Talks - Approaching the Dharma - Rob Burbea

Approaching the Dharma

Insight can defined by its capacity to decrease dukkha
- If it doesn’t decrease dukkha, is not insight (one way to see it)
- Mindfulness may not always decrease dukkha (I know I’m suffering, but continue suffering)
Practicing with a certain way of looking (impermanence, Emptiness), over time can change our mental habits
- Practicing with impermanence decreases grasping, attachment etc…
  - Look at all sensations coming up as impermanent
- Mindfulness is another way of looking, it decreases Papancha
- Other ways of looking
  - Anatta (no self)
  - Metta
    - what happens if I sustain this way of looking (also in terms of reducing dukkha)
Insight as a result of practice (no self), can be used as the method of practice.
- allows to consolidate the insight
- Original insight becomes a platform for new insights

All perception is fabricated (including the sense of “self” perceiving, the sense of [[ Oneness ]])
That things exist is one extreme, that things don’t exist is another. The Buddhist path is the middle way (The Middle Path)
Any way of looking is fabricating reality
- Mindfulness says to be with “what is”
  - the underlying assumption is that what is, is real
- Emptiness is the most Liberating way of looking
What fabricates the fabrications is not real either, neither is the time in which fabrications happen
if there is no reality, the ways of looking become even more important and relevant
- the malleability of our perception is way beyond what we could imagine (human minds are awfully malleable)

False belief in a separate self
- Below the level of thought (implied in awareness “I am aware of this”)
- Causes reactivity
- measurement, Comparison with others etc..
At the root of Papancha (vortex of mind reactions)