Burgs Podcast

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.

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.”

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.

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 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 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.

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.

The Buddha talked about beings that are volitional (driven by personal will) or functional (performing their function seamlessly in an awakened state). The transition from adolescence to adulthood is when we find out who we actually are by performing our function and not thinking we are special. A skilful human being moves like a stick through water and does not leave much of a trace. There are countless ways of being of service and performing our function.

The Buddha was not interested in teaching the momentary cessation of suffering but finding a pathway to cut off at the root the habit of bringing ourselves to suffering. When he was a prince twenty-five centuries ago, he came to the conclusion that there is no happiness to be found in the pursuit of pleasure alone. After he renounced his worldly life and went forth, he also found that practicing austerity practices alone does not cut off the causes of suffering. When he became enlightened, he...

With more mindfulness, you can see what you are bringing to this moment from the past. When you witness this without a sense of self, you see things much for how they really are rather than what you think they are. We can bring a more objective perspective and open the door to some of the charge we are carrying.

What did the Buddha say was the cause of suffering? You might think that attachment is the cause of our suffering, but attachment itself is caused by ignorance. If we saw what life truly is, we would not suffer. Our ignorance is the illusion of self. When we are absorbed in what we are doing, our sense of self fades. The arising of the sense of me in the middle of my experience is what creates the sense of separation.

Sometimes the conditions are not present for us to be flourishing and we are either struggling or coping. The maturing of our insight ensures we can make more skilful life decisions, so that our expectations are realistic and in tune with the karmic forces that are underpinning our lives. There will be times when we are supported karmically, and times when we are challenged. If you get a sense of what is going on in the background, you can time your decisions appropriately, ...

Are you looking to learn to meditate or realise the path out of suffering? Your welfare in the here and now is dependent on the accumulation of merit in the past. If you are practicing to enhance your welfare for now and in the future, this is realised through virtue and how you conduct yourself. The Buddha taught the path of the causal cessation of suffering which might not be everyone’s aspirations. Whatever your aspirations, it is clear that we need to change signif...