These teachings are taken directly from The Angel Debates The Devil, an ancient Tibetan teaching on emptiness by His Holiness the First Panchen Lama, who lived 1565-1662. The text is at the same time, extremely funny and extremely deep. It will help us be successful in this life, and in the next as well. This is the 11th ACI program dedicated to this ancient classic. We’ll be focusing on how “me” relates to body & mind, and how to change body & mind into an enlightened being with a rainbow body and a clear-light mind. As the Lama says, we’ll be trying to hit emptiness with the arrow of our mind, even as we wear a blindfold.
The ancient wisdom of Asia says that the world is an illusion—which isn’t hard to believe sometimes, when our life gets turned upside down. But maybe there’s a way to see through this illusion and make our life go the way we always wanted it to: a perfect relationship, financial security, strong health, and a world without hunger or war. One of the greatest teachers of Tibet was the First Panchen Lama, who lived over 400 years ago. He said that if we really understand the illusion we can make it work for us, to create a life full of happiness and success.
Four centuries ago there was a Tibetan master named the First Panchen Lama. He was one of the greatest meditators who ever lived. He learned the traps that can ruin our meditation, and he learned how to beat these traps. He described all this in a book called The Devil Debates an Angel, a very funny and profound argument between the Devil and an Angel, inside of one’s person’s head.
A dish in the sink, a person lying in the street, people in pain all around us; we want to do something but we hesitate. The decision to cheerfully stop and help is described in Buddhist scripture as the step before ultimate love, or bodhichitta. And aren’t those who take responsibility even when its “not their problem” the most beautiful people you know? Using a new translation of a text by the First Panchen Lama, you’ll learn how to become that extraordinary being who embraces and enjoys taking responsibility, whether for the dishes or the planet. You’ll see that the result is a life full of sheer enchantment and unsurpassed joy.
A one-night course by Geshe Michael Roach in San Francisco on August 28, 1999. This teaching is about a special style of meditation called Mahamudra. This course will be based on a teaching about Mahamudra by The First Panchen Lama and will give an introduction to Mahamudra, a discussion about the advantages of studying the emptiness of the mind, as opposed to the emptiness of objects in general, and a description of beginning Mahamudra meditation for you to incorporate into your daily meditation practice.
The 22 levels from earth to sky refer to the development of the Wish for Budhahood (Bodhichitta), from the initial intention in a baby Bodhisattva to the full Bodhichitta in the mind of a Buddha. This list of 22 comes from the Ornament of Realizations (Abhisamayalankara) by Arya Asanga which is one of the Five Great Books of Maitreya—The Future Buddha. They were taught by Maitreya to Arya Asanga in Maitreya’s heaven and then he brought them back to this world.
The 22 levels from earth to sky refer to the development of the Wish for Budhahood (Bodhichitta), from the initial intention in a baby Bodhisattva to the full Bodhichitta in the mind of a Buddha. This list of 22 comes from the Ornament of Realizations (Abhisamayalankara) by Arya Asanga which is one of the Five Great Books of Maitreya—The Future Buddha. They were taught by Maitreya to Arya Asanga in Maitreya’s heaven and then he brought them back to this world.
After spending many years at His teacher’s side, Geshe Michael teaches us the Steps of the Path to Enlightenment using beautiful examples and stories of how His own teacher’s life reflected these Lam Rim teachings. One of the greatest ways to learn these teachings is simply to observe the behavior of a great teacher who has received and mastered these teachings themselves.
Geshe Michael Roach gave three days of special teachings on meditation and the nature of the mind in Sedona. These teachings are taken directly from The Angel Debates The Devil, a dialogue between the good and evil that happens in our mind, by Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen. The text is at the same time extremely funny and extremely deep, as it reveals the tricky ways that our mind deceives us into believing we are thinking and acting in a way that actually helps us. This teaching will help us to unravel these seductive arguments of the Devil in our own mind to order to be successful in this life, and to learn how to develop the skills necessary to confront any obstacle.
Here's how disagreements go: Somebody else says they want to do something one way, and we gently suggest that we might want to do it another way. Then their opinion begins to harden, like cement—and our disagreement with them gets more concrete too. In the end, we reach a point where it feels like we’re completely, solidly stuck. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a certain kind of meditation that we can do, for a few minutes, which literally melts disagreements away.