The Path Is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation

Description

Lessons on the true purpose and power of meditation, from one of the great masters According to the Buddha, no one can attain basic sanity or enlightenment without practicing meditation. It is the essential spiritual practice-and nothing else is more important. In The Path is the Goal, Choegyam Trungpa teaches us to let go of the urge to make meditation serve our ambition; thus we can relax into openness. We are shown how the deliberate practice of mindfulness develops into contrived awareness, and we discover the world of insight that awareness reveals. We learn of a subtle psychological stage set that we carry with us everywhere and unwittingly use to structure all our experience-and we find that meditation gradually carries us beyond this and beyond ego altogether to the experience of unconditioned freedom. The teachings presented here-all in Trungpa's concise, accessible style-provide the foundation that every practitioner needs to awaken as the Buddha did.

Choegyam Trungpa (1940-1987)-meditation master, teacher, and artist-founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, the first Buddhist-inspired university in North America; the Shambhala Training program; and an international association of meditation centers known as Shambhala International. He is the author of numerous books including Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and The Myth of Freedom.