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.

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.

“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.”

Many people are afraid to empty their minds lest they may plunge into the Void. They do not know that their own Mind is the void.

I fell into some Huang Po, and extracts from his teachings, The Transmission of Mind.

Dharma practitioner Chodpa, after some time with a more formless meditation and now practicing Shamatha again with focus on the breath, has the opposite problem. He can find the breath okay, but it doesn’t seem to be anything.

Yet as my mind settles, the breath gradually goes out of view. As my mind settles, then I know more clearly, and the breath ceases to be a ‘thing’ which I can focus on. Instead of this ‘thing’ called the breath, which one might assume to be pretty continuous, and solid, a process with continuity, as it were … there’s …. well, what is there?
- Where did my breath go?

Chodpa goes on to examine just what there is there. I love this kind of sharing, about our experience of practice. It’s the one thing I can do as a relatively new practitioner without stepping on teachings about which I know too little.

And it’s the greatest thing about the teachings of Buddhism, that they are presented to be experienced for oneself.

I spent at least my first year in Shamatha practice visualizing the breath that I was focusing on, although I never quite realized this.

And one day, when I guess I was pretty settled in and stable with all this, it occurred to me to wonder what my experience of the breath was actually like – I found myself in a different “place”, actually experiencing breathing without having any real picture or foreknowledge of what it was like.

I fell in love with that “place” on the spot, and could have wept with joy, to find myself in the nowness of my own experience. It was maybe the first time in my life.

Some time later I was volunteering at a weekend program at the Shambhala Center, and one of the beginners – she had been meditating for a week – told me she was color-coding the breath, visualizing the inbreath and the outbreath as two different colors. I told her to keep on doing this as long as she wanted, and one day she wouldn’t anymore.

The breath is phony, as Chodpa points out in his description of his own experience. As phony as the self, only more useful I’d say. I think I always knew this, from the beginning. I figured the breath wasn’t really the moment, because how could the moment be that long? But you have to start somewhere.

I can’t find a reference that gives me the exact number, or even the story now, but I’ve heard that the Buddha said that a single Snap! of the fingers is a length of time that subdivides into more than 300 pieces. This is how far you have to look to find the actual moment itself – if it can even be found, if such a thing even exists – or so it always seemed to me.

So it’s really great to see Chodpa discern the breath in its more momentary fragments. I hope he will write more about his experience with Shamatha. Will he find his “object” to focus on? We wait with baited…umm…well we wait that’s all

Acharya Eric Speigel, of the Shambhala lineage – and once a teacher of mine in Austin for a weekend class on death and dying – sent us a lovely and touching account of the Karmapa’s landing and teachings in New York.

The Austin Shambhala blog has the full accounts – he’s sent us two so far. Here are some links.

Official websites for the Karmapa are here:
H.H. 17th. Karmapa Trinlay Thaye Dorje
Kagyu Office of His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapaкомпютри втора употреба

and here’s the Shambhala blog, with Acharya Eric’s two accounts so far:

May 16th -
His Holiness Karmapa in New York

May 19th -
Visit of His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa to New York

and for more about Acharya Eric Spiegel, who really touched us so deeply when he came to Austin for the first time that weekend, check these stories from the Shambhala blog:
http://austinshambhala.org/blog/category/death-and-life/

It was wonderful for our sangha to hear about the Karmapa from our dear friend in New York.

There is only one thing, from the very beginning,
infinitely bright and mysterious by nature.

It was never born, and it never dies. It cannot be
described or given a name.

What is this “one thing”?

An eminent teacher wrote,
Even before the ancient Buddhas were born,
One thing was already perfectly complete.
Even Shakyamuni Buddha could not understand it.
How could he transmit it to Mahakashyapa?

There is one “thing” that is never born, and never
dies. For this reason it cannot be named in any way,
or expressed, or depicted.

The Sixth Patriarch of Zen once addressed the assembly
thus: “I have something that has no name and no form.
Do any of you see it?”

Zen Master Shen-hui immediately replied, “It is the
essence of all Buddhas, and also my buddha nature.”

Due to this answer, Shen-hui cannot be considered a
legitimate heir and descendant of the Sixth Patriarch.

- Zen Master So Sahn (1520-1604)

And who is Sogyal Rinpoche? Here’s a bio of this Dzogchen master:
http://www.rigpa.org/Sogyal_Rinpoche.html

And here’s a beautiful short extract from his renowned book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

“We all feel and know something of the benefits of compassion. But the particular strength of the Buddhist teaching is that it shows you clearly a “logic” of compassion [...] in practice our actions are deeply uncompassionate and bring us and others mostly frustration and distress, and not the happiness we are all seeking.

“To realize what I call the wisdom of compassion is to see with complete clarity its benefits, as well as the damage that its opposite has done to us. We need to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego’s self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering comes.” – Compassion: The Wish Fulfilling Jewel

And here is a taste of Sogyal Rinpoche, explaining

What meditation really is
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tIBYxed16s&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

The Four Seals he describes as:

• All compounded things are impermanent
• All emotions are painful
• All phenomena are empty
• Nirvana is beyond extremes

The second one captures the attention, the thought that all emotions are painful. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche says that only Buddhists would think this way. Everyone else celebrates the high emotions like love; Buddhists think, “this is all suffering.”

Then he describes in more detail what this says about our experience.

The dualistic mind creates a lot of expectations—a lot of hope, a lot of fear. Whenever there is a dualistic mind, there is hope and fear. Hope is perfect, systematized pain. We tend to think that hope is not painful, but actually it’s a big pain. As for the pain of fear, that’s not something we need to explain.
The Buddha said, ‘Understand suffering.’ That is the first Noble Truth. Many of us mistake pain for pleasure – the pleasure we now have is actually the very cause of the pain that we are going to get sooner or later. Another Buddhist way of explaining this is to say that when a big pain becomes smaller, we call it pleasure. That’s what we call happiness.
Moreover, emotion does not have some kind of inherently real existence. When thirsty people see a mirage of water, they have a feeling of relief: “Great, there’s some water!” But as they get closer, the mirage disappears. That is an important aspect of emotion: emotion is something that does not have an independent existence.

I wanted to share this.

And if you wonder, as I did, who is Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche…

UPDATE – if this is a new concept to you, do not despair, happiness exists, but not where we usually look for it. To answer this riddle spend five minutes with this video from Mipham Rinpoche, called What About Me

I will add more material about this man over time. He directs Siddartha’a Intent International, and that website carries many materials including audio files of his teachings, as well as news of his activities. His bio is impressive: About Siddhartha’s Intent and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche is a filmmaker. As Khyentse Norbu, he directed The Cup, and most recently Travellers and Magicians. He appeared in the documentary, Words of My Perfect Teacher.

In 1991, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche agreed to take responsibility for the World Peace Vase Programme, a vision of His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.