Hard Light Center Of Awakening Meditation Center

The Hard Light Center of Awakening is an organization founded and directed by Mark Griffin as a forum for the study of spirituality and meditation. Mark is a Meditation Master who is firmly established in the advanced samadhi states—rare strands of consciousness that lead to remarkable perception and spiritual accomplishment.

The study of spirituality is very subtle. It deals with a spectrum of experience that is entirely different from our day-to-day world. The real study lies within, beneath the layer of language, beyond words and symbols as we understand them. It is the Teacher’s role to bring the student into direct relationship with this profound inner mystery.

There are actually two teachers – the outer teacher and the inner teacher. The outer teacher is a guide and a coach, demonstrating how to harmonize the inner and outer realities. This outer teacher prepares the student for engagement with the real teaching, which takes place on the inner planes. The inner teacher is found through a dialogue of discovery and gradual recognition of the Self.

Mark Griffin is a spiritual teacher or Guru who transmits the teachings and practices of yoga masters known as siddhas, spiritual adepts who have fully realized their true nature and who have the capacity to transmit the light of awakening to sincere spiritual seekers. The process of awakening is an experiential matter, a path one travels rather than a matter of belief.

We live in a time when many in the West seek to undertake the great journey of spiritual awakening. Success in this endeavor requires a reliable guide and a map of the territory to be traversed. Mark Griffin is a spiritual teacher or Guru who transmits the teachings and practices of yoga masters known as siddhas, spiritual adepts who have fully realized their true nature and who have the capacity to transmit the light of awakening to sincere spiritual seekers. Siddhas embody the teachings they convey to others and empower seekers to realize the truth they teach in their own lives. The process of awakening is an experiential matter, a path one travels rather than a matter of belief. Nevertheless, this process can be more readily understood and appreciated if it is situated in the context of yoga spirituality and the vocabulary that expresses yoga’s esoteric principles and practices.

All great religions or wisdom traditions contain contemplative teachings and practices. Yoga is the essence of the religious and mystical traditions that originated in. Since the 1960s, meditation masters from have transmitted teachings and practices of yoga to receptive seekers in the West who yearn for inner peace, genuine happiness, and an experience of the divine. Swami Muktananda was one of these great masters. He sought to create a “meditation revolution” by awakening the kundalini, the dormant spiritual energy of those seekers who came to see him during his three world tours in the 1970s and early 1980s. Mark Griffin was among the earliest of Muktananda’s Western disciples to receive shaktipat initiation in 1976. After years of intense sadhana or spiritual practice, Griffin entered the profound state of nirvikalpa samadhi and awakened to his true nature. After Muktananda died, Griffin continued to study with Kalu Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa, great Tibetan teachers of the Kaygü tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. He subsequently began to teach and to transmit shaktipat to sincere seekers, establishing the Hard Light Center of Awakening in 1989 as the vehicle for guiding his students through weekly study and practice sessions, day-long meditation intensives, and retreats.