Source Text
A proportion of this material was previously published in 1986 by Element Books as Rainbow of Liberated Energy.
The personal vision and style that are characteristic of Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen are very vivid and full of energy. Words can be judged by the energy with which they convey the essence of the teaching, and increasingly people want to get to the essence to solve their problems rather than taking up different cultural conventions.
Ultimately, through embracing our emotions as the path, we can attain the most subtle level of the essence of the five elements – the luminous rainbow-body.
Opening Our being is a brilliant pattern of energies, a spectrum of possibilities. At every moment we have the capacity to experience the open dimension of what we are.
For anyone who has come to rely on such methods, the idea of embracing emotions as the path could appear quite horrific. If we find the vivid display of our feelings somewhat inconvenient, then the idea of opening ourselves to the free-flowing quality of our emotions may seem too dangerous – especially if the texture of our lives is rather raw. We may not want to rip ourselves open just to experiment with what it feels like to be a gutted fish.
The whole idea could start to seem a trifle terrible. In the face of this, it might seem better to be ‘sensible’.
We find it necessary to exercise an emotional discipline that turns life into a tight-rope walk with a tight-lipped stoicism. We cannot sympathise with anyone because we expect the same constrictive behaviour from others.
By this means, we gain the dubious benefits of experiential impotence; or at best, some form of pseudo-spiritual emotional sterility.
and to be oblivious to our loss – because, after all, who needs emotional depth in the stratosphere? From this neutered position we might well begin to find the body an encumbrance – we would prefer to fly away to some other realm where pastel-coloured beings are constantly smiling … However, we could be conspicuously unattracted by the timidity and shallowness of this type of control. We might feel that living by whim and wild impetuosity are what life is really about. So we could abandon ourselves to our impulses, and see where that led.
We could be said to be relating to life through intensity, as if intensity held some kind of meaning in itself. We might view the tangles of our emotions – the giddy highs and the heavy devastating lows – as ‘the rich tapestry of life’. But this cliché is little more than a way of looking back at pain in order that it appears to have been to our advantage. When we are actually experiencing pain, our ‘rich tapestry’ more often reveals itself as mere flaccid verbiage.
AI Summary
Spectrum of Ecstasy by Ngakpa Chogyam and Khandro Dechen presents key insights from the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.