(Awakened awareness is always here — the clouds are what move, not the sun)
So, from a great Great Completion, Dzogchen point of view, the real nature of the mind’s radiance, awakened awareness, is always here. You are never apart from that. So, everybody experiences awakened awareness all the time. But you don’t recognize it. And the analogy that’s used in Dzogchen is it’s like the sun. The sun shines all the time. And if it’s cloudy and the cloud’s clear we say, “The sun just came out.” But that’s not true. The sun shines day and night. But from your perspective, only when the clouds clear you could see the sun shining forth. And as long as the mind is clouded over by one solid construction after another, layers and layers of thought, sense of self, time, and the solidness of emotional reactions. All that stuff is like layers and layers of clouds. So, the radiance of the infinitely vast awakened awareness, an ocean of awakened awareness-love that’s always right here, is obscured like the
That’s what the Heart Sutra mantra is all about. It’s a description of the stages of emptiness practice. It goes like this in Sanskrit [“gate” here sounds like gah-tay]: Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā
Always right here is an infinitely vast ocean of awakened awareness-love. You are never apart from that. But you don’t realize it. And the reason why you don’t realize it is that that unbounded wholeness of awakened awareness-love cannot be apprehended by a partialized stance. The partialization can’t recognize the whole. Every operation of your information processing system partializes, from slowest to fastest operations. So, the slowest operation is thought.
So, the entire video game of your information processing system is set up to obscure awakening—unless you get special instructions that help you to see beyond it. Those are the pith instructions. And if you see beyond it, even if for a short time, you shift out of that particularizing, that partialized mode, to being the unbounded wholeness of the radiance of awakened awareness.
And after a while you develop what’s called dengwa, confidence. Even if it clouds over, it’s like a thin veil—it seems perfectly ridiculous to you—you can never lose what’s always right here. That changes everything, when you’re confident you can never really lose it again. And that finishes the second map.
So, you hold both those views simultaneously—the vast expanse and the liveliness—and you don’t engage anything that comes up. But non-engagement isn’t a strategy because that’s engagement; it’s part of the view.
The average time if you do that practice 24/7 is about six years. If you supplement it with energy-drop practices you can get it down to about two years. And then you achieve what in Buddhism is called sangye.
(Dharmadhatu exhaustion: no negative states left, eighty positive qualities bloom)
So, the outcome of dharmadhātu exhaustion is you don’t have any negative states of mind left.
We say the mind is stainless—I like to translate drime as clean, the field of experience gets cleaner and cleaner. Imagine the implications of that for mental health. No negative states whatsoever. And what comes out when they’re no longer obscured are eighty positive qualities of mind that flourish, come out all at once. So, you achieve the epitome of mental health which is all positive qualities of mind and no negative states left for the rest of your lifetime. Except if the Patriots lose. [Quiet laughter] If the Patriots lose that’s still a negative state. Short of that, it’s relative, relatively speaking. That’s my best practice, right? Then, at that level of practice, all karmic memory traces are eradicated. At that level of practice, ordinary perception changes and is transformed. Everything changes into light rays and the sound of awakened awareness expressing itself to itself.
Wherever you see the boundaries, open right into those as empty space, as if you’re pouring space into space.
translated one of the dark retreat manuals. It’s very detailed. And basically, what you do is Inner Fire practice and central channel practice. You go through the different levels of bypassing visions where you dismantle perception in a much more systematic way than the Western research. And having dismantled ordinary perception completely you begin to see in your direct experience that all that seeming “out there” stuff is internally generated. So, after a while you can see things just like this world except there’s no light, and you realize that this whole thing is internally generated. It doesn’t come from out there because you’re seeing the same world perfectly clearly in the dark.
Everything is clear light in the midst of that darkness. It all becomes the clear light with the brilliant radiance of awakened awareness, all the time; in its sheer blazing splendor, as we call it. So, it’s quite a ride.
Another strategy is future time orientation. “Imagine yourself at some hypothetical time in the future when you’re no longer operating out of this negative belief system, but whatever the positive opposite of that is.” And get the person to try on something more positive. “Imagine a time in the future when you have no question in your mind that you’re completely lovable, and imagine all the details of your life,” and get them to remap it. So, what I’m saying is that there is, in the history of psychology over the last hundred years, we have evolved a series of methods that actually fundamentally change these seemingly intractable negative beliefs. We know how to do that.
So, from that perspective, we never practice in isolation and it’s never about personal gain. It contributes to the greater good.
Whereas in something like Christianity, that never really happened. You’ve got two problems. One is that mystical experience was always a threat to the Church, so you got Anthony and the early Desert Fathers starting at around the year 50 A.D. and lasting about 200 years. And on two occasions, when people were leaving the Church to go off to study with the Desert Fathers, the Church got threatened by that because they were losing their constituency. So, they hired two great scholars of the day to go out to live with the Desert Fathers systematically to debunk them and they didn’t debunk them. They gave them positive billing, which made it worse.
(Lineage, spiritual duty, and the danger of treating teachings as merchandise)
That’s not a very good track record. Most people take another workshop, another meditation course, and they manifest what Rinpoche calls the dharma flea market. They can’t see the preciousness of the lineage teaching. It’s just another meditation workshop. We’ve had people who’ve had strong and stable awakening who never practice. They just throw it away. It’s unfathomable to me.
It’s not like ordinary stealing. If you try and take these instructions and use them for personal gain, you will piss off the ḍākinīs and you do not want to piss off ḍākinīs. That’s your karma. All I can do is warn you about that. Don’t piss off the ḍākinīs.
So, the main duty is put it into practice. The second duty is don’t disseminate the teachings in a way they lose their potency. They’re not for sale. They’re given freely from heart-to-heart. It’s a special relationship. It’s based on a karmic connection. We are all kaldens, ones of fortunate karma. Don’t reverse that, because if you sever the spiritual duties, they’re not repairable. It breaks my heart. And it’s all about self-interest, the same thing that gets in the way of everything. When Guru Pema, Padmasambhava, gives a precious instruction that’s secret, he ends it by saying, “Gya, gya, gya.” “Seal, seal, seal.”
But I’ve been noticing more, as we do more advanced courses, a tendency to get more lax, to follow less, because you think you’re advanced. That, my friends, is spiritual pride. And the further, not the less, you get along the practice, the more at risk you are for spiritual pride. Because you think you’re beyond being followed by a teacher. That’s not going to go anywhere good. It’s a problem.
The inner fire course is like the Lamps course. It’s the most advanced course that we’re doing. We’ve not done it before. It took a lot of work translating the texts. It took a lot of work getting some convincing credibility and trust that they would actually allow us to teach this. Like the Lamps, it’s probably the most advanced course we’ve done, even maybe more so. It’s taken three or four years to set up to do this, and 70 percent of the people don’t get permission to do it? That, my friends, is not acceptable to me. You’ve been given a great gift.
Her whole realization was going to the Ganges and looking in a sadhu’s eyes. And that was her whole practice, ever. And she wrote a couple books and got famous from her books. No lineage, no practice. And she took over the faculty residence for her attendants—she had six attendants—and squeezed out myself, someone who represents the Tibetan lineage, and a Tibetan Zen master from Japan. They didn’t have room for us because of her attendants. And I said, “What kind of spiritual pride is this?”
the difference between a lineage tradition and this Western garbage, you’ll never see me again.” I haven’t been back since. But, see as Westerners, we can’t tell the difference often. You get people who are self- realized and they talk about their own realizations, but they don’t have a method. Because they didn’t learn it in a lineage where they learn the methods. There’s nothing wrong with their realizations. They’re probably legitimate. But you’ve got to watch that they don’t go off in the prideful direction. I have to watch for that all the time.
But the dream stuff is just a ripening of karmic memory traces, which is mostly useless. So, you’re releasing them.
So, the first thing you’ll want to do in the morning, because you wake up from a dream, is self-arising/self-liberating. You let the dream content come up in the vast expanse as lively awakened awareness and don’t engage it at all. Just let it run through and pass through. That way you’re releasing all those karmic memory traces that have been activated until there’s nothing left. It takes about twenty minutes to do that.
So, since I don’t have dreams like that and since I just arrived with this teacher, I told him the dream, and he was really interested, and he said, “Oh, I see what happened.” He said, “There’s a naga who lives in the mountain, and we didn’t appease the naga before we built this project, and the naga is pissed off.” So, he said, “We’ll take care of it.” So, they did a ritual to appease the naga, and then they didn’t have any trouble with a mudslide after that ever again.
But that’s just samsāra in Buddhist terms; the way the world appears isn’t the way it really is. It’s all bullshit. So, part of the problem is that we as a culture missed authentic spiritual experience, not belief systems. So that makes us very vulnerable to other traditions that offer us methods. And because our need is so great to get a plan, a method—if you practice this and watch your mind and you meditate this way and that way, these are the results you’ll get—we so much crave that that it makes us vulnerable to suspending our metacognitive judgment. When you sit with a spiritual teacher you don’t park your metacognitive intelligence outside the door. You take it with you.
And he was authentic. You’d never know anything about his spiritual practice unless you worked with him, because he never tried to show it to anybody. He just lived his life fully. And if you asked him, it was his duty to show you. As [the Sufi poet] once said in one of his poems, “Great masters roam through the marketplace every day, and no one ever recognizes them.”
Well, since doing Level 1 … I mean before that, I thought I knew something, and then I did Level 1 (student laughs). Dan Well now you’re getting somewhere if you think you know nothing. [Laughter] Then the next step is you realize everything you do is wrong. Then the next step is actually lightheartedness about it. Then you start moving on from there.
And the field of awareness is lucid. It’s distinctly different from ordinary awareness. It has dangpa, brightness. It has gnar intensity. It has hrige, awakeness. It’s very awake. It has bole, softness. It has trule, sparkling immediacy. It has danpa, sacredness. Everything has a sacred hue to it. If you don’t make those into qualities and take them as guidelines of recognition, you recognize the distinction of that state.
I have only one thing to say. When you sit down to meditate, the first thing that should go through your mind is: ‘Why am I doing this?’ Then answer the question to yourself. If you’re doing it because it would be helpful to other people, and you’re doing it because it moves your heart, then you’re on the right track. If you can’t answer it that way, don’t bother to waste your time.”
Then once you open up awakening, you’re doing inner fire practice to brighten the mind so you recognize awakening more frequently; and then how to develop awakening so that you have it automatically; how to mix it into dream and sleep, and daily practices.
mind. We say that “the near enemy of compassion is indifference.” “The near enemy”—something that appears like something, but it’s not really that thing. So, some people practice spirituality and they think that they should be equanimous, and not react to anything, not have any feelings anymore, and that becomes an illusion of indifference. You think you’re not being reactive, but what you’re actually being is indifferent, and stoic. There’s no caring in that. It’s not even genuine spiritual practice. It’s an idea. You still get the feelings. The issue is not to get the grab of the feelings, but you don’t try and do away with the feelings. In that sense, you live life more fully.
What’s lost is the grab to the feeling. You feel it cleanly, and it’s done.
The Dalai Lama is Avalokiteshvara. He is the emanation of Avalokiteshvara for this generation, and if you look at his life, he lives it, he embodies it. He is Avalokiteshvara, just the way that Rahob Tulku is the emanation of Padmasambhava. These non-ordinary beings recycle themselves.
(Mental engagement creates karmic traces; non-engagement is not a strategy but the view)
“Mental engagement” is when the mind goes towards something to make more of it to process it further, or goes away from it to make less of it. And that process of mental engagement in Dzogchen or Great Completion teachings is what causes karmic impressions to form. As soon as you engage something that comes into the field of experience, you make a karmic memory trace. That gets stored in the storehouse mind. And over lifetimes, there are millions and millions of karmic traces.
And that’s pretty much consistent with modern Western research on mind-wandering. Most people spend 47 percent of their day in mind-wandering mode. If you look at the content of mind during mind-wandering, it’s about the self, making the self important in one way or another, or “maintaining this tiresome project of self” as Hafiz, the Sufi poet once said. And the more you spend time dwelling on the fantasies of self, the more negative it gets for most people in terms of the research on mind-wandering. So, it’s not a good thing. But it serves as organizing principles in everyday reality and relative reality. But ultimately, it’s just an empty construction.
Still, that awareness is caught up in coming and going in conventional time. If I go beyond conventional time, I go to ocean-like, changeless, boundless awareness. That’s a much bigger shift. That’s called going way beyond—pāragate—to ocean-like, changeless boundless awareness. Still, that awareness is caught up in localization of my individual consciousness and my information processing system.
The reason why the Heart Sutra mantra is so popular [is] because the whole path is right there; and it all has to do with
shifting from one level of awareness to the other. And emptiness is the pathway that allows you to clear away the clouds of the mind so there’s no clouds anymore, so the radiance of awakened mind is always right here. Simple.
People want stuff, they want attainments. But it doesn’t work like that.
Of course. In your everyday life, the basic practice is following grab, reactivity. Grab to everyday experience is perceivable. And whenever you have the grab, you take your awareness and roam around in it. See if you can find anything substantial about the nature of that grab. So, you do an emptiness onthe-spot meditation. If you do that every day with the things that grab you the most, after a few weeks you’ll see that there are patterns there. Not everything grabs you equally. What one of my students called “identifying my favorite clouds.” Find your favorite clouds. What do you get caught up in the most? Do you get caught up in self? Do you get caught up in thought? Do you get caught up in out-there-ness. Do you get caught up in time? Do you get caught up in emotions in general? Is there a specific emotion you get caught up in? Do you get caught up in dualistic thinking? See for yourself and look at it with your metacognitive intelligence and identify the patterns. That’s the second step. And the third step is that after you identify the patterns, do a dedicated emptiness practice around that, whatever the major, your favorite clouds are, once or twice a week, not as a regular daily practice.
(Off-pillow practice: viewing all experience as lively awakened awareness)
But, the next level of practice off the pillow is if you can hold a strong view of ocean-like, changeless, boundless awareness from that vast expanse of timeless, limitless awareness, you let everything arise like a wave, like an ocean viewing its own waves. And whatever arises within that great spaciousness has no grab whatsoever. Then you walk around in your daily life in the realm of what’s called spacious freedom. That’s a much better practice. But don’t do it when you’re driving a car. Other than that, you can do it pretty much all day long. If you have awakened awareness and it’s relatively stable, you view everything as lively awakened awareness—thoughts are lively awakened awareness, emotions are lively awakened awareness. Sights, sounds, body, body sensations are lively awakened awareness. You train yourself to see everything in terms of it’s all the dance of lively awakened awareness. If you’re further along the practice and you’re doing dharmadhātu exhaustion and everything arises within the expanse, arises without running its own course and with no mental engagement, it immediately liberates itself, leaving no trace.
You take your mind everywhere, so you never stop practicing with it. That would be the superior practice. Or as Milarepa says, “there’s no distinction between sessions and breaks.”
You do it 24/7. And the third is longsang, or mastery meditation. Whatever the mind does, it has full mastery over it with lightning speed. Then you’re getting somewhere.
You’re creating an artificial construction of mind that somehow that meditation is going to be something more beneficial than everything off the pillow; and you’re going to get calmer or something—another construction of mind like that. It’s just a state that you’re constructing. It’s a perfect delusion. If you’re really honest with yourself, you practice all the time. And it’s especially good to practice at times that are most difficult.
My favorite practice is working in the courts as a trauma and abuse expert with the worst situations of what people do to kids. I love being cross-examined. That’s my best practice. It’s my best moments of practice. Because otherwise I could be self-reactive or if I have a team of attorneys whose whole purpose is to discredit me, if I get shamed, shame-sensitive or reactive, I get nowhere. But if all that stuff dissolves into the expanse and all that’s left is their full presence, all I need are three or four questions and I got all their arguments, then I’m going to have fun. And I’m going to do something useful for the sake of those kids.
And the purification. Visualize the bodhisattva on top of the crown and the honey dripping down through your body. Dan Nectar. Yeah.
We were once with His Holiness Menri Trizin, he was my Root Lama, and we were working on some of these preliminary practices with him, and my wife said to him, “I can’t relate to the Mandala offering at all. It’s so alien to me.” And he says, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Just offer up New York City.” [Laughter] He was making a joke, but it wasn’t entirely a joke though. He said, “Find a Western equivalent where you give everything away.”