Five-Part Series: Dependent Origination and the Path to Freedom
Five Thursdays: April 4 – May 2,
7:00 – 8:30 PM
taught by Suzanne Colón
There’s an essential paradox at the heart of Buddhist practice: We must get exquisitely intimate with the moment-to-moment mind-body experience of the (small, relative) self in order to transcend it. The boat to ‘the far shore’ is built of our messy, frustrating stuff of life on this shore. The way beyond our reactivity, our back pain, our nagging inner commentary is to equanimously and compassionately embrace it. This is Alan Watts’ “backwards law” and the meaning of Dogen’s Genji Koan.
This class will begin with the teachings on the Five Aggregates and build up to an understanding of the chain of Dependent Origination – the Buddha’s map for what’s going on in human experience, how we get caught and why we suffer. We will explore the practices that intimately “study the self” and how those lead to “forgetting the self.” The chain becomes a liberative cycle of expanding wisdom and freedom.
Each week there will be a suggested home practice to deepen our experiential knowledge of the concepts. The series is designed to be sequential but anyone is welcome to attend sporadically or singly as their schedule and interests allow.
This class, designed for meditators with some experience, will be offered in our weekly Thursday sangha meetings on a drop-in basis. We welcome anyone in the community who’d like to explore the nuances of these intricate teachings of the Buddha’s.
April 4: The Five Aggregates and the Importance of Vedana (feeling tone)
April 11: How Vedana inevitably leads to having human preferences and “grasping” which – without Mindfulness, Wisdom and Equanimity – send us along the links in the chain to “clinging, becoming, and suffering.”
April 18: The Full Chain of Dependent Origination and how it illustrates the Four Noble Truths
April 25: The Liberative chain spiraling toward wisdom, insight, compassion and freedom
May 2: “The Full Choir” How nurture, self-compassion and equanimity increase our capacity to stay in the Liberative cycle and maximize growth and the capacity for Freedom
The workshop offered on Saturday, April 6th is designed to deepen and enrich the series (or it can stand alone…) See listing below.