Above all, a practical guide to meditation ...

This book is first and foremost a practical guide to meditation. It is essentially a technical description (and spiritual) of the various ways to practice centering on itself and relaxation of the mind.

MR begins his book by first explaining what meditation is useful and what we must meditate. In doing so, it briefly discusses the fundamental aspirations of the human and defines key attitudes to live in a spirit of serenity (altruism, compassion, joy, fairness, wisdom). It then comes quite quickly how to practice meditation for it to be beneficial. He explains that meditation is not intended to empty the mind or block thoughts - this is impossible - and it is not a simple exercise of physical and mental relaxation, but a state of consciousness that allows to let go of the hopes, fears, whims of the ego and all that feeds the inner conflicts. Expressed this way, the tool seems very abstract meditation, and the book would not be of much use if there be ended.

What the book teaches us most is the technique of meditation and how to practice it. Because meditation is learned through experience and practice as anything. MR we nevertheless warned from the outset that it requires two important conditions: 1) have a real will, a true motivation for change, since a mere wish is not sufficient; and 2) to allow time to learn, because the mastery of an art is not aquière few days.

The "meditation" is a page 100ne on 140 of the book. MR explains how to meditate by focusing on an object or rather by freeing the mind of all thought, which is particularly difficult and is the ultimate culmination of the practice. Any advice necessary and sufficient are provided to us on conditions of place and time favorable to meditation, the physical positions of reference and their variants, and effective ways of managing his mind during exercise. MR gives us a complete suite of meditation techniques of increasing complexity, each with a specific purpose, such as understanding the ephemeral, eradicate dissatisfaction, develop altruistic love, soothe physical pain, get insight. He dissects the technique step by step, to teach us how to do an emotion (pain, love, compassion, joy ') an object of meditation, and fuel our spirit of these emotions there for what they are: mere states of consciousness in a continuous flow. The whole purpose of mediation is in the development of this ability not conceptualize emotions but to contemplate conscientiously.

This book is aimed first at those ones already does not take a serious interest in meditation or who started the practice. It's a bit of the student textbook. However, this is not the best book to discover and educate newcomers to meditative philosophy and precepts that underlie it. It may however also be read for many extracts of Buddhism selected by MR reference texts to illustrate his point, he calls nicely "inspiration". The greatest quality of the book is probably to connect the abstract and concrete aspects of meditation in the same text, using a simple image discourse. A challenge not that easy to overcome, even for a successful master ...