Meditation and inquiry weekend at Triratna Highland Buddhist Centre, Inverness

Mind, Body and the Three Marks

Distinguishing our mental activities (‘mind’) from immediate sense experience (‘body’) is vital to all kinds of meditation. If we can develop clarity about this, we can become increasingly embodied and no longer try to ‘think’ ourselves into meditation.

This clarity is essential to mindfulness of breathing, metta bhavana, and ‘clear-seeing’ (vipashyana) practice, such as contemplating the first two ‘marks’ of conditioned existence, impermanence and unsatisfactoriness. On day one, we’ll explore all of this.

On day two, we’ll focus more on the third ‘mark’ – that “I am separate”. This is better known as anatta, ‘not-self’, but this core pointing-out on the Buddha’s part isn’t suggesting that we’re non-existent! Rather, it is pointing us back to our essentially undivided nature.

As Sangharakshita commented: “delusion may … be there in the form of a belief in a fixed, unchanging self or essence or soul, but that … is not there, it never was and it never will be.”

On the basis of unconditional love and calm, embodied, aware presence, we’ll explore our experience to see how we create and sustain the delusion of separation and a self-other divide.

Each day will run from 10.00 – 4.30