Completion of the Autumn Buddhist Philosophy Course (cont’d)

HELD AT KAMALASHILA TIBETAN BUDDHIST CENTRE
​7-10 November 2024

Some additional comments from students

The overarching theme for me throughout the Autumn Buddhist Philosophy Course has been that of a gradual shift from intellectual understanding to experiential understanding. From conceptualisation to embodiment. A move from head to heart. It has allowed me to put my chronic introspection and overthinking to good use, to switch it from negative to positive. So much of the course seems to have been encouraging us to flip the two sides of the same coin – The Two Truths. 

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Such profound wisdom leads to compassion. Firstly, self-compassion, then maybe these negative stories about myself I play on repeat in my mind have no substance. What I thought of as reality is just a dream. When there are infinite possibilities – the mind as clear and spacious as the sky. How wondrous and liberating! I now have this methodology that enables me to sit back and observe where these stories, these clouds, are coming from and their impermanence. A lightness of just being has germinated, a shift in how I move through the world. With this shift, I have found loving-kindness and compassion can come more easily. The course has sparked understanding on a heart level and how to respond at this heart level, rather than just on an intellectual level. It has inspired me to be more comfortable in expressing love to others, in whatever myriad forms love takes. 

The Four Common Foundations have been so grounding. This core wisdom has recently helped me guide a friend through a difficult loss and helped me deal with my own losses. A softening effect, switching up longing and clinging to transform into gratitude and contentment. I continue to plant the seeds of peace with each footstep I take wandering the earth.

I am so deeply grateful to Khenpo la for his extraordinary generosity, profound wisdom, his humility and good humour – in guiding me onto the path of the Dharma. May I be even a fraction of the benefit he has been to so many beings. I am also so grateful to our special little sangha that has blossomed under Khenpo la’s guidance for helping to cultivate joy, diligence and understanding. 
~Matthew D.

We were asked to present our greatest learning from the Autumn Buddhist Philosophy 3-year Course to our large group. We were also asked to consider the impact the course has had on those around us. Using the knowledge and skills I had learnt in the Course, I needed to address the anxiety that arises around presenting for me, my greatest learnings! Applying the steps and practices around transforming the mind from the uncomfortable to the comfortable, has definitely had the biggest impact on those around me, I feel. This has helped me significantly in lessening my anxiety.

Firstly, I had to totally accept that everything comes from my own mind. That within the teachings of The Six Paramitas, I discovered that when my intention is coming from a place of pure awareness, there is no room for grasping, therefore no room for suffering, just pure compassion and wisdom. However, I must admit that even with a growing awareness within my daily life and with continual practices of self-compassion, my understanding of emptiness at this time, the Four Kayas, Conventional and Absolute Truth, I find myself in my habitual pattern of uncomfortableness. Yet I must remind myself continually, this will be a lifetime practice, there are no instant results.

Anxiety for myself lurks there revealing itself as the biggest roadblock to practising pure and/or perfect loving-kindness and compassion. Through meditation, I am discovering that deep down, I am still not investigating the mind with total honesty, blaming conditions outside of myself. With the help of a Dharma brother, I began to specifically investigate my self-cherishing when the anxiety arises. I began to recognise that behind or in front of any uncomfortableness there was still the attachment to ‘I’, hiding in plain sight. Even when I was 95% sure my motivation or intention was coming from compassion, again I witnessed just how tricky the mind can be. By truly identifying the grasping of self, the frequency and severity of my anxiety has lessened, which then allows the opportunity to set intention with pure compassion within any moment of the mind. If I keep practising to replace the ‘I’ with pure bodhicitta intention, eventually compassion may be the first thing to automatically arise, from a state of pure awareness, in order to benefit all sentient beings. 
~ Leanne