Why the Buddha Did Not Preach to a Hungry Man
from Bodhi Leaf No. 121 by Louis van Loon

What makes one man poor and another rich is not only a question of material possessions, how much they consume or the extent to which they are able to satisfy their cravings. This is determined largely by the manner in which they subjectively experience and psychologically evaluate a feeling of well-being in the context of the environment in which they happen to be situated. Indeed, “poverty” and “affluence” are largely relative terms: quantitatively, a well-to-do member of a primitive Bushman society is still desperately poor compared with an urbanised African who may well own a radio, a guitar, a good suit and some cattle at his homeland kraal. He, however, is appallingly destitute when his lifestyle is contrasted with that of a white artisan who, in turn, envies the earning capacity—and everything that goes with it—of a Johannesburg business executive who, however, may well earn— and be able to afford only as much as a New York dockworker.

Narrated by Judy Swift
2020
50 minutes

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Audiobook copyright, 2021 Pariyatti

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Chapter 28 - We Are Everywhere
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Solutions to the new, crowded, interconnected era will not be just technological but spiritual. They will embrace sorrow for what each individual life is not, for without conscious awareness of the sorrow that is intrinsic to individuality, there will be no possible solution to group self aggrandizing aggression and the plagues of externalizing blame that have characterized organized religions and nation-states. I prefer to meet people covered with tears rather than those holding a fistful of complaints.

Whether humankind U-turns away from dysplastic growth toward peace or not, I have—and you have—the option to live the best possible life. Inner peace is already within you, waiting to be opened. Cultivating inner peace will make you happier and more resilient and practical, able to face the difficulties of your personal death and human communal confusion head-on. It will open you to realizations that exceed the pragmatic, so that you will enter the stream of peace that is always invisibly flowing in and around you. Engaged in the world most helpfully, you will become an internal habitue of a place beyond the wind, the abode of peace.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
17 minutes

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Copyright, 2021 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 27 - A Great Cry On Earth
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

The practices from which inner peace derives, and which it in turn furthers, transcend material reality without rejecting it. To find inner peace, a person must be turned completely around. A challenge is set before us by the radical perception of “the flow of nutriment,” which means: Is there anything more to your life than the tumbling on of animal instinct—“the male collects food, and the female lays eggs”?

People contain an invisible wavelength that grows out of the feeling of “enough!” It is not exotic nor esoteric, for it is found in every person, more or less developed. Peace ascends through the aperture of psychic fullness. Energy to pursue high values, mindfulness of the ephemeral sensations of every moment, thoughtful inquiry beyond complacency—these are the seeds of enlightenment. Concentration, calm, joy based on perspective rather than acquisition—these are seeds of enlightenment. Equanimity in all circumstances is the culmination of inner peace—the radiance of sufficiency.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
31 minutes

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Copyright, 2021 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 26 - Our Inner Peace Is Earth's Frontier
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Cultivating Inner Peace is the most important action we can take to help planet Earth, on whose back we all ride, whose breath we breathe, whose plants provide our food, and whose properly intense sunlight is the source of energy for the molecules that form our body. Rather than solipsistic disinterest, the cultivation of inner peace activates our fundamental human calling: to overcome our predatory egotism—which is the source of war, over population, and environmental destruction—and to reorganize our lives around the deepest gratifications we can feel: love, sympathetic joy, compassion, and peace of heart and mind.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
34 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 25 - A Personal Experience of Vipassana Meditation
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

I took my first Vipassana meditation course in 1974 under the guidance of Mr. Goenka... In those days, Vipassana wasn’t being taught in the West. I made several trips to India and returned with the technique half-learned. I didn’t know where it fit into my life, but I saw it as something honest, free, and useful. I could own it myself, practice it without being swallowed by a religion or being wafted away in a pointless vacuum of career and convention.

I became increasingly committed and serious because every time I “sat” I felt I got something out of it. I never had any mystical or unusual experiences. I both experienced my mind-body, and was able to get some distance from it. I kept returning for ten-day courses, and practicing with increasing devotion in between. By now I’ve lived half a lifetime this way, and am archeological proof that meditation isn’t “Eastern thought.”

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
40 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 24 - Peace Is Purity
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

The nucleus of inner peace is purity of heart and mind. When you say, “I want inner peace,” you mean that you want to be able to live with what’s inside you, to be at ease in the depths of yourself; and that integrated positivity, without cracks or seams, is called “purity.”

We have no difficulty in becoming aware of our mind. It floods us: it spawns epics and anecdotes and vacation plans. We all dwell in the captivity of our own melodrama. No one who has not spent whole days sealed alone inside her own head can know the fantasia of multiscreen ideation that will not stop for a moment. How can this self-entranced mind gain a more embracing and enduring perspective?

Purity, transcendence of imaginary and divisive selfhood, is the outcome of the experience of ineluctable change throughout the dream of the self. When the bodily basis of the self dissolves into the impersonal flows of universal matter, one drop of purity glistens in the mind. Purity is a direct product of experiencing ultimate reality of change in every particle of one’s own body-mind. In a moment of sweeping, penetrating meditation, the students may experience themselves as they might if they observed themselves from a helicopter for a hundred years: as a passing cloud.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
53 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 23 - Peace Is Participation
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Among those who passed through the cloud chamber of existence and left a track of inner peace to hover behind them and to guide those who follow, none left a more exquisite trace or lived a more complete life than Rabindranath Tagore. His life is exemplary of a life of inner peace and participation. He mastered and manifested the intricate rhythm of solitude alternating with service in an atmosphere of dynamic harmony. He participated in every sphere, an energetic and active life with a broad sweep of interests that brought him into contact with a world fellowship, a bold life of competence and engagement. Yet his residual vapor unambiguously condenses into peace.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
25 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 22 - Peace Is An Ambiance: Rabindranath Tagore
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

There is a charmed quality to Rabindranath Tagore’s biography that enables us to inhale the fragrance of a life of peace-in- action. Not only the facts, but his atmosphere inspires peace, like the smell of transpiring grass on a summer evening. His history reveals how insight and action are complemented by relationship to an ambiance, producing an infectious feeling tone of dynamic equipoise. The events of his life and his poetry form a bouquet of images that can pervade our own peaceward dreams. As peace seekers, our strongest motivation arises from seeds of our own planting, but we are encouraged onward by the mythic potency of images derived from the lives of those who have absorbed and suffused the atmosphere with peace.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
70 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 21 - Individual Identity Within Egolessness
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Peaceful living derives from balance in a world of torque. The world shakes, but our gyroscope must remain upright. The student of peace envelops deep habits about how to live intentionally, selectively, naturally, knowledgeably, and harmoniously amidst losses, defeats, and gradual decline. Like an acrobat with eyes fixed on the horizon, peace focuses beyond self. Peaceful people inhabit landscapes where perspective derives from an infinitely distant vanishing point. Peace is transcendence of flux. Mountains erode, continents and oceans slide into one another, stars burn out. Still, men and women find within themselves an unshakeable something-else. Regardless of language, culture, religion, or its absence, inner peace means detachment from anxious narcissistic immediacy and entry into the impersonal. Peace is the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the world beyond measurement.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
39 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.

Chapter 20 - Peace Is Humility or Egolessness
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Generally, we experience the details of our week as earth-shattering. To live a life of inner peace, we need to cultivate detachment from those gripping ups and downs on which our well-being appears to depend, because it is the delusion of importance that blinds us to the real panorama. The humility that will help you cultivate inner peace is a continuous falling back down to earth, like the leaves of birch trees spilling down in golden autumn showers.

The growth of humility, downward, creates an upward expansion of starry sky to contemplate. Traditionally, this attitude of greeting toward the world has been called “egolessness” in the East and “humility” in the West. I want to remove humility from its churchly old lace and make this realization helpful and regular as denim.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
30 minutes

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Copyright, 2020 Paul R. Fleischman

There is more information about vipassana meditation at Dhamma.org, and books and audio resources available for purchase in the Pariyatti bookstore.