Principles of Buddhism: First principle P1/1 - Awareness

Principles of Buddhism: First principle P1/1 - Awareness

What does the spiritual life consist of?
What do we have to do to lead the spiritual life?
What’s the essence of what we have to do?

The essence of the spiritual life is awareness.
The essence is developing awareness.
The message of the Buddha is we can develop awareness.
We can develop awareness beyond the scope of anything we can conceive of now.
In doing so we totally transform ourselves.
We become someone, who we can’t conceive of now.

So developing awareness is very important.
It is very beneficial.
Learning how to develop awareness is very important and beneficial.

We can develop awareness of:
1/ the world, objects and the so called material world.
2/ ourselves, our inner life.
3/ other people, including their inner lives.
4/ reality, what’s true and what is false.

We have precepts and practices for the development of awareness.

The precepts:

A/ the negative version of the precept,
That which we try to stop doing,
Or reduce doing.
I undertake the training principle of not clouding the mind.

The most common application of this precept is not drinking alcohol.
The morning After drinking a lot, you might not even be able to remember what you did.
But this precept also applies to anything that leads us to lose awareness.
This means losing our awareness of our body, feelings or thoughts.

B/ the positive form of this precept,
The vow,
What we are trying to start doing in it’s place,
Or increase doing.
With mindfulness clear and radiant I purify my mind.

There are our course meditation practices for developing our awareness.
Mindfulness of the body.
Mindfulness of breathing.
Just sitting and doing nothing.
Walking meditation.
Even the metta bhavana (development of loving kindness)
Can be seen as developing awareness of other people.

But even if we meditate every day,
We are not going to make much progress,
Unless we try to develop our awareness all the time, ongoingly.

We can try to be constantly aware of our body,
This is very difficult,
Constantly aware of our feelings,
Constantly aware of our thoughts.

We can try to be more aware of our character type.
We can reflect on the effects big events in our lives have had.
What if I never got married and had children for example.
We can reflect on the effects of our words and actions on other people.

So in all these ways we can develop our awareness,
We can learn to develop our awareness,
By practising the precepts.

In part two we will look at other ways of developing awareness,
Or rather looking at developing awareness from other points of view.