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

Download Audio (20 MB)

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

Download Audio (25 MB)

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

Download Audio (12 MB)

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

Download Audio (34 MB)

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

Download Audio (19 MB)

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

Download Audio (15 MB)

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 19 - The Gateway to Sympathetic Joy
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

A person who has learned the skill of sorrow paradoxically will be lightened by kinship and communion with all beings, and will spontaneously speak in phrases of emphathy and saliency. Words and sorrow are a couple with a long, strong marriage.

Regardless of what we believe the meaning of our life to be, we feel peaceful when our sense of concern is directed outside ourselves toward others, not as a substitute for selfcare, but as an extension of it. Sorrow is what enables pity, dread, or condescension to become compassion. This is one of the deepest ironies of human nature, that our sorrow also contains a leavening celebration.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
16 minutes

Download Audio (7 MB)

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 18 - Sorrow Is a Skill
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

Some people can successfully avoid the depths of life, but if you try to deepen your feelings of peace, you’ll unearth within yourself and the world profound unpleasantness. We saw this to be true in the lives of ecstatic visionaries like Walt Whitman, and in the lives of great nature lovers like Thoreau and Muir. Logically, the world is unknowable to us, who are brief visitors. In spite of that, because of that, to find peace, we have to confront our despairs, ignite our faith, and learn to feel sorrow. Hold on, Reader! We’re headed toward a magnificent campsite, but first we have to be roped for safety across an icy traverse.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
19 minutes

Download Audio (10 MB)

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 17 - Peace Is Facing Sorrow
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

If a reader were using this book as a practical guide to cultivating inner peace, he or she might now be thinking: I know that mere situational adjustments won’t essentially improve my life, which gains its trajectory only from my own actions and feelings. I want to sail toward peace, easy in the currents of myself, harmoniously related to people and circumstances, and to achieve this I have to consciously steer with peace as my polestar. When life storms and batters me, my goal is to return to course, and the will to do so creates the dynamic resilience I need. I’ll limit myself to sail light and trim. I’ll absorb the wise directions of those who’ve already negotiated these straits, soaked in the soothing sounds of peace, and my own words will add to this score. I’ll befriend all I meet on wing and wave, an unwalled, welcoming life.

But you might feel confused to find, having taken these steps, that you are oppressed by a cloud of sorrow. Yet this would be a good sign, because impersonal and surprising grief is the harbinger beyond the known world of yourself to the horizonless peace you seek, as the story of the Buddha will show.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
33 minutes

Download Audio (16 MB)

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 16 - Celebrating with Everyone
from Cultivating Inner Peace by Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.

A peaceful heart celebrates with everyone. “Nature” is a construct, the imposition of a category over the living, vibrating, collections of atoms and molecules, shaped into hearts and minds that are swaying, flying, and yodeling around us today. When even the concept of “nature” is removed, rivers and bears are seen to be as consanguineous as spouses and store clerks.

The process of impermanence and change unites the world. Nature and people have no clear demarcation. We are all tumbling on together. What we subsume under the rubric “nature” is the screen onto which we project our own love and compassion—or lack of them—and when we say “love of nature,” we refer to our capacity to pour out nurturant and fond delight toward all or any “others.” “Nature” is inner peace flashed back and forth between a human being and any other kind of cloud.

Dr. Paul Fleischman
Massachusetts, USA
2020
8 minutes

Download Audio (4 MB)

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.