So near and yet so far away. Berlin, 2011

Evening public talk in Berlin, Germany. 6 May 2011

James Low
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Transcribed by Jo Féat
Edited by Barbara Terris and James Low

Excerpts

When we began this evening talk, I noticed a lady out in the garden watering the flowers with a hose. But of course she wasn’t just watering the flowers, she was watering the weeds as well because the flowers and the weeds go together! If you want the flowers to grow, you bring manure and nutrition for the soil, which makes it a very nice place for weeds to grow too.  This is exactly the same issue in spiritual development: the better a person you become the richer your soil for new kinds of weeds to grow in…
…If we chase happiness on the basis of sorting ourselves out, of becoming better people, of removing all the knots and difficulties which make us narrow-minded and selfish, we are then operating inside a paradigm: the paradigm which says, “I am a construct that can, with effort, be re-constructed so that I come into the right shape.”
…From the dzogchen point of view, it’s about living our own complexity rather than trying to simplify our energy by making ourselves a reliable, fixed phenomena. We are relaxing to open up to the infinity of the nature of our own presence, the spaciousness of our ground-being which is wide enough and deep enough to provide hospitality and space for whatever kind of experience is arising. In that way, we can inhabit each moment as it is.

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