Exploring themes of enlightenment and spiritual awakening, this collection features three interconnected tales. The first two focus on the life of the Buddha, delving into his teachings and experiences. The final story shifts to a millennium later, highlighting the Bodhisattva Maitreya, who reveals himself exclusively to the monk Asanga. These narratives echo the philosophical depth found in Siddhartha, inviting readers to reflect on the journey toward understanding and compassion.
A revolutionary new approach to a mindfulness of thinking that accepts and investigates the thoughts that arise as you meditate--from the author of Unlearning Meditation . In most forms of meditation, the meditator is instructed to let go of thoughts as they arise. As a result, thinking is often taken, unnecessarily, to be something misguided or evil. This approach is misguided, says Jason Siff. In fact, if we allow thoughts to arise and become mindful of the thoughts themselves, we gain tranquillity and insight just as in other methods without having to reject our natural mental processes. And by observing the thoughts themselves with mindfulness and curiosity, we can learn a good deal about ourselves in the process.
Meditation without instructions—a path to tranquility and insight that you can discover all on your own When we meditate, our minds often want to do something other than the meditation instructions we've been taught. When that happens repeatedly, we may feel frustrated to the point of abandoning meditation altogether.Jason Siff invites us to approach meditation in a new way, one that honors the part of us that doesn't want to do the instructions. He teaches us how to become more tolerant of intense emotions, sleepiness, compelling thoughts, fantasies—the whole array of inner experiences that are usually considered hindrances to meditation. The meditation practice he presents in Unlearning Meditation is gentle, flexible, permissive, and honest, and it's been wonderfully effective for opening up meditation for people who thought they could never meditate, as well as for injecting a renewed energy for practice into the lives of seasoned practitioners.