5 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2018
⏱️ 20 minutes
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One of the earliest teachings of Buddhism remains as insightful today as it was thousands of years ago: if we can learn to separate the tangle of sensory experience into organized piles, we gain insight into our true nature, which is Freedom, and Joy.
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0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus. My name is Thomas McConkey. I am your host. Thanks for joining us today. We are grateful for the return listeners and those sharing our show with friends. Let me give you an introduction, those of you who are new. I've been in this practice for the last 20 years, and it has had such an amazing impact on my heart, on my humanity. I'm still a human |
0:44.0 | being who struggles, but I've learned to struggle well through the practice at least a lot of |
0:49.8 | the time. So it's really a joy to get to share these basic pointers, these, in modern culture, |
0:59.2 | we could call them neurohacks. There are ways to pay attention. It's that simple, just the way |
1:04.7 | we pay attention to our moment-to-moment experience can dramatically transform our experience of being human. |
1:14.2 | So thanks for joining. Thanks for practicing. I want to share a little bit of history |
1:20.7 | that comes from the Americas, and then I want to link that to a practice we're going to do today. |
1:27.3 | As for the history, many historians agree that horses were first brought to the Americas by European settlers. |
1:37.6 | And when the native people of the Americas first saw Europeans on horseback, there is documentation that these Native Americans had no idea what they were looking at. |
1:52.0 | Not only had they never seen a horse, they'd never seen a horse being ridden by another mammal. |
1:58.1 | It was kind of unimaginably weird. It's hard for a modern mind to |
2:03.6 | try to get into that experience. So when these indigenous peoples were first experiencing the sight, |
2:12.7 | the perception of Europeans on horseback, not to mention they were quite hostile horseback riders. |
2:18.5 | That's a whole other dimension of terror in the experience. |
2:22.9 | They didn't know what they were looking at. |
2:24.7 | There are accounts that, you know, these were godlike beings, half man, half horse, |
2:30.8 | not unlike what the Western mind has mythologized as the centaur. |
2:36.0 | So basically because the indigenous peoples had never seen this thing before, |
2:42.7 | they couldn't discriminate. |
2:44.5 | They couldn't detect where exactly the human ended and the horse began. |
2:51.0 | So imagine this kind of terrifying experience of seeing this new kind of godlike being, |
3:00.2 | literally riding roughshod through the land and, you know, inflicting terror, not always, but often. |
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