Burgs Podcast

Happiness arises when you chose to accept yourself to be what you are without any judgement.  It’s important to find a sense of loving kindness for yourself.  This is what will help you to let go.   It is a loving surrender, free from aversion, and finding forgiveness for yourself and others. On the path, love and insight need to mature in equal measure; generating a wholesome quality to our mind. 

There is a current of vital force running through you.  Vitality is partly generated from the volition or desire that we bring to our actions.  There is also the vitality of our spirit – the current of life that is driving you which is not personal.  When you shut down, you choke the spirit that makes your feel alive.  To be fully, powerfully alive is to reclaim every aspect of yourself with full consciousness and authenticity, so that the current of life is pouring through you. This podcast directly follows the last episode (no.37 – Reclaim Your Consciousness).  

Your soul is something that is inherent in you and is deeply conditioned by everything you have experienced.  It feels like something that is fundamentally “me” which we can break down and dismantle.  We might experience a fractured or broken part of our soul which we are disconnected from.  The way to fill that hole is to be with the experiences in the past that we were unwilling to be with. This is the doorway to our awakening and the route to reclaiming our consciousness.  

The 10 paramis are qualities of our character identified by the Buddha that act as wholesome support to our mind on the path out of suffering. Once these qualities come to perfection in us, we make very swift progress. Burgs explores each one of the paramis: generosity, virtue, truthfulness, renunciation, patience, vitality / energy, determination, lovingkindness, wisdom and equanimity. By refining these qualities without judgement, we are polishing the lens we look at life through so it is less distorted. 

The Dharma is a transmission of an experience of reality which frees us from suffering.  It is about the transformation of our hearts, not our ideas. A devotional attitude helps us to get beyond ourselves and our limiting ideas of who we think we are.  When we surmount our pride, our heart opens and we can come into resonance with a higher consciousness.   

How can we best prepare ourselves for our own passing and how can we best support others in the dying process? In the immediate period after someone passes away, loved ones should seek to gather in their house (or a place where they felt most at home) to connect to their spirit and share merits. Holding this space lovingly is wonderful service and can be a huge support.  One should reflect on the wholesome deeds the dying person has done in their life and provide encouragement to let go of any regrets so that there is a feeling that affairs are settled. 

When we are deeply moved by something, such as music, art or nature, it switches on a faculty of consciousness that does not involve the mind. It works at a spontaneous level - arising directly through awareness at a non-conceptual level.  We are transported beyond ourselves where the sense of “me” stops arising.  When we clearly see the mechanism behind this process and touch what is truly sacred, we can find a peace within ourselves. 

Sleep lies at the centre of our lives but we often miss its importance. In some ways, it can be seen as a doorway to the greatest of all spiritual awakenings – resting deeply in the clear light of awareness (even though we tend not to be conscious of it). Dreaming can be seen as unpackaging our karmic tendencies – similar to the vipassana process – that can be accepted rather than rejected. If you can be with your biggest disturbances in the night, and let them go with equanimity, it can be a transformative practice.   

Meditation can be a way of life rather than a pallative for stress. There is a significant gap between what we can currently experience at a conscious level and what our true potential is. The spirit of the yogi is a gradual process towards unifying yourself with your experience and ending the sense of seperation, representing one of the greatest and highest endeavors. 

There is a huge disparity between the way we live as human beings and the way we are designed to engage with our experience consciously. The only way we cope is by shutting down so that we cant feel what we are doing to it. We need to wake up to what a human being really is and make changes in our lives to build our spiritual capacity. To do this, we must first transform our character before we transform spiritually. It's a warrior's path