90 Alan Has Arranged a Marriage with Avalokiteshvara for Us

90-2016 - Alan Has Arranged an Marriage with Avalokiteshvara for Us

Olaso. So, somebody left me a note here. Here’s a question. I’ll answer it for everybody. The difference between conditioned consciousness, that pointing out instruction from Padmasambhava yesterday, conditioned consciousness and primordial consciousness. Is it that conditioned consciousness is contaminated by the illusion of a false reality or false, misleading, phenomena? Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And then, this may be right, who knows, about the six-footed stove? The person who wrote this, unidentified, no problem. [Oh it’s Elisabeth, where is Elisabeth? There’s Elisabeth. Thank you.] Could be. It’s something I simply don’t know at all, but it’s a good, it’s a good guess. The six-footed stove, could it be the one like Tenzin Palmo where the, you’re sitting in your meditation box, two arms, two legs, one head, one body, that’s a good, it’s, it’s a good number of arms, better than three or one. And that goes for the legs also, much better to have two than three. [Laughter] And one head, it’s very odd if you have two heads, [laughter] because you didn’t know where to put the seed syllable. And one body, so that could be, it could be, [laughter] it could be, maybe so. Really, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe that’s it though, that could be, maybe, that could be a jackpot. Very good. So, [laughter continues] time to go to meditation.

[01:39] Please find a comfortable position, preferably seated for this one, preferably seated, unless you’re uncomfortable. If you’re uncomfortable, then any posture that sounds good to you.

[02:06] So the next section in the text, in this concluding chapter, is on guru yoga and again he gives this meditation. So I thought, well, why read about it when we can actually do it? But it just says one, one sentence of introduction, he said, “The best way to counteract obstructive forces, [so just kind of harmful energies that you can say they are obstructive forces, malevolent entities that might want to get in the way of your practice] avoid pitfalls, [as all kinds of ways we can go astray] and [the way to] enhance your practice [really kind of supercharge it, there’s this Tibetan term [Tibetan 02:43], is kind of like giving it that extra, extra boost. Enhance is good. The way to do that three-fold, that’s quite, quite big benefit] is to practice guru yoga.” Guru yoga. So let’s just do it. I’ll talk a little bit about it afterwards. But let’s do that.

[03:22] Meditation bell rings.

[03:37] So by way of a very brief introduction for myself before I read excerpts from the text, the central point of the practice of guru yoga is to realize experientially the indivisibility and non-duality of your own mind with the mind of the guru. But this is not a marriage of souls. This is not a union with somebody else’s mind. What happens if you happen to have two gurus or 20 gurus, 30 gurus? It gets very complicated. So not that. We’re speaking of the union of your own mind with the guru’s mind. The guru’s mind simply is rigpa, is dharmakaya. Don’t think of anything else, nothing less, there is nothing more. But this means the whole practice for guru yoga is to design, to melt away any sense of difference, any separation, between your conscious awareness – this ordinary consciousness of the present moment – and dharmakaya. So with the motivation to realize the identity of your own mind with rigpa, to see your own face as the dharmakaya, thereby achieve perfect awakening for the sake of all sentient beings, settle your body, speech and mind in their natural states.

[06:25] Come to that still point, which is the beginning, the middle and the end of the path; awareness resting in its own nature with no object, still, cognizant, clear.

[07:20] And now visualize Amitabha, Lord of the family, as the sentinel of mindfulness on the crown of your head, as the great compassionate one. So I think you’ve all seen images of Amitabha in the form of a Buddha, with the 32 major and 80 minor marks. Ruby red in color, glowing red. Not very large, but hovering immediately above the crown of your head, above the crown chakra. Lord of the family; there are the five Buddha families of Amitabha, Akshobhya, and so on. Lord of the Lotus family, to which Avalokiteshvara, Padmasambhava, Tara, all belong, for which the buddhafield of course is Sukhavati.

[08:25] So visualize the Buddha Amitabha radiant, ruby red light. His body is red in color like coral and has all the signs and symbols of enlightenment, including an ushnisha on his head. This is the crown protrusion and one of the major marks of a Buddha. So visualize this clearly as you can, viewing Amitabha as your guru.

[09:08] His hands are in the mudra of meditative equipoise, holding an alms bowl filled with ambrosia. I think you know the mudra – left hand below, right hand above, thumbs pressed together, symbolizing the union of wisdom and skilful means. And holding an alms bowl filled with ambrosia – amrita, the elixir of immortality of the deathless state.

[09:57] Imagine him upon a lotus and moon seat with his legs in the vajra asana, or full lotus; imagine at his heart, in his heart chakra, the seed syllable, the seed syllable of this entire family, Hri, red in color, and imagine rays of light, of ruby red light, flowing out in all directions. Invite your primary lineage gurus and dissolve them into him. So imagine rays of light being emanated in all directions out from the Hri, from his heart.

[10:58] And inviting in all the lineage gurus back to Padmasambhava, all the lineage gurus through time back to Amitabha himself, and your own root gurus, all receiving the call, being called from afar, so to speak, and all converging in upon and dissolving into, indivisibly, Amitabha.

[11:49] Directing your attention to the guru Amitabha, now of the nature of all of your gurus synthesized into one form, one being, the very embodiment of pristine awareness, make whatever supplications you know, or recite ‘I pray to the dharmakaya Amitabha, I pray to the sambhogakaya, the great compassionate one that is Avalokiteshvara, and I pray to the nirmanakaya Padmasambhava.

[12:28] So as you focus on the dharmakaya aspect, the most central aspect, the sheer embodiment of you own pristine awareness and Amitabha himself, you may, if you wish, recite the root mantra of Amitabha, very simple: Om Amitabha Hri. [AW recites one mala of the mantra Om Amitabha Hri]

[14:47] Then turn to the sambhogakaya form, the great compassionate one, Avalokiteshvara. We can recite one mala of the Om Mani Padme Hum. [AW recites 1 mala of the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum]

[16:16] And then once again in the spirit of supplication, we can turn to the nirmanakaya aspect, Padmasambhava, and we can recite the Vajra Guru mantra Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hung [AW recites 1 mala of the mantra Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hung]

[19:10] From the depths of your heart and not with mere lip service, completely place your trust in him with the conviction: You know whatever is to be done in this life, future lives and the intermediate state, or the bardo. Do so with such heartfelt reverence and devotion that your hair stand on end and you’re moved to tears. And each time you make this supplication do so in the manner of calling your guru from afar. And by so doing, scattered outer thoughts will swirl away and inner thoughts will nakedly arise as empty luminosity. Whatever experience arises due to the power of blessings from praying in that way, sustain it. It is said that it’s resolved, there will not be a single obstructing force or pitfall.

[20:37] So, simply let your awareness rest in its own place. And rather than effortfully visualizing Amitabha on the crown of your head, just rest in awareness. Let that appearance arise effortlessly, like a rainbow, simply appearing in the sky.

[21:40] Ever so gently, like holding a feather, sustain the visualization, sustain even more importantly the sense of the presence of Amitabha above the crown of your head. And whatever thoughts might arise, view them with your best approximation from the perspective of rigpa, and view each thought, whatever comes up, as a spontaneous expression, effulgence of pristine awareness, creations of the luminosity of your own awareness. And rest in stillness with your awareness empty, open, expansive and luminous.

[25:08] And evidently, as this appearance of Amitabha and the nature of Amitabha is nothing but an appearance of your own awareness, of the nature of your own awareness, then rest in the obvious truth that your own awareness is indeed indivisible from that of the guru, Amitabha.

[27:21] Meditation bell rings.

[28:19] Olaso. Very simple guru yoga, very central, very much within the current of the Padmasambhava’s lineage all together and very specifically the Lake-born Vajra, Dudjom Lingpa, very central. So, it’s quite clear, quite obvious that some people just by disposition, temperament, call it past-life karma whatever it may be, some people have more devotion than another. Just like some are more artistic than others, some are very good at mathematics, some are not so much so, and so forth. They come with different dispositions, especially in this modern era, where there’s so much burnout on religion, which I totally, totally get. And then also coming, not being born in Tibet, not being raised with Om Mani Padme Hum, and you know, the deities and so forth, there can be something of a sense of otherness, you know, something outside one’s culture. We in, in the Abrahamic tradition – Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I don’t recall there being any depictions of the Divine with four arms. Don’t think so. [Laughters] So it’s not natural in terms of our acculturation in the modern world and modernity in the West.

[29:45] So what to do, what to do if we’re not so devotionally inclined? I think, not close to it. Not enough. When they say, ‘Alan, I don’t want to do it’ and then don’t do it. See how that works out, [AW laughs] especially with Dzogchen. What to do? Well, that occurred to me just recently, because actually I came in here with a totally empty mind. I had no idea what I’m going to say. [AW laughs] Normally I have something but today I came up with nothing at all. Empty head, empty mind. But it did occur to me, something popped up, finally, the tele-prompter came up with something. [Laughter]. And that is, in the modernity over some centuries now, they have this, for marriage, for marriage and the whole notion of romantic marriage, you find someone, you fall in love with, you, you court them, maybe you fall in love with them, and then love marriage. We all know of it.

[30:39] But in India to this day, it’s really still very common, arranged marriages. And it’s not, it’s not a matter of forcing, you know, your daughter, your son into a marriage, something like kicking and screaming and, you know, when they get married, they say, ‘I hate you’, ‘I hate you too’, you know, that doesn’t happen. But nevertheless, they are arranged marriages, somebody in the older generation is finding what they feel would be a really good match. And I haven’t really checked the marriage statistics there, but I think their divorce rate is actually lower than in the modern world and in the West. And I have no expertise there at all, I have no judgment, actually, if that’s what they want to do, and everybody’s happy with that. But what I know to be true, in this traditional culture of India, which is to this day, and of course it occurs in Jewish culture as well and I’m imagine many others as well, is that, in many cases, the couple who have been arranged to come together, they see the other person, they have no real objection, and they know they need to get married. And so they go along with it, they say, well, at least we’ll get along, you know.

[31:43] And then what often occurs, I mean, this is just a fact without any judgment from my side at all, is that in some cases they come together and they’re just kind of like each other, and then they’re living together, and living as man and wife, living and then gradually, gradually, they start to love each other. And then they really develop a very deep bond. And as the years go by, decades go by, it really didn’t matter whether it started out with romance, it wound up being really a true marriage of two people being very much in love with each other, having a deep commitment, genuine affection. And that happens, right And so, to use the old cliché, fake it until you make it. [Laughter]

[32:25] It’s a little bit like this here, you know, if you just don’t want to do devotional practices then don’t do it, do the practice you’d love to do. But this one here is very simple, very sweet, very straightforward. And if you don’t, you say, ‘Well, Alan brought me together with this Amitabha [laughter] till death do us part. Better not part at death, that would be the time to really bond. [Laughter] Just do the practice, you know, if you feel like it. You don’t have to feel, ‘Oh, I have tears flowing from my eyes, and I haven’t tremendously…’ Well, then, okay, so there’s no tears, that’s okay. It’s okay, no tears, that’s okay. [Laughter] Nobody will reprimand you. Just do the practice, do the practice.

[33:14] It’s really quite simple and elegant the dharmakaya form with Amitabha, then Avalokiteshvara, many of us have a strong connection with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. So that’s a natural. And then many of us have a connection with Padmasambhava, the nirmanakaya aspect. All of the same family, the same current; like the tip of the mountain, the peak of the mountain is Amitabha, and then flowing down into the stream of Avalokiteshvara and then manifesting as a human being, as a human being. Because Avalokiteshvara is not a human being, sambhogakaya form, archetypal form, right? But Padmasambhava was a human being, had human consorts, spoke in human language, and so forth. And so he was a human being, nirmanakaya.

[33:58] And then we come back to a simple truth. I mean, it’s just clearly, uniformly regarded as kind of an uncontroversial truth in Mahayana Buddhism, and that is as we attend to the guru, whoever we are, what we’re seeing is a reflection of our own light, right. What it is for everybody, see just your next-door neighbor, that’s reflection because we’re, again, we’re the painters, we’re the artists, inspired by that person over there, the next-door neighbor, inspired by the actual guru, he, him or her, old, young, Tibetan, Western, whatever. But the actual appearance is a reflection of our own minds, specifically our own karma. And that is what we see of the world, what we see of other people, how they actually appear to us, is very much a matter of our karma, dishing up, presenting these appearances. These appearances are called impure appearances because they are generated by karma and klesha, by karma and mental afflictions, and so we’re seeing impure appearances. And that is of course of ourselves as much as anybody else, but they’re impure appearances.

[35:07] But then here, this path is kind of like, this whole path of Dzogchen is very compressed, rather than being laid out over many, many, many, many lifetimes, it can be compressed into even one lifetime. And so in the course of one lifetime, when you first attend to the person who maybe will become your guru, you’ll have one perception. So, I remember, I don’t know that… I must have seen that. I remember when I was on my way to Dharamshala, first time from India, from Germany, Switzerland actually, Switzerland, by way of Germany, flew off to India and made my way. And I took the train up to Pathankot, the long overnight train from Delhi to Pathankot, hill station. And from there, you get a bus, a bus that winds its way up in the mountains to Dharamshala. And I was staying in this dingy little hotel room, and there was a picture of that photo on the wall of the Dalai Lama, must have been a Tibetan hotel. And I looked at that photo. And I thought, yeah, he’s the king, he’s the king of Tibet. I hope I can find a real lama when I’m there. [Laughter] You know, yogi, living in a cave, you know, long beard, you know, something really cool, something really yogi like, and not a king, I didn’t really want a king.

[36:22] That was my first perception. So, gotta start somewhere, [I] started with the king. But as one, now moving away from my story, as one then purifies the mind, purifies the mind, purifies the mind, and you reach the Mahayana path of accumulation, then, whoever your guru is, you actually see the guru as a buddha, as a nirmanakaya. Not necessarily with all the 32 major and 80 minor marks. But when you look upon the guru, you actually have a sense, ‘I’m looking at a buddha, I’m seeing a buddha’, right. If it’s a woman, still looks like a woman; if it’s an old man, looks like an old man, a middle-aged woman is your guru, looks like a mid… But, like when you look at Einstein, I mean, pretty much we all know, I’m looking at the face of a genius. He’s like archetypal genius. Yeah, and that, ‘Boy, there’s Einstein’. And we just immediately say, ‘Boy, there’s a genius,’ you know. Or likewise, great singers and so forth, just see them as, ‘That’s what I see, I’m seeing the greatest genius of the 20th century’.

[37:31] You look at your guru, and you see a Buddha. So the guru that appears to you, you’re not imagining, you’re not pretending, you’re just having a sense of I’m in the presence of the sacred, I’m in the presence of a buddha. And it wasn’t that the guru necessarily changed during those years or decades or lifetimes of practice. But the veils of your own awareness are fading away. And so instead of seeing the king, what is a really nice person, a very charismatic teacher, Lama Yeshe was incredibly charismatic, incredibly sweet. It’s easy to get hung up there, because he was just so sweet and so smiling. And then you can stop there, you know, you can, it’s very easy to do, and then I kind of stopped there. But if you keep on looking deeper, deeper, deeper, you, well, but it is really, it’s not like X ray vision, you’re purifying your mind, just purifying your mind. And the veils of obscuration created by karma and klesha are fading away, fading away until you look at the person like Lama Yeshe, and then you see, ‘oh, a buddha, for me he’s a buddha’.

[38:35] It’s not that you expect everybody else to look at him and see he as, as a buddha. And it’s, you know, it’s just, in my mandala, this person appears to me as a buddha. And there is a buddha where this guru is, and that’s what I’m attending to. There is a guru where this cup of tea is, the buddha mind is there, you know. Or the dog’s tooth, you know, the dog’s tooth, where the dog’s tooth is, there are the blessings of the Buddha. So it’s not really astonishing that the rays of light would emerge from it. If you’re attending to that as a relic of the Buddha, what’s the problem? You know, you’re seeing the dog’s tooth as a relic. The dog’s tooth is empty of inherent nature anyway, it’s not inherently a dog’s tooth. And you’re viewing it as a relic of the Buddha. And the Buddha is there, the Buddha mind is there, and therefore, it rises, the reality rises to meet you. And you get blessings from what other people see. Is it a dog’s tooth and for other people that’s all it is, is now not a special tooth. It’s just a dog’s tooth for everybody else. And that’s what they see and what they’re seeing is valid. Your view doesn’t refute theirs. But then theirs doesn’t refute yours either, you know.

[39:53] And so, on that trajectory then, get to that Mahayana path of accumulation and you just, when you’re with a guru, you sense, ‘This is the Buddha, right. For me.’ And it’s not just imagining it or something like that, it’s, ‘This is the Buddha for me.’ And you continue practicing and move along that stage, that path of accumulation, path of preparation, and then you reach the second of those four yogas, right, if you’re starting out in that yoga of single pointedness on the Mahamudra track, then you have reached that second, that second yoga, a freedom from conceptual elaboration where you’re viewing emptiness from the perspective of rigpa. So it’s not just ordinary Mahayana arya bodhisattva bhumi, that’s actually become a vidyadhara, a fully ripened vidyadhara, you’ve achieved the second yoga, freedom from conceptual elaboration. And you look at the guru and now you see the guru from that perspective, you see the guru, if you’re on this, this track, this lineage, then you see the guru as Avalokiteshvara. That’s what you see. And not really like that. You don’t see him like a painting. This is the best that the artists can do. It’s a nice, it’s a nice image. It’s accurate for sure, and it is a nice image.

[41:13] There are better artistic renditions and, you know, poorer, cheaper and less, more, and expensive artistic renditions, but what they are is renditions that we can see with our impure vision, whereas the actual form, the actual appearance of sambhogakaya is something that cannot be seen and cannot be imagined by anybody who is a commoner, and that is one who has not reached that arya bodhisattva level. If you are there, then you see something nobody else sees, unless they’re also arya bodhisattvas, then you share the vision. So there’s intersubjective validation among arya bodhisattvas, so vidyadharas, they will have a lot in common in their perception, that people who have not gained that realization of emptiness by way of rigpa. Other people will be seeing something very different, right. And the higher does not negate the lower, the lower does not negate the higher, but they, when they look upon the guru they are seeing sambhogakaya, right. So then you don’t have to visualize Avalokiteshvara, they actually see Avalokiteshvara.

[42:15] So for those who know about this, and we hear that Khadro-la, when she gazes at His Holiness, looking through the window, as he was in this car he was driving by, and she saw, she actually visually saw 1000-armed Chenrezig, with rays of light emanating out in all directions. That tells something about His Holiness. It tells a lot about her, right. In principle, it could have been a dog’s tooth in the car, in principle. But it wasn’t, it was the Dalai Lama. But her vision was so pure. And those of you who have met her, or have heard her speak, sense the kind of guru devotion that she embodies and expresses. Then you will know, I think you will know certainly, as I did, I have a pretty crude mind, but when I sat with her seven years ago, I just, it was kind of like, I mean I’ve a really crude mind, really coarse, but even I could tell, ‘Oh, I am in the presence of purity here.’ And that would be quite extraordinary.

[43:28] And move up and then you see your guru as Amitabha. And that would be very good, be very good for you. So this simple practice, this very good one, very simple. I like it a lot. And so if you’re drawn to do it, then do it sometimes. [AW laughs] Why not? Like an arranged marriage, even if you don’t find tears flowing through your eyes and all of that, and you feel not devotional, well, let it be an arranged marriage. [Laughs] And maybe out of the practice itself. I don’t really mean faking it. Don’t try to pretend something you’re not experiencing. I never encourage pretense or hypocrisy. But to the best of your ability, if you got a little thimble full of devotion, then, then drink it, you know. Drink what you’ve got. Use it. You know, faith is like intelligence, it’s like shamatha, it’s like visualizing ability, it’s like learning how to play piano. You know, do it more and more, cultivate what you have, use what you have and it grows. It’s like anything else. And if you have an ability and you don’t use it, you have a capacity of faith, but you just never use it, it will remain as it is and won’t grow, probably, you know.

[44:42] So. So if you’re inclined to do it, and then just do it. Just go, go through the motions, as well as you can, not faking it, not doing it in a dry sterile fashion. Doing as well as you can, and then see whether the… They say when the faith arises, it’s like the, like the ice pack on the top of the mountain starts to melt. And it then flows down to. And when you receive blessing, and I think many of you, and I’m sure, I know many of you know what it’s like, that we’re not talking airy fairy la la land kind of nonsense here. But something that is as real as drinking a glass of milk, that you know what it’s like to receive blessings. And then doing this practice, you may receive blessings. Know you’re receiving blessings, you receive it, and knowing you’re receiving it. And then you know your refuge is really not far away.

[45:35] And in terms of the refuge in guru yoga for life, this is very good. You can always visualize, always have that sense, the imminent presence of the guru. If in case when you started, you have this sense of the guru of being maybe off in India now or someplace else, you know, it’s easy to do. I mean, your guru is, where is Lama Zopa right now, well, not here, right? And where’s His Holiness the Dalai Lama right now? I don’t know, not quite sure but not here. And so that’s very natural, it has a reality to it. That’s, you know, if your guru is from afar, well then call from afar, but then having that sense of utter imminence.

[46:14] So, the beginning, middle and end of the path are very helpful. And then, of course, at the end of life, I think you really couldn’t do any better than this. And that is, if you’re hopefully conscious, you’re clear as you’re dying, then if you’ve done this 100 times, 1000 times, then see, we’ll know what just recall, this would be really good to practice now, just holding that image, and not just the image, but that sense of your refuge, your guru on the crown of the head, that would be a really good idea. Whatever degree of faith or belief and trust one has in this tradition, I think you can all be certain that this can’t possibly be bad advice, right? Like, ‘Oh, no. Why did I do that?’ You know. If you did that, and it turns out all to be true – the teachings on Sukhavati and Amitabha, the possibility of taking birth in that pure land, and it all turns out to be true, boy, was that a good thing to do. And if it turned out to be not true, yeah, where’s the downside? [laughs] Actually, I’m quite confident it’s true.

[47:30] So, guru yoga, a lot to be said about it. I don’t think I’ll say much. But I would encourage you, if you’re following this path, think of your guru as Amitabha. And then Amitabha can manifest in a myriad of ways, right, a myriad of ways. There’s this guru, that guru, this guru, this lineage guru and so forth. And so when you look upon your guru, if you have the opportunity, if you look upon your guru, in person, look through in a way. This is so familiar, all of it really, so familiar. Look through the outer veneer – old, young, male, female, whoever, whatever maybe, east, west, skin color or whatever, look through that. Because that’s what you’re just getting with your karma; karma is throwing that up, that’s what you get, right. Look through that, seeing the emptiness of the appearance, the emptiness of the person, the emptiness of the person’s mind such where your guru is, there is no inherently existent human body, inherently existent human voice, inherently existent sentient being’s mind. It’s not there. So it’s not something you have to do away with. It’s just not there at all from its own side in the first place. What is there is the buddha mind, buddha speech, buddha body; attend to that and where your guru is, attend to Amithaba.

[49:02] So that wherever your guru has high realization, low realization, you’re looking through that, all the gradations in between, no realization, maybe just one step along the path further than you, which they say, in really degenerate times like now is enough to go one step further ahead in the direction you want to go. You look through all of that, just back to the emptiness of that, and from the very beginning, just look upon Amitabha as your guru, and do supplications to Amitabha, and when you’re listening, you’re listening to Amitabha. Or you’re listening to Avalokiteshvara, you’re listening to Guru Rinpoche. All of those will be just fine, no mistake.

[49:42] So I could give a whole little discourse on guru yoga within Shravakayana, within Mahayana, within Vajrayana; I’ve done it many times so I’m not going to do it again. But something I think is useful. That’s useful, I’m just not going to teach it now, I’ve taught it so many times. But if when I think of the flavor, kind of the ambience of the Shravakayana, that we see so clearly presented in such detail, such clarity in the Pali canon, and the nature of the practice, for example, the nature of this vipashyana, vipashyana practice, insight practice, something kind of leaps out at me, it seems kind of really obvious. And that is as we’re engaging the Four Applications of Mindfulness. So this is really grounded. Right, Andrea? It’s really, it’s just grounded in our experience, I really love that aspect.

[50:30] I was really introduced to this, you know, from a teacher and really kind of getting it when I left the Buddhist School of Dialectics. And when I was 24, I just went up in the mountains to meditate. And it just woo, karma ripened, reality rose up to meet me. And there was a monk who’d been meditating, being trained in Thailand for six years, he came to Dharamshala and we connected. And so he taught 100, he gave a 100 dharma talks, and cited many of the sutras. And we meditated together. He was interested in Buddha’s psychology, Buddha’s logic, so I shared a little bit from what I know. But just the other presence, the imminence of the Buddha, and the practicality, the, the teachings, right where we live, you know, nothing to imagine, no leaps of faith, just, and the ambience was as on those Four Applications of Mindfulness, which were really the focus of the practice back then. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I got. I left the Buddhist School of Dialectics to practice the Four Applications of Mindfulness. And lo and behold, the Theravada monk showed up. And he taught me the satipatthana, spent, we spent weeks and weeks together, so it’s, it was quite timely.

[51:40] But the theme, I just reiterate a little bit, is you’re closely applying mindfulness to appearances. You’re not analyzing appearances, you’re not engaging in an ontological probe by enlightening these teachings, you’re simply closely applying the mindfulness that you’ve already cultivated in shamatha. And you’re closely applying them, attending closely to the body as the body, internally, externally, internally and externally. You’re attending to the appearances, and so there’s a very strong emphasis on what I called yesterday in my talk, radical empiricism. That’s William James’s term, that’s exactly what we’re doing here. Radical empiricism, just attending with as little conceptual overlay as possible, just attending very closely, when I attend to the body as the body, that is, I’m seeing it as a body and not my body, or an attractive body, or ugly body, or, just seeing the body as the body. Then seeing what is actually appearing as it were from its own side, and scraping off the layers of seeing that which is impermanent, one’s own body is impermanent, it’s the body, one’s own body is impermanent, and scraping off any film, any scum of overlays of it being stable, durable, abiding, unchanging, which we very easily do, right? Internally, externally and internally and externally, and scraping off that conceptual cloud layer of seeing the impermanent as permanent.

[53:39] Some people, I’m sure – I haven’t done this for a long time – but some people, I’m sure, look upon their bodies as a source of pleasure. You know, like, this is my wellspring of pleasure, this is where I get all kinds of pleasure, my body, my young, healthy, attractive body, right. And on a relative level, well, yeah, you certainly are getting a lot of pleasure by way of your body. Is it authentically, truly a source of pleasure? Well, you’ll see. Scrape, scrape that away, and then you’ll see well in the bigger picture, as you’re attending closely. No. So you scrape away the veneer of seeing dukkha as sukha, that which is by nature unsatisfying if you’re looking at it as a source of well-being and seeing it as unsatisfying. So it’s attending closely and scraping away these conceptual veils that we’re superimposing on experience, right? And then of course, self. We look upon the body and ‘that’s me, that’s my face, me. That’s, that’s an image of me in the mirror. Oh, yeah, that’s the photo of me. Yeah, that’s, this is who I am. Oh, yeah, I’m a little, I’m getting a little bit too chubby around the waist,’ blah blah blah, and I am I am, you know, me, my body, my body, me. And scraping that away and saying, ‘This is just a body. How amazing! It’s nobody’s body! Nobody’s body, it’s just the body. Just a body. Doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s an empty house. Empty house.’ And what a relief!

[54:41] And it’s all this very strongly perceptual mode, really just looking at appearances and seeing the impermanence as [im]permanent, impermanent, dukkha as dukkha, not self as not self. Clearly with a scalpel separating that which is arising from moment to moment to moment, by way of all six sense doors, separating that from kind of a [55:03?], like Shravakayana [55:06?], separating that from all the stuff that we superimpose. And people start with their baby, baby, baby steps in that, with the kind of modern mindfulness movement; whatever comes up, just be present with what? Without the overlay of judgment, and so forth and so on. It’s good. It’s the right direction.

[55:24] So that’s the Shravakayana. Very strong emphasis on perception, just directly observing what is there. And then we go to the, you can say, The Second Turning Wheel of Dharma, the prajnaparamita, teachings on emptiness. And there we’re not satisfied, right, we’re not satisfied by simply attending closely to appearances. Because the appearances lie. They are suggesting that the things that are appearing are really out there from their own side as they appear in a dream, but with our intelligence, with prajna, with prajna, with intelligence that sees through appearances, then we see, ‘Oh, yes, the appearances are impermanent, dukkha, not self’. But all these objects are imputed upon appearance, the appearances themselves are empty of inherent nature, they’re just appearances. They don’t exist anywhere, right? And if we say ‘in the mind’, yeah, where’s that? Inside your head, outside your head, in between? Nowhere to be found, even the appearances are nowhere to be found. And they’re just that, we just see there’s nothing more to them.

[56:31] Appearances are just appearances, and they don’t even have any location. That’s pretty thin. How could anything be inherently existent if it’s not even located anywhere. So, appearances are nameless. They’re just what they are. And of course, they’re rising, non-dually from awareness itself, the appearances are simply like the creative effulgences of awareness. And so with intelligence, with prajna, the culmination of the sixth perfection, then we probe into the very nature of appearances, and the objects we impute upon them, and with intelligence, we penetrate, we tear the veil of appearances, to see the emptiness of all phenomena. So it’s using intelligence, it’s using intelligence I think in the most magnificent way we possibly can. Some people use intelligence for creating better cell phones, or as this gentleman yesterday told me about modern science, you know, with Western European intelligence we do better with all this technology, the sciences, medicine, and so forth. All of that, all that we see, all this bountiful display of the benefits of science and technology; it’s coming from intelligence, it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful.

[57:44] It’s very easy to see, if you go from here to India, you know, how, any difference? You know, in terms of, you know, everything? Yeah. Go to Tibet, even before the Chinese were there, and compare, you know. I mean, Tibet has a lot of charm, but you really want to live in a house with no toilet, no electricity, and so forth. So the benefits of this hedonic science are very evident. The benefits of contemplative science you have to look behind appearances, you have to look with intelligence. Any dope can look at a cell phone and say, ‘That’s cool.’ You have to be actually intelligent to live in a refugee community, which looks like the worst slum you’ve ever seen in your life. You have to look twice and say, ‘Yeah, but wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense. These are happier than the people I’ve seen anywhere else. What’s up with that?’

[58:43] Whereas back in 1992, we had this wonderful Mind & Life conference; it was on sleeping, dreaming and dying. And I remember all the professors, all the scientists, and one philosopher was one of my professors. We went off to Delhi first, of course, you have to go to Delhi and then head up to Dharamshala. And while we’re there, we had a couple of days just to kind of get acclimated and get accustomed to the time zone and all of that. And so we had a little van, as I recall, and all these professors, he’s really, you know, world class scientist and philosophers. And we went to Old Delhi, Old Delhi, into the really poor part. We walked through it. And it’s not abject poverty, you don’t see children with extended bellies, and it’s not extreme, like we sometimes see images from Northeast Africa and so forth. But it’s just poor by any standard. This is poor, you know, they’re really poor.

[59:35] But I remember one of, so these Stanford professors, you know, professors from fine universities here and there, as we’re going through this neighborhood of just, you know, poor India, what they noticed, one of them mentioned it to me, they look at the little kids playing, and they said, ‘These kids seem as happy as the kids in my children’s school. No less. They’re just playing. And they’re not thinking, Oh, I’m poor, I’m poor, my parents live on less than $2 a day. They’re just kids, living in the neighborhood and hanging out, like kids do everywhere.’ And they notice, you know, these people are no less happy than the people I know. But boy, the poverty level compared to any of us – incomparable. So it’s seeing it through appearances. Any idiot can see the benefits of hedonic science and technology. You have to be discerning to see the benefits of the eudaimonic, the benefits of Dharma, whether Hindu Dharma, Buddha’s Dharma and so forth. So there’s that whole area, that middle, that Second Turning of the Wheel of Dharma, prajnaparamita – seeing through appearances to a deeper reality that is veiled by the more, the relative truth, yeah, samvriti-satya.

[1:00:56] And then we have this Third Turning of the Wheel of Dharma, which is all about buddha nature. And so that segue smoothly over to the Dzogchen. And this is not just about looking at appearances, and it’s not, although we do look at appearances, and it’s not simply about using your intelligence, your power of reason and so forth, power of analysis, to rend the veil, to, you know, cut open the veil of appearances and see how phenomena actually exist as opposed to how they appear. This turning about buddha nature, it’s really intuitive. That’s the best put up word I can use in English, it’s intuitive. As the last of the four reliances is all about; rely not upon conditioned consciousness, rely upon primordial consciousness. Primordial consciousness as it floats up, like mist, floats up into where we live in our conscious minds, it floats up as intuition.

[1:01:55] That’s the best, I just don’t know any better word for it. And I know, I know exactly what I’m talking about. Not that I’m some expert on it. But I know it. As I know blessing; I know that that’s not just a fiction. I know there’s intuition that has a deep source. I know that too. It’s not a big deal. But I do know it. And I know it from 1971, when I picked up The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, my first book on Tibetan Buddhism, on Dzogchen. And I’m pretty intelligent, I mean, enough that as I read through this book, I knew that I understood very, very little. And intuitively, I knew this is it. This is what I was looking for. I’m home. This is it. And then 20 years later, I got to have teaching on it. [AW laughs] And those 20 years were very, very good. They were wonderful.

[1:02:44] But so, when we come to the guru yoga, the teachings of Amitabha, Avalokiteshvara, Guru Rinpoche. We come to guru yoga, we come to the teachings on pristine awareness, primordial consciousness. We won’t get it just by observing appearances. We won’t get it by just thinking a lot of really profound analytical thoughts. The teachings, if we ask, ‘Who is the audience of’, you know. It’s called [Tibetan 1:03:13] – the disciples for whom particular teaching is intended. It comes up a lot, right? Well, who is the intended audience for the teachings on Dzogchen? Your pristine awareness. It’s Padmasambhava speaking to your pristine awareness, and if you get in the way, then if intellect says ‘I’ll take, I’ll take over here.’ [Laughs] Or, you know, your perceptual mind, your radically empirical mind comes up and you say, ‘your guru… oh, a guru’s, ha, your guru’s… hum, he has not very good English, hum, guru, bad breath, hum.’ [laughs] You’ll miss it. If you can just listen with your heart, listen with your intuition, then your own awareness is listening to itself.

[1:04:04] And that’s called the mind-to-mind transmission. Whose mind to whose mind? I think it’s actually your own pristine awareness to your mind. I think it’s the mind to mind. I don’t really think it’s so much horizontal as vertical. It’s a mind-to-mind transmission, your rigpa to your mind. ‘Hello, I want to introduce myself. You’ve been ignoring me for a very long time, [Laughs] but I thought we’d get to know each other a bit.’ [Laughter continues] Pointing out instructions, your rigpa pointing out, and the guru is there as a reflection. Almost like your mind is like a projector, like a movie projector. And the guru is there as a projector. And then he has the appearance of pointing out your own rigpa to you. But the, and I’ll end on this note then we’ll get back to the text. But it reminds me of a student of mine who is very gifted for lucid dreaming. I told the story many times. But he came to one of the retreats in Phuket, at least one of them, very gifted, he had a lot of lucid dreams. And he said in one of his lucid dreams, he was just, in one of his dreams, he was just cruising along in his non-lucid dream. And a man appeared in his dream and said, ‘You know, this is a dream, don’t you? This is a dream.’ [AW laughs] He got pointing out instructions from somebody in his dream. He didn’t know he was lucid, but the man he met did. [Laughs] The man he met gave him pointing out instructions on his dream, and then he became lucid, of course. Okay, now who’s pointing out to whom? [Laughs]

[1:05:31] Olaso. So that’s my simple, rambling, introduction to guru yoga. If you’re not in love with guru yoga, then have an arranged marriage. See how it works out. [Laughter] Olaso. So here we are. I’ve just actually added a little bit. I don’t think it will mislead you. I added Amitabha’s root mantra ‘Om Amitabha Hri’, Hri being the seed syllable, of course. That’s about it. I didn’t add much more. So I think that should be okay. Very simple to the point. Quite lovely. And so that’s guru yoga. Then we go to page 274. Moving right along here.

[1:06:15] “Then this is the way to enhance your practice and reliance upon bodhicitta.” Love and compassion. So you see, so going through, kind of returning to and unpacking the fivefold practice. So we’ve just finished with the guru yoga, before that we have the deity yoga and now we have the bodhicitta. “All sentient beings in the six states of existence have been very kind to you in that they have all been your parents many times. This being the case, generate powerful compassion as you consider that they’ve had no opportunity to escape from the sufferings of the six realms.”

[1:06:52] “And while you’re exhaling through your nostrils, imagine that all your merit and roots of virtue gently dissolve into sentient beings. And imagine them finding immeasurable joy and happiness, and possessing incalculable merit as the cause of joy. And either verbally or mentally recite, ‘may all sentient beings be endowed with joy and the causes of joy.’ [So we’re halfway into tonglen practice, so there’s the breathing out.] And then while you’re inhaling, imagine all the suffering, evil and obscurations of all sentient beings converging and dissolving into yourself.”

[1:07:34] So I’m sure you know the visualization. Imagine this is like the form of the darkness or dark cloud, all of this converging upon yourself. But now, a nice twist, a very nice twist, actually, I really would encourage you to experiment with this. “Rather than visualizing yourself in your ordinary form, and imagine in your ordinary form, let alone your reified ordinary form and identity, and then trying to take upon yourself the sufferings and evils of all of the world, which could be rather a tremendous burden, imagine your own form as Avalokiteshvara. So purified form. So practice tonglen from that platform.” I’ve suggested it before. Here, he’s suggesting it. I guess I know where I came from.

[1:08:21] “Your own form as Avalokiteshvara blazes with greater splendor. [So it’s interesting. It’s like, what is it, well, like, I’ve just got to say, ‘like wood added to fire.’] So each time you bring in, imagine drawing in all the suffering, evil and obscurations; as you’re drawing this and imagining, relieving them from it, taking the burden from them away. So breath by breath, they’re feeling more and more light, more and more relief, more and more free, as this you’re taking upon yourself. Rather than having a sense that you’re enshrouded in darkness, burdened with darkness and so forth, imagine this is all like wood for the fire. So your body is a blaze, and blazing with greater splendor, like incandescent, radiant white light, as Avalokiteshvara. And as the darkness comes in, it’s just fueling the luminosity, enhancing the luminosity, like wood added to fire, and all sentient beings are freed from sufferings of each of the six states of existence.” That’s quite lovely.

[1:09:25] “Imagine that they’re free from all evil and obscurations, which are the cause of suffering, verbally or mentally recite ‘May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.’ And that is the cultivation of compassion.” So there’s really a beautiful quintessential teaching on tonglen, within the context of pure vision of yourself taking on this pure form of Avalokiteshvara, and taking upon the identity, dissolving your ordinary identity out of emptiness, then imputing, designating your identity as Avalokiteshvara. And from that platform, then practicing tonglen as the kind of the engine that drives you towards bodhicitta.

[1:10:11] Again, as I mentioned before, so now very briefly iteration, but when you’ve dissolved every aspect of your personality, your personal history, you’re devotional, you’re not devotional, blah, blah, blah, all those kind of personality characteristic, whatever they are, and however afflicted your mind be, when you’ve just dissolved that all, I mean, the whole issue of basta, okay, finish with that, and just dissolve it. It was constructed, deconstructed, dissolved into emptiness. When you are born again. You’re born-again Buddhist, and you’re rising as Avalokiteshvara, then you don’t bring any vestige of your personality, your temperament, I’m this kind of person, that kind of person. Your whole notion of your personal history, your strengths and limitations as this individual versus that, you just incinerated that, you just dissolve there without trace. So when you’re coming out, you’re Avalokiteshvara, that’s it, you’re simply this pure radiant embodiment of the compassion of all the buddhas. So whatever you thought about yourself is irrelevant now. It’s like you died, dissolved yourself, and this is, has no history. It is simple Avalokiteshvara and you rest in that identity, which is timeless.

[1:11:24] So that’s, for many of us certainly, including myself, that’s a much freer basis, unimpeded basis for cultivating loving-kindness and compassion. Because whatever I thought about myself prior to the meditation is now completely irrelevant. That’s very, very helpful. So, so relaxing. So, it’s such a relax. We can all do a deeper, deeper sense of relaxation, I have been emphasizing it for all eight weeks. And so there are ways, you know, there are techniques like breathing out, releasing, releasing and all that business, the infirmary, you’ve heard it many, many times, here’s a very deep way to relax. Because so much of our tightness, the stress, the constrictions, the knots, that tie our energy system up into knots and tie our minds into knot, it’s all bound up with who we think we are. Personal history, past experiences, relationship with mother, relationship with this person, that person, and then out of that all conjured up and detailed, and a pretty much fortified sense of I am, and I am this and I’m not that.

[1:12:29] And it’s just so relaxing just to say, oh, whatever it is. Enough. [AW blows] Just like that. [AW blows] Just release it. There’s no remnant, it’s like nirvana without a trace, without a remnant, just [AW blows]. And out of that emptiness, here’s where the PHAT comes to … just PHAT [AW pronounces the syllable PHAT]. And out of that emptiness, spontaneously arises Avalokiteshvara, with no baggage. It’s such a relief. It’s very, very relaxing, from your core. And this is a sustainable type of relaxation as long as you maintain that pure vision, that sense of identity, sustainable.

[1:13:15] “So if you’re moved to tears due to love and compassion, that is great love Maha Maitri and great compassion Maha Karuna. [If you have a sense of equality without bias towards all sentient beings, that is immeasurable love and immeasurable compassion, they become immeasurable if and only if they’re rested in the fourth of the Four Immeasurables, right – Equanimity.] Moreover, if you can meditate while in a state of undistracted practice on the essential nature of the mind, [Okay, now we just introduced the wisdom element] that is the connate samadhi of Maha Maitri and emptiness [of great loving-kindness and emptiness, bearing the essence of compassion. It’s called nyindjé tsawachen [Tibetan 1:14:04] – bearing the root of compassion and nyinpochen [Tibetan 1:14:10] – bearing the essence of compassion.] This is the root of Dharma of the sutra tradition of the Mahayana.”

[1:14:16] So that was a very rich paragraph there. He packed a lot into it. So there’s your practice of tonglen. If you ever wonder how do you practice, there’s a, I’ve never seen anything better than that. And on that platform, pure vision makes it all the more powerful. So more of it, “It is said that there’s nothing more profound than this in terms of protecting your own merit, purifying obscurations and as a wheel of protection. [So we have many preliminary practices such as Vajrasattva, prostrations, guru yoga, Mandala offering, and so forth, for the sake of accruing merit, purifying obscurations. There are some elaborate practices, visualization and so forth in sadhana practice of the wheel of protection, within the mandala, to protect you from these obstructive forces. It says there’s nothing more profound than this, just that practice there in what, two paragraphs, there’s nothing more profound than that. Often the greatest profundity is found in the greatest simplicity.] There are said to be 640,000 Atiyoga tantras, these are the Dzogchen tantras, among which 17 are presently available.” And here’s a little classification.

[1:15:26] “There are 17 little child tantras, 17 mother and child tantras of the mind class [Bear in mind that there are three classes, of the expense, of the mind and of the pith instructions. And] so there are [what was that?] 17 mother and child tantras of the mind. [So, so little child tantra] 17 mother and child tantras of the mind class, the quintessence of the dakinis, khandro nyingtig, and the quintessence of the clear expanse, [Tibetan 1:16:01], the quintessence, a quintessential commentary of the guru, and so on. These are some of the principal Dzogchen tantras, the primary meaning of all of them is this clear light leap over, the direct crossing over.”

[1:16:13] So he’s now, he moved, he’s covered the five, the five-fold practice. And since this is a text on the union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen, he’s now giving a brief explication of the, I’ll just say direct crossing over, the clear light, ösel (Wylie: od gsal), direct crossing over. It’s called clear light, because it’s utterly, from start to finish, this phase of Dzogchen practice is 100% visionary, is visionary and entails no visualization. It’s quite interesting. No visualization, no effortful imagining this or imagining that. It’s visual, but it’s all spontaneously actualized. And, of course, that assumes you’re resting in rigpa. So the appearances that are arising, are rising directly out of rigpa. And you see that.

[1:16:58] “This is the practical instruction on awakening without meditating.” And it’s called that. It’s called that because once again, you’re not doing anything; when you’re practicing the tögal, or the direct crossing over, you’re not, you’re not actually doing anything, you position your body in a certain posture, and then you just hang out in that posture. You direct your gaze in a certain way, which is not complicated at all. And then, then you just sit there, resting in rigpa. That’s a little footnote that people sometimes forget about. Because the postures are really easy. And the gaze is really, really easy. The resting in rigpa is easy if you are resting in rigpa, but if you’re not, not so much.

[1:17:45] So that’s what he means by ‘without meditating’ just as in the trekchö practice, when you have access, when you’ve identified rigpa, that’s when you’re really ready to practice non meditation, which we, you know, did a little approximation of it, because you’re not doing anything at all. Right? You’re not activating your samsaric mind to do anything at all, you’re just releasing that completely without trace and resting in what’s left over. That’s rigpa. And you simply rest there and let the sun rise, you know, let it simply come more and more manifest. And it’s really like the sun rising and then, and then melting away all the fog, like round fog and so forth, and all that haze , it’s all melted away until it’s just crystal clear. And then you have an unmediated realization of rigpa.

[1:18:29] And on that basis, then you can, you’re fully bonafide, qualified, to enter into the direct crossing over practice. And so this is the practical instruction on awakening without meditating. And it is the profound practical instruction on liberating – liberation by means of observation. You literally are using your eyes, it would be good to be sighted, it would be difficult to do this practice if you’re blind; you actually are using your visual perception. It’s not confined to that but your visual perception plays a key role here.

[1:19:01] “This vision of the five colored lights” And of course, he’s assuming that you’re already … in this earlier chapter, a chapter, there’s a chapter here, and a chapter in this A Spacious Path to Freedom. He’s unpacked all of this. And if you wish to read it, there’s no reason not to, Gyatrul Rinpoche said this is for people who have faith, you’d like to practice, you can certainly read it. And if you feel you’re already qualified to receive those teachings, you can certainly find Dzogchen lamas who will teach them. I’ll teach, I’ve taught it a little bit, but don’t have any plans in the very near future.

[1:19:29] So “This vision of the five colored lights is not like seeing a rainbow, it is a direct perceptual vision of the five facets of primordial consciousness. [Those five facets then, they are of the very nature of clear light, and they’re manifesting, their luminosity is displayed in appearances, in visions.] It is said that there is no difference between this and actually encountering the five families of the jinas [of the conquerors, victorious ones, buddhas]. Unlike when you make your first observations, you will see an amazing brilliance.” So if you set out on this, and by and large, and I’m not in the future, I’m not going to try to write a script for myself now, but what I will and won’t teach in the future. But I know I received the teachings a number of times from Gyatrul Rinpoche and I really don’t know, he was always with this… Actually, he taught it pretty publicly, when he was teaching this text, A Spacious Path to Freedom and when he taught Natural Liberation. There were 40, 50 people, a couple of them were Christian. I have no insight into the level of realization, but it was in San Francisco, and they were dharma students living in the Bay Area, you know, maybe they’re all arya bodhisattvas, I don’t know. But I know he taught it.

[1:20:54] And then on one occasion Gyatrul Rinpoche took then a few selected disciples of his, he chose which ones and he let me come along. And we went up to a hillside overlooking the Pacific on a clear day. And then he gave us the teachings there, the pith instructions on direct crossing over, they are very simple actually. Gyatrul Rinpoche knows me, so he knows that I have no realization, yet he still taught me. So the seeds are there, just like [Kyabje] Zong Rinpoche, 1978, in Tharpa Choling, taught The Six Yogas of Naropa. And I was there translating for him. So the seeds were sown.

[1:21:32] So there’s nothing wrong with receiving them before. This whole issue of ‘it’s sequential but let’s not get too uptight about it’, you know, shamatha prior to vipashyana, but don’t get too rigid, you know, go ahead and venture into vipashyana before you’ve achieved shamatha. And so clearly, the teachings that I received primarily from Gyatrul Rinpoche, uh, well, [?1:21:54] Rinpoche could not have been clearer: At the same time, should you not go anywhere near any teachings on the direct crossing over until you’re very, very clear about resting in rigpa. Well, I say that’s up to you and your lama. So it’s not for me to say, right. But having the seeds there, getting some, some idea.

[1:22:13] And so when he says…, this is where, where is it? “Unlike when you make your first observations” Well, again, the techniques are very simple, you can read about it. They’re very simple. And so you adopt one of the three postures and then you set the gaze, and then you start to see stuff, okay, within your visual field, in a manner of speaking. So you see that. Okay, so you, that’s what I saw the first time. And then, if you’re resting in rigpa and you continue in the practice, continue, continue, continue, not meditating, just positioning your body and directing your gaze, and then seeing what comes up spontaneously, then, “unlike when you make your first observations, you’ll see an amazing brilliance.”

[1:22:58] I mean, let’s just go ahead and assume the optimal. And that is you actually are a vidyadhara. And you’re ready to make the leap from the first of the four visions to the second, which means you’re ready to leap to directly cross over from the first bhumi to the fifth. That’s a big leap. If you’re not even on the first bhumi, it’s hard to imagine how you can make that leap. But if you’re on the first bhumi, then you just skipped second, third, fourth, right over to the fifth, right. Well, when you’re in, what’s happening here is the unveiling process as you’re resting in rigpa, it’s just purifying, purifying, purifying, and so your vision is purified and you start to see these, “these transcendentally archetypal appearances arising in amazing brilliance.”

[1:23:47] “It is said that if that is witnessed [if you see the amazing brilliance, and this is of bindus, of vajra strands, eventually seeing spontaneously arising, appearances of the five buddhas, without visualizing them. They just arise right out, Amitabha, Akshobhya, Vairocana, and so forth. They just spontaneously arise and then they start to become clearer and clearer and clearer, more and more, more detailed, within bindus, within orbs of light, you know. It’s quite amazing brilliance, quite spectacular that is all happening spontaneously, that this is not simply some vestige of medieval Indian notion of royalty. And this is why there now has nothing to do with India, nothing to do with any period of time. This is all spontaneous and you don’t have to have visualized, you don’t have to have rehearsed; there’s no rehearsal here.] When you’re practicing shamata, vipashyana, trekchö, tögal, there’s no point in that straight lineage, which is all that is necessary, according to Lake-born Vajra.”

[1:24:50] “None of those entail visualizing the five buddha families.” You can if you wish, but that would be an extra; you can, fine. But you don’t need to. Shamatha, vipashyana, trekchö, tögal – it’s that. But, and so shamatha, vipashyana, trekchö, that’s just cutting right through to rigpa and then you go to tögal. And then you have the five Buddha families appearing spontaneously. That would suggest to me that they don’t belong to a religion, because it’s just rising out of the ground and they are appearing – this is our best image and the best images we can get is like images of Amitabha and so on.

[1:25:25] So, “It is said that if that is witnessed, [if you see this amazing brilliance of these buddha families, these bindus, these vajra, these vajra chains or vajra strands, and I called vajra stands, [1:25:36 Tibetan], it’s called in Tibetan. If these pure effulgences of rigpa seen within the dhatu, the absolute space of your awareness] it is said that if that is witnessed, [while you’re alive and well and you’re becoming an accomplished tögal, or direct crossing over practitioner] when the assemblies of peaceful and wrathful deities appear in the intermediate state, you will surely be liberated in that state.

[1:26:05] Okay, the peaceful, “the 108 peaceful and wrathful deities appearing in the bardo. This is the bardo after the clear light of death appears and prior to the bardo of becoming. [when you’re just in the bardo bardo, that everybody, you know, knows about, if they know about it.] But there’s that intermediate, that interval between the clear light of death and then simply going through the bardo of becoming. And that’s the bardo of dharmata, [the bardo of dharmata] ultimate reality. [And it’s during that interval that spontaneously arise, fall at you –you’re dead now – and you’re in the first, that interval bardo of ultimate reality. And that’s when these appearances of the 108 peaceful and wrathful deities appear. And] If you identify them for what they are, as pure expressions of [displays of, projections of] your own pristine awareness, then you will surely be liberated in that state. You will achieve enlightenment by way of sambhogakaya.” And that’s how Tsongkhapa achieved enlightenment, in the bardo, as sambhogakaya; that’s how he achieved enlightenment.

[1:27:13] “There is no shorter path than this. If you watch constantly, you will directly see many peaceful and wrathful deities, including the five families of jinas. It is said that if they are seen there is no need to go through the intermediate state. [Well, what he’s referring to there is the intermediate state of becoming, you know, on those multiple phases of the bardo, the classic bardo, which culminates in your taking your next rebirth. You don’t have to, you just, you skip that. It’s a whole bardo process, a whole cycle within samsara, it just gets snipped, it gets terminated right there in the bardo of dharmata. And there you become enlightened by way of sambhogakaya.

[1:27:50] So the tögal, the direct crossing over, is precisely designed. “If you don’t achieve enlightenment in this lifetime, then that’s your moment.” [That’s your moment, right? If you’ve practiced a lot of trekchö and gained realization of rigpa, then when the clear light of death arises, that’s your moment.] And you may achieve enlightenment by way of dharmakaya. But if you miss that opportunity and you slip into the bardo of dharmata, and then these archetypal forms [they are not archetypal as in form realm or formless realm, archetypal as in from the ground of being] and these appear [and you identify them] as expressions of your own pristine awareness and don’t reify them [don’t see them as other] then you achieve enlightenment by way of sambhogakaya, and then you don’t experience the next bardo.” The bardo of becoming which everybody experiences apart from these people.

[1:28:43] “Therefore, it is important that you watch constantly through the morning and evening. [It has to do with the positions of the sun and moon; the morning, the sunrise and the sunset in particular, but you can also practice the tögal with respect to the moon. It’s very interesting practice.] In the evening, when you’re about to fall asleep, you should seal with prayers of dedication, whatever virtue you have accomplished that day.” So he took a brief foray into the direct crossing over and now he’s coming back again to the final of the five-fold practice, and that is dedication of merit.

[1:29:20] “If you make this dedication by reifying the person doing the dedication, [that is, reifying yourself] and you reify the object of dedication, [which you’re dedicating to] and you reify the act of dedication itself, then dedication is poisonous [Poisonous, not in a sense it will lead you to some hell realm or something, it just won’t lead to enlightenment] because it’s all tinged by delusion.” So it’s poison, a heavy term, but it just means that if this is really about awakening, well that won’t do, don’t reify yourself, the object which you’re dedicating to, the dedication itself, so it will not lead to the Path of Awakening.

[1:29:56] “Performing a dedication in a state that is undistracted from the essential nature of the mind is perfect dedication concerning the agent, object and act. So that leads to the Path of Awakening.” So here, it should be, here you start to get a sense of Tibetan in Buddhist teachings, Dzogchen teaching in particular. The meaning of words, like the essential nature of mind, you pull that out, by context. So, in this context, what is the essential nature of mind? [A student answers – rigpa?] Yeah, it can’t be anything else. When you’re coming to the culmination, you’ve settled the mind in its natural state, and Dudjom Lingpa, Padmasambhava says, ‘And now you’ve identified the essential nature of mind.’ That’s referring to? [A student answers – substrate, yeah, it’s exactly the same word. And substrate, substrate consciousness and rigpa are definitely not identical. Right? They’re not the same. One is just the culmination of shamatha, the other one is big culmination. But you understand these by context? Right? And there’s just no question. That’s what it means here.

[1:31:02] “And you know it also [when he says ‘concerning the agent, object and act’] and that is seeing that each of these three in that triad, [just we have the one who has informed, the act of information and that about what you’re informed] each of these is empty of inherent nature. [Take away one the other two vanish, Well,] Likewise, the one who’s dedicating, the act of dedication, and that for which you’re dedicating. [Take away one the other two vanish instantly, right? Therefore, they can’t possibly be inherently existent. And so,] Realizing the emptiness of agent, object and the act of dedicating, [really is like emptiness] that’s what brings you onto the path. [Shamatha gets you on to the on ramp, it’s vipashyana insight into emptiness that brings you onto the path. Very clear.] So that leads to the Path of Awakening.”

[1:31:49] “Whatever Dharma and spiritual practices are performed, any concluding pair of dedication that is made with an undistracted mind will later certainly come true. [He didn’t say six months later, or a year later, he just said, ‘Be patient.’] Therefore, it is important that there is no misunderstanding concerning prayers of dedication; consider what you want in the future as a result of receiving these instructions, and engage in the spiritual practice. [So that was very much our morning’s meditation. As we make this extraordinary resolve, we’ll consider what you want in future, what’s your strategy, what’s your plan, what’s your vision? It is like also our initial loving-kindness practice, with the four questions.] It is best to surrender yourself and pray to serve the needs of sentient beings for as long as samsara persists.”

[1:32:42] So this reminds me, a final note, reminds me when is, when was it? I think it was early on, I think it was the first time I was in Dharamshala, it must have been, when I was there from 71 to 75 and I was having an audience with His Holiness. And I think I knew do a little bit of dharma by then. And so I knew that there was self-interest, [sra arta, Tibetan 1:33:06] which culminates in dharmakaya, you know, which is not self-centeredness, it’s just ‘Why [do] you practice? Is there anything that you would like out of your practice?’ ‘Yeah, realize dharmakaya.’ And then there’s [para arta, Tibetan 1:33:17], the well-being, the welfare of others, the concerns of others, right? So there’s these two, and they’re both completely legitimate. So His Holiness was, we were talking, I don’t remember what we were talking about but it came up. And maybe I was showing off, I can’t remember, maybe I was showing off. I tend to do that. And I commented, because he was giving me of course guidance in my practice. And I commented, ‘Well, of course, there’s as – I was kind of negotiating with him [laughs]. There’s, you know, in terms of practice, there’s, you know, [Tibetan 1:33:47] – your own interest, and then [Tibetan 1:33:49] – in the interest of others. And His Holiness said, ‘No, no, no. Well, you just think others.’ [Laughter] Give me a break. No break. No break.

[1:34:10] Olaso. So anybody would like to, I’ll see you in our pure land in the making. And I think you know the name Castellina Marittima. Did I say it as the right way? Is that okay? Good. [Loud laughter] Castellina Marittima. Is that better? [Loud laughter continue] I’m not going to try anymore; I’m getting a B minus and it’s better than a D minus; I can, I can be content. It means a little castle by the sea. Yeah, Castellina, a little castle; Marittima, well, by the sea. There’s the sea. It’s on the hill, up above where we are; look out over the sea, but from a higher elevation. So a little castle by the sea. So there it is, blessed by Khadro-la, Dagri (1:34:57?) Rinpoche, Lama Zopa. Maybe one day by His Holiness.

[1:35:01] Filippo, the director of the Institute, told me he’s been asked four times by the Dalai Lama to create a center for the study of Buddhism and Science at the institute here. Four times. So a few days ago, when we were speaking, he was saying, you know, we talked about His Holiness because His Holiness has been here a number of times. And I asked him when His Holiness would be expected to come next, what was on his itinerary. And Filippo said, “Well, His Holiness said, ‘When you establish the Academy of Buddhism and Science, then I’ll come’.” Right? So, get cracking Kirsty; Kirsty may be helping them. When that happens, then if we’ve gotten our act together, maybe we can have His Holiness then; it’s just seven kilometers up the hill. Maybe he’ll come up and bless that land. And I think he would. And I would love to have Khadro-la back. I think she would come. I think she would come. Olaso. So maybe see you tomorrow at nine. And enjoy your day.

Transcribed by Sueli Martinez

Revised by Shirley Soh

Final edition by Kriss Sprinkle

Transcript formatted and posted on the website of the course by Rafael C. Giusti

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