You can check the Tibetan calendar online here for the Tibetan 10th & 25th days of the month. We meet at 7 pm.
Please confirm to Ron on 027 641 5346 or aquazonenz@yahoo.co.nz if you are interested in coming along.
The purpose of an offering feast:
An extract from Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s book Fearless Simplicity – The Dzogchen Way of Living Freely in a Complex World, Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 2003 describes the outer, inner and innermost meaning of Tsok in some more detail:
We make a feast offering, a tsok, in order to be in harmony with all the masters of the lineage, the
dakinis, and the guardians of the teachings. The Vajrayana feast mends any rift, reconciles any disharmony that may have taken place. When people don’t get along for small reasons, they get together and throw a party so that everything is cleared up, forgiven and forgotten. In the same way, we may have fallen into disharmony with the teachings, or there may be disharmony among Dharma friends. All this can be cleared up by throwing a ganachakra feast. We make a party where we drink a little wine, eat good food, and have a good time together. This is the outer meaning.
The inner meaning of feast has to do with the fact that the food and drink, which have the nature of means and knowledge, enter your mouth and the mandala of your physical body in the form of unconditioned nectar. The nature of great bliss permeates the 72,000 channels in your subtle body, and this feeling of ease and bliss suffuses your physical being so that all the channels that were bent, withered, or tangled are straightened out and fully opened up. The deities that dwell in this mandala of your body, all the dakas and dakinis, are given this offering of unconditioned great bliss that is indivisible from emptiness. Imagine that they all get intoxicated with the taste of great bliss and are fully satisfied. This complete internal harmony is the inner meaning.
For the innermost level of feast, you acknowledge the basic space of your being, called dharmadhatu, the immensity of your empty nature, as the offering tray for the feast offerings. The feast articles themselves are the cognizant, awake quality that is present within this emptiness. Your unconditioned nature, manifest in actuality, its increase in experience and vision, your awareness reaching culmination, and the exhaustion of concepts and conditioned phenonmena, as well as the six lamps and the display of awareness – all these are the innermost feast articles. In short, when these articles don’t leave their tray, everything that appears and exists is part of the innermost feast. In this way, when everything is spontaneously experienced as being pure – a purity that is free of dualistic clinging to subject and object – everything on the innermost level is in harmony as well.”