Sacred West

The path is long and yet the distance is not far.

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Here are three film clips of Tibetan Bhuddist masters and students on the practice path of the yogi.

I love these clips, and maybe I can find the whole DVD somewhere. The narrative I find beautifully articulate and expressive of teachings familiar to practitioners.

Clip 3 is an ocean of practice accomplishment, face after face of mind on the path of perfection. Here’s the first one, but be sure to watch the last

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Om Ah Hung Vajra Guru Pema Siddhi Hung.

This is a nice clip, obviously made with devotion. It’s a softer sound than you normally hear the mantra recited. Beautiful images.

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A sangha member died last week, a revered elder teacher. As is the Shambhala practice, we sat with the body for three and a half days, around the clock in the shrine room, taking shifts.

On Sunday afternoon I was there for a couple of hours, contemplating the cold body on ceremonial display, marveling as always at the nature of appearances, the mysterious essence of life that animates matter – the difference between the alive and the not alive. I was thinking, even if Lord Yama takes the body, he can’t take the regard we hold this person in, that endures forever.

And yet – where is there that anything endures? There is only interdependent arising.

Funny how soon the presence of a person disappears, how rapidly the context of a person recedes into memory, how memory shows itself as thought, all thoughts fading as they will, and all the business of knowing someone having had the nature of dream all along.

It’s as if, whatever was left after dying, that was all there ever was, in the reality of this person to me. Everything else was elaboration out of the endless river of thoughts.

There’s only ever the essential presence of a moment, and everything else is empty thought, curling upwards and away like smoke.

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I wonder indeed what it must feel like to have one’s actions be as fine as a sesame seed and one’s mind be as vast as the sky.

I contemplated this very thing last Sunday, but the comparison came to me accidentally, backwards from experience so to speak. I was trying to experience a certain freedom of mind, and yet at the same time to be very physically present in the shrine room, with floors and people and light through the windows – in other words, not just caught in a concept of freedom, not just lost in focus, if I can say it that way.

This was what showed me how Guru Rinpoche’s revered statement applies. One is more here than ever before, and one’s mind is empty. And the practice of this is possible.

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For a long time I’ve been asking myself, if all the teachings talk in terms of resting in natural mind, why is it so wearying to meditate? Where does the resting part come into the picture?

I had a bit of an answer recently during a Sunday morning sit at Shambhala. After working really hard for three hours and making some headway, as it were, I perceived that my ordinary self was struggling to catch up to the tastes of liberation experienced, and was very tired.

So it’s really perhaps just as simple as one has always perceived since starting to meditate: it’s not the being in the moment that takes energy, it’s having to start over again an instant later. It’s the firing up of the motor again. It’s the sadness at seeing ourselves cover the moment over with glue. The stickiness of our grasping. Seeing this again and again.

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During the summer while I had steady work and income I felt a level of security that I haven’t felt for some years. I was able to observe elation as it arises, and bring it into my practice. I jotted down the following notes.

When something makes us happy we forget, or don’t notice, that all that’s happened is we’ve allowed ourselves to lift the pressure off our happiness button a little bit. The happiness that arises is a function inside ourselves, or we could better say, a quality of ourselves that exists always.

We can flash on memories, dreams, little instances of joy and exuberance and happiness – call it freedom perhaps? – and we can actually see that this feeling, this function of feeling, has been a faculty that we’ve possessed all along. It just needed a reason to come awake.

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Welcome me back, I’ve been absent from these pages. I’ve had a very busy summer, writing for the health care industry – a regional hospital network in my area. I neglected to post anything here, but I didn’t neglect my practice, in fact I strengthened it during the rigor of working in the corporate world. It was very supportive – how does anyone get by without the Dharma?

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Lama Surya Das during this busy summer of mine sent another gem that I want to share.

This great encouragement is from His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa:

On this small planet, in the daily dreams of our life, beneficial deeds are always recommended, simply because we are all born to help each other.

By sharing our love with different expressions and through the practice of generosity, morality and understanding, we will then be fulfilling our purpose of being members of the human race.

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Lama Surya Das, in a recent Words of Wisdom email that he sends out weekly, told of the following teaching given by Venerable Ajahn Chah:

“Try to do everything with a mind that lets go.
If you let go a little you will have a little peace.
If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.
If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom.
Your struggles with the world will have come to an end.”

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