This Sunday Zac prompted our reflection and dialogue with the story of the Four Divine Messengers. The tale holds truths about initiatory experiences, setting forth on the path, catalysts for transformation, and reveals a particular archetype of the spiritual path. The talk and discussion focused on the divine messengers in our lives today.
Michael guided our reflections today with a talk on Stream Entry, the first definitive stage of Awakening, after which there is really no turning back.
A variety of canonical readings on Stream Entry can be found at
The story of Siddhartha’s bowl floating upstream can be found in
The Buddhacarita or Acts of the Buddha, Asvaghosa,
available on line at
http://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Texts-and-Translations/Buddhacarita/
and in
The Hungry Tigress, Buddhist Legends and Jataka Tales, Rafe Martin, (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990)
Joey guided our reflections this past Sunday as we focused on Wise Speech, drawing from several sources including Joseph Goldstein and Gregory Kramer.
Here is the talk by Joseph Goldstein:
Payton led the discussion centered around the idea of Papancha, or Mental Proliferation. The seminal sutta on this topic is the “Honeyball Sutta”, where it’s explained as: first there is the coming together of three things, an object, a sensory organ, and consciousness. The meeting of these three is “contact”. Contact leads to feeling tone (Vedana), which leads to perception (naming), which leads to thinking about, which then leads to Mental Proliferation.
We listened to a talk by James Baraz entitled “The Honeyball Sutta: The Source of Our Confusion and the Way Out”.
Zac guided us through multiple avenues of reflection on vedana or the feeling tone of our experiences…pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Recognizing these dispositions as they arise and breaking off the automatic clinging or rejecting or ignoring can help us step out of a downward spiral.
Payton guided the discussion this morning on the concept of Doubt in our practice. Typically Doubt is expressed as one of the Hinderances, but in a talk by Tony Bernhard we heard that doubting is only natural, and perhaps more important is our understanding of what we decide to believe.
To listen to Tony’s talk, follow this link to Dharma Seed: http://dharmaseed.org/teacher/182/talk/24678/
Wendy Guided our reflections this morning, anchoring the discussion in Tara Brach’s talk “Freedom from Addiction.” As Brach sees it, Addiction is a version of the Tanha or Thirst or Craving that the Buddha identified as the cause of suffering in the Second Noble Truth. We reflected on addictions from email checking to substance abuse, and explored the relation of psychology to dharma.
To access Tara Brach’s talk, which includes two guided meditations, click
http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/175/?search=freedom+from+addiction
As our sangha met for the first time in our new location in the Lojong Space, Payton guided our reflections on Sangha, the sense of community that spreads from those seriously committed to the Buddhist path out to include all those we interact with, and finally to a sense of connection with the population of the world at large. Serving to center the discussion were excerpts from a talk by Oren Sofer on a visit to Vermont, titled “Sangha Refuge and the Relational Field of Practice. This talk can be found at
