Host Michael Taft speaks with Vajrayana teacher Rin’dzin Pamo about Vajrayana meditation practice currently, adapting practices for our times, their practice of The Mind Illuminated, the role of the guru in practice, how meditation practice is like engineering (and Jiu Jitsu), and much more.
Rin’dzin Pamo (also known as Charlie El Awbery) is a British born Vajrayana practitioner living in the US. They were an apprentice in the Aro gTér tradition of Tibetan Buddhism for twenty years and are an experienced Dzogchen meditator and mentor.
Rin’dzin received the London School of Economics Fei Xiaotong prize for their Masters research on the Chinese tech industry. They worked on international development projects in India, Africa and the Middle East and as a program director for Amnesty International.
Rin’dzin writes at VajrayanaNow.com and has recently been publicly journaling their progress through Culadasa’s system The Mind Illuminated.
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Thanks for the interview. I really enjoyed their(?*) voluminous TMI series. As I come from a sutric approach, I especially like how they delineate the Sutris-Vajrayana differences with and how that shapes seemingly similar practices like Shi-né/Samatha-Vipasanna *Sorry, but I’m a complete noob to these new pronouns norms.
Some links:
• Timur Karan’s Preference falsification from the book Private Truth, Public Lies (1997): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
• Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs
• And two terms that are new to me – Failure modes and failure causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_cause
with all due respect for the person and the achievements, that gender pronoun nonsense newspeak tyranny so gets to me that it put me off even listening to the podcast. Please leave postmodern ideologies out of these spirituality related discussions – I also suppose you see the irony in „deconstructing the self“ only to reconstruct an even more illusional gender identity?
Sorry, Claude. Rin’dzin gets to choose whatever pronoun they like, whether you like it or not. I’m sure you see the irony in the fact that you’re enraged and judgmental about their choice.