Topics Include: 1) Review of the sixteen stages of awakening. 2) Understanding the sixteen stages as the foundation for the four levels of enlightenment: Stream Enterer, Once Returner, Non Returner, and Arahant. 3) The three characteristics of all phenomena: impermanence, suffering, and non self. 4) Understanding thoughts as discrete phenomena with a beginning, middle, and end. 5) Understanding how observing phenomena with mindfulness causes them to diminish and disappear and understanding the result as impermanence. 6) Seeing suffering as the breaking up and destruction of thought moments, the lack of continuity and permanence and the ephemerality of experience: the lack of any solid footing for experience. 7) Seeing experience as the play of impersonal phenomena. Nothing arises of its own. The basis for the idea of non-self. 8) Seeing our suffering as rooted in the impersonal forces of karma working through us. 9) Question: Understanding negative thoughts that enter into the mind. 10) Question: How to reframe our idea of suffering as something positive and beautiful.
February 12, 2022
60 min.