Session 19: Expanding our Awareness (of Awareness)

We enter the final day of the first 10-day cycle of meditations in this retreat and the last phase of Awareness of Awareness in which we “expand our sense of our space of the mind.” The practice comes from Natural Liberation, by Padmasambhava. We are then graced with a wide ranging discussion including: the philosophies of mind - materialism and Cartesian dualism, a modern version of relative and ultimate truth, a description of who (from each person’s own philosophic or religious perspective) achieves liberation, what it is that is both physical and not material, and two approaches to a rich Buddhist education. Descartes’ illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_dualism