April 4 – May 2, 2024
taught by Suzanne Colón

After Session Five: For Further Exploration

Year-Long Online Study+Practice Course
with Brian Lesage and Tuere Sala

Program Description: In this year-long program, we will explore the profound Buddhist teachings of dependent origination and emptiness through the practices and understandings in the book, Seeing That Frees by Rob Burbea, supplemented by sutta readings and heart practices. This exploration will be held within the container of community that we will co-create together. We will also gear this exploration toward practicing in our day-to-day lives and making all of this relevant to our daily lives.

This is offered through the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies – listing here.
(Twelve days of residential retreat experience and three years of home practice are prerequisites for this course.)

Live sessions are 5-6:30 PM on First Weds of the month, Aug 7 – July 2, 2025
Small group discussions meet once mid-month. Bozeman sangha participants will have the option of being in a discussion group together.

Books:

Dependent Origination in Plain English, by Bhante Gunaratana
Seeing That Frees, by Rob Burbea
Patterns in Emptiness – Understanding Dependent Origination, by Lama Jampa Thaye

Recordings of a Day-long Retreat with Tempel Smith

Recorded at Spirit Rock on Dec 14, 2024 and split into 9 segments, this day includes his presentation of the essence of the teachings, guided meditations and Q&A.
Access the (audio only) recordings here. Go to page two to find the first talk, labeled “1 of 9.”

From Session Four

Link to recording of Session Four.

Highly recommended follow-up to our Q&A:
This conversation with Tempel Smith. a very down-to-earth explanation of how “becoming” and other parts of this chain underlie our daily experiences. He describes the process of craving, clinging, becoming in real, daily-life terms. Includes Q&A on how we can participate in the world “from a base of contentment, rather than strategies to chase contentment (craving).”

He also explains how we can navigate “desires,” changes we’d like to see in the world, goals, and healthy aspirations, without the grip of “craving.”

Also includes “craving” is what craves, it’s the energy of craving that’s arising due to current conditions. There is no You there doing the craving.

This is Yama holding the wheel of the human experience, with Greed, Hatred and Delusion at the center and the 12 links around the outside. Note that the Buddha is in the upper right corner pointing the way and there’s a ribbon path to him to give an exit from the wheel. He’s pointing to the 8-Fold Path. represented by the wheel with eight sections in the upper left.

From Session Three

Blue: what we bring with us from past experience that “conditions” how we experience the here and now. This is our level of wisdom, insight, and ignorance (1) and the accumulation and momentum of our actions, beliefs, opinions (2)– all that’s in our “database.”

Yellow: the experience of the here and now – “contact” at the sense gates with its attendant Feeling Tone/vēdana. I wish the the bottom circle were labeled “Feeling” or “Feeling Tone.” “Feelings” is confusing (connotes emotions). “Sensation” is contact at the sense gates and should not be there. (I view this as a misleading error in the diagram, but I chose this for its helpful color distinctions.)

Green: Our response to the Contact/Feeling Tone – Where the rubber meets the road, and where we direct our attention in practice.
With wisdom, mindfulness and equanimity we can escape the following links. Without wisdom, mindfulness and equanimity, we will be dragged into the orange links.

Orange: The grip of selfing, a collapse of the sense of self into the clinging of the experience which leads to taking a “birth” as a separate, contracted “self” with an agenda, subject to the slings and arrows of what follows. All of which is characterized as “Suffering” – stressful, additional unpleasantness, and which likely leads to more confusion, ignorance and contraction in the blue links, conditioning future suffering.

This talk by Joseph Goldstein, lays out the chain of twelve in very clear terms. It’s a classic – recorded in 1985

From Session Two

Link to recording of Session Two.

Please fast forward to minute 3 or 4 to skip opening logistics. While we were seeing the slides full screen on the BDC tv, they apparently weren’t full screen on the zoom.

From Session One

Link to the “Lump of Foam” sutta on the Five Aggregates:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.095.than.html

On Feeling Tone or “Vēdana”

Each sensory experience making “contact” at the sense gates automatically comes with a visceral Feeling tone which registers in the body (not the mind). It is this we are investigating, noting it as Pleasant, Unpleasant, or Neither/neutral. The mind (nano-seconds later) may respond with a valuation of positive/negative, good/bad, helpful/unhelpful, like it/don’t like it… etc. We are separating that evaluation from the way the contact lands in the body: pleasant, unpleasant or neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant.