In Finding Awareness, author Amit Pagedar brings to light the struggles, confusions and frustrations we experience in everyday life and offers a way of examining them through the process of self-inquiry. Covering everything from comparison, insecurity, and addictive behaviors to anxiety, Amit offers a practical approach to observing and understanding these issues through the tool of insight meditation. By diving beneath the surface and unraveling the deepest patterns of egoic thinking, he explores uncomfortable truths and brings to light the unvarnished reality of who we are as individuals. Through this self-inquiry he hopes to empower the reader to face themselves, as they are, and bring about a profound and fundamental shift in the way they approach their problems. In this book he describes the structures of ego and suffering and the processes by which these forces sustain themselves. He further explores why and how these powerful structures sometimes collapse and bring about immediate and irreversible personal transformation in the individual.Along with accounts of real conversations with his readers over the past few years, Amit offers an account of his own personal journey through this book. He begins with simple ideas and progressively builds upon them to create a spontaneous insight into the nature of our being. The book also includes a comprehensive question and answer section, where readers will find the tools they need to begin the art of finding awareness and embark on their own personal journey of self-discovery.

Invites seekers to open themselves to the authentic experience of meditation, revealing ways to ask spiritually powerful questions and determine the real answers.

A simple, yet deeply effective series of reflective and written exercises that leads readers to a greater awareness of God's daily presence.

The Dalai Lama reveals how training the mind in compassion for other beings is directly related to—and a prerequisite for—the very pinnacle of Buddhist meditation The heart of meditation—the thing that brings it alive—is compassion. This is not an ordinary compassion but one that is developed and expanded in parallel with wisdom that arises through meditation. Without that essential foundation, other practices are pointless. Fortunately, the mind can be trained in compassion, and the mind thus trained is fertile ground for the practice of the Great Completeness (Dzogchen), which is considered the pinnacle of spiritual practice by many in Tibetan Buddhism. In this book, His Holiness the Dalai Lama teaches the Great Completeness simply but thoroughly, using as his reference a visionary poem by the nineteenth-century master Patrul Rinpoche to show that insight can never be separated from compassion. Through practice of the Great Completeness, we can access our innermost awareness and live our lives in a way that acknowledges it and manifests it. The wisdom and compassion that arise from such insight are critical, His Holiness teaches, not only to individual progress in meditation but to our collective progress toward peace in the world.

First things are spiritually and theologically important. Before Belief explores the precognitive human experience of transcendence, illuminating how such foundational experiences are formative of attachment relationships with people and ultimately with God. The book proposes an implicit learning model rather than rely on Freud’s or Jung’s understanding of the unconscious, with a goal of recovering unconscious spiritual learning. Once discovered and put into language, early learning needs to be tested and integrated into life experience and expressed in committed living. The theories examined and advanced in the work are also carried through in practical case studies that demonstrate the pastoral and clinical salience of understanding and connecting people to those grounding experiences.