Dzogchen for All Levels: Beginner, Intermediate, & Advanced

Date: November 15 2019
Location: Tso Pema, India

Transcript

BEGINNER DZOGCHEN

LL: In the true Dzogchen – Move that. Don’t put it down here. Not where it is. Over here where it was. Yes, that is good. That way it won’t get knocked all about by a dog – who is welcome to be in here. And who seems a bit rambunctious. Hello, pretty puppy. You settle down now, relax.

Who You Are

The beginning of Dzogchen is the same as the end of Dzogchen, which is that Buddha nature is inherent in you. It’s already there. You don’t have to achieve it, acquire it, be good enough for it, develop it, or any of these things. It is inherently present and always has been. It is the true, infinite, open awareness which arises naturally as the innate, luminous, lucid vitality which itself is the innate, shimmering, sparkling creativity which is inherent in all life. Yeah, you too. You be alive. Poke yourself. Feel it?

There’s things you want. There’s things you don’t want. Hope and fear. Desire and attraction. This is what separates that which is alive from that which is a simple hallucination. That which is alive has Buddha nature. And it is this Buddha nature which creatively gives birth to the myriad ‘thing-ies’, stuff, perceptions, experience through your sense organs, named as ‘this or that’ by the ignorance which accompanies every moment. Each perception then described by your thought process: ‘ Oh, this is what happened and this is what it meant and this is what I now feel about it and I feel it because it happened like this and they did that and they did that’. You see how you do that?

So, that is what is what you do to distort the innate and natural perception of enlightenment. If you could just relax and stop trying to make things perfect, there it would be. But it is never quite good enough, this moment. You want it to be a little bit better, a little bit different, a little bit happier, a little bit clearer, a little bit wiser, a little bit more enlightened, a little bit something, in the next moment. So, ya fix it. That’s your grab and push. And it is the grab and push, and the obsession with phenomena which arises as grab and push, that keeps you stuck circling in the experience of being a singular experiencer within the boundaries of samsara. Except that’s not what you are.

You are Kuntuzangpo, Kuntuzangmo. Innate Buddhahood. Not Gautama. Not a name. But the very aliveness of eternity and infinity. And that is present, is in each moment, unchanging, unborn, undying. All the methods of Dzogchen are simply methods to help you stop fighting it. Your own natural, innate enlightenment. 

However, it is also important that you not take my word for this. You need to actually glimpse, even if through the smudge on your glasses dimly, through your own obscurations and mental formations dimly, your own Buddha Nature. You actually have to see it yourself. Otherwise you will not go to the effort of trying to relax into it. You will not believe in it. Not really, not here. “Oh, it is a nice intellectual theory but I’m no good, I am not good enough to actualize this”. 

That’s more of your pride talking. “I am too good and I am not good enough” are both pride. Humbleness is a form of pride. Just as hom pa [hom pa), ngacha [nga bdag], self-aggrandizement, is a form of pride and they’re a form of the same thing. Ooh, what level am I at? That is part of that. That is all Northern direction. Trying to figure out what level you’re at and if you’re doing it right.

Getting a Glimpse

LL: The first step is to recognize tawa [lta ba], your own innate Buddha nature. To get yourself a glimpse of it. Once there is that glimpse, you can develop faith born of experience. Not faith born of believing somebody else’s words. You can learn to take refuge in that glimpse, and you can learn, having found that glimpse once, to allow it to expand. Not to expand it. It is naturally expansive. It is naturally everywhere, everything. You can allow your attentional focus, the focus of what you pay attention to, to expand from your usual point focus on the minutiae of the day…Is my English too fancy for anybody here?

Participant: No, it’s perfect.

LL: Ok. I know you’re not all first English speakers. So, I can use words like ‘minutiae’? Okay, just checking cause I can also use other words if I get a group that doesn’t speak English as a first language predominantly. Or hasn’t learned it in school, where they give you all the big words.

So, normally, every day and you can notice this, because look at today – What did you spend your time doing today? Where was your attention focused? I’ll bet it was on stuff. And what you thought of that stuff, the thoughts you were having about the stuff, and how you felt about the thoughts you were having about the stuff. I bet these are the three things you were focused on. Now stuff, you know, stuff-things, how do you experience them? Through your sense organs, is it not? If I held up this water bottle but you were blind and I didn’t slush it, you would not know what I was holding. But if you heard it slush, maybe you would. But that is another sense organ. 

So you have six senses. The eyes see. But the eyes don’t see things. They see shape and color. The chakra back here interprets that shape and color into “That is a water bottle”. If you were in a primitive culture – in fact there is a lovely movie about a primitive culture where they find a Coca-Cola bottle. It is called ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy‘. I would highly recommend it. It’s not recent. It’s old but quite good. And it shows how you can misname things that are not familiar to you. Besides, I could have filled it with vodka. You wouldn’t know. [laughs]

Participant: I could have smelt it.

LL: From over there, no!

Participant: It is vodka light, without alcohol. It is very modern.

LL: Yes, got ya.

Giving Up Thingies and Relaxing Focus

LL: This is why it is so important to get the glimpse yourself. Because of your usual obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is you compulsively obsessed with phenomena. You pay attention to the minutiae of thoughts, feelings, and perception. All the time.
Did any of you stop today for any period?

LL (talking to student): You’ve been doing tantra today. Which works with minutiae. Different path.

Participant: Even in meditation?

LL: Even in mediation. Sometimes we minutely focus on a single point, pointed focus. So, we focus on not-thought. Guess what? It is a thing. It is also a thing. This is shinay with an object.

Whether it is the breath- or we don’t use the breath because it is later hard to stop breathing. When you wanna take your object away. We use a pebble. Cause you can always chuck the pebble over the fence. And it’s gone. Whereas you can’t do that with your breath. So, this is a slight difference in how we use to focus our attention. And it’s only because we need to go to shinay [zhi gnas] without an object by removing the object.

In all the focusing, including shinay, which is often called one pointed focus, you’re still obsessing compulsively with thingies. With phenomena. So, the key is going to be to expand your focus of attention. Not to move it. Not to shift it from here to here. You’re good at that already. To broaden the focus. But not fuzzy broaden. Relaxed, open clarity. Usually, when we take a few glasses of whisky, our attentional focus does open. At least mine does. Some people instead just get into a royal grouch and get in fights. I don’t. I seem to be a nice drunk, usually…[laughter]. 

There is the story in town about me throwing the guy out of the cafe and breaking the chair, one New Years’ Eve. He called my wife a n*****. Of course I threw him out of the cafe and broke a chair! What would you want me to do? I am not gonna let him do that. She’s timid. She is not gonna fight for herself. He called a whole bunch of French people frogs before that and they didn’t do anything. Crazy Dane. But usually, usually, I am a very nice drunk.

However, what the lack of focus booze gives you, as do other drugs. You know, consider your own experiences if you’ve played with that. I am of the baby-boomer generation. We use these analogies. You younger folks may not. That’s a fuzzy focus, using alcohol or recreational drugs to soften one’s point focus, just gives it a fuzzy focus. It’s not a bigger focus. It’s just out of focus. It’s like you’re looking through binoculars and you’re turning the little knob and it gets fuzzy but you’re still looking through a couple of tunnels. 

That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to actually open the orifice of focus of our attention. Not of our eyes. Not of our ears. Of our attention.
Without letting go of its clarity. There’s some tricks to that. Cause if I tell you just “Right, do it”. Yeah right…

Teachings of the Body

LL: So, to make it easy, there are the teachings of the body, the teachings of the speech, and the teachings of the mind. So, the teaching of the body is basically to sit with our back straight. Now, squished into this little cave we really can’t do that properly. You can try for the Maitreya position, which is both feet flat on the floor. Your back straight and your hands here.

LL (to student). Find out some way that you’re not turned sideways.

Participant: Ok.

LL: You don’t have to watch me. You can listen. But you really want your back straight if you want to give this a try. I hope you’ve sorted yourself into the best comforts you can for that. Faizal, you’ve probably got the best seat for doing the Maitreya position at the moment. This aligns your channels. There are certain emotional tones that occur from twisted channels. For instance, if you do this with yourself bent forward, slumped, it can lead to depression. If you do it with leaning back too far, it can lead to hyperactivity or insomnia. And if you do it twisted to the side, it can lead to what we call in the texts ‘peculiar ideation’. I’ll point you out to a few of our beggars in town who suffer from that. The odd belief systems like the CIA is controlling you through your fillings. That’s an example of peculiar ideation. Feel free to put that down if it bothers you.

LL (pointing to the young dog, who is lying and playing on the lap of one of the students): He is just so happy to have love…[laughs]

LL: And I think he is young. He looks like a puppy. You are very patient.

Participant: I can take him away. You want that, for a little bit?

LL: So, this is the beginning of the position of the body. Now, your thoughts think a lot. You know they be doing that. (to student) If you move your butt back, you can actually possibly support your back on the bookcase if you need to.

Participant: Ok.

LL: I have enough scoliosis that I need a certain support on a certain part of my back or the curvature gets out of hand. If you have scoliosis of the spine, get someone standing behind you with your shirt off, while you try to do this. Find out where the curve is and find out how to adjust your seat by putting a wedge under your ass, or leaning against the side prop or back prop, to make the scoliosis as straight as you can. 

I have worked with post-Polio Tibetans, who are doing tsa-lung [tsa rlung; Wylie] practice where it is even more important than this. To devise seats that support them in that. So, it doesn’t mean you can’t if you have scoliosis. It just means you’re gonna have to pay a little more attention to how you set up your seat. Most people past the age of sixty have a bit of it. We wear out.

With your channels in alignment, your chin is your throttle. If your thoughts are moving too fast at any given moment, you can move it down just about a centimeter. And if your thoughts are moving too slow and you’re falling asleep, you can either get a dog or move your chin up [laughter] a couple of centimeters and that will speed them up. 

It’s a very subtle movement of the chin, but it does help, because sometimes – You know, like you’ve had an extra cup of coffee and it’s all going “pprrubblubururullururburulu”. Or you know, you’ve just had a really big, heavy lunch annnd..aaaghh…So, this is where the chin helps. The chin helps when it is a little bit too fast or too slow. If it is extremely too slow, go take a walk or dunk your head in water. If it is extremely too fast, wait till the coffee wears off. It is usually a result of a situation that it gets that fast.

The biggest and most important point of this is your eyeballs. I bet none of you can turn your heads and look at the altar without paying attention to it, can actually look at it with our eyes without your attention being on it. See that? You can’t do it, can you? Your attention follows your eyeballs. Wonderful, you’ve got a handle on it. 

So what you’re gonna do is release the point focus of your gaze. Without having it become totally fuzzy. Allowing clarity to remain but expanding, allowing it to expand into full peripheral vision, rather than being focused in the middle. It is a little bit fuzzy in the middle, but it gets clear all the way out to the edges.

When you do this with your eyes, it will make it easier for you to relax your attention. If you wear glasses, sometimes, for most people, removing them makes this easier. For other people it does not. So you can figure it out for yourself. Some people, it actually forces them to let go of point-focus when they take the glasses off, cause they can’t see well enough to point-focus. This is the teaching of the body. It is extremely important.

Teachings of the Speech and Mind

The next is the teaching of the speech. The teaching of the speech is very simple: Shut up. Stop talking to yourself. Stop saying in words this continuous, little under-mutter of a nattery description of what you are doing, what you will do, and what you did do. Just shut up. But if that’s not possible for you at this stage, see if you can put your thinking in neutral gear. So that thoughts may arise, but they do not connect to the next thought. 

The original Tibetan of this advice given in Spontaneously Arising by Guru Rinpoche is to shunt aside the sluice gate of your waterwheel. So that the water is flowing but the mill’s grinding wheel no longer turns. You divert it by the sluice gate. Since most of you do not have a mill and may have never seen a watermill, although we do have them here, think about putting it in neutral gear. Even if you step on the gas, no matter how much the motor turns over, the clutch is not engaged. This is an analogy. Without connecting the previous thought to the next thought – that would be engaging your clutch, making that connection. Relax. Breath in through your nose and slowly out through your mouth like a sigh.

This will settle the chi in your channels. Now, as the little nam [rnam], the little thought particles dance in a random fashion and keep chittering to cap your attention, connect to each other and make phrases, allow your attention to relax past the focus on what you are thinking to the infinite, vast openness of where your thoughts arise. Shift your attention from the “what” to the “where”.

For some people, visualizing an image, say of a teapot, letting that image arise clearly in your mind’s eye – your mind’s eye is in your mind. Find the location of the image. Some people do better with a bigger image. Have you ever stood next to a freight train? Imagine that. Visualize a long freight train. You are standing right next to it. Where is the picture? Where is the sound of clanking and sighing that comes from the train? Did your mind also put the flashing lights of a street crossing in? That whole picture, which is a lot bigger than your head, will not fit between your ears. Don’t make the mistake of finding a location that is inside or outside, in front or behind, to the left or the right, above or below. This is another direction all together.

For some people – and I found this true with certain musicians – audiolizing a tune and then feeling around with their perception, with your yi, the sixth sense. Not with your intellect. Don’t use your intellect for this. Won’t work. It is like getting to get a bolt loose with a screwdriver. Just can’t do it. Feel around. Where is the song that you have audiolized to play? Just imagine a very large green elephant with pink stripes and five tails. His trunks go in a spiral. He is smiling. Where’s the picture?

Beyond real and unreal, beyond is-es and isn’t-s, as far as your imagination extends, dharmakaya extends. Infinite and open. Lively and lucid with the ability to think, to imagine, to feel, to perceive. And all those thoughts, feelings, perceptions arise in mind, dissolve in mind. This infinite, vast openness, in its entire vital, luminous lucidness, which is its innate own nature. This is mind. Semnyi [sems nyid]. Big mind. Not cramped, little personality that is always changing. That is born and dies. Big mind. And the vitality of this big mind, its luminous lucidity, its clear light nature, its vital aliveness, is shared by all life. All life partakes of this very aliveness. The Buddha nature inherent in all life is this infinite, open awareness, and the nature of awareness is to be lively and creative.

So, the shimmer of the clear light of infinity, of infinite, open emptiness, that clear light nature inherent in it; sparkle of that, the shimmer of that, is the phenomena rising and dissolving. All those thoughts, feelings and perceptions that happen and unhappen, happen and unhappen, happen and unhappen, happen and unhappen in each moment. Constantly changing, not made of any substance. Not each single nam of them having, or particle of them – and there are no particles there. They’re about as particley as a quark. Each single bit of them, bit-less bit, does not last for any length of time. Is not made of any atomic weight or substance. Your own innate Buddha nature. This infinite, open, awake, aware, lucid and lively mind. George, if you prefer. Really, call it what you will. You’re naming it will not succeed in encompassing it or making it small enough to grasp. Do not look at this like a view.

Tawa [lta ba] is to be this. We see, perceive, experience, this infinite open awareness in all its luminous, lucidity. And all its lively creativity. And we think ‘I’ see that. And so, we create this separation of duality, which is the original “Oops!” anyway. It is not a ‘you’ or personality. Seeing tawa, nature of mind, Buddha nature, as if there were two things there. That liveliness, that sparklyness that arises in the infinite openness, that’s your personality. That’s the phenomena of thoughts, feelings and perceptions that is you as you are in this moment. Unseparate from your surroundings because your perceptions are made and make that. This infinite openness is the dance of perception. The dance of feeling, the dance of thought. Phenomena, thought, feeling and perception is no other thing than the innate liveliness of this infinite, open vastness.

The First Point

Do not separate yourself forcefully from your own Buddha nature. Notice it, and for a moment, be satisfied. Nothing to fix. Nothing to gain, nothing to accomplish, nothing to acquire. To glimpse, notice. Not as if it is over there and there is a you here going ‘ooh, lookie!’. But to notice as if you had never before seen a mirror, and suddenly caught your reflection and touched it.

 To notice your own true nature, without separating from it, is tawa. This is the first point. But because our personality, in its dissatisfaction and continuous experiential changeableness. “The next book you read is gonna change you, man!”. Their idea is gonna get into your ideas. The next person you talk to is gonna change you. Their words are gonna get into your ideas. The next food you eat is gonna change you. Those molecules are gonna get all mixed up with your molecules.

Your constantly-changing personality, even though it has glimpsed this, due to habit patterns of eons, will re-grasp point focus and forget this, even though it is noticed. Your forgetting it doesn’t make it go away. It just makes you feel more and more dissatisfied with not feeling like you have it. And so you run around trying to get more money, more food, more friends, more lovers, more wisdom, more enlightenment, more practice, more wangs, more blessings, maybe a rebu. And it won’t help. 

What you need to do, in each moment, while sitting on your cushion with your back straight, and while getting up and making yourself a cup of tea, is to notice your innate Buddha nature, tawa. Don’t grab it. It’s like grabbing butterflies. It squishes them. It’s also futile. There’s no handle attached to emptiness. There’s nothing to grab it by. Instead, relax again and again. You can use the methods of making the picture, looking for it. Making the song, looking for it. If that helps you to glimpse, to notice, not outside, not inside, not above or below, not left or right, not in front or behind. Not anywhere because there is no there to that there where. Glimpse, relax.

If you keep doing that a lot, while doing simple things, and then while doing more and more complex things, you will find after some time, months, years, that – Okay here is an analogy. Look at me through your spread fingers. Look at my face through your fingers. When you look at my face through the fingers, you can see my face. When you look at the lines on your fingers you can see them, but you can’t see my face clearly at the same time. See that? That’s your analogy. 

In the beginning, when you first do this, it feels like looking from your normal focus on point- you know, thoughts, feelings, what you’re doing, what you’re gonna go get, what you’re gonna do tomorrow, what is the shopping list, what do I need, what do I want, Ahhhh. [deep breath]….And back to the weather, yadayadayadayaya. [Lama Lena mumbling fast]

So it is gonna feel like it is going from “here” to “here” at first. Don’t worry. That is an illusion. Come back to basics. Keep doing it. After a while, it is gonna feel like looking at your fingerprints and then at my face through your hand. Like a shift of depth perception.

After a while there – [sound of the dog barking] Easy dog. Hello?

Participant [entering]: Hello, it is me, Karma. Sorry for being…

Participant: Hi Karma. You just missed the wang. Come on in. Somebody make room for Karma.

Participant: Thank you. I am comfortable here.

LL: Okay. Put your shoes on. It is cement. You can take a cold. Put your shoes on. Come on. You can’t put your bare feet on cement. It’s gonna make you miserable. You’ll get sick.

So, I’ll go back into the four wangs again. For right now, and yes, the dog is overly friendly and a puppy and we don’t know whose it is. Is it? Does it belong to anyone here?

Oh, it is your’s, okay.

Participant: No, no..

Participant: It belongs to the teashop

LL: Tea shop dog. It decided it wanted to come to the teachings.

Participant: His name is Tommy

Participant: Next life he wants to be born as Dzogchenpo…

LL: Not unusual. That may be why we like Dzogchen. We were a dog from a tea shop that came to a teaching last time and somebody gave us a biscuit, so we thought it was cool. I’ll give him a biscuit afterwards.

Shifting Your Perception

So, in this practice, this at first feels like you’re shifting your gaze. Then it feels like you’re shifting your depth perception. Then there is no shift at all. No difference. This, in the Three Words of Garab Dorje, refers to no difference between session and session break.

But that doesn’t happen at first. That is what will happen. You can’t make it happen. It will happen if you follow the instructions. But you can’t stabilize Dzogchen. You may meet a number of advanced or more advanced Dzogchen practitioners who say “I am having trouble stabilizing my Dzogchen”. Because they think there’s something that moves that they have to hold still. No. The moving will move. You can’t hold it still. The infinite, open, vast emptiness has nothing to it to move, so what’s to worry? They are the same thing.
They are not separate.

But you won’t come to know this – don’t just take that they’re not separate ‘cause I said so. Doesn’t work in sutrayana. Doesn’t work in Dzogchen. Works in tantra! In tantra, “because I said so” works. Not in sutrayana, where you’re supposed to really – the Buddha said “Take my teachings as you would buying gold in Benares”. Any of you been to Benares? Familiar with the bazaar in Benares? Yeah.

So, you actually have to do this practice. We call it quick glancing. But that is, in the teachings given by my teacher’s teacher, not Garab Dorje…Dyang Chub Dorje [byang chub rdo rje]. Back in Tibet. Who is fairly well known as Norbu Rinpoche’s root guru. Dang Chub Dorje said, “While walking and talking, while eating and sleeping, while getting up and sitting down, remember to return your attention to the already familiar openness – open awareness”. 

Garab Dorje in tsik sum né dek [tshig gsum gnad brdegs] said, “At all times, and on all occasions remember the – no – notice by remembering the already recognized Dharmakaya nature of mind’. So this is the same thing. From two different texts. What this means is you gotta make a lot of sessions.

Making Sessions

If you want to actualize Dzogchen, in the first couple of years of your practice you need to make a good six to eight sessions a day. Now they can only be ten minutes long. Cause maybe you have a job, or work, or family responsibilities. But you can make a five minute session. Six to eight times a day. In the West, go in the bathroom. You have some privacy. Unless you have a two-year-old, it is a private place. At least at work it is. Here in Asia, that won’t work.

Bathrooms are not good places to meditate in Asia. Mine is. But for the most part. So, find some other reason to go off by yourself. Just go sit on a wall, go out back, sit on the veranda, go onto your bedroom. whatever you have to do. Six, eight, ten times a day. Align your channels, get your position good, find your mind with your mind.

Mind mind looking. Quote from Wangdor Rinpoche, in English. Sems kye sems lta. Mind sees itself and you relax into this. If you do that many actual, seated sessions, on a park bench, on a wall, wherever you find yourself multiple times a day, you will find it easy in between these sessions to continuously relax and open your attention and notice the tawa, nature of mind, infinite, open awareness. That innate and natural vastness that has never moved and never will, that is your own true nature, is still there. And you have to notice it experientially. Knowing it is there intellectually is useless. 

Do you all know what a pizza is? Does that keep you from being hungry? What would you need to do with a pizza to satisfy? You’d actually have to eat it! Understanding it, talking about it, reading about it, these things won’t work. This is why the practice has to be done and that is up to you.

Now, when you do the practice, you should do two long sessions in the day, on first waking up and right before going to bed. This will help you deepen your view. Deepen your relaxation into tawa. The short sessions, eight to ten times, will help you spread through time your view. Your relaxation into being the view. Not seeing the view. So both are necessary. Now, something funny is gonna happen. A lot of funny things are gonna happen. Just as in the monsoon time, when it rains, all sorts of weird green stuff grows up in the jungle. So when you begin to actually pay attention to mind, it does weird shit. 

What happens is you start getting either a greater intensity of thoughts, a greater intensity of feelings, or you get these come and goes, nyams [nyams; Wylie]. These things that you think are ‘I’ve got it!’s”. “I got it”. Jesus, if you didn’t have it before and you got it now, don’t trust it. There is a Tibetan saying: A yogi, through his practice, when he suddenly finds himself able to fly, is strongly advised not to fly over large bodies of water. Especially if he can’t swim.

You get these nyams and some of them may feel really miraculous. Do not jump off a cliff because you now have a nyam that you can fly and your body isn’t solid. How do you recognize it is a nyam? It came! It wasn’t always there! It’s new. It had a cause: your practice. Don’t trust it. Don’t grab it. Relax. In Dzogchen, if a nyam happens and it’s just moving through, you get say, ‘bright light’, some of your eye dilates and everything has, like, an aura around it, that is a real common, early nyam. Cause you’re trying to change your eye focus. That, you probably don’t have to do anything about unless it gets stuck. Nyams do get stuck. 

You can get into a state where you are not thinking, and even if you wanna, you can’t get a thought to come. You can get stuck there for hours. It’s not luminous. It’s big, open, vast, and empty. But it’s kind of dull. There is no lucidity to it. But since you’ve previously been plagued by thinking continuously and “I can’t shut up”, you think you’ve got something cool. It actually is a sign of progress. But it is not the progress. The example we give is you’re driving along, and you see a road sign that says “Chandigarh: 100 kilometers” and you are headed to Chandigarh. You don’t pull over at the sign and go sit by the sign ‘cause it said “Chandigarh”. Just because it named your destination. Keep going.

Getting Stuck

They say a Buddha has no namtog [rnam rtog]. But namtog is a compound word. In English, discursive thoughts. Also a compound word. Nam, those little, tiny, infinitesimal lack of duration or substance bits of thought that sometimes just sort of ‘bluh-bluh-bluh-bluh’. And when you don’t hook them together, like I showed you earlier, those are ‘nam’. The talk is the hookieness that hooks them together. Buddhas don’t have that hookieness. So their thoughts aren’t stuck. It is not a matter of stopping thinking when you’re enlightened. Don’t translate namtog as thought. And saying that, “When I am enlightened, I won’t be able to think”. It’s rather, you won’t be trapped in the apparent solidity caused by the ignorance of all your descriptions of phenomena. 

Therefore, you’ll be able to perceive directly as it is rather than as how you think it is. This is why, when you get an experience, if it arises and it goes, fine. Leave it alone. It’s gone. Don’t try to keep it and for god’s sake don’t try to get back an experience you had last Tuesday that you really liked. Don’t do this.

But sometimes they get stuck. It could be as simple as a sound that doesn’t go away but that did come. A ringing in your ears. It could be a sensation of wisdom and clarity where you know all the frigging answers. It could be bliss. Where every moment is just physically perfect. Dewa nyam [bde ba nyams]. The bliss state that gets stuck. It gets stuck, especially on us old meditators. Cause nothing hurts. It’s like “Oh,’wow, nice!”. [laughter]. “Can I keep it?” But seriously, you don’t wanna keep it. Because it is a divergence. It will drop you right into the god realms, and the lower god realms at that. Gods of form. And then you die. Again. And you used it all up. It’s like you used every cent you’ve saved on a vacation in Hawaii and then it is Monday morning. And the vacation is over and you’re back at work and you don’t have enough to put gas in the car. 

So, when you get these nyams and you will, all sorts of experiences and you’re gonna think you’ve got something cool. And yeah, maybe it is cool, because it says you’re doing the practice right. You’re going in the right direction. But you just – the trick is you can’t stop there, you can’t get stuck. Don’t get your wheel stuck in the mud ditch, by the sign that says ‘Chandigarh’, just cause you’re going to ‘Chandigarh’ and you pulled over for a minute in confusion.

These are analogies. You have to ‘pop’ the nyam. You have to pop the experience. So in Mahamudra, there is one method. But this is a Dzogchen teaching and there is a different method. There is a seed syllable. Are you cold hun? Put this around your shoulder.

Participant: No, I am good, I am actually gonna grab my shoes, I thought I…

LL: I told you to put your shoes on!

Participant: I put my socks on and I thought that would be good enough

LL: There’s a reason to follow the lama’s instructions… [laughing]

Participant: Okay, I got…. I am good

LL: Take this too.

Participant: Okay, thank you so much.

LL: I have another one for the next cold person. Anyone else cold? Yeah, you on the outside, cause you were a little late, so. It happens.

Participant: I am fine

LL: This is a small cave. When I am teaching a large group, we borrow the gompa [dgon pa] but there is Puja for the next couple of days. And anyway, I am taking smaller groups. Cause this is really to work with where people are. So I divided everybody into three groups.

LL: So, there’s a syllable. A seed syllable. Seed syllables. English equivalent would be magic word. That is comprised of the union of the letters of method and wisdom. Pha and Tra. And it spells ‘phat’ [pronunciation: ‘phet’]. “Pheeet!”. But in this case…It has a lot of uses in Dharma. We use it in chöd. We use it in phowa. A very, very powerful seed syllable. In this case though, it has to be done with certain characteristics. It has to be done suddenly. It has to be done sharply. It has to be done fiercely. And it has to be done quickly. So, in this case, a little wimpy “peeet”’, won’t do diddly squat. You have to say it hard, fast, and sharp. Almost sneaking up on yourself. Phat! Try one.

Participant: Phat!

LL: Come on, everybody.

Audience: Phat! Phat! Phat! Phat! Phat!

LL: You guys are good. Now, there’s two aspects to popping a nyam using the tool of the seed syllable phat. And if my English gets to what anybody isn’t getting, you let me know. I can use different words. But I want to see a hand if I say things in the language that doesn’t work for you. We’ve got a lot of different languages in this room.

LL: So, it is not enough just to make the sound. You have to have your attention right on that experience, that nyam, that is in your way. When you make the sound. Because behind that experience is a momentary glimpse. A dewa of no thing at all. The experience is a thing, an occurrence, that your wonderful, tricky mind, which is not sure about this enlightenment stuff. That it wants to go there. Because after all, do they really have chocolate there? Or whatever it is you’re attached to? You’re just not, I mean, even if you really want to, you understand all the reasons from lamrim, there is a part of you that doesn’t wanna let go. So, it is gonna be tricky. And you’re just gotta accept that and it is like you can’t out trick yourself cause you’re smarter than you are.

LL: So, when that happens, you have to be looking right at mind. And making the sound.

Now, this is a secret practice and a private practice. So, you don’t do it in public. And you don’t do it in group practices. Even group Dzogchen practices. If you do it in a group practice you’re just gonna sound like microwave popcorn. And distract each other.

So, this is for when you’re alone and you’re mostly in your long session. This is gonna happen. Your little short five-minute sessions – probably you’re going to be less likely to get caught in a nyam during those. They happen in the longer sessions. Questions so far on nyams? Nyam simply means meditative experience. Questions so far on anything I’ve talked about already?

LL: It was that clear? Yes.

Participant: Are you just going to be able to identify a nyam as something that is different to what you perceived before?

LL: And something that, in some way, you are enjoying or attached to. Yes, a difference. Now, sometimes people in retreat do things like get dehydrated and it causes ringing in their ears. That is not a nyam. Sometimes you catch a cold and have a stuffy nose. That’s not a nyam. That’s a stuffy nose. Yeah, it wasn’t there before, and it is now. These are things that happen in mediation. That weren’t there before. Things that feel like realizations. But they’re new. 

When you actually see your own mind, exactly as it is, rather than slightly off center the way we usually hit it, there is no question that it can come or go. There is no thing there to stabilize. They say that actually recognizing one’s own nature of mind dead center is enlightenment. Until that we are getting our tawa – the way we are seeing – it is close. And each time we look it gets closer to the center. But we’re slightly off. It’s like learning to play darts. It takes a while before you get good enough to hit the middle. 

Literally, nyam means meditative experience. So – and there are a few that are extremely unpleasant. Such as having a panic attack every time you go into relaxation. That panic attack is a nyam and can be hit. You can hit it with phat but you must be looking right at it, facing it, not .. goin’ like that when you hit it.

Basically, in the teaching of Dzogchen, tawa, to recognize your own nature. Gompa to repeat the experience to recognize your own nature again and again at all times and in all circumstances. Sopa [spyod pa]…Sopa happens as a result of tawa and gompa. It is not something you do. It is something that is. It’s always been. Sopa is the nature of thought. Of phenomena. None of which has any duration. Do not attempt to accomplish sopa. Allow sopa to arise naturally as a result of tawa and gompa.

Tawa is the key. If you do not find tawa then there is nothing for you to re-find. So the ability to find tawa. Sopa is simply the certainty. The absolute certainty that arises and is unshakable and never leaves. Once tawa has been noticed and gompa, which is the doing of looking again and again, finding it again and again, perceiving again and again, until you transcend perceived, perceiver and perceiving. That is tawa. Always was and will be.

LL: Questions on any of this?

Participant: So, how do we know if we’ve recognized it or…

LL: You no longer ask that question. If there is doubt, you haven’t. It’s so clear and obviously not a thing. And all of our ‘recognizes’ that we get before then are simply mind made projections of what we think it is. To recognize tawa is easy. And yes – no I take that back, you might have doubt in the beginning. Once you’ve noticed a few times and it hasn’t changed, that is it. How do you know if it is the right thing? It doesn’t change. Is has always been there. It is not a thing. To recognize tawa is imperative.

Practicing Gom

LL: Try again with the back straight. Let me show you something and then I can answer that question a little bit more directly. So, with the teaching of the body, that the channels are straight, with the teaching of the speech, that one shuts up and stops talking to oneself about what one is doing, that continual undermutter of internal dialogue – put it down, let it go. If you can’t shut it up, then stick it in neutral gear. Shunt aside the slush gate of the waterwheel. Let the thoughts flow without engaging them with each other, without sticking them together and without engaging your attention with them.

Let the eyes be slightly open. Let the eyeballs relax so that they are not pointed at a thing. Allow the eyes to release their point-focus so that the mind itself can release point-focus. Follow your thoughts home. Where are they happening? Find your mind.
If your chi is unsettled, your lung [rlung;Wylie], breathe in through your nose and slowly out through your mouth, which will settle your lung and make this easier.

Relax your eyeballs. Relax your attention.

The thoughts arise. Thoughts dissolve. A single thought nam lacks completely duration. It lasts not even an instant. Like writing on water dissolving the moment it arises. It’s when they hook together that it is like writing on ice.

Make a picture. Visualize something in your mind. Where is the picture happening? Allow your attention, what you pay attention to, to open wide. Infinite. Empty. No thing.

As far as your imagination extends, Dharmakaya extends. In all dimensions. There is not a specific location in front, behind, left or right, above or below. Mind itself is neither inside nor outside. Inside and outside are thoughts. Vast beyond conceptualizing, without even a mit of an idea of center or edge. But not dark. Not black. Not the void of nothingness.

For it is vitalized by its innate, clear light nature. That very luminous lucidity, which is not separate from the infinite openness, but which is simply the awareness of infinite open awareness. The infinite openness is aware. Its nature is awareness. It is awareness that is infinitely open. Sambhogakaya nature of mind. Where all the Yidams are born.

And this infinite, open, awake awareness is lively. Creative. The sparkle, the shimmer of the clear light nature of infinite open awareness is itself the dance of phenomena.

Chö ku rol pa [chos sku’i rol pa], the play of the Dharmakaya.
Nirmanakaya nature of mind. There is no separation.
Svabhavikakaya.
Dharmata it is. You are. We are.
Tawa.
And gompa. Meditation. 
Simply to relax into this again and again. 

For it is your own true nature. It always has been. It always will be. It is the Buddha nature inherent in all life. You do not own it. And yet you are it.

Open your attention again and again into this infinite, vast, lucid and luminous, lively, awake awareness. Unbound by concept. Vast as the sky. Relax and relax again. Nothing to fear here. Nothing to grasp. Completely natural. Always has been. It is the true totality of yourself, of all self, of all beings. In this recognition, Bodhicitta is unavoidable. How else?

This is the practice of Dzogchen. You will have thoughts that say, “Am I seeing it? Am I not seeing it? Did I get it right? Am I doing it right? Are we there yet, Mom?” Please do notice that those are thoughts. And there are no true thoughts. The Buddha gave 84,000 different teachings and words without saying a single true thing. And yet all 84,000 pointed to the same true thing. Words don’t go here. Practice.

Any questions?

Conclusion and Dedication

LL: Don’t try to think about it. You’re very intelligent, so you have a habit of thinking about things. This may be said about most of you in here. It’s gonna be hard for you not to think about tawa. So I say go ahead and think about tawa. Just don’t pay it any never mind what you think. It isn’t what you think it is. None of it ever is.

And this is the introduction to Dzogchen. This is not instead of practicing the six paramitas and your basic teachings. This is the top of them. And at this point, goes with them. For example, if you are generous of body, speech and mind, if you practice patience and do not get in a lot of fights, if you do this with tsön-dru [brtson ‘grus], perseverance, make sure you do it every day, even if you don’t feel like it. If you do this, if you practice morality, you’ll be in less trouble in life. If you end up stealing from, if you steal from people, you’re gonna get a reputation. It’s gonna do you poorly. The same with killin’ things. You know that is gonna bring bad. 

So, practicing the six paramitas is just sort of a context in which it is how to practice all practices. Yeah, you practice them with patience. If you’re having a bad day, don’t thwap yourself. Do not beat yourself around the head with a baseball bat because you had a bad day and you can’t even get anywhere near tawa. So what? Time passes. Okay? Patience, with self, with one’s practice. Perseverance. Just cause you had a bad day, don’t stop.

So, at this point, Dzogchen is part of the Dharma and goes with other practices you may be doing. Such as Chenrezig. Tonglen. Vajrasattva. Ngöndro. Ordinary Ngöndro. Extraordinary Ngöndro. Reading the sutras. But if you want this to work – and this is the highest teaching and the fastest method if it works for you. If you can do it. How do you know you can do it? You kind of like it.

All it takes is to practice this with joyful enthusiasm for a time. Tantra, they say, leads to enlightenment in one life. Sutrayana, they say, just by itself without any additions, leads to enlightenment in four hundred lifetimes. They don’t say how many lifetimes you’ve already been doing it though, so it might be this lifetime. Dzogchen leads to enlightenment now. In this now, and every now because when you see it for what it is, you always were. So it was the then now as well as the this now. But that won’t be – that will not have been so – follow the tense – until you actually see and are tawa. Brought to full culmination. Full perfection. But it is not a hard practice to do, if you experience joyful enthusiasm for it. Not all the time every day. But predominantly. 

Questions? We’re good to go then.

Dedication

LL: This tawa, this samsara, this nirvana… we’re all in all of it together. So support each other. And the bugs. And the birds. And the fish.

Intermediate Dzogchen – Lama Lena in the Caves of Tso Pema

Transcript

The Essence of Dzogchen

Lama Lena: In the true practice of Dzogchen, the essence is guru yoga. Because the transmission must be telepathic, not only in words, you need to be able to practice sufficient guru yoga to the lineage. To primordial Buddha. To Kuntuzangpo and whatever symbol of that you have chosen. In order for the transmission to enter you. It is not about the personality of the individual who is standing in front of you, assisting the lineage in its transmission. personalities are personal things. We all have them. You have one, I have one. He, she, and it has one. Even bugs have them after their own fashion. Why one bug behaves differently than another bug. Personality is held in the patterns of your energy channels, your tsa, your nadis. Your energy channels do not end at your skin. You look more like a luminous egg, made of fiber optic tubing, than a man shape. When one examines the energy channel, the energy body. The only reason it’s egg shaped is because you tend to keep your energy channels wrapped around yourself due to self-interest. 

Your primary interest in this world is yourself, your stuff, your job, your plans, your hopes, your fears. This is the self-interest which limits the expanse of your energy channels and the expanse of your view. Your personality is comprised of the dim spots, bright spots, dense and lumps, protrusions, of the energy channel pattern. And your energy channels are constantly moving like this. Like a tree in a windstorm, they don’t hold still. They point at whatever you are paying attention to. You perceive through your six sense organs. We have the energy channels that extend from the chakras involved in those sense organs. You interpret those perceptions that enter through those energy channels of your sense organs. According to the dim spots, dents, and patterns held in the energy channels. Some of it is genetic. Levels of intelligence are to some extent genetic. Certain kinds of what we call in my family brain farts are genetic. ADD or intrauterine environmental. Old karma. Things like ADD, autism. Other, what is it dyslexia. Other learning eccentricities that individuals have, those are patterns inborn in how you hold your channels and they probably won’t change unless you go rainbow body. Rainbow body is where all the channels relax and open up to their full extent. Double checking…

[Voicemail : inaudible]

She got the stuff. You just had a perception. You heard sound. You saw with your eyes me picking this up and checking to see what was said. And then you heard someone speaking Tibetan. Now, this is sensations you had. But what was going on is your interpretation of those sensations, the whys and wherefores. Those interpretations are according to your channel patterns, which is your personality. If you happen to be inclined to have optimistic and approving personality formations, channel patterns, especially, that’s how they’re hanging today, then you will find a happy feeling about that. If you happen to be having grouchy or judgmental personality channel patterns, or at least that’s how they’re hanging today, due to drug use, dizziness, a headache, or whatever, then you will probably have a negative feeling about the interruption. 

Your feelings are not based on what happened. They are based on your interpretation of what happened. A sensation is happening in your sense organs. The interpretation is how you interpret that sensation. Good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant, means this, means that – that’s happening in your thought process. Once you have interpreted sensation, it’s called a perception. We’re using the word and I have to define words here, we’re using the word perception to mean an interpreted sensation. Once you have a perception, you then having interpreted your sensation as a this or that arise a feeling of liking or disliking about that sensation. Having arised a feel – arisen a feeling, you then perform an action. That action can be a mental action, a verbal action, of something you say or write, or a physical action of something you do. Mental action of something you think and believe to be true. These actions, of course, will change your energy channel pattern. It will either entrench it, make it stronger the way it is, or change it to how it is. 

The Six Paramitas

When we practice the six paramitas, specifically generosity of mind. The first paramita (generosity) breaks down into three pieces: generosity of body, generosity of speech, generosity of mind. When we practice generosity of mind, we are changing how it’s hanging, how our tsa, our nadis, are hanging. Therefore, we are changing our personality a little bit. Over time. You’re always changing anyway. You no longer have the personality you had at 16. One hopes. Most of us were pretty damn fucked up as teenagers. It’s normal. Even tulkus have hard teenage years. Being a teenager is one of the most difficult things that we go through in life, even worse than menopause. 

So, understanding the nature of personality and energy channels, what is being transmitted is not the personality. That’s just a sidebar. Kind of not very important, except in that, whatever your pattern is, has to be able to function in regard to whatever the pattern of the teacher is. And choose your teacher for one who has a personality pattern that you can deal with. If you can’t deal with that personality, please pick a different one. Because everybody’s got one. Trungpa Rinpoche – promiscuous, drunk personality. What he was pointing at – Way beyond that. And everybody tried to be a promiscuous drunk just like him, except for nun who couldn’t try to do that, being a nun. And she is now pretty much acknowledged as his lineage holder by those who understand the one who is performing his teachings. And her name is blanking to me. Anybody remember Pema? Pema Chodron, Trungpa trained, couldn’t be distracted by his personality. Followed where it was pointing. 

So, when we talk about guru yoga being the basis of Dzogchen, guru yoga is the ability to not get all tangled up in the personality of the teacher. But instead of that, to actually focus on with – where they are pointing. This is difficult. My own root teacher was a – help me with a word again – one who believes every word of the Bible? Fundamentalist. Was a fundamentalist towards all the Tibetan texts. I found this exceptionally difficult personally. Worked for him. And yet, having to adjust to that personality so vastly different than mine. He was also very sweet, very gentle. And yeah, trying to adjust to a personality, sweet, gentle fundamentalist who has a strong dislike of verbal argument and physical violence. And he got me. Poor thing. Complete opposite. A bitch who tends to not have a problem with verbal and physical violence. Poor Rinpoche. 

It’s not about the personality. Look past the personality, at the lineage, and what is being pointed at. This is what’s most important. Don’t fall in love with or fall in fate with the personality. Don’t make it so important. It’s just going by and it’ll have changed by tomorrow, just like yours. Instead, look past that. At what is being shown and what is being pointed at. Tawa. The view is the root of gompa and the root of sopa but can only be experienced, shown in a somewhat telepathic manner called the fourth wang. The first one is an intellectual explanation. The second one is a sort of a poetic, emotional explanation using words. The third wangis the showing of something transparent. No, I want the water bottle. This one fallen? Yes, this will do. It should be a crystal. I don’t have one. 

Transparency

So, let’s look at this. I see you. Transparent. This is the key. Your thoughts. Your feelings and your perceptions are transparent. That’s the essence of the third wang. So, don’t try to get rid of thinking. Don’t think thoughts are the root of all evil. Goodness, no. They’re the liveliness, the lively creativity of the nirmanakaya. All phenomenon is that. Don’t fight your thoughts. And for God’s sake, don’t fight your feelings. Feel, live, love, get angry. But don’t grab it. Don’t take it seriously. Don’t believe it’s real. But don’t try to stop feeling it. 

In the practice of Gompa (and this group has pretty well seen tawa, and is working on the practice of gompa), tawa is simply your own mind. It is not that important that a teacher be able to see their own mind. You want to find a teacher who sees the innate buddha nature – not in themselves, but in everybody. In you. Otherwise, how can they show you where to see it yourself? It’s not enough just to have found it within oneself and to be working on it. You actually have to perceive it in every student, as a teacher. And part of guru yoga – there are responsibilities to the teacher who has permitted, allowed, the transmission of lineage from themselves. One of those responsibilities is to see the innate buddha nature of each and every sentient being. So that you also, in seeing your own innate buddha nature, can see the buddha nature in each and every sentient being, because it’s the same buddha nature. It’s what we mean when we exchange the white scarves. That’s the symbol. 

The other responsibility is to be kind rather than nice. I have found that difficult at times, wanting people to be happy and being nice to them when it’s not the best thing for them. Sometimes kindness is not niceness. And that’s hard, because of our conditioning, at least in the West and also among Tibetans, to always be nice and polite and smiley. So, you get a double dose of it as a Western woman. Conditioned to be nice. And as a Tibetan, conditioned to be nice and smooth and calm-seeming. Not the most useful thing for Dzogchen practitioners and a teacher. Because each one of us who have chosen the practice of Dzogchen, because we like it, want to get past our belief systems that we’re tripping over. Our conditionings, our self-conditionings, our cultural conditionings, our family conditionings, our physiological conditionings. And getting past that, at least in my experience with my teacher, was not always comfortable. And not always nice. And it was very difficult for him with his personality to be kind rather than nice. So thank you, Rinpoche. 

The View

The view is an utter relaxation. You cannot get it by tensing at it. You can only relax into it as the completely natural state. Your tensions, your holding patterns. These are made of your belief systems. What you think is right. What you think is wrong, what you think is real, what you think is not real. And the thoughts you believe and we’ve all got em. Thoughts we think are true. These belief systems need to be released. And yet a part of us doesn’t want to, for many of them have protected us. Or we think they have. The whole world is out to get me. That makes me safe, believing that, right? If I happen to have a paranoid belief system. “The world is a loving place. I function best if I don’t push it things. I function best if I don’t push at things”. See these belief systems? I should be kind, I should be nice, I should be smart. I should be tough, I should never cry, I should cry and laugh easily. 

This is the cocoon that wraps around our own true nature. And distracts us from relaxing into it. These habitual patterns of holding. It is by the practice of gom – meditation, that is the fastest method of relaxing these. And gom is simply, at all times and on all occasions, regardless of what you are doing, experiencing. thinking or feeling, to look right through those perceptions. Not the sensations, the perceptions. Which is already an aggregate. A clump. Those thoughts and those feelings while you’re having them. Not after. So one rests in tawa, which is not something big, and ‘Whoo’. It’s not something that should make your eyes bug out and your mouth fall open. But it’s the utter simplicity of here and now. Un-complexified? Un-obtusified. Is there a word, obtusification? Without doing that to it. So that it’s simply utterly simple. Here and now as it is. Wide open, without preconceptions. Without post conceptions. Without current interpretations. That doesn’t mean reject your preconceptions, post-conceptions, and current conceptions. They are transparent. They always have been. To recognize, to directly perceive their transparency, look, not at what you are thinking in this moment. But where that thought be happening. Not a place, not a here or there, or any particular where. Vast beyond concept. Luminous, lucid, and alive with the shimmering sparkle of the liveliness of creativity. So that constantly thoughts arise and vanish, feelings arise and vanish, perception be going on. 

Decide on One Thing

Look through them right now. We all think, “Okay, I’ll try it when I get home. Okay in a minute”. You can never meditate later. It has to be now, in each and every now, looking directly at the great mother ocean of dharmakaya. In all her vibrancy of sambhogakaya, which is simply a word referring to the vibrancy, the vitality, the luminous lucidity, the awake awareness of the infinite vastness, shimmering and sparkling with all the arisings of nirmanakaya. One thing, no thing, beyond concept. This is mind-mind looking. And it does not preclude or interfere with thinking, feeling and perceiving. Nor does thinking interfering – thinking, feeling and perceiving interfere with this. Because, as you can see for yourself, your thoughts, your feelings and your perceptions are utterly transparent and insubstantial when you choose to notice this. And this choosing is the key to gom. To decide on one single thing. To decide to look there. That there to which there is no where. 

The key to gom, meditation, is this decision to meditate now, in this now and every now, without exception. If you don’t decide this, utterly and absolutely, then you won’t do this. How very simple. This is the key to Dzogchen. Once you have clearly noticed dharmakaya nature of mind, great mother ocean of dharmakaya, tawa, then you need to decide to look there. To decide on one single thing is the second vital point. Direct quote from Garab Dorje’s text. Now, that doesn’t mean you will not become distracted, overwhelmed by a set of theories or emotions or perceptions. That’s okay. Everybody falls off the horse. Do not bother increasing the fall off by beating yourself about the head and shoulders with a dead fish. Because you fell off. You’re just digging the hole you fell in deeper. Get up. Say oops. And look at your mind with your mind. 

To practice Dzogchen you have to really, really want to. If you don’t really, really want to, you won’t. In which case, go find a practice you really, really want to do and do that one. Or not. Maybe you don’t really, really want to do a practice. Then go back to trying to understand the Four Noble Truths and why things are going to hurt if you don’t. And why you’re going to fuck yourself up if you don’t, which you will. And the fact that you’re going to get old, decrepit, and die unless somebody kills you first. Or some thing. Which is also true. The ordinary ngondro, understanding the nature of suffering, the nature of karma, the nature of impermanence, if truly accomplished leads one to the desire to escape from that crap. If any of you had any idea what crap old age is, you would be terrified. What kind of shit you can get yourself into for your next life. If you really understood the nature of karma, how it works, you would be scared shitless of what you’ve been creating. And you would have a motivation to do a practice. Something to get you out of this mess called samsara. 

If by chance Dzogchen is the practice that you really, really, really, really want to do, then goddammit, you’re just gonna have to decide to do it. Literally, that’s what it takes. Get the teachings of the pointing out to understand how to do it. 

Where the Thoughts be Happening

First point. Absolutely necessary to sit with your channels in alignment. Stop slumping, even though this place is not perfect. It’s so much easier when you get your backs straight. And yes, I know my tiny little cave, aside from where I’m sitting, does not have the best of seats. So just temporarily try. Unfocus your eyeballs. Not into fuzziness, blurriness, but into allowing peripheral vision to be as equally clear as central vision. Since attention follows the eyeball gaze. As you open the focus of the lens of your eyeball, open the focus of your attention. Have a thought. Any thought. I find nouns easiest. Your experience may differ. 

Whether you find a sound, a texture, an image easiest will depend on the configuration of your energy channels and your personality. So, give it a try with any one of those. 

I am imagining a pickle. Nice big green, kosher dill. I’m salivating. My body is reacting to the image. I am imagining its scent. Its flavor. Its color and texture. The sound it makes when you bite into it. My feelings about it. All of these are a form of thought, feeling, bilbla. Bilbla means tangle. Clump. Where are they happening? Where am I perceiving the scent of that pickle? Where’s the picture? At first, it seems, because a pickle is about, oh, four or five inches long, that it’s occupying a space about an arm’s, half an arm’s reach, in front of me. I’m gonna move it around and see what it’ll do. Left, right, up, down. Huh? I can put that pickle anywhere I want. I’m going to have it orbit Pluto. I can perceive that, can’t I? I can see that. I can visualize my dill pickle orbiting the outer planet. Let’s see if I can send it out of the galaxy. Yep, there goes the pickle. Where’s the pictures? Picture of the galaxy, picture of Pluto. Where am I seeing all this? Feeling, perceiving, tasting, smelling, imagination. Where is my imagination? 

Do not attempt to answer the question intellectually. Do not attempt to answer the question emotionally. Use the perception. Perceive the infinitude of open awareness. Longchen Rabjam. Infinite vast expanse of imagination. This is where you imagine things. Is where your thoughts occur. When you imagine a unicorn, you imagine it in your mind. Make that unicorn as big as the planet. Make it as small as a grain of sand. Your imagination has boundaries. What you can think of is limited by your experiences, your channel patterns. Your species. 

Can you imagine a poem in sonar? A dolphin can. Can you imagine? The recitation of a song in ultra violet visual, the way octopuses can? 

You see, your imagination is limited. Where your imagination occurs is not limited by that. It is not limited by what you can imagine. What you can think is limited – in words – is limited by the languages you know. What you can think in pictures is limited by the wavelengths of light your species can see. Not what you imagined. Where you imagined the unicorn. Bring it back. See the unicorn in your imagination. The unicorn is transparent. You want proof of that? Put the unicorn here on the end of my finger. You all see the unicorn standing on the end of my finger. Can you see through it and see my face? See, it’s transparent. The unicorn that you have imagined is made of thought. All thought not only is transparent but it always has been transparent and always will be transparent. Therefore, it is not difficult to look at mind while thinking by looking through the transparent thoughts. 

All thought have no duration, no substance. The no substance is, well, if you think it has substance, grab one and hand it to me. Come on, I’m waiting for a thought to be placed in my hand. You can see that your thoughts have no substance. Now, duration, when you think, “Yes yesterday for supper, I had a bowl of soup”, or whatever you had. That thought seems to have some duration. Actually, that is not a thought. That is a thought chain. The thoughts themselves, when we talk about thoughts, we talk about discursive thoughts, thoughts that say something. These are thought chains. They’re little tiny particles of no things stuck together. If you try to catch one, a piece of yesterday, “I had soup for supper”. Well, there’s an idea of yesterday. And then there’s a lot of connotations around that. Everything else you did yesterday sort of stuck in, wound around yesterday. It’s a whole clump. Most of us spend our time constantly thinking discursively. We stick our thoughts together to make sensible phrases. And we stick the phrases together to make paragraphs of meaning. And we stick the paragraphs together to make a whole story about what’s going on. And then we believe the story, get all upset by the story, and do something about it, creating more karma. 

Let Go

So, the idea of Dzogchen meditation is to slow down a bit. Sit there on your cushion, and look through the thoughts, while you think them, resting in tawa. As tawa, allowing the thoughts to arise and vanish without sticking them together or getting them to make sense. It’s putting your mind in neutral gear. It becomes easier with practice. Hence, you have to decide to practice. At first, it takes a great deal of effort and it’s tiring. 

You know those old ladies that hang on to Kleenex with one hand all the time. Surely you’ve seen them. And they can’t let go. You can pry the Kleenex out of their hand but they’ll find another thing. Another bit of Kleenex somewhere to hold in there and surely you’ve seen this phenomenon. It’s a habit. Be aware that you have a habit in the same way of putting all your attention into your thoughts rather than into tawa. 

Once you have decided, then on your cushion, where it’s easiest, mind-mind looking. Infinitely vast, but not dull. Not dark. We call the awareness that is the natural state of that infinite openness it’s clear light nature. Because the word awareness in Tibetan is see-er, rigpa. Literally, see-er. And in order to see you need light. Transparent light. This is the clear light. Transparent light. You can’t see without it. If there’s no light, there is no seeing. Therefore, clear light is the proper symbol of the see-er, that which enables the see-er to see. That which enables awareness to be aware. It is the natural state of that infinite vast openness of mind to be able to think, feel, to perceive. All life thinks, feels, and perceives. The confusion of sentient beings is that things really are the way they think they are. Even though, by our age, we have certainly noticed that many things did not turn out to be the way we thought they were at the time. You know, all of those, it seemed like a good idea at the times. If I do this, this will happen. Yeah right. So, in spite of this experience, we still cling to believing things are the way we think they are. 

Please understand that I have not said a single true word today. The words are just fingers pointing. Don’t memorize the words. Look where the fingers point. We rely so much on our thoughts, on our feelings, on our perceptions. “I perceive that he is scowling and angry”. Maybe he’s trying not to fart, you don’t know. But if you perceive that he’s scowling, and angry, then you interpret it as he’s angry at you. You make up a story about why he’s angry. You justify why he should not be, so you get angry back at him. And he finally gives up and lets out the fart and looks relieved and embarrassed. And now you know, oops, “I made all that up, didn’t I?” 

Practicing

The meditation. First on your cushion, frequently, several times a day, many times a day, as often as you can do it, for short, short sessions, in the beginning, and longer sessions later on. Is to make it easy on yourself by straightening out your channels as much as you can. Praying to the lineage, Kuntuzangpo, primordial buddhahood, in whatever symbolic form you wish to see it. Whether as Guru Rinpoche, as an individual person that you can relate to, however you like it. Arising guru yoga and bodhicitta, which are the same things. Because all sentient beings of the three realms arise as all buddhas of the four times obviously. You can’t love all buddhas without loving all sentient beings. Not really. Because all buddhas are made of all sentient beings. It’s the same thing there. 

So, in that way, arising guru yoga and bodhicitta and then opening your attention, stopping talking to yourself, or at least putting all of that, putting your mind in neutral gear, and opening your attention into the infinite vastness of natural mind. Doing so, you will allow mother and child luminosity to unite. What this means is that infinite vast openness, which we sometimes call great mother ocean of dharmakaya, she has always been there. She always will be. This doesn’t come and go. This itself you allow to merge with tawa as pointed out by the teacher. So that there is no separation between your view, you the viewer, and the lineage view. 

And with mind seeing itself directly like this, whether you are thinking or not, whether you are feeling or not, whether you are perceiving or not, relax into this and then relax again. Don’t fight with the arisings. They are simply the sparkle of clear light. Don’t fight with the dissolving or try to hang on to anything, including tawa. Have you ever sat and looked at a body of water, a lake in the bright sunlight, and seen all those little sparkles on the water? Reflections. They don’t last, do they? They never last more than an instant. Thoughts are like that. Look through them. Just sit there. And when your time allotment is complete, because you have to go to work. Get the kids ready for school, or do whatever else is arising in your life. Get up and look right through them. Find the missing socks. Make sure the backpack is stuffed. Remind them of the lunch money. Remind yourself to put everything in your briefcase. 

Whatever you need to do while you’re doing it. Recognize. Once you have decided to do this, then do it. Do it until there is no difference between being in session and out of session. Do it until it is a matter of course that the thoughts are transparent. That the feelings arise as sensations of energy and dissolve as such. Work with the thoughts first, because in order to work with the feelings, you got to strip them naked. And you can’t do that until you can really see the nature of thoughts while thinking them. As they try – When you’re having thoughts around a strong feeling. “Goddamn that motherfucker. Oh shit, what have I done”? Whichever way it’s going, however it’s going. 

Monsoon Season

It’s really harder to see those than the ones when nothing much is happening. Which is why we make retreat. We go to a situation where nothing much happens. And there we are with our thoughts. And in the beginning, they bother us. Oh, even more so when you first make retreat. They are a bugger. It’s almost like something stimulates them. And they start jittering in your face, like a two-year-old that wants attention. It’ll pass. Keep going. Don’t be put out when that happens. It’s a normal occurrence. 

When the monsoon rain falls, all the weird green stuff grows up in the forest. And if you try to walk through the forest in the middle of monsoon, your legs are going to get wet and you’re going to be tripped, and vines will go around your ankles, and it’s just like that. Monsoon will end. The locals will come and cut the grass for the cows. And walking will get easier. So, here is where sopa and sundrup, patience, and perseverance come in. The six paramitas are simply an instruction of tools to use while doing the practice. Generosity of body, speech, and mind. Morality and the awareness of karma. Patience, perseverance. And so, wisdom arises. 

Wisdom is not something you add or gain. When the ignorance is removed because you’re finally able to let go of your way of cherishing it, and your fondness of it… Oh, man, do we love our belief systems. Oh, man, do we not want to let go of our belief systems. Rinpoche used to kick me in the feminism all the time. “You believe in that, don’t you”? He used to kick his Tibetan students in the Dharma. You kick somebody in what they’re really attached to. I used to watch him kicking the Tibetans, students in the dharma, saying, “Why did you kick me in the Dharma? Says, “Because you’re having trouble believing in the Dharma? Why would I say”?

Speaker 1  

When a feeling arises, and I tried to look like where it is, arising?

Lama Lena  

No, don’t do that. That’s not how you work with feelings. That’s how you work with thoughts. A brief example of how you work with feelings is, when a feeling arises, you first strip it naked. To do that, that feeling is arising, there’s a story of why you feel that way. “I am afraid because he is yelling at me. And holding a club. I am angry because he took my lunch”. So there’s that story about why you feel that way. That’s what you look through. Not the feeling. The story attached to the feeling. The story that justifies or suppresses the feeling. “I should not feel this way”. Whatever you’ve got wrapped around your feeling, you got to get it off. And you don’t get it off by peeling. You get it off by seeing it’s insubstantial, lack of duration, transparency. Then what you’re left with is a feeling in its underwear. It’s underwear’s the name of the feeling. Angry, afraid, desirous, a desire, jealous, whatever the name of the feeling is, that’s the underwear. Get the underwear off. The name of the feeling needs to be seen. Also, like a thought, transparent in the same way. Once you’ve done that you’re left with a physical sensation. Just that somewhere in the body. Don’t mind it. Don’t like it, try to keep it, dislike it, try to get rid of it. Just notice it. A physical sensation. Now, the stories or names and things are going to try to come back due to habit patterns, life upon life, of justifying your feelings to yourself. So you have to keep peeling them. Keep peeling them. Don’t let it put on a bathrobe. That’s how you work with feelings. Make sense? So, in order to start working with feelings, and there’s a retreat I teach in some places, will teach where requested, which is working with feelings. If people are here next year and specifically want that retreat, I will teach it, but only to those who have spent at least a year, if not several years, working with thoughts. If you can’t see through your thoughts, you’re not going to be able to work with feelings. And you’ll just do yourself a mischief. Because of course they’re going to get stronger when you start doing this. Make sense? So, for now, for this time and space, work with thoughts. Work with the thoughts around the feelings. But work with the thoughts to see through the thoughts.

Speaker 1 

Because I think when I, for example, have a strong emotion, and the story comes, then if I look, it’s like, how can I say like I cannot? They just go, right? And then they just-

Lama Lena  

Thoughts become transparent and are no thing and nowhere. Yes. But you still have a feeling.

Speaker 5  

Yeah, exactly.

Lama Lena  

Find it in the body.

Speaker 5  

And then I find it and it’s very powerful.

Lama Lena  

Yes, leave it right there and don’t object to it. It’s just a physical sensation. It’s not actually pain. It’s not actually pleasure. It’s just a sensation. Without making that sensation into something you like or don’t like, because both liking and not liking are stories. Leave it where it is. Leave it be. Just leave it. Feel it? Don’t try to not feel it. Just feel that sensation and don’t lay anything on it. Other questions?

Speaker 3  

Is it good to make mantras?

Lama Lena  

At times, yes. Now to decide on one thing is the second vital point. Is to decide that this is the practice you’re doing. However, if you have the experience of a big dead ole nothing. If it seems dark, not vital, your view, then you can do some Chenrezig practice, which I’ve already taught. Or some tonglen. Together. Not at the same time. In different sessions. With your Dzogchen. Because that will lead you through symbols, through your unconscious mind, to directly perceive the vitality of open awareness. The vitality of open awareness is bodhicitta. It manifests in the story of the way living beings try to remain alive. That which is alive loves life. That’s the storytime manifestation of bodhichitta. When bodhicitta is actualized and the tawa, the innate buddhanature, is recognized as not being separate among sentient beings. Among buddhas, among anything. Not being defined or bound by a single point in the space time community in the space time continuum, such as a here or a now. When that is directly perceived, the ultimate bodhicitta is obvious. It is the aliveness of that, the vitality of that, which manifests in many ways. In the stories we tell ourselves, the urge to merge, the mating instinct, even the self-preservation instinct. Both of these, which are actually opposite sides of the same thing, when purified of the stories that we keep wrapping them up with arise as ultimate bodhicitta. So, if by chance, you start meditating on what you’re thinking of as the void. Oops. And it seems really empty to you. And the emptiness is, like overwhelming and even a little bit scary. Go do Chenrezig to improve your ability to perceive the vitality of it. Does that make sense? If you have damsik of certain mantras, you should not stop doing them. Without strongly discussing it personally and privately with a teacher. Yes?

Speaker 2  

Can you translate damsig into English? 

Lama Lena  

Sometimes, in certain initiations that you attend, you are given instructions to do a certain sadhana every day, or a certain mantra and a certain number of times every day. In this instance, that’s the damsig I’m referring to. Damsig has a lot of different meanings under different circumstances, but that’s the one I was referring to. You really need to talk directly to the teacher who gave it to you, or to your root guru. Under those circumstances, if you find that you have so many of those, that it’s keeping you from practicing Dzogchen. There are ways to find ways of minimizing it, but it doesn’t go away. Did that answer the question? 

Speaker 4  

I believe so.

Lama Lena  

Other questions? Yes. 

Speaker 3  

When I have been practicing this, this past few weeks, like doing the rushen. And after the cremation, I started doing a lot of guru yoga. But is this very beautiful way…is very, very beautiful, what guru Yoga is really rooted in Dzogchen view. So a lot of resting.

Lama Lena  

Yes.

Speaker 3  

And like two main things, like having, having, like, I get this, this nyams, you know, like these experiences of clarity and sometimes bliss. And initially makes me like a little tight, tight, you know? So, I try to recognize that and relaxing that knowing that is not the main point, you know…

Popping Nyam

Lama Lena  

Do you all have you all had the teachings of how to pop a nyam with phet? Is there anyone here who has not had those instructions? Okay, so it’s really simple. And let me repeat them because they’re part of gom, which is the second word to decide on. One single thing. They’re part of this process. Sometimes they get stuck. Now, if you just relax, sometimes they just – they just pass and by. If they’re just passing by, let them go. You don’t have to do anything about it. All sorts of things pass by. It’s like the green stuff I talked about that grows up in the summer. But if one gets stuck, a dewa nyam, a bliss state, a clarity state, a thought free state. These are the three most commonly talked about ones, but you can get a grouch state, a horny state. Virtually any state of mind can get stuck during this, especially in retreats. Especially when making long sessions. So, there’s a method for popping them. There is a seed syllable in which you take the letter of wisdom, cha, and the letter of method, pa. That’s magic letters. You know in the Kabbalistic tree of life, how the different Hebrew letters have different magical mystical meanings? You’ve probably heard of this before. Or rune stones, Runes have meanings. Well, Tibetan letters do this too.

Speaker 4  

*inaudible*

Lama Lena  

Yes, but no. These are the letters that make up the seed syllables. The letters themselves have units of symbolism, of mystical meaning. So, when I say method, I mean bodhicitta. Powo. Yang energy. When I say wisdom, I mean shunyata. Yin energy. Khandro, Sky dancer, openness, the openness of open awareness. Yang is the awareness of open awareness, but they’re not separate. They’re the same thing. So, we take the letters of method and wisdom, which I could talk about one of them for an hour. Talking about the depth of meaning, of how the symbolism goes. We stick them together. Method and wisdom together make up the seed syllable. So, in the case of popping a nyam, phet, spell itin English, but you probably should learn what it looks like in Tibetan. Okay. So, you take that syllable and you hit the experience with the syllable while looking right at the experience. But you hit it hard, suddenly and sharply. Fiercely, sudden, sharp, hard, fierce. It must have those characteristics. Like lightning bolts. You must be looking right at the experience when you strike it. When it pops, when you strike it with phet, no thing at all is left. Yes, we have a phrase for that – hedewa. No thing at all. However, if you’re not looking directly at the nyam, nyam, when you strike it with phet all you do is startle your fleas. Quote from Wangdor Rinpoche. Do you understand that method?

Speaker 5  

And the method I’m wondering about the nyam. What if its vision and its instructing?

Lama Lena  

Is it stuck? You use this when they’re stuck. When they don’t arise and vanish properly. Visions happen. They can be useful. Realize that you will interpret them according to your personal personality and ignorance. Be careful of the interpretation and hold it lightly enough that it can change as your practice continues. But yes, they can be useful.

Speaker 6  

So, I’m glad you said about the phet because I wasn’t sure who should ask this here or not. But I saw the YouTube video. And since the last instructions, I have to meditate or whatever. I’ve been doing it. And you know what? Sensations and all that arise? They go very quickly.

Lama Lena  

The quick ones you don’t have to hit. 

Speaker 6  

Well, the thing is I’m always stuck in this blissful state. And I tried to hit it with phet. And it didn’t go. And I can understand whether I’m not doing the right or what.

Lama Lena  

When did it start?

Speaker 6  

Since our last retreat at Devon, when you gave us the proper instruction about how to line up the channels.

Lama Lena  

If it had a beginning moment in time, it will have an ending moment in time. So, don’t rely on it. Show me how you’re doing phet.

Speaker 6

Phet!

Lama Lena

That’s pretty good. That’s a little bit long. Shorter.

Speaker 6

Yeah. But it was almost bugging because like I said, I sit there and the body’s gotta have pain. Normally, I would shift that leg or whatever. But now I don’t. And it bugs me. You see? Why am I stuck in a blissful state?

Lama Lena  

Okay, two things to be careful of. One, we had a guy who sat through pain, which you can do, until he destroyed both his knees. So please pay attention to when you’re having pain. Know whether it is a sign of you’re creating damage in the body, or whether it’s just one of those pains that happened. Please pay attention to that. That was an accident of one of Rinpoche’s students, who forced himself at an older age to sit in a full lotus for hours and had to have surgery on both knees as a result of what he did to himself. Because he was a good enough meditator to see through the pain and not react, but did not also use what Tibetans – common sense, for a Tibetan goes without saying. Because any need Tibetan without common sense is dead before they reach the age of learning meditation. It’s not easy to stay alive up there. You lie in your boots with dry grasses. Because you can change those frequently. If you don’t change them, your toes will freeze. When they thaw you will have gangrene and be unable to walk and you will die. Flat out, you’ll freeze to death. So common sense is, sort of a goes-without-saying”, because by the time they’re old enough to be learning and practicing dharma, all those who didn’t have common sense are dead. So they forget to tell you Westerners to use common sense. Now I even have to remind myself. 

Lama Lena 

Come on guys. Two things. Common sense. And Dharma isn’t safe. Two things that Tibetans always forget to tell the Westerners. Of course, non-Dharma, being stuck in samsara, wasn’t safe either. Jumping out the window from a burning house is dangerous. But you started in a burning house. So, hello? But it is dangerous and should be walked carefully.

Speaker 6 

So that’s my question. So, you’re saying is, I say the phet and that doesn’t work. Let the process go through. Is that all you’re saying?

Lama Lena  

I’m going to give you another method. It just may be… It’s a method out of Mahamudra. There is a beautiful prayer. Lama Kheyno. Are you familiar with it? 

Speaker 6 

No.

Lama Lena  

I will get – 

Speaker 6 

I missed your, your Mahamudra at the Oxford. Wasn’t it, you stayed down-

Lama Lena  

That may have been but we have – It’s beautifully sung by Palga Tulku in a teaching which should be on my website. Palga Tulku’s teachings. We did three teachings together. Of three of Wangdor Rinpoche’s students who teach. Palga Rinpoche of Ledak. Candice O’ Denver, of Denver, originally. Now she’s a Bolinas. And myself. We are utterly different personalities with utterly different childhoods and backgrounds. One raised as a tulku. One raised as an aristocrat living abroad, like in the time of the Raj, kind of thing, and one a street kid from Hell’s Kitchen, New York. So, hearing the Dharma, from these three vastly different perspectives, and was also – allows students to triangulate what’s being pointed at from all these angles. So I would recommend, at the end of it, Pulga Rinpoche, she sings a beautiful tune in song. I will send you the words to that song, although maybe not tomorrow. Have to go find them somewhere and send them

Speaker 6  

No rush.

Lama Lena  

I recommend you memorize or learn that song. And that you sing it again and again from the heart. And visualize whatever for you is the symbol of your teacher, your root guru, that can be Kuntuzango, Kuntuzangmo. That can be a human individual that you feel that connection with. That can be the Buddha. That can be the Bon lineage. Not important. But visualize whoever that is for you. And feel blue light, coming from their heart and filling your heart and taking you past the nyam into the reality. You need to transcend the bliss that came one time to the bliss that was there before you found it. Does that make sense? It’s the same bliss, but one is the reflection of the moon in water. And the other is the actual moon. So, we got to get you to look away from the reflection at the actual moon. Try this other method. This is Mahamudra method. You have to verbally out loud. Pray to whatever you use to symbolize your teacher. Somewhat at length. It has to be out loud. You have to use your speech chakra. It can be as simple as “Hellllp! I’m goddamnit stuck in a nyam. You gotta help”. But it’s much prettier to sing the song.

Speaker 6  

Because when I get stuck, it’s just, it’s just there. But I can see it working. Because like I said, normally the office had been pretty quiet. Well, when someone screws up, I care not to do that anymore. And that’s okay. I can see. I can see the reaction of how I should – used to do it in the old days, and how I’m doing now. So, there’s a mindful –

Lama Lena  

Mindfulness is looking through the thoughts. 

Speaker 6  

Okay. See, I can see working, you know. It’s working quite well.

Lama Lena  

Yeah, mindfulness is the tool you use. Mindfulness is not itself a meditation in the Tibetan system. Mindfulness is a tool of remembering to look at mind with mind at all times and on all occasions. You use mindfulness to remember to do that.

Speaker 6  

Like I said, it’s working. It’s working. It’s working, but I’m just worried about this.

Lama Lena  

This particular phet – That’s not working. Let’s get you this beautiful song to use instead. And it’s not that the bliss is supposed to go away. If there’s something behind it, it’s not a thing. So, the bliss came in a moment, which means it’s likely to depart in the most inopportune moment possible. 

Speaker 6  

I’m sure. 

Lama Lena  

These things do that. And the last thing you want is either to be clutching at a death. Because if you’re hanging on to a mind made bliss, at death, you end up born in the realms of form among the gods. Which itself eventually wears off and you’re a bug again, or whatever. And you’ve been there before and you’ve done that before. Other questions?

Speaker 3  

Also, the other thing that has been going on is like when I manage to rest in thought, particularly the ones that are more subtle…

Lama Lena  

More what? 

Speaker 3  

Subtle, subtle, subtle. Like there is like, like, breakthrough but I don’t know like it’s too short. I don’t know if it’s like there is *inaudible* or its more blank.

Lama Lena  

You’re worrying about it and trying to analyze it too much. Right? 

Speaker 3  

I’m not supposed to do.

Lama Lena  

It is okay. It’s right. You’re doing it right. It starts that way. Very short. Don’t grab it. You can’t extend it. It has to be fresh in each moment. Permit it. Don’t try the – There’s such a trap of trying to figure out, “Is this it? Is that it”? There is no it there.  Let go. Your mind will do that anyway. Those are thoughts. Look through them. All the thoughts about am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Did I get it? Did I not get it? Is there something wrong with my practice? Is there something right with my practice? Is my practice good, is my practice bad? You know those thoughts I’m talking about? You got to get them. I get them. You better get them too. I think we all get them. Those are ones that you also need to look through and recognize the transparency of. Don’t believe those and not believe the others. There is no real thought out there somewhere, if you could just find it. And that’s important. Ah, yes, you will try to judge. Wonderful opportunity to look through thoughts. Judging yourself and judging others, which you will do. Wonderful opportunity to practice. Everything that arises is fuel for the sparkle of dharmakaya awareness. All thoughts arise, all feelings arise, as fresh fuel for this. This is also out of tsig sum ne dek.  Out of sopa. The third word. Other questions? 

ge wa di ji 

nyur du dag

de ji sa la 

gö par shog

So be it. We are complete for today. Thank you

Experienced Dzogchen – Lama Lena in the Caves of Tso Pema

Transcript:

Lama Lena: The last teaching is the same as the first. You have Buddha-nature, inherent within you. Therefore you do not need to acquire it. Or create it. Or achieve it. Or do anything else whatsoever to it. It is simply there. 

The Nature of Our Dissatisfaction

Usually, because of our obsessive, compulsive  relationship to phenomena, we turn our face away from our own inherent perfection. Focusing our attention on what we experience through our sense organs. On what we think about what we think we experience through our sense organs. On how we feel about what we think about what we experience through our sense organs. We exclusively pay attention to this, enjoying the flow of thoughts and emotions, the flow of sensations. Until we don’t. Until it hurts, and that happens pretty frequently. It hurts, because of not getting what you want. It hurts, because of losing what you have. It hurts due to inability to escape from what you fear. 

All of this is uncomfortable, there is a dissatisfaction which permeates our experience of samsara, it is never good enough. This moment as it is, which in and of itself is complete Samantabhadra, nonetheless, could be better. We could do this, and make it better, we could do that and make it better, we could make us better. Even if you achieve the wealth of a universal king, or the wisdom of the greatest sage, or the samadhi of the formless realms; because these are phenomena, they are subtle states of perception, subtle states of thoughts, subtle states of feeling. And so, like all phenomena, oops, they change. It wears off. Even if it didn’t, you would be sitting there in perfection going ’yeah, but I could make it just this little bit better if I moved two inches to the right’.    

That continued malice of dissatisfaction is what is trapping you, into pursuing your desires and fleeing your fears. You know all this, I am simply recapping something which is well known to you. 

Ta-Wa – The Nature of Our Own Mind

When you truly experience ta-wa [lta ba;wylie] as ta-wa, without separating from it, and trying to grab it, trying to reach for it, trying to make it some way that it isn’t; more stable, more perfect. When you actually perceive ta-wa and accept it as it is without trying to improve it, gom-pa (sgom pa;wylie] is accomplished. Ta-wa is simply your own mind. It’s where the interpretation of your sensations occurs. It is not a place. It is not an it. If you follow your thoughts home, into that infinite open awareness, which is the natural state of all life, and then leave it be as it is, that’s Dzogchen. 

The error that arises for practitioners who are well familiar with ta-wa, who understand the process of gom-pa, as described yesterday, (the how to), is that they try to make a perception of ta-wa, the feeling of ta-wa, the idea of ta-wa, hold still and make all that ‘stabilization’. 

Understand that you cannot make a mode of phenomena hold still. All phenomena are impermanent. It arises in mind, it dissolves in mind; mind is ta-wa. Sem-nyi [sems nyid;wylie]. It arises there, it dissolves there, it was never anything other than that. But it doesn’t last. Sem-nyi is always there. When you try to stabilize the experience of ta-wa, an experience is moving, you cannot make it hold still. When you try to stabilize the sensations of ta-wa, sensations are moving. You cannot make them hold still. The same for the idea. 

So you have to let go. You have to find ta-wa, recognize ta-wa, return your attention to ta-wa again and again, until you are absolutely certain that ta-wa is always there. And then relax about it. Let go, stop trying to maintain something that you have acquired. You can’t. Stop trying to get away from something you are afraid of. You can’t. 

Gom: The Practice of Looking at the Mind

Once you have become certain, by your own experience, not by hear-say, of the nature of your own mind, by the simple process of gom; mind-mind, looking at all times, on all occasions, in all circumstances, mind-mind looking. A certainty that regardless of what phenomena may be arising is the play of the dharmakaya of this moment. It is no thing, in no ‘where’. Whatever you’re thinking right now, about what I am saying or about what you will do later, whatever it is you are thinking, now you are thinking something else. And all thoughts are manifestations of ta-wa as are all feelings and perceptions. 

You need to find this out experimentally. And then you need to trust it. Striving, trying to accomplish Dzogchen, trying to improve your meditation, trying to improve yourself, trying to be better and better, trying to win the game of dharma; this is all counterproductive and it is all the crap you fall into, we fall into. He, she, it, they fall into. Sentient beings fall into. That is dissatisfaction with this moment as it is. 

That continuous attempt to fix it. It is not necessary, there are no stages, there are no corrections, there are no doings and no lack of doings. All life itself is a manifestation of the innate vitality of open awareness. All life is open awareness. All thoughts cannot be made to have a duration, no matter how hard you try. You can’t keep ‘em. You can make them happen again and again, but each one is slightly different than the one before, freshly arising, newly arising.  

Each moment, each single point in the space-time continuum which thinks it is a self, inhabiting a here and now, limited to a here and now, all these belief systems, every single one of them, is arising in your mind, lacks utterly in duration or substance, dissolves in its moment of arising, can leave no trace behind. Like the path of a bird through the sky, there are no footprints. A bird cannot leave footprints in the sky, no matter how hard it tries. You cannot maintain an idea, keep an idea, stabilize an idea; the same for feelings, the same for perceptions, so let go. Allow that inherent dissatisfaction, that accompanies all the moments that are not quite good enough for your liking, to be recognized for what it is; a feeling, a mood. A play of open awareness. Simply a mode, a manifestation of the liveliness of awareness, which is inherently open and vast, without thing-y-ness. 

In Dzogchen it is not a grasping of stabilization, but a letting go of hope. Together with a letting go of fear. And the thoughts ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I’ll never get this’, ‘I got this’, ‘I am at a high stage’, ‘I am at a low stage’, ’where am I on the map?’, those are thoughts and all thoughts are made of the same ‘no-thing’. ‘The great roar of the dragon, intrinsic awareness, permeates all of samsara and nirvana, how can you possibly miss it?’ Quote from Kadrin Tshola.

So-pa: Recognising the Mind’s Impermanence

Stop grabbing:The simplest instructions for so-pa [spyod pa;Wylie]. Recognize that so-pa is simply a description of how moments arise and vanish, never to come again, thoughts arise and vanish, never to come again, feelings arise and vanish never to come again. 

You get a new one, you might give it the same name as the old one; it is not the same, little bit different, little bit different. So your practice cannot be maintaining of a thing grasped. Your practice can only be recognition of the freshness of each moment,  recognition of the insubstantiality of each moment, recognized freshly in each moment. 

Gom, simply creates the habit pattern that leads to the certainty of this. So-pa is an ‘is-ness’, not an accomplishment. It is not an action for you to perform. It is not a conduct which is required of a yogi. 

It is the inherent, intrinsic arising and vanishing of each moment, which has always occurred and always will. Don’t make it happen. You can’t make it not happen. You can’t keep yesterday. You can’t make tomorrow last. You can’t make it better. You can’t make it worse, or speaking of practice here, if your shirt catches on fire put it out. This does not mean being alive and acting in the normal way of aliveness. This means stop thinking that it’s ‘not good enough’, or that it is ‘good enough’. Let go.

The practice of Dzogchen, not in all its little preliminaries and things that help you, such as breaking things into sessions. There is no difference between sessions and sessions-end, because in session you are in a state of mind, out of session you are in another state of mind. And in fact each one of those states of minds follows the one before, again and again and again and again and again and it’s an ongoing process. So it is not different, you don’t have to make it different. Relax. Let go of hope. Relinquish fear. They are only feelings that arise in mind, dissolve in mind and are never anything other than mind. Let go of your interpretations, of your sensory input. 

You  see a friend. Now you have thoughts about that friend, depending on the state of your digestion in that moment will influence what thoughts. Those are thoughts, you do not have to believe, you do not have to reject them or get rid of them. Simply see them for what they are while thinking. Ta-wa is the key to see your own mind as it is. Not like ‘me is over here’ and ‘looking at mind’. No. 

This is mind seeing mind. Self-seeing, rang-rig [rang rig;wylie].  Rig-pa, the see-er of rang-rig, the self-seeing see-er is mind. It is not mind. Mind is a word; it is not the word. ‘What are you looking at me for? I don’t have it, you have it’; that is a quote from Rinpoche. Completion stage text. Bön- Dzogchen. Where is the Tibetan, where is the Tibetan? 

‘Nag rdzogs rang chen mi ne chang’  

All the varieties of phenomenal existence, the nature of the variety of the phenomena, it is not dual. 

‘Cha cha ni ding cho dang tral’ 

This very moment, since thoughts are no ‘thing’ at all, is inherently and naturally thought-free. You are free of your thoughts when you see them for what they are. You don’t change them to be not real, you change nothing. You simply are no longer fooled. Like my cat, who eventually stops chasing the laser pointer and grasps my hand. You suddenly figure it out; ‘Oh, those, yeah got it’. Not by thinking that. By recognizing that. I have to flip through this to get to the Tibetan, which is written in a very funny way. 

‘Gi sems, pa chi mi tog, chang’  

Back to Norbu Rinpoche’s lovely translation; ‘in this innate and natural thought free inherentness, it shines out as all forms, always Samantabhadra’ 

Samantabhadra means all good. The innate perfection of everything, it is a symbol. 

‘Nam par nang de kuntu dyang’ 

I don’t really read Wylie well. It is already perfect, so the sickness of striving is easily avoided. Stop trying. Relax, let go and leave it be as it is. If you have recognized ta-wa, stop trying to fix it! There is nothing to fix and no-one to fix anything. When we say ‘mind-mind looking’, that mind which perceives itself, is no mind at all. It is infinite, open awareness, no ‘thing’. Vast, vital, lucid and aware. But not a ‘thing’, no ‘thingy-ness. And that vital, lucid awareness; that infinite, vast, open, vital, lucid awareness; you, he, she, it, all; neither singular nor multiple, but both and neither, mind – mind looking. 

First ta-wa. Follow the pointing finger, don’t copy the pointing finger. Follow the pointing out to the direct perception of mind by mind. It is not looking at the mind. It is self-seeing, self-arising, self- perfective, ‘rang rig rang shal’ Samanthabhadra ying.     

Look at mind with mind. There is no ‘at’, no mind looking at mind. Mind resting as mind in awareness of its infinite, vast openness. Vitaly aware and lively with projections, not a single one of which has substance or duration. Simply the sparkle of the ‘rang rig rang shal’ [Lama Lena talking Tibetan] of the self-seeing self-luminous. This is who you’ve always been, what you have always been, what you always will be and what you are in this moment. 

It does not require your effort to be that way. Your effort is just part of its sparkle. The shimmer of the luminosity of infinite openness, your lack of effort is equally, part of the sparkle. The shimmer of the luminosity of infinite openness. So reláaaax. Stop fighting your own true nature. Let go, stop trying to grab or stabilize something that you’re making up. Leave it be as it is. 

‘

Shig nye stol way na tang ti. Lungi ne pa, shag pa yi’ 

It is already worth it, it is already perfect. So the striving sickness is vanquished. Spontaneously, spontaneity is spontaneously, constantly present. All arisings arise spontaneously. You don’t make choices. You spontaneously think this and that. There is no reason to believe a word of it. You spontaneously feel this and that. There is no need to mind a bit of it. You spontaneously do this and that. There is no need to schedule it. 

If this teaching is insufficient for you, then go back to gom, break your sessions into sessions. It is still a  mind-mind looking, it is still exactly the same. But because you cannot abandon the illness of striving, the ma-rig-pa [ma rig pa; wylie], the ignorance of striving; you can’t stop trying, you can’t just go and leave it be. Then you might as well improve your meditation and your Dharma.  So in gom, following the basic instructions of the six paramitas you make sessions, but you don’t separate them. “Now I will sit for half an hour. Now I will do the dishes.” Your meditation doesn’t change when you’re sitting and when you’re doing the dishes. Don’t change it. You may want to, this is your natural resistance to enlightenment by your ignorance, pagshas, your own demons and everything else. You don’t really want to step off the edge. Do it anyway.

Are there questions? There are not a lot of words about so-pa.

Q & A

Participant: Different methods, quick glances and watching thoughts..

Lama Lena: That’s all part of gom.

Participant: Are there some different instructions, like you said that we should be like follow [sama…?], not trying to understand like with your mind, but like just follow, do this, do this. And then maybe..

Lama Lena: Yeah, that is gom, that’s what I taught yesterday, did you see it?

Participant: Yes, yes.

Lama Lena: Follow that one. If you want to follow something.

Participant: But quick glances, are they essentially the same as this practice of quick glances, is it all essentially just one thing, but different names. Like quick glances, thoughts watching and trek-chö.

Lama Lena: No. quick glances is a method. Thoughts watching is a Ngöndro. It is the inner mind Ngöndro where you watch the thoughts to see where they’re happening. If you focus your attention only on the thoughts, that’s just pointless. So thoughts-watching is not that,  there is no point in watching just the thoughts. Some people find that by looking at the thoughts they’re able to see through them since they’re naturally transparent and not made of anything. Then watching a thought is a method of noticing ta-wa. Therefore it is a Ngöndro. But it is not trek-chö. 

Quick glances is a method of gom. Before you are able to simply, at all times and on all occasions, notice the already known ta-wa, before you can do that, then a way of building up to that is making many, many quick glances until they merge together. It is simply a method. It is not trek-chö. 

Trekchö is cutting through. Trek-chö involves recognizing ta-wa and at all times and on all occasions resting in ta-wa. That is trek-chö.

Quick glances are a method of stabilizing trek-chö. But they themselves are not trek-chö. You could almost call them a kind of Ngöndro. 

Participant: so there are three 

Lama Lena: Well, of the three you told me there are three. There are many, many, many, many methods. You can do tsa-lung [tsa rlung; wylie]  practices, you can do tantra’s and work with symbolism. There is no limit to the number of methods for the different sentient beings. 

Participant: I was just, I encountered them here, like while starting from you, this was three that I kind of like, feel 

Lama Lena: That you like?

Participant: Mention..first you told me to watch thoughts, then this quick glances..

Lama Lena: Yeah, first you watch thoughts to find out where they’re happening.  Once you have found out where they’re happening, you don’t watch the thoughts, you look through the thoughts. Okay? At ta-wa. 

Ta-wa is the word for where the thoughts are happening, your mind. 

Mind-mind watching is referred to as ta-wa. So if you don’t perceive ta-wa, then you can’t do gom-pa. then you have to go back to one of the Ngöndro’s, until you are able to perceive ta-wa.  Ta-wa is the most important thing. Without the perception of ta-wa, and yes, it starts as a perception, but it can’t stay there, it has to mature, past the perception. A perception is a phenomena, you can never stabilize that, so you have to go past perceiving ta-wa to being ta-wa. That is done by first quick glances, then allowing the quick glances to merge together. Does this make any sense, it is progression. 

Participant: I was …

Lama Lena: Aah, you have come to both beginning, middle and end teachings, requesting them. You really have to figure out where you are. Until you understand that you aren’t anywhere. [laughter]

Does that make sense to you guys? Figure your level, which may be in the level of path of accumulation, not path completion. 

Path of accumulations involves doing. Path of completion is not doing. In Mahamudra it is broken down into even more stage stuff, stages. 

First you do shiné  [zhi gnas; wylie], learning to rest in stillness. 

Then you notice the difference between the stillness and the moving and you become very clear on what is moving, phenomena, and what is stillness, ground of mind; it is not a ground, it is an infinite, open awareness. 

Once you are clear on what is what, then you do something called yoga of dancing stillness. Where you allow phenomena and the stillness in which phenomena arises, which is nature of mind, to be recognized as the same thing. That is trek-chö [khregs chod; Wylie], that is where treck-chö starts. Where you can actually see phenomena as open awareness and open awareness as phenomena. And you can stay in seeing that or rather you can learn to freshly see that again and again in each moment. You develop a certain certainty from that. That all phenomena is infinite, open awareness; arises in infinite, open awareness; goes to rest in infinite, open awareness. 

And that certainty is part of so-pa. Sö-pa [spyod pa;wylie] is phenomena such as thoughts, feelings and perceptions arising in open awareness, dissolving in open awareness, without having duration or substance. That is the spontaneous action without an actor, so-pa. Not a conduct, not something you have to do.  It’s what is always the case, always has been always will be. Making sense? 

Participant: yeah.. which part? [laughter]

[Lama Lena ]. The whole thing, there aren’t parts in Dzogchen. There are only Ngöndro’s and methods that lead into Dzogchen. Dzogchen is a not doing,  ro-cig [gro-cig; wylie (one taste)]  

All phenomena taste the same because they are made of the same no ‘thing’. The perceiver and the perceived are no difference whatsoever, the perceiver is made of the perceived. Your very personality is nothing but a momentary arising of thoughts, feelings, perceptions of this moment and it is changing just like your thoughts, feelings and perceptions, there is nobody in there. There is nothing out there. So what are you gonna fix?

True Dzogchen is not a ‘doing’. True trek-chö is a complete relaxation. But because of our habit patterns, of grabbing and shoving and grabbing and shoving and fixing and making, this has been going for so long, infinite time. It is really hard to relax and let go. That’s why we’ve got methods for relaxing and letting go. The highest method of relaxing and letting go, the fastest method of relaxing and letting go, if you can, is simply to relax and let go. [laughter]

Keep it simple, ‘stupid’. However, if you can’t do that, there are all sorts of other things that will bring you to the point where you can do that. Like sutra and tantra and Ngöndro’s and rushens [ru shan; wylie]. But these aren’t real Dzogchen, this isn’t your trekchö, these are things that help you get to the point where you can rest in trekchö, without making anything out of it. Other questions?

Then I will tell you where one of the holes is. Once the final part of Dzogchen makes perfect sense to you, and you recognize there is nothing to fix, and you relax the malice of striving and you leave it be, you may feel that you no longer need to make sessions. You don’t any longer need to make specific meditations in your sessions. But every day, without fail, take some time and just sit there, don’t stop. Because it is easy to be fooled by this, in the very beginning. And it was a subtle perception. And as such being a perception it does what all phenomena does, it freaking wears off. And you’re gonna be going like ‘Fuck, I can’t even find the view, and I, I ..and I, but it won.., uh, ooohhhh, mamaa…!’ [laughing]

And your lama is gonna do exactly what my lama did: ‘Hahahahahahaha!!…Make sessions, you’re an idiot!’ [laughter]. Other questions? Yes, Onalaya.

Participant: Where does tö-gal [thod rgal; wylie] fit into this, or is it not.

Lama Lena: Once you are to the point when you’re quite comfortable with your trek-chö, you’re not trying to stabilize something that  is inherently unstable. You’re quite relaxed with your trek-chö. There is a process of allowing karma, phenomena, the display to unravel. This process requires a certain timespan. Tö-gal accelerates this process. You can just sit in trek-chö for quite a number of years. 

But should you really be ready to completely let go of improving things, especially should the end of your life be near, due to age or illness, tö-gal will assist you in accelerating the release of those little annoying ‘quarks and pagchas’ that are still there even though you rest in trek-chö. They have to unravel. You have to maintain the looseness of trek-chö for some period of time, for all the little bits in your tsa to relax and unravel, it takes a while. So tö-gal helps that process, it is a series of physical positions and eye-gazes. 

Participant: And dark retreat is also another method to allow, like..

Lama Lena: I believe it may be, but I have not done dark retreat myself, so I can’t really say exactly.

Participant: Okay, thank you.

Lama Lena: I am not sure if it counts as a ru-shen [ru shan;Wylie]. It might..

Participant: It is very possible

Lama Lena: Or if it counts where, or if it is where tö-gal is, I have not heard of anything else in the place of tö-gal. But different lineages may have different things. 

Participant: Thank you

Participant: May I..

Lama Lena: Yes.. 

Participant: Yesterday I watched the video and you talked about guru-yoga and as Dzogchen practitioners; how do we do guru-yoga. I mean, like..

Lama Lena: Didn’t I say that yesterday?

Participant: Yeah, but still, 

Lama Lena:. So, you’re gonna have to give a more specific question.

Participant: Like I understood it is  just, it is like allowing the teacher to give you the transmission basically by looking at where the finger is pointing…

Lama Lena: Then following the instructions without breaking samaya. 

Participant: Is there something like when we do the beginning of the session, we do guru-yoga.

Lama Lena: Not in Dzogchen. Well not by reciting many things and doing many things, guru-yoga is inherent in it. Guru-yoga and bodhicitta are aspects of the same thing which is the innate liveliness of the sambhogakaya. I said all this yesterday. The infinite open awareness, right you know what I am talking about here?

 The infinite open awareness is not a big dead old nothing. It is vital and alive. That very vitality also known as clear light nature, also known as luminosity and also known as lucidity; all these words get used for it. This is the sambhogakaya nature of mind, this is where all the yidams arise, this is where the aliveness, the vitality of all life arises. This is where Kuntuzangpo arises as form. This is where infinite open awareness takes on the dream-forms of rainbows. Which is the prism of vitality. All beings are simply a manifestation of that aliveness, all living beings. All sentience is a manifestation of the vitality of the infinite open awareness, since all sentient beings share that infinite open awareness of buddha-nature. All your teachers, all the guru’s, all the buddha’s of the four times arise from the completion of all beings of the three realms. Buddha’s are made out of sentient beings, when sentient beings recognize their own nature they are called buddha’s. So guru-yoga, bodhicitta, sambhogakaya are all different ways of talking about the same innate vitality of the universe. Look! Look out there! Now don’t look at me, look out there! Instruction. 

Look how much life there is. Listen. I hear bugs. I hear birds. There is life everywhere. This is how open awareness manifests in form, manifests its vitality in form as living beings. You can’t love your teacher, and your lineage and all Buddha’s of  the four times, primordial Buddhahood, Kuntuzangpo without loving all sentient beings. It is all wound in together, the manifestation-ness of it, the phenomenon of it is nirmanakaya. Where it seems to be sort of separate, not made of life, but you know, like this is, was wood and the wood grows a tree and the bugs ate the tree, that all multiplicity. You understand the multiplicity? That’s nirmanakaya, except it is not multiplicity and it is not singularity. The multiplicity is obvious, but it all arises in mind as mind, was never anything other than mind. Or call it ta-wa. Call it infinite open awareness. There is no separation. Makes sense yet?

Participant: It all makes sense. Uhm, so guru-yoga we don’t do anything special practice during the day for guru-yoga. 

Lama Lena: You do, until you are practicing Dzogchen in pure Dzogchen. You do in Ngöndro. You do in tantra. Dzogchen you should already have done that. It should have permeated to be a ghost without saying by now. If it hasn’t then yes you should do it, something special. If it is a ghost without saying, that innate recognition of all buddhas and all life, that complete love for the vitality of the universe, how the vitality loves itself, and you’re part of that; if that isn’t the ghost without saying then please generate bodhicitta by some method. 

Participant: I would rather do this Dzogchen way.

Lama Lena: Can you? 

Participant: I had, well not that I am always, but I had this experience you are talking about.

Lama Lena: But it has to be always. Not as an experience. An experience is a come and go, you just, you’ve had nyams. Yeah, we all get nyams. I have a friend, one of my Tibetan friends, who keeps losing time, so lunch was late today, cause she thought it was fifteen minutes and it was a couple of hours that got away from her. She is just sitting there and polishing butter-lamps and…oops. [laughter].  So, we’re laughing at the ‘me-tog-pa’ nyam, which she fell into this morning, which is why lunch was half an hour late. Cause she wanted to bring me lunch today. So, you know, nyams happen. [laughter]

Participant: What is the difference between nyam and recognition? 

Lama Lena: Recognition does not come and go. Nyams do. Recognition isn’t a thing. It doesn’t start at a certain moment, and doesn’t end therefore at a certain moment, it always has been. Mind has always recognized itself. Only you haven’t. 

Participant: inaudible [0:54:39]

Lama Lena: Yes for as long as you think you are a you. You are gonna miss this. Cause you’re separating yourself from the mind that recognizes mind. So you have to relax. Keep practicing. By relaxing and keeping practicing at some point you will find the, (I am gonna put it in words that aren’t quite accurate); the aspect of yourself, of the totality of yourself, which has always known. When you find that, then of course you will have always known, even though you don’t know you have always known. 

Participant: I had this experience once.

Lama Lena: But it is an experience, doesn’t count. Cause it comes and goes. So keep practicing until there is nothing that comes and goes. And yet everything is fresh, moving, dancing, spontaneously arising. Keep practicing.  

Lama Lena: Yes.

Participant: Uhm, I am very clear about what hasn’t arrived, I mean that hasn’t started or happening, so I am always observing that everything arises and so lights and deities, things are arising. But there is one thing that, there is like, it was like, it was in the heart, like some kind of very bright light, that even though it started, it felt like it was not something that had a beginning and an end. It was like from the heart, like this kind of chob[?] that was, it just. So I just had a question about that. I mean..

Lama Lena: What is the question? Where is the question mark?

Participant: If that [done so]

Lama Lena: I am not sure; I am not sure there is a tantric thing of the thigle expanding. Life force essence expanding which can look like light in the heart. But that is tantra, not Dzogchen. 

Participant: Yeah, I mean there were some…

Lama Lena: We’re working with symbols. 

Participant: Okay, because there was something I observed in that light, I mean, like there was something like this that doesn’t change, was thereafter, before and after.

Lama Lena: The not changing is Dzogchen, but the light is tantra. And it is a tantric vision. So light as a symbol of vitality. Don’t grab the symbol, look where it is pointing. Sambhogakaya nature of mind. Manifesting as Nirmanakaya. Sambhogakaya nature of mind is simply the innate vitality of infinite openness. 

Participant: And if sometimes on manifestation just disappear

Lama Lena: Let it do that

Participant: Okay

Lama Lena: Don’t fight, don’t fix, 

Participant: I can’t..

Lama Lena: Just sit there

Participant: Okay, and that is

Lama Lena: For you, begin to see if you can perceive to, not perceive. See if you can not- experience, see if you can, I am gonna use the word ‘see’, but I mean a much bigger word; who is the experiencer? Find for you now, find the experiencer of these experiences. 

Participant: I know who..

Lama Lena: Knowing is not enough

Participant: I mean being..

Lama Lena: Being not enough, when you find the experiencer, the separation between the experiencer and the experience dissolves. 

Therefore there is no one experiencing it, it is experiencing itself. If this begins to happen to you, relax into it. I think it might be starting for you. So relax into that, don’t fix anything. But keep sitting. Don’t necessarily try to meditate whenever you sit. Sometimes just sit there. Okay? Other questions? From the shadows? [laughter]

Participant: I just wanna say thank you, Lama Lena. I’ve, it’s the first, it is the second time I have experienced your fun.. as lama Candice called it. I wanna thank you for the first teaching we had together, a few days ago. You said, you really clarified something for me when you explained the different yana’s. You said that those of us that practice, each one, that we’re actually incapable of practicing the others. That really, really helped me to understand why I have a particular inkling for Dzogchen. I’ve always found it almost impossible to cultivate, for example cultivating loving kindness or cultivating positive states, or something like that. So, I just wanna thank you for that clarification, it really helped me. 

Lama Lena: Hmm, that clarification sounds awfully out of context right now. 

Participant: It does?

Lama Lena: Yes. 

Participant: You want me to clarify it further?

Lama Lena: Well, tell me what you think I said.

Participant: Well, what I thought you said was that, for those of us that for example have an inclination towards Mahayana Buddhism, then that is what we love to practice and that is what we can practice. 

Lama Lena: Ah, practice the one you love. 

Participant: And you also said that those who have an inkling with Vajrayana  Buddhism or for Dzogchen, we, this is how I understood it, that we can’t, it is like, it’s almost impossible for us to practice

Lama Lena: Actually, Sutrayana should be in, should be already known to practice Dzogchen effectively. A nodding acquaintance with Vajrayana, and Mahayana is very helpful for the practice of Dzogchen. So, no it is not that you can’t practice the others, it is that you won’t practice the others if you don’t like them. And if you won’t practice them, they won’t work. So yes, practice the one you love, not that you can’t, but that you probably won’t. Cause you don’t like it. However attempting to practice Dzogchen without a really clear basis of Bodhicitta, will get you stuck in the void. It is cold out there. The warmth, the vitality of Bodhicitta must be recognized as part of the practice of emptiness. Now I am not as familiar with Lama Candices teachings as you are, so I will presume that she is emphasizing Bodhicitta quit as strongly as she is emphasizing the quick glances and the ‘emptinesses’ 

Participant: inaudible

Lama Lena: Yeah. What I have heard of her teachings, yes it does. It is both or evenly very nicely done. I simply haven’t attended that many of them. 

Do we have any other questions for today? There is not a lot to say about completion stage of Dzogchen. Cause there is not a lot to be done. 

Participant: I have one question

Lama Lena: Yes 

Participant: Is it something, like sopa, is it something that like the teacher says ‘okay’. You know, like now we had these three kinds of divisions.

Lama Lena: No, it is something that you say ‘okay’ for yourself. It is not the teachers’ job to judge your practice. Nor is it your job to judge your practice. You keep practicing, the teachers keep teaching, and things mature. Judgment is really not useful. Sometimes a teacher will notice ‘ooh, you’re missing something, it is over here’. But your friend will also tell you ‘you’ve got a bit of spinach between your teeth, it is over there’. [laughing]

Which is the same difference, it is not really a judgement, it’s letting you know that you missed something. 

Are we complete? What about you….? 

Participant: If even I had some questions, they all dissolved by this lecture. 

Lama Lena: For you: relax. Sometimes take some time to just go to a nice place and sit in it. Don’t bring a book, leave your cellphone in your purse. Just sit there for a while. Don’t try to meditate. But don’t try not to either. Just relax. Okay?

And you know: love the beautiful sparkle of tantra; in every tantric sadhana, this is in there. Don’t jump over it with attachment to the sparkle, when you come to everything absorbing into the seed-syllable going ‘ooh’. Spent time there too. It is just as important as how you got there, in the sadhana. And you are doing better than you think you are.[laughing].  But something, a knot, needs to continue to relax. Keep relaxing. 

[Dedication Prayer]

We are complete.