WELCOME TO THE VILLAGE TEMPLE - A WORLD COMMUNITY
Village Temple is spiritual center, a Temple, where in search of peace, our community can
gather in friendship, contemplation and meditation.
The Village Temple community provides spiritual support for people endeavoring to lead an examined life, those dedicated to bringing a loving equanimity to this precious human existence and thereby, bringing peace to the world.
The ancient wisdom traditions all speak of the true nature of our essential humanness, the true nature of our being. These traditions observe that at our core, the human spirit is inherently peaceful, loving, infinite, ever-present and self-aware. And because this is our inherent nature, it is what we already are.
Therefore, there is nothing to attain. There is nothing more to become. It is not possible to become what we already are.
Rather than inspiring to be a better version of ourselves, our spiritual journey is simply a matter of self recognition, a recognition of the true or pure nature of self, as differentiated from the everyday egoic self that we assume ourselves to be. Simply put, it is a discovery, an awakening to the essential nature of being.
Through discovering the essence of our being as it truly and already is, our personal, egoic suffering, in all its forms, can gradually come to an end.
Once we cease to identify as separate, limited, finite beings, we can become liberated, free from what the Buddha called the wheel of Samsara. We are then able to offer our infinite being, our inherently peaceful presence, as a gift to the world.
The Village Temple explores what is referred to as, the direct path to spiritual awakening (direct as opposed to progressive). The direct path facilitates the experiential discovery as to the true nature of being. It points us to the very essence of being itself.
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Following this insight, the teachings then focus on stabilizing the lived experience of this realization, thus bringing our human experience, as well as our everyday behavior, into greater and greater alignment with this new understanding.
The Village Temple hosts weekly gatherings, exploring the wisdom of ancient traditions, mainly focusing on teachings inspired by the Buddha, as interpreted and taught by contemporary masters.
The Temple's gatherings, traditionally called satsangs, provide a space and opportunity for our community to come together in friendship, meditation and self inquiry to aid in this ancient but all too rare discovery of the true nature of the human spirit.
Ultimately, we discover that we are not the limited, separate, vulnerable, egoic beings that we previously believed ourselves to be. This discovery reveals our true nature as infinite, self-aware being, our Buddha-nature.
Only after we awaken to our Buddha-nature can we begin to stabilize in the new realization that what we always and already are is unlimited, self-aware being, pure openness, pure awareness itself.
This transformative understanding arises from a subtle (but life changing) shift of perspective. It is a shift of attention away from the contents of our egoic experience to the open, spacious and unlimited awareness that is the essence of and at the very core of our being. We see that what we are is simply a spacious, infinite, presence.
The key to this discovery is to be knowingly aware of awareness itself. Put even more simply, it is being aware of being aware. This core teaching is so simple that it is very often misunderstood and consequently, many times it is missed all together.
Village Temple - Bringing peace to the world, one awakening at a time.
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