Meditation and Myriad Worlds: Buddhism’s Immense Vision of Reality

Image courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope, presenting a star-forming region called “Pillars of Creation”, echoing the immense universe described in Buddhist tradition.

Welcome to a retreat that explores the profound changes of our time and reorients them within Buddhism’s vast vision of reality—an evolutionary, expansive, and transformative understanding of who we are and the universe we inhabit. In the midst of uncertainty, we are invited to ask: Are we ready to question the narrow ways we have been taught to experience ourselves and the world?

Rather than presenting human life as isolated, material, and self-contained, the ancient Tibetan Buddhist texts reveal a living cosmos of many dimensions, many realms, and many kinds of beings, all arising in dependence upon mind, perception, karma, and awareness.

Tibetan Buddhist sutra presents cosmological systems—including those of the individual way, the universal way, Kālacakra, and Dzogchen—not merely as outer descriptions of the universe, but as invitations to loosen our fixation on the small, habitual world we take to be absolute.

In this way, Myriad Worlds becomes a profound spiritual antidote to modern times: it widens our imagination, softens rigid identity, and opens our hearts and mind to a reality that is luminous, interconnected, and far more mysterious than we have been taught to believe.

For those of us feeling trapped in loneliness, anxiety, alienation, or the exhausted patterns of modern life, Buddhism’s visions of reality point toward another way of being.

When we no longer see ourselves as separate, cut off, and confined within a single fixed story, the causes of so much suffering begin to loosen. The Buddhist path suggests that confusion, mental affliction, and even forms of embodied distress are deeply tied to how we perceive and inhabit reality; as that perception opens, greater balance, vitality, meaning, and compassion become possible.

This retreat will include yoga, meditation, and the prophetic teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, which can help us break beyond the mental boxes that keep us small and rediscover the spaciousness and sacred depth of our own experience. The connection between cosmology, mind, and the arising of worlds comes at a timely and necessary point in our human evolution.

Material from this retreat is drawn from a variety of sources, including Jamgön Kongtrul’s sacred text, “The Treasury of Knowledge”, which encompasses the entire Tibetan Buddhist path, “enshrining all the wisdom of Tibet”.

Registration

This 6 day 5 night retreat begins with dinner at 5pm on Thursday, August 13th, and completes with lunch on August 18th.  Our four full days together will follow the schedule below, which includes a daily Gentle Yoga session and morning meditation session lead by Linda Stuart. Click here to find more information about Linda Stuart.

6:45 – 7:15  Meditation with Linda Stuart

7:30 – 8:30 Breakfast and Clean up

9:00 – 10:00  Tibetan Chants and Meditation

10:30 – Noon  Morning Session with Ani Lodro

Noon – 1:30 Lunch and clean up

2:00 – 2:45 Silent Sitting in Shrine Room

3:00 – 3:45 Gentle Yoga with Linda Stuart

4:00 – 5:15 Afternoon Session Q&A with Ani Lodro

5:30 – 6:45 Dinner and clean up

7:00 – 7:45 Silent Sitting in Shrine Room

6 Day Retreat Fees:

$825 Lodging, Meals, and Program

$500 Commuters: Meals and Program

$175 Online Zoom Attendance

To inquire about sangha discounts, or scholarships, please email us at vajravidyacrestone@gmail.com

Click here to Register

For questions, please reach us at

vajravidyacrestone@gmail.com

       

Hubble’s visible-light image of the “Pillars of Creation,” released by NASA/ESA. Called “Pillars of Creation” because the 5-light-year-tall columns of gas and dust are part of a star-forming region, the pillars are giving rise to new stars. There is also a poetic reason the name became so powerful: the forms resemble vast pillars in a celestial temple, so the title captured and stayed in people’s imagination.