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VIPASSANA/THERAVADA BUDDHISM WITH BHANTE GUNARATANA
L.M.: I thought we would start with a question on inner and outer peace. From your perspective, what is Vipassana meditation? And how does this meditation practice help bring about peace in our lives?
B.G.: Vipassana practice is a very involved and deep way of training our mind to reach the very bottom of our mind and our problems. Through vipassana we penetrate all superficiality, and get into the bottom of reality, or truth, that we all experience. We want to remove all the layers of distortion and confusion from our mind to reach reality. Vipassana practice is the method; and its sole purpose is to cleanse the mind of all psychic irritants. We remove the layers of psychic irritants that have accumulated from time immemorial. Inner peace can be achieved only by removing these psychic irritants, because all our
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