Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Liberation Now: From the Progressive Path to Direct Experience

With Caverly Morgan recorded on December 1, 2019.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

In a progressive path approach to practice, we sometimes fall for the idea that liberation is in the future. We are conditioned to believe that we must end thinking, master practices, meditate for years, and purify our minds. Without realizing it, our beliefs can maintain the conditioning that stands in the way of our direct realization.

Turning our attention outward to various objects in practice can be deeply helpful. And, what changes when we cultivate our effortless capacity to rest the attention in Awareness itself? What changes as we practice inquiry into the nature of consciousness? And what tends to get in the way?

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Intimacy and infinity: beyond inner and outer.

    WorldwideInsight.org’s founding teacher Martin Aylward explores the tension we tend to feel between inner experience and outer engagement, self and world, being and doing. Martin leads a guided meditation and offer teachings on cultivating an inclusive practice, where our contact, curiosity and care go to whatever arises, whether ‘in here’ or ‘out there’.

    Read More

  • The freeing of human consciousness: from seeing the world ‘out there’, separate and alien, to directly knowing, feeling, and living the intimacy of all things

    The Shurangama Sutra, which points out the foundations of Zen practice, discusses the essential nature of mind as the “primal essence of consciousness that brings forth all conditions.” Implied is the heart-mind (citta) both profoundly intimate with all things while at the same time free and independent of all things. How is it to live…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Jaya Rudgard – Week of July 24, 2023

    This week’s theme is “Meditations on the Five Great Elements of Nature”. The five elements or energetic properties of nature (earth, water, fire, wind and space) feature frequently in the Buddha’s teaching and are a wonderful support for meditation and insight. This week we will practice with these elements as skilful means for contemplating body and world, and for cultivating the mind.

    Read More

  • The Spectrum of Awareness Practices

      This session will explore different ways in which attention works and associated meditation practices: from focused awareness, to flexible awareness, to natural awareness. We’ll do a number of fun experiential practices in hopes of understanding a variety of ways to meditate and how we can refine our own practice. Diana draws from her latest…

    Read More

  • Pascal Auclair

    This Is What We Are: Foam, Bubbles, Mirage, Banana Tree Trunks and Magical Shows

    In this session, we will explore the Buddha’s wise use of images in the Phena Sutta. We will see how these are representations of the deepest teachings of Insight Meditation and how they can be relevant for us today in our quest to free the mind and heart from constriction. There will be time to practice together guided by Pascal and time for questions and beginning of answers.

    Read More

  • In Relation to Everything

    All of our dharma practice is done in relation to something. We’re essentially always in relation to whatever we’re paying attention to. And, we might say that, in order for our dharma practice to progress, we need to be in good relation to four things: the dharma, ourselves, our meditation object and, in general, to…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Milla Gregor – Week of 26 May, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Milla Gregor leading our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Being Grounded: Five+ Ways

    What is it, to feel grounded, for you? Contact with the earth, with fundamental interrelatedness, your body, values or lineage; with the histories of the land? What’s the opposite of being grounded? We’ll explore such ideas, grounding our reflections in embodied meditation practice.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    An Open Heart in Hell

    After a summer of extreme heat, drought and fire, we may well enter the autumn wondering how to manage the grief at our fragile and collapsing ecology. Taking the title An Open Heart in Hell from Nick Mulvey’s recent song “Prayer of my Own“, we’ll use this session to honour the pains of the heart without getting…

    Read More