Establishing Awareness: On Virtue, Concentration, and Wisdom
You must train the mind like a muscle. If you want to train your body, you must exercise regularly. Likewise, if you want to train your mind, you must practice meditation on a daily basis you cannot carry a heavy load with weak muscles. Training is a gradual process, and you must persistently, continually train your mind if you wish to overcome difficulties and gain strength. Every time you recognize a thought, your mindfulness has become that much stronger. Slowly you will gain inner strength.
Garchen Rinpoche
The training of the mind is the task of a lifetime, and we must start now. We must start before it’s too late. We must train before we are swept away by sorrow, overcome by physical pain and old age, or utterly bewildered by pleasure. Every day we face an ever more extensive suite of existential risks, from algorithms that compete for our attention, exponentially more powerful Artificial Intelligence models, geopolitical instability, climate change, and nuclear warfare. Moreover, we are immersed in an ever more polarized and reclusive society — less open to dialogue and more open to the pursuit of fast pleasure.
And yet.
Well-being and contentment are available to all of us here and now.
I recently went to an exhibition on the poet Rumi. I picked up a text in the museum gift shop and found the following words that resonated deeply.
“The New Age, in its narcissism, its lazy greed of appropriation, its ability to make over all sublime and demanding truth in its own hazy image, and its lack of any real or ennobling concern for political, social, and environmental issues, has created a limited version of Rumi to serve its own ends. This limp and vulgar version entirely omits an essential side of Rumi’s spiritual genius — its rigorous, even ferocious, austerity. Andrew Harvy
Many spiritual seekers find this ethos of rigorous and ferocious austerity difficult to cultivate. This level of earnest seeking is often awakened by suffering. Other times — it is a sincere and immense curiosity about another way of living. The course I will outline below awakens this immense curiosity.
I have worked hard for several months to assemble a comprehensive introductory Buddhist meditation course. This course, if followed properly, is not meant to be easy. It embodies the original attitude of the earnest spiritual seeker truly willing to challenge themselves and step outside of the normal world.
It is divided into six modules. The course contains over 6 hours of pre-recorded lecture content, 100+ pages of readings, 2+ hours of sequenced guided meditations, and access to a discord community. The module titles are listed in the image below.
The essence of the course is to establish yourself in the Three Trainings. These are training in Virtue, Concentration, and Wisdom. The argument runs as follows. We must first practice virtuous restraint to calm down our minds. If we continually engage in emotionally disturbing actions, our minds will be too coarse to engage in meditative practice.
Once we have a foundation of virtue, we further sharpen our minds using concentration meditation. We hone our ability to hold in frame, without being distracted, a highly resolved picture of reality. We train this skill with breath meditation.
Finally, with our sharpened minds, we observe the changing nature of reality and gain insight into the high-level patterns of our experience.
As our insight develops, we are able to refine our virtuous restraint to live more in alignment with our realizations. This in allows us to practice concentration more effectively, leading to an even sharper mind that can discern even more subtle truths. And so the cycle continues.
If you want to learn more, please follow this link.
