Simply Being (South West)

Wendy

  • True Love… you’ll find it in the end…of ‘what’

    What am I? What is love? What is true about it? are questions given many answers…
    But finding… being, how we are…is inexpressible…

    I heard this song True Love Will Find You In The End by Daniel Johnston… playing in a Picturehouse cinema a couple of decades ago.
    It’s a YouTube link and if you look in the comments underneath, some …like lolothesilly’s five years ago… are heart-warming
    I liked it so much that I rang the cinema to find the title …and learned how to sing it… after a fashion!

    Since then I had many years of unlearning, relaxing out of confusion and realising more clearly ‘how it is’ and so ‘how we are’ ahead of me…with the guidance of the perfect teacher – for me..
    Happily I’ve lived ’til now to enjoy the learning…and the heart-opening that brings!

    There is so much that’s been sung written and said arising from the multifarious concepts human beings have linked with that four letter word… ‘Love’ …
    And for this Valentine’s day… here’s a bit more from a dharma perspective..

    From this perspective, every sentient being has the potential to manifest ‘True Love’…as an expression of the absolute truth of their intrinsic buddha-nature.
    This kind of ‘love’ is profound and inclusive…and of course …not about some graspable ‘thing’ grasping another 😉 !

    Rather it would arise as gestures through receptive connectivity with another ‘processional manifestation of emptiness’ – as are we all, but otherwise believe.
    However rather than the basis for the connectivity being karmic conditioning within a dualistic frame-work, as per usual… here the basis for the connectivity would be ground openness; from being relaxedly at home within, inseparable from… the ground of our being…
    This love is natural, freely arising and free from judgment…not earned by deeds or representation …a love which, by its nature, is vey easing.

    In the first line of the prayer the ‘Four Immeasurables’ …the meaning of love is expounded as the wish for all beings to have happiness …and more deeply, not just happiness… but the root of that happiness…
    For all to enjoy the satisfaction of complete release from the dualistic tensions which arise from the ignorance of believing they are some self-existing, knowable entity…an evaluate-able ‘thing amongst things’…
    released through the wisdom of realising their true nature, how they truly are…

    And, in the lovely ‘Prayer for Happiness in the World’…there are some lines which go:

    For all beings, human and non-human, may the precious excellent bodicitta (buddha-nature) arise naturally*

    So that, free of harmful or troublesome thoughts and deeds… they have minds full of love for each other…


    This next prayer comes from James’ recent book the Deep and vast Freedom of the Dharma:

    May I rest in openness for the benefit of all

    May I be present with the clarity of my potential for the benefit of all

    May I be open, available and responsive for the benefit of all

    With the fulfilment of that prayer I think we would not have just found true love, but would be it !

    So this love is of a very different order of magnitude and orientation from the usual narrow and exclusive notions of love …romantic or otherwise…
    Whilst ideas rooted in ignorance of their ground… through reification… invite attachment clinging and other forms of suffering ~ these gestures are light…without grasping… there is enjoyment.
    With dharma as the DJ, it’s ‘good dancing’ ! (JL macclesfield talk ref.)

    Buddhas are clearly not blind to the infinite potential of beings…and our spring-like new shoots of awakening, starting to open our eyes and hearts…climbing out from under the duvet of our assumptions… invite us to feel this kind of love…which shows itself in many ways…
    Once they too envisaged themselves as being ‘something’ definable …with all that that entails… and they respond…according to the circumstances… : )

    I had a go at altering the lyrics of the ‘True Love’ song so that they were a bit more fitting to this view:

    True love, you’ll find.. and you will mend …

    you’ll find how to rest.. in the end

    Don’t be sad, I know you will…

    But don’t give up until…

    You see that it… does not depend…

    ~

    This is a promise with a catch

    Only if you’re looking will you find it

    True love is looking too, but how will you recognise it

    Unless you… step out into the light… the light… the light

    ~

    Actually we are always in and of ‘the light’ of the sky-like mind…but, forgetting this, we tend to solidify and fuse with its movements… of any passing clouds, and surprising rainbows…(as thoughts, feelings and sensations)
    However both are movements within the sky, and given its hospitable nature, both phenomena are equally welcome…
    The space of the sky simply allows their movement and doesn’t try to fuse with…or reject either

    So whether it’s a lovely meal, a kiss …a long stemmed rose …or none of those… that arrive for you on Valentines day…whatever comes will be just fine…if you get what you’ve got…
    Your buddha-nature,

    Sky-like mind…

    There is an arrangement of coloured dots below for you…if you can imagine they are flower-buds…then you may imagine an infinite number of flower-buds for you and everyone …buds about to open in the sunshine!

    … and today’s invitation to listen to the latest recording …part (vi) from Open to Life-the heart of awareness from the book the Open Door of Emptiness which maybe brings this view a little more clearly into focus… if you scroll down ….to the end!

    about to open in the sun

  • New recording ….

    ….here’s part (vi) from Chapter 3 of the Open Door of Emptiness… a gift for Valentines Day!

    Just scroll down to the last recording on the linked page…

    Love – Wisdom and Compassion

  • Emptiness and form – The Heart Sutra and Repelling all Troubles – links to texts, commentary, audio and video

    As we look around the world we can see that life on this planet is currently impacted by multiple disasters … and existential threats, of which climate change is just one, hover more closely around us as their potentiating factors accumulate.

    If we see this and imagine what is to come, it would be easy to fuse our life energy with the arising emotional turbulence.
    But if we do that.. then life’s energy flowing with our dualising attention – acting like gelatin – will bring deeper apparent ‘solidification’ and deepen the dualising separation…of our separated sense of ‘self’ and our other imaginings from their ground.

    We were talking about the impact of recent events generally and how they impact us…in the group a few weeks ago.
    Later I found this unpublished post in drafts written quite a while ago…and added links to some of the material which can be so helpful to us…as we open more into the dharma.

    As James has explained our egoic capacity is like a very small pot, and easily overwhelmed.
    So we may then become fearful… with sinking feelings of powerlessness, maybe depression…
    or, on the other hand, anxiously aroused into the belief that ‘tooling up and mobilising in’ will solve the problem. ‘I must do something…and doing anything is better than doing nothing!’

    From the general Mahayana view these reactions are completely normal for sentient beings – driven by the karmic tendencies arising from prior dualistic activity… with the various polarities of seeking pleasure, profit, praise and fame and wanting to avoid sorrow, loss, blame, and infamy as our primary goals.
    If we look through the lens of impermanence we can see how suffering will inevitably result from this ….and our ability to be present with circumstances will be diminished, restricting our availability both for connectivity with others… and to our own innate open potential…

    Putting our heads in the sand, crossing our fingers and assuming that there will be a stable basis for enacting the continuity of our habitual patterns in an increasingly unstable world, would limit our connectivity with the actuality of our ever-changing world and set us up for deep shock and dislocation as the fault lines and gullies of our imaginedly stable world open up in front of us.

    Some time ago James counselled that this was a time for deep practice, meditation and prayers.
    As has been observed ‘there will never be peace on the outside until there is peace on the inside.’
    In deep practice outside and inside aren’t separate… and arisings self-liberate without disturbance.

    Realising the emptiness of form, which is taught in the Heart Sutra, is the basis for this…

    You can find the meaning of this profound sutra is explained… or gestured towards… by commentary, in many places …
    For example:

    …in the practice text Repelling all troubles

    …in these audio recordings… nos.19 and 20 from the book Longing for Limitless Light.

    … in Macclesfield talk 13 …The Illusory nature of Experience                                           March 2012

    The text of the Heart Sutra, which is the basis for this talk, begins ‘Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness not other than form’….

    The expounds the statements of the sutra about the true nature of all phenomena, including what we take to be ourselves.
    This is so very ‘other than’ we how habitually imagine it to be yet James explains freshly, clearly, and accessibly.

    audio      video   

    and in this last suggestion…which is not the least!

    …The recently published book by James Low ‘The Deep and Vast Freedom of the Dharma’ invites us into a deep exploration and reflection of the truth our being….to discover that how we actually exist is other than the psedo-encapsulation offered by our egoic-identity.
    It offers us a deepening appreciation of how the different aspects of dharma teachings, and different practices can facilitate our realisation of this truth
    As you can see from the link..it’s contents includes Shine and Vipassana, meditation instructions, the Repelling all troubles – Dokpa practice text, with much else… that is – maybe after a fair amount of head-scratching – eye-opening…
    There are prayers for waking, for the end of the day… and it ends with a profound prayer for all.

    It’s the first book on the recommended reading list/study program that James has put together for us… and a truly precious resource.

  • Macclesfield Talks! Study Group…

    That’s an interesting question…for dharma practitioners…!
    There is a story we can tell ‘about’ it…but what did actually happen? Was it ‘real’?

    Here’s some of the story of aspects behind the scenes…
    From the club being wound-up with debts of half million pounds in 2020…rising to the match last Saturday when….despite being 117 places below them in the league…they beat last season’s F.A. cup-winners 2: 1
    Macclesfield Town’s football team, the ‘Silkmen’, have risen like a phoenix from the ashes!

    Having retained the family feel of football clubs of the past… and succeeding, with enthusiasm drive and talent…the club members and fans were jubilant at this result…running onto the pitch and hoisting aloft Paul Dawson, one of the goal scorers.

    Just twenty-five days before this match one of their most talented young players, who seems also to have been an all-round lovely person, aged 21… was killed in a car crash returning from a match…and the club is still in mourning…

    Manager John Rooney said ‘It puts life into perspective… seven days before, he scored a goal for us, and seven days later he’s not here any more. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever been involved in.
    The match against Crystal Palace is a massive occasion, but it is a game of football at the end of the day.
    We want to perform all of the time, but there are bigger things out there than just a game of football.’

    So well said…so poignant is this life, and no-thing is certain.
    His team mate Danny Elliot said that they assumed ‘he’d have fifteen years or so of F.A cup runs ahead of him…. but life has strange ways of not being what you think it might be’…Indeed it has!

    When goal-scorer Paul Dawson was just three years old …James Low came up to Macclesfield and started to teach a few of us in the way his teacher had asked him to…starting at the top, and in a way that helps them (us) get the point.

    While players were playing at home in the Moss Rose ground ‘the emotional epicentre of Macclesfield, which radiates a unique charm that fans across the country envy’ ! : ) – or away…an increasing number of dharma-fans gathered once or twice a year to sit and listen to James teach.

    His teachings… over the ensuing twenty years…have given us the opportunity to engage with the great depth and breadth of the dharma that he offered.
    The topics he has covered are wide ranging… yet are accessible on some level to anyone with interest …and are listed here.

    These teachings are, for the many of us who do so, a joy to listen to…
    It can be such a blessed relief to hear someone who actually knows ‘how it is’, and can explain how we also might see more clearly… having devoted much of his life-energy to transmitting what can truly help us… in different ways.

    This listening can in itself act as a soothing massage…but there is such a lot of nourishment in the talks that will only become available to us through our own careful and reflective mastication!

    A thought arose to bring these teachings to wider attention and deeper engagement…and a format for this has now emerged.

    Each of these talks was recorded…these recordings have been transcribed, so transcripts are also available on the Simplybeing.co.uk website… Audios>Retreats> England>Macclesfield…(reading as well as listening is valuable)…and for most talks there are also video recordings you can watch.

    The idea is to study each talk for a month then meet together to discuss, check and discover more through engaging with others in the group.

    James’ advice for studying is… ‘perhaps listening for half an hour at a time then reflecting…’ and in our weekly group, sharing could be helpful.
    Slowing down enough to engage in this way may not be easy… but it will allow for deeper perfusion and absorption than just allowing the talks to flow over us…one after another… as I did for many years : )

    To give some sense of the listening time required for this… the talks are much the same in length, the first is about 300mins long…so that’s ten sessions of 30 minutes of listening time plus reflecting time ..so maybe ten hours a month?

    That might seem a lot…or not… but maybe puts into question where does true value lie?
    How much of this life’s time is being invested in the, inherently unsatisfying, transient..?
    The average time spent on smartphones per day seems to vary from between three and a half… and five and a half hours a day. Mid-way between, at four and a half hours, is one whole day per week…

    The meetings will be on the third Sunday of the month between 4pm and 6pm UK time
    James suggested that we try ’45 minutes in groups of 3… then 30 minutes together with you for questions and discussion, then another 45 minutes in another 3 reflecting on how they could apply their learning in everyday life.’… so we can give that a go!

    The first meeting… on the talk ‘The View of Dzogchen’… will be on 15th March, so happily there’s more than a month from now to begin to become acquainted with this profound view…
    As, I think, Suzuki Roshi said ‘the most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing’… and through engaging with these teachings we have a chance to open to this most important ‘no-thing’

    If you are interested in coming to the monthly meetings, or have any questions… let me know via the ‘Contact Me’ form…(top right)
    Please add a sentence or two that shows… eg by addressing me by name, including your name.. referencing the meeting date, title of the talk…that you are not a robot!

    …and last but not least…may all our studies and practice go well… for the benefit of all….


  • Invitation to a film – Bashu, the little stranger… and reminding of the dharma film club

    This film, released in 1987, won the classics section at the Venice film festival last year.

    It was written and directed by the Iranian … Bahram Beyzai, who died just after Christmas this year.
    He also wrote plays…was a master of Persian literature, mythology, and Iranian studies…and did much else besides!

    About half a century ago in a big London teaching hospital I asked a lady if she could find a patients’ x-rays for me. She wrote down the details on a pice of paper and I was amazed at the beauty of what appeared from her pen …she explained that it was Persian script…

    I haven’t watched a film for a long time, perhaps this was the link that made me write down the name of the play when I heard of Bahram Beyzai’s death on the radio…

    I am glad that I did… and maybe you’d also find it a very heart-opening experience…

    You can watch the entire film on YouTube.

    I don’t like to know much about the details or what others have seen in a film, play, place or whatever, beforehand…so I can see it freshly…but to know that the people of the south are generally of much darker skin colour than the north was helpful in understanding some of the reactivity that Bashu encounters…and to know that the language each area uses at home is very different… was helpful.
    The film reveals itself …no doubt uniquely to each of us, through our conceptualising lenses, filters… mood attention and so on … and perhaps more universal themes emerge the less clearly the film is pinned in time and place.

    If you’d like to read more about it afterwards [or before ] here is a very sensitive, perceptive and appreciative in-depth review by Bijan Tehrani

    There is a sangha film-club started by Ben Goddard and others…which offers the opportunity to meet together and discuss a film, exploring with and through others eyes and dharma perspective…
    Do get in touch with him if you are interested… …. through connectivity and openness there’s so much that can help facilitate the widening and deepening of our narrowed views…

    Praying in these turbulent times for naturally occurring bodhicitta to arise in the minds of those in Iran and all beings caught up in the suffering of samsara…so may all be free of aversion to enemies and strangers and clinging to friends and relatives..

  • The dharma invitation….

    The dharma offers us the deepest and most profoundly healing invitation…to look and keep looking…
    until we are able to relax out of our fascination with, and absorption into, the movements of the mind as if they held inherent truth…
    into the unconpounded, ungraspable basis for those movements… the underlying ground and truth of each and every ‘one’…

    We can use the different dharma lenses offered by the teachings to open ourselves up to different perspectives, as to how the world is and we are. Views which range from rather to radically different from that offered by our self-absorbed myopia, help us examine our fixity, putting into question the validity of the basis of our assumptions and beliefs…

    Are the opinions that we hold about ourselves, others, and the world… the actual truth of how it is?
    Are we a knowable entity, an independently self-existing… individual ‘thing’?

    Our ‘ego-self’ would like to think so…but then…what exactly is this ego-self?
    And how and why does this aspect attempt to assume definitional mastery over every other ‘thing’ by, in some way, labelling?
    Is it the whole.. and truth… of us?
    And fundamentally…if we rely on what we take to be ‘our’ thoughts feelings and sensations to tell us the answers to these questions, to tell the truth about everything…is that wisdom or ignorance?

    Without encountering the dharma…would we ever ask these questions?
    Without the teachers and teachings would we find the answers… all on our ‘owney-o’ ?

    We are so lucky to have so many different teachings, explained and available…to help us release from our delusions. Different aspects of these will be helpful at different times…and they will reveal themselves differently to us as we continue to engage with them.

    Exploring the teachings an relating to them we find our own unique and wiggly way to unfold…
    Mine has relied heavily on the teacher and teachings in the Macclesfield Talks for the education, which in the true sense of the word, I lacked.
    I’ve worked on and with many of them over the years and so was able to checking a query about the abrupt ending to Talk 3 Anxiety and Doubt.
    My copy ends the same way… so I checked with Chris Coppock who made, and has many of the early recordings … unfortunately there was a hiccup, and the ending was not recorded.

    Checking that out was a bit of an obstacle course… but I then found myself listening again to Talk 15 Balancing relaxation and effort in Buddhism with its wonderfully rich invitation to explore how our off-balancedness comes about, can be recognised… and resolved in the true balance of the middle way…
    I wrote a post recently about balance, referencing Weebles … this talk takes it much broader and deeper.

    I think listening to it would be helpful, and enjoyable… for those who are meditating on Sunday (or any day) to engage with ….taking your time to feel your way home : )


    Maybe, like the snail, you’ll find some older older invitations… including some simple prayers… if you look below…

  • The Open Door of Emptiness ~ Ch 3. Open to life… the heart of awareness part (v) and other good news…!

    Work of Art by Hiroshige from an exhibition at the British Museum

    This recording is now available…from the Audio/Video tab…
    If you hover over the down arrow you’ll find lots of other recordings there…from James’ commentary to and translation of The Dhammapada, up through a staircase of other books and teachings.
    The Open Door of Emptiness is at the top, and if that’s your current interest you can just click here for that set.

    The contact form is now working again thanks to the vital efforts and skills of the singer song-writer sound engineer who’s been keeping this site in shape and working on the recordings, for over a decade… and latterly also working with a serious health condition…

    A lady with whom I was very happy to spend some time with in India, when I did a retreat and pilgrimage back in 2010, got back in touch today after gap of nearly fifteen years…

    We were both helpful to each other in different ways…and I know that any help I was able to give was possible because of other helpful connections I’d encountered…and so it goes… in this astonishing illusory display of life…

    Our first names are the same now they were then but ‘how we are’ now … cannot possibly be.
    There have been billions of different displays of energy called ‘Wendy’ and called ‘Alicia’ during this long time…showing these particular qualities sometimes, others other times, to a greater or lesser degree…depending on causes and conditions (and the interpreter’s perspective)… all going under the same name!
    Are these impostors of the real Alicia or Wendy? : ) well no, as we know, there isn’t one…but each has a common denominator of openness or emptiness… and with spaciousness as the basis the greatest possibility for connection becomes available …
    Fifteen years makes a difference to the body for sure, but the potential for freshness of connection is unchanged…

    However much the disconnection and dislocation around us increases …movements of warm, and sometimes surprising connection, outside the box of assumptions, continue to blossom in the world …

    The other good news relates to recent James Low’s book publications, Natural Freedom and The Deep and Vast Freedom of the Dharma which deserved their own post…


  • Books: ‘Natural Freedom’ and ‘The Deep and Vast Freedom of the Dharma’

    If you haven’t yet come across this selection of teachings, edited by Barbara Terris and compiled by Divya Gupta… I’ve recommended this book in a review on Amazon .
    I think you’ll find it worth a lot more than every penny it costs!

    The amount of work from beginning to end involved in the production of these works for our benefit is not necessarily obvious…but the number of hours and the attention to detail…with writing and re-writing typing and retyping… editing and re-editng recording transcribing design /layout selection of material management of printing , working with Amazon and other sellers …and other aspects involved in making these books available… is a staggering…display of love!

    And so it is that… the long awaited ‘Deep and Vast Freedom of the Dharma’ is now available … my copy is on it’s way ; currently there are a few others available with more in the pipeline.
    I’m sure many of us will share in the enjoyment of the fruit of these labours! : )

  • The Dzogchen View is clear and bright, dimness is not intrinsic …

    Whether glowing dimly or brightly there’s nothing wrong with our lamps!

    If you know that a dimly glowing lamp is connected to a dimmer-switch …which operates by offering variable resistance to current…then you can simply turn the knob to decrease the resistance…and increase the current so that the lamp gives full brightness.

    To allow the dharma current to flow freely through us… it would be lovely to find some secret knob and turn it in the right direction. Would that it were so easy!
    Yet the egoic, karmic ‘self-sealed’ resistance… which limits our view and responsivity is not intrinsic,
    not an integral part of who we are…but formed from accretions picked up through time and incorporated into our constructed sense of self.

    There’s a great excerpt on the Simply Being homepage at the moment ‘The construction Industry‘ from a talk in Barcelona 2018 where James precisely explains… how we are truly….and it’s truly different from how we think we are….!

    When I heard James teaching The view of Dzogchen , the first Macclesfield talk back in 2003, much of what he was saying floated straight through me… but I knew that it was true… and deeply wanted to have that truth as the basis for my being…
    So like others, with close attention to the guidance offered by dharma teachers and their teachings..through reading… reflecting… questioning…and practice… old ideas about what’s true about ‘Me’ and it’s primacy diminishes.
    The grip on thoughts of what I need for satisfaction loosens …so that we become more and more open and aligned with how we actually are…

    All the dharma views have the most profound truth as their basis and it’s a matter of our luck or karma as to what we encounter and how able we are to make the best use of what comes our way.

    Some of these, the ego-syntonic ones…build up our sense of being a ‘good self/buddhist’.
    Others – the ego-dystonic ones, don’t taste so sweet but, as with less sugar…can be very helpful to us if we are willing and able to engage with them correctly – without grasping or misunderstanding.

    If the Dzogchen teachings taste sweet to us, that may be due the good fortune of ripeness …
    Alternatively the teachings may have been misunderstood – warped by a glancing engagement with their depth… through lenses clouded by samsaric finger-prints.

    A superficial view of Dzogchen can be very attractive to the wobbly ego, which grasps at and interprets concepts in its own peculiar way, as giving a laissez-passer to ego-centric behaviours …but, as is graphically indicated in the book ‘Me First’ ( the link is to details, zoom talk and animation), the consequences of engaging from a distorted view can be profoundly detrimental to the one making the mistake…and to any who give credence to their expressions of misinterpretation.

    Someone recently was surprised when I suggested we would do well to be a bit suspicious of what we are up to…and also that ‘the other comes first’… because it did not fit with their understanding of Dzogchen as spontaneous expressivity… acting however feels right in the moment…and this post is an elaboration of my response…

    Some dharma views may be understood intellectually, but this kind of knowledge is not so highly rated… it’s considered to be like a patch covering a hole in a garment…
    It hides the hole but it’s an add-on, not integral, not part of the fabric, and easily comes off with wear in daily life…
    However the view of Dzogchen is primordial…and so cannot be grasped by thought, cannot be realised by any kind of thinking…

    With this view, spontaneity is an energetic movement or gesture which arises directly from the openness and potential of emptiness … in connectivity with others, in the manner of a dream.
    So ethics are inherent and the spontaneity which arises is radically different – it has a different root – from the impulsivity, drivenness, and other dualistic movements arising from the inflated egoic nexus…which are inevitably tinged, to a greater or lesser extent, by the poisons arising from ignorance.

    If this difference is not deeply realised …then reading about Dzogchen or hearing the words…may lead to the belief that ‘Now I’ve got the deepest truth… so I can act, at will, from that…’
    But this belief will blind us to the truth itself and also to alternative, more accessible, yet helpful dharma views which could prevent us from harming others and ourselves.

    If the depth of the view of Dzogchen is contemplated… even if not realised…the contradistinction with a superficial view may throw a spanner in the ego works and be illuminating.
    So… if…and it’s a very big ‘if‘… the mind is resting in openness, at ease and settled in itself, and open without effort…free of the dualism of subject-object…then compassion is inclusive… and it never separates from emptiness!
    If that’s how it is for you… then noticing what we are up to, in the way I suggested, would clearly be redundant….
    But until then… whilst Dzogchen is just an idea of freedom….there is much to relax out of…and let go…

    It’s so easy to get lost in samsaric confirmations and entanglements, mixing them with dharma as cloak to hide our shakiness…
    … to realise, and practice never separating from the naked truth of ourselves, is hard.
    So kindly noticing to what we are up to, how we tend to position ourselves, is useful…we are not defined by what we see but in seeing, but we can then begin loosen out of our habit formations.

    A ‘me first’, ‘what I want is most important’,’ I know what’s best’ ego-centric entitled positioning, blocks the receptivity of ethical connectivity… so that would be a particularly good position to loosen out of!
    If free from that, gradually moving towards a more nuanced and attuned intuitive responsivity, within the shared experiential field, becomes more of a possibility….

    As James has said ‘we have to have the humility to know that this practice is very difficult…’
    And if the view does not become increasingly clear and accessible, deepening wisdom and compassion en route… then another dharma route with clearer tracks is a wise engagement … all are expressions arising for the benefit of beings…tending to their source.

    If we have some grounding in a different view …say of tantra or general Mahayana practice… in this or other lives… then our mind has been worked in such a way that we are less likely to grasp onto a mistaken view of Dzogchen as a validation for impulsivity and entitlement, with limited or absent compassion…
    Slipping from the view, if we cannot return directly, with a dharma safety-net, we may return more easily….and more readily accept that other views are also good and may be a better fit for our particular flourishing at this time.

    In short: engagement with Dzogchen teachings invites us relax a bit and look without judgment at what we get up to… so that we can see through our defensive smoke-screen and feel all the tension and friction that comes with the falsity of grasping at identity as our ‘touch-stone’ and ‘home-base’ within a thought-formed dualistic framework… and then relax a bit more …easing our grip on that entanglement… and so on until our hands relax completely…and the rest…

    As the ego shrinks back to it’s proper size, resistance to ‘how it is’ as opposed to ‘how I think it is’ decreases… helping us to bring all of ourselves, with trust and faith, into connection with the infinity of truth’s heart-call…and alignment with openness …
    The brightness of the unmediated connection between the infinite source and the lamp… allows it to shine like the undimmed sun…

  • The Open Door of Emptiness ~ Ch 3. Open to life… the heart of awareness (iii) & (iv)

    The recordings of these next two sections of this text …
    ‘Seeing how lost we are’ P.104 and ‘Practice: Meeting our Actuality’ p.110…
    are now available for you … at the bottom of the list of recordings of this book under the audio/video tab here … ❣️

    Thanks Molly, for the stunning image to go with this….

  • Pattern of Emptiness ~ James Low interviewed by Sam Harris

    This is now available if you look under the Audio/video tab…or click here

  • Simply sitting Sun-days….

    In response to James suggestion, and with his encouragement and advice on the meditation program …
    on the first Sunday of each month, any of us who… whilst bodily separated … would like to come together as we are – like a flock of birds, settling into sitting practice… can meet for some sustained mediation practice together on-line.

    At 9.45 UK time, a brief introductory explanation/revision is followed by five meditation sessions between 10am and 4pm:

    Introduction … 9.45 -10.00

    Session 1 …  10 ~ 10.35         
    Session 2 … 10.55 ~ 11.40           
    Session 3 … 12.05 ~ 1.00   

    Session 4 … 2.00 ~ 2.45  
    Session 5 … 3.05 ~ 4.05

    Each session starts with about 3 minutes practice of the Guru yoga of the white ‘A’, followed by shamatha meditation…
    There is no bell to indicate the end of the three minutes…the suggestion is to get a sense of how it feels to practice this for just 3mins on your own …before joining the Sunday meditation…

    As soon as you notice fusion with thoughts has occurred, just relax and…on the out-breath… return  to openness… 

    Try this once…or  twice…then  shift to the shamatha meditation for the rest of the session …  with eyes open, inclusive of the panoramic field of experience, but lightly resting your attention on the sensations accompanying the flow of the breath up and down the groove connecting the base of the nose with the upper lip. 

     As soon as ‘loss’ is noted… simply return to this light focus again and again …without comment…or judgment     

    Continue with this practice for the rest of the session…  

    If your situation is such that these sensations seem too ephemeral for you to maintain attention… then shifting the focus to staying with the flow of breath … from the infinite – into the body– and  back into the infinite – is a valuable alternative.

    Rather than wasting time in a session fruitlessly struggling to regain any initial openness…just start afresh with the 3 ‘A’s  in the next session…

    The sessions length increases (except for the sleepy after lunch shift!) throughout the day… until the final sit is for an hour.

    The intention is to maintain the energetic connection of the group throughout the day if possible…but people are free to join and leave as they need…so people in different time zones are welcome to join in when they can…

    You will hear some noises from my end, as part of your experiential  field, but the feedback from different microphones is of another order!                                                                                                                               So if you can remember to join with your microphone off – and ideally at the beginning of a session so that the 3 A’s are in synch – that would be a kindness to participants…

    Also, if you’re new to this and the time seems too long …maybe just have a go…and see how it is…
    You can always leave when you need and build up gradually… struggling isn’t helpful…but stretching might be …and relaxing into it, out of limiting thoughts certainly will be !

    There is an invitation, if you find this beneficial, to consider how you can weave more of this into daily  life.

    If you’d like to join us … or have particular questions before or afterwards …just send me a message via ‘Contact Me’ … top right on the home page…

    Happy meditating… Sunday…and everyday!

    ~ *~

    When I heard James say, back in 2003, that many people didn’t know themselves very well…
    I was thinking of brain damage…memory loss after car accidents… and also wondering about being ‘more myself’ – what might that look like?

    ‘You belong in awareness…’ ‘Your mother is awareness….’

    Oh…my goodness!!!
    Realising that the mother that I think of as ‘mine’ in this life, is also considered to be ‘my mother’ by each of my siblings … and that we all see her differently…
    That how we see her is not ‘the truth’ of her, for herself…and that all of these ‘mothers’ were constructs of our selective attentions, was a step in the right direction…
    But the givenness of our relationship to awareness… as the mother of all phenomena – the mother we’ve forgotten in our shaky ego’s ungrounded efforts to stabilise the unstabilisable, in our grasping at the vanishing – was much more than one step beyond that…!

    Yet although all this was astonishing and incomprehensible to me at the time, it was somehow comforting to hear.
    I think that encountering news with truth at it’s heart, is a very rare and wonderful surprise … however strange it may seem…
    and in sensing that’s the case, the journey out of confusion begins…

    There’s a vast amount of teachings now freely available to read/listen to/ explore.. to help us put our habitual views and actions into question…and relax out of identifying with transient arisings as if these movements were the main event.

    In meditation, as we relax out of continuous involvement with arising thoughts feelings and sensations … we start to become more at ease…at home with being settled as presence with awareness as our abiding continuity…
    Gradually the movements that we’d habitually grasp at seem less tasty… as more of ‘how it is’…of how we actually are, is revealed.

    The previous post the Open door of Emptiness Ch.3 part (ii) is a gesture towards that exploration… (iii) and (iv) continue it…

  • The Open Door of Emptiness-Ch.3 part (ii)

    The recording of the next section of the book is now published and inspired what’s below:

    This image might make you go ‘Wow’…because to me ‘how it is’ is impactful…
    The variations in colour and shape, are startling……
    There’s nothing to be done with this…we can just receive it, be at one with it as it is…
    If we stay relaxed and open…with this…we get the revelation of its fullness …
    Then… the moment’s display refreshes…

    But it’s rare to for us to engage with appearances in this way… We’re not used to tasting the freshness of experience and finding that enough…so our interest in this first and direct appreciation is very brief…
    We ignore the unspoken invitation it gives to ‘Mind the gap’… stay open, don’t go abstract … and we step onto the ‘thinking about’ train of dualising consciousness… and straight back into samsara.

    Separating in duality to… there’s ‘it’ there, a special something in the experiential field… and there’s ‘me’ here… We get busy…adding, and and then relating to, an overlaying web of thoughts…
    These thoughts have little to do with what’s actually there…and a lot to do with ‘me’ and what I can bring to the party. ‘Me’ can be like a big handbag full of intoxicating spray – cans of dry knowledge, of biases, beliefs, stories, memories and opinions… which will surely help the party go with a swing!

    Psst…Maybe not…and anyway… there is no party!…the image did not send out an invitation…
    Never mind!… here I come ; )…mobilising in with my conceptual elaborations…
    And as we shift to relating on that secondary and relative level… any freshness that the image offered is ignored… in favour of its potential utility as a springboard for whatever flavours of mentation come to mind.

    Starting with ‘I like’ or ‘I don’t like’ as a feeling tone… we can divide the image it up into different parts.
    There’s foreground and background depending on our interest… Our attention might be caught by what is central… we are used to that being the position for what’s most important.
    We can label…naming the colours and shapes and separate with words like ‘flower’ and ‘wood’ and
    We can dissect and label each part of the flower – as in a biology exam… …
    We can classify – ‘it’s a nasturtium’ – though it doesn’t know it! As far as we know, flowers do not use human language to communicate among themselves.. or they would turn their heads in recognition : )
    We can compare and contrast ‘this’ type with another…and know the conditions of soil water nutrients and sunlight that the plant might find ideal…
    We can discover whether it’s an annual or perennial, whether it’s frost-hardy or not…
    …and we can know that ‘its’s edible’.
    We can drift into memories of grandma’s garden…or be glad that their leaves provided food for the butterflies…
    And then there’s the wood. … the relationship between the wood and the flower– seeming brighter on a darker background…and on and on..

    Does any of this thinking bring us closer to the showing… or does it distance us, enshrouding the freshness with a dusty veil?

    The me-goic aspect of ourselves is however more than happy to engage in all this busyness …’I exist as someone who can add value… who knows what’s what… and can explain….’Yay – go me!”
    And, having told myself what’s interesting and true about this… comes …’Let me tell you how it is…!’
    Puff… puff… puff…the seemingly individuated self-bubble inflates…whilst at the same time, investing an air of importance and truth into… whatever is expressed!

    None of this is a problem in itself…knowledge has its function, as does thinking…but all this agitated and agitating movement is occurring on the non-stop train… moving through awareness with the windows closed and the blinds down…
    ‘I know….’ chuff chuff chuff…
    ‘It is…’ chuff chuff chuff…
    ‘I think…’ chuff chuff chuff…
    ‘I think…therefore I AM….’ chuff chuff chuff!

    The value of Descartes’ statement seemed obscure when I first heard it…a self-validating sealed loop of an idea, offering no useful insight… later seeing how this conclusion precludes any enquiry as to the nature of the thought, or the mind… the one who is thinking…or how it is to ‘be’?
    It was later critiqued by Pierre Gassendi…with a response that makes more sense to me, and dharma before that would agree… that the most he could honestly conclude is that ‘thinking is occurring’.
    And that is far from proof that there is an individual who is thinking!

    As we can see it’s so easy to fall asleep into our soup of ‘knowing about’
    However our interpretation is not what is in front of our eyes …

    The dharma offers the possibility of being awake and present as presence… which doesn’t tangle with arising thoughts…nor reject them… they dance as petals in the breeze. As a petals we can dance with them or not, within the openness..

    The invitation of ‘a flower’ to be simply received is unspoken…and direct reception is without words…
    The dharma transmission from Shakyamuni buddha was received by Mahakasyapa in that way, with a smile.

    So, maybe the lily/nasturtium/ petal-thought arising turd… is fine just as it is… without my gold or lead or other colour of spray paint?

    Well, what do you think?

    Could it be that varnishing these self-liberating expressions of the truth is…err…both unnecessary and problematic?

    The stale megoic automaticity of thought-engagement can diminish…as the freshness of the open spacious of the truth of ourselves as home-base… becomes more familiar and wonderfully easing to us.

    Then ‘My bag’ can shrink… as the spray’s sticky and condensing effect is realised… that the hand of the sprayer is caught in the act…entrapped….not free to be…

    There is a lot to engage with in this twenty-five minute recording…and it’s my experience that listening and reflecting, again and again and again, may be necessary to the allow the message to penetrate deeply… rather than just be some words that we heard or read, that bounced off…like a down-pour of rain onto bone-dry soil.

    That’s really not because we are stupid… but because we become stupefied – made stupid or senseless – by our attachment to unexamined beliefs. Beleifs which seem foundational… but have no basis in truth.

    It invites us to look at beliefs that we take completely for granted… beliefs that, without these teachings, we would never dream of questioning in a million years.

    Beliefs about who we are – such as that I am ‘Me’ …. a self-existent, individual, with autonomy – can be put into question and their falsity appreciated.

    Hearing that the experiential field is panoramic and undivided.. inclusive of what we take to be self and other… and that there is a direct unmediated response to that which arises… prior to interpretation…
    can put into question the value and function of all the interpretations that we make….and challenge the unwitting privileging of this second-order activity.
    So we might become curious as to how to desist…or relax out of this …

    The dharma teachings shine a light on how we disguise ‘how it is’ from ourselves in so many ways ……but old habits die hard.
    Living the samsaric dream/nightmare lifetime after lifetime as a ‘thing’ amongst other ‘things’ with the five poisons running wild… is no picnic, and if we’re clear about how it is construed, we can see that trying to ‘think our way out’ is a impossible task…
    and the invitation to mediation practice makes more and more sense…

    We’ve had many…and one more follows …
    in the Simply sitting Sun-days post

  • Open Door of Emptiness – Open to Life (i)… road-runner!

    Road-runner… nose to nose with Wyle E. Coyote…
    from the Warner Brothers film To Beep or not to Beep !

    Sentences from James’ teachings have often – thankfully – ‘stopped me in my tracks’… and caused me to reflect…sometimes for a long time, acting like a koan…

    ‘Stopped me in my tracks’ is rather a telling phrase … it’s as if we have train-tracks underneath our feet… that we are unwittingly running on until we shift tracks, the tracks shifts… or something shifts us!

    The audio-recording of the Introduction to Chapter 3 of the book, the Open Door of Emptiness is now published… and I was struck by this sentence referring to the construction of the different stories that we tell to different kinds of people: ‘The stories may seem quite true as we tell them, yet we can’t quite escape the knowledge that they are constructs, that in the telling of them we are creating the ground we are standing on.’

    As I was unpacking that…as I see it … that the ‘ground’ we create in this way acts as a temporary platform, or jumping off point, for further expression and is, of course, not the self-existing ground… but more a moment by moment investment in selected aspects of the of the mind’s creativity … yet how in a confused way, as we busily link one thought-formation with another, we imbue the result… (which, if one were to give shape etc. to it… would have the all the integrity and strength of home-made polystyrene tile)… with stability validity and credibility … some vivid imagery arose – of a new scenario for a Looney Tunes cartoon!

    I watched these cartoons a very long time ago!
    There was Road-runner… the very tall ‘chicken’ who was such an incredibly fast runner…
    So amazingly fast that he left a trail of smoke behind him as he happily sped through the Arizona desert…often fanatically pursued by the hapless Wyle E. Coyote…who was intent on destroying him.

    As humans we are a bit like Wyle E. Coyote…with a plan to fulfil our desires by deploying a special dualistic conditioning kit bought cheaply from the Acme store (don’t buy from them – believe me, they never work!).

    When Road-runner comes to an obstacle, like a canyon…no problem… down… and then up the other side he would go… quick as a flash.
    So in this imaginary scenario Wyle Coyote plans to catch him as he shoots back up the other side of the canyon… by getting across the canyon before him, crossing directly… in a straight line – through the air… After all, the fastest way between two points is a straight line, isn’t it?
    (Some wiser ones will know that this is not always so…it would depend on the terrain and many other factors… and also be thinking, look before you leap…but anyway…!)
    So he buys an ‘air-suspension-bridge’ kit from Acme.
    On delivery, he discovers the kit is comprised of a generous supply of short wooden planks in a bag … and the instructions for their effective deployment.
    The instructions tell him to carry the bag under one arm and run very very fast towards the canyons edge… then use the other arm to start laying out the track, throwing the pieces out in front of him so quickly that, letting momentum carry him forward … he would be able to run onto the next piece before it fell to the ground.
    So much quicker than going down one side and up the other…he thought!!!

    Maybe you can picture the scene as he runs onto the track… as it briefly extends towards the other side … through the air across the chasm…
    before panning down to a coyote-shaped depression in the canyon floor…as road-runner passes going ‘Beep Beep!

    Life in samsara ; )

    If he had turned the plan over, perhaps he would have found its deconstruction…another sentence from the introduction… and given up the dualistic chase, for:
    ‘To locate a moment in the arc of time, you have to apply an interpretive structure…which disguises the immediate actuality of the moment’
    …and finding his way to the truth of that, would surely be a less painful and more satisfying way of spending his days!

    Screenshot–image thanks to Wikipedia…under fair use policy…



  • Wisdom and Compassion (2) …perfectly balanced in space, drinking the nectar

    This beautiful picture, accompanied by the words below…invites engagement with the recently published video of the talk which James gave in Macclesfield in spring this year…

    ‘Wisdom and Compassion are often said to be like the two wings of a bird. With their collaboration, we can fly free of the snares of samsara and its false dualism. We will integrate the wisdom of emptiness, which reveals how all our experience is like an illusion, with the kind compassion, which brings us into authentic contact.’

    Bringing our confusion into direct connection with dharma James Low illuminates it’s profound truth using very relatable examples… from life’s experiences and world events…
    With it’s relevance allied to the meditation practice he invites… life can open up as we lighten up…

    There is also an audio recording of this talk prepared with great care by Gareth Williams if you’d like the option to listen.
    You’ll find the audio and video listed as talk 23. on the Index to these talks (it’s also on the home page introduction)… along with all the others.
    Talk 4, from back in 2006 has the same title – the same topic…but a different flavour which you might also enjoy!

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01Mar2026

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Meditation practice day… devised in collaboration with James Low

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