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This is a handbook on the art of meditative attention or meditating for insight. It deals with the basics of awareness meditation. There is practical instruction on how to do sitting and walking meditation and how to apply awareness in daily activities based on the Insight Meditation (Vipassana) tradition. The purpose of this handbook is to give the beginner to awareness meditation a guide to the basics of the practice, with the emphasis on its practical application to daily life.

This course describes a series of meditation exercises and practical advice on how to apply them. It works best if you follow the course progressively, giving each sequence of instructions a good 'work-out' before proceeding further. Meditation is the intelligent heart of the Buddha's way; the only criterion is that you should apply it to daily life. The purpose of this meditation course is not to create a system of beliefs, but rather to give guidance on how to see clearly into the nature of the mind. In this way, you can have first-hand understanding of the way things are, without reliance on opinions or theories — a direct experience, which has its own vitality. This course has been prepared with both beginners and experienced practitioners in mind. A feature of this workshop is that you are encouraged to share your meditation experience with others, as it will enrich not only their practice but your own as well. So your questions and my responses will be posted here as we go along. Above all, feel free to ask for clarification on any aspect of the practice presented here. While this is a new medium to learn the ancient art of meditation it is still text based; but I hope that with your help it will become more interactive.

Ven. Pannyavaro is a qualified meditation teacher. He received his full ordination under the Sangha Raja of Thailand. During more than 25 years of monastic training he has studied and practised meditation in all of the major Theravada Buddhist countries ie. Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, including long periods of intensive practice of Satipatthana - vipassana meditation at the Mahasi Sayadaw Centres in Burma. He has received training under Ven. Sayadaw U Janaka of Chanmyay Yeiktha, Burma, who is the foremost disciple of the renowned Burmese Meditation Master, the late Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw. Ven. Pannyavaro has also studied meditation under the late Ven. Matara Sri Nanarama Mahathera of the Mitirigala Forest Hermitage, which was founded by Asoka Weeraratna in 1968.

Ven. Pannyavaro is a qualified meditation teacher. He received his full ordination under the Sangha Raja of Thailand. During more than 25 years of monastic training he has studied and practised meditation in all of the major Theravada Buddhist countries ie. Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, including long periods of intensive practice of Satipatthana - vipassana meditation at the Mahasi Sayadaw Centres in Burma. He has received training under Ven. Sayadaw U Janaka of Chanmyay Yeiktha, Burma, who is the foremost disciple of the renowned Burmese Meditation Master, the late Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw. Ven. Pannyavaro has also studied meditation under the late Ven. Matara Sri Nanarama Mahathera of the Mitirigala Forest Hermitage, which was founded by Asoka Weeraratna in 1968.

The definition of the words in the word lists is based on Barron's GRE word list (usually known as the 33000 word list),

Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that "our" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.

Quantum physics may appear complicated, especially if one forgets the "big picture" and gets lost in the details. However, it can become clearer and less tangled if one applies a few fundamental concepts so that simplified approaches can emerge and estimated orders of magnitude become clear. Povh and Rosina’s Scattering and Structures presents the properties of quantum systems (elementary particles, nucleons, atoms, molecules, quantum gases, quantum liquids, stars, and early universe) with the help of elementary concepts and analogies between these seemingly different systems. The original German-language edition of this book was written for students preparing for their final oral examination in physics. By and large, the scope of the book in English has been essentially enlarged and thus may also be of interest for physicists in general.