Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

anonymous patron who helped support this book and shield it from complexity.

By training in insight, we can improve how we fundamentally perceive reality at a bare sensate level, such that our actual sensate experience becomes progressively clearer. This increased clarity can become hardwired into our brains, such that our baseline degree of sensate clarity increases.

Practical Insight Meditation is my favorite dharma book of all time with no close competitors. If you ever lay your hands on a copy, do so; fortunately, it is now easily available on the web.

using the jhanas as a basic framework for understanding what is going on and how to advance is extremely useful, practical, and empowering. To know them well is to know something profound about the core mechanics of how attention works and develops, as well as the vast range of amazing things we can do with attention.

Thus, realization is not something created or acquired but instead is discovered or unveiled as being an intrinsic aspect of phenomena. With enough stability and clarity (concentration and insight), this natural, compassionate process of manifestation can begin to function more skillfully, as it now has better information to go on, and can begin to

Once the stages of awakening are attained, that aspect of our suffering is forever eliminated and never arises again.

That is all there is to it. See, that wasn't so hard, was it? Thoughts, the breath, and all our experiences don't quite seem to be in our control, do they? That's it! Know this moment to moment. Don't struggle too much with reality, except to break the bad habits of being lost in stories, poor concentration, and a lack of understanding of the three

Five Ways to Know Yourself.

Be mindful every friggin’ second from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep and in all transition periods