What if you could go back and sit under a tree with the Buddha and listen to him giving his original meditation instructions? What did he teach over 2500 years ago, and are those original instructions valid for today's practitioners? Most of us cannot travel through time, but we do have the records of the Buddha's teachings in the Pali suttas. In this book, Mark Edsel Johnson, Ph.D., demonstrates that by following a meditation practice called Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation or TWIM, which is directly based on the records of the Buddha's teachings, practitioners quickly experience the positive and profound uplifting of mind that matches the Buddha's own words. When the American Buddhist monk Bhante Vimalaraṁsi began to read the suttas and put into practice the original teachings of the Buddha, he found the Buddha's promises of the transformation of suffering, stress, confusion, and depression into peace, joy, and liberating wisdom to be true. From the sutta teachings, Bhante Vimalaraṁsi reconstructed the Buddha's original method, which he has named Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM). Mark Edsel Johnson holds TWIM up to the light of the teachings of the Buddha as recorded in the Pali suttas and demonstrates the TWIM method is in keeping with those teachings. Using the actual experiences of TWIM meditators, he demonstrates TWIM's effectiveness. At the least, it is a method of personal growth and at the most, one of profound spiritual attainment.
