Friday Night Talk - Paths of Freedom: Old and New with Adam Lobel & Gaylon Ferguson

Friday Night Talks begin at 7 pm Eastern, (8 Atlantic, 5 Mountain, 4 Pacific time).

What does it mean to practice paths of freedom today? 

Here is our question:  

From one familiar perspective, genuine spiritual paths are step-by-step journeys from fixation to freedom. For example, ego-fixation is a cause of pain and suffering for ourselves and others. Realizing egolessness is key to individual liberation. Fixating on our experience as solid and truly existent blocks innate compassion and compassionate activity. The deep intimacy of emptiness unleashes spontaneous compassion. Fixating on ourselves, others, and sense perceptions in the world as "ordinary" obscures all-pervading sacredness, complete realization of sacred outlook.

From another less familiar perspective, we and all beings -- including trees and greenery and everything, are all already free. Everything, everywhere is -- all at once -- sacredness. From this outrageously cheerful but strange point of view, effort is not only not helpful, but actually obscures realization. What if, as some suggest, wakefulness is "not caused by anything. Not meditation, not prayer, not devotion. How can we cause something that's already present?"

You are warmly invited to join Adam Lobel and Gaylon Ferguson in considering these and other questions of paths and freedom.

Gaylon Ferguson, PhD, has led group meditation retreats since 1976. He was executive director of Karmê Chöling Buddhist meditation center, and one of the teaching representatives of Trungpa Rinpoche to northern California. A Fulbright Fellow to Nigeria, he taught cultural anthropology at Stanford and the University of Washington. He was Core Faculty at Naropa University for fifteen years. His two books are Natural Wakefulness (on the four foundations of mindfulness) and Natural Bravery (on fear and fearlessness).

Adam Lobel, PhD, is a practitioner-scholar of philosophy and religion and served as a longtime teacher (acharya) in the Shambhala tradition. He would like to acknowledge with a full-heart the challenge of having been part of the leadership in Shambhala in the midst of the revelations of sexual abuse and abuse of power within our tradition.

A speaker on ecology and spirituality at the United Nations, he was part of the first delegation of Buddhist teachers invited to the White House under President Obama. He leads ecodharma workshops called "Silent Transformations," has taught alongside Joanna Macy and others in the Ecosattva Training, is a Greenfaith fellow, and is active in ecopsychology, ecological, and social justice movements. Adam's teachings focus on Great Perfection Tibetan Buddhism, modern phenomenology, and inoperative studies (Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben). As a founding practitioner-educator at the City of Bridges High School, he has a longstanding interest in progressive contemplative education and transformative pedagogy. A professor of Buddhist and phenomenological psychology, he is curious about a cultural therapeutics for our collapsing society. He remains attuned-to an awakened, just, terrestrial society. Adam teaches a critical style of contemplative training that seeks to avoid enclosure in neoliberal mindfulness while still disclosing effortless awareness.

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