So I am firmly suggesting that Vikalpa is kind of the thing in the way. It is the thing we need to deconstruct. Vikalpa is like: a wall being continually built, by you, by your mind, by your thinking and discursive activities......kind of all the time; it is the notion that you are something of [...]

The post 015 Episode Fifteen – What’s The Thing In The Way? appeared first on Arete House.

Insight meditation is really a critical process. A process of negation – one is trying to actively undermine something; to tear down a solid wall; to uncover something which has been concealed. To find something which is normally hidden. So in most traditions, it is a deconstructive process, not a process of building something up. [...]

The post 014 Episode Fourteen – Insight Meditation appeared first on Arete House.

In shamatha meditation, nothing is being added, and nothing is really being taken away. It’s just a point where stillness and stability may be discovered as part of the functioning of your mind; alongside all the other crazy, interesting, dirty, strange stuff. It is at precisely such a point where the Dharmic traditions offer a [...]

The post 013 Episode Thirteen – Taming the Swarm of Bees/Mind appeared first on Arete House.

In this episode we begin our investigation of the mind by asking 'how do we know what the mind is?' And I invite you to examine those often unexamined predicates about how we know what the mind is, by widening and going beyond the sense that brain and mind are simply synonyms.

The post 012 Episode Twelve – Knowing the Mind appeared first on Arete House.

When we have an actual technique to work with, such as tonglen, this will only work in the context of intention and repetition. There is no magical panacea, a technique that you find or someone gives you that just kind of magically works. It is by the sheer weight of accumulation that it works. How [...]

The post 011 Episode Eleven – Spiritual Technique appeared first on Arete House.

Once we steer our thinking away from the notion that love is something innately ‘there’; or that it is something we ‘get’ from other people, or that it is something we choose by swiping left on Tinder or finding someone attractive at the bar. Once we cut through all of that illusion, and realise that [...]

The post 010 Episode Ten – The Ethics of Love appeared first on Arete House.

The great ethical traditions –  the virtues traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, the Shramana traditions of ancient India and the Confucian stream of ancient China – are for all their differences, united in seeing a causal relationship between present mental dispositions, virtues, vices, character and future possible happiness or flourishing.  

The post 09 Episode Nine – Harnessing the Reality of Causation appeared first on Arete House.

In this episode I make a very strong claim about the relationship between causation and our ordinary lives - it is this: that success and failure, happiness and depression, confidence and fear, enlightenment and ignorance, a good life and a shit life, virtue and vice......all, absolutely, 100% depend on thoroughly mastering causation in the context [...]

The post 07 Episode Seven Mastering Causation appeared first on Arete House.