Welcome to the Spiral to Freedom
Throughout this course, you'll find a text summary content beneath each talk or meditation. These summaries may contain tables, diagrams, or other visual aids, and will be collected in each unit's workbook.
The discovery of an auspicious thread
There is a famous Buddhist teaching called "dependent arising." It speaks of conditionality as a principle, and the spiral to freedom is a particular facet of this conditionality... a facet that has been hitherto underexposed. We hope to shed light on this very promising, very auspicious, and very inspiring teaching.
A path with many entry points
The arc of this course will take us from contextualization and some history around the background of these spiral texts. We will juxtapose the spiral to freedom with traditional forms of dependent arising. These texts promise a vision of freedom, a path of growth right from the ordinariness of our lives onward and the power that individual virtues hold. The beauty of these texts has to do with the manifold entry points that we find in them. Unlike the traditional form of dependent arising—which focuses solely on ignorance as a starting point—these spiral texts offer us a number of virtues that can act as the stepping stones for a sequence that spirals towards freedom.
We hope you will see that many of the entry points that these spiral texts praise are there in your life and can be appreciated, strengthened, and invigorated by what you learn with us, and that this will bring the path to fruition in your own life and practice. I trust you have picked up on our enthusiasm and eagerness for this material. We care for this very much, and we hope you enjoy joining us on this course.
A hidden teaching?
We look forward to sharing this material with you, particularly as these texts are hiding in full view. They're not hidden in any way. They're within this vast corpus of Buddhist teaching. We cannot criticize the traditions for not paying attention to this because there is an enormous amount of information within these texts. The traditions have been very selective about what they've used, but this has been taken up by some.
Cultivation
What we're engaging in is not offering you meditation techniques. We're offering you ways of cultivation, which is actually much more in line with the original Pāli word bhāvanā, which is usually translated as "meditation." So it's cultivation that we're engaging in. And in fact, I would say the whole course is really a series of cultivations.
A path for everyday life
One of the beauties of the spiral path of freedom is that it doesn't require perfect conditions for practicing within. As we all know, we have to practice within the lives that we have. Those lives can often be fraught with unsatisfactoriness and problems that will seemingly hold us back. The beauty of this particular path is its inspiration to practice from where we are right here, right now, in the midst of our lives, with whatever is pulling us in whatever direction it might be pulling us in, and that we can still attain the goals and the virtues that are proffered by traditional Buddhism.
What we're also excited to be able to share with you is that these this particular path can be undertaken by all of us in any aspect of life, in the midst of your daily life. It does not require special conditions for you to be able to practice in this way. And I think this is the beauty, this is the inspirational quality of this particular teaching: that we can do this. And I do emphasize that, that we can do this within ordinary life. All it needs us to be is human beings interested in growth.