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You have two very strong and powerful opposing forces galvanising life; virtue and desire. When life is organised around virtue, the pursuit of our desires does not bring us to grief. The degeneration in the quality of life is all a reflection that we surrender our virtue to the wilful pursuit of our desires. The only way we can reclaim our quality of life is by making an unwavering conviction to stand in virtue regardless of what I have to give up in the process. There is no other way we turn things around towards the ascendency of consciousness.

The emergence into awakening is the process of the gradual fading of our sense of self in the experience. When we grow up, we galvanise our energy around being seen. This episode explores the story of the Buddha and the potential for spiritual transitions through different life stages. Being liberated from the bondage of self happens once we have had enough of exploring life from a personal level.

Expansion and contraction are the way of things. There is a reason why the universe is not in conflict. It stays in perfect balance. There is a place in our lives where we are not going to grow any more. We stop taking out and we give back. If you don’t breathe out when you are meant to, you hold a tremendous amount of conflict and tension within you. Wanting more is the cause of suffering. Now is the time to find a blissful way to breathe out.

How you reacted to what you have done throughout your life is karma. It is what prompts you to react. What happens to you has the potential not to your undoing but your teacher. One of the most valuable things you can get from your meditation practice is the attitude that what I am facing “it is what it is” and you can walk without fear of how things are going to turn out.

You can’t understand a computer by looking at it structurally. Rather, it’s the software side which allows you to understand what it does. It’s the same for a human being. We have come to such a materialistic perspective of life that we try to understand consciousness at the mechanical, physical and biological level. In order to understand life fully, we have to look at the software side or what the Buddha called “the fine material sphere.”

It takes a lot of insight and discernment to see the functioning of karma. Seeing the causal process of dependent origination is how we come to demystify the process of life. Recognising that our actions have a cause and effect is one of the strongest prompts to create an unwillingness to cause harm to ourselves and others.  If everyone realised that they are fully responsible for what they are doing, the world would be a very different place.

Stillness is not just emptiness . When your meditation subtlety reaches a certain point, love spontaneously arises within the experience. You are not just resting in stillness, you are resting in a state of blissful love. The cultivation of this become the path out of suffering and the purification of your mind is reflected in how love expresses itself through you.

Real love is often not what we think it is and it takes some time to understand it fully. We build all kind of neuroses in our best efforts to experience love and don’t reach the point where we experience boundless unconditional love in its true form. Equanimity, love, compassion and appreciative joy are the four states of divine abidings that spontaneously arise in us as a reflection of the degree to which we remove the hindrances that bring us to suffering. We can actively mature our capacity for love. This is the path of love.

It’s really worth fighting to reclaim the deepest part of our heart and its capacity to feel. None of us are inherently greed or aversion rooted. What we are missing is our connection to what is contained in the stillness. When we overcome our numbness, the quest to find meaning in life is over.

The five hindrances are the grossest parts of the mind that need to be attended to before we get properly settled or make progress towards refining the mind. So much of the work is around the refinement of character. The more tendency there is to unwholesome states of mind, the more painful it is to make progress.

The Buddha shared the teachings of insight and concentration to those people who were committed to living a virtuous life. The ego pursues different things from the Dharma than the heart. We don’t become receptive to a higher understanding that the Dharma points to until we have learned to restrain the more selfish aspects of our mind. The first part of the Buddha’s teaching is virtue.

When human consciousness is refined with kindness and respect and our hearts are pure, we are close to the divine.  Our inspiration is to be close to that. But when humans get too self-absorbed, we are not moved by the divine. The general psyche is absorbed with itself and the pursuit of what it wants. We separate ourselves and cut ourselves off from the creative process. Individuality is a human obsession.

When the Buddha taught the Dharma he hoped that beings would free themselves from suffering. We swing from periods of good fortune to misfortune. When we are fortunate, there is a danger that we run our life on karmic overdraft and our merit runs out. When this happens, a life of good fortune is no longer supported. A fortunate human life is the rarest opportunity to free yourself from suffering.

How you are feeling now is a result of how you have reacted to what you have experienced in the past.  The way we react is hardwired into us. It is a conditioned response. We each have a different stock of reactions that we have accumulated.  If you change the way you react in the present, it will change how you will react in the future.

Giving back and breathing out can be an adventure. You have to put a significant amount of time and energy into your practice to see what you are truly capable of. Committing to a long retreat, for example, is an opportunity to change the make up of your mind in a permanent and enriching way that will serve you for the rest of your life. Burgs explains why now is the time to be a yogi.