Four Kinds of Hello

(Photo Credit: Jeremy Bishop)

What should I write here? The task is to introduce myself. A plain enough endeavour on the surface of things. Yet one aim of this Sutrayana Study and Practice Intensive is to delve beneath surfaces. To engage the teachings and practices of this somatic lineage in order to perceive life more deeply. With a heightened measure of sensitivity and refinement.

In Part One of this event - the Foundation Yana - the term used to describe our heightened experience of life was egolessness. As the central insight of the First Turning, egolessness points to the fact that our sense of self is not what we typically think. Rather than being definitive, what we designate ‘I’ is more flowing in character; a winding river of ever changing experience. 

What if I were to introduce myself along these lines? 

I’m sitting at my desk right now. Late afternoon sun burns through the window, star-bursting my vision and warming the left side of my face. I’ve got one line from a new Bruce Springsteen song cycling through my mind (“I’m hitch hikin’ all day long”) and the soles of both feet hurt. Off at the edges of awareness there’s a subtle discomfort with this line of presentation. My skin tingles when I let this in. Just beyond discomfort are darker colourations: judgement, criticism, shame.

In this second part of 2019’s Sutrayana Study and Practice Intensive, we will be looking at the underpinnings of the Mahayana stage of development. We will be looking at the central realization of the Second Turning, emptiness. Then our attention will shift to the Third Turning, the experience of buddha nature.

If I were to introduce myself along the lines of emptiness, I might encourage us to reread the ‘egolessness introduction’ above. I might suggest we feel our way through the text while doing so. Let each word perforate and open. Let your awareness ease into any emergent gaps and see if I can be introduced without conventional vocabulary. Whenever words return, let go and ease through.

Doing this along the lines of buddha nature, the invitation might ask us to feel whatever arises in those gaps. Feel whatever comes forward in the open space between and behind each word. Receive whatever remains in the instant you let go. What do you sense? What do you know?

Of course, I could simply return to the surface of things and let you know it’s good to be back in this Sutrayana container. The Mahayana’s relevance to our every day lives was one of the things that hooked me into the dharma all those years ago. My wife and I took a lojong course with Pema Chodron - one not too unlike this one, curiously enough - and came away thinking, ‘Wow!’   

Which is not to suggest anything more than a glancing familiarity with what we are poised to explore through the next several weeks. Not at all. These teachings arise anew every time I immerse in them. So - as I believe I suggested in our Welcome Talk - I look forward to discovering what they might offer this time around. I look forward to doing this together.

- Neil