Somewhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries, in halls warmed by firelight and shadowed by war, a Norse skald set down one hundred and sixty four verses spoken in the voice of Odin himself. He called it the Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One. It was not a hymn and it was not a myth. It was survival counsel, the kind a father might give a son before sending him out into a hostile world: how to enter a stranger's hall without getting killed, how to spot a false friend before he ruins...

Every day your mind makes thousands of judgements before you are even aware a decision has been made. It decides who to trust in the first three seconds of a conversation, whether a plan is safe enough to try, and whether a nagging doubt about a colleague's motives deserves a second thought or should be dismissed outright. Most of us go through this process on autopilot, trusting the verdicts our minds hand down without ever asking how they were reached. Cultivating Metacognition: A Primer...

In a Brisbane bookshop sometime in the 1970s, a slim volume practically jumped off the shelf into David Tuffley's hands. It was the Tao Te Ching, and what he found inside changed the direction of his thinking for the next fifty years. Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu's Timeless Classic for Today is the result of that lifelong engagement, a fresh rendering of the oldest book still in print anywhere in the world into language a twenty-first century reader can actually use.Written aroun...

Most of us have felt it before, even if we never had a word for it. A moment on a clifftop when the line between you and the sea seemed to dissolve. A strange spaciousness that opens in the small hours when the city sleeps. The sudden, unaccountable rightness of watching a child lost in play. The Japanese call this satori, the flash of intuitive insight in which the felt separation between you and everything else falls away, and something larger and calmer looks out through your eyes. Chri...

There is a particular silence that follows a good koan. Not the silence of failing to understand, but the silence of a mind that has just met something it cannot out-argue. Ask a philosopher to define enlightenment and you will get paragraphs. Ask a Zen master and you might get a cup of tea poured until it overflows the saucer, or a single unanswerable question about the sound made by one hand. That is the territory David Tuffley PhD maps in this quietly disarming collection of a hundred c...

Thirty-seven Practices of a Bodhisattva is an ancient text written in the 14th Century BCE by Tokme Zangpo, a Buddhist monk and scholar who was born in Puljung, south west of the Sakya Monastery in Tibet.Thirty-seven Practices seeks to make clear the day-to-day behavior of a Bodhisattva (an enlightened being on their way to attaining full Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings). It serves as a practical guide for those people seeking to travel the path of enlightenment. ...

True happiness, lasting happiness can be achieved through a process known as Self-Actualisation, or Self-Realisation. This is a natural state and within the reach of all human beings. It comes from having satisfied all of one's human needs.This is the kind of happiness that cannot be obtained through the acquisition of things. The fleeting gratification in receiving goods or services is not true happiness. That is an illusion created by our global consumer society. I am not suggest...

This eBook allows you to grasp the basic principles of Buddhism in just a few minutes.Much has been written about Buddhism and how to practice it. Readers will have no difficulty finding hundreds of books on the topic. It simply focuses on the essence of Buddhism, as expressed in the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. It is what the Buddha first talked about after he became enlightened – this is what makes it the essence.Reading this eBook should not conflict with y...

The first teaching, "The Three Principal Aspects of the Path," was given in France in 1982.The second teaching, an "Introduction to Tantra," also in two parts, was given at Grizzly Lodge, California, in 1980.These comprise the first two lectures of a commentary on the Chenrezig yoga.Lama Yeshe says:"Meditation is not on the level of the object but on that of the subject - you are the business of your meditation."Bodhicitta is very practical, I tell yo...

In 1975, Lama Yeshe undertook his most extensive international teaching tour, being on the road for nearly nine months. During this time he gave many and varied teachings, a few of which have already been published in Becoming Your Own Therapist, Make Your Mind an Ocean and The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind.This book contains the teachings and meditations Lama gave at a five-day retreat he led near Melbourne, Australia, which he introduced by saying:"Whether or not ...

Because words can no more hold the truth than a net can hold water, we use koans. Koans are sayings, or doings, of Zen masters, the patriarchs and Buddha. Take for example the koan: The Sound of One Hand clapping. In its entirety it reads: "You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The obvious, intellectual answer is, No sound at all! But then what is this No sound? In other words, is it just silence?If one is to work on this koan, indeed on ...

In Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand Pabonka Rinpoche explains how the great Atisha would purify any negativity, no matter how small, immediately. Even in public or when riding his horse, as soon as he noticed a breach of his ethics, he would stop what he was doing, drop to one knee and then and there, purify it with the four opponent powers - the powers of dependence, regret, remedy and restraint.Atisha practiced purification in this way because of his deep realization of the ps...