The Art of Crafting Supportive Conditions for Liberation
Videos of Public Classes on The Art of Crafting Supportive Conditions for Liberation, given both in-person and online in the first week of the 2022 three weeks in-person Summer Retreat of Crystal Mountain Society on Galiano Island, Canada B.C.
Introductory Class: The Art of Retreat – Unbinding That Which is Bound (given to the in-person retreatants only)
'Retreat means to make auspicious opportunities for finding out that which works and that which does not work for liberation.'
'Retreat is for unbinding to the unborn. One unbinds to one’s unborn nature – natural freedom.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 1: Distinguishing That Which Is Already Unbound from That Which Is Bound
'It is my duty as a teacher to help you refine and retune the mental intent of what liberation, freedom, awakening, meditation, Dharma classes, and retreat actually are.'
'Everything is intent. The intent mind, which most of it is invisible to us, drives everything. It also drives the meditation experiences; it drives how you are in this tent and how you are online in your home, everything. To reveal what is hidden to us is partly why we meditate and do retreats.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 2: Commentaries on the Loving-Kindness Sutta – Karaniya Metta Sutta
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen's answer to the question, “What are real signs of liberation?”:
‘Unless the three non-virtuous poisonous afflictions, greed, hatred, and delusion, go down, really eradicated, there is no liberation.’
'Sometimes, what people call meditation is tranquillizing. It is a state of tranquillization. You need to distinguish between tranquillization and bright awareness.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 3: The Right Conditions for Loving-Kindness to Manifest within Oneself
'You don’t create Loving-Kindness. If you actually let Loving-Kindness come out by having the right environmental circumstances … It could be that one needs just the right conditions, the right auspicious conditions, the right nutrients, for you to spot more and more the innate Loving-Kindness, the innate Compassion, the innate Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity. '
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 4: The Practice of Loving-Kindness and Compassion According to The Vimuttimagga (The Path of Freedom)
'Patience is extraordinary power. If you are frustrated, you do not understand the meaning of things.'
‘Patience is power. This is armour. This protects the body well and removes anger and resentment. This is honour. This is praised by the wise. This causes the happiness of not falling away. This is a guardian. This guards all. This helps one to understand the meaning of things well. This is called “putting others to shame”. (Vimuttimagga p. 183)'
'You have to have intelligent Loving-Kindness. And that’s when we come to Compassion. Loving-Kindness by itself may not be the unravelling of the suffering state. But you still need the patience.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 5: The Practice of Loving-Kindness and Compassion According to The Vimuttimagga (The Path of Freedom) - Part 2
'The five poisons can become comfortable to the point where we want to have the five poisons as an antidote to anxiety. But actually, on is stoking up more anxiety and more pattern.'
'It feels uncomfortable to change one’s behaviour, even when the behaviour is unwholesome. Feel the resistance! It does not feel comfortable to push the unwholesome away and allow the wholesome to grow. But you need patience and capacity. Recollecting and changing your behaviour in your body, your speech and your mental level. Feel the resistance, the not wanting to go there. ‘I won’t go there,’ ‘Don’t make me go there,’ ‘I won’t look,’ ‘I won’t see.’
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 6: The Practice of Loving-Kindness and Compassion According to The Vimuttimagga (The Path of Freedom) - Part 3
'What is it like to be happy without an object? Write this down as a contemplation; place it into the mind stream: What is it like to be absolutely at ease with no object at all?'
'Where is the only place you could possibly find that which is neither happy nor sad but is actually free? The happiness of freedom, the happiness of ease, where is it?'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 7: The Meaning of ‘Metta’ - The Twelve Means of Removing Hatred According to The Vimuttimagga
'Metta is not affection. Affection is the enemy of Metta … This is a culture that has been permeated by the idea that love is affection.'
'The Pali-English Dictionary renders Metta as friendly, benevolent (which means wishing to serve and support beings), kind, free of ill-will, friendliness, active interest in others. Another meaning of Metta derived from its roots is to mix or to be connected to. This is one of its most profound meanings. How well is one connected and mixed? So, to be friendly is to be well mixed.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 8: Compassion and The Four Noble Truths
'If metta is the care, the benevolence and the kindness for all sentient beings, then what is compassion? What is compassion—karuna in Pali—from the perspective of 2500 year old lineage of very awakened beings? What is the reason for the practice and the unfolding of compassion?'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Short & Pithy: The Importance of Bringing Back the Tradition of Deep Training (Epilogue of Class 9, Q+A only)
'Part of the difficulties that we have in the West is we are no longer entering into the depth of training and the depth of retreat with our teachers; being in retreat for long enough, for enough times, to get the kind of direct both sharp intellectual training and gut knowing training, that is deep enough and lasting enough to give confidence in Dharma.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 10: The Four Noble Truths - Part 2
'The intent leads everything. But sometimes the intent is a little wishy-washy, or the view of intent is not very complete. So, we work at it.'
'It is important in the Path of Liberation that we engage all of our faculties as liberative faculties. We do not ignore body over speech, speech over body, and we do not turn the Path of Liberation into a mentalist activity, disassociate from the body and so on. It is important that the unification of the three, body speech and mind, comes to be brought to the full.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen
Class 11: Commentaries on Buddha Nature – The Primary Cause for Liberation According to the Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Je Gampopa
'When one enters into the Path of Liberation, into a spiritual path or a path to wake up, one of the most natural tendencies that we all have—it is natural, it is normal, it is ordinary—is extremely difficult to break through unless you have a teacher, a living teacher. It is he tendency to want to go to peace, to peacefulness.'
'Just as you are going to plant a tree or a vegetable, there must be a seed. And that seed, that is pervasive for all sentient beings—because all sentient beings can become liberated—is called Buddha Mind, awake mind, Buddha Nature, and so on, Tathagatagarbha.'
'It’s very straightforward: If you have a seed and you do not have the right conditions, no matter what you do, it just does not turn into a plant. So too, one has to have the notion that there is liberation … and one has to encounter and be willing to be in the right causal conditions.'
Lama Chokyi Gyaltsen