About

Dear friends,

We are lucky to have so many teachings and practices to draw on as we walk this beautiful path.

One of Thầy's books that really resonates with me is Understanding Our Mind. If you haven't come across it, it brings together many of the terms you may have heard such as store consciousness, manas, habit energies, mental formations, and so on, into a single, unified view. And of course, it may well be the other way around, that much of what we pick up from the various teachings we read, watch, and listen to, are fragments from this particular Buddhist psychology framework.

I first read the book in 2004, and immediately decided to read it again, more slowly, taking notes along the way to better digest it. I was so inspired by the 2013–14 Winter Retreat focusing on this book that I reached out to Jan, a dear friend who had translated the book into Polish, and together we set up a group to study these teachings. We spent 50 weeks going through the 50 verses in the book. Then in 2019, a sangha I co-facilitate decided to study it, this time we went more slowly, spending almost three years working through the first 40 verses.

In 2024, our sangha wanted to return to the book, and so we set off again. It's now been two years and we are up to Verse 9. What I find remarkable about these teachings is their depth — each time I revisit it, so many new layers reveal themselves.

Earlier this year, Claude's most intelligent model seemed to cross a threshold in its ability to help explain these teachings with great accuracy and in great detail. Like most teachers, its answers are not always perfect. But its understanding of Sanskrit, the Yogācāra school, and the Plum Village tradition, and its ability to contextualise its answers within the book, the two retreats, and Thầy's Columbia thesis, has helped me penetrate these teachings much more deeply.

At the same time, I hold this help lightly. However fluent these models are with words and ideas, they have never drawn a breath or touched life directly. They work with concepts about reality, not reality itself, and the understanding these verses point to is not conceptual, it has to be lived. So please test everything you read here against your own experience.

My aspiration is simply for these teachings to reach more friends, and I may look to start a new group in early 2027. If you feel drawn to these teachings and would like to study in community, or if you are a sangha facilitator who would be happy to host such sessions, I would love to hear from you. You can write to me at [email protected].

With deep gratitude to Thầy and all our ancestral teachers,

Alipasha
True Fluent Energy