Dreaming Ourselves Into Existence: Dukkha, Non-Self, and Waking Up

Instructor(s): Joseph Goldstein

Program Description:

In the Aṅguttara Nikaya, a collection of early Buddhist discourses, we read that “one who perceives non-self achieves the elimination of the conceit ‘I am’ and attains Nibbana in this very life” (AN 9:3). Although non-self is one of the most difficult points of early Buddhist thought to understand, we can begin to experience it through the more obvious characteristics of impermanence and dukkha. By realizing the impermanence and unreliability of our sensations, feeling tones, thoughts, emotions, and other elements of our bodies and minds, we directly experience the way in which all the constituent elements of our experience arise and pass away dependent on conditions. This embodied insight into the three characteristics of impermanence, dukkha, and non-self helps us lay down the burden of craving and grasping, softening the heart, and leading to a sense of liberation that comes with relinquishing clinging to a self.

About the Instructor(s):
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  Joseph Goldstein

  Joseph Goldstein has been leading insight and lovingkindness meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, where he is on the guiding teachers’ Founders Council. In 1989, together with several other teachers and students of insight meditation, he helped establish the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.

  Joseph first became interested in Buddhism as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in 1965. Since 1967, he has studied and practiced different forms of Buddhist meditation under eminent teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet. He is the author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism, Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom, The Experience of Insight, and co-author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom and Insight Meditation: A Correspondence Course.