Ajahn Brahm: Letting Go, Stillness, and Vanishing

In this special video version of the Wisdom Podcast, host Daniel Aitken travels to Berkeley, California, to speak with Venerable Ajahn Brahm, a meditation teacher in the Thai Forest tradition and author of many popular books including Falling Is Flying; The Art of Disappearing; and Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond. In this conversation, you’ll hear Ajahn Brahm talk about his early interests in theoretical physics at Cambridge University and how this intersected with his interest in Buddhist thought. He talks about the constructed nature of perception and how what we perceive is largely contained within the limits of our own imagination. Ajahn Brahm also discusses what he calls the art of disappearing—namely the relationship between letting go, stillness, and vanishing. You’ll hear him explain how true mindfulness, as well as its connection to the necessity of higher states of meditation, both emerge from this place of disappearance.