http://www.thevalleyretreat.co.uk/

Rob Dowling, The Valley Retreat, Truro (2026)

16/03/2026

We have to remember when this teaching (heart sutra) was first given on vulture peak, Bihar, India there were many people present who fell unconscious. Because what this is describing is not something you can pull into your existing frame of reference. This is like pouring boiling water into a paper bag. The ordinary concepts we have for managing our life in samsara cannot contain emptiness. Emptiness is not just another concept, a better concept, a buddhist concept, it is the dereification of all concepts. And when you take this reification or solidification out what you have is playtime because you can't make anything. You're just in the flow, in the move and you stay with that

- James Low

28/01/2026

We allow ourselves to be deluded because of the basic proposition anything is better than nothing. Nothing is the big fear. That there will be just some empty void, a desolation, an abyss. The abject condition of falling out of the dreamed hope, the paradise in which all that seemed to contain and reassure and validate our existence is experienced as a bunch of empty signifiers, as insubstantial as the fluff on a dandelion at the end of its life and that the winds of fate just blow us hither and thither and in that fear we want to cling to something and it doesn't really matter what it is and that is truly desolate that we sell our soul for a mess of pottage

- James Low

20/01/2026

Dear dharma police I fully appreciate that you are more advanced than me (that is not difficult), you question my motivation and wish to put me in dharma jail. Please can I humbly request that instead you simply be more advanced somewhere else. Whilst clearly deluded it appears that some of the posts shared here have some benefit for me and perhaps some others. Please can you be happy for us. I do not wish to argue as I am often very tired by such differences of opinion. Life is short. Please go on your way with good luck. I wish you well

- An old fat fool (Rob)

11/01/2026

If you just had one product some people would like it and some people wouldn't like it. So we hear that the buddha taught 84,000 different dharma teachings because there are different people with different backgrounds. Is this true? When you take the wrapper off what's inside the 84,000 different dharmas, it all tastes the same. It's all emptiness, absence of inherent self-nature, impermanent and co-dependant arising. What else is there? Nothing! 84,000 dharmas all with the same ingredients but in slightly different proportions. That's all. There is not a lot to understand but it is hard to live. It's easy to forget. Because it's not about accumulating knowledge and ideas. Its about entering into this domain of spontaneous experience, which is to be the ground in its emergence. Which is what we all are. We are all the spontaneous emergence of the ground. That's all there is

- James Low

10/01/2026

This is the nature of the teaching; nobody can give you anything. The dharma teacher shows you how you stray from yourself

- James Low

09/01/2026

(the guru yoga of the white Ah); this kind of practice will not make you feel stronger and better because its designed to allow the formulation, this is better, this is worse, to go free. What you get is nothing. The buddha says the nature of the mind is nothing. Awareness is nothing. This is the understanding of all the buddhas, nothing. But we want something and when you get something you really get nothing because you get nihilistic nothing because every something you've ever had has vanished. When you were six years of age may be you got some very nice shoe, if you want to put these shoes on your feet now then you have to be like the ugly sisters in cinderella, you have to cut your toes off. They won't feet you anymore. They're out of date. They're time has gone. Everything is vanishing. This is not a punishment. This is not a punishment

- James Low

04/01/2026

Getting lost is very easy. You can become fixated by anything. This is the shadow side of human creativity and imagination. You can become obsessed by Star Trek you can spend a lot of time and energy making a costume so you look like Dr. Spock. People do that and they meet in conventions and all greet each other and feel at home because they are the one's with the true faith. They know what is really important and people do that with stamp collecting, with collections of little painted model soldiers made of lead, there are all sorts of amazing groups of people fixated on what for me is weird s**t but for them is something incredibly meaningful. And in terms of dharma this is really, really helpful to see that. The energy, the potential of the mind can be poured into anything. It can be poured into developing techniques of torture, it can be poured into how to exploit and cheat other people, to develop scams that will get you to send them money when you are not going to give them anything in return. We know that through the Internet all kinds of negative mental formations are acted out. So the meditation is very simple but very important because it gives us the chance of seeing the limiting pathways that exist for us, hovering on the edge ofmour attention and which will take us into familiar territory and that can encourage us to stay to the task, staying grounded, simple and attentive

- James Low

04/01/2026

Humor allows us to see that ultimately things don’t make sense. The only thing that truly makes sense is letting go of anything we continue to hold on to. Our ego-mind and emotions are a dramatic illusion. Of course, we all feel that they’re real: my drama, your drama, our confrontations. We create these elaborate scenarios and then react to them. But there is nothing really happening outside of our mind! This is karma’s cosmic joke. You can laugh about the irony of this, or you can stick with your scenario. It’s your choice

- Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

01/01/2026

Once we start to see I lie to myself all the time, I cheat myself by believing that the impermanent is permanent, we can start to relax. That's what I am doing, I don't need to do that because it is a doing, if you don't do a doing it will be ok. Things stop when you stop doing them. You don’t have to do anything to stop them, you just have to not do them, not doing is not energetic it doesn't do any damage to you. It won't drain you, it won't exhaust you, you just stop doing it

- James Low

31/12/2025

We are the children of space, our real nature is space, we are ungraspable. We have all these stories about ourselves but they don't sum us up. So from the practice of dzogchen the key thing is to start to live in the presence of the moment and to accept the absolute impermanence and flow of all phenomena. To move from control and avoidance towards a lived vibrant participation. Which means never being sure, never being settled. Why do we want to be settled. What is the value of safety. Things are always occuring. What are you going to nail it to. Samsara is a state of terrible amateurish DIY in which we are all try to nail ourselves onto secure territory with drills and we are putting it through our toes and our eye balls, we are all pinning ourselves to things that just doesn't work. You put something on the shelf and it falls down. You create a sense of who you are, you think you've now got a good relationship and suddenly it's gone, how the hell did that happen. You think I put all these hours into working it out, I thought it was going to work out this time, where the hell's it gone. We're not trained, we're not skilled tradesmen

- James Low

23/12/2025

Our understanding of Buddhism should not be just gathering many pieces of information, seeking to gain knowledge. Instead of gathering knowledge, you should clear your mind. If your mind is clear, true knowledge is already yours. When you listen to our teaching with a pure, clear mind, you accept it as if you were hearing something which you already knew

– Shunryu Suzuki

17/12/2025

The world doesn't stop. The world goes on. We don't do it. We are much, much less important than we think. The egoic fantasy that I as a separate entity different from other entities, that's delusion, when it dissolves, the flow of the world continues, as it does and we are there. The less participative or engaged we are in that moment, the more the inherent lucidity or clarity or luminosity of what's occuring arises. That is to say a thought comes and vanishes. What's the nature of the thought. It has no substance. It appears and disappears, like a wave in the ocean. The ocean is water, the wave is water. When we see just the wave, we don't see just the water of the ocean. The wave appears to be something other than the ocean. So when a thought arises in the mind this is just a little wave between silence and spaciousness. This wave arises and descends and vanishes. We say 'oh sometimes it's a very choppy, stormy Sea'. We see many waves coming all at once. We're just sitting. We've got space. It's just movement. Movement of emptiness. Nothing is born. Nothing is established. So it doesn't have to be corrected

- James Low

Rob Dowling

16/03/2026

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