Description
Tuesday, June 20
6:30-8:00pm ET
Chose Your Price: $10, $25, $50, $108 | Hybrid
Co-sponsored with Shantideva Center
We spend our lives being seduced by the outside world, believing utterly that happiness and suffering come from “out there”. Even more fundamental than that, we assume that we are the handiwork of someone else, either a superior being or our parents. The experiential implications of this are blame, anger, and guilt, bringing ever-deepening levels of suffering and hopelessness.
Buddha’s view of reality is that we create ourselves: we come into this life at the first moment of conception in our mother’s womb fully programmed with our own tendencies and the seeds of our experiences in this life. As the Dalai Lama says, the view of karma is one of “self-creation.” We are, literally, the creators of our lives, our happiness, and our suffering. We are the boss.
With this view we realize that everything we experience is our own “karmic appearance”, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche puts it. Everything is made by our own minds, in the past and in the present.
The experiential implication of this view is empowerment, accountability, and the courage to change and, combining it with an understanding of the Buddha’s model of the mind, we gradually loosen the grip of ego-grasping and the other neuroses, thus developing our marvelous potential for clarity, self-confidence, empathy and the other qualities that Buddha says are at the core of our being.
