Dharmapala College

For Order members and mitras

(Note: In our printed programme, this seminar is advertised as open for order members only and with a different title.)

Impermanence, pain, insubstantiality … we’ve often heard it, to an extent seen it, and our experience of these marks of existence impelled us to look for an alternative. Yet, having become Buddhist, we are still fettered by patterns of avoidance, escapism, sitting on the fence … or by attempts to appropriate the Dharma with materialist or eternalist delusions.

The three laksanas don’t really make much sense without their counterparts, the vimoksa mukhas. They are the doorways to liberation. If we go deeply enough into our experience each of these doors opens into it’s own particular experience of reality: the Signless, Wishless and Sunyata Samadhis.

The fourth seal, in Sangharakshita’s translation, is ‘Nirvana alone is peace’. Bhante’s teaching on the spiral path offers a profound contradiction to spiritual materialism and eternalism alike. We can’t ‘do’ the spiritual life, we have to grow it, it has a natural progression: “the growth of the total psyche, in and through awareness”.

This is the stuff of our seminar. Once again, it’s about treading a ‘middle way’ between willed effort and no effort. Bhante calls it the ’spiritual’, a way forward within relative truth, the conscious choice we have in every moment: creative mind or reactive mind. He has included friendship and the arts as subversive responses to the ‘real world’ with its illusory foundation in space, time and power.

We don’t have to retreat to the countryside to find reality. Reality suffuses everything that surrounds us … and all that is us. During the seminar we’ll take to the streets of Birmingham with a mind open to ‘wabi sabi’, discovering the presence and beauty in the ordinary.

Each day of this ‘seminar’ will include meditation, led reflections as well as talks and discussion. Also a laksanas movie night!

10 September, 1pm - 14 September, 2pm, at Madhyamaloka, Birmingham
With Vajrasakhi, Vajradarshini, and Dhammaloka

Suggested donation: £ 120

To ask for further information or to book for this event, please contact us here.

To go back to our 2008 schedule, please click here.