Confusions, grievances, enthusiasm, and curiosity
On Saturday, I’m leading an online Vajrayana Q&A session. AMA!
This coming Saturday the 10th of August, I’m leading an online Vajrayana Q&A session.
New video about tsa lung (“energy”) in Dzogchen.
This is a Monthly News & Notes post. Often those grow short essays in the middle, too long for a Substack Note, but too short or too little-baked for a full post. That happened this time, but it got too long and I’ve pulled it out to post separately. So this is just two announcements!
An online Vajrayana Q&A session
On Saturday this week, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific, I’ll be answering questions (and maybe asking some, and leading discussion) on Vajrayana. That’s the branch of Buddhism I write about on Vividness and Buddhism for Vampires. It includes Buddhist Tantra (the path of the transformation of energy) and Dzogchen (the way of instantaneous self-liberation).
Vajrayana is fascinating, beautiful, and inspiring. It is enormously complex, but has a unique crystalline logic, which—once you see it—reveals the essence as perfectly simple.
Vajrayana is also tiresome, horrific, and repellent. It’s a godawful mess; vast, repetitious, and totally conceptually incoherent. That’s because it has accreted in layers, across fourteen centuries of adaptation to different cultural circumstances, none of which are relevant for us now.
The session’s tag line is “Bring your Vajrayana confusions, grievances, enthusiasm, and curiosity.” I included “grievances” because I want to make space for complaints that none of this makes any sense. If you aren’t constantly annoyed by that, you haven’t yet learned enough about Vajrayana! But it is also beautiful and inspiring, and can be understood—not so much by learning more details, but with an attitude combining skepticism, enthusiasm, and curiosity.
This online Q&A is sponsored by Evolving Ground, the Vajrayana practice community co-founded by my spouse
. The session is available only to eG members, but membership is free. If you are not a member, you can sign up, and you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to Saturday the 10th you’ll get the zoom link.Freeing energy with non-ordinary sensation
has a new ten-minute video about tsa lung (“energy work”). Specifically, it describes the approach of one branch of Buddhism, Dzogchen Long-dé. That branch concerns the experience of subtle and dramatic sensations in vivid, open awareness. It is a way of unclogging energy.The video uses a few Tibetan terms that may be unfamiliar. You may want to read Charlie’s brief intro page, which gives two paragraphs of context, plus definitions of the Tibetan words.
I edited this out of an hour-long interactive discussion, partly as practice in video production. As a semi-professional Content CreatorⓇ in the YouTube Era, I gather that’s something I need to learn to do!
Besides the intrinsic interestingness of the topic, I think Charlie’s personality as a teacher comes through clearly. I’m pretty happy with how the edit came out, even if it’s barely even semi-professional.
Longdé is a series of texts emphasizing space or vastness, and makes up about one third of the Dzogchen tradition. What Awbery is teaching is likely kumnye, which is part based on Longdé and part based on medical tantras: https://www.aroencyclopaedia.org/shared/text/s/skumnye_ar_eng.php