Journey and the Guide: a practical course in enlightenment

This is an eight-week course in Enlightenment that will take a lifetime to complete.'The natural mode of consciousness is to expand. In every moment we can either allow consciousness to unfold or we can make it 'me' and 'mine' and feel it shrink back to the level of egocentricity. It's as if we've identified with a tiny ripple on the surface of the ocean. Once we let go of that identification there's the whole ocean: centre-less, edgeless, completely free.'

• Building on the success of Life with Full Attention, Maitreyabandhu offers a challenging but profoundly useful work on how to practice Buddhism in everyday life.

• Train your mind to be healthy and calm through learning from the life of the Buddha.

• Drawing on examples from the life of the Buddha, Maitreyabandhu gives an easily understood outline of the system of spiritual life as undertaken by Buddhists in the Triratna Community.

• Maitreyabandhu shows how the journey starts with our own mind, particularly when we begin to look into the truth of things — the truth of the old man on the escalator, the friend in hospital, the coffin we carry to the graveside.

• What we find in our guide, the Buddha, is a man with a "fit" mind: a healthy, happy, non-neurotic, honest-to-goodness mind. To get fit, we need to work on becoming a happy healthy human being. We need to integrate our thinking faculty with our emotions. We need to wake up to thought and tune in to direct experience. And we need to work against the ever-rising tide of trivia, dissipation, and over-stimulation of the modern world.

• Maitreyabandhu takes us on this journey with practical week-by-week exercises, focusing on cultivating mindful awareness, being happy, integrating and simplifying our lives, and knowing ourselves.