Finding freedom at the bus stop [01]. Macclesfield, 2003

James Low

Macclesfield, 8th November 2003

Transcribed by Gordon Ellis and Sarah Allen
Edited by Wendy Chozom

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Listen to the audio here.

Excerpt
…There is no rule-book to tell us how to live; we are all flying by the seat of our pants. In this situation it’s best to keep our eyes open, our ears open and our heart open…
…Buddhism is saying something very disturbing and very radical. It’s saying that we are asleep within a dream which is not the whole reality—a dream constructed out of a particular set of causes and events. Because we created causes in the past, we come to be born in this dimension, sharing a particular kind of karma. After a while, the causal forces which generate our access to this domain will get burned up and then we’ll be in another domain, another kind of hologram, another kind of experience, and it probably won’t be as nice. So we need wake up from the dream world of samsara…
…If we have enough things around us to prop us up we seem to be okay, but it’s like a magician’s sleight of hand. We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re grounded when actually we’re impulsive and reactive and unstable…

Contents
A relationship with the practice… 1
The hinayana view… 1
Dependent co-origination… 3
The mahayana view… 8
Effective help… 12
Tantra… 14
Three stages of ignorance… 17
Consequences of ignorance. 20
A transformed world… 21
The functions of methods… 25
Discrimination… 27
Dzogchen… 33
The meditation
The view
The three aspects of the mind.. 45
Refuge. 51
The mind and its clothing… 61
A right to ‘be’… 65
Generosity of the heart… 70