I’ve been meaning to mention this for awhile… and maybe now it’s time to put pen to paper… or something like that 🙂

The buddha images above are clearly symbolic, they don’t speak words (as far as I can tell!)…while others do…
and listening to words arising from openness rather than conditioning is a rare treat in this world.

These days, as you have probably noticed… karmic glitches and gremlins abound…interrupting and distorting easy connectivity… and at the moment they are bounding about much more rapidly !!!

Yet how much do we still take for granted in the face of impermanence? Perhaps quite a lot…

For us, one of the likely things would be to have access to all of James’ audio and video teachings… these dharma transmission through words… available via the internet whenever we want to access them.

As you may know, in the Zen tradition, there are stories of teachers who once held their precious sutras so close to their hearts – but eventually discarded them… and those happy to burn a wooden statue of the Buddha in order to keep warm.

The point here is that when the teaching is integrated and sings as the basis of every movement there is no longer any need to hold onto an outer form or expression of the teachings…until then we need help.
Introductions to the view, explanations of the view… of different views and mediations….

As we hear these teachings the first listening or viewing gives so much, is so rich… and later we discover more as we review them having grown in the dharma…
I have often been so surprised, as I listen again, that James actually said something ‘way back then’ that had just struck home… .
Sure I heard but didn’t notice it, it didn’t register when I first listened… either because I already had so much on my plate that it slipped off… or I already had my mouth full, was chewing on something else…or perhaps my teeth weren’t sharp enough!

Whatever the veil of obscuration… re-listening and re-viewing has been a principal way of learning for me… letting it sink in… and sink in deeper….working it around, so it is assimilated… thinning and dissolving the obscurations to full receptivity.

My suggestion is that if there are some talks or videos or prayers on the website that are particularly meaningful to you, it may well be worth while downloading them now and keeping them as a resource on an external hard drive or some other device. The apparent stability of internet accessibility and cloud storage is imagined…it will change.

If we have the teachings in our heart that’s best for sure, but in the meantime at this juncture taking steps to create our own readily accessible back-up may be very wise.

In case you missed it here’s an archive  video from 1992 of James teaching the basis of what, ten years later, had developed the ‘View of Dzogchen’ audio … the first of the Macclesfield talks, mentioned in the introduction to this site.

I’m about to check all the links in the Index to these talks…some no longer function as videos have moved home or because of other issues.
Please let me know if you come across a problem and hopefully between us we (Barbara, Chris, Pedro and I) will be able to restore them for you.