The Path Is The Goal
A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation
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The Path Is The Goal
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Narrated by:
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Julian Elfer
According to the Buddha, no one can attain basic sanity or enlightenment without practicing meditation. The teachings given here on the outlook and technique of meditation provide the foundation that every practitioner needs to awaken as the Buddha did. Trungpa teaches us to let go of the urge to make meditation serve our ambition; thus we can relax into openness. We are shown how the deliberate practice of mindfulness develops into contrived awareness, and we discover the world of insight that awareness reveals. We learn of a subtle psychological stage set that we carry with us everywhere and unwittingly use to structure all our experience - and we find that meditation gradually carries us beyond this and beyond ego altogether to the experience of unconditioned freedom.
©1995 Diana J. Mukpo (P)2014 Audible Inc.Great book
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for me, a touch challenging to get into
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You have to be fairly experienced
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it offers good insight into meditation mindfulness etc.
Great book
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This is a transcription of two seminars delivered by Trungpa in the 1970s, including question and answer sessions with the students who attended those seminars. Fifty years on, some vocabulary has dated, the tutor seems a little harsh with his students. It’s easy to miss when the audiobook is shifting from speech to Q&A, which is quite confusing when you start listening to this.
It is unusually clear on several aspects of meditation which I found helpful:
1) the nature of meditation. You can just be there, like a rock and that’s more than OK.
2) what to focus on when meditating - that 25% of your attention goes on the breath, but the rest of your mental energy can be there to relax and learn from thoughts that arise, so meditation can have a playful, relaxing quality.
3) that meditation doesn’t stop at the mat, that you can (and should) be mindful whatever you are doing - going out with friends, washing up, whatever.
4) through meditation you are trying to understand and accept yourself, and root out sources of suffering in your life, so you can be at your best most of the time.
5) that meditation is often boring and lonely, and yet a life lived with full attention can be really joyful.
For my taste, it makes too much of the idea of ‘no-self’ - that you do not exist - some Buddhists argue that non-existence was intended as a thought experiment to reduce the ego rather than being literally true. But for all its weaknesses, this audiobook contains a lot of practical advice to the intermediate level mediator, and I’m very glad I read it.
A useful overview of meditative practice
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