Wendy

You can read more about the book and its contents, and find out about dohas here

Below is my review for browsers on Amazon:

‘It’s a heart’s delight to read, speak and resonate with these Songs of Realisation… and to appreciate the integrity of their expression.

It seems to me that translating these songs requires facility in both of the languages  used – for accuracy, a poetic appreciation and expression – for flavour and flow, and ideally realisation of the actual for the feeling tone – to reflect most fully the truth which is being gestured towards.

There is no doubt in my mind that the dohas and texts in this book are a clear and true representations of the original expression of the Mahasiddhas… and James Low’s introduction, with its advice on how to approach the contents, is invaluable – a plain-song doha – key to receiving the treasures within.

With this, having left our intellectual glasses at the gate, we are welcomed as though into an exquisite garden where images of great beauty… and variegated blooms of profound truth, shimmering and radiant with clarity… manifest with each turn of the page. Their scent, rare yet pervasive, is of cloyless emptiness…

This book costs about £16, enough for a gorgeous bunch of flowers…which will eventually decay, smell rank, and fade away.
Whereas the blooms in the book open… whenever you open to them…
it’s more than a bargain!’

‘This early Buddhist account of the rise of a demonic dictator helps to illuminate how the will to power can bring misery to many as with the current political situation in the Ukraine’.
This is the introduction on the simply being.co.uk website. 
The book compellingly draws us into a portrayal of  the originating factors for the resultant mayhem and the arising of buddhas… manifesting as required and as requested, to overcome the destructive power of ignorance.

This is an extraordinary book. Having read the account as given by James in a teaching some twenty years ago and more recently the full translation of the text from the Tibetan – which is found in the book  ‘This is it’ – I was unprepared for the impact of this presentation… which takes it to another dimension! 

James’ absorbing re-telling powerfully grips the attention and the illustrations by Diana Collins are a perfect counterpart. Ranging from the grotesque to the sublime they give shape to the words and transform the book into an immersive and visceral experience.

The wrathful power of the buddhas is situationally evoked by the escalating horrors perpetrated though a self-serving misunderstanding of profound teaching.

Resting in awareness there is no grasping, but in ignoring awareness and relying on thoughts – which relate to the falsity of ‘me’ as the central referent – there is grasping and no rest…
…and this grasping does not ease the anxious tension which arises with the false position…but exacerbates it!
As with compulsively scratching an itch…eventually inflammation, infection, and poisoning radiate from this… and when systemic – ignorance – the source of this, won’t be cured by easing balms and lotions…

A ‘tour de force’…an expression from the heart of the buddhas!

This evening James was inviting us to engage with the dohas in his new publication ‘Sweet Simplicity’ * translations of songs of realisation from such great wisdom-beings as Saraha Virupa and Tilopa

Yesterday I was attempting to clarify the meaning of some words in ‘This is it’ with a fellow student…
and this morning some words came together…

I don’t know if they’ll be helpful but i know that even a little candle glow may illuminate a unseen obstacle from a slightly different angle…and that your take – whatever is evoked, will be a unique and empty experience… : )

Homage to the Guru:

What, in truth, is this?

– a showing; radiance of your empty mind

What makes this radiance appear?

– nothing…it’s natural, always here

How does it seem?

– ah…that depends…

Depends on what?

depends largely on the degree
to which the looker dualistically
identifies as solid – ‘Me’
with all that brings
to the party!

If, fully, I identify as Me
‘my’ shadows shade the true
and, unaware… it’s consciousness
that mediates the view

and so there’s ‘I know this’ and ‘that’
and also ‘me’ and ‘you’

Each seems an individual thing…
about which, other things are ‘known’
… ethereal pots
and their embellishment …
each seeming-thing’s mind-thrown!

arisings – transient and yet…
deluded ‘potter-Me’
– forms, fires, invests, imagined pots
with self-substantiality!

N.B.
The creativity of the mind does not hold water!!!

All that effort…huh! unreliable display!
each moments flown……
but don’t despair
awareness has not gone away

With this, as this, there is
no ‘thing’ to gain
no ‘thing’ to loose
… egoic grasping was confused!

Interest without investment* –
better!… that way we’ll be
resting in equanimity

open relaxed
with minds at ease
no ‘thing’ to do
no ‘thing’ to seize

Hands freed from shaping
of the ‘clay’
gestures arise as flow

and fade away

as they do

naturally

👐🏻………………

* This is an amazing idea…outside the dharma, who’s heard of interest without investment, without inflation?
Just playing around : ) – it’s a bare interest that’s meant…a simple open co-presencing with, and appreciation of the revelation of the display.
This is not available at the Bank of Consciousness…don’t use them if you can help it… their vitality rates are dire!

*As an alternative to the ubiquitous Az … in the U.K. Blackwell’s bookshop stocks many of James’ books. N.B. In their search engine just entering the book title may not bring up the book you are after. You do need to enter James Low after the title or from the selection offered you may conclude it’s not available. If you create an account with them before ordering it is tracked. Waterstones also have a selection. Watkins bookshop (phone them) and Shambhala bookshop have some of the earlier books in stock.

There is a poem about devotion in Dzogchen, which was posted last night on the simplybeing.co.uk website.

James composed this on the final night of the retreat entitled ‘Clarity and equanimity in a time of provocation’ at Emerson college in 2019. In the post there is an invitation to click if you would like to listen to James read the poem.

I invite you to take up that invitation in quite a big way. You can of course just listen to the poem which is at the beginning of the last recording however I really recommend that you continue to the end of that recording and then… Begin at the beginning : )

There is more than enough in that set of recordings to help us to take up ‘the burden of putting things right’ in a way far removed from what Hamlet does in reactivity to his horror at his own imagined situation…

What’s Hamlet got to do with this?

Well, just below the poem on the website you’ll find another post entitled:
Establishing Balance and Harmony do take a look.

In that post referring to the requirement for us respond to the turbulence in the world James references Hamlet with this quote:
The time is out of joint―O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
                          Hamlet 1.5.188

The post goes on to invite – having taken refuge and generated bodhicitta – the creation of tsa-tsas whilst the recitation of Padmashambhava’s mantra or the Seven Line Prayer is running through your heart-mind. Any merit generated in the process is then dedicated to the relief of suffering in all the six realms.

What a beautiful, inclusive, peaceful activity… full of the highest intentions and connected with wisdom and compassion of the highest order. 

This energetic engagement, linked with spaciousness ease and the truth of impermanence, inevitably changes the environment and modulates our own tensions and distortions; changing our way of being through our way of participating.

This is far removed from the prevailing deeply egoic desire to ‘tool up and mobilise in'(JL!) to improve things  or being completely absorbed in and fascinated and depleted by the suffering in the world in the spotlight today. First thing to do in the morning need not be, as it is for many, check Twitter feed for developments in the drama! Fine if it would help…but it doesn’t and is not a great starting point from which to engage with the day’s complexities.

Returning to the Hamlet reference. I don’t know if you know Shakespeare’s story of Hamlet but in fact, having taken the burden of putting things right upon his shoulders, he made a right mess of things!

You see, he had watched his mother become close to another man around the time of his father’s death. Some thoughts arose around how his dad died. He put two and two thoughts together and these thoughts became certainties. With his dualistic simplistic right/wrong good/bad thinking there were bad people whose bad deeds should be exposed. He decided to expose this ‘certainty’ in publicly…giving those involved no room to manoeuvre, or explain…

That way his father’s death would be avenged as people would then know the (his) truth – which was that, that driven by desire for the ‘new man’, his mother had killed his father.
He formed his story line into a play and arranged for this drama to be acted out in front of his mother, step-father and their assembled court … this would inescapably ‘set things right’!

So we begin the play with a son’s grief and one man’s death. Then in the son’s ignorance, jealousy and aversion arise… and stewing in his own juicy thoughts…aversion becomes hatred…a force which drives him into what he sees as righteous activity. 

He follows though with his idea to ‘put things right’ as he sees it, and his play begins before the assembled protagonists and the rest of the court.
However, when his play ends…guess what? Rather than there being some magical resolution of all his tension as ‘evil’ is exposed… overt madness and death is the consequence for most of the main protagonists …the play ends with  bodies everywhere and misery heaped upon misery!

I once saw an unusual version of the play which suggested he could have just thought ‘well my Mum is a bit of a slapper…but anyway’ Whatever you might think about that : ) …with a more spacious perspective other thoughts were possible…and his and other lives could have moved on…

Unlike Hamlet we, happily, have the good fortune to bring whatever level of Dharma understanding we have into every situation that we encounter, with the potential to avoid fixation on a story-line with all the rigidity and judgment that goes with that.
From that different basis…rather than believing in our thoughts as veridical…what can we bring to the world in our everyday interactions?
Maybe… a peaceful heart, goodwill, wisdom, absence of judgment, openness, receptivity, tolerance, clarity…Calmness and Equanimity… Harmony and Balance!?

Maybe other qualities?

Certainly our way of being…

May we be whatever is needed! 

p.s. Twenty years or so ago I came across, in the Buddhist scriptures, a story of a bird at the edge of a lake having a drink of the water. The bird noticed much increased noise and clamour, screams and agitation coming from the birds animals and other life in the nearby forest and realised that the crackling was of a huge forest fire.

Being just a small bird the options to help were limited but the bird decided to fill its beak with water and fly fast as possible to the fire and spit the water out onto the fire. Then return to the lake and repeat the process over and over again. Eventually the fire went out… the bird died of exhaustion.

I loved that bird… and then thought maybe I can do that? Maybe direct my energy to bring whatever small benefit i could into the world in the second half of this life. 

Clearly the fire did not go out just from the volume of water carried in the birds beak yet that strong intention to help set up the conditions for the bird to later speed along the path to enlightenment.

The dharma offers so many methods to revise our views and release from our confusion …we are fortunate, through the practice, to be able to become freer and wiser in the choices we make over how we spend our time. Noticing the pull of old habits – unhelpful ‘thinking about’, the hunger to gather ‘information/deformation about’, the desire to have things be as our ego wishes – and hanging out there long enough without fusing for such, or any, thoughts to vanish so we can rebalance…as openness/ emptiness…the great common denominator!

I was putting this post together at the same as the preceding post about the availability of the audio recording of the Introduction to Longing for Limitless Light… because engaging with the explanation you’ll find there… reveals the profound benefits of engagement with the different practices in the book. The healthy and healing re-orientation they provide is clearly explained…and the need for the benefit of the result of practice, offering the resolution of tension and confusion, is ever present.

James has composed a prayer for the current situation… and noticing he had also offered a helpful practice to do at this time …to put them together in a post, with some other teachings which might also be calming and clearing, made sense.

Then James wrote:

“The tragedy engulfing the Ukraine is so awful for all the people there and also upsets so many others.

I have put up a Prayer for Peace and a short practice on the Simply Being website. 

I think it is a time for prayer and heartfelt connection.
https://simplybeing.co.uk/

Warm regards
James

So the practice he refers to is ‘Repelling all troubles’

Last week he talked through this practice on-line, giving a commentary which was recorded.
The quality is improved now, so it’s a bit easier on the ears : )
You can listen to or download the recording … the video will soon be available on simplybeing.co.uk.

You’ll find the text of the practice from these links:

https://simplybeing.co.uk/texts/repelling-all-troubles/ – for links to translations and short introduction.

Click to access Repelling-all-Troubles-Dok-Dokpa-01-03-2022.pdf – for text and practice in English.

… and here’s the profound Prayer for Peace which he wrote:

I’m hoping you also will find something helpful among the suggested talks below …
What i’d written about staying truly alive, present and connected, working with the circumstances…you’ll find from yesterdays post!

This index is a useful way to see what’s available from the Macclesfield Talks archive…….you’ll find your own way but talks:
3. Living with Anxiety and Doubt

14. Integrating openness and presence ( below)

16. Staying Open to Life as it is 

20.  Balance in Turbulent times 

21. Kindness, Fellow Feeling and the Common Weal  

might be particularly helpful…audios are available for all, videos for most

This week a few of us practised some of the activity of tong-len as given in talk 14, below, and it was appreciated with a big smile, as removing all the held tension : )

If tension is strongly running, a physical practice like this is beneficial and maybe easier to do than other practices.

Making the big ‘A’ sound opens the chest, the breathing improves with the regular repetition, adrenaline levels drop. The impact of the sound which removes the tension of samsara’s divisions… dissolving the reification…is tangible…. and the inclusion of all beings without exception! softens and tenderises the encapsulating judgment and opens the heart. This love arises from the ground of our being rather than the ego…and the suffering dissolves into the openness of that same ground.

Without a sense of the openness at the heart of all, its probably best just to do the radiating. Otherwise taking in the suffering of all beings is problematic. It seems very compacted heavy vast and contaminating. This overwhelms the wobbly ego’s cup, and misery spills over everywhere!

the link is below

14.    Integrating openness and presence                                        Feb 2013

Explaining how wisdom and compassion can be activated in our own existence.

Seeing that the compassion which arises from through understanding the illusory nature of phenomena is not artificial…

that the openness, the radiance,  and the arising gesture are integrated.

This talk includes the  practice of tong-len

audio     

Well…I had imagined that the next post would be an audio-recording of a chapter from C.R. Lama Collected Works.
However Peter, who does the technical work on this website, is not well and is currently in hospital.
His treatment is working well but he is wisely pacing his work…and it seems that recording will be published very soon.

In the meantime, working with circumstances, like the ‘Potter’s Wheel’ film that used to fill the space between the main feature and the supplementary film at the cinema back in the day when reels of film had to be changed over between features…we can now offer you the Video recording of The Four Foundations of Mindfulness – Macclesfield talk 11 from 2010
on Vimeo…. on Youtube… as an audio recording

In this weekend of teaching: “Mindfulness is explored from different perspectives including psychotherapy, theravada and dzogchen. With mindfulness we can become intentionally attentive and careful so we are no longer at the mercy of whatever is happening. From the view of dzogchen we can be in the movement of the world as it changes and re-mind ourselves to relax back into integration.”

Those few sentences can’t encapsulate the breadth of the teaching but gesture towards its invitation into mindfulness of the body, of feeling, of the mind, and of dharmas.
Towards a deep investigation into how our belief in the veridical nature of thoughts has us inhabiting a world of knowable ‘things’ as a ‘certain thing’.
Towards seeing how and why fusion with and addiction to thoughts arises.. what we loose in this confusion and how to begin to ease out of the habit.
So hopefully you will find this rather more precious and useful than a ‘time-filling’ film…yet the potters’s wheel analogy is somehow fitting.
There’s a wheel, clay, movement, involvement…shaping…Some ‘thing’ seems to arise….something that can go back into the mass of clay…or we can become more involved in shaping… finally, using a wire, we cut this ‘some thing’ off from the base then ‘hard bake’ it.
Ok with clay…. but are we are doing this with thoughts… take a look : )

Thanks to Chris Coppock who made the original recording and to Pedro for making this widely available…and wishing good health to all!

The list of currently available ‘Macclesfield teachings , both audio and video, since 2003 can be viewed here

A very precious jewel to reflect and reflect upon…
one which illuminates the deep heart of the previous post…
is offered in James’ teachings entitled Vulnerability as Hope.

If you’ve already watched this perhaps you may remember the ‘ghost’ explanation/connection which comes around mid-way!

But even if you have, and certainly if you haven’t, do take a (nother) look and listen.

These teaching are so rich that it’s unlikely that we are able to digest and incorporate them sufficiently well – to be able to reflect upon what this means for us, and become more aligned with the truths expressed – in just one sitting.

In the little group i facilitate the first fifteen minutes brings more than enough to the table to fill the stomach…
And fifteen minutes chunks may be a very helpful way to try listening or re-listening…
With space for the words to sink in… drop by drop…if we are very dry, otherwise so much just runs off us.

Walking in the desert, being so hot and tired and thirsty…
then coming across a waterfall of clear cool water flowing over the rim of a rocky outcrop
How amazing and wonderful it is to just stand underneath and let it flow over us…

As the words wash over us… we know they are good and refreshing…and,
amidst the aridity of much that is around us,
such relief…

But it’s on opening the mouth to drink,
gently… gulp by gulp,
that satisfaction’s found…

beyond belief!

Some years ago on Halloween, some children came to the door and demanded ‘Trick-or-Treat’.
I smiled and said ‘Trick’ … they were so surprised they did not know what to do or say…

Our selective attention, our expectations and projections, our assumptions our beliefs… are all ingredients with which a trickster or illusionist can work to manipulate and affect how we are likely to interpret our experience.

In a projector or ‘magic lantern’ a concave mirror, placed behind the light source, is used to focus the light from a source in the lantern… through a slide – a piece of glass with an image on it – placed in front of the light source… onto a lens at the front of the lantern.
This lens can be altered to change the distance at which the magnified image became clear when focussed onto a screen.

If a slide with a suitable image is used, and the result is projected onto smoke
then the resting appearances, observed in a darkened room by gullible observers, may be assumed to be ‘spectral.’
One definition of spectral is – ‘of or like a ghost’…
another is – ‘of or concerning the spectrum, the band of colours of light’.

The second more accurate definition of what actually occurs is taken to be the first – ‘it’s a ghost!’ – when we bring all the interpretive ingredients on our side into the mix!
Illusionists who forget their own hand in creating the shapes and shadows they project, and then believe that the illusion they created is real, are deluded… and well on the way to the kind of madness prevalent in the world.

Maybe a bit interesting, but what has this to do with me?
Well, quite a lot because as the dharma explains, we live in an illusory, ungraspable world and how we actually manifest (notwithstanding our story-lines) is also illusory and ungraspable.
It’s hard to see the truth of this… it doesn’t seem like this to us because we are ignorant of the karmically coloured lenses in the glasses we wear; ignorant of the mediating filters in our ears, our noses…all our senses…
and while repeatedly singing, or sighing, the ‘song of me’ we are deaf to the truth of the way in which we and ‘others’ actually exist.

So we in samsara are illusionists…projectionists… who become delusional as we attribute a self-existence to the appearances which arise for us, imbuing them with our beliefs.
We miss-take nature of these appearances, assuming solidity continuity and reliability and in misprisioning their true nature we delude ourselves and take them to be truly real.
Lacking curiosity – the wobbly little ego seeks stability in certainty – this leads quickly to ‘I know it is so because I think so’… ‘whatever it, or they, seem to be (for me!)… has the ring of truth about it ‘….

The ‘ghosts’ of ourselves, the shadow-shades of our past confusion, patterns of relating… to which the ego-thoughts attach in insecurity… attribute solidity and give certainty of definition and value to colour shape and movement.
In low-lighting ‘this’… and high-lighting ‘that’ aspect of experience – imputing, forming a particular perspective – and then taking the resultant con-fusion… that juxtaposition, brought togetherness, or compounding… as an accurate reading giving us the truth of the arising…
we make it ‘real’ for us, although we cannot really…and believe in the products of our creativity….

and then…
Oh! No!… Snap!
We are trapped ….by our beliefs… into one of many possibilities of formation… including ghosts!

What nonsense!…you might say.
But humans have the potential to experience many different states from heavenly to hellish, for a while…which may seem like a very long time!
Can I rest, as presence, and move from that responsively?
If not maybe there is something ghostly in the way of false identity getting in the way…acting as a limited shadow of my potential.

Without the dharma we wouldn’t have a ghost (ha! ha!) of a chance of realising any of this but happily, as with card tricks and the illusionists ‘magical display’… once we know for ourselves how the trick works we’re no longer so easily taken in, no longer so certain about and believing in the truth of our earlier conditioned interpretations.

With our deep habits – reliance on our thoughts and our beliefs, the patterns with which we identify… of thinking and activity, patterns which feel so much to be the truth of ‘me’… it can take much time and application or attention, listening study and meditation, to shrug ourselves free of these limitations…or maybe not so long depending on the students desire or aspiration and the teachers realisation and capacity*.

Maybe the little ‘ego-me’ tends to take things a bit too seriously…
you must get it right! you mustn’t lose! or break or….
whatever the wraith we snag with energetically…

Spaciousness and kindness – the truth of us, can say
‘Aw c’mon, sweetie its o.k.
relax… and relax more…it’s your display…
tension, with humour, fades away…’

So ‘Welcome sweet ghosts…
Here, have a chocolate finger
… yes, have some more : ) ‘
Happily, sharing, dissolving
becoming free-er
than before….

Believe in ghosts?…

Perhaps we do unwittingly…

the thoughts that tell us how we ought to be
echoes from the past
arising presently

Believed in,
tangled with these, our lived reality
is shaped by ghosts

defining the truth for me,
and you, and all that we can take to be
‘just as it seems to us’…

and we are lost…

Happily, a chink of wisdom’s light
illuminates, reveals, explains
our own birthright

and the innate integrity
of all within
mind’s pristine reality

As the Budhha said, of experienced phenomena, ‘mind is their chief and they are mind-made’

* there’s more to this…. and much else besides… in The Collected Works of C.R. Lama by James Low.
Some audio recordings of the ‘Brief Teachings’ from this will be posted here soon.