Unfettered Mind
Summary: Translator/teacher Ken McLeod provides spiritual practitioners with the essence of Buddhist practice. Ken is noted for his ability to present profound teachings and practices in clear straightforward language free from the myths and cultural overlays that make many Eastern teachings difficult to understand. These podcasts are a sampling of the 300+ recordings, some with transcripts, freely available at UnfetteredMind.org under Teachings. Our website also has dozens of original articles and translations of Buddhist texts.
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- Artist: Ken McLeod
- Copyright: Copyright 2017 by Ken McLeod
Podcasts:
Imbalance and relationships; entering vs observing emotions; experiencing a broken heart; patterns as addiction; various forms of obsessions and remedies.
Sacrificing our conditional personality; the appropriate opponent; the function of reactive patterns, emotional core of patterned mode of experience; passive and reactive poles of a pattern; guided meditation: cutting the opponent.
Ethics as comprised of a set of five principles: presence, balance, boundary, obligation, and courage; what these are and what they mean.
Intention: the ability to direct attention; process of awakening; guided meditation practice for working with intention.
Introduction; how to live in power without being controlled by it; the three illusions -- survival, control, being somebody; how they inhibit the exercise of power; five mysteries: power, balance presence, truth & freedom; primary practice; attention, intention and will.
Death: Friend or Foe 7 (retreat)
How Do I Live This Experience Called Life? - Group contemplation: “I can’t know what this experience called life is -- and I can’t know what follows it. So how do I live this life?”; observing mortality brings you back into life; meditating on impermanence gives you faith, the willingness to open to everything and the energy to do so. Transcript online at UnfetteredMind.org
Three Gates of Freedom - Attention enables us to perceive experiences as more fluid; three Gates of Freedom: no characteristics, no hope and no ground (emptiness); two typical errors people fall into when they encounter emptiness: actions don’t matter and despair; despair as a form of checking out, avoiding experience; meditation: ¨How do I live when I can’t know what this experience of life is -- or whether anything follows it?¨ Transcript online at UnfetteredMind.org
Forms of Death - Many forms of death throughout life: death of beliefs, death of trust, death of enmity; we know we are aware and we are going to die; response / inquiry contemplation. Transcript online at UnfetteredMind.org
Death: Friend or Foe 3 (retreat)
Everything Changes, Nothing Stays the Same - Ozymandias; exploration of “Everything changes, nothing stays the same” by means of a group contemplation called response / inquiry. Transcript online at UnfetteredMind.org
Introduction - Value of contemplating death and impermanence; accept change and not hold on to what’s time has passed; sit in the whole mess; meditation: “Everything changes, nothing stays the same.” Transcript online at UnfetteredMind.org
Wisdom; meditation: observing what changes when we rest and relax with a problematic experience; experiencing what is actually arising and being at peace at the same time; spiritual opening as memory, idea, belief; beliefs vs ideology; compassion; emptiness as the means to compassion; compassion and ideology.
Fascination with tools we develop in practice; skandha map; human tendency to worship; honor and appreciation toward those who show us something valuable; discussion of Pure Lands; falling into worship, moving into projection and away from living awake.
Meditation on “What am I searching for?”; resting in the full experience of this question; meditation: “I practice in order to be at peace with the world.” ; samsara as the chaotic process of moving among different ways of experiencing different worlds; “I” as a narrative that is constructed in order to give a semblance of rational consistency to this chaotic process.
