Northern California Information

Creating Pure Vision through the Realization of the Six Lamps

Friday, November 19, 2010, 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Saturday & Sunday, November 20 - 21, 2010, 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location: 830 Bancroft (at the corner of Sixth), Berkeley, CA

According to the Oral Transmission of Zhang Zhung, one of the principal dzogchen, or "great perfection" lineages of the Bön tradition, our suffering in samsara can be traced to a single cause: our failure to comprehend that external appearances are only a manifestation of our own innate awareness. In the text, The Six Lamps, part of the inner cycle of the Oral Transmission, the precise manner in which innate awareness is situated in our body, travels through our channels, arrives at our eyes, and emerges as external appearances, is carefully investigated. It describes how one moves from the experience of the first lamp of the base-of-all to the experience of luminous innate awareness in the heart, the second lamp. From the heart, the light of innate awareness rises up the subtle channels of our sacred bodies into the lamp of the eye, allowing us to maintain our connection to the inseparable state of emptiness and innate awareness and perceive all aspects of our environment with pure vision. The final lamp describes the unification of our natural state with our experience of the bardo where we again maintain our connection to our essence and see all the bardo visions as our own essence or the essence of Samantabhadra.

In this weekend, the second in a series, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche will be giving an oral commentary on the Six Lamps and presenting practices based on this text. The next scheduled teaching on the Lamps is May 6-8, 2011. It is not necessary to have attended the first weekend in order to attend subsequent teachings.

For more information regarding these teachings, please see the PDF flyer.

Practice Groups

Practice groups are held twice a month in the East Bay, on the first and third Wednesday evenings of the month from 7:00-8:30pm at 1500 Holly St., Berkeley, CA. They are open to all students who have been following the teachings of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

Contact Information

If you would like to be on our e-mail list, contact Scott Clearwater at . You can receive practice group information from Tom Faupl at . For all other information, contact Laura Shekerjian at , 510-849-2373.