The Wheel of Life - Paticca Samuppada
The joys and pains of life, the suffering and the freedom, the ignorance and the wisdom – how do they really happen? This course takes us deep into life’s journey and the mysteries and possibilities of our conscious experience.
This is a fundamental and yet most profound Buddhist teaching that details how we create our experience and how in each moment we can free or imprison ourselves. It is the basis of Buddhist psychology, and insight into perennial questions about reality that keep arising, for example: What is creation? Why do I suffer? How can I understand birth and death, and at the same time the timeless and deathless? What is consciousness?
Class 1 - What Creates our Reality, our Experience and our Suffering
Exercise - The Conditioned World: Take a specific event, such as going onto a restaurant. As you enter the restaurant, consider the events that led you to be there, the choices you made, the multitude of accidental events that brought to you to this place at this time, the thoughts that accompany this event. Then watch as what happens creates many further possibilities and results. Now do it again with other events such as making a cup of tea.
Class 2 - The Cost of Illusion
Exercise - Cost of Illusion: Focus on experiences of discomfort and difficulty that you are having today. What is missing, problematic, unsatisfying, challenging, threatening, etc? Now check what we are making out of this event? What are our responses, view, and reactions? Is there struggle? Are we sure it is such a problem? Try looking directly at the experience and ask ourselves if we need to define it as a problematic experience, if there are other more free ways of regarding it.
Class 3 - How We Make our World
Exercise - Challenging our Constructions: As many times as possible during one day, whenever you find yourself thinking or saying a certain view or opinion about ourselves or about the world, that you normally believe to be true, let a small voice appear in background that asks: is this really so?
Class 4 - The Body, Senses and Perception
Exercise - Body and Senses: When walking, several times a day, even when walking from your house to your car, zoom in on what you are actually experiencing with the senses. The sense of touch will show us how our feet are touching the ground with a constantly changing experience of pressure, contact and the texture of the ground. The eyes are constantly seeing movement, of the world going past and of your own body in movement. The ears are hearing changing sounds from near and far. Just let go into the richness and joy of being connected to the world through the senses. Be aware of what is pleasant and unpleasant.
Class 5 - Desire, Need and Holding on
Exercise - Attachment: Several times during one day, stop, breathe and ask yourself what is driving my thoughts, words and actions right now. What are the needs desires and aversions that are working through me now and leading to these reactions and responses? Is there something automatic about them, something contracted and not free?
Class 6 - How Did I Become Myself?
Exercise - Identity and Self: Today, after you read this exercise, go about your daily life and watch the constantly arising sense of more me or less me according to triggers. For example, if someone uses your cup, sits in your usual chair, parks in your usual spot, or challenges you, watch the arising of a strong me, in the form of protection and reaction. Make sure you have some time to completely relax and lie down and watch how there is less sense of identity at those moments. See the habits of more or less ownership as you handle possessions, or arrive at ‘your’ house.
Class 7 - Out of Control: Birth, Aging and Death
Exercise - Birth and death: stopping the chain: Today, take several moments of just stopping in the middle of the flow of activity. For example, we are sitting at the computer. First feel the pressure of habit, of what went before, of what I need to do, all of which makes us function in a certain way, without questioning. See the way this moment is born, and then dies away to give the next moment, and we have no control of the process. Then during the moment of stopping, experience being out of time, out of habit and out of any pressure. Just a timeless moment of existence.
Class 8 - How to Get off the Wheel of Samsara
Exercise - Getting Off the Wheel: Every time you meditate during this week, and at other times when you stop, for example sitting with a cup of tea in your hand, remember that this moment is perfect, it doesn’t lack anything, there is no problem in this moment, it is not going anywhere or coming from anywhere. Try to feel it in our deepest being rather than as a thought, even if just for a moment.