If you’re sitting there meditating, you’re feeling a little on the lazy side, you when the master walks behind, you put your head on the side like this, and they take this big stick and they go clunk, and they hit you right here. They have a slit down the middle of the stick, so it’s like a long bamboo thing. So because then when it comes together, it’s like as it comes together, it goes very loud right beside your ear like that. So you kind of go like you occasionally request it if you’re feeling a little sleepy. Where did I put my stick?
I could demonstrate. So anger is a little bit like that when it comes into one’s life, not one’s own, when it comes into one’s own life. It’s kind of thrown into your lap like this explosive firecracker blow which sends a shock through your whole body. And when it arises within you someone else is like really getting on your nerves. Like you come home and you find your husband in bed with five downtown ladies and you feel a little irritated And you think you’ll say something to him about it right away.
And you don’t you don’t plan on expressing it in poetic verse. When that sensation arises within oneself, it’s very refreshing, very awakening, very invigorating. The world becomes very clear and oneself becomes very purposeful. So at that time one should sit back and just enjoy that fabulous feeling, the power of anger. And very seldom in a punch up fight does the best man win.
You know, it’s really the one who puts their spirit into it the most. You know, as a freshman in college my favorite sport was boxing and very seldom does like the biggest best boxer win. It’s almost unheard of. That’s the fellow who goes in there and keeps his mind totally focused and really leans into his jab. So in that same way when that angry energy comes in to us we get real focus.
We get real energy. Know, like normally maybe you can only lift like a hundred and twenty pounds. You come home and like, you know, see your fella in bed with like five naked ladies. It’s like three hundred pounds. No problem lifting them up.
You become very powerful. So lean into that power gently. No, lean into that power gently. This is like the martial artist going You think, now why does anger arise in the first place? Usually it indicates that something needs a little a little readjustment in our life, isn’t it?
We get irritated because there’s something there which rubs us the wrong way. Yeah, like someone slamming the door all the time or someone painting graffiti on your Jaguar. I mean something needs a little readjustment there so you get this feeling of this tremendous infusion of energy. Like get those five ladies out of my bed kind of thing. A kind of let’s go fix things up kind of energy comes in to the body mind, doesn’t it?
I almost made the mistake of saying it’s like anger comes because there’s something wrong in our life. In sūtra we would say that. Generally you get angry because it seems like something’s wrong there and you generate this whole energy which gives you the power to fix it or to right it. In that way anger is a good thing. Anger is a bad thing in that we usually don’t look for what’s really wrong.
We point the finger in the wrong place and then throw that unharnessed energy on the wrong object. So in tantra what we do is we just allow that wonderful infusion of great creative energy like let’s fix things up to arise within us. We don’t allow the object to determine the agenda. We just allow that energy to arise and we think let’s look in the mirror of this experience. We take the energy to be like the glass of the mirror and all those beings and one’s own feelings and everything that’s happening to be like other like other objects reflected in the mirror.
And one says to oneself, let’s look at the elements of this mirror. Look at the radiant presence of things in the mirror. You know my face appears in the mirror. It looks like it’s really me in the mirror but there’s actually nothing in that glass to represent me. Something happens in your environment.
It seems this, it seems that but are the things of this and that really there in that appearance? In the Tibetan world if you don’t answer right away the whole crowd has to go oh, cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer. So like that with each of the five kleshas, each of the five negative minds, the first anger, the vajra family, one transforms it into the mirror-like wisdom. Secondly, excessive pride. Now someone comes across and says, no, you Irish are the greatest species on earth.
You’re all such great poets and writers and musicians, handsome to boot. They go on and on and on about the great qualities of the Irish. A man could almost feel proud. So this thing of pride, within it, there’s a kind of a lifting up, isn’t there? It’s like your life has suddenly improved.
It’s like you’re feeling very poor and suddenly you get a bank statement in the mail saying that you’ve actually got three million two hundred and twenty seven dollars there. Actually nothing changed in your life, it was always there, right? You just weren’t thinking about it. The only thing that’s changed is that like now you’re thinking oh three million two hundred and twenty seven dollars and eighty seven cents. Wow.
Isn’t it? There’s no reason for you to feel any better about things. You don’t have any more or any less than you did five minutes before the letter arrived. Just a thought in your mind made a difference, right? Otherwise everything’s the same.
You have the same precise three million two hundred seventy five dollars and eighty three cents in the bank. You are the same person, you have the same friends, the same enemies, the same mom and dad and kids and all the rest of it. Nothing has changed. But reading that letter suddenly you think, this feels good. That really makes my day.
I didn’t know that I had that three hundred minutes, three hundred eighty three cents in the back. And it lifts you up in that same way. During the course of all of our time, you know, things are happening always lifting us up a little bit. Now what happens with some kind of disaster case people is they get lifted up, but in their lifting up it seems they don’t notice that they’re being lifted up. It seems like other people are just being pushed down a little below them.
And it’s like they can’t go up a little bit without somehow the rest of the world going down a little bit. Yeah? Like, your mom and dad are wealthy, so you don’t think that lifts me up a little bit in a spiritual way or an emotional way or a happiness way. Rather you think, well all those people out there who don’t have that much wealth that puts them down a little bit. You know, you went to a very good college.
What, Perth? No, Harvard. Someone else went to a miserable college. And I go, yes, I went to ba ba ba. He only went to ba ba ba.
Yours didn’t really lift you up much but his kind of it really had more effect of putting him down, didn’t it? Well, what we this whole thing with being proud is really quite a nice thing. You know? It’s pleasurable to be flattered. Like let me tell you, you are the sweetest looking bunch of people I’ve seen all day.
Everyone amongst you is a real beauty. Nice smiles, good breaths. You all washed your feet and socks. Hey, you’re a chirper bunch. You know, feels okay, doesn’t it?
There’s no reason why the things that pick wind up have to put others down, is it? You know? You get a letter in the mail saying three hundred million two hundred seventy five dollars and eighty three cents in the mail. There’s no reason why that should make you a snob, is it? But this world is filled with a lot of snobs.
If we were to invent a disease that wiped out the snobs on this planet, which I’m not suggesting that you do it but if you do If such a disease came along the human population would drop drastically. People get snobbish over all sorts of things, don’t they? You know, who’s got like the nicest nose, you know. My nose is nicer than your nose. My car is bigger than your car.
My house is bigger than your car. My kids are smart smarter than your kids. My lawn is more neatly mowed than your lawn. It’s like we cannot find enough things somehow to be snobbish about. You know we’ve got like a think tank out in the middle of somewhere trying to come up with new things to be snobbish about.
Well, it’s good to feel good about oneself. Good to feel good about oneself. And in sūtra we say try to avoid it because it makes you it’s too dangerous. And most people getting into the feel good about themselves things just turn into snobs and they’re an obnoxious bunch. So in Tantra we say don’t worry about it.
Just do that feel good thing all the time. But as you do it see the radiance or the light or the empowerment of it. It kind of empowers you doesn’t it? I say to you listen, you are the smartest, most wonderful, delightful human being I have met ever in my whole lifetime. You think, oh, that’s nice.
It’s kind of empowering, isn’t it? Certain kind of power comes out of our feeling of strength or competence. You know, like we say with kids, when you raise your children, rather like bang them every time they get something wrong, encourage when they get things right. Then they grow with the right things without getting like banged all the time over the wrong thing. It’s a little bit like that, isn’t it?
Pride. Being proud arrogance. It can be very ugly in that if it gets arrogance at the detriment of others and pushes others down then it uglifies you rather than beautifies you. But if it arises within the context of the totality of your experience then it’s something very self empowering, something very beautiful, something very rich. I think we should open shops like the compliment shop.
You go in and buy compliments. I guess the shrink industry is a bit like that but we need professionals with our PhDs in compliment giving, Specialists. So he said, when it arises, transform it into feel the empowerment of it, feel the pleasure of it and then transform it into the wisdom of equality. Just like I’m great, you’re also great. Just like I’m fabulous, well, you’re almost as fabulous.
And thirdly, with desire, attachment, clinging, wanting, craving, you see something, I need that, I must have that, I must get that, I must keep that. This feeling of desire, clinging, craving, wanting. Actually why do we really want anything, right? It’s kind of silly. We’ve got the whole universe already.
Everything there in our experience is ours, really. You know? It’s all our world. I mean, you know, Yeltsin may call Russia his, but it’s every bit as much mine really, isn’t it? You can call your dog yours but it’s really part of my world.
You’re just the one stuck feeding him. I get to enjoy him without having to like carry the stick and the shovel. Everything is like that. Everything in the universe is mine. Everything in the universe is yours.
I mean, you may have someone else, know, maybe Ross Perot with the four billion dollar bank account, but it’s really my four billion dollar account. I just don’t need it right now. In a way, the craving desire clinging thing. It’s like, it’s like an instinct for what’s needed, isn’t it? It’s a positive thing in some sense.
You know. You’re hungry, you want some food. If you didn’t feel hunger, you wouldn’t think to go and eat some food. If people lost their appetite all over the planet, you know, humans would like stop dropping start dropping like flies. People would stop eating, you know.
People who lose their appetite, like, give them medicines to make the appetite come back. In a sense, our cravings, our desires, our attachments are good things. You know, if from time to time we humans didn’t feel a little on the sexy side, like we wouldn’t go out and have sex, there’d be no kids procreated, as a species would die out. But don’t worry there’s still some Irishman around, there’s no danger of that happening in the immediate future. Now in Sūtra, Buddha says desire, attachment, clinging, craving is the cause of all our sufferings.
Now in a sense it is, isn’t it? The reason why people feel a tremendous, unfulfillment. So it’s not really that Buddha is contradicting himself between sūtra and tantra. It’s an opposite path. He taught very differently.
The languages seems to be opposite. Right? In sūtra, we say desire is kind of a clinging attachment, craving is kind of a bad thing. See it as an enemy, overcome it. In tantra we say desire is fabulous, attachment is excellent, craving is magic.
Does that sound a little contradictory to you? Some people over history have thought it was a little contradictory. But in a way it’s not. These ordinary people, they don’t actually want what they need. You know?
They think, if I had that new car, I would be happy. They get a new car and it just turns out to be a big hole in the ocean into which to throw money and they get stuck out beside the highway and get mugged and robbed and the car has a wheel stolen. You know, we think if only I had that woman, I would be happy. We get her and she turns out to be like a, you know, like a serial killer who when we fall asleep snips off our wee wee. We want like all the we don’t want the right things all the time.
That’s the problem. And when we get the things which we need, we don’t find happiness in them because our schizophrenic mind says, well, no, not this woman, I want that one. Or not this man, I want that one. Or not this house, I want that one. Or not this job, I want that one, or not this car, I want that one.
You know, the untrained mind cannot find fulfillment, cannot find contentment ever because essentially its own lack of fulfillment is always looking for an object to blame. We can eat and eat and eat eat and eat and eat and eat and every day from now till the end of our life but we will never end the eating process until we die. In that same way, if we always have a kind of desire which is looking to objectify our own fulfillment, we will never find fulfillment. You have one camel, it’s not gonna make you that much happier. A hundred camels isn’t gonna make you a hundred times happier.
A thousand camels isn’t gonna make you a thousand times happier. Happiness arises within the mind. Physical things can give can fill the space of one’s emptiness for a little while but if the mind is not naturally happy through its own wisdom and its own understanding soon that lack of happiness will manifest whether you’ve got one camel or a hundred camels. So Buddha said in the Sūtra Path, desire, attachment, clinging, craving are endless cycles that just drive peoples in circles. They are like a leper scratching an itch on his arm.
All it does is make the flesh fall off, doesn’t fulfill his spirit, the itch just increases. The more we scratch it, the itchier it gets and it spreads it. In that same way, until we fulfill the spirit, until we find inner fulfillment, inner peace, just trying to fill the vacuity of our own spiritual poverty with things will never work. I don’t get my own spirit together and I think that by marrying you or spending a week with you or seducing you is somehow going to fulfill my spirit. Well, maybe.
No, no. So anyway, so anyway, it wouldn’t help you know. Unless you are a great magician, queen, shaman who can take me into other other worlds of wisdom through the encounter. But that’s rare. Usually we don’t choose such partners or we don’t choose such objects.
We think if I had this, I would be happy. If I had that, I would be happy. That leads to just increased unhappiness because we’re overlooking the fact that we simply have not established the inner foundations of happiness which is a spirit spiritually balanced, spiritually clear, a spiritually powerful, a spiritually free mind. Until we establish that nothing we fill or pour into that vacuum is going to bring happiness or fulfillment. But it was a nice week.
But the week’s gone. We may feel even worse because we had placed such hopes in that thing by that boat, by that car, by that airplane, by that house. We’d placed such hopes in it somehow fulfilling that vacuum in our being and when we put all the time and energy and money into it and it doesn’t help even slightly, it’s like maybe even worse really. Then not only do we have the headache of spiritual vacuity, then we got the dumb house in the country to worry about if thieves are gonna rob it and we have to go out on weekends and like hammer up to like the eaves and all this nonsense. That’s why in Buddhism we have a saying, if you got one camel you’ve got the headache of one camel.
A hundred camels and the headache of a hundred camels. Unless you have the fulfilled mind, all physical things essentially are useless. When you cultivate the fulfilled mind all physical things can be used joyfully and in a fulfilling manner. A king and a beggar both die alone, both die naked, both are born naked. A king and a beggar, a king with a million subjects and a million horses and a million elephants and a million jewels and a million wives and so on, if he does not have inner happiness, finds no added happiness through all those things, just occasional escape from his boredom.
A beggar with nothing, perhaps only a begging bowl and a walking stick. If he or she has inner happiness, he or she is much richer than that king. Like I mentioned yesterday, this friend of mine in the States who was going on and on and on and on and on and on about losing a twenty or twenty five million dollars on a recent stock market thing. Like, it was such a big sad thing. And meanwhile, he had another fifty to a hundred million just socked away which wasn’t giving him any happiness at all and the thought of having lost this little bit of paper somewhere.
What we have inside gives happiness. What we have outside either adds to our confusion and suffering or at best merely distracts from it. If we establish inside, then everything outside becomes useful. If we don’t establish inside then outside is just like dust blowing around. No benefit really for ourselves, no benefit to others.
So that’s why Buddha on the side of the sūtra said attachment, clinging, craving, useless, useless like a leper scratching his or her itch does not help at all. But in tantra we say, well actually that desire feels kinda good. Attachment clinging feels kinda good. And also in desire attachment clinging, there’s a kind of a wisdom. The things you want, why you want them.
Like, I want this woman and not this woman. I want this horse and not this horse. This house and not that house. This job and not that job. All our wants, wishes and whims, the kind of there’s a kind of wisdom in them in it very deeply.
Why we choose this path and not this path? Why we’re drawn this way and not this way? If we can really look at our desires in this pure way by holding to the light, seeing appearances, being like the child of scattering the consciousness equally over the entire field of our experience, being like the depths of the ocean, seeing all things on it as kind of waves, being like the martial artist holding our own ground. If we can do that, see things in that kind of light, hold to that territory, then our desires, our attachments, our clingings and our cravings are like little sprouts of wisdom, aren’t they? It’s like going this way, something’s drawing me there.
What mysterious power is it? It’s all distinguishing awareness. Awareness. I tell a difference between you and you. I tell a difference between this and that.
So the previous one is talking about the wisdom of all equality, the equal nature of all beings. This one’s talking about actually, there’s a difference, isn’t there? An orange and an apple, there’s a difference. One you going you go to a single spar at night and you go home with someone. It’s a difference who you go home with.
It’s not the same. Number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. You go home with number six is different than if you go home at number eight or number three. You have no experience in this room? Everyone’s looking puzzled.
Really? I tried all ten, they all seem the same to me. So the point is here that if we can rest in our own natural radiance, our desires, attachments, clingings are like messengers of wisdom. You know, in Tibetan medicine we say when you’re sick, your tongue is your best teacher, your best doctor. The things you crave to eat when you are sick, your tongue is telling you this is what you need to reestablish balance in your body.
You crave something sweet, eat something sweet. You crave a Guinness, drink a Guinness. Like a cat, when a cat gets ill it goes out and wanders in the garden and goes around sniffing on the various herbs and little grasses and plants and it’s looking for something which matches its own desire. Its illness produces a desire in it for certain things. It doesn’t know what.
Just walking around the garden sniffing and smelling, take a little nibble on this and a little nibble on that until it finds what it’s looking for and then it knows. Our desires, our cravings are a little bit like that. They’re like we’re sick beings wandering around looking for the right medicine. But rather than that in Tantra we say it’s like the great festival of bliss and vastness in which we need to have a little more input somewhere into the great theater going on. It’s like we have to pick up the tempo hair, put in a part player there or change the costume hair or add a horse there or cut this scene or like that.
Our desire in tantra is a natural barometer for us. If we can learn to follow it correctly it becomes the all distinguishing wisdom. So first we had what? Anger becoming the the mirror wisdom, the clarity mirror wisdom. Secondly, pride becoming the all equality wisdom.
Then desire becoming the distinguishing wisdom. Fourthly, often we get envy, jealousy, don’t we? We look at other people and other things and we think, wow, I wish I had that. Wow, I wish I could do that. Wow.
And somehow, in Sūtra, open teaching, we say this jealousy, envy is like a big a bad thing. Overcome it. Eliminate it. Avoid it. When you become jealous of others, you plot and connive and intrigue to trip them up.
You get pleasure from their downfall. It gives you a sense of enmity. You know, I look at you. You’re doing better than me in some sphere or some respect. I get jealous or envious of you, I actually get a destructive instinct towards you as a result.
I think, my goodness, that person is doing better than me. I better pull them down a peg or two. Actually, so from sūtra point of view we say it’s a negative mind, a klesha, a crazy darkness, get rid of it. In tantra we say no, it’s a good thing if you can use it right. Jealousy or envy kind of is like a signposts on the path, isn’t it?
Now if we have a small mind, we see someone else, jealous envy, it makes us want to destroy that. But actually, what should envy or jealousy really do should make us want to accomplish that, shouldn’t it? That person should actually become like a role model to us, an object of our devotion, an object of our admiration. So we say when that feeling of envy, jealousy comes, just sit back into it. Feel its natural empowering radiance.
Like we say people are burning with jealousy. We liken it to a fire in our culture, western culture, don’t we? People get so jealous they can’t go to sleep at night thinking about, you know, their husband out with some other lady or whatever. It’s like, your wife out with some other guy. So it’s sort of like or the big house next door or whatever.
Someone else got the promotion. You know? It’s like this jealousy becomes so empowering that we can’t even sleep. We got so much energy from it. So in tantra we say just lean gently into that energy and transform it into the all accomplishing wisdom.
Jealousy happens because it means someone is getting something you’re not which you would like to have. You should translate that into accomplishment. Then fifthly and finally, laziness for the fifth klesha. Moreover on the Sūtra side, Buddha said, The laziness is no good. Transcend it, transform it or get rid of it or avoid it.
In Tantra we say, Laziness the sweetest of all devices. Like waking up a Sunday morning at seven o’clock and knowing you don’t have to go to work and being allowed to laze back into bed. Feel that gentle warmth of not doing nothingness caressing your body. In one sense laziness is negative in that there’s things we know we should do but we’re we’re too untogether or indecisive to get them, to make them happen. We know we should do this and we make excuses tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
Laziness can be like the a great drainer of our creativity, can’t it? We can’t somehow snap our dreams and visions into high gear and realize them. We put it off, we procrastinate, we make excuses. That’s on the negative side. On the positive side, laziness is like just relaxation or the peaceful mind gone a little bit askew.
Isn’t it? Actually, we should really learn to be sublimely lazy. The path of sublime laziness is the fastest, quickest, easiest path to enlightenment. Ramana Maharshi, one of the great Hindu tantric masters of this century, he said most human beings are like standing on a train going a long journey and they put their baggage on their head. And then they arrive at their destination saying, my goodness, that was an uncomfortable journey.
I am so exhausted. They should have put their baggage down on the floor of the train and sat on it comfortably and enjoyed the trip. We want the kind of laziness which puts down the unnecessary baggage and uses it for our own comfort. That’s the laziness we want in tantra. No unnecessary effort.
Actually, you know, the universe is already complete. There is nothing to do or undo. The train of our life is traveling at full speed. We don’t have to make any effort in the traveling. We can pace up and down nervously on that train but we’re not going to get to the destination any faster no matter even if we run up and down that train.
When the train gets there, it gets there. Our efforts in that regard are totally, totally meaningless and fruitless. Ramana Maharshi’s sense here is learn to let the train of your life do the work. You need only sit and enjoy. Your personal power compared to the power of this vast universe is nothing.
It’s like comparing one drop of water to the power of the entire ocean, nothing. But if that one drop of water goes into the ocean, it mixes with all the ocean’s waters, it achieves all the powers of all seven seas. We are just one little drop in this vast universe. If we channel this universe through us, we get the full power of this entire universe. That being the case, running up and down on the train seems rather ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
Trying to flex the muscles of this little this little drop. We’re never going to be able to make this drop, the muscles of this little little drop become as big as the muscles of the entire universe. So it’s a hopeless approach. Hard work gets you nowhere. It’s like the Chinese saying goes, all things come to they who wait.
And that’s not saying don’t do things. You look at the great lamas, the great masters, often they get up at five o’clock in the morning and they travel you know, they do it seems like they do three thousand things in the course of the day. You read the Dalai Lama’s schedule for instance. He gets up at about four o’clock and he meditates till nine and then he meets people till noon and then at one o’clock he’ll start a teaching in the temple and teach till six in the evening and so on and so forth. And do that for a week and then he’ll hop on a train to Delhi and fly to some country and have meetings from like five in the morning till midnight.
Our lama Zoparampachie, I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to travel with him or walk behind him. That fellow like sleeps an hour and a half a day and he’s like, you know, marathon running those twenty three hours. Yeah. It’s like a continual. So he’s not lazy in the conventional sense.
But when you look at him, he’s kinda like this. Looks like kind of a lazy fellow. When you look at the Dalai Lama, he’s sort of sitting there like this, looking a little on the lazy side. We don’t accomplish things by thrashing about. Too many people mistake thrashing about for hard work that will bring some benefit.
In my next lifetime, I vow to be the emperor of this planet. I’m gonna make a rule. Everyone has to stay in bed one month of the year. If they break that, they will be shot on sight. People have to learn to simply do nothing and allow the universe to do the work for them.
The universe is working for us at all times. We just have to be in the right place at the right time to pick up on that hard work. On the hard work that the universe is doing. Of course, we move our hands there and our legs there and our mouth there, we walk places and we do things and we talk But that’s not really work, you know? Well, our effort should be like if we tell a child, hey, listen, there’s a chocolate bar over there.
Will you run over and get it for me? That kid doesn’t like say, wow, this is a lot of hard work. You know, they just joyously run over there and grab that chocolate bar and eat it. Now on the other hand if we say to a kid, listen, walk over there. The kid thinks it’s rather unpleasant and they kind of go over like that.
You know someone tells you, you you have to go to Adelaide as a punishment for, you know, you’re from Timbuktu or somewhere. They say, well listen, you’ve been very bad. We’re sending you to Adelaide for three years as a punishment. You think that’s really terrible and that person comes like it’s really hard work. Someone else like wins a lottery ticket.
Free trip to Adelaide, holiday in Adelaide for three years. They think fabulous isn’t it? Our life is kinda like that. So our effort, we should never have any effort in our life. Everything should be effortless.
We should accomplish ten thousand or a hundred thousand things without the slightest effort. We have to learn to be the most productive lazy people in the world. When we do that, this is called the wisdom. So we look at that sense of relaxation, laying back, doing nothing. Within that, there is a certain wisdom and it’s the wisdom of the infinite.
Nothing to do, nowhere to go because already all things are done, everything been there and not in a way like bored about it all, but just like completely fulfilled, a kind of a pure laziness, a totally pure laziness, like everything is really absolutely done. No need to go out and bring in the cows. We already bought them in. No need to, like, shovel the manure out of the barn, already gone, shoveled. Just that sense of all things complete.
And then with all other things that we do, like the child chasing the candy bar joyously fulfilling, no effort, effortlessly fulfilling. So the first pillar of tantric practice is establishing this view. The six pointer here is that finally, sixthly, we should be as buoyant and light as a piece of dandelion being thrown on the wind. Don’t walk around like, I’m a great tantric practitioner. It was all very serious stuff, this Tantric practice.
We are our sense of self and others should be as light as a piece of dandelion fluff floating on the wind. If we can follow these six pointers, we can always maintain the tantric vision. If we maintain the tantric vision, nothing else required in life. If we’re by ourself, we’re happy. If we’re in company, we’re happy.
Whatever comes, we’re happy. Whatever goes, we are happy. All things like the ocean and its waves. We experience the totality of things and the infinite diversity of things. So we say in the tantric tradition only this is needed, nothing else.
All other tantric practices are, if you will, just something to give a little bit of power to that. So we’ll finish that first one now and as for the power that’s given to it, we’ll look at that second one which is Tibetan Kundalini practice, practice. How we really rev up our sexuality for a superpower in the spiritual world. I think there’s some tea in the kitchen, guys. Now you said you wanted to ask a question earlier?
I think I forgot your name. I guess the question was about being serious in in moment. On TV recently, I saw that a lot of Tibetans and and Mhmm. Where where is that theater in the picture? You just had a mistaken vision.
I didn’t It was theater of the divine. I was there. What else could you call it? People dancing on the street outside the home of a president and of an emperor shouting things like, and such. How more divine can theater get?
A Chinese emperor dressed in a Wall Street zoot suit and a chubby American president who’s under charges for having a mole on his penis in a specific place for How more divine theater could one want? And the judge actually was they’re considering because the the defense no. The one suing him wanted a photograph to prove that this mole was actually in the place that the lady suing him for sexual harassment was saying where it is. We in America were all hoping that when he posed for the picture it would like be really enormous because this was could have could have happened just before Jiang came over and had so had it done so I go to come out in all the papers and Jiang would have like looked at this picture and thought, my goodness, I’m really up against something over here in America. But unfortunately the the judge ruled that the picture was unnecessary.
The doctor did examination and said no such mole is there. So we didn’t get that bit of divine theater on Jung’s visit. No, I think in tantra we say that when you when you everything you do, you should either be in bed relaxing or if you get out of bed, you should only do one of four things. And that’s four different faces of compassion. If show four faces of joyful, compassionate activity, loving activity, celebration of bliss and joy in the form of loving activity.
Firstly, you send out the white light of joyous activity which is in a very in a very peaceful way, like serene, beatific sort of stuff. You know? You see that occasionally if you go like to the opera, you know? People walking into the opera wearing their finest furs and smoking cigarettes in long cigarette holders. It’s very beatific.
And secondly is kind of use you do it in a way of augmenting or increasing, sort of like the rhythm master in a band, you know, you walk into this room and you think, this is really a kind of a slow, soggy group here. We’ll have to like pump them up a little bit. So you do the activity of increasing. You go to work, friends at work, you’re not quite sure of the ambiance. It’s divine theater, but they seem a little on the sluggish side.
So you pump some energy in and pick up the pace. Not that what is there isn’t perfect, you’re just making your little contribution to the theater. Thirdly, out of, the compassionate activity is the red light of power or overpowering. You think, well, all these dakas and dakinis and buddhas and buddhinis running around here seem like a bit of a discombobulated crew. I’m gonna take charge.
Manifested as power. And fourthly, if you think, these Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Dakas and Dakinis are really totally, absolutely out of time and out of out of tune with the the symphony of this divine theater. I’m gonna really have to straighten things out and you knock them all flat on the floor, just level them flat on the floor. And that’s the fourth activity which is compassion expressed as destruction, violence. All four are equally valid tantric activities.
When we do them ourselves, they’re equally valid and when we see them in life as theater, they’re equally valid parts of the divine theater. You’re saying that there is no time to take something very seriously. Everything is ultimately serious. Every moment of your life is the most serious possible moment. There is nothing which is not serious, but there is nothing also which is serious, which is which is, not a cause of joy and laughter if you look at it in a particular light.
The most terrible event that happens on planet Earth has a kind of a silver lining to it. Like in the west, we say the cloud with a silver lining. There’s always a silver lining there. Nothing that happens in life is meaningless. All things are unfoldments.
Things don’t fall out of the sky. Tibetans wouldn’t have left Tibet if there wasn’t some reason, some karmic reason. We don’t yell at Jiang for no reason. We yell at him for a reason. So all these things have their own flow.
Serious? Serious in that we want to do as much as we can in the celebration of the joy of our life. Serious? Nothing is really truly what it seems. Nothing really is truly what it seems.
We see a small part as Buddha gave the example of ten blind people touch an elephant. The one who touches the trunk will say it’s a don’t know, something. And the one who touches the leg will say it’s like a tree, and the one who touches the tummy will say it’s a house, and the one who touches the tail will say it’s a snake, and so on. I mean, was it a house? Was it a tree?
Was it a snake? Was there any basis for saying house, tree, snake? Actually, something was there for each of those people, wasn’t it? Similarly, the things we experience in life, we put this label or that label on them. But the nature of their being in the context of the totality of infinity or the universe is quite different than the little perspective we put on it just as that snake is not the tail and has very little basis really in the reality of an elephant.
So because nothing is what it seems, nothing should be taken too seriously directly. It’s like it should be serious but not serious. And like Nāgārjuna put it, all things are like a moon reflected in water. Not really true, not really false. You know, the dog looks over the bridge and sees a man there’s a man standing over the bridge with a big piece of meat in his arm.
Now Tibetans have these kind of coats like this. Have you ever seen a Tibetan coat? Wraps around, you put the belt here and it’s got a big flap here, or you like take a sheep’s leg or something and throw it in there, and when you’re walking around for the next two or three months whenever you’re humry, take out and take put a bun and throw it back in. Anyway, a fellow wearing a coat like this with a sheep’s leg sticking out was leaning over the bridge looking down in the water, and his dog looked down too. And looking in the water saw the reflection of this delicious piece of meat, so he jumps over the bridge into the water to get the meat and he drowned and died.
Many of us are like that. We see this, we see that. We don’t think like a moon reflected in water neither really there nor really not there, neither really true nor really false. We think really true and we jump in. It’s a matter of, I think I made made this example the other day, it’s like holding an egg.
Not too tight, if you hold it too tight you break it, too loose you drop it. Our seriousness and our laughter should be something like that. We don’t want to laugh too much about things. Stop laughing. We don’t wanna be too serious about things because like the moon and water, not really there, not really not there.
You know, what’s really going on between Tibet and China? How do I know? How do you know? Did the Chinese really invade and take over Tibet? Or did the Tibetans trick the Chinese into coming in as a way to break down, you know, the big communist state of this world or for any of ten thousand other reasons?
Tibetans have served as gurus in the court of China since about twelve fifty. That’s almost seven hundred years of serving as the gurus, the spiritual preceptors for the entire courts of China. So it’s been a very close relationship for many many many hundreds of years. On the other hand, his holiness says, you know, jump up and down and shout a little bit when Jiang comes by. Sounds good.
I’ll do that. Maybe throw a tomato at him. I’m up for that. I don’t like peoples in in those banker Wall Street zoot suits. I think we should throw tomatoes at anyone who wears one of those things.
It’s almost ruined the male fashion industry in the world. Look how nicely we used to dress five hundred years ago, us men. There wasn’t almost a single place on the planet you couldn’t go where men looked interesting. You know? Wonderful turbans, big earrings, you know, swarthing things, capes, swords, little pistolettes, know.
Now we’re stuck with these horrible little the pen in the pocket, business card. I mean, Tibet should leave China for no other reason than they have imitated the worst fashions of the western world. If for no other reason than bad taste in fashion, male fashion. And you see Mao walking around in that horrible little blue khaki zoot suit with this kind of funny little kind of like when you’re a kid, know, you play like firemen or police with a whistle. For no other reason than introducing that piece of a cloth into the world, he should leave Tibet.
So serious, yes. Every moment of our life matters. Not serious in the sense that all things are a great vast festival of our own spiritual unfoldment, the dance of the divine. If we’re a Christian, we think, well, it’s all God’s creation. If it’s God’s creation, that means it’s some kind of magical thing, isn’t it?
If we’re Buddhists, we think it’s not like that. We think it’s the unfoldment of our own life processes or revolutionary processes, it’s still magic because everything we experience in our whole life is part of our own unfoldment. Nothing we experience in Buddhism, nothing we experience is disconnected from us. We think this is me and that’s something else over there. I don’t like that.
This is me. But why is that over there in my face? You know, how did my face get in this picture? I don’t belong here. You know?
We have that sense. You know? This isn’t the real me. Let’s see, someone else had a question. Is he sitting in here somewhere?
You, oh yeah, at the back. Yeah. The way one draws the line is in in Sūtra, we say avoid anger, avoid pride, avoid desire, avoid jealousy, and avoid laziness. In tantra, we say cultivate anger, cultivate pride, cultivate desire, cultivate jealousy envy, and cultivate laziness. If you practice all five together, the lawn will be taken care of.
You know, you’ll be jealous of the next guy or his neighbor’s lawn looking nicer than you, so you go out and shine it. Or you’ll desire a nicer looking lawn or go out and plant some flowers. Let those five factors run amok, transform them into the five wisdoms or abide, not transform, nothing to transform. See the light or the natural radiance which is in them, which is the wisdom on which they are founded. Rest the mind in that and all things will be accomplished.
Okay. I was told to try and finish by one thirty here for the lunch break. Oh, you wanted to ask something? That heavenly sign that is underlying it in the setting is that if we have a that is tangible way of doing things, then that is passion to have responsibility. I think it’s ultimate responsibility cause you are seeing everything in your life as a divine theater in which you are the prime star.
You’re really writing and editing your script on a moment by moment basis. So it’s ultimate creativity in action, I think. It’s like you take really utter responsibility for everything going on on the stage of your life. You think this is the great festival divine of the unfolding of my life. I’m doing a great celebratory dance in the middle of it.
What little things can I do here to pick up the pace, pick up the beauty, pick up the celebratory energy? Okay. So this is the first thing we just covered is the inner vision. This is what we want to maintain. This is real tantric practice.
This is what is meant by tantric practice. It’s the same I think if you do it in do it in Taoist China following the way of the Tao. The vision I think the same. If you practice the Sufi tradition then it’s the great intoxicated romance, the bottle of wine and the lover. Really in life we need nothing more, a bottle of wine and a good lover.
Really, everyone feels fulfilled. Given a bottle of wine and a really good lover, everyone feels just peachy dandy. This is the metaphor used by the Sufis and they do their whirling dervish dances as essentially to see all of life as this. The objects of the senses are like the good lover and the one’s own joy, one’s own mental presence is like this gentle intoxicated mind. The second Dalai Lama used to always sign his poems, the drunk beggar monk, the crazed beggar monk.
Drunk or crazy is the same word in this in this usage in Tibetan. We want to be drunk all the time with our own wisdom. We want to be drunk with that tantric vision. So I think the Sufi vision, really identical to the tantra. We look within Christianity, we see elements within Christianity where this celebratory approach to practice is taken.
Love your neighbor as yourself indicates you’re seeing those others. You always see yourself as perfect. Naturally, you’re always gonna be seeing those other people in a good light if you really love them. Yeah. The joy of the spirit is within you indicating.
We can find, you know, the I think every great spiritual tradition, we can find something for that same visionary process, very, very similar to the tantric process. The strength of the Buddhist tantras is that it’s been clearly transmitted as a unique lineage. You know, the Taoist mix in a lot of their tantra with all of this kind of like burn this mantra to get that virgin and, you know, do this burn this little piece of paper and put it in water and drink it to get this and blah blah blah blah. So they kinda water out their vision teaching by a lot of fairly obscure stuff. And the Christians, they dump in all this, like, structure, you know, like, don’t use condoms.
I mean, let’s stick to the point. You know, they get caught up in trivialities. And the Sufis unfortunately kinda got taken over by the Muslims. And the Muslims have a lot of good things going for them like you can marry four wives and stuff, but they also have something of a kind of a radical political post colonial fervor running through them right now, which makes some of their stuff a little inaccessible for us. So I think this tantric vision is called the primordial vision because all mystics of all places have always experienced something like that.
Their minds have rested in the natural radiance of their own being with the things like floating holograms. They have always made their minds childlike, able to splash over the objects of their experience without conceptual blocking or in without throwing anything extra in or blocking something out due to conceptual hopes, fears, expectations, preconditions. They have always been able to remain in the depths and take the objects of their experience like waves. They have always been like captains of boats keeping their mind on that vision of radiant luminosity and joyous appearances, allowing the boat to remain in that ground while all the things, the seagulls fly wherever they will. They have all been like great martial artists able to maintain that vision regardless of the circumstance.
Not saying, well, goodness, I can’t be a mystic today. There’s, too much noise outside. I can’t be a mystic today. Those three beautiful ladies are distracting me. I can’t be a mystic today.
You know, there’s not enough mountains. You know, always been like the great martial artist regardless of the situation, able to maintain that vision. And they have all been like the piece of dandelion fluff floating on the air, not taking themselves too seriously, they’re moving along, not taking themselves too seriously. They’re not putting great gravity in their thing. They sing songs of joy, songs of happiness, songs of delight.
The Sufis have done so. The Taoists have done so. The Tantric Buddhists have done so. The Hindus have done so. Even a few Christians have done so.
Being Irish Protestant, I must say less Catholics have done so than Protestants. In order to maintain this vision, we need a bit of empowerment, a bit of power. The best power to use, the best energy, the best fuel is our own sexuality. With most people, their sexuality is disbalanced. Male is too strong in the body, female is too strong in the body.
One dominates, one gets dominated. When that happens, one goes askew. So people sit up for a minute. I want you to watch the flow of your breath. Breathe through the nose, watch the flow of breath through the two nostrils.
Okay, now is the air passing equally through both? If it’s passing more forcefully through the right than through the left that means your male energy is a little exaggerated, your female a little on the weakened side. If it’s passing more force fully through the left and through the right, the female is predominating and the male is a little weak. Now as we go through the course of our day there will be natural fluctuations. We don’t stay always perfectly balanced and this is a good thing.
The natural fluctuation makes a kind of a gentle shift in our mood, in our body language, in our emotion language, in our thinking language. Makes a little bit of a shift but it should be a natural shift through the courses of the day itself, the swing of the energies of the day. If it gets stuck, if it becomes a condition where the male is always exaggerated and the female always weak, it’s harmful. If the female is always exaggerated, the male always weak, it’s harmful. So what we want to do is balance those energies.
We want to do it physically, we want to do it emotionally and we want to do it spiritually. Physically, our male femaleness are our male female hormones, the chemicals that constitute the substance of our body. Emotionally, our maleness is our kind of aggression, outgoingness, our femaleness kind of our intuition or wisdom and incomingness. Spiritually, our femaleness is the radiance of our mind, a natural radiance of our being. Our maleness is the joy or the form which arises and plays within the sphere of that vast luminosity.
So we want both equally in balance in all three levels. So we’ll start with the body because the body is the most accessible and it’s also fun to play with the body. You know, humans have spent so much of their life just playing with their bodies, combing their hair, scrubbing and washing, sniffing. We get a lot of pleasure out of just playing with this little thing we have. Ladies are lucky.
They have more ways they can play with it than us, know. But we’re quite lucky. We get to play with ladies. We’re our buddies. Which is more fun than they get them playing with us.
Okay. So just gonna start with the we’re gonna start with the body here. And during my love sex enlightenment talk the other night, I taught a breathing exercise. This is the breath’s best kept secret, super empowerment used in all Tantric technologies. It’s used by the Tibetans, it was used by the Indians, used by the Taoists, used by the Sufis.
It’s really a pan Asian basis of all the mystical traditions. I think there’s no Central Asian mystical tradition which doesn’t speak of it even if they don’t use it very much. In Tibet all the highest yoga tantras or the main tantra systems all use it in their energy, the Chakrasamvara practices. So let’s just try it and I want to teach you half a dozen exercises to do. When you begin, begin with a simple breathing.
You breathe in through the right, out through the left, in through the right, out through the left three times and in through the left, out through the right, in through the left, out through the right, then in through both, out through both. When you breathe in through the right here you’re thinking you’re breathing in male energy. You’re breathing in aggression, agro stuff. And you’re breathing out distorted or exaggerated agro energy. When you breathe in then So you do it three times.
We don’t have time because like we have to finish for a little one thirty by lunch. So you when you breathe in through the left, you’re breathing in intuitive wisdom, desire energy. Intuition and desire are very closely linked. So you breathe that in. And then you breathe out to the left, any exaggerated female intuitive desire energy.
And when the air seems right out you just push out that last little bit extra to totally clean, expel the dead air from the bottom of the lungs. Then you do it three times through both. You breathe in and you think, Breathing in male female in balance which is really a state of like peace harmony which really is kind of like on a negative pole becomes kind of like laziness in a negative way. In a positive way, it becomes like complete relaxation. When male female in this are together, like right after the moment of orgasm, you feel completely relaxed physically, emotionally, spiritually.
In that same way, when male female in this of your body, emotion, spirit are in harmony and balance, you feel completely fulfilled, completely relaxed. So you breathe in that fulfillment, relaxed energy. And as you breathe out any kind of exaggeration of that like when male female are in balance but they’re not empowered. It’s a kind of relaxed but it’s a kind of a lazy listless relaxed. We want that lazy relaxed but we don’t want the lazy listless relaxed.
We want a kind of a really joyful, luminous relaxed like the Dalai Lama’s oldest guru. I used to go see him. I think he was like in his very late seventies. When he was like mid sixties, like he got TB coming to India because no Tibetans had any experience with TB for, you know, fifty thousand years, so no natural immunity. So he got TB and lost one lung.
And it looked like he was gonna lose the other lung, which you can’t live without both of them, but only half of that second one went. So he lived the last twenty years of his life with only half a lung. But really one of the most powerful, wisest fellows I’ve ever met in my life, just an incredibly great, great, great man. And when he was very, very old, he was extremely, you know, relaxed, In fact, almost tired. And he’d go into his room, he’d be on his bed like this, like this.
And he, like, got to the point where he didn’t have the energy left to lift his arm or to open his eyes. So when he came in, he had to keep his hand like this. And when he came to visit him, all the energy he’d left have left is like he’d go like this. He only had movement for the last couple of years of his life. He’d just sit there.
But when you looked at that eye, it was just so full of joy, so full of power. It was like looking at like a two year old kid bouncing up and down with enthusiasm. There was so much energy in that eye. So we wanna be a little bit like that. We wanna have this kinda completely relaxed thing combined with that complete ecstasy, empowerment, joy, exuberance.
So we breathe that in then we breathe out. So we that’s basically it’s called purifying the channels. It’s called channels because this is the whole way our energy is moving. If this process is all moving well, we’re really getting maximum from the meditative stabilization happening within the body. If this breathing isn’t happening well, the passages aren’t happening well, we’re not getting enough oxygen.
And if any of you ride motorcycles, as you know, if you don’t get the right amount of oxygen in your gas then things don’t burn very well. So the breathing starts with that. The second we breathe in, we breathe down, we push it down to the base of the spine and it’s good if people cross your legs when you do this just because it actually tends to keep your spine straighter. Push down with the abdomen and pull up with the muscles of the pelvic floor. And we’re gonna actually do half a dozen different Kundalini arousing exercises.
So any of you, basically what we want to do is keep our Kundalini strength as powerful as possible all hours of the day or night. When we have that naturally very sexy stimulated sexuality of the Kundalini power coursing in our blood, running through our veins, it’s very easy to keep that tantric vision of radiance and holographic images, depths and waves, martial artists and radiance and all these things. Extremely easy to sit in that place. When our energies go down, impossible, almost impossible. So we keep the physical energies high.
When the physical energies are high and the sexual energies are high, there’s a natural sense of joy and a natural sense of radiance. It just emanates emanates from the body then we don’t have to make much effort to keep that vision there. Simply riding that natural radiance, riding that joy itself does the work for us. So we breathe in, push down and then with the muscles of the pelvic floor on the first exercise we tighten the muscles of the pelvic floor then relax them, keeping the abdomen tight. Tighten again then relax them.
Tighten them again, then relax them. When we tighten everything from about an inch behind the anus to about an inch in front of the genitalia, so essentially that whole area just tighten it once, relax it. Tighten it once, relax. Tighten it once, relax. You mean like on the buns?
We’ll have to ask one of the ladies to stand up, turn around, and do the exercise. Now watch. No. Actually, you have to use the not the bum muscles, the bun muscles. Have you seen that video called buns of steel?
It’s kind of kind of like an aerobic thing. The bun muscles, you kinda they get into you use them a little bit to help that whole pelvic floor muscle tighten and relax. By doing this, essentially what you are doing is massaging your whole sexuality. Now, all of the ovaries and all of the testes and everything that men and women have down there is essentially strengthening it, relaxing it, strengthening it, relaxing it. So we do that a second time.
So we did one breath, we do that a second time, breathe in, push down with the abdomen, tighten the pelvic floor, relax, tighten, relax, tighten, relax. How long you hold tight? Basically, divide your breath into three. So when you begin practicing, you can’t hold the breath very long. As you practice more, you can retain the breath for longer periods of time just like swimmers, underwater swimmers can train to hold the breath longer.
So then if you can hold it, say, for a minute, you hold it tight for like twenty seconds, then you relax, then tighten it again, hold it for another twenty seconds, then relax, then tighten again, hold it for another twenty seconds, then relax. So that’s the first exercise and that’s essentially to loosen up your sexual juices down there. The second thing we’re going to do is try to balance them. Now there’s a whole bunch of organs in here which are always releasing chemicals. Most of those have a male or female, predominantly a male or a female quality to them.
We’re going to breathe in, push down on the pelvic. With the abdomen tighten the muscles of the pelvic floor, this time keep the muscles tight, don’t relax. Take this part of the belly and imagine it like a ball that you’re going to make circulate three times this way, three times clockwise, three times counterclockwise. As you go three times clockwise, one, two, three, one, two, three, as you do that and let the breath out very slowly through the nose, never let anything pass through the mouth. Taking it three times clockwise is like churning up or releasing.
Male encourages the release of chemicals and male hormones from the liver, the pancreas, I don’t know what else is down there, gallbladder, all these little bits and bobs that we have hanging and floating. And it releases them going three times left counterclockwise releases all the female ones. So in this way we release first the male then the female. So now we’ve got our sexuality kind of starting to loosen up and balance down there. So we take another deep breath.
Now we’re going to loosen the spine a bit. We twist this way and so you imagine your spine right from the base to the crown of the head. You just gently flex it this way, don’t in any way force. Get it to its natural reaching point and just stretch it a little bit, curve it a bit, lift up on your back a little bit, then go the other way. Now you’re doing this while holding that breath.
And you come back this way and let the breath out. Breathe in again. This time just stretch it this way. Stretch your spine this way. Bring it up.
Let it out, then breathe in again, down with the muscles of the abdomen, up with the ones of the pelvic floor, kind of stretch toward your knee. Stretch the other one. Just feel your muscle, make it kind of like a rope when you snap a rope and the movement of the snap kind of goes travels down the rope like that, kind of just stretch your spine naturally as though you were lifting yourself up by the top of your head. And just feel that whole part of your back. Now you’re holding your breath while you’re doing this, When you bring your back down release the muscles of the pelvic floor, release the abdomen, breathe out slowly.
Breathe in again, Push down, pull up. Now this time as though your back were like this, you’re gonna snap the whole thing like as though you’re like the base of your back, as though you’re just whipping it forward like a little whiplash. So you do that by essentially pulling the shoulders in like this and lifting up from the from the base down here. So you kind of snap it. You go and you go.
Almost as though you are trying to touch your genitalia to the crown of your head but without really bending over that far. I really love getting groups to do these exercises. You can say anything you like. You know?