The emergence into awakening is the process of the gradual fading of our sense of self in the experience. When we grow up, we galvanise our energy around being seen. This episode explores the story of the Buddha and the potential for spiritual transitions through different life stages. Being liberated from the bondage of self happens once we have had enough of exploring life from a personal level.

Expansion and contraction are the way of things. There is a reason why the universe is not in conflict. It stays in perfect balance. There is a place in our lives where we are not going to grow any more. We stop taking out and we give back. If you don’t breathe out when you are meant to, you hold a tremendous amount of conflict and tension within you. Wanting more is the cause of suffering. Now is the time to find a blissful way to breathe out. 

How you reacted to what you have done throughout your life is karma. It is what prompts you to react. What happens to you has the potential not to your undoing but your teacher. One of the most valuable things you can get from your meditation practice is the attitude that what I am facing “it is what it is” and you can walk without fear of how things are going to turn out. 

You can’t understand a computer by looking at it structurally. Rather, it’s the software side which allows you to understand what it does. It’s the same for a human being. We have come to such a materialistic perspective of life that we try to understand consciousness at the mechanical, physical and biological level. In order to understand life fully, we have to look at the software side or what the Buddha called “the fine material sphere.” 

It takes a lot of insight and discernment to see the functioning of karma. Seeing the causal process of dependent origination is how we come to demystify the process of life. Recognising that our actions have a cause and effect is one of the strongest prompts to create an unwillingness to cause harm to ourselves and others.  If everyone realised that they are fully responsible for what they are doing, the world would be a very different place.  

Stillness is not just emptiness . When your meditation subtlety reaches a certain point, love spontaneously arises within the experience. You are not just resting in stillness, you are resting in a state of blissful love. The cultivation of this become the path out of suffering and the purification of your mind is reflected in how love expresses itself through you. 

Real love is often not what we think it is and it takes some time to understand it fully. We build all kind of neuroses in our best efforts to experience love and don’t reach the point where we experience boundless unconditional love in its true form. Equanimity, love, compassion and appreciative joy are the four states of divine abidings that spontaneously arise in us as a reflection of the degree to which we remove the hindrances that bring us to suffering. We can actively mature our capacity for love. This is the path of love. 

It’s really worth fighting to reclaim the deepest part of our heart and its capacity to feel. None of us are inherently greed or aversion rooted. What we are missing is our connection to what is contained in the stillness. When we overcome our numbness, the quest to find meaning in life is over.  

The five hindrances are the grossest parts of the mind that need to be attended to before we get properly settled or make progress towards refining the mind. So much of the work is around the refinement of character. The more tendency there is to unwholesome states of mind, the more painful it is to make progress. 

The Buddha shared the teachings of insight and concentration to those people who were committed to living a virtuous life. The ego pursues different things from the Dharma than the heart. We don’t become receptive to a higher understanding that the Dharma points to until we have learned to restrain the more selfish aspects of our mind. The first part of the Buddha’s teaching is virtue.