Six sessions exploring bright, vivid, unflinching ways of perceiving and interacting

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🕰️ When: Wednesdays 7-9pm, October 7 - November 11

📍 Where: Fractal Campus Lounge, 111 Conselyea St Fl 2, Brooklyn, NY 11211

👥 Size: 6–14

💵 Price: $350. If cost alone would prevent you from participating, reach out as there may be limited scholarship slots.

📝 Apply here: https://forms.gle/EwcQTtfF2n1XWYfH8. Deadline: September 29. I’ll send acceptances on October 1.

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What is Vajrayana?

Vajrayana is a unique tradition within Buddhism that emphasizes creativity, spontaneity, and responsiveness. It is:

• non-renunciative—embracing weirdness, complexity, ambiguity, and mess.
• non-monastic—compatible with ordinary human endeavors like working a job, raising children, making art, building companies, and falling in love.
• often symbolic—deploying theater, ritual, imagination, and craft as portals into non-ordinary ways of being.

I like to think of Vajrayana as an excessively profligate array of invitations to unusual, colorful, and heroic ways of being.

It is cringe-inducingly optimistic, starting from the premise that we can relish life just as it is.

It is starkly confronting, viewing “what life is” as simultaneously heaven and hell, a pure land charnel ground from which there’s no escape.

It is suited to our moment, offering ways of being that are capable of staying capable, kind, and connected when systems and social norms become unstable.

It is also big, old, and resistant to sweeping generalizations. Our goal here will be to give you a series of starting points.

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By the end of this course, you will have

• a daily meditation practice you’ll understand and can continue on your own
• a clear, practically oriented map of the major Buddhist vehicles—Sutrayana, Tantra, and Dzogchen—and understanding of how to use it in real situations
• ability to recognize renunciative view as it appears in practice, culture, and mind, and a sense for what else might be available
• conceptual understanding and some preliminary contact with several Vajrayana methods, including opening awareness, moving awareness, trek-chöd, mantra, and yidam
• a set of trailheads into books, teachers, practices, and communities for exploring further
• a much clearer sense of what place—if any—you would like Vajrayana to have in your life
• connection with some fellow explorers on similar paths </aside>

Who is this for?

Artists, nerds, lovers, heroes, engineers, bureaucrats, clowns, aristocrats, witches, vampires, incipient god-emperors, regular shmucks, and people who like to make it up as they go along.

Whatever happens—may it happen! Whichever way it goes—may it go that way! There is no one purpose! — The Three Terrible Oaths of Dorje Trollo

Also if:

• You want to feel the texture of life more vividly. To become more accommodating of intensity and less avoidant of situations that trigger fear.
• You’re curious about developing a contemplative practice that is enjoyable, effective, and supportive of life in a modern city. Curious enough that you’ll commit to practicing every day for six weeks.
• You’re dissatisfied with meditation presented purely as wellness technology or a way of reducing suffering. You’re also interested in practical, outward-looking effects: how you show up in relationships, make choices, and impact your world. You’re interested in the possibility that meditation might really change things, for you and others around you.