Making a prostration as I did and as some did to the altar. And we do this not as a kind of an act of devotion but because Dharma knowledge or enlightenment knowledge is something passed down through the spiritual ancestors. We say dharma or truth or reality but what this is referring to is the dharma chakra that in this enlightenment tradition, as in most enlightenment traditions around the world, the enlightenment experience is transmitted from one generation to another by means of training. It’s like, lighting candles, using the one candle to light a whole group of other candles. And when those candles are almost burned down, they one of them can be picked up and used to light a whole new set of candles.
Enlightenment as an historical phenomenon was transmitted over the generations in this way. If one of you achieves enlightenment, then you become a Buddha, then you’ve and then your candle is burning and burning. You get this enlightenment. You get this achievement of Buddhahood through training. You train under other masters of the previous generation.
The candle of your life burns and burns and when it gets towards the end, then you would train some students, some trainees to yourself and arouse the primordial wisdom within them. This enlightenment is not made new every generation rather it is simply a knowledge or an experience of the way things are combined with a spiritual fulfillment or maturity on one’s own side. The teacher, the master does not fabricate an enlightenment for you but simply you training under a master. The primordial wisdom becomes aroused within you and your spirit achieves fulfillment, perfection. So it’s called dharmachakra because in this way dharmachakra are reality wheel or truth wheel because the wheel passes from one generation to another by means of the training process.
So when we come in a temple we offer a few prostrations to the altar thinking that the altar represents all those beings of the past, present and future who have fulfilled that process or are fulfilling process or will fulfill that process. And as we offer the prostrations, we think thanks a lot. You’re doing great. And I too wouldn’t mind a piece of that enlightenment pie so I’m here to try to get enlightenment. Those of you who were here yesterday during that workshop, we looked at what we call the general Buddhist training.
These are things that are were taught openly by Buddha which are usually practiced as preliminaries or as the foundation of tantra. But there’s two types of beings, those who haven’t done much in previous lives and those who have done a lot in previous lives. So the ones who came yesterday and also came today, they’re the ones who didn’t do much in previous lives. So they had to come yesterday and do the foundations. And the ones who didn’t come till today, they had already accumulated those practices and fulfilled them previous lives so there was no need for yesterday.
What we did yesterday in Dharma in Buddhism, what we did yesterday is generally known as the path of causes or the causal path, also known as the sūtra path or the open teachings or general teachings. It’s called the causal path because in that way of practicing we think, I’m not enlightened, you’re not enlightened, we both have to work on our enlightenment and we cultivate the causes of enlightenment. We think more universal love, more enlightenment so I’ll cultivate universal love. We think more wisdom, more enlightenment, so I’ll cultivate highest wisdom. We think more self power or spiritual power, more enlightenment, So I’ll cultivate spiritual power.
Tantra is called the path of the result. Rather than think of ourselves as being on the way to enlightenment and enlightenment being way down the road somewhere, we instead bring enlightenment right back to where we are. We don’t work up to enlightenment. We bring enlightenment right back to where we are. So rather than saying, I need more love, more compassion, more wisdom, more power and so therefore I will cultivate them, I will grow them like a farmer growing crops rather than we say that, we say to ourselves, goodness, I’m already enlightened.
I have full compassion, wisdom and power. You are already enlightened. You have full compassion, wisdom and power. We don’t cultivate the causes of enlightenment and try to evolve into enlightenment. We simply claim enlightenment as our own and then having claimed it we try to live up to it, we try to live it.
Tantra is called the fast path, also the easy path, also the path of desire. It’s called the fast path simply because instead of thinking of ourselves as enlightened and having to evolve toward enlightenment, we simply claim enlightenment. Now, the biggest obstacle to actually achieving enlightenment is our own sense of inadequacy. Our own sense of enlightenment must be difficult because so few people have it. Because of that, it becomes awkward for us to transform.
It’s like we’re saying to ourselves, I want to transform but I can’t transform. Same old me. I’ve got weakness, that weakness, this problem, that problem. The ego stands in front of us. It blocks our way to enlightenment.
In tantra, we completely bypass the ego. So it’s called the fast path. It’s called the easy path because in ordinary but as an ordinary practice, we have to do the difficult austerity of being patient with all of the obnoxious sentient beings like you. So it’s difficult to be enlightened. We have to be patient with one another and that’s not easy.
It’s not even being easy being patient with your loved ones like your own your own girlfriend or boyfriend. They leave the toilet seat down and you get mad at them. Your own kids don’t clean up their room in the morning, you get mad at them. Mother or father phone you too often or grumble too much, you get mad at them. So it’s a hard path to enlightenment.
In tantra, we simply transform the way things appear because I regard myself as enlightened, yourself as enlightened and all activities that arise around us as a great dance, theater, celebration, festival, feast of bliss and spaciousness. Nothing you can do can disturb my mind. You jump up and down and start screaming and I think, she’s singing heavy metal music. Start throwing dishes around, I say, op art, or was it performance art? No matter what arises, it’s the great celebration of bliss and joy.
Nothing else required. No patience. No saying, oh, poor thing. Now quiet down. Just pass you a few more dishes and say, throw these two, please.
So it’s the easy path to enlightenment. It’s called the path of desire because in the ordinary way of practicing, We take the objects of sight, of smell, of taste, of touch, the objects of sensory experience and we try to simplify those. We say, oh, better not look at too much, better not listen to too much, better not smell too much, better not eat too much and for touch, not make love too much. We try to simplify our life on the basis that the objects of the senses are kind of indulgences. It’s like we can’t be listening to something and listening to good music and meditating at the same time in ordinary practice.
You turn on the music or the television, you sit on your meditation cushion, these are like different activities. People will say to you in ordinary practice how much do you meditate in a day or do you meditate in a do you meditate? Those Purushutra practitioners have to practice meditation. Well, in tantra we don’t have to do anything. We’re already enlightened.
We take a vow not to see not to see any difference between meditation and non meditation. If someone asks us, do you meditate? And we say yes. We’re dangerously close to undermining the whole process. Because there is no meditation, there is only meditation.
So it’s called the path of desire or the path of sensuality because we don’t make a difference between listening to music and sitting on our meditation cushion. Eating good food, good drink and sitting on our meditation cushion, having wonderful perfumes and aromas in the air and sitting on our meditation cushion, Having the most wonderful sensual contacts such as making love, always used in tantra as the best of sensual contacts and sitting on our meditation cushion. Why? Because in tantra, the objects of the senses themselves are taken as objects of meditation. Not like in tantra where we like in sūtra, ordinary practice where we sit down and we put the objects of the senses aside.
We quiet the mind and say, now I’ll meditate. We turn off the music, we tell the kids to pipe down. We want peace, we want quiet, we want little incense in the background. Tantra, we don’t really care best of incenses or the smells coming from the bathroom. Equally stimulating.
So it’s often called the path of desire or the path of sensuality because in tantra, we don’t look for anything out of the ordinary. Whatever arises, the perfect environment for meditation, whatever peoples are present in our company, the perfect environment for meditation, whatever we are doing or not doing, the perfect environment for meditation. In tantra we simply talk about tundra, which means sessions. Like four times a day we try to sit on our cushion and do nothing, a kind of respectable way of being lazy. If someone says, what are you doing?
And you say meditating. If they get the sense that when you’re not sitting on your cushion, you’re not meditating, then you’ve done the great sin of telling a lie. You’re not meditating when you go to your cushion in tantra. You’re simply going into your cushion and sitting down to try to get out of washing the dishes or mowing the lawn. Nothing special whatsoever.
No more meditative than when you were washing the dishes or mowing the lawn, just slightly more pleasant perhaps. That’s the main reason it’s called the path of desire. The objects of the senses are taken themselves as perfect objects of meditation, nothing extra required. Sometimes it’s called the primordial path. It’s called primordial because since beginningless time, each of us has had one simple sense.
Every human being has always had this one simple sense and that sense is that I am always right and if there’s a difference between my opinion and the opinion of the rest of the universe, we know which one of those two is wrong. I am always right. All of us thinks we are the smartest person in the universe, the hippest person in the universe, the sweetest person in the universe, the most deserving of all things good in the universe. That is a very deep instinct in every human being. In tantras sometimes we call it pride, in sūtra sūtra, the ordinary way, Sometimes we call that pride, thinking I’m best.
In tantra, we call it the primordial wisdom and we go with it. But so as not to be too obnoxious around our neighbors, We say to ourselves, just like I think I’m always the best and I’m always right, they also think they are also always the best and they are always right. So just like I am the best and I am always right, so too they are always best and they are always right. So it takes what is a very deep instinct in our human psyche, our natural egoism or egotism and we take the vow to live the fantasy of that ego. In the open path we say ego is a bad thing, put it down, be humble.
In tantra, the first, the most important and the most pervasive precept we take is the vow always to be as egotistical as we can possibly be. To completely dwell within the sense of I’m I’m best, I’m perfect. God may have made five hundred billion mistakes and all of them except me may be slightly mistaken. Faulty products that perhaps should be sent back for adjustments. But I myself, he got just right.
Or she, whichever, I don’t know, got just right. We have that very deep instinct. So in tantra, when we take tantric initiation, the first thing that happens on the on the first day of the empowerment is we imagine that the empowering master sits in sexual union with a consort. These days with our lamas and with all the celibate monks, they do the initiation we visualize. In olden times, classical Buddhism of Tantric Buddhism in of India, the actual consort practice would happen during initiation.
Then we would imagine that during their union, we get swallowed by the master, go down his tummy, go out the sexual organ through the his organ into the passage of the consort, into the womb. And in the womb, we are totally reborn. We come out of that womb and then from that moment, come out of that womb. We are little Buddhas, little mandala deities. The meaning there is that this primordial sense of me first, me perfect, me always right is the essential power we’re working with in tantra but it needs a slight sublimation.
We need to be swallowed by the master and the consort. Swallowed by the master, transformed into little sperms, shot into the womb of the consort and reborn with our divinity made whole. We take that sense of me first, me perfect, me always right. We have to slightly retune it. What do we retune it with?
The master hair represents pure joy, the happy mind, pleasure in the body, pleasure in the spirit. He represents great bliss. And the consort, the mother, she represents the wisdom of no fixed reality, the wisdom of no this and no that, no is and no is not. She represents the wisdom of the infinite. She represents the aspect of the mind which is the very basis of all sentient life.
She represents the most profound primordial wisdom which is the ability to say, I’m always right. And so we are reborn from her womb. To practice tantra, this is all we need, all we need. We need the commitment to bliss or pleasure and the commitment to the primordial wisdom of no is, no is not. It’s also called the primordial path because it’s said that all human beings who have ever achieved enlightenment in one lifetime have practiced this way.
They may have been reborn ten thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago. They may have been reborn on this planet or on some other planet but their enlightenment process has followed the maturation of their own bliss and primordial wisdom. They may have called it by another name. So it’s primordial because there is no Since ancient times, not only the beginning of this universe, before this universe existed in other universes, those beings who achieved enlightenment did so by invoking the primordial wisdom and relying consistently upon joy, pleasure, bliss, making those their two supports in life. Sometimes it’s called the dangerous path because when you’re walking around saying to yourself, I’m perfect, I’m perfect, I’m perfect, I’m perfect, Occasionally, it irritates your neighbors.
Someone gives you a good thumping. It’s called the dangerous path because in it, don’t make a difference between meditation and non meditation. So if you don’t know how to meditate, you’re kind of screwed. It’s called the dangerous path because in it there is no acceptance and no rejection of sensory data. Whatever arises within the field of the senses is a perfect display of bliss and primordial wisdom.
Some people get a little attached to some of the sensory data. They lose the bliss, they lose the vision of primordial wisdom. A little too much of this, too much of that, not enough of this, not enough of that. They aren’t able to handle the precept of no acceptance, no rejection, too much of things that seem to bug them and they get really irritated. Not enough of the things that they seem to have an addiction to and they get a sense of not enough.
The basic principle of tantra is that there is no extra effort needed for the sensory data. There’s always something to look at, always something to hear, always something to smell, always something to taste, always something to touch. It’s also called the dangerous path because it’s the path wherein the five kleshas or the five spiritual poisons are taken as medicine. In ordinary Buddhism, we say I’m going to have less anger. If anger arises, I’m gonna cut it off and practice love and patience.
We also said so that’s the first. Second, we say, I’m going to have less pride. If pride arises, I’m gonna meditate on humility. In ordinary Buddhism, we say, I’m going to have less clingings and attachments and desires. If clingings and attachments arise, I’m going to cut them off.
I’m going to meditate on the impermanence of all things, how at death these are all left behind. I’m gonna meditate how those beautiful bodies that I’m attached to or that I cling to or I’m feeling lustful towards. I’m gonna forget how, pretty and beautiful those ladies are. I’m gonna meditate instead on the pus and the blood and the snot and the urine and the excrement in their body and cut off that sense of of magnetic the magic spell that they cast over my mind. Not in tantra.
In tantra, we think very nice feeling. In ordinary so that’s the third. In ordinary Buddhism, we try if jealousy, envy arises, we say, oh, bad. Bad. Glacier, crazy darkness of the mind, mental poison, spiritual poison.
I better not be jealous of that person. I shouldn’t be envious. Everyone has their own karma, their own destiny and we philosophize about it. In tantra, we just say, delicious, delicious, delicious jealousy. We take it as medicine.
In ordinary Buddhism, we think laziness is a bad thing. We say, don’t be lazy. Work hard. Get up early. Get on your meditation cushion.
Do some prostrations. For God’s sake, do something. Not in Tantra. In Tantra, we say, oh, that laziness. So sweet.
Like warm honey. One of my teachers talking about laziness and the primordial wisdom or tantric wisdom sometimes called Mahāmudrā, the great stamp or the great signature. So what’s laziness like? He said, well laziness is kind of like this. And what’s Mahāmudrā like?
The primordial wisdom is It’s kind of like this. Of all of these five, because Buddha said desire or attachment is the toughest or the strongest or the most powerful of all of them then in tantra we like to call, we like to take desire as a symbol for all of and so we sometimes call it the path of desire because desire is the most powerful overwhelming force of the mind. And we like to use sexual desire as the example because of all desires, sexual desire is the most absolutely penetrating. It’s like a drop of oil put on a piece of paper, like it gradually, slowly spreads until it gets to the furtherest extent of the paper and it completely pervades that entire paper. One tiny little piece of oil slowly travels out and covers the paper.
In that way, we see another human being that we really want to get in the sack with and we can do what we like, but that little drop of oil starts spreading spreading and spreading and spreading and spreading until even our little toes start feeling quite desirous of that object of our fascination. This desire spreads through every cell of our body and into the deepest recesses of our mind. We find ourselves making little excuses like, oh, I think I’ll go to the library thinking, maybe she’s in the library. When I go I’ll go for a walk through the mall. I need some cigarettes.
I’ll go for a walk through the mall. Not because we even smoke, we perhaps don’t even smoke but we need an excuse to take a walk through the mall. So we call it the path of desire because desire is the most profound of these five. In a sense the most not the most profound, the most deeply moving or pervasive. So in the tantra we like to take that drop of oil and just let it soak right through every fiber of our being.
And use that feeling of right down to the soles of our feet being filled with great passion. It’s called the dangerous path because sometimes that can be a little indulgent. That could be mistaken for indulgence. It’s also called the path of desire because in ordinary Buddhism, we try to limit our desires, we put a limit on them. But in tantra we think no limits are necessary, no number too high, no ocean too deep, no territory too far away.
So from the psychological side, it’s slightly dangerous because right from the time we start practicing we say, I’m perfect, you’re perfect, the world is perfect. And we try to live our life on that basis. Everything that comes to us is a great celebration of the divine theater which is our life. It is nothing more than divine theater. You’re walking home and someone throws a television out of the thirty seventh story of the building and it lands right on your head.
You look up and it’s only one inch away. You think, divine theater. You leave the teaching here today or the session the meeting our gathering here today, you get outside, your car has been towed, divine theater. Whatever arises seen as divine theater. So it’s a little bit dangerous because it can become a little kind of airy fairy in people’s minds.
Everyone becomes like Californian New Agers on steroids. If you don’t do it with some subtlety. It’s sort of like a what’s her name? Pollyanna? Like Pollyanna on cocaine.
It’s like, wow. Everything’s great. Everything’s great. But it’s a fast path if it’s done correctly. The Tibetans say it can be a little bit like going from walking to riding a wild horse.
If you can ride the wild horse well, you can travel ten times as fast as you can walk him but if you don’t know how to ride a horse maybe you’re better off walking. That wild horse can be a little wild. So psychologically the dangers are there, in tantra it’s said because of this juggling of our ego sensitivity. In Sūtra we ask who am I, who am I, who am I and we look for the self or the non self. In Tantra we just say, I’m Buddha.
Question answered. You’re a dakini, you’re Buddha Bodhini. So sometimes I said psychologically that can be a little dangerous because it has to be done with a kind of a certain degree of lightness about it or it can be somewhat obnoxious. That’s why it’s said, first, you do the common trainings. You get your spiritual detachment, your spiritual inner freedom or spaciousness well established, your universal love, compassion well established, and the wisdom of emptiness or non self.
The wisdom of the self get this fairly well established by conventional means. Those conventional means are pretty safe, you think. I need more love and compassion, enlightened beings have more love and compassion, I need some more. If I get some more I’ll be more enlightened. I need more inner freedom, inner space, inner contentment, inner non attachment.
Enlightened beings have a lot of that. I don’t have very much. If I have a little more, I’ll be a little more enlightened. I need to get it. Then we think of wisdom of the self or wisdom of the non self.
We think, I haven’t got a clue who I am let alone who you are. So I better get a little more wisdom of who I am and who you are. And we practice some methods for increasing wisdom. It’s a pretty safe path. It’s also a little on the boring side.
The tantra, we say, oh no need for more spiritual freedom, No need for more contentment. Whatever comes is just celebration. We don’t have to edit the movie which is our life. It’s already in the process of self editing in overdrive. We don’t think, I need more love and compassion.
Who is there to feel love and compassion for? You? You’re already a Buddha. You don’t need my love or my compassion. Do you?
Why should I feel compassion for you? You’re a Buddha. Even in the sutras it says don’t bother with compassion for the Buddhas, they don’t need it. Save it for wounded birds and such. So in tantra, we say, don’t bother with loving compassion.
If you treat yourself like a Buddha and others like a Buddha, it’s obsolete. It’s like carrying coal to Adelaide. Oh, no. What is it in Adelaide? Churches.
Carrying coals to Newcastle. In tantra, we say, we don’t need to cultivate more wisdom of this, that or the other. Simply, the primordial nature of one’s own being has wisdom in it of sufficient force. So this making of no extra effort it said makes sūtra a more safe path and tantra a slightly more dangerous one because sometimes people don’t really have what it takes to hack the peace of saying, I’m Buddha, you’re Buddha. This is perfect, everything’s perfect, merely divine theater.
That’s on the level of the basic mind practice. In tantra, the body practice is also hero practice isn’t the right word. We don’t practice in tantra because there’s nothing to practice. We do tawa, chöpa, Gompa. We have a certain vision.
Tawa, chöpa. As an expression of that vision, we walk around, sit down, talk, make love, engage in the various activities. That’s activity. And Gompa. We, as part of our celebration of the theater of bliss and emptiness, do some exercises.
Gompa means meditation but we shouldn’t think that it means that it’s being used in the sense of meditation. Just means we do some exercises. Like we know we’re perfect but we do an aerobic workout anyway. We don’t really need it but it’s just pleasant doing a kind of an aerobic workout. Not like Jane Fonda aerobics.
Kundalini aerobics, arousing our sexual passions aerobics, arousing or lighting the great fire aerobics. We don’t call it meditation. Just like flexing our muscles to keep them fresh. Doesn’t mean we’re admitting there’s anything wrong with the muscle or the muscle needs improvement. The nature of a muscle is that it just feels good sometimes to flex it.
So today, looking at tantric practice, how we can be tantric practitioners, our tantricas, yogis and yoginis of the tantric path to enlightenment. I want to look at four If we have these four keys, we are tantric yogis and yoginis. If we do not have these four keys, it is questionable whether we are or are not. So the first key is the is the key which is the tantric arrogance. Maintaining this vision, I’m perfect, you’re perfect.
Everything that comes is perfect. Everything that goes is perfect. The first factor we have to establish is this way of seeing. I’m perfect. You’re perfect.
Everything that comes is perfect. Everything that goes is perfect. We say that in Tantra, if you take initiation and for just one second say to yourself, oh, I’m not perfect or you’re not perfect, or this is not perfect. You break the tantric precept. You’ve lost your empowerment.
You have to do, like, go back and get another empowerment or initiation. Allowing that thought for just one finger snap is equivalent to murdering the guru. So that being the case, you are not allowed henceforth from this moment ever again to allow yourself the thought, I am imperfect. This person is imperfect. To do so is like murdering the guru.
This tantric arrogance is the key to all practice, the most important of all the precepts, the sacred words of honor (samaya). But how do we maintain it? How where how do we stand? Where do we stand within ourselves that allows such a vision? How do we maintain that same division if we’re sitting in the most beautiful country resort in the world or in the most busy, unpleasant, hectic, intense, stressful environment.
As the Tibetan saying goes, alone in a beautiful cave at the top of an absolutely fabulous mountain or downtown in the busiest, dirtiest, grumpiest, noisiest city street. Or as Lama Yeshe used to put it, sitting in your meditation room or in the chocolate aisle at the supermarket. How do you maintain that same vision? Essentially, do it by discovering or sticking to a place within yourself which is always radiant, clear, blissful, joyful. Why are, like, quiet, easy, beautiful places easier for us, more pleasant for us than a busy, crowded, dirty place?
You know, people travel from all over the world, all these rural places, all over Europe and America and whatnot, to go to downtown New York. The greasiest, grimiest, dirtiest rat hole this side of, like, the cold hells. Not only do they get they go there, they think it’s like a good thing to do. They enjoy it. So why do we have to think a quiet meditation room or a wonderful cave or cabin on the mountains is less stressful and more enjoyable than downtown New York?
It’s just a matter of how we see it, isn’t it? Why do we think slow, easy, casual, flowing events are less stressful than very fast ones? It’s just a matter of how we hold them, is it not? You know, some people’s, you know, traveling along the freeway at ten miles an hour and others traveling along at twenty and others at fifty and others at a hundred and if you’re in Germany on the Autobahn at two hundred and thirty five miles an hour straight down the freeway. What makes one think it’s slow and another fast for any of those speeds?
Purely relative. The flow of events that constitute our life, there is a place in us where we can stand and just take those all like a juggler with a hundred apples or oranges. Perfectly relaxed. Oh, yawn, yawn. Hundred things flying around.
No problem. To practice tantra well, the first or live the tantric way, the first thing we need to do is find that place where all things arise and all things fall without any pushing or any pulling from our side. Like the martial artist. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand things can come flying at him or her by just no problem. Just seeing each one and dealing with each one at a time or the juggler.
There’s just always one or two being moved. The rest are just flowing. We have to find that place in us. We have to find that place. If we find that, we stick to it.
No problem dwelling in the tantric vision. You have to learn a little bit of upbeat language. Someone says, how are you today? You say, fabulous. You can’t like, oh, wow.
Goodness. You know, my dog got run over yesterday. Just say, wow. Fabulous. You know?
This dog. Finally. Yeah. You gotta learn to be a little bit up more upbeat about things. But that’s about all, really.
So in learning to find this place or keep to this place, the great tantric masters of the past have given six pointers. If you keep to this place well, no other effort is needed in life. You don’t have to go visit any gurus. You don’t have to get any teachings. You don’t have to read any books.
You don’t have to get anything or get rid of anything. You don’t have to take any vows or lose any vows. No other practice is needed for those of highest capacity. Those who are not of highest capacity have to do some other things. It’s sort of like a visit to the doctor.
You’ve actually got no problem, so a sugar pill will do. So this instruction is like the sugar pill. For those of you with coughs, we need to give some cough medicine in addition, and those of you with colds, some cold medicines. Those of you with grumbly predispositions, we have to give you some Prozacs, Or it will be difficult to maintain that perfect predisposition in all times, in all places. So basically, there are four ways of maintaining this perfect predisposition.
The first is called simply maintaining the vision. Where we are, where we’re coming from, where we’re going, what we’re seeing on the way, maintaining the vision. The first pointer now what this is talking about is you imagine that your head is about this big around and that you really are like this little shadow figure that stands or dances somewhere in the middle of your head. Where you stand and dance in the middle of your head makes a difference to how you experience all the rest of the dance which is going on in this stage of your your life. Yeah?
Standing over here, you get one thing. Standing over here, you see something else. Standing here, you see something else. There’s a way of standing or a way of dancing and a place of standing or a place of dancing that we have to get. If we get this, we’ve got the tantric vision.
So the first thing is we have to have a sense of our mind as being like a radiant light, like looking north-south along the horizon at sunrise. Not into the sun, looking north-south. You get this kind of shimmering. Your mind is like a shimmering light and all objects that appear in it are like holographic images. In other words, try to get a simp a more wispy wispy sense of the objects that you experience.
You look at me. I’m like a holographic image appearing in your own luminosity, the field of your luminosity. Joe, what am I? Go on. Shimmering in the field of your mental or spiritual, whatever, your presence luminosity.
The first is that. We try to get a sense. My mind is radiance. My mind is just the light. Those images appearing in my mind are just light.
They are not separate from my mind. They are not different from my mind. When I look at you, where do you begin and my mind end? You are just an image appearing in my mind. Where where in that image, like the space that you seem to occupy in my mind, Does my mind pervade that space of your mental image?
It’s like the whole thing is one texture, isn’t it? Your sense of being, your mind, and the image that appears in your mind. Like, think of your grandfather. Everyone, did you think of your grandfather? A handsome like me?
So, anyway, you put your grandfather in your mind. Can you ask, where does mind in that image, where does my mind begin? And his image begin and my mind end. Does your mind go through the image in your mind of your grandfather? Is the image of your grandfather in your mind a non mind or mind?
What do you think? That’s a question. Joe. There’s one in every crowd. So the first bite, get this sense.
You’re not actually carrying any weight around with you. It’s not like the the world that you experience has any gravity to it, is it? Is the question time yet? I asked two questions. Not yet.
No. No. You have to answer that question first. You could ask a question after I go through these six things. Okay?
But I may be like you guys, and when I when someone asks me a question, I might go, is this a trick? Is this a trick question? So I was saying, yes. This world we experience, they everything we experience in our life, just images in our own mind. The world actually has no gravity to it whatsoever.
I mean, just it is as grave or as solemn or as serious as we choose. You know, if we look at the world, we’re gonna sit there crying about it all the time. If we like crying, we can laugh about it all the time. If we like laughing, we can be very contemplative about it all the time. Interesting.
If we like being contemplative. We can be angry about it. If we like being angry. Oh, this darn world. I don’t like this, and I don’t like that.
Whoever made this made a real mess, and it pisses me off. So we could take all those different approaches to this universe as we experience it. But what do we really know about it? We only know that we’ve got a mind that is experiencing something. We don’t know much else about that world, really.
We know we’re in it and we know we experience it. But that’s really all we know, isn’t it? Unless you guys are in on some secret that I missed. So as a result, we don’t have to take it that seriously. You know?
It’s not like some big deal. Alright. Just a piddly little universe appearing in our piddly little mind. Alright? That’s all it is.
So we think from the beginning, I only know that it’s a universe appearing in my mind or my mind has a sense of there being me in the universe. So then we say, okay, there’s me in the universe. And what have we got? We got two things. We got my sense of radiance or being.
You know, I get a sense like I’m hair. Right? Do you also have that sense? Not Joe. He fell asleep.
We have a sense like I’m here. Well, like I’m here. And secondly, we have a sense like there’s a whole bunch of other stuff here too. I think. So we’ve got just really those two things going for us.
So I think, okay, I know I’m here, so I’ll have this sense of radiance, this sense of presence. Presence. I know other things are here, so I’ll have the sense of, like, holographic images in the radiance of my own presence. All those things that rise and fall, we don’t know their status. Who’s got a clue?
You know? We could go home and, like, look in some old junky newspaper in our backyard and find a postage stamp in there worth three million dollars or ten million dollars. We’d seen that little newspaper and that old postage stamp time in and time out. We didn’t know the silly thing was worth two or three million dollars. It happens to people all the time, doesn’t it?
That kind of thing. It’s probably happened to you four or five already. So we don’t know the status of any of that stuff we’re experiencing, you know? Who knows what’s the sun worth and the moon worth and the stars worth and those mountains and that trees and that river? Who knows their real status?
Except me. Either most people haven’t got a clue. So simply, it’s best to say to yourself, I’m present, and these things appear in the field of my presence. No need to say anymore about them. I am present.
Something appearing in the field of my presence. Anything beyond that is mere speculation. When you say this about the mountain or that about the mountain, they say that’s a big mountain, and like there’ll be some eagle flying overhead looking down at the thinking, what a piddly little mountain. It’s like that British film, you know, they went up a mountain and came down a hill. So the first pointer in being able to practice tantra right, in holding the vision, tantric vision, is the sense like you’re looking north south across the horizon.
You get this pure luminosity. And just after daybreak, the way, you know, wakes up the birds and the flowers and everything is, like, rising. You get this sense. And as you’re looking, it’s like there’s a whole bunch going on there, but you’re really you get the sense of this vibration, this radiant vibration. Everything else seems to be happening kind of around it.
One way we put that in the the tantric practice, you’re the lord at the center of mandala. The whole universe is happening in this circle or sphere around you. In a way, we are all the center of our own universe. Now wherever you go, you carry the center of the universe with you, your little universe. People run into problems in their world when they forget that they are the center of their world.
They lose balance of all the things moving around them when they get out of balance. Well, as long as you remain in balance, your whole universe will be in balance. So you that place of light looking north and south, the sun’s rising over here, You’re looking north and south. That’s the way this energy goes. The sun’s coming up.
Everything’s moving. You have the sense of the radiance, which is in the field within which your universe rises and falls. So if someone says, how are you? You say, pretty bright. Radiant.
When we take the vision off the radiance and put it too strongly at the object appearing in the radiance, we run into trouble. That object is beautiful, we usually get attachment clinging, stickiness. The object is ugly, we usually get repulsion. The object is friendly, we get lovey dovey. The object is aggressive, we get like anger stomping, raging mad.
But if we maintain our awareness of the radiance of our own being and see those objects as a great piece of theater rising and falling those falling in the radiant sphere of our own presence. Nothing is held too close. Nothing is held too far. From everything, we can get joy without we can get pleasure. We can get fulfillment without addiction, clinging, craving.
That’s the first one. The second one is we have to learn to, like, be a little bit more childish. You know? Try not to be so adult about everything. Most adults are quite square about things.
What we want to be is something like a two or three year old kid. Have the vision of a two or three year old kid. You know, an an adult cannot look at a decent painting in a in a in a useful way. You know? They go, interesting.
Some poor, you know, Italian jock, like, slogged away for, like, seventeen years making this thing. Interesting. Whereas a little kid, because what happens is, when we get a strong conceptual mind, we’re rather like looking at something inside the thing, which case we miss the overall picture of things, or we step back and try and see the overall picture and we can’t see any of the details in there. We’re either looking at the forest and missing the trees or looking at the trees and missing the forest. It’s the great curse of adulthood.
So we have to learn to relax the conceptual mind in our way of seeing. Like a little kid looking at a painting and sees the whole thing and sees the images and says, look, mommy, that lady in the painting has no clothes on. She’s got such big boobies. Like a kid looks just innocently, sees the whole thing, sees the detail. We’ll look and it’s like, we either see the detail or we see the whole thing.
So when you practice the tantric vision, you kind of occasionally, a few times a day, practice kind of like just splashing yourself over things, like you guys right now. I’m gonna just splash myself all over you like, that felt nice. We have to practice that or bring it into our vision. This way of seeing things as integrated holes in which the parts are every bit as important as the whole. You don’t think this and that and this and that and this and that and but simply fabulous.
That’s the second pointer, learning to relax the this and that mind and see things in their fullness, the holistic experience of your environment. The third one is learn from the ocean and its waves. The ocean and its waves. In the depths of the ocean, there is complete silence. There is complete calm.
On the surface of the ocean, the waves rise and fall with great tumultuousness. That’s a difficult one. Bet you didn’t think I could do that. I couldn’t repeat it. The waves rise and fall, tumultuously.
Now we have our radiant, our sense of natural radiance, the things appearing in our mind, We’re trying to just kinda splash splash or sprinkle ourselves over this garden of our own life, our each moment of our life. We’re trying to splash or sprinkle ourselves over that completely, evenly, not leaving some out here and putting more there. We’re just taking in the totality of what we are at each moment. How do we do that effectively? Like the ocean and its waves.
In the depths of the ocean, all is quiet. On the surface of the ocean, all is very, very violent. All all is in a state of motion. So like that, in our experience, we have to try to keep one part of us in the depths of the ocean of our being. A herd of ten thousand elephants stampedes through the center of this room right now.
We have to think, those are like the waves in the ocean. I am like the depths. Between the depths of the ocean and the waves of the ocean, there is no competition. Both are equally made of water. All the things that we experience are simply the same are simply the substance of our own experience.
Everything that comes to us in life, good, bad, and indifferent, is just different stuff of our life, different life stuff. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing to get excited about, nothing to get disappointed about, nothing to get happy about, nothing to be sad about. Just a great celebration of bliss and vastness. Bliss and vastness.
We want to stay in the depth of the ocean. This is like the vastness. As the waves go, some days are calm, some days are choppy, some days are very, very choppy and occasionally there’s a hurricane. Whatever comes is just bliss, the waves, and the vastness. Stay in the vastness, there’s no fight with the waves.
You don’t have to pull at the waves to keep them. You can’t lose any of your own waves. They’re your waves. You don’t have to try and ruffle up a whole bunch of other waves. Those waves come and go as the natural course of the life of the ocean.
To maintain the tantric vision, the first and most fundamental of the tantric yogas. To maintain that, we must learn to be like the depths of the ocean, not pushing, not pulling on our own waves, not fearing some and liking some, disliking others, and so forth. Whatever waves come, we say, just a wave. Here it comes. There it goes.
As one goes through one’s twenty third wife. Wave twenty four. Good. Many waves come within the depths of the ocean. The the depths of the ocean can accommodate those many, many waves.
Sometimes the waves are very few and far between. The ocean is undisturbed. It doesn’t say, oh, how boring. No waves today. Someone says to you, Are you bored?
If you practice Tantra, you say, What? What? Bored? How could one be bored amidst the festival of vastness and bliss? Now French movies, they can be boring.
Yeah. But not the festival of vastness and bliss. Even little pleasures can be great pleasures in the festival of vastness and bliss, no less pleasurable than the great exotic, ecstatic pleasures. So that’s the third. The fourth is to be like a captain of a boat in the middle of the ocean on which there’s a whole bunch of bluebird or or seagulls.
The seagulls are like the thoughts of your own mind. Now in this in the sutriyana or ordinary Buddhist practice, we think we better watch our mind, control the mind, cut the mental wondering, focus, da da da da, like that. Right? That sound familiar to anyone except me? We think like that, not in tantra.
We think whatever goes on in the mind is like just a bunch of seagulls on a boat in the middle of the ocean. We don’t have to bring the mind back. We don’t have to chase the thoughts, resolve them, investigate them. Where are those seagulls gonna go? You know, you’re the captain of a boat in the middle of the ocean.
Do you, like a seagull flies off, take your boat off course and go chasing after this dumb bird thinking if I don’t it’ll drown? Who cares? Probably it won’t. It’ll probably fly back to your boat. And where else is it gonna go?
You’re the only boat in town. For your thoughts, your mind is the only home base. You don’t have to chase those thoughts, you don’t have to repress those thoughts. Just see them like seagulls coming and flying in the middle of the ocean. You yourself are running the boat, you stick to your course, You don’t think angry thought and let yourself go into anger.
Attach thought, go into thoughts of attachment. Fearful thought, go into thoughts of fearfulness. Keep your mind on your luminosity. Keep your mind like a child looking at the whole thing sprinkled equally with awareness. See your mind like in the depths of the ocean with the waves rising and falling.
Good thoughts arise. Think, oh, festival of bliss and joy has me with a rather raunchy thought there. What? What? Me deserted on a desert island with three hundred and twenty two ladies and not a stitch of clothing washed up on shore?
Whatever thought arises, you just think, a seagull flying in the vast skies of my awareness. No need to chase it, no need to repress it. No need to be puzzled by it and say, what does it all mean? Like the two psychologists passing in the hall. Good morning, sir.
What did he mean by that? We just simply stay on our boat. No. Not stay in our boat. Keep our boat.
We are the navigator or the captain of that boat. Keep our boat on course. Let those thoughts rise and fall and fly where they may. Fifthly, sometimes in doing this, have to be a little bit like the swordsman, the martial artist swordsman who is being attacked by a hundred archers. Archers think of themselves as really a hot shit militants, you know, a kind of little on the arrogant side because they stand about a hundred feet away from everywhere and they go ping.
You know, they think of themselves as like extra dangerous kind of martial artists. Right? You know, you can be sitting there with all your fancy judo chops and over the head three times flip kicks, and this guy goes ping. Well, if you’re a swordsman, you’ve got him. You basically just take your sword and you stand there like this, and there’s a hundred archers sitting on you and you wake calmly there like this, this kind of expression on your face.
Arrow comes flying at you from the left, get a little, ping, deflect it. One comes from the other side, deflect it. Another from the other side, ping, deflect it. Those hundred archers do not in the slightest perturb or disturb you. You are as cool as a cucumber in Antarctica in winter.
That essentially, thought flows need not in any way even slightly move you from the vision of spaciousness and blissful appearance, divine theater arising on the stage or landscape of your mind. Nothing need to move you from that vision. Whatever comes, you just cool you just cool that thing. You don’t have to move even slightly from your ground to do so. So an angry appearance arises in your face, you kind of look, Angry?
Whatever appears, you just remember radiance, spaciousness, just something happening in my dream. And you just essentially don’t budge from your ground. The thing with the arrows and as I said, this is to be like very specific with specific things that arise to try to push you off your primordial ground. Things arise which make you make you angry and you think. This is like an object seen in a mirror.
Take the anger, which is like a great energy inside of you. Like if someone comes up and yells at you really loudly right in your face, yells right in your face, you you get kind of this rush of adrenaline, or at least we Irish do. I don’t know about you guys. But this real rush of some something very intense and anger thrown right in your face, you get this rush. So you try to feel the pleasure of that rush.
You know, some people would travel to exotic countries and buy that kind of drug at, like, you know, billions of dollars per gram or something. How you’ve gotten it completely free. You start you try to feel the pleasure of that rush of that person jumping up and down and yelling in your face, and you think, mirror like wisdom. This pleasure of this feeling, this great adrenaline anger rush, it’s like a mirror. It’s radiant.
The things that appear in it, it makes them more radiant. It’s kind of like that, isn’t it? Something really irritate you know, really gets in your face. It’s like your everything becomes as crystal clear as a mirror. You’re sitting there a little bit kind of spaced out thinking, oh, stocks went down here, and this is happening over here, and that’s down there, and the car is not working, and I gotta pick up the kids at four o’clock, and your mind’s kinda dribbling off into ten thousand directions, and someone jumps up in front of in front of you and yells, you stupid.
You know? And suddenly, it’s like and you’re right in the hearer and now very, very, very intensely. So you think, at that time, a tremendous clarity comes over you.