Transcript

How did I come to the Dharma? Well, that’s an interesting question. And for me, I came to it differently than a lot of people do who are seeking some relief in their life. It was thrust upon me in an interesting way. I was rocking along as an adult, as an agnostic atheist, having decided that Christianity, where I was raised made no sense to me. And so I had a dream one night, maybe lucid dream, maybe a vision, I don’t know. But it was very strong, very powerful. And I remembered it in great detail, which I usually don’t. And in this dream, I had a started in my garden with a Buddha garden statue, only it was a live person and a monk. And they had this great procession came to take him away to become my teacher. It was the most interesting thing that you can imagine. And they left me gifts in my yard. And so when I woke up or became cognizant again, I thought to myself, this is too much. This is I have got to see what this is about. So I went to the Half Price bookstore and looked at the Buddhist books. And because of the color of the robes in the garden, I knew that it was a Tibetan Buddhism situation. So I bought every book on the shelf on Tibetan Buddhism and started exploring whenever people came to visiting monks or lamas came to the area, I would go and see them. I actually began to explore Buddhism in many ways. I flew out to California, this two day retreat with Chick Moran, and and then I but I never really found my home was an interesting exploration. 

 

And then I began to took a class on Tibetan art, which, of course, is Buddhist art, and began to see the symbols and the meanings of them in the iconography of the art. And then I took a class in Tibetan Buddhism in terms of the meditation and what the different aspects were. From there, visiting teacher came in who was a born teacher and I went to a weekend retreat with him, and the experience that I had there was very interesting and profound, and from that point on, I decided I was going to just study this one tradition in order to see how it fit into my life and how it might fit into my life. The one thing about Buddhism that attracts me is that there is no God outside that is taking that manifests down here and decides what’s going on or takes care of you. The there are as many Buddhas as there are stars in the sky and we are all born as Buddha. Is we just the ability to be able to be enlightened, to see clearly, and to have that wisdom is clouded by being human, by observations, by our karma, by our upbringing, by our culture. And so it’s fit well with my traditional, the way I had been before I found Buddhism, which was as an agnostic or atheist. So this there wasn’t any conflict between those different philosophies of life. The other part of Buddhism that I was extremely attracted to is that it was besides the fact that it gave you a pathway, a curriculum, it was very laid out to achieve this wisdom and this peace that comes from that. But also it’s a tradition that the 1 to 1 tradition is one that you do this not only for yourself, but for all people, for all beings, for all beings. Being a veterinarian and this resonated with me quite well also, and being environmentalist, the bumper tradition is very earth based and element based. And so that was the other part of it, aspect of it that attracted me to the bumper tradition and made me want to explore it and study it. So I have been doing so since and maybe lifetimes before and will lifetimes again.

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