In this episode, Lama John concludes reading from the “Unifying Method and Wisdom” chapter from Kamalaśīla’s “Stages of Meditation,” the final chapter in the text. He begins by talking about how you can gauge progress in your meditation by noticing the cessation of mental afflictions in your mind that had been there before. He then goes on to describe how difficult it is to let go of our samsaric tendencies due to our propensity to get ensnared, virtually non-stop, in the net of our conceptual elaborations. As the text comes to a close, he tells us to never give up, to keep going forward on this path toward the ocean of omniscience, toward Bodhisattvahood, toward Buddhahood. We can do this!

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