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Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche on Meditation

Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2012 12:21 pm
by phantom59
Expert meditation practitioners don’t feel like anything is missing from their lives because they are truly comfortable with themselves. If you don’t know how to connect with yourself, you always feel like something is missing, you always feel the need to connect to outer circumstances. The problem with that is that when the circumstances you relied on for a temporary feeling of fulfillment change then you end up suffering. The Buddha discovered that the way to happiness, the way to contentment, the way to inner peace, is through meditation—through connecting with yourself, connecting with your true nature. Once you know how to connect with yourself, then you know how to connect to the whole entire world.

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Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche explains how meditation allows us to enter into a state of pure consciousness

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Realization is about how to get in touch with, how to access, the pristine mind that is our innate nature. Realization has to do with how we can access the happiness that lies within us always, and how we can see it so that we don’t just have an intellectual understanding of it, but actually experience it. Being in direct contact with your nature of mind, getting in touch with it experientially, actually accessing it, is called realization.

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Without a good teacher-student relationship it is very hard for the teachings to unfold naturally. The teaching really depends on that connection. The teacher has to be inspired to teach that subject.

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That’s what makes a community. That is the basis for real friendship. That is the foundation of a genuine relationship and the key to everything. In a community, we need to have a little bit more patience, more love, more understanding, more appreciation for each other. The teacher-student relationship itself is not enough. The student-student relationship is vital too. The students need to have a good relationship, a good connection with each other. When this is happening everything is strong and everything the students do together becomes very powerful.

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The Buddhadharma is essentially a collection of principles for improving ourselves. That’s the reason we are practicing dharma, spirituality. And the main ways to improve ourselves, to be a good person, to have good connections with others is to have respect and appreciation and gratitude, to treat everyone with patience.

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The more you study, the more you practice meditation, the more teachings you listen to, the more inspired you feel, and the more you give rise to a natural-born feeling of connection with enlightenment. That is devotion.

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This teaching describes how meditation helps calm your restless mind and makes you feel more comfortable in every situation. This happens from taming your thoughts and relaxing in your natural state of mind. This also improves our connections and relationships with others.

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Rinpoche explains that we are unconditionally happy. All beings are unconditionally happy. Every living being is fundamentally comfortable, innately happy. That is our true nature. Generally we are only familiar with happiness that comes from external conditions. We are experts in that. We are always searching for that. That’s all we know. The mind is innately pristine, flawless. This is who you really are. Mental events are just temporary. This is how it is.

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Photo Gallery
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He began his studies at the age of fourteen at Larung Gar in Serta, eastern Tibet, with his teacher, the great Jigmed Phuntsok Rinpoche, who is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest Dzogchen masters of the twentieth century.

Over the next ten years he received teachings, meditation instructions, and spiritual training in the Mahayana, Vajrayana, and Dzogchen traditions, and developed a special appreciation for the secret treasures of Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava. He inherited from his great teacher a tradition of sharing the Buddhadharma in a way that is practical, experiential, and from the heart, and his time studying with this enlightened master changed his life.

He completed the studies, practice, and meditation training required for the khenpo degree, the highest degree of Buddhist study and practice. Out of a class of over one thousand, he was among the first group of only fifty-five highly accomplished students upon whom Jigmed Phuntsok Rinpoche bestowed the degree. The graduates of this and subsequent classes from Larung Gar now teach throughout the world preserving this unique spiritual heritage.

In 1993 he began teaching in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he stayed at Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling for two years as a resident teacher to lamas, monks, and western students. In 1995 he met and received teachings from the sublime Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, who subsequently invited him to come to the United States. In 1996 Lama Tharchin Rinpoche hosted Orgyen Chowang at Pema Osel Ling in Santa Cruz, California, where he taught in the College of Buddhist Studies. Three years later, he moved to Berkeley, California in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently resides.