Samadhi Part 3, (The Pathless Path)

There’s a saying in Zen:
“Enlightenment is an accident but practice makes us accident-prone.”

In this film we will examine the mechanisms by which one becomes accident-prone.

Samadhi 3 conveys an overview of the two dimensions of practice, which are mindfulness and mental emptiness.

Samadhi is freedom from identification with the limited self; freedom from our conditioning; freedom from suffering. Sadhana or spiritual practice that leads to Samadhi has two fundamental aspects: the first aspect is purifying the self structure through practices which shift the energy out of conditioned patterns and pathological thinking. When the energy is free it facilitates greater interconnection, love, and expansion into higher levels of self or soul. What you think of as “other” becomes integrated into you. The self structure becomes like a node in increasingly higher levels of mind.

The paradox is that any practices we use to become free of the unconscious conditioning are themselves conditioned. At a point all techniques, all concepts, all doing, all attempts to realize Samadhi have to be let go of. A meditator cannot awaken. A self structure cannot awaken. It can only give up egoic control reactions and preferences which lays the groundwork and inner rewiring for staying awake on the gross subtle and causal levels.

The second aspect of practice could be called formless self-inquiry which is about becoming aware of awareness itself; waking up to the realization that all levels of self or soul are ultimately empty. Like the wings of a bird these two aspects of sadhana, mindfulness and mind emptiness carry one towards Samadhi- the collapse of all duality.

The path is you and every obstacle on the path is you. The path to Samadhi is not the sort of path where you put one foot in front of another to get to some destination. The path is a stripping away of illusion, a waking-up to exactly who, where and what one is.

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Other Films in the Series

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  Samadhi 1 – “Maya, the Illusion of the Self”

• 

  Samadhi Part 2 – (It’s Not What You Think)