Third Floor (Vajrayāna)

Intro

  • The Third Floor emphasizes transformation through imagination, culture, and symbolic study. At this stage, students explore how rituals, art, and lifeworlds function as educational tools that reshape perception. Through these methods, the curriculum encourages imaginative reframing and embodied awareness as ways of deepening wisdom and compassion.

  • This level also introduces the advanced contemplative exercises traditionally known as the stages of perfection. In secular educational terms, these are framed as processes of imagining perfection and internalizing perfection, leading toward practices of open awareness that rest in the spacious nature of mind.

Educational Pillars & Arches

  • Philosophical Orientation: comparison of Vajrayāna perspectives with earlier Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna approaches, showing continuity and transformation.

  • Investigative Study of Wisdom: analysis of how symbolic practices, subtle body models, and cultural lifeworlds represent ways of understanding the nature of experience.

  • Imaginative Reframing: using ritual, art, and visualization as educational tools for transforming perception and reframing self and world.

  • Stages of Perfection:

    1. Imagining Perfection — creating an idealized framework for perceiving self and world.

    2. Internalizing Perfection — embodying and stabilizing these reframings through symbolic and embodied practice.

  • Compassionate Application: understanding teacher–student roles, community rituals, and service as forms of compassionate recentering within a cultural context.

  • Open Awareness Practices: Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen introduced through secular exercises for identifying with the space of awareness beyond conceptual reference points.

Climbing onto the Roof

The Third Floor transforms study through imagination, symbolism, and embodied practices, leading students toward new ways of reframing perception and cultivating wisdom and compassion together. From here, they ascend the Grand Stairway to the Golden Roof, where all levels of the palace come together in absolute fulfillment and integration.