Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Wake Up to what? and how?

Watch the following deep Dharma talk by Thay Phap Linh.


The followings are the keywords excerpted from the video.


< Keywords >

Wake Up to what?
Wake Up how?

Letting go of our thinking.

Actually it's not a talk. What I'd like us to do is to experience life.

Don't listen to the words. Listen to your breath. Listen to your body. Listen to your heart.  Listen to the flow of life as it traverses all of us. 

I want to invite us all, if possible, to let our guard down, to let the filters go, to see if we can enter space of not judging, not reacting, but just allowing something to unfold all together.

If we really want to relax, we need to stop the internal discourse, the non-stop thinking. 

The door (of cage) is always being opened. That door is our breath. When we bring our attention back to our breath, to the simple-felt experience of the breathing, perhaps for a moment, the cage dissolves, disappears and we can touch life, we can touch the present moment. 

In the silence, we may hear something new. We may hear our body. Our body is there. And it is constantly speaking to us. It has a kind of voice but it doesn't use words.  

This is there all the time. It's a constant source of wonder, of novelty. 

(My commentary)
This Dharma talk by Thay Phap Linh is very deep and a new approach to teach how to wake up. His detailed hint must be very useful for practitioners who have never awaken themselves. I have not heard Thích Nhất Hạnh explained like this before.

Mindfulness sounds easy but actually it is not so easy to practice because we must stop thinking in order to be really mindful. In other words mindfulness means self-transformation. We need to transform ourselves from ego (separate self) to awareness (true self, non-separate self). In other words, awareness is equal to the whole cosmos, awakened consciousness, the Buddha, or God.

The key message of this Dharma talk is to stop thinking. So, I felt that Thay Phap Linh had better stopping to say, "I think...". It may be his habit but I recommend him to use "I feel...". It may be a little bit better expression.

(Cf.) http://www.amazon.com/dp/B014NYEP04

Thay Phap Linh