Enlightenment @ MindSay

OCTOBER 2-3, 7:30-9:30 PM - Meet renowned spiritual teacher and author Lama Christie McNally as she returns to Los Angeles to introduce her newest book, The Tibetan Book of Meditation, and shares two days of rare and beautiful teachings on how these profound practices can transform the mind and open the  heart.

ABOUT LAMA CHRISTIE MCNALLY - Lama Christie is a professor of spiritual studies and a translator of Tibetan and Sanskrit classical monastic texts. She co-authored The Essential Yoga Sutra, How Yoga Works and The Eastern Path to Heaven. She is an accomplished practitioner who has spent six years of her life in silent deep meditation and is one of the first American women to be recognized as a lama.  Lama Christie trained in India and Nepal and has received extensive instruction in all the texts required for a Geshe degree (traditionally a 20-year course of study).  She is co-founder of Diamond Mountain University, a revolutionary effort to provide a classical monastic education to Westerners from all walks of life, free of charge.  In 2003, she completed a traditional three-year silent meditation retreat with her spiritual partner, Geshe Michael Roach.

DATE/TIME:  October 2-3, 2009,  7:30-9:30 PM
LOCATION: Mahasukha Center, ACI-LA (Asian Classics Institute of L.A.)
ADDRESS:  6512 Arizona Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90045

The Tibetan Book of Meditation is a synthesis of all the great Tibetan commentaries on meditation.  It is a comprehensive guide to transforming one’s meditation practice from ordinary to extraordinary.  The book begins with wisdom from a profound ancient teacher, Master Kamalashila, and continues with teachings carried through by a long lineage of Tibetan masters, right up to the great modern day Lamas.  Lama Christie combines her own insights and experience together with ancient wisdom, to teach today’s practitioners how to transform their meditations into a practice that can bring them ultimate happiness.

ABOUT THE MAHASUKHA CENTER
Mahasukha (Sanskrit for “great bliss") is the home of the Asian Classics Institute of Los Angeles (ACI-LA).  The Center provides a wide range of courses, including guided meditations, Buddha dharma, teachings on spiritual partners, workshops by nationally known yoga teachers and informal talks on a variety of subjects.  The Center is a place for people to connect through study, practice and events such as Dharma Flicks evenings, debate nights, dinners and more.  All classes and events are open to the public and offered on a donation basis. All are welcomeSee aci-la.org for events and pod-casts

TO LEARN MORE about the Asian Classics Institute of Los Angeles, Lama Christie McNally, The Tibetan Book of Meditation and Diamond Mountain University, and for information about events or downloadable podcasts, please visit the following links:

aci-la.org     
aci-la.org/mg -podcasts.html
DiamondMountain.org
TibetanBookofMeditation.org

My mind hurts and my body aches. The energy I have exerted in thought has left me fatigued and with a dizziness of sight. I pose again with reiterating thoughts if it’s meaningful, is there purpose, and now is it worth it? Have I allowed myself to be trapped in a world of abstractness and candy cane fantasies of what should be? This where I begin to become consumed with thoughts of escapism. Could I leave all this behind and be content with new directions in life or thought? Do I need new context or some basis on which to judge my work and goals? If it comes to light that all this has been or becomes a matter of vanity and egoistic fulfillment I will retire myself and my thoughts as well as destroy any material that I feel to be inauthentic or done in vain. My wrestling with these ideas has come from a teetering and pursuit of finding activist and conscious individuals who understand the world in a deeper context outside of themselves. As I sit in University classes listening to other peers and professors, I realize that the worlds they live in are the same physical areas as everyone, but the realities are far more disparate (in some abstractness) than probably realized. The propositions of having the thought of the non-scholarly person (in this sense I mean someone with out the collegiate certificate) enter into consideration with regards to the issues and topics seems confounded to most. Why do we leave out those that we are working to help or understand? We cannot be caged mice and look through the glass walls of our cage with a safeness and abstinence from the others outside. We rest in comfort without risks. We fear consequences and participate in a menial comatose life of conformity and comfort. What happens if we only do one great thing to change the world? Is that not enough? If we never let the world, not academic world, change us how will we ever change the world. We must experience, not always vicariously through publications, but experience the things we fear the most. We must experience the negative consequences to experience the positive consequences. When we become awakened and conscious then we become enlightened. This need not be with academic facts or knowledge, but the truth of knowing ourselves. Once we know ourselves then we know the world in a very different light as almost if for the first time. When we reach a small moment of consciousness it is at first unsettling, but then it settles in with a calmness and feeling true to the essential being or self. No orgasmic flow will match the intensity of an enlightened moment of consciousness of the world and of the self. This can be sought during a time of relation with another. Enlightenment comes in a sense of calmness in looking at the person as if for the first time. When we are able to become enlightened and sustain such enlightenment then we begin to see and appreciate the things around us and the people we come in contact with. That first moment will be sustained and repeated each time you gaze up your significant other, taste a piece of fruit, or smell the morning air. Perhaps my thoughts are just thoughts. Take what you will if you read them, but take the most valuable piece that influences you or strokes a particular thought. The world is what it seems and is elusive in what it is. Find in your world a purpose and meaning of what you do with some consciousness of how you are

Man has but the simple task of balance.  Balance is not the same as moderation.  That balance entails the unique and tumultuous duty of acting in a way that brings neither extreme or fanaticism nor subjugation.  We act in ways that fulfill consumption.  This may be food, sex, alcohol, reading, etc..  Consumption fuels the inner desire we have for something.  Eckhart Tolle discusses the idea of the ego as being the barrier to enlightenment and stillness.  Hannah Arendt would refer to conditioning, but it becomes a quandary of sorts in understanding the function of conditioning (separate from that of influence).  Man produces conditions, yet he is subject to being a product of conditions.  It seems an inescapable dialectic of life.  To what degree, if any, can we escape conditioning without providing conditions by which to escape previous conditions?  Since we cannot seem to escape conditions and conditioning we must work within them to understand their influence and determinism in imbalance.  Balance is our continuous struggle and reward in life.  We maintain an understanding of our consumption as being appropriated in moderation in order to implement balance that is neither starvation nor gluttony.  This process of balance does not only occur within ourselves but also with ourselves and nature, individually and collectively.  There is not centerfold which holds higher regard than the other because in the cosmic illumination that extends beyond our understanding we are but workers.  What are we working towards?  This remains a question of life and a collective question for humanity.  Man has been given the unfortunate ability of emotion, love and hate, which predicates most of his feelings and willfulness to act.  The balance is to not fall into the extremist disillusionment of fanatical love or hate.  A man who has all the love for the world one day can awake with the bitter taste of hate on his lips the next morning.  Man fails to understand balance and partake in healthy emotional consumption.  When man fails to moderate such consumptions he becomes consumed by it and no longer assumes the role as consumer but product.  He becomes a product with extremism and narrowness of thought.  His balance has shifted from one terminal point to another.  If becomes consumed then he may become confused and unable to discern balance fearing that one movement will shift from one terminal point to another.  Perhaps this manic imbalance is why people struggle with life.  They have been conditioned to allow consumption to consume them and thus are no longer masters of their consumption but products of it.  They are oppressed by the ego as they try to fulfill it but it is an unhappy bitch.  It takes what it wants and destroys, sometimes, violently what it discards.  Man's responsibility is to understand that neither peace nor war can ever sustain man.  It is utopian to believe in sustained peace and abominable to believe in sustained war.  Man will always feud.  His feud will primarily be with himself.  He projects his internal conflict outwardly and thus begins the cycle of providing a condition under which others are conditioned.  It is with moderation, compromise, mediation that we can come to an understanding of balance within ourselves and humanity.  As we look for answers to the world’s problems and degradation of humanity, we must look at the consumption of one and the ill conceived product of being consumed.  When you can balance yourself you can project a balance proposition for conditioning and thus retract the ill fated cycle of extremism and teetering form one terminal point to another.

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University

Unless rooted and grounded in love, (not just a spiritually deficient, lust-confused physical notion of love, but love that is the selfless, exponential sharing of ones humanity; love which extends vertically and expresses laterally; love which has no tense, neither past, present nor future but is unconditional in every aspect of its existence), unless anchored in this understanding of love, even the height of sincerity rarely prepares us to cope with and eventually resolve the things that lie waiting to be unearthed just beneath the surface of our conscious existence.   Those things which, consequently, are the irrevocable reasons for and the ultimate causes of our need to don our “mask”, yet are barely perceptible and can only  be exposed by embarking on a journey of self discovery, those longed to be realized things which have submerged our true selves.

 

 Such was the mindset that provided the impetus for my personal journey.  Here are some recent results from my ongoing explorations:  Memories of past experiences that undoubtedly shaped my psyche’ are becoming clearer with each day’s subterranean probing, revealing with overwhelming implication how all of my decisions and every choice settled upon, were the direct result of impressions made by everything that ever happened to me. All the potent words I ever read or ever heard, all the touches I ever felt or didn’t feel (because they were denied me), all the unkindness my young spirit endured, all the devaluing, undeserved retorts, jeers, jibes, taunts and criticisms ,every omission of much deserved, empowering kindness, applause and affirmations that were my birthright simply by virtue of my humanness and my entitlement as a citizen of the planet, all of this, for better or for worse, impacted my emotional and psychological development and consequently, my self image and my behavior.

 

I have a vivid memory from a time years ago of being on a hike in a wonderful old woods just outside Cuyahoga Fall, Ohio.  These woods were near the beautiful lush green rolling hills I use to roam on horseback every summer in my teen years while vacationing on a family farm.  This one day in particular, a group of friends and I were seeking out old trails in the woods we had never explored when suddenly the trail we were on ended in a steep overhanging rock face with a 10 to 12 ft drop to the resumption of the trail.  The guys in the lead decided to do the 'macho' thing and make the jump rather than go all the way back to a juncture.  They landed safely with no broken bones and none the worse for wear...not so with the girl that followed behind them...in addition to some minor head injuries, she broke her leg in three places...owwww...that was enough to turn the rest of our group around for the long hike back for help.  I've never forgotten standing at the top of that cliff, impervious to the goading, trying to decide whether to jump or not...she, on the other hand, having grown impatient with the time I was taking to make a decision, pushed ahead of me and leapt into the air garnering cheers from the boys on the ground below.  I've never been exactly comfortable with my indecisiveness not being sure whether it was wisdom or fear that accounted for it and ever since I’ve sorely hated the notion of being perceived as afraid (this was a twofold self-indictment because I didn’t want to appear to be a coward to my friends and I couldn’t reconcile within myself being unwilling to take a leap of faith).  I've often thought that maybe she made the most worthwhile decision...perhaps her willingness to risk life and limb was worth what she gained in self respect...after all, broken bones do heal...the wounded psyche', well, I’m not so sure. 

 

The moral of this story is:  Until issues are resolved, we’re usually left mired in a maze of worthless, illogical, unproductive regret, developmentally hampered spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.

 

lovespirit