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Showing posts from January 5, 2025

From the jungle of the Buddha's scriptures to the waters of Zen clarity. - Dosti Regmi

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I was contemplating the springboard that catapulted Buddha into his undertakings. It was the sight of sickness, aging, and death. The suffering inherent with life. And lastly the sight of the ascetic. The ascetic must have been a promise that one can overcome or deal with life's inherent suffering, obviously by detachment. So what he started with was the physical dimensions of the suffering. In his 49-day-long meditation, he must have mused upon a lot of things. One thought leads to another into monotonous addition and leads to no conclusion. So is life. As Albert Camus said, we try to search for meaning and life does not seem to care. Buddha takes reference to his own life and that is the most fail-safe and authentic reference. He remembered when he was a child and there was a farm plowing, he had sat under a tree and had been absorbed into a deep meditation and he was oblivious of the time and at that time he was just conscious of the coming in and going out of breath. He impleme...

फिल्म।

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Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), The Drama (1860), oil on canvas, 98 x 90 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons. हाम्रो दिमागमा, एउटा  न एउटा  फिल्म त चलिरहेकै हुन्छ। झुर, पट्यार लाग्दो , बैरागी  फिल्म त, बक्स अफिस को रेकर्ड नै तोडेर चल्छ।

What Yuval Noah Harari tells about meditation?

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When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is meditate for an hour. Later in the day, sometimes I’ll meditate for another full hour in the afternoon. Meditation serves a significant purpose for me—it’s about getting in touch with reality. The mind constantly produces stories—stories about myself, about society, and about the world. These stories create a barrier between me and reality. Meditation is about learning to let go of these stories and truly see what is happening. It starts with the simplest things, like observing your breath as it comes in and out of your nostrils. Surprisingly, this is incredibly difficult to do. I remember when I first started meditating—I was doing my PhD at Oxford at the time. I thought of myself as an intelligent person, someone in control of their mind, someone who knows themselves well. But I realized I didn’t even have the basic ability to observe the simplest thing in the world—my breath—without my mind wandering off into some fantasy. This...

Satipaṭṭhāna Meditation: A Practice Guide (Bhikkhu Anālayo)

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MINDFULNESS: Relation of mindfulness and memory: Full awareness of the present moment will make it easier to recall later what has happened. Moreover, if the receptive stance of mindfulness is established at the time of recalling, it will be easier to access the required information in the mind. The type of mindful presence to be cultivated in this way is similar to how we would try to be alert and attentive when something takes place that we later have to remember. When walking a path for the first time with the help of a guide, for example, knowing that the next time we will have to find  our way on our own, we will make an effort to notice and clearly remember which turns to take.   Mindfulness vs Consciousness: Whether we are mindful of a meditation object or caught up in a dream or fantasy, the flow of consciousness is always there. The same does not apply to mindfulness.  This mar...