To understand bondage and liberation, we need to see how we are bound by our thoughts. This is not just the discursive thoughts, but our projections, which are the objects of the discursive thoughts, and the emotions that link the two. This whole system of thoughts is bondage.
When we don’t recognize the nature of these phenomena, we are bound by them. We are taken in by the illusion or mirage, like thirsty people lost in a desert. When we recognize them, we are free from their compulsion. This is self-liberation: this freedom is not brought about by an outside agent, but by our own insight.
Contemplating Reality for the 21st Century
- Andy Karr
- Andy Karr is a writer, photographer, longtime meditator, and Buddhist teacher. He trained intensively with two of the great founding teachers of Western Buddhism: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, author of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and other classics.
Andy’s second book, The Practice of Contemplative Photography, teaches the most essential photographic skill—clear seeing. It will be published by Shambhala in April 2011. His first book, Contemplating Reality, a series of investigations into the nature of mind and the phenomenal world, was published by Shambhala in 2007.
Coming Soon from Shambhala Publications
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