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.

(With gratitude to the original poster at YouTube.)

Clip 3 is an ocean of practice accomplishment, face after face of mind on the path of perfection. The final three faces in clip 3 are:

• His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche
• Venerable Kalu Rinpoche
• His Holiness the 16th Karmapa

When I watched these clips the meaning of “self-secret” seemed very evident to me. Especially when I read the comments at YouTube – always an exercise in generating the optimism necessary to prevail over despair. One person thought the practitioners in clip 3 were just stoned. But practitioners recognize mind intent on practice.

I thought about self-secret, how wisdom and knowledge present themselves to us when we open to them. When closed to the discovery we can stare for an eternity at what’s in front of us and never see it.

How wonderfully accomplished these people are! I wish I had the karma to have the fortune to meet the circumstances to follow this path, and then to have the character to follow it with such devotion. I have neither.

But the wonderful thing about understanding karma, and the teachings of the Dharma, is knowing that we can get the karma we don’t have. So I can aim my path with faltering steps towards the accumulation of merit sufficient to bring me to this terrible and auspicious stage.

Ah, may we all soon become enlightened together

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.

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.

~~

Duality, duality. All answers to questions such as these must come in relative truths. And as Anam Thubten Rinpoche has made clear to us, we’ll have our ego with us every step of the way towards enlightenment – the ego is very spiritual, always ready to buy more time outside of liberation, with answers that keep the ego intact.

Even so, to share this or even consider it I have to use relative terms. As practitioners we have to think in terms of making progress, and even sometimes in terms of experiencing setbacks, although we don’t let such things hinder our practice. These are all just the appearances that arise and give us the material of realization. And as is taught, we use relative truth continually to switch our grasping away from samsara and towards liberation.

~~

The Shambhala Sunday sit for me is when I work the hardest all week. I really enjoy these three hours of meditating every week, I’ve been going since I started meditating four years ago. They help my practice through the rest of the week, and the longer sessions let me build a focus for things I don’t always attempt during my shorter sessions at home: things like guru yoga, contemplation of karma, death or compassion, and dwelling briefly in more subtle experiences perhaps.

In recent months during these longer sessions I’ve been working harder, raising windhorse frequently, supplicating Guru Rinpoche, really aiming for the clear mind of the master. I’ve found in certain blessed moments that I can experience a mind that is mine, yes, but which I can only approach through the mind of Guru Rinpoche. The great ones lift us higher I think, and I’ve heard it said that only the rain of blessings from them enables any of us to progress along the path.

~~

But I wonder if I should be so weary after this practice. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. Am I going anywhere, or just digging a deep groove in the wrong place? This seems to be the thing to do, to chase after objectives, to aim for practice targets. But shouldn’t more energy flow into me? Shouldn’t there be less striving, more surrender?

Ah, practice. I don’t know these answers. It seems we move from one set of answers to a new set of mysteries.

And I call this a glad thing.

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.

So the goal of practice in general is to pull back from the things we call events and circumstances, and draw closer to the faculty of ourselves that’s doing the experiencing. Drawing back from the reasons and the circumstances, drawing closer into ourselves purely as experiencers, we find the happiness faculty, and witness our own foot pressing down on it, keeping it choked back, while we wait for perfection to occur, to give us a reason – an excuse – for joy.

It’s basic mindfulness to all you seasoned meditators, but it’s always worth the reminder that we have to keep practicing when appearances arise and seem good, just as much as we do when coping with fear and the lowlier emotions.

Let’s always remember how well Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche explains this in that post I made a while back, called When the Pain Gets Small Enough We Call It Happiness

A year or two of training and meditating passed before I really started to understand what the teachings were advising. Like many new Buddhists in the West, I had an overlay of moral encouragement applied to concepts such as gentleness. I didn’t realize that it has a purely functional purpose as a core practice instruction.

The great surprise for the westerner in Buddhism I think is to understand that the concepts presented are not moral injunctions in the sense we commonly think of such things. Everything is functional, based upon the nature of reality. For example, as a practice one does good deeds only because karma really does exist, and never ceases to operate. Therefore meritorious action sufficient to overwhelm unvirtuous action is the only way to supply oneself with increased advantage on the path.

When my teachers have repeated again and again the advice to be gentle with myself, it seems to me now that this has not been a way of saying, hey, you deserve a break today, so be nice because being nice is the nice thing to do. It’s more a way of saying, if you’re aggressive to yourself this is wrong action, and you move backwards a step. If you apply gentleness to yourself you allow newness to arise, and you stand a chance of moving forward.

~~~

In practice it seems easier for us to connect with our innermost sense of being with our eyes closed. I’ve heard many people after a group instruction on mindfulness meditation ask why we have to have our eyes open, when it seems easier to connect with our eyes closed. My silent answer has always been, because it’s harder with eyes open, just as life in the world on our feet is harder with our eyes open. But this is why we practice, and this is how we become present, in life, on our feet.

In the beginning I found it easier to touch my heart sometimes with my eyes closed. Or sometimes my eyes would close of themselves as I experienced an emotion that transported me. Or simply my eyes would feel tired and want to rest from being open, a purely physical thing. And I noticed every time, on opening my eyes, that a degree of intimacy with myself was lost.

Eventually I came to wonder how I could open my eyes and not break the contact. I experienced how tenderly we cherish ourselves, how intimately we love the blood and flesh of our own bodies. And how cold the world in comparison seems. And it became clear that somehow we have to bring this inside tenderness outside to all the world, and this enables us to stay connected with ourselves.

Gentleness, then, is the way to stay in one’s own being even as one regards the world of the ten thousand things that seems to exist outside our fabricated selves. And this becomes a practice one can perform as a training exercise.

~~~

The ramifications of experiencing the functional power of gentleness are large, to me.

The Buddhist understanding that compassion is our true nature; the observation of how coldly one treats a loved one as one labors to repair a wounded sense of self; the experience that caring for others removes all worries for oneself; the happy little “secret” of Buddhism that the most “selfish” thing one can do for oneself is to practice tonglen, the giving away of all one’s goodness to all beings, in exchange for taking on all their misery; the teaching that the experience of reality as emptiness comes indivisibly united with an embrace of compassion; the thought that aggression is said to be the most damaging to oneself of all the kleshas; the contemplation of the emptiness of ego, the non-existence of self except as a fabrication wrought only by exiling all other beings to a place outside one’s boundaries of trespass: all of these things combine to show me the way on the path, which dissolves in no self and all compassion, abiding in momentary reality.

Gentleness seems like the beginner’s way in, a way we can all pursue.

In delusion
We shy from distress,
And bolt from reality.
Tasting the tip of the power,
We feed our hunger for comfort
And squander our energy
In habitual reactions.

In wisdom
We learn
That there is no distress,
That there is no delusion,
And that all of our power
Keeps trying arising,
Invoked by the present,
To fill us exactly
Inside of each moment,
To help us prevail.

As I wake in the mornings I find it relatively simple to notice the thoughts beginning to form a picture of my circumstances “out there”. I catch myself getting absorbed in arising “realities” that I need to remember and deal with during my working day.

In the dark with my eyes closed I can pull myself back into my own experience itself, and most mornings I play with watching this concretization occur, pulling back from the going out. I’m always astonished at what a simple trick it is happening to me, and yet how unresistingly I get pulled into this delusion. David Deida has described this in nicely lay terms:

…you can feel your attention “come out” of a deeper, blissful consciousness and “carve” a world of thoughts, objects, feelings and relationships that you call your life. Out of the silent, blissful nothing of deep sleep, suddenly you are aware of – and absorbed by – whatever world reflects your current fears and hopes.
-from Finding God Through Sex

Having pulled back in the dark, however, the difficult task for me is retain this space as my eyes come open. This is something I’m practicing with, and in sitting meditation sometimes I’ll close my eyes, and try to discover what it takes to open them and retain the same completeness of experience.

(Tip. I’ve noticed that gentleness is the way to take my inward feeling of self-in-body out to the world outside the body. Gentleness, as all my Shambhala teachers have always emphasized.)

One morning a few months back I woke up and pulled myself back from this world of absorption, and felt utterly peaceful, resting in great spaciousness. I opened my eyes and retained the spaciousness. Softly I arose, and started getting dressed, spaciously sitting down to pull on some shoes.

As the left shoe was coming on I watched in bitter surprise as I turned away from the great peaceful mind of empty space and reached out to the clothing of thoughts and preoccupations to wrap myself in. I watched my space shrink and draw close, and I was able to detect a lingering trace of the desire for comfort that had caused this. Comfort.

Dammit. Pull on familiar clothes, bring on familiar thoughts, and before you know it you’re dumb again.

I wondered, as I’ve so often wondered: why exactly is it so very hard to rest in this place? We’re supposed to be resting the mind, resting in open sky, resting in mahamudra. If it’s so restful, then tired as I am, why don’t I want to stay here?

As I watched I saw in fact how I deeply I do want to stay here, and this is the problem of course, because here is gone, has left the station, carries now only a cheap copy of the original dot that graced its “i”.

But oh, the desire! How hungrily I desire to remain in this moving moment. And how wearying it is to search for it continually. I said in our discussion group on the Sunday that I have yearned all of my life to find this place, and finally the simple, unconditional meditation practice of Buddhism leads me to this very place, only to find that it goes away before I can even sip from it.

It is wearying, I think, the challenge each moment to abandon oneself anew, and go out with the outbreath, go out with the reflex, go out with each new gift of waking, abandon the very gift so precious and sweet. Abandon.

I have spent three years switching my allegiance from absorption in thought to this much striven-for gift of waking. But now I see there is another piece, the part about letting go.

The practice is letting go, not getting to.

This is where I need to train next. I need to overcome the grief of watching the present flee away, to turn this to gladness. I can train for this, on the cushion, where all the major work is done. I want a new kind of switching allegiance now, shifting from getting to, shifting to letting go.

Abandon desire to stay here. Practice letting go. Abandon desire.

Abandon.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche developed this instruction as the beginner instruction of the warrior path of Shambhala Training. This is the instruction Rinpoche gives in his core book, The Sacred Path of the Warrior. For a long time the open technique was the basic instruction that all meditators were taught who came to any Shambhala center for the free instruction.

But in recent years the basic instruction now taught has become the “precise technique”, focusing on both the inbreath and the outbreath. This change I am told was wrought by the Sakyong and I have heard that it caused large ripples throughout Shambhala, as practitioners were invited to review their decades-long basic practice.

I was given the basic meditation instruction less than three years ago, at the Austin Center, well after this change had occurred, but nevertheless I was taught the open technique. This can happen apparently when older sangha members haven’t quite heard the news of the change.

The open technique is held to be quite an advanced technique, and certainly this is how it strikes me now. I find it immensely difficult to perform faithfully according to its simple and vast instructions.

Fellow Dharma practitioner Chodpa was writing recently about not finding the breath, not finding anything real there, having turned to Shamatha from a long time in the space of mahamudra, and I think he would have liked the teaching of this Level I beginner weekend. The breath, it turns out, is just a place to find yourself lost.

Our teacher talked about noticing the contrast between where we are as we awaken from our reverie of thoughts, and the place that awareness has brought us back to. Simply noticing the contrast. Simply noticing the contrast. Oh, and maybe switching allegiance from one side to the other.

As I practiced, I noted the contrast between the pain of being caught up in thought, and the open space of presence that comes as a gift somehow, when awareness alerts us that we’re back. I can only call it a gift, because I don’t know how to claim credit for it, the coming back out of thought.

I know that I’m training in meditation to come back out of thought into presence, but I don’t know how this works. I said once to a teacher, and was agreed with, that somehow in continually returning our focus to the breath we are replacing the karma of forgetting with the karma of remembering. I stand by this, but it doesn’t mean I know how awareness comes to be in the first place. If there is a first place.

Better simply to turn away from this kind of speculation, and return to the breath, if you can find it. Because in this game the breath, I suspect, exists not to be found so much as to give us a means to recover from being lost.