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Wealth is not happiness nor is swimming pools and villas. Nor is great work alone reward, or fame. Foreign places visited themselves give nothing. It is only you who bring to the places your heart, or in your great work feeling, or in your large house place. If you do this there is happiness.

Recognize that something sinister has been sculpting the landscape of dream. We are seeing an unprecedented colonisation and colonialisation of the dream worlds. When we discussed incubation it was made clear that the Ancient World understood the importance of dream, and since then it has been accumulating a grey silt. The dream world is becoming as polluted as the natural world, as despoiled. Before we can even reach the Asclepium, our minds are chorusing with chatter, assailed by demands. The previous strategy of ‘thou shalt not have unauthorized dreams’ has been superceded by a more terrible strategy. It is not simply dream which is derided as meaningless, but every aspect of our lives. In a parody of Hasan Il Sabbah, nothing is true and thus nothing permitted. We parade our inner selves which are revealed to be no more than loyalty to a sect of compatible brands. When we see ourselves and the world around us we do not recognize the sacred. Our culture has devoured itself. It is little wonder that Christianity sees the end of days, that Islam retreats to medieval certainties, that everyone else is plunged into their digital soma slavery.

Perhaps many people were trying to figure out how to do vipassana in the late 1800s. Only four succeeded. They all started from descriptions in the Pali scriptures. The most detailed are in the Satipatthana Sutta, the Visuddhimagga, and the Anapanasati Sutta.

In the mid-1800s, these texts were revered because supposedly they showed the way to nirvana. However, the way they were practiced was for groups of monks to ritually chant the text in unison. This is like a bunch of people who don’t know what a computer is reading the manual out loud, hoping the machine will spring to life, without realizing you need to plug it in.