Who said Buddha didn’t have a sense of humor? Okay. So now we’ve got the sensuality or the sexuality, the natural juices, the male female chemicals of the body organized and we’ve got the backbone somewhat relaxed. So now we’re actually gonna try and stretch the chakras a little bit. We’re gonna try and force some energy into those chakras.
Now you know, the main difference between Hindu tantra and Buddhist tantra, Hindus think or the linguistic is different and it’s not a criticism of them for being so, just so you understand the difference. That in Hindu Tantra you talk about the lower chakras as something lower and the higher is something more divine or high. In Tantra your bottom is no more lower than your head, know. If you think it is stand on your head for a while and your bottom becomes higher than your head. We’re not talking about taking lower chakra energy and moving it up to the high chakras.
We’re talking about equally opening all those chakras in balance So the energy in all the chakras are equally powerful. Now we could do it working with any chakra first, second, third, fourth or fifth. It’s usually easier to begin with the lower chakras and work up just because the sexual energy has a natural rising kind of feel about it, like you may have noticed, you know, after a glass of champagne and some sweet words whispered in your ear, the warmth sort of starts down here and moves up, comes to the heart and moves up and then fills your whole body. That’s the natural way in which sexual energy moves. So Tantra, one of the reasons why it’s called the quick path to enlightenment is it tries to take what is the natural process of life and do the yoga in connection with that rather than create an artificial environment like we do in the open teachings where you, you know, go to your meditation room and turn off the TV and turn down this and, you know, create this kind of very specific environment.
In Tantra, it’s working with the natural forces. So here we’re gonna try and open a few chakras. If anyone isn’t insured, if you’re wearing pacemakers, have bad hearts, please mention me in your will. Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do.
We’re gonna start with a heart chakra just because it’s easier to visualize as you do this exercise. Okay? We’re gonna take them the butt the arms like this. We’re gonna take breathe in. Breathe down, tighten the abdomen of the pelvic spine.
Now we’re gonna go like this. Watch what I’m doing. And we’re gonna push out as hard as we can as though we’re pushing out a thousand pounds. We’re imagining and saying actually that we’re at the center of the heart here and the chakra. We’re imagining that we’re kind of stretching it like We’re stretching it open.
Then we go this way like drawing a great ball. We’re stretching it like this. Then we pull it in like this. And then with the two arms, we’re gonna take the energy and, like, push it right into the heart chakra. Like and we’re still holding the breath, then we let the breath out gently.
Then we’re gonna do that the other way. Breathe in. Abdomen down. Pelvic floor tight. Push out.
This way. And then down with the elbows. So we do that on the heart. We start in the lowest chakra, which is the in the male, it’s on the tip of the penis, In the female, it’s what Masters and Johnson called the g spot, not the clitoris as some people have erroneously written. This is called the tip secret chakra on men and then on women.
The mid secret chakra on women is the clitoris, on men it’s the point just above where the organ touches the body, just inside the body, so again like a very sensitive point on the male body. So that’s the second one. Secondly, do that on that chakra. The third chakra is the base secret which different tantras put it in different places, it doesn’t matter exactly where it’s done but generally it’s just above the anus inside the body. So it’s really some put it one inside the anus, one right between the anus and the genitalia, the midpoint of the body just slightly inside and the other the tip of the penis.
The female tantras which on the male they put at the tip of the penis, the middle of the penis and the top of the penis on the male and on the woman they put it inside which would I guess be cervix, g spot and clitoris. Those kind of things don’t matter very much. The important thing is you have your mind in that region of the body where all those chemical producing organs and glands and so forth are. And essentially what we’re trying to do is make those organs, make those glands pump out juices. And essentially how well those glands work really determines a lot about our whole meditative stabilization.
So you begin with one of often in the Tibetan tradition you just do the four fingers below the navel just in front of the spine. You do that one to represent all the lower chakras, then you do the heart, you do the throat, you do the crown, you only do those four. If you want to increase it then you do the three below that making seven. But a lot of Tibetans, particularly beginners, just work with the four because it feels a bit funny doing this on the end of your penis, you know. You know, someone could come along and say, Hey, what are you doing?
And you’ve got to explain, Well, gosh, I listened in charge what I was doing with that. So if you just say, Oh, the navel chakra sounds a little cut off. Easier to talk about in public. Anyway, we start with that, we either do it with all seven or we just do it with those four or sometimes we can just do it with five. If you do it with five, the navel is for the base one and the one which you use as the fifth one is the one just at the top like on the male where the organ joins the body or on the female just inside kind of halfway between the clitoris and the G spot.
You kind of put your mind on there as that one representing all of those lower energy sources. So then you do five times. Each of the five times you do at least one breath, but in the yogas usually you try to do three breaths. So you go first chakra, then you let out their breath. So you really forcefully pump yourself up like that.
When your physical energies are very high, very balanced, your chemicals totally vibrating, then it’s very easy to maintain this vision. Me Buddha, me radiant, me blissful, this great celebration. When those sexual energies are high, very easy to maintain joy and luminosity. So that’s that exercise. The other one I taught during the love sex enlightenment thing, breathe in, push down the air, pull up on the pelvic floor, put your hands like this and you imagine that you go down to whichever is their lowest chakra that you’re using in that practice, a red drop down there like a little sun and you lift it right up this in front of your spine And it comes right to the crown of your head.
And then you turn it over, and you push it all the way back down. It joins the white drop up there or the moon, your maleness. You push it right down the center of your body. And it goes right down to the navel chakra or to the secret or the tip secret. Then you let out your breath.
Then you flip your hands over. And then you breathe it up again. Turn it over. So like that, you kinda rev yourself up. Does that mean you boost that energy?
It’s generally the practice. You hold the breath until right at the end and then you let the breath out very slowly. And as you let the breath out, the example is like if you’ve got a fire building up in a stove and you open the shoot underneath the way the fire comes up. When you hold the energy while you’re pushing it down, thumb it’s right down, then you relax everything and go and just feel the energy rising up your body and filling your whole body with this very pleasurable, very sensual, very sexual kind of ambience. Then when you finish those, it’s good to do a kind of well, there’s actually twenty one or one hundred and eight of these you can do, but these five, four or five are the main ones that I think are very, very important and which are sufficient for most people.
The other ones are more for people who like, you know, they’ve got physical problems. They can’t get their Kundalini going. Then there’s like premature ejaculators. You have to teach them how to like, you know, get those energies corrected. Ladies can’t afford orgasms.
They have to go change and re retune and finally redevelop all those energies down there. And people who can’t sleep at night because their energy, you know, there’s all these different ways of using that Kundalini for all those different purposes. Here we’ve used it essentially just for arousing the joy and luminosity of the physical energy. When the physical energy is joyful, which is the male quality, and luminous, which is the female quality, then those two in balance and the mind then is riding a horse of joy and luminosity. The mind riding joy and luminosity.
When the body has no joy, no luminous energy, the mind naturally won’t feel very joyful or luminous. You probably noticed, you have a luminous, you feel joyful and luminous. You know, you drink like a flat beer, you feel kind of joyless and unluminous. The nature of what’s in the body makes a big difference. So then when you finish, you should do this kind of simple little movement.
We can all stand up for this. Essentially all this pushing and pulling of energy throughout the body mostly moves it through the trunk and what we don’t want to do is get it locked in the arms and legs, the prana or the chi power. So essentially this one is called shaking the arms and legs and also the head like they have no trunk. So you kind of go like this and you kind of just try and feel that energy which you had flowed through you and just release it, like shake your hands like this. You’ll notice if you do this practice, particularly this pushing and pulling one, if you get locked energies in here, like at night when you go to sleep, you’ll get pain in those muscles.
If you get it locked down in the calves, you’ll get pain there. So you just kind of loosen it like this, like you’re throwing excess energy out of your arms and legs. You’re supposed to do it with your head like it says shake your head like it has not like it is not attached to your body. And then when you finish, there’s I won’t teach them, but there’s eight specific dakini movements you’re supposed to do like. And you exercise the body in eight ways like that, but those are considered peripherals, unnecessary for general practice, but peoples living in warm climates who like body movements usually throw them in.
So, of the four quintessential tantric practices, the four factors that make one a tantrica, if one has these four, one is a tantrica. You don’t say I’m practicing Tantra, you say I am a Tantrika. You just do these four, there’s no practice. You just do them. You don’t practice doing them.
You stick in that vision, you keep your sensual and your sexual energies high And the other two we’ll look at after lunch which is the illusory body practice, one of which you do during the day and one of which is at night. The illusory during the day is essentially a way of seeing things that as you go about your life and the illusory body practice at night is dream yoga, so we look at that. And the fourth one, the clear light yoga, there’s a daytime practice and a nighttime practice. Daytime practice is making love in a particular kind of way and the nighttime practice is while you sleep, you bring the kind of gentle pleasure of that love making into your sleep consciously and retain it. So those are the four principal elements of tantric practice.
If we do them then we can say we’re tantricas. We don’t have to be shy about saying it like well I think I’m doing tantra but I’m not sure. I do a few mantras, does that count? I keep three hundred and seventy-two tantric precepts. Not very well, but so we don’t have to go into it from those sides at all.
You see, we just live the tantra. If you do these four, you live the tantra, then there’s there’s no non practice. You cannot break precepts because there are no separate precepts. These four practices fulfill all precepts. Anything else is fabrication.
So let’s take the lunch break. So in the tantra tradition, we try to maintain the Dawa or the vision, the tantric vision, which is the first the first foundation that we looked at today. The second is that we try to empower our energies or keep our energies balanced and intensely present. When we do those physical exercises, it’s also good to do some added kind of meditation on the chakras. When you finish the physical exercises, it’s often good simply to do twenty one, seven or twenty one breaths where you simply breathe in, breathe down, push down with the abdomen, pull up with the muscles of the pelvic floor and hold as long as is comfortable.
As you release, you kind of feel the energy come straight up the spine and you kind of imagine it coming from the lower chakra, upper chakra, upper chakra, upper chakra and then up to the crown. And then as it hits the crown, allow it to kind of come down like this. Then as the energy you feel is coming down about this far, you breathe in again. Again, you push it in at the lower chakras with the breathing exercise, again you hold it. Tibetans also recommend a few.
Most of the Tibetan masters like you’re bringing up from the lower chakras. As it comes up to the next chakra, sometimes you can imagine it coming up like a little thread of fire as you breathe up, as you let the breath out, imagine like a little little flame is rising from the sun at the little sun that we discussed at the bottom of the chakra, which you push up and push down and push up and so as you breathe out no. As you hold the breath, you breathe out, it comes up to the navel chakra and kinda just goes around three times in the navel chakra, rises to the heart, goes around three times, rises to the throat, goes around three times, rises to the crown, goes around three times. Just pausing the mind in that way at the chakra and making the sense of it going around and stirs the energy or moves the energy and causes a sort of like scrubbing inside of pipe or something like that, breaks up the blockages. Actually, those blockages are not really physical things in a sense.
It’s just the way our electromagnetic or our auric energy is moving. But when we do that kind of physical based movement, it causes a shifting in that electromagnetic field. Often we see it said this energy practice with karma mudra. karma mudra means practicing in the sexual context, but I won’t discuss that at this point because we’ll look at that later in the fourth one which is the clear light yoga. Essentially it’s done as a kind of a radiance enhancer application.
So may forget, so if it comes to the end of the day and someone says, Hey Glenn, you forgot to talk about the sexual thing. If any of you remember, you can find it out. But I think in Australia, no one’s interested in the sexual aspects of these things anyway. It’s more the philosophy. Right?
So the second the third the third pillar or the third foundation of tantric practice known in Tibetan simply as which means something like well, people translate it as illusory body and it does refer to illusory body in one of its app like application, but it really means more like the corpus of illusion, really having a sense of the great illusion, how things are not what they seem. So we practice this vision thing with the radiance and our placement, our inner posture. We practice the energy thing. And then whether we’re sitting or walking, but it’s easier to talk about it walking around going about normal life, there’s two aspects of this practice. One is called the pure the impure or the unpurified and the second is the pure or the purified.
The first one means that as you go about your ordinary activities, you always do so with the sense of how things are never what they seem. All things like an illusion. So you go to work in the morning, you think, illusory building, illusory job, illusory friend, illusory car, illusory road, illusory train. You sneeze, you think illusory sneeze. Everything that goes on, you think illusory.
How is it illusory? It’s illusory because the and the are different. The ultimate mode of the thing, the actual mode of the thing and its appearing nature are different. We always look at something seeing it as a separate entity within a bigger reality. I look at you, I think separate entity in bigger reality.
I separate you from the rest of reality as I look at you. Nothing is separable. This is purely something we do mentally for convenience sake. Nothing is really separable from the rest of reality. All things exist only in the nature of interdependence with all those other things.
Yet the mind creates this sense of this is this, that is that, this is this, that is that, an infinite number of dualities. When we have the sense, I look at you and I think you are that separate from the rest of reality. I my awareness of your reality is very different than the actual nature of your being. The actual nature of your being is that in every aspect, you are completely interdependent with the rest of reality. You are dust of the infinite brought into a specific seeming appearance.
Now I for instance, just a simple example. I think you’re there. You’re a human on planet Earth. That’s now that’s a big kind of presumption there. But we make this kind of we get this kind of feeling.
Right? You’re right there. This is your body, mind, so on. We think the body is this thing like this. It appears to the mind in a very concrete kind of a way.
But where does your body begin? Where does your body end? Your body really reaches out through the entirety of the universe. You know, a little bit of dust blows in on a comet come coming through Jupiter, carries that dust down into our atmosphere. The atmosphere gets blown around a bit and land lands somewhere near Adelaide and the tomato crop grows up there and a few specks of that dust end up in that tomato crop.
You eat the tomato crop. A little bit of Jupiter is in your body and in that same way, a little bit of the entire universe is in your body. The essence of everything from everywhere is in your body. We think your body is something very solid right there. It’s not.
You know, five hundred million cells leave it every day and go back to Jupiter and to Venus and to the furtherest extents of the universe. Universe. You are just the recreated ashes of ten billion ancestors. Your body is just a recycling of ten billion dead humans and dogs and insects and trees. We think this body is mine as something very solid, very real, very separate, has not much to do with the rest of the universe.
Now one of the tantric texts I recommended for a sense of this with your bodiness, it’s very good to do something like you know, in tantra we like to do things naked and we like to do them on full moon. That’s our two favorites. Or to throw in a third, then we do it like on a remote mountaintop. One of townsfolk techs I saw said a very good thing to do is go to a naked to a remote mountaintop, take off all your clothes, lie down naked on the earth and on your back, sprinkle water over yourself and just look up over the stars and look down into those little drops of water. Every little drop of water reflects the entire universe in it.
The whole universe comes into that single solitary drop of water. In the same way, the whole universe comes into your body every moment. Now we think we’re all separate people here. This is my body. This is your body.
Since we’ve been here, you’ve breathed in, you’ve breathed out. I’ve I’ve breathed in that wonderful air that you have breathed out. Part of your body became part of my body. Over here right now, part of your body, I own it. It does come to me.
But you don’t think, oh, that’s part of my body over there, do you? You think that’s my body hair. But it’s not. It’s not. This thing we have, it’s a total illusion.
The way we see things and the way we condition our mind to deal with them is a total illusion in terms of what’s the actual nature or real nature of those phenomena. Your body is always totally giving little things back to the universe and taking the universe through you. During the course of your life, in a sense, the entire universe is channeled through you. That whole universe is you, is your body. So as we go about daily life, the impure or unpurified illusory body yoga is simply to look at things as a great festival of bliss and joy, like a great illusory spectacle.
And there, they’ve used a lot of different examples like to try and see those things like a star at dawn. We see a star at dawn and we think very beautiful, very solid, very real. A few seconds later, we look back and it’s disappeared, hasn’t it? That thing which seems so bright, so powerful, so radiant, suddenly it’s gone, just really in the snap of a few fingers. In the same way, all these things which appear to us, they appear very solidly in this way.
The next time we see them, they’re different. They’ve changed. Each moment your body really dies and is reborn. Each moment, it’s a totally new body. It’s totally, completely new moment by moment by moment by moment, reborn on the ashes of the old body like that star at dawn.
It’s like a magician’s creation, what we see. A magician says spells and a magical scene appears. Whatever spell he says in a according magical scene appears. Like this one shaman friend a shaman a shamanic friend of mine. He used to like to get drunk and full of mischievous tricks in central Asian taverns and bars.
And what he’d do is take in a piece of dough and go in and sit down and play with this dough and then make it into a shape like a frog or a rabbit and put it on the table while everyone’s drinking and then sit there and do his And suddenly this thing like would jump in someone’s lap. On this one occasion, one of the fellows at the table spilled his beer as a result and got very angry and gave a beating to the shaman. Well, that’s the dangers of tampering with the illusory nature nature of things. But what now the now the shaman doing this, he knows that that little dough or dough frog which he made is just a piece of dough that’s jumping about because of his mind power. Someone else looking at a piece of dough jumping about has a totally different impression.
They don’t think, oh, there’s some shaman sitting there meditating saying a few mantras making that dough bounce about. They think, my God that dough is a dough frog jumping up and down on me. And they get kind of startled like, you know, if suddenly I made this glass float over and like pour water over you. You wouldn’t probably mind the water so much, it’s just the idea of this thing floating on you. So the idea here is that just like now the magician, he knows what’s going on.
So he’s not shocked, surprised or doesn’t get a distortion from the experience. The person who in Tantra we like to say the untrained, those great masses of untrained looking at that dough frog would panic. And if you make a dough tiger and chase it towards someone. So like that, in a sense, all the things of our life are like a magician’s creation. Who is the magician?
We are the magician. Everything that comes into your life is something you call into your life through the magic spell of your own destiny, your own karma, through the mantra of your own thinking and unfolding. Your thinking isn’t just thinking I like this or I don’t like that. Your thinking is the unfoldment of your life. The conceptual mind bubbling away in the middle is just a little part of that.
That like the magician’s creation, everything we experience is connected with us. Yeah. Anything happens in our life. The great untrained masses point the finger at other places. This person, this, that person, that, this can do you know, we’re all kinda like always making excuses and pointing blames for things we don’t like about life.
But everything in our life is our own creation. Karmically comes into our life because of our connectedness with it. It stays in our life because we keep it around on the conventional level. On the deeper level, things are what we make of them. Two people looking at that dough frog, one thinks this is this so it becomes that for him.
The other thinks this is this, it becomes that for him. It’s like Nāgārjuna said, a man’s walking in the dark and he sees a rope and he thinks it’s a snake and he jumps with terror. What is the basis of that snake? What is the basis of that snake? Where is that snake?
If we look anywhere in the rope, do we find that snake? Take Joe for example. We think Joe is over there. He may look a little absent from time to time. But where behind that big smile and that mischievous grin is Joe?
Essentially, all things, how we look at them, what we get out of them is very different than what’s actually in them. Like, if I asked you and your worst enemy both to sit down and write a description of you, what would come on that piece of paper would be very, very, very very Two different realities painted upon the one canvas. So, in that same way, everything we experience in our life is distorted by the conditioned and conceptual mind. Take snakes, poisonous snakes for example. A lot of people see poisonous snakes and they think terrible poisonous snake and they either run from it or they hide from it or they kill it, attack it and kill it.
In tantra, we think poisonous snakes are fabulous beasts, that poisonous snakes are a symbol of everything good and mystical in this world, that their venom can be used as medicines in thousands of ways, mixed with other herbs becomes one of the most mystical of psychotropics, cook them up and eat them, they taste good. Wonderful. Mixed in with snakes, every four or five snakes, one will be a saint. The saints love to take form as snakes because snakes have such a fabulous way of seeing the world. And they really see the world in a much more true way than we do, don’t they?
But you know, the side of that good snake or that bad snake, it takes such a strong thing in one’s mind. One sees a snake and one goes, woo, you know. People scream and run-in terror and such. And other people go out and say, oh, nice snake, nice snake. Such two different, totally different takes on the one basis, such different paintings made on that one canvas.
In that same way, everything we experience is conventionally an illusion and ultimately an illusion. Conventionally an illusion because we all we tend to think if we don’t train ourselves otherwise, we tend to be conditioned to see them as disconnected and as random. As somehow there’s me and all those other things. Those other things in my life are not connected with me. That’s a distortion.
That’s a falsity. The reality is that all those things in my life are connected with me. My connection with them is fundamental to my being. That their being there has something to say to me. This sense of disconnectedness of things is convent is conventionally, totally an illusion.
Thing, the interconnectedness is the actual reality. All things born from cause and effect. No seed, no sprout, no sprout, no plant, no plant, no flower. If the flower lands in your lap, you know it came from a stem. That stem came from a sprout, that sprout came from a seed.
That everything in that way is an interconnected unfoldment. It’s not me and the universe, it’s me in the universe, part of the universe. This is the conventional training, to learn to accept everything that comes to you as something with a message for you. Everything has something for you. Easy things have easy things for you, middle things have middle things for you, hard things have hard things for you.
Everything and equal in the sense of its interconnectedness with you. That’s the conventional illusion. Ultimately, the illusion is that those things seem real as they appear, but the reality is utterly other than they appear. So this is what is known as the impure or the unpurified illusory body training. So you cultivate this vision of the radiance, the ocean and blah blah blah, you hype up your energies and you walk around and you say, illusion, illusion, illusion, illusion.
What’s the meaning of this illusion? What’s going on within this illusion? Now just as illusions, like the moon reflected in water, it’s true. It’s not true. I dream of you coming into my life.
My dream of you is not you, but it is my dream of you. You dream of me coming into your life. Your dream of me is not me, but it is your dream of me. All things existent but not existent. As real as we make them but not as real as we make them.
This is the impure illusory body. True in that they are present, untrue in that the manner of their presence is easily mistaken like the moon in water, a face reflected in a mirror. We look at the face in the mirror and we think that’s me. You know, like people who look at Playboy and Penthouse magazines and it’s just like ink, paper, you know, nothing there to make a man horny. But yet people look at these things and they miss the point.
It’s only ink and paper. Or people who watch like porno flicks. I mean it’s okay to do a celebration, know. You think let’s have a party and celebrate the wonders of the porno flick industry, you watch one. But if you’re actually like getting lusty over that stuff, I mean it’s a bloody television set with a like a, you know, big canon boob tube, you know.
Much of life is like that. You know? It’s worth putting something in that which isn’t there and there’s something about that which we’re not looking at. We look at this print in a Playboy magazine, we’re putting all sorts of stuff there which isn’t there. All that’s there is paper and ink.
So we’re pouring all sorts of stuff into that which isn’t there. And then things which are there, like the fact that it’s simple paper and ink, we’re hardly noticing at all. It’s the same with almost everything in our life. We get angry about this, attached to that, fearful of this, insecure about that. And the actual things we’re getting angry about and attached to and fearful and insecure about is just ink on pieces of paper.
We’re putting things into them which aren’t there and then worrying about those things being there. You know? You know, like, you come over to give me a grant for fifty thousand dollars to do my next book, which is very nice. Thank you. And I’m thinking, oh my goodness.
This person is over here to seduce me. Corrupt me. Make me a money monger. It’s a big test. You can try me on it.
But in that way with almost all things in life, we’re pumping all this stuff into it which isn’t there and then we’re acting like it’s really there. Know? Like it’s like I go out and say to someone, you know, that Nancy is like a real hot number. And then actually, I don’t actually think she’s a hot number. I hope I don’t know if there’s any Nancy’s present.
I’m not talking about you. If there are any Nancy’s present, we’ll use a different name. Use an obscure Tibetan name. No is like a Russian. No is like Russia.
That’s it. Nose like Russia. Okay. So nose like Russia. You know, isn’t an especially attractive lady whatsoever.
She’s the worst lover in town, uses and abuses her men, and throws them out like garbage at the end. You know? But I go out and I start a rumor saying, nose like Russia is really the hottest number in town, like, great looker, fabulous dresser, real swinger, the best lover in town. Before you know it, word is going around. Right?
All these guys think, wow. She must really be great. Where is this nose like Russia? And they go out and they look at her and they think, oh, wow. Yeah.
You’re right. Oh, she is really great. Sort of like the emperor’s new clothes story. You know? It’s not there, but we put it in our head enough, and we deal with it like that’s the way.
Or, you know, if you’re living in some little small town in a remote area and some person of another race or a strange manner or whatever moves into town, people look at that person and go, weird. They get these kind of uneasy feelings, you know. It’s nothing to do with who or what or anything about him. They just put these qualities in, and then they react around him as though these were his qualities. One more to tell you.
You know, this Glenn Mullen who’s actually very almost celibate fellow. If they were to say to you, like, he’s a real kind of ladies guy, you know, then poor me. It’s like celibate. Every time I walk around, look, this lady is saying, oh, this lady’s guy. Like that, put things in.
We get hopes from them because we put those things in. Then when we don’t get our hopes fulfilled, we think, my goodness, how unfortunate I am. Is that right? But this training of seeing the illusory nature, it’s talking about the way we’re always doing that directly or indirectly with all things. We’re putting something into them which isn’t there.
Like for instance, you know, yesterday someone insults me. I think that obnoxious behavior is an inherent part of their personality. They just happen to be in a bad mood that day and, you know, I just happen to be bi, so they insult me. Next day, I see them. You know, I put that obnoxiousness into them as a way of looking at them.
Now today they’re in a really good mood, but then I look at them and I think, my goodness, obnoxious, obnoxious. The way I look at them doesn’t allow that good mood thing to come out, does it? I’m projecting that obnoxiousness into them. So in that same way, we’re not dealing with reality very much in our life unless we’re very, careful. Those untrained beings, they see but they don’t see, they hear but they don’t hear.
They’re projecting into and then dealing with that projection as though it were the thing. What is there? They’re not looking at like it doesn’t exist. They’re like looking at a rope snake in the a rope in the dark saying snake and then if they hate snakes or like jumping up and down, if they’re terrified of snakes or running away, if they like snake soup they’re like going to get the axe. It’s like everything we experience is in that manner, has the danger of being in that manner.
So the part of the training is as you go around your life with everything, you say, illusory appearance. Illusory appearance appears like an illusion. This thing of like an illusion, like if you take a flower, you know. We hold this flower in our hand and we think this flower is something very, very, very, very, very real. We can smell it, we can taste it, we can touch it, we can feel it, everything.
But what is it? Now, a few specks of dust from hair and a few specks of dust from there and a little bit of water from hair, some sunshine, some fresh air. And like magic, this thing appears. And if someone says to you, what is this flower? You don’t say, well, listen, it’s dust with a little bit of water, touch of fresh air and a bit of sunshine.
You know, you say, there’s a flower. You don’t get the sense of the dust, the water, the fresh air or the sunshine. That whole process seems divorced from the flower. It seems like this flower just is this flower, like it’s just simply a flower. It’s not simply a flower.
It’s dust, sunshine, fresh air, flowing water. In that same way, we are just dust, flowing water, fresh air, sunshine, earth, water, fire and air. Even those things themselves, unfindable, unfindable. Even the substances from which flowers and human bodies are made, unfindable. So the way we look at it, we pour into it, we get out of it, very little to do with the actual nature careful, unless we cultivate eyes which actually look carefully.
A similar practice in the Zen tradition is with everything that comes in front of your face, you just say to it. You say about it, what is it? What is it? What is it? Never take anything for granted.
What is it? Who is it? Who are you? You know, I think I know you, but who are you? You’re not the same you yesterday.
What of you as me projected in you? What is you projecting yourself to me? So to see in the illusory flow, Now Tsongkhapa, in his one of his writings, he suggests a good thing to do is go to a mountaintop naked on full moon and start screaming at the opposite mountain. Scream first. You’re the most beautiful, handsome, smart, intelligent person I know.
And listen, and the words come back, you’re the most beautiful, handsome, intelligent, smart person I know. He’s like, oh, that’s very nice. And then you yell back, you are the most unkempt, foolish, dumb, silly, ta da person I know. And you listen as it comes back. You think, that’s a little unpleasant.
And you notice how just the mind plays tricks. It doesn’t notice that those words are just echoes from a cave, echoes from a rock face. It actually thinks that they have some reality. You know, they themselves have no reality in their own nature. It’s just sound waves bouncing off a cliff.
We don’t think sound waves bouncing off a cliff. Now if I yell at you, blah blah blah blah, I don’t wanna yell any insults someone will think I’m referring to them. But if I yell at you, you beautiful, rich, spoiled blah blah blah, you don’t think those are just sounds, movements, flows, energies. You actually think, oh, there must be something in me which is that. You know, you don’t look at the reality.
We don’t look at the actual flow. We look at something we’re taking out of the flow and distorting into something totally other than the flow. We’re not seeing reality. We’re seeing a distortion of a distortion of a distortion of a distortion of a distortion of reality. That being the case, we should enjoy the distortion.
We should enjoy the illusion. Take the illusion lightly but seriously, gently but firmly. And this is where the practice transforms from the illusory, impure or unpurified illusory body to the pure or purified illusory body. I think, I don’t know who you are, so I’ll think of you as an enlightened being. You may seem this, you may seem that, but how do I know what I’m putting into you and what’s a distortion of a distortion of a distortion of a distortion?
Now do I want to take the time with every individual being to strip them naked, lay them out on the table and dissect them in ten thousand ways to figure out where they’re at and what’s going on? Why bother the minute you find out they’ve already changed anyway? Not worth the effort, not worth the time. Simply best right from the beginning. I don’t know who you are or what you are.
You could be a god or goddess fallen from the highest heavens here just for my own delight. I have no way of knowing you’re not. Why not give you the benefit of the doubt? Why, seeing as I haven’t got a clue what that illusory appearance really is, why not take it in a celebratory manner? Why not take it in its highest possible implication?
You are a god fallen from the highest heavens here for no other purpose than mere celebration. You may have another purpose, but while you’re in my face, that’s the only purpose you have for me, is pure celebration. I don’t know who or what you are. Okay. God or goddess will do.
I’ll take either of those. So it’s trying to see all the living beings in that light. They are illusory. We haven’t got a clue. So let them arise.
Tsongkhapa says, see all things as illusory, see the illusory as divine, allow the divine to arise as a as great bliss in the vastness of radiance. I haven’t got a clue who you are. You’re totally illusory. So allow you to arise as a divine. I’ve got to do something with you, you know, as long as you’re here.
You know, I’ve got to make something of you. Allow you to arise in the divine. Have that divine arise as a great celebration of joy and vast radiance. I can make of you what I want while you’re with me. I can be nice to you.
I can be indifferent to you. I can be formal with you. I can be informal with you. I can be serious with you. I can be playful with you.
While you as long as you take the great risk of stepping into my presence, all of those things are there. Those potentials are there. What’s the safest for me? What’s the safest for you? Tsongkhapa says that’s an important question.
We can do ten billion things together. We can form armies and go out and kill some communists. Not a bad idea. Oh, except you’re all pacifist, so we’ll get beaten. No good idea.
Confucius say, only fight when you will win. Blazing no fun, bloody nose. There’s ten thousand, ten million, ten trillion things we can do together as humans, aren’t there? So what’s the best way to protect my own self interest and to protect your self interest? Seeing as how I don’t really know who you are and you don’t really know who I am.
And even if we live together and get merit and spend a hundred years together, I probably still won’t know who you are and you probably still don’t know who I am. Like my brother, he’s married for twenty two years and he comes home from work one day. Actually, he doesn’t even get out of work, just at the office checking out. There’s a note from his ex wife’s lawyer who who’s wife’s lawyer saying now it’s his ex wife and she’s taken the house and car and bank account and gone. He went to work in the morning thinking everything was hunky dory.
I mean, what do we ever really know about anyone else really? You know? The important thing is I shouldn’t have to depend upon you. You shouldn’t have to depend upon me. I should be happy in and of my own self.
You should be happy in and of your own self. I should be happy when I’m with you. I should be happy when I’m apart from you. The only real protection is happiness and peace, happiness and freedom. Bliss and radiance, as we call it in tantra.
Unless I have bliss and joy with you, not very useful. Unless I have freedom with you, not very useful. I mean, you know, if you don’t have joy with someone, why bother walking across town and saying hello? You know, you can stay home and feel bored. So Sankofa says, yeah, what’s the most important thing for me?
My own safety. What’s the most important thing for you? Your safety. How do I most securely establish my safety with you? I stay in bliss and radiance.
How do I mostly establish joy goodness and happiness in your safety? Well, I demand when you’re in my presence you be joyful and free. If you don’t want to be joyful and free, that’s your option, but I anyway will see you as being joyful and free. You may express your joy as crying or as tears or as temper tantrums or whatever you like. That’s your option.
That’s your call. It’s your body. It’s your speech. It’s your mind. You do with it what you like.
But from my side, I’m going to be joyful. I’m going to be free. I’m gonna see you as joyful. I’m gonna see you as free. You don’t wanna actually be joyful and free.
Okay. But don’t blame it on me. You know, that’s what Tsongkhapa was saying, the kind of energy we want to bring into our relations with everyone. Now you go to the supermarket, the person at the supermarket checkout counter. You know, look at the person.
That person is there in your face for some reason. See them as an illusion. Allow the illusion to arise as a divinity. Allow the divinity to arise as joy. And you think, great groceries.
And it doesn’t matter what you do in your life, what situation you’re in, that will always benefit because there’s no way you can ever, with that illusion, ever say this, that, or the other about it. It’s just an appearing phenomena in your life, which is one of the twenty five billion trillion kajillion phenomena appearing in your life with the stars and the flowers and the kangaroos and peoples and all those other things. So as those things appear, no need to think much about them. No need to puzzle over them. Just plain simple, stay in joy and radiance, joy and freedom.
Deal with all things with joy and freedom and you will get the most out of that encounter. Dalai Lama was once asked what he thought was the best in his life, most useful in his life. He says, well, whenever I’m with anyone, I always try to be happy and I always try with them, you know, to kind of project some happiness. He says, and I think that really has helped me very, very much in my life. People meet me and they think, oh, Dalai Lama, he’s a nice guy.
So then they treat me nicely. That’s helped. He said, that’s one of the biggest, best helps I’ve had in my life. You know, it’s okay to talk about meditation this and samadhi that and ten million mantras and doing fifty thousand prostrations and on and on and on and on and on and on. It’s limitless to things we can do.
But when we practice tantra, we want to have a quick path to enlightenment and an easy path to enlightenment. And the easiest is simply you claim that ground of joy and freedom. It’s your birthright. It’s there because one of the tantric texts says, how do we know that we really deserve it? Well, how did you were you conceived?
Through joy and ecstasy. Joy and ecstasy. If it weren’t for that, you would never have been conceived. It began with a twinkle in your dad and your mom’s eye. One thing led to another and there you came as a result of that joy and that freedom, that radiance.
That’s what brought you into life. The time you die, we say, the elements of the body revert onto themselves. As the consciousness leaves the body at that very moment, there’s a flash. In a male, a drop of sperm moves down, comes to the tip of the organ. A flash of clear light, pure radiance, pure freedom and a sort of a small orgasmic release.
We’re born in joy and freedom. We die in joy and freedom. During our lifetime, joy and freedom are there at all times for hours merely for the claiming. It’s like, you know, homesteading in in America. Jump on your horse and go and put or Australia like when we put guy you know, the Europeans first came here.
Carry out a shingle and put it down and say, Bert’s farm. You know? Then it becomes Bert’s farm. Your joy, your freedom, all you have to do is come is claim it. So see it as an illusion.
If you don’t, see it as an illusion, then the pretty things will make you attached and clinging and and and sticky, craving, the negative things will make you fearful, aversion, angry, then you lose the joy, you lose the freedom. So you begin by seeing it as an impure or unpurified illusion. When the practice becomes somewhat stable, then you transform the illusion. You think, I don’t know what it is. So see it all as gods, goddesses.
See the world as a mystic mandala, great radiant light shining everywhere. It’s not much of a imposition. World really is great radiant light shining everywhere. Know, humans, other living beings really are fallen gods and goddesses. We choose not to take them as such.
We’re shortchanging ourselves. That’s the tantra attitude. I see you as a god or goddess. I get a god or goddess. I see you as a demon or demoness?
I get a demon or demoness. Candrakīrti in his Madhyamakāvatāra says holds up glass of water. He says, now a god sees that as ambrosia and nectar, every sip of which heals all four hundred and four diseases and gives rise to complete intoxicating ecstasy. In the old days, they had drunk they they had drinks which made you like drunk and stoned out of your skull, but totally tuned in spirit spiritually. So they were like they’re called what’s it called?
Soma or remlis. So it’s like the best Guinness and single malt scotch mixed together without the ropedy side effects. So a god sees it like that. A ghost sees it like blood, pus, urine, excrement, like that, filthy things. And a human sees it as mare water.
What a taste. So in that same way, the one phenomena seen by those three beings utterly differently. So all things we see in life are like that. So if we take them as God stuffs, we get the best from them. And you meet people who say, this sounds a little easy but tough to do.
Comes down to the first thing I taught yesterday, Namo gurubhya, Namo Buddhaya, Namo Dharmaya, Namo Sanghayaya. You have to invoke your own inner guru, the power to claim your own decision making abilities. Namo Buddhaya, you have to invoke your own sacred nature. The little Buddha in you, make him stand up straight or her stand up straight. Namo Dharmayaya, you have to remember the Dharma that you learned and rely upon your own innate goodness.
Namo Sanghaya, you have to be a truth seeker, you have to want to do it, You have to take the responsibility. The Buddhas can’t do it for you. You can go visit the Dalai Lama twenty million times. He’s not gonna do it for you. No one can do it for you.
You do it for yourself, it’s done. You don’t do it, it’s not done. It’s very simple. I suggest people carry little cattle prods. Every five minutes you check up on your mental space.
If it’s not joy and free, we can teach cows with those things. humans are supposed to be smarter. That’s why sometimes a good external guru, close relationship with a good external teacher is good. Carry the cattle prod. One of my teachers who died in meditation actually in front of me during one teaching, he was famous for being tough.
Well, if you wanted to be a student, people used to complain, know, he used Tibetan tea makers, carry this big stick of wood that’s it’s about that thick down the middle and it’s hardwood, not like the soft bamboo thing that the Zen people use, and at one end it’s got like a big round thing like the plunger, which is like heavy piece of hickory, and he’d keep that under his seat like that. Students would come in and he’d sort of sit there like this, and occasionally he’d pull this thing out and just whap. And if he were really thought people really weren’t keeping it together, he’d take this thing and flip it over backwards, catch it, so the big like solid piece of wood is at the end. I used to walk around the monastery with this sometimes and it’s just and someone once someone said to him, well, Rinpoche, don’t you think this is like a little uncompassionate? He said, know, the guru is like a mad dog.
If you don’t want his madness, don’t come close. So a a good forceful teacher sometimes is very useful. But as humans, a lot of people just tend to think, I can’t do it. They tend to say, oh, joy and freedom sounds nice, but I can’t be joyful. I can’t be free.
I’ve got things to worry about. So the daytime practice is that, illusory nature, illusory as divine, divine as bliss. The bliss focused on emptiness or the bliss released in the vast radiance, the way it’s put in tantra. You know, with worries, Śāntideva said, if you can fix it, you don’t have to worry about it, just fix it. If you can’t fix it, don’t worry about it, you can’t fix it.
And within our joy and radiance, then to release the tingle, see every activity that we do, everything we engage in as something which is a release of bliss, joy, and freedom. It’s Buddha karma sending out great waves. Everything we do we think, sending out a beautiful wave. May it go on for eternity. We say one single word.
Small thing, right? Well, it sends an echo, an echo, an echo, an echo, echo, goes on for eternity. Every single thing we do on for eternity is part of the great flow of energy. It affects everything. So as we flow with the events of our life, we dance and play and celebrate within this illusion, become doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs and the such.
All of those activities we understand. We, the doer, are part of the illusion. The doing is part of the illusion. The done to is part of the illusion. And it’s all a celebration.
Every activity done as a release of an illusory wave that goes on forever within the illusory world, sent out with a prayer, sent out with a good thought, like putting a little bolt on a at the head of the Ganges River and making the prayer all the way to the ocean wherever this goes, whoever sees it, whoever touches it, may inspire them with joy and liberation. People don’t need anything else. They don’t need food. They don’t need clothing. They don’t need shelter.
With joy and liberation, all things become fulfilled. Without joy and liberation, no amount of stuff put there helps. No amount of food tastes good. As simple as food with joy and liberation tastes better than the most exotic food with no joy, no liberation. In the tantra, we say a mystic can pick up a piece of human excrement on the tip of his finger and put it on his tongue, and it tastes ten thousand better ten thousand times better than the best feast eaten by an unenlightened king with joy and liberation.
What is a tomato? It’s just reprocessed excreta. What is anything? It’s just all the dead things that have ever been being reprocessed, part of the great illusion. And, of course, as we go through our life, sometime we express the great dance of love, compassion, celebration, joy, freedom.
Compassion, celebration, joy, freedom. Things seem a little wild somewhere, we make an offering of peaceful energy and tame things down. Things seem a little bereft, we try to increase, give out some clothing, give out some food, give out some cash. I’ll take fifty thousand. But basically, we do what we can in a flowing way.
But we understand. What we see is not what we get. So that’s the daytime practice. In conjunction with that, we do generally some kind of sadhana. We do mantra and do mantra practice in connection with it to make it strong.
So it’s good to do some kind of mantra. I’m sure here at the Dharma Center you’ve learned many and I won’t recommend any in specific other than the Namo gurubhya, Namo Buddhaya, that’s the essence of all mantras and, it’s a good general one to do. The nighttime practice is dream yoga. Most people go to sleep, Nothing happens. All day long, they collect negative karma chasing friend chasing enemies and collecting friends and this and that and the other.
They go to sleep and just dream about more negative karma. Just negativity after negativity after negativity all day, and they go to sleep and they just have nightmares about it. But if we bring our daytime under control well, under control. If we sublimate our daytime or transcend no. What’s a good word?
Make more enlightened daytime living. We get more enlightened nighttime living Here’s the basic idea. So when we go to sleep and dream, we should just like we get up in the morning, we put on our clothes, we brush our teeth, we brush our hair, we put on some lipstick and earrings, put our condoms in our wallets and go out for a walk, just like we go through all those problems in the morning. So at night when we go to sleep, we should take some effort to go to sleep prepared. No.
Most people don’t. They kinda stagger home confused and exhausted by the whole days, and all they did was joy and freedom all day. They got not nothing to grumble about. Anything other than joy and freedom they did, which was difficult to their own fault for doing it. So anyway, they stumble home, nosh down some, you know, dead fishes or something, and turn on the TV for a few hours, you know, drink a beer, you know, maybe jump up and down on top of the wife for a little while, then crash out, you know.
The story of many a man’s life. And then they grumble why they don’t feel so good. So during the day, we do the daytime practice. At night, we do the nighttime practice. When we go to sleep, we practice the dream sleep yoga.
Usually when I teach dream sleep yoga, we do it over a period of a few days. But just to give you a a a few couple of simple things you can do, At night before you go to sleep, essentially you sit down, you clarify the body energy, you clarify the emotional energy, you clarify the spirit energy. So body dimension, emotion dimension, spiritual dimension, or physical body, emotional body, spiritual guide. Check up. Do the do take a couple of breaths, breaths.
Is the air flowing equally between both nostrils? No. Check up. Why? Where?
What’s going on? Physical body balanced? Emotional body balanced? Spirit body balanced, then do the physical exercises or at least the breathing. In, out.
In male energy, out male energy. In female, out female. In female, out female. At least balance the body. You’re probably run down because you’ve been racing all over the place all day and not doing it with and freedom, and you’ve drunk a bit of beer and eaten some stale pizza, your body’s not so good so you better like heighten things up.
Do a few pause breathings, maybe seven, twenty one, pump up your exercise. And then learn to understand your sleep process. The most important one at sleep is just pushing up, pushing down, pushing up, pushing down, pushing up, pushing down. And then you try to read your sleep process. If your sleep is too deep that you’re not getting your dreams, you’re not remembering them or aware of them, then you work a lot with the throat chakra.
Push up, push down, push up, push down, push up, push down, and push up. Stop it in the throat chakra. Then do some of these. Make the chemicals of this gland active. Release them.
You need some good drug power for your sleep from hair. What are these? Pituitary. What? Thyroid.
Thyroid. This is pituitary. I was just checking to see if it was the same in Australia because I heard everything was upside down there. That’ll make your dreams more powerful. Agitate the dream state, make dreams more clear, more powerful.
If still they don’t, we say in Tantra, we say the crown chakra is the seed of waking state consciousness. Throat chakra is the seed of dream consciousness. Heart chakra is the seed of deep sleep consciousness. navel chakra is the seed of sexual ecstasy consciousness. And if we take it from point of view of lower chakras and the navel becomes waking state, secret becomes dream state, mid secret becomes deep sleep, and tip secret becomes sexual ecstasy.
So we have to look at our sleep. Like you don’t just get dream yoga like you do this one night and then it’s over, you got it like, you know, learning to ride a bike or something, or like getting pregnant. You have to like kind of do it gradually. So like you watch your sleep over the nights and you think, my sleep is too deep. I have no conscious presence in my dreams.
I have to waken it up, move it up to the throat chakra, work with the chakra. Still your dreams don’t come clear enough, move it up to the crown chakra. If you do too much of the crown chakra, your sleep will be too light. Too much of the throat chakra, the dreams will be too intense. You keep waking up.
If they’re too light if they’re too intense, your sleep is too light, your dreams are too intense, you want to calm them down a little bit and have a more smooth dream, you work with the heart chakra, put the energy into the heart chakra. If your dreams are so so but not especially pleasant, we all want sweet dreams, we’re not gonna practice dream yoga for nightmares, then you take down to the sexual chakras, bring heightened sexual energy into the body system before going to sleep. When that happens you will have more pleasant dreams, sweet dreams, joyful dreams. In this way we work with the four, five, six or seven chakras in order to slowly learn the dynamics of how the fluids from the different glands and chemical sources of the body, how agitating those just prior to sleep affects the sleep state. We can cure insomnia.
We can cure, like, too deep a sleep a lot of people, like, sleep and wake up more tired than when they went to bed, easily cured with dream yoga. A lot of people can’t sleep, easily cured with dream yoga. The other thing with dream yoga is a dream state is the easiest for recollection of previous lives cause you’re always flipping in and out of the various dimensions of the subconscious anyway. The conceptual mind is very relaxed and our sense of who we are now and what the world is now is the biggest impediment to us getting deeper visions of what’s in our psyche. So dream yoga is very easily used for the accomplishment of that.
But in the beginning, we essentially want to use it so that when we go to sleep, it’s it’s a complement to our day. We’re awake in the day, we practice tantra, we keep joy, we keep freedom. We go to sleep at night, we want to continue joy, freedom. We want that same positive enlightenment flow at night as we can generate during the day. So in the dream yoga techniques, a lot of different points are a lot of different methods are offered such as ways to move the drops through the chakras and ways to make love just before going to sleep if you’re not a, you know, if you’re a lay person practitioner.
If you’re a celibate practitioner, ways in which to do the breathing exercises and move the energies and so forth. All of these are discussed in great depths in the text on the subject, ways to use colors in different chakras and mantras in different chakras and so on and so forth. But I think as beginners to the dream yoga practice, of which I think two of you are beginners, that essentially all you need to know is the basic breathing, the basic chakra idea, and then it’s just a matter of trying it out. You know, watch your sleep and take responsibility. Just like you meet so many people who refuse to take responsibility for their own happiness in the waking state, a lot of people won’t take it in their sleep state.
You you meet people that I’m unhappy. Yeah. Okay. Be happy. Know, illness cured.
But just as you meet people who won’t do that in the waking state, you meet people who won’t do it with their sleep. Well, we can’t worry about them unless they come to us and ask them for a cure, in which case we can take a stick and set them on the right path. But if your only way to enlightenment is your own discipline, that is your stick. If you don’t do it, if you don’t make yourself sounds like you’re doing an unpleasant chore. No.
Sticking in joy and freedom isn’t that unpleasant. You know, the discipline is to remember that that’s what you’re doing. That’s all the discipline is. Yeah? That’s just to say to yourself, mindfulness and introspection.
I need to apply those two forces of mindfulness and honesty, basic spiritual honesty. Mindfulness, you’re looking at what’s going on, and honesty, when you see it, you’re saying, oh, this is what’s going on. It’s not a big deal. You know, goats have achieved enlightenment. Anyway, we better take a quick break here.
I think our tea is ready.