Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation (Shambhala Classics)
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Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation (Shambhala Classics)
The five spiritual faculties—faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom—are our greatest friends and allies on this journey of understanding. These qualities are most powerful when they are in balance.
Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: World Publishing Co., 1971), Joseph Campbell,
are, it is possible to arouse this quality of awareness. In the Satipatthana Sutta, which is the discourse the Buddha gave on the four foundations of mindfulness, four fields or areas of mindfulness are described.
it this way as she was washing the lunch dishes: “Isn’t it strange that we prefer the quicksand of somethingness to the firm ground of emptiness?”
We attain wisdom not by creating ideals but by learning to see things clearly, as they are.
Meditation has to do with opening what is closed in us, balancing what is reactive, and exploring and investigating what is hidden. That is the why of practice. We practice to open, to balance, and to explore.
Traditionally, this understanding grows through the development of three aspects of our being: a ground of conscious conduct, a steadiness of the heart and mind, and a clarity of vision or wisdom.