Talk 29a: Finding Unity in Personal Relationships - Eknath Easwaran is commenting on the last chapter of the Buddhist text, the Dhammapada. He encourages us all to use our practice of passage meditation to quiet the mind and to whittle away at our ego. Easwaran points out that the Buddha maintains most of our problems arise from an inflated self-will. One fruitful remedy is to strive to look at situations through another person’s point of view.
Talk 29b: Inner Freedom and Beauty - Easwaran shows how the Buddha questioned the standard assumptions of his day, and turned them into tools for teaching us that it’s not what we wear or how we look that counts, but how we think and live. He outlines some of the stages in developing this awareness. He says we can find the ultimate freedom, which he speaks about at the end of the talk: we get free from our samskaras – the conditioned patterns of thought and habit which affect not only our mind but even our body.