Dzogchen in ordinary life. Public Talk, Cologne 2005

James Low

Evening talk at the Stadtraum in Köln, Germany
27 April 2005

Extract
Buddhism, generally, is concerned with how we can free ourselves from suffering. The Buddha’s basic teaching is that suffering is grounded in ignorance and attachment. Ignorance means not knowing our own nature, not understanding the nature and the structure of the world we live in. Attachment is the dependency which develops for us in relationship to the phenomena which we experience in the ‘light’ of ignorance….
…So, we have a story, or an understanding, which gives us a sense of the continuity of who we are. We build up, layer by layer, great lasagne of stories about ourselves, and as you know, lasagne is very heavy.  And that’s what we do with our life…
In this way a great deal of our suffering is because our experience of ourselves, and the environment we live in, is mediated by habitual stories which have a tilt, which have a bias, a direction to them, and which block many of the other possibilities that we might encounter.
So, the purpose of meditation is to put into question the true status of these narratives.