Akincano Marc Weber (Switzerland) is a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. He learned to sit still in the early eighties as a Zen practitioner and later joined monastic life in Ajahn Chah’s tradition where he studied and practiced for 20 years in the Forest monasteries of Thailand and Europe. He has studied Pali and scriptures, holds a a degree in Buddhist psychotherapy and lives with his wife in Cologne, Germany from where he teaches Dhamma and meditation internationally.
Teaching is essentially translation. It means ferrying an authentic contemplative tradition across choppy waters into our psychological and cultural realities, losing neither the vision nor the truth of what we know to be our immediate experience.
How do we make ourselves growth and realisation? Tracing the historical, psychological and
Two sources of valid forms of knowlege:
– Paccakkha "before the eye," i.e. 'perceptible to the senses'
'direct experience'.
– Anvaya – 'inference'
History of Sudden & Gradual. Aside of the the historical background, these terms have taken on a metaphorical meaning: the talk looks at how these metaphors chart the path of practice, their respective analogies and their images, their framing of the probleme and their respective values and drawbacks. – May these metaphors ultimately have their bases in the differeing mind functions of samādhi (gradual) and sati (sudden)? The speaker, despite little canonical evidence, thinks so.
Hedonic tone (vedanā) as a feature of human experience is the major factor in governing involuntary attention – vedanā rules much of our attention. The reflections unpack the role of feeling tone on attention, intention and the cultivation of mindfulness. Learning to cultivate attention beyond gratification and avoidance and to uncouple attention from pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone.
Kafka and the girl with a lost doll.
Satipaṭṭhāna and Suttas in general – a little history.
Satipaṭṭhāna as a cartography of human expericence: the 'raw materials' to establish mindfulness in. (This is not the satipaṭṭhāna as exercise but their use as a map of the somatic, hedonic, affective and discursive aspects of mind.) This orientation helps greatly with the actual practice of satipatthana exercises outline elsewhere.
The challenge of attending and being mindful. Mindfulness (sati) and Attention (manasikāra) are different things. Attention comes in two forms: voluntary and involuntary attention.
Body as a construct. On touch (phassa) and touching and being touched (phusati). Differing senses create a different relationship - 'seeing', 'hearing' and 'touching' as analogies for attending to something create a different kind of relationship to ourselves. The visual is overdetermined, often at the expense of touch. Feeling the body as an experience of touch rather than being 'observed'.'.
