A Practical Guide to Awakening
Siddhartha Gotama famously sat under a tree.
For three decades, he had lived as a young prince, full of craving for the delights of the world, until, dissatisfied, he left his palace home to study under a series of spiritual teachers.
Each teacher directed Gotama toward an ever-more-austere life, and for six years, he lived in poverty, hunger, and often, in a pain he inflicted on his own flesh. But the dissatisfaction that had driven him from the palace remained.
It was then that Gotama came to the tree in Bodh Gaya, a village in northern India. The story goes that he meditated beneath the tree for 49 days. His concept of self vanished. And with it the dissatisfaction that had plagued him.
The key message here is: The unmindful life is characterized by a suffering caused by the self’s endless craving.
When Gotama rose, he was the Buddha, the awakened one. He walked on for several days, to another village, where he would share with friends the truth he had discovered.
He told them that life is suffering; caused by things like war, hunger, injustice, sickness, and aging, yes, but also fear, hatred, envy, grief, and loneliness. The suffering the Buddha spoke of included people’s longing for pleasure and the knowledge that one day everyone will be parted from their loved ones. It included the fact that the wonders of life end in death.
The Buddha called this suffering dukkha.
Human beings are like a dog, he said, tied to a post and unable to escape, forever pulling at the rope. He called this trap of suffering the wheel of samsara, or the cycle of life and death.
He went on to say that the cause of people’s suffering is desire. Everyone is consumed by a craving that cannot be satisfied. They seek it in food, alcohol, power, sex, and drugs, saying “I want, I need, I must have!” And that craving makes fools of them all, as they take on debt, fill their lives with stress, and scrape to get ahead. They crave being someone else, a future self that is happy, successful, and powerful. At times, when it gets too much, they may even crave nothingness – to stop existing entirely.
But there is a way to end the suffering. The Buddha teaches that when you let go of your self, the craving goes with it, and you can at last find refuge in the highest happiness of all: nibbana.
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (2013) explores how adopting a Buddhist approach to mindfulness can unlock a true and deeply felt freedom. The author draws on an ancient dialogue conducted by Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha, and creates a clear, systemic path to establishing mindfulness of body, emotion, thought, and time as a way to overcome suffering.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
