A Practical Course in Enlightenment By Maitreyabandhu ISBN 978-1909314092 Read by Tejasvini
What does it actually feel like to move towards Enlightenment? This is the question that Maitreyabandhu asks in his new book, The Journey and the Guide: A Practical Course in Enlightenment.
How can you make the most of your life? Maitreyabandhu, a prize-winning poet who has been sharing his experience of practising Buddhism for over 20 years, sets out to answer this most basic question. With humour and profundity, mixing Buddhist teachings, poetry and myth with down-to-earth instruction, he describes what it means to set out on the Buddha's journey and how you can follow it day by day and week by week. 'The natural mode of consciousness is to expand. In every moment we can either allow consciousness to unfold or we can make it me and mine and feel it shrink back to the level of egocentricity. It's as if we've identified with a tiny ripple on the surface of the ocean. Once we let go of that identification there's the whole ocean: centre-less, edgeless, completely free.'
An extract from The Journey and the Guide
Just as the journey is an image for spiritual life, so is the Mandala. The difference is that the mandala is a pattern with everything arranged around a central focus. You might have seen films of Tibetan monks making sand mandalas, or come across mandalas in the writings of Carl Jung. But what I have in mind is a different way of looking at spiritual life: instead of thinking of it as a road that's going somewhere, we think in terms of arranging our life around what we most value.
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