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James Low, April 2026 writes: The traditional structure of Buddhist teachings is that each level or vehicle has its own View, Meditation, Activity and Result. Over the years I have focused on making the various views and meditations as clear as possible and you can access these through my many audio and video recordings, books and transcripts.
I feel that our retreats now need to have increasing emphasis on your activity and proactive learning.
We all have a lot of life experience and so how can we mobilise this experience to become an ally on our path instead of an obstacle? Rather than relying on our habitual assumptions and conclusions, our practice is to investigate how our subjectivity arises in different situations. We aim to locate the ground (or basis) for our subjective thoughts, feelings and actions in our simple presence within the ever-open here and now.
I will be teaching in the mornings. In the afternoons there will be small group activities led by experienced members of our sangha. They will offer a range of activities and I am encouraging you all to try them out so that you can experience what you can make use of (or not) at each moment in time. The key point is for you to observe what arises for you as you engage with each activity in your ever-changing environment.
The aim in dzogchen is to see the self-vanishing of each moment. We do this by ripening our presence without engaging in dualistic reificatory judgement.
- This event has passed.
Public talk. Staying sane in an insane world. Freiburg, 2018
James Low.
Staying sane in an insane world.
Buddhist teaching emphasises the impermanence of all phenomena. Our experience moment by moment is the ever-changing patterning of the happenstance of emergence. However our sense of self requires us to feel a degree of reliability and predictability in the patterning of our existence. Our ego self fears both invasion and abandonment. Awakening to the ground of being allows the permeability of our self-system to be lived with minimal anxiety and effortful control.
For further information see here.
This is followed by a weekend teaching retreat in Todtmoos.
