Mindfulness-Based Anxiety Reduction: Enlightenment And The Liberation From Psychological Suffering

Mindfulness-Based Anxiety Reduction: Enlightenment and the Liberation From Psychological Suffering

This manual on Mindfulness-Based Anxiety Reduction (MBAR) is written for people who are interested in both the cessation of psychological suffering and enlightenment. MBAR proposes that our sense of personal identity and history are conceptual constructs that orient us to our human lives. Though such conceptions serve us, they also deliver psychological suffering. Psychological suffering is of the nature of ideas and memories. It follows that the liberation from such suffering must provide for the loosening and restructuring of troubling conceptions. Non-conceptual awareness, which is closely allied with enlightenment, presents a perspective that is outside the purview of conceptual suffering. It is immediate, rather than recalled; sensory, rather than pensive; and impersonal, rather than individual. Non-conceptual awareness, as described in MBAR, is at once enlightenment, as well as being the deactivation of the conceptualizing that delivers psychological suffering. There is no neurosis in the moments of non-conceptual awareness, which occurs in deep sleep, as well as in mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation and its equivalents radically reduce the mind