The divine abodes are loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. These are both fruits of a practice of meditation and can be doorways to the deepening of that practice. In this guided meditation we explore the connection between romantic love and loving kindness. Romantic love hints at the universal love we can experience and embody whether or not we are in love romantically with someone or not. Both in love songs and romantic poetry we can get a taste of something that is beyond our individual selves, beyond existence in a certain place and time, beyond the usual way we experience life. Universal love can flavour our lives and be flavoured by the qualities of romantic love.

This talk explores the benefits of these often tricky challenges and what Buddhism and relational science offer us in dealing with them. Idealised or romantic love is dualistic and relates to the other, Harmonic love relates with the other. Rather than being in love, we become love.

Opening To Love, by Jack Wicks by Andrew Tootell

Awakened awareness is not about special experiences – it is about recognising the simplest form of conscious experience that is available to everyone. Joko called it “Simple Mind”, Shunryu Suzuki called it “Beginners Mind” or we could simply call it awareness of awareness or “Pure Awareness”. We could say that the purpose of meditation, both silent and guided, is the process of dis-identifying from the suffering that is generated by identifying as a personal separate self with the flow of impermanent, interdependent phenomena and recognising and returning to our home base of Simple Mind. By Sono.

This guided meditation offers a chance to gain clarity around our thoughts and emotions. Taking a few deep breaths, we can name our experiences. Then we gain an opportunity to fully experience them without being overwhelmed by them. We can then move on the investigate them if it feels safe to do so. Remembering to nurture ourselves by coming back to the awareness of the breath.

This session gives an introduction to the Buddha’s first discourse on Turning the Wheel of the Dharma. In this discussion we focus on the four truths or practices.

In this guided meditation Sono introduces three types of Zazen: Mindfulness of a mental object; Mindfulness of the field of all objects; and Just-Sitting

This session gives an introduction to why it is important to study philosophy and an overview of the course.

In this talk I reflect on the “Voice from the Heart”, why the referendum lost and what has to happen next. It provides a brief historical background to the Voice and it includes some reflections on the One and the Many from a Zen perspective and applies the concept of “spiritual bypassing” at the collective level when a nation denies the truth of its history. It concludes with the following quote from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”. Caveat: There was some technical problem with the recording so the quality is not very good.

Our original nature can be described as Awareness or Heart-Mind. This Awareness that we are, which ultimately constitutes our original nature, has a number of essential qualities. As an introduction to this guided meditation, I discuss the four faces of Universal Love. In Buddhism they are called the Four Brahma Viharas (divine dwellings): In the language of the Buddha, these are metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha. In English they are commonly known as loving-kindness, compassion or care, appreciative joy, and equanimity, peace or simply being. In order to support the transformation of attachment-based exclusive love into love and happiness that radiates in all directions (including ourselves), contemplation of the four abodes can be transformative.

This talk guides us through a journey of embodying the connections we have with our place here …the earth, the elements, and the beings we share life energy with. Exploring the fundamental Buddhist truths that everything is connected and everything is impermanent. Being present with the emotions that arise and coming to the spaciousness that allows anything to be possible.

This meditation guides you from the experience of your breath to some old zen parables. The first story is a re-telling of “A Parable” from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki. Two koans are featured, both are from The Gateless Gate by Koun Yamada. These are, Case 30 “Mind is Buddha”, and Case 36 “Meeting a Man Who Has Accomplished the Way”. Influences for this talk are also SN Goenka and Paul McKenna.

This guided meditation was taught by Gurdjieff to his students. Through each round of body sensing we are guided into self-remembering – the “I am” of awareness.

This guided meditation is all about finding or recognising and then stabilising in your essential nature, your inner “treasury”. I have titled the meditation “Appreciate this Life” after the book by the same title by Maezumi Roshi. Even though we cannot “see” our essential nature we can simply be, knowingly, our essential nature. We need to recognize our essential nature in this way. It doesn’t need to be a dramatic event. But it is always deeply wonderous

Joshu(Peter Thompson) founder of the Wombat Sangha in Sydney gives a introduction to the importance of Yoga Nidra practice and how it complements our Zen practice.

ZAZEN YOGA NIDRA This guided meditation integrates zazen and yoga nidra. Both zazen and yoga nidra are gateways into the subjective sense of the body and ultimately the realisation of self as nondual awareness.

Joshu (Peter Thompson) is a founding member of the Sydney Zen Centre and a founder of the Wombat Sangha based in Sydney. In this talk Joshu develops a founding narrative for contemporary Zen practice based upon Evolution. Joshu says, “An important part of the story and mystery of our evolution and being here is the existential reality of alienation and separation and anxiety seemingly caused by the emergence of the frontal neo cortex, bringing with it the human thinking mind ...This brought about The Fall from the graceful state of oneness ( The Garden Of Eden , Genesis ) ....In explaining this, I am cross fertilizing a number of religious stories ... In the beginning existed "only The Tao, Silent and Alone " ( Tao Te Ching ) … Tao or Brahma is moved to create a Divine Lila or Game ...A vast game of Hide and Seek - to lose 'herself' in her creation and then to seek to find herself again in the evolution of the human instrument over 4 billion years from the first living single cell! Woman and Man, at first totally lost and ignorant ( Avidya ) , confused , immersed in forgetfulness and clouded by thinking mind are moved and driven to find themselves as absolute and eternal life , which in reality they had never lost or left.” The great master Jesus points to the need for a great search to arrive back at home again-'Seek and Ye shall find , Knock and the door shall be opened ' He demonstrates the centrality of the theme of 'lost and found' in three major and profound parables 1. The Prodigal Son/Daughter 2. The Lost Sheep and 3. The Widow's Coin ....What is most notable here is the grief of the loss, the intensity and unrelenting search and the tremendous relief , JOY and CELEBRATION upon the finding ... ( Ecstasis, Kensho, Sartori , Epiphany etc.) The thesis is thus that JOY and CELEBRATION are the alpha and omega of our existence - the main goal, the main reason for our being here... (Zen Master Hakuin - " Singing and Dancing are the Voice of The Law “) Brahma - Tao - Godhead and the awakened person exhibit these seven main qualities. Universal Love ( Karuna , Agape ) , Joy- Bliss ( Ananda ) , Creativity ( incl - Vishnu -preservation/ protection and Shiva- destruction ) , Intelligence , Conscious Knowing ( Chit ), Energy , Absolute BEINGNESS ( Sat) The thesis here is that these metaphysical considerations enhance our Zen spiritual practice and understanding by embedding us in a most meaningful background context and Universal viewing platform ...

This talk is continuing our conversation about nonduality. One of the core dualities we are trained into is subject and object duality. The theme of this talk – recognising our essential self as awareness – and some of the experiential exercises are taken from a book called “Standing as Awareness” by the nondual philosopher Greg Goode. Last month I spoke about the Koan of the goose in the bottle. This represents “normal” experience of duality – the goose in the bottle is a description of the self-centred dream – we are trapped, or identified as, a separate body-mind self that is the activity of suffering. Practice can be described as shifting from our identification with the self-centered dream (the goose in the bottle) this limited body and mind which we take to be me, towards recognizing and establishing ourselves as being awareness itself. This is our journey from suffering in the self-centered dream to discovering our in freedom when we recognize ourselves as awareness (there never was a bottle in the first place) – is the journey to our home which we never left.

This guided meditation leads us into the non-duality of Simply Being through the gateless gate of silence.

This talk, based on an old koan, continues our exploration of psychological or mind-generated suffering and the ending of this suffering through seeing how psychological suffering is always synonymous with getting caught in conventional duality of “me” and “not me” and not seeing from the alternative perspective of unbounded awareness. Here is the old koan. Lu Geng asked Nanquan: If someone puts a gosling into a bottle and feeds it until it is full-grown, how can they get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle? The Master kept silent for few moments and then clapped his hand. Lu Geng was startled and Nanquan said, “The goose is out!”