The Devil Debates an Angel
PART 16
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 16: Bodhisattva Vow Ceremony (2022, Arizona)
What’s amazing is that—as we listen to the Devil and the Angel debating—we unexpectedly begin to get some new ideas about how the world around us works: why things happen to us the way they do, why we meet the people we do. By the end of the fight, we have a lot of what we need to know to change our own life—to be happier, and make those around us happy.
PART 15
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 15: Stepping into Our Next World (2022, Arizona)
The traditional name of our text is An Argument with the Tendency to Think that Things are Real. It was written by Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen, who lived 1565-1662. He was above all an extraordinary practitioner, thinker, and contemplator; a yogi; a poet and writer among the greatest who have ever lived; and an ardent pacifist who once stopped a war single-handedly, by walking out between the opposing armies.
PART 14
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 14
Coming soon.
PART 13
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 13: A Dialogue on Mind and Meditation (2019, Arizona)
The genre of the work that we will be learning in this course series is known as Mahamudra, or the Great Seal. This is a practice where we try to come to an understanding of emptiness by observing our own mind in meditation, and grasping how the mind itself—like all other things—is empty of being itself, by itself.
PART 12
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 12: A Dialogue on Meditation and the Nature of the Mind (2018, Arizona)
What’s amazing is that—as we listen to the Devil and the Angel debating—we unexpectedly begin to get some new ideas about how the world around us works: why things happen to us the way they do, why we meet the people we do. By the end of the fight, we have a lot of what we need to know to change our own life—to be happier, and make those around us happy.
PART 11
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 11: Target Shooting with a Blindfold On (2017, Arizona)
These teachings are taken directly from The Angel Debates The Devil, an ancient Tibetan teaching on emptiness by His Holiness the First Panchen Lama. 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.
PART 10
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 10: Is a Perfect World Possible When People Want Opposite Things? (2014, Sedona)
Four centuries ago there was a Tibetan master named the First Panchen Lama. 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 mind.
PART 9
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 9: Making the Impossible Possible (2014, Phoenix)
The traditional brief name of our text is An Argument with the Tendency to Think that Things are Real. It was written by His Holiness the First Panchen Lama, Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen, who lived 1570-1662. He was above all an extraordinary practitioner, thinker, and meditator; a yogi; a poet and writer among the greatest who have ever lived; and an ardent pacifist who once stopped a war single-handedly, by walking out between the opposing armies.
PART 8
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 8: If Einstein’s Wrong, Problems Disappear (2014, Phoenix)
This is an argument which occurred one time between Wisdom and her opponent, whose name was The Tendency to Think that Things are Real. It all started when Wisdom was identifying what the word “Mahamudra” meant, at three different stages in a person’s life: in the way things normally are for them; in the way they are as this person practices the spiritual path; and as they are when the person reaches the fruit of their practice.
PART 7
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 7: Melting Disagreements Away (2013, Phoenix)
Here is 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. The meditation comes from ancient Tibet, and anyone can learn it, to help with a problem we’ve gotten stuck in.
PART 6
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 6: How to Watch Your Thoughts (2013, Phoenix)
Our whole life, we’ve had thoughts going through our mind. They tell us if we’re happy or angry, if we love somebody or we don’t. The chatter is almost constant, year after year, for a whole lifetime.
The ancient Tibetans said that we could learn how to watch these thoughts. And then we could learn how to make them more clear, more peaceful. And then we could improve our job, our relationships, and our happiness, day to day.
PART 5
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 5: A Simple Path to Happiness (2012, Phoenix)
We come across lots of problems and challenges in life, and we try to do the right thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But what if we’ve just been seeing everything the wrong way? Could a little shift in how we see things fix our life forever?
PART 4
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 4: Getting Your Life To Work In A World That Isn’t What It Seems (2012, Phoenix)
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.
PART 3
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 3: A Weekend Party to Stop War (2011, Phoenix)
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.
PART 2
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 2: How to Meditate and How Not to Meditate (2011, Phoenix)
In America, we’re new at meditating, and we’re still making a lot of mistakes. We can learn to avoid these, and have a really great meditation practice, if we listen to the wisdom in this book. Using highlights from the meditation section of this spiritual classic which has never before been translated or taught in the west, we will go through the traps that can ruin our meditation, and learn how to meditate correctly, for peace, focus, and spiritual enlightenment.
PART 1
The Devil Debates an Angel, Part 1 (2011, Phoenix)
Sometimes we hear a voice in our head telling us to do something that might not be so good to do. We tell it to go away, and then it surprises us by talking back. What’s worse, the voice is sometimes quite convincing.
400 years ago in Tibet there lived the First Panchen Lama, very much like the Dalai Lama. He wrote poetry, he knew dance, he was the greatest thinker of his time and also managed to stop a war once, single-handedly, by walking out between the two armies.