Nyondo: And we’re live.

Lama Lena: Good morning, y’all. Do I have to wait 30 seconds for Martin?

Nyondo: Ah, yeah. You might just speak generally until – for the next 30 seconds.

Lama Lena: So this teaching is a continuation of The Six Paramitas. Last time, we went through generosity, morality, and a little bit of patience. This time, we’re going to talk about tsöndrü (perseverance), gom (meditation), and yeshe (wisdom).

[Lineage prayer]

PERSEVERANCE

Lama Lena: Patience, I think you understand you need to practice all of these. You need to be patient in order to practice generosity of body, speech and mind. The same for morality, for gewa rather than digpa. You need to be patient with yourself as well as with others when you notice that you’re not perfect. Perseverance is also vital. You need it because practice, although it goes best when done with an attitude of joyous enthusiasm, you won’t always feel that way. Do it anyway. Sometimes you don’t feel like it. Be patient and persevere, do it anyway. Sometimes you do feel like it. Do it anyway. This is the key. We all get to a point where we do not experience a difference in our meditation between in-session and out-of-session. Don’t stop making sessions. Do it anyway. 

Enlightenment cannot be grasped because it’s not a thingy. It does not have causes and conditions. You cannot build it, create it, be good enough to get it. Actually, it is inherent to you and has always been there. You’ve just made yourself so damn busy with phenomena that you can’t notice; you have no time to notice, you have no space to notice, you filled your life with stuff. Outside stuff, thingies, and inside stuff, how you feel about it, all these feelings that come and go, good mood, bad mood, everything you feel, and what you think. All those thoughts that describe the situation. And when your focus is entirely on that, on phenomena, you are confused by it, and don’t notice the inherent enlightenment which is natural to you. It’s still there. When the clouds obscure the sky on a rainy day, the sun is still up there. We say there is no sun today, but that’s not true. There is sun, there’s just clouds between you and the sun, so you can’t see it. The sun is still there. All this phenomena, when you do not understand its true nature, clouds your vision, it arises as smutch on your glasses and you can’t see clearly. You need perseverance to keep going through the variety and the assorted feelings that arise and dissipate and other ones arise and dissipate and the moods and the overwhelming sadness and the fear and the desire and the hope. We have to not grab on to those and make them real. They aren’t, you see. All phenomena – without exception – is made of the same not-stuff.

Perseverance is keeping going. Nevermind how you feel, never mind what you think about it today, just keep walking. Simple, isn’t it? Never forget to keep going. Are there questions? On perseverance. 

Nyondo: Not yet.

Lama Lena: If there are, type them in. 

There will be days when the last thing you want to do is your practice. Do it anyway. There will be days when you are too frightened to focus your attention. Look past the fear, and un-focus your attention on it. There will be days when you are so delighted by the arising temporary circumstance of that day, the sun has finally come out, someone you care about has come to town, something wonderful is happening, and you don’t want to practice, you want to go enjoy it –  practice anyway. Regardless of what ethereal, moving, changing phenomena arises, practice anyway. It might be just very simple, this one.  [Nyondo laughing]

Nyondo: Possibly, possibly. Double checking, it may take people.. “The concept of emptiness seems like a dead end. Is it?”

Lama Lena: Nope, you’re missing  what the Tibetans in their lexicon call clear light nature of emptiness. A visual culture, so the verb to see, rig, is the root of the word awareness, rigpa, which literally is “seer,” “experiencer.” Don’t be caught in the way of speaking that is cultural. Every time I say to see, I mean to perceive. We use “did you see what I mean?”. ‘See’ – it’s used bigger than referring to the eyes. When I say, look, I don’t mean look with your eyes. Look with your mind, perceive, notice. So when we say clear light. Here’s an object, a thing, you see it right, because there is light in this room. The light reflects off the object and you can see the object in my hands. See this object? If this room was in total darkness, you would not see this object, now, would you? So when we say clear light nature, we’re speaking poetically about the ability to see, to receive, to be aware of, to notice. It is by light that the eyes see things. Transparent light, this light between my hands, it has no color, no shape, it’s utterly transparent, you can see right through it to see my face. When we speak of clear light, selwa, it’s also the word for transparent, you could just as easily say transparent-like. This is transparent-like. Not big bright, some amazing something, just this, by which you can see objects. So what this is pointing at symbolically, when we say the clear light nature of emptiness, it is the ability of that emptiness to perceive both itself and assorted stuff. We call that the sambhogakaya nature of mind. We call it “clear light nature of dharmakaya”. We call it “vitality of natural mind”. We call it many things.

I’m going to do this again. I do this all the time. This is a bell. This is a finger. The finger is pointing at the bell, yes? No matter how long my finger points at the bell, my finger is not a bell, my finger will not ring no matter how much I shake it and point at the bell. Only the bell can ring. 

The words, the analogies, all of this are the symbols, that point. Emptiness is alive. The universe arises out of emptiness as emptiness by the vitality of that emptiness. If that vitality, that innate aliveness was not an inherent characteristic of that emptiness, then nothing could arise, because there would be no perceiver. The perceiver is really sambhogakaya nature of mind. Not separate. Sambhogakaya is the clear light nature of dharmakaya, and all that manifests: phenomena, inner phenomena, thoughts, feelings, outer phenomena, stuff. That is simply nirmanakaya – the phenomena arising out of the innate liveliness, the manifestation of that vitality as creative liveliness, also known as the nirmanakaya nature of mind. You must not think that emptiness is separate from rigpa, awareness, vitality, perceiver or seer, or that what is seen; thoughts, feelings and stuff, is in any way separate from the seer of it. For a more detailed explanation of how this works, go read a few texts on quantum physics. There’s nothing in there. Matter are made of thousands of little bits moving up, there’s no bits. Matter is simply made of movement. But these are all analogies, ways of expressing it in language. Mathematics is another language. You can express quantum mechanics in mathematics as a language symbolically pointing. But you’ll never get the finger to ring, the way the bell does.

Anything else coming with questions? I see things appearing on the screen, but it’s too far away for me to actually read them.

Nyondo: “Is there a text this teaching is based on?”

Lama Lena: Thousands! Go Google it. Google for yourself, “Tibetan texts, translation, six paramitas.” Check out especially a reliable site, is anything translated in Lotsawa House, or by Keith Dowman. There’s a lot more than that, and there are other good translators. Tony Duff is pretty good, if you like big words, John Reynolds is also very good. I like his take on many things. And this is not only the translators. There are… there is Yeshe Khandro, who’s quite nice. And I can’t even name them all, but they’re. Don’t go for, trying to go with, like when you get the discussion groups on Reddit or something about this. Don’t even go there. What they’re doing is spreading dharma rumours. It would be better not to listen to those. 

You don’t want the discussion groups, you want direct translations of the old texts, because there’s some weird dharma rumours out there. How those get started? Somebody gets a teaching that is specific to them… I told a student the other day that they were forbidden to do ngöndro. This is due to the particular karmic formations that that student is dealing with at this moment; it would be counterproductive. However, if that student were crazier than they actually are – it’s actually a very sane student – they might have taken that and decided that they would that ngöndro was a forbidden practice and started a rumour to that effect. I have seen such things. Some teacher tells someone, you go do this, and the student takes it as this is the way everyone should do it. Nuh-uh.

You have to adapt teachings, the map, to where the student is standing. If you’re in Chicago, and your friend is in New York, you would not use the same map to get to Mexico. If I said to the person in Chicago, go south x number of miles and then west a much smaller number of miles and then south again, and the person in New York tried to do this, they end up somewhere in Texas, maybe, or Louisiana, Mississippi. Which would not be the Mexico they were trying to get to. So it’s very important that the map goes from where you are. Now, there is another way to do it if you have a map that goes from, say, eastern Tibet to Shambhala, and you want to go to Shambhala, but you are in Paris, but you don’t have a map that goes from Paris to Shambhala, you could first go to eastern Tibet, and then follow the map. That’s how I did it. When I was a kid, there were no maps from Europe to enlightenment, to actualisation of dharma. Oh, a few people like Trungpa Rinpoche, a few others were just beginning to draw maps. Much of it was experimental, because on some levels, exactly where Europe was – was unclear. You’re trying to translate from a flat-earth map with a real up and down to a round-earth map, where up and down is relative to your position on the globe. Hard to translate those maps.

Me, I just went and adopted the Tibetan language, the Tibetan culture became only as much as I possibly could Tibetan, and then followed the Tibetan map. Now, here we are, 50 years later, making maps from Paris, East Africa, Canada, U.S., South America, Brazil, Argentina, from all these subtly different cultural places, that lead to what I’m calling symbolically here Shambhala, the secret land. So I strongly recommend you avoid dharma rumour and read the old texts. If there are teachers whom you have confidence in, listen to their teachings on this subject. Other questions?

Nyondo: Yes, there are. “How does emptiness relate to perseverance?”

Lama Lena: You can’t see emptiness. You can’t perceive, recognize it because you’re too damn busy. You have to preserve it, peeling off the layers of your created busyness to see the inherent natural state of emptiness in all its glorious vitality, and its dancing, sparkling, lively creativity, all at once, as it rather than at it. Even the to see verb, don’t go all the way. When I see something, a thingy, I’m here, and it’s there. Subject: I, Lama Lena; verb: to see; object: candlestick. That is not actually the reality. When I look at the candlestick, the looker and the looked-at are not separate. The me of this moment, the moment of looking at the candlestick is created by influenced by change by the candlestick. What I am thinking about, the redness, about the light coming through it, leading me to then have a thought about the crystal I hung up and wondering when the rainbows will get here (it has a certain angle of sun to do that), and then thinking of… all those thoughts are arising because I am looking at the light through the candlestick. I am what I am thinking, I don’t have thoughts, I am my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions. I am infinite open awareness, there is no conflict between these two things. You’re grasping the word emptiness. It doesn’t ring no matter how much you shake it. It points at something, beyond concept, empty of characteristics, empty of centre, edge, here, there, big, small… Not a void, that which is not. You are that which is not, vital and alive with its clear light nature, dancing, sparkling with the creativity of phenomenon, none of which ever becomes anything other than that, which is not. And there’s no that there to that there there. My words point. Just like the finger pointing at the bell, they don’t ring. Go look where they’re pointing. Don’t stare at the finger. Next.

Nyondo: So the follow up is, “Are you talking about how this relates to perseverance and persevering in trying to see that? Where does perseverance come in?”

Lama Lena: You can’t get anywhere by trying to see that. What you need to do first is remove. Look, I have not cleaned my glasses for a couple of days. Yeah, I do that. Yuck. No matter how hard I try to see clearly through this, because I have not clean my glasses for a few days. Nnnng! I still can’t see clearly through it, but I have a trick. It’s called method, tab in Tibetan. I’m going to clean my glasses. Ahh, that’s better, much clearer. Now I can see. That was an analogy – everything’s an analogy. It’s appealing rather than appearing that you need to be able to see the nature of phenomena as emptiness and emptiness in its innate nature of vitality arising and dissolving as phenomena without ever changing. They’re not thingy-nature.  What you need to do is to peel off, wipe, clean up the smutch on your glasses. That’s an analogy for your compulsive obsession, obsessive compulsive disorder. You have an obsessive compulsive disorder with phenomena. You’re always paying attention to it, always mucking about with, always fretting about it. Stuff! Yeah, and feelings and thoughts, how you think about this, what you think you can do, what you think you can’t do, what you think you want to do, what you think you don’t want to do. How you feel about what you think and the stuff you’re having all those thoughts and feelings about, other people’s actions, probably, stuff, things you perceive with your sense organs here with your ears, the sound of what they said, see with your eyes, the body language they had while saying it. Your obsessive compulsive disorder to continuously pay attention to this is blocking you from perceiving emptiness – as it really is, rather than as you think it might be, fear it – could be, hope it – will be. Those are thoughts, feelings, stuff, phenomena, inner phenomena, outer phenomena. No real difference. They’re all interwoven. So you got to get the smootch off your glasses if you want to see anything. Peering harder don’t work. This brings us to the next paramita, gom, meditation. That is how you peel your obsessive compulsive disorder off of the true nature of reality. Next?

Nyondo: “Where does the vitality come from?”

Lama Lena: The vitality does not come from anywhere, nor does it exist in a place. Time, as you know it, is an idea. It is a bit of phenomena, a thought, a belief system. The innate vitality contains time, arises time, as its play, but does not exist at a single point in time, but rather all points. Look, you think time is real, right? Ay, westerners! You know how when the American Indians, the Native Americans dance, there’s different joker dances. We have them among the Tibetans, too, where we dance with jokers. There’s a… I think my, what do you call it, not archetype, your Facebook person… avatar is a picture of me dancing with the clowns at one of the Tibetan dances. Anyway, when the Native Americans portray a dancer that’s supposed to symbolize a Westerner, they strap a large alarm clock to their wrist. That’s how you know it’s a Westerner. They believe in their wristwatch, their cell phone. They think hours are real. They think time runs at a steady pace all the time. In spite of the fact that they are perfectly able to perceive some days as being much longer than other days, they simply discard this direct perception and follow the taught theory that seconds, minutes and hours are a real thing.

“Injies,” we call them. It’s a euphemism for Westerner that derives from the word “anglaise,” which means Englishman, because they’re the ones who got around everywhere back in the day when a new word was needed to refer to that culture, the culture of time and of believing in it. I could tell you stories with the Native Americans, how we laugh at the Westerners who don’t have the sense to get in out of the sun because it’s “time” to do something. Don’t have the sense to take a nap when they’re tired, because it isn’t “time” to sleep. The old joke: how do you kill an Englishman? Take away his wristwatch, he’ll starve to death because he never knows when it’s time to eat. So where did it come from? It is the innate nature of the universe to be alive. Next question.

Nyondo: How can we persevere through physical pain? 

Lama Lena: Take a pill, I highly recommend ibuprofen. There are two kinds of physical pain. Physical pain that is signalling damage occurring to your body. Please pay attention to that pain. 

My own teacher had a student once who was very determined. The student sat in a full lotus for days on end and tore apart their knee joints as they got older, forcing themselves through the pain to do this. My teacher, when he stopped laughing at them, scolded them severely and told them not to do that. But the damage was already done. That kind of pain is an important signal from your vehicle, your steed that you are riding to the other shore, the boat you sail to the other shore. Do not drill a hole in the bottom of your boat. 

If you have pain, investigate the pain. Is it telling you of damage occurring, do you have a headache? Go check your blood pressure, perhaps it needs adjustment. Check the pillow you’re sleeping on, perhaps you slept with your head at a bad angle and it came from the back of your neck. Check it out first. Run it through an MRI, run it through this, run it through that until you are very clear about what’s causing the pain. Examine the options that Western science offers you in treating that pain. Examine the methods that alternative medicine and chiropractic, other modalities offer you in treating that pain. If after clearly determining the cause and what is available in treatment, you are left with intractable pain, yes, there are methods, but do that first. Common sense is not to be abandoned for magic. Common sense and magic work together. Magic is simply a technology that you don’t understand yet.

Tomorrow, I am teaching the beginnings of the extraordinary ngöndro, and boy, did I spend a lot of time finding a proper text. I wanted to do Nyingthig, because that’s – of the ones I’ve done – I think that’s my favorite. So I found two texts. Long Nyingthig ngöndro, that’s too long for most people here, and a short Nyingthig ngöndro. The problem with the short one is they left the magic out! There’s a bunch of magic that goes supposed to be in there. Magic, technology that I don’t feel I have the terms to describe to you in English. So I had to actually cut and paste between the two of them to come up with a suitable text that was short enough for Westerners in the busyness of this place to accomplish and still have the magic in it. The short ngöndro that I found was designed for someone’s second, third or fourth round after they’ve accomplished the magic part of the ngöndro. Where you’re just doing a quickie in a particular lineage because of a practice. Magic is real, but it is not instead of common sense, they work well together. 

So with pain, first, common sense, then magic. To work with physical pain, and I have at my age, as any others of you who are getting on for 70-ish, pain. The body gets old, joints get messed up. Which one is it? Yeah, this one. See the way it bends? Yeah, sometimes they swell and get red, too. Part of old age. I have osteoarthritis. I’ve had both hips replaced. The trick meditatively to working in with pain, once you know what’s causing it and you’ve decided to do your damn physical therapy and work through the pain with a clear idea of what is the limit to what’s good for the body and what’s pushing it too far. There is a way of entering in.. Ooh, how to describe that… where the pain remains, but it doesn’t hurt? It remains as a physical sensation, but it isn’t annoying, it isn’t distracting, and it doesn’t hurt. 

Now I will speak to my skills after on, towards 50 years of practice, I can do that. But any pain above a level of a five, you know, on the Western pain scale, I have to actually sit in a meditative position to do it.  If it’s above five, I am not likely to be able to work well with the pain and not be bothered with it while running about cooking supper or cleaning the house. So when I need to run about, cook supper, or clean the house, I take a pill. And when I don’t need to cook supper and clean the house, then it doesn’t bother me, I just sit there with it and don’t do things. And that works for me up to eight, nine. It hasn’t gone higher than that.

How to do it? Gom, meditation. But you have to be good enough at meditation, which you get through perseverance, practice. Those of you who emailed with me and who I assist in arranging your personal practice, so that the map is going from where y’are, not where you want to be, but from where you are to where you want to be, you will notice that half the time what I send back is “Keep going. Practice. No, no, you’re not done yet. Keep practising.” I’d say that is the reply to fully half of the emails I receive. Because most of you are doing your practice right. You just need to keep doing it! Takes some time, paramita of patience. And perseverance, they actually go together, you have to be patient enough to persevere. Next question.

Nyondo: “Should I persevere to continue my practice and give gewa at the end, even if it was a broken practice with negative thoughts and confusion, or do I skip that?”

Lama Lena: When have you ever done a practice without some kind of negative thought or confusion intruding? Can you really do that? I can’t. My thoughts are all over the place when they happen. Sometimes I’ll sit for a while and I’ll not be thinking, sometimes I’ll sit for a while and I’ll be thinking and the thoughts are positive and they’re negative, and they’re this and they’re that. Who cares? It’s just thoughts, they’re not made of anything, you can’t even sit on them! Yes, continue your practice. It’s almost impossible to do an entire practice session without having thoughts arise. I, Lama Lena, have thoughts that intrude on my practice session. So what? They do that; they’re thoughts! The nature of the clear light nature of the emptiness, that vitality, it can think, it can feel, it can perceive in the thoughts, feelings and perceptions are not other than that vitality as emptiness in emptiness arising and vanishing. Don’t make a big deal out of them. They are just thoughts. Next.

Nyondo: “During practice, I have feelings that being Homo sapiens is something disgusting and repulsive. How do I deal with that?”

Lama Lena: Ah, you probably were a God last time and you’re homesick. Those are feelings. They’re made of the same thing as a thought. Look, only on what we call the human level – is the door out. Now, it’s not just Homo sapiens on the human level, there’s all sorts of critters. Nagas are human. The gods of – what are called – gods of war, of desire are fairly human. But once you get up into the gods of form and formless, they are not. They’re trapped. 

Once you get down into the animal realm, ninety-nine point nine percent of them are trapped. A few get lucky due to their karma. I once saw three worms get enlightened. Actually, I knew them in a past life. They had been good friends. They were karmic debtors of mine. They died right at the moment of the greatest blessing of a powerful Kalachakra wang done by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and went rainbow. I was quite surprised to see that. So every so often something in the animal realm gets lucky, or has previously — they were yogis previously — created the karma for this, but then had an oopsy and ended up as a worm or something, a bug, a cat, a dog. 

Below that, there’s no way out. The pretas are too distracted by desire, hunger. The hell realms are too distracted by pain, pressure, fear, anger. The gods of form are too distracted by bliss, and the formless gods are too distracted by emptiness. So it is an incredible thing to have been born in the human realm. Yes, Homo sapiens have stinky pits, juicy cunts, snot. But they can get enlightened. It’s worth it! Because here and now, in this time and place, a lineage, vital and alive, unbroken for 30,000 years and another arising, vital and alive, unbroken for about twenty thousand… no. When was the Buddha, 10,000 years ago?

Nyondo: At least.

Lama Lena: Somewhere around there. Somebody check dates. I’m old and have no memory. For that to be still existent here at this time, accessible and you have the interest and ability to pursue it, damn, honey, that’s rare! But don’t be bothered by the pits. Only the gods don’t stink, and that’s just until they get old, then they do. Go do the ordinary ngöndro. It should make you feel better.

Nyondo: “With mantra practice, is it still useful to sing it while doing other things such as bottle feeding orphaned kittens? I am overrun with orphaned kittens who need my time nearly all the time, so the opportunity to sit has been squished. Secondly, helping kittens…”

Lama Lena: The answer to that is yes, very much so, both for you and the kittens, next.

Nyondo: “Secondly, what can we do to help them be as lucky as those worms?”

Lama Lena: But you already said it, the mantra. Just sing the mantra when you feed them, any mantra, your mantra, the one you like from the heart. It leaves an imprint. Whether they’ll be as lucky as those worms or simply lucky enough to end up human with opportunities, or… we’ll see. Much will depend upon the individual kittens’ karma. Where are you located, person with all the kittens? I want another kitten. 

Nyondo: D’aw….

Lama Lena: A new one, or one that’s been hand fed.

Nyondo: Well, weren’t we just talking about cats that brought their kittens to us?

Lama Lena: Yes, I probably don’t need another kitten. 

Nyondo: Yeah. Wangdor Rinpoche, remember, blessed a set of kittens.  

Lama Lena: Yes. And only one survived. 

Nyondo: The other three seem to burn off their karma quickly and died… 

Lama Lena: Meanwhile, Redux is doing well.

Nyondo: Yes. So a question here: “Do you mean gods and goddesses cannot get enlightened?”

Lama Lena: Most can’t. Why would they? They’re having such a good time. Why leave? You only want to get enlightened because you’re dissatisfied with this, being a god is very satisfying, until you die and then you get to be something else, usually something quite dissatisfying.

Nyondo: “Earlier, you spoke about two types of pain. What is the second type?”

Lama Lena: Ah, what I was talking about is pain that is a signal of damage going on and pain that you already know what it is and there’s nothing to be done about it. Do find out which type you have. Only work on meditating with the second type; the first type is a sign there’s a problem with the body and you should, please, go fix it. Common sense, remember?

Nyondo: “Is impermanence a function of emptiness?”

Lama Lena: No, it’s a funct– well, yes, but I’m making a bit of a stretch and a jump. Phenomena is a function of vitality which is inherent to emptiness, impermanence is the nature of phenomena. So, yes, they’re all the same thing, but they are different aspects of that thing.

Nyondo: “I also practiced South Indian tradition of worshipping the divine mother, will that interfere with my Dzogchen practice?”

Lama Lena: Not if you recognize Yum Chemo, the great mother, the mother of all Buddhas, as the dharmakaya nature of mind, the great ocean, the vitality from which all phenomena such as Buddhas and idiots springs. If you step that far in knowing her, then it will help your Dzogchen practice. Next.

Nyondo: A follow up: the kitten practitioner is in Tunisia.

Lama Lena: I can’t get kittens from Tunisia in these times.

Nyondo: But they work with the charity that gives them… sometimes gives them Tibetan names, the animals.

Lama Lena:  Sweet! That’s also auspicious. We give auspicious names to beings, that when you call someone “Luminous Awareness,” a part of them comes to instinctively live up to that or recognize that they are luminous awareness, because that’s their name. So it’s very helpful to give such names. Anything more? 

Nyondo: One question here: “Is perfect perseverance the absence of giving up, the freedom of having a goal, the continuation of the tantra?”

Lama Lena: Yes, transcend that. Remember, these are paramitas. You practise them all the way through. And you transcend them, you go beyond perseverance, but to go beyond perseverance, you are beyond the duality of doing and not doing. 

MEDITATION

I want to spend a little time talking about meditation. There are many kinds. There are a number of purification practices, rushens and ngöndros, ordinary ngöndro, extraordinary ngöndro, vajrasattva taken just by itself, rushens of body, of speech, of mind. These are all the cloth I wipe my glasses with, which at the moment is my zen, but yeah, whatever. 

There are symbolic practices of tantras, and you can include these preliminaries, purification practices in tantras as a tantra, but they primarily rub your glasses. There are also practices where you dance the dance through to full enlightenment again and again. You follow the map of symbols, which is the nature of sambhogakaya, where all the gods and archetypes are born, the innate creativity of vitality. You follow these patterns, which may well contain some purification patterns as well, through symbolically to no pattern. This is called sadhana practice. Most mantras are in a sadhana, although they can be done without doing the full sadhana. These are symbolic, repetitive practices. 

Monlam is a practice of recitation. When you just do a mantra that’s often considered monlam. Monlam is wish path. You state an intent. Most of the frigging translations say “May I”. “May I be reborn in Dewachen?” Who are you asking permission from? It’s not in the Tibetan. The original text says, “I will take rebirth in Dewachen,” not “May I,” and yet that is the traditional way it’s always been translated into English, so everybody translates it that way. That’s not what it says. You’re repeating again and again your intent to do so, not again and again asking some big Daddy’s permission to allow you to do that.

OK, enough rant on that one. Translators always rant at other translations, it’s because there is no right translation, ever, from one language to another. There are only possible approximations. So everybody else’s guess at the closest approximation is never quite satisfying to everybody else. Even my best guesses, I’m always re-guessing myself half the time when I do translations, which is why I do so many of them just off the cuff. What do I think it says today to this person I’m talking to in English?

Chöku Kuntuzangpo gombayi…  dharmakaya, primordial Buddha as the meditator, seen as the meditator. Just one line there, now, I might have said that quite differently and it would still be accurate or as accurate as we can ever get. Yeah, texts are fun. Say the question again, I got sidetracked, I ranted on translations. Oh, talking about different kinds of practices?

Nyondo: They were doing the South Indian practice with…

Lama Lena: No, there was one after that, one after that.

Nyondo: Let me go through the list here. Oh, well, “I am asking if gods and goddesses cannot get enlightened?…”

Lama Lena: No, just give me a new one. I got sidetracked and hopefully answered the question in the process. Sorry, guys.

Nyondo: How is this one? “I am easily distracted from one project to another without finishing. This causes me frustration and sadness due to my lack of perseverance. Is there anything that can help me cultivate this virtue?”

Lama Lena: Have you been diagnosed with the ADD? There may be medications that will help. But limit how many projects you have going at any one time. Limit how many practices you are working on at any one time – to five. Don’t the rest of you do that, I’m talking to one person here. So don’t start a new one until you finish one of the five you have going. Pare down the ones you’ve started and actually give or throw away or pack up in a box and put it in the attic or basement, if that’s the best you can do, all but five. Don’t try to go cold turkey, you just might be a multitasker, someone who is best at that, so limit how many are going at once, but I think five will work for you. I tell most people three. I don’t think you can do three, I think five is the best you’re going to get it down to. Email me. We’ll talk further. Yeah, I get distracted, too. What I end up doing is orbiting around and coming back to it, usually. If it’s still important when I get back to it or interesting to me, then I do it, and if it’s not, then it goes away. And I do it for a while and then I orbit around, but I usually keep it down, like there’s only about three texts I’m reading at the moment, and the risk of stuff back in the bookcase so that all my books weren’t piled in my bed. I had a fine lover – that was Joy, actually –  when we first got together, and we would always get together over at my place because her bed was full of books and there was no room for me. Have you ever tried doing it on top of a pile of books? Pokey! So I completely sympathize. Try to keep it down to five and make a habit of circling. Later, we can try taking it down lower if five is too few for you. Nine? More than that’s too many. But circle among them. If when you get back to one in your circle, you have no interest in it, pack it up, put it back, put it away in the place those things go. Feather dilly bobs for my hats, which I haven’t opened up for two years, are on a top shelf in the craft room, like that. For a while, I was quite into making and wearing those.

Nyondo: “When I do a lot of practice, I often attract people with severe mental problems who just want to be around me. I wonder which practice can I do to bring them some serious benefit?”

Lama Lena: Manis. You will also probably find you attract cats. Nothing quite causes a cat to want to sit on me, like deciding to sit for a while, or opening a text, in which case the cat will sit on the text I think practice blows on some kind of funny level that some people and some cats are very attracted to it. So the most beneficial practice you can do, the reason it is so common is because it works so well: manis.

Om mani padme hum. Om mani padme hum. Om mani padme hum. Hri! Jan, one of my students and a dear friend, is leading a group in that practice. When is Jan on? I think it’s Sunday or Saturday.

Nyondo: Uh, this weekend or next?

Lama Lena: This weekend.

Nyondo: I’m looking at the schedule now.

Lama Lena: It was either this morning or tomorrow morning.

Nyondo: The trekchö or the Chenrezig?

Lama Lena: The Chenrezig.  

Nyondo: That’s tomorrow morning.

Lama Lena: Tomorrow morning, what time?

Nyondo: That is at 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

Lama Lena: 9:00 AM Pacific Time tomorrow morning. 

Nyondo: And they need to go to the site to get details.

Lama Lena: Go to the website, my website… would you type the URL in again for people?

Nyondo: Yes.

Lama Lena: And we’ll give you details of how to access that. And it’s just a group practice which you might enjoy it. Lama Tashi, another student of mine, does a group practice, which has already happened this week. It was this morning, I think about that same time, 9:00 AM, with just sitting and meditating, because sometimes people working together can synergize. So this is available to you all, should you be interested. 

I want to talk a little bit about meditation, because it is the next paramita. 

So I talked to about different kinds of meditation: sadhana, purification practices, shiné, resting in stillness, learning to spend periods of time not thinking, mantric work, all of these are kinds of meditation. They lead to the pinnacle of pinnacles, trekchö. Trekchö, called “cutting through”, trek chö, because it cuts through the crap that sticks you into a view of duality. It is the top of the ninth level, the highest form of meditation. It is taught in Dzogchen. For a full teaching on that, I believe The Three Words That Strike the Heart by Garab Dorje, Tsik Sum Né Dek is available on the website, canned, recorded, both by me, and amazing of all amazings, by my teacher in the Guru Rinpoche’s practice cave. Very beautiful teaching he did there. I’m translating it, so it’s also in English. Took about five days, so it’s a long one. You listen in bits, and then try it.

Meditation at its end point is non-meditation, when trekchö is taken to its end, the separation between doer, doing, and thing done, subject, object, verb, dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya – is lost, and the not-doing of the third word of Garab Dorje’s sopa directly arises in its natural state. This is transcending meditation. But you do not transcend meditation without applying to it: Generosity – for the sake of all life;

Morality – do it in a relaxed state; Patience – don’t try to make it work; Perseverance – keep doing it as long as there is a doer, a deed, and a done. A doer, a doing and a deed. That is how you meditate. All of these are contained in that one, and then transcended. Or in the paramita of wisdom, the gone-beyond of the beyond, there is no separation between  dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya, between the doer, the doing and the deed. They are the same thing, infinite open awareness in all its lucidity, luminosity, sparkling with the playful creativity of phenomena arising in emptiness as emptiness. 

You are that. You, all of you, us, all life in the universe, the bugs and the gods and everything in between – is innate vitality of awareness that permeates, that is the nature of the vast open emptiness that manifests as the playful creativity. There is no separation between doer, doing, and deed. They create each other interwoven, interpenetrating, interdependent. Relax. Let the phenomena arising playfully out of the vitality of awareness arise as emptiness and dissolve as emptiness in emptiness without ever becoming other than that. This is you we’re talking about. This is us. This is the bugs and the birds, the demons and the gods. Simply the dance of awareness in vast openness.  Are there questions? 

Nyondo: Yes, well, here we go.  Almost had it… “I’m in Los Angeles, where can I go to get direct introduction into Dzogchen teachings?” 

Lana Lena: Friggin hell, I just gave it to you! You don’t have to go anywhere. We believe it transmits across the Internet. I say, we believe, because this is so new that no one who has only and solely received teachings through the Internet has gone rainbow as yet, so we have no proof that it works. But we think it does. Theoretically, since time is simply another bit of phenomena in the way it arises, part of the way the pattern interpenetrates everything, recorded should work too. But we are less certain of that because of the telepathic component, which should not, from the side of the teacher, be prey to here and there or now and then, but may well from the side of the student. So it’s can-able for students who are able to step outside of time to capture, and it’s transmittable for those who are able to step outside of space and catch it. And if you can’t do those things, try a few purification practices and some manis and some other things until you can, because right now nobody’s doing in-person teachings. And then, of course, you get to practice the paramita of patience if you are uncomfortable receiving it over the internet, but that’s from your side, not from anybody else’s. You can practice the paramita of patience until there are teachings in person. If you really want it that way, it’s up to you. Next?

Nyondo: “Does the dance of awareness arise as self?”

Lana Lema:  Yes, all selves. Us’un.

Nyondo: “Is practicing the question of who am I, being a witness, a part of Dzogchen practice?”

Lama Lena: Not the way you are perceiving it as a witness, no. There is a point in Mahamudra where that question is asked, but the way it translates together with Western psychology as “witness” messes it up too much and won’t work. It… it goes astray. There is no witness. It’s an illusion. You are what you witness, there’s no separation there. Next.

Nyondo: “Does one have to be Buddhist to practice Dzogchen?”

Lama Lena: Nope. Next?

Nyondo: That’s all of the other questions. The one that we lost earlier had to do with perfect perseverance being the absence of giving up or the freedom of having a goal.

Lama Lena: Ok, don’t think of… although the perfection of the paramitas is one of the ways they say it, that perfection does not mean what you mean by perfect. Completion, dissolution, transcendent and perfect, all mean the same thing. Go, chew on that. I think we may have finished.

Nyondo: I think so, too. I’m just doing a last check on questions here. Ah. “What can one do if trying meditation sets off an array of different kinds of psychiatric problems/states?”

Lama Lena: Mantra, sadhana. Not all meditations will set those off, therefore, gently exploring which ones won’t and avoiding the ones that do for the time being would be your best bet. Rarely will manis set that off: they’re designed not to. Try manis without a sadhana, and then slowly and gently see if you can do it with a sadhana. Do not attempt Mahamudra or Dzogchen at this time. We need to get a little bit more purification done in a very gentle way for you, so that you do not have too many side effects in this way. Capisce? So we’re going to start gentle with manis and ordinary ngöndro, which is thinking and understanding things, together with bodhicitta and arising bodhicitta. No direct meditation. There are some lovely books on bodhicitta that I’m going to recommend you read, some by His Holiness. Go play on Amazon, see what you can afford and get a couple of them. Read books on bodhicitta. Say om mani padme hum, gently and softly, just singing while you take a walk. No sitting at all.  Not now. And get in touch with me by email and we’ll work with this further, you need a particularly gentle entrance. Certain entrances and ways of going, you’ve got some PTSD, that’s what’s causing these symptoms. And we’re going to have to just sort of gently go around it without stimulating it until we can get behind it and fix it. Fair enough? Email me. And I think, are we done or did anybody else come through? 

Nyondo: I think we are. Let me just double check on questions here.

Lama Lena: Are you all satisfied? I think so.

[Sharing merit]

May all beings be happy and find the true cause of happiness. May all beings be free and find the true cause of freedom. See, I’m doing it, too. I’m saying “May I.” Inji! Yeah, I am one. Oops. All beings, be free, beyond time and space. As it is, so be it.

We are complete. Ok, some of you I’ll see tomorrow, and the rest of you will see next week. I think next week I’m teaching Mandarava. I think it’ll be on the schedule if it’s the case.

Nyondo: And you are off-line.

Lama Lena: Thank you!