in our lives. 6) The third stage: consciousness, or how we perceive our experience through our six sense doors. 7) The fourth stage: name and form: the application of consciousness to our experience. How our conditioning colors not only how we respond to our experience, but also the direction our lives will move into the future. 8) Understanding how the first four stages describe the development and manifestation of our personalities or our sense of self in the world. 9) The difference between humans and animals in the creation of a sense of self and the application of the law of karma. How the sense of self arises in humans.
January 30, 2022
40 min.