All Buddhist schools argue that our regular perception is conceptually constructed, or as philosopher Tom Tillemans calls it, made up of useful fictions. That does not make these fictions untrue. We need concepts to make sense of a world that is otherwise too vast and complex to comprehend. The useful fiction of ‘my body’ is […]

The rainy season in Myanmar was impressive. The first drops gave every bedbug throughout the monastery a new lease on life, but luckily also the flowering plants and creatures great and small. Within a week the trickle transformed into a curtain of water, its rushing sound enclosing the silence of my hut. There were days […]

How can we keep ourselves from self-criticism and discouragement as we explore what is? Self-criticism and discouragement depend on what is called in Pāli sakkāya diṭṭhi, or personality view: I am this, I am like that. It is a consequence of the generalising process of conceptuality. According to the Buddha all things happen in a […]

To feel or not to feel, that is the question Equanimity is not indifference towards feelings, and especially not suppression, but the letting go of identification and interpretation. Feelings and emotions are a natural and impermanent part of our makeup. They’re not always pleasant for sure, but we’re not buddhas yet, so this is part […]

Meditation is an ill-defined Western term that only partially covers the meaning of the Tibetan term gom (སྒོམ་) or the Pāli bhāvanā. Moreover the term is also used to translate different Buddhist terms like samādhi, jhāna and in some cases even the union of calm abiding and special insight.  Both gom and bhāvanā rather mean cultivation, […]

Is joy an object of shamata, or does it manifest itself when the mind becomes unified in a stable practice of shamata on an object like the breath? When joy manifests as a result of breath meditation, it is a mental factor. When cultivated as a brahmavihara it is called empathetic or appreciative joy and […]

How to stay when we reach a state of joy? The paradoxical answer is you can’t, and that for two reasons.  The first reason is that piti (non-sensual joy) is not something that you can generate. It is a side-effect of the mind responding to its own wholesome state. It is important to recognise the […]

Is sufficient trust necessary for deep absorption to the object? If so, is there any evidence that a secure attachment style aids absorption? Trust plays different roles at different times in the evolution of our meditational practice. One of the first hindrances that we encounter is an unwillingness of the mind caused by procrastination, attachment […]

What am I supposed to trust? Your buddhanature. In more modest terms: the five aggregates that make up our person. Each of them is evidently non-self. The body knows quite well how to breath, digest, walk and talk. In a similar vein, our feelings, thoughts, and perceptions come and go without any interference of a […]

Someone asked “How can we stop the tendency to utilise people?”. This is a very important question that we will explore over time, for the ignorance at the bottom of this is complex. It has to do with the interaction between concepts and reality. Concepts allow you to think of things independent from context, space, […]

We often have the idea that meditation should be peaceful, that no thoughts or disturbances should occur. Although some can be reasonably good at suppressing thought, this is not a productive path, for it can lead to clinging and fear of that which we have suppressed. Serenity is simply the fruit of equanimity, whether there […]

The Buddha said: “When this is, that is. When this is not, that is not.” This is the principle of dependent origination that Je Tsongkhapa so famous wrote a praise of.  All phenomena exist in dependence on parts, causes and conditions, and naming. That latter aspect we will study in our third year. Our mind, […]

Equanimity is the natural abiding of the mind in the absence of disturbance. Some meditators asked: “I can’t feel it, can I move on to the other brahmaviharas?”.  How could we meditate on joy, love, and compassion, when we have still difficulty experiencing peace within ourselves; when our mind still struggles with discontent, judgement and […]

All Dharma – all virtue – perceives [interdependence] to some extent. My joy perceives this to some extent. My love perceives this to some extent. What I would like is to see it entirely, but at least I see some of it. All hatred, all jealousy, all spite and so forth, denies this. All our […]