Sunrise, New Year’s Day 2023*
I’m writing this now as, on Sunday 8th there is an opportunity to take the vows which will be needed if you wish to take the Padmasambhava initiation later in the month…
…and having come across the fresh clarity of Dzogchen teachings, the question is arising for some… why bother with taking Refuge, Bodhisattva vows, Initiations and other such-like ‘buddhist stuff’?
Dzogchen practice involves realising directly the nature of the ground … and thus the illusory nature of appearances…and increasingly not deviating from that unconstructed view of ‘as it is’.
[This is very different from resting in the usual dualistic throw away line ‘well… it is what it is’… meaning ‘it is as it seems to me’…a miss is as good as a mile here!]
With this, through realising the middle-way between ‘something as such’ and ‘nothing at all’, ultimate compassion arises naturally…
And if that’s the case for you then you won’t be asking the question!
The question may be more about… If I listen to and study James’ teachings and meditate as he suggests won’t I get ‘there’ without all this other weird stuff??
I can’t answer that for sure but I think it’s very risky approach…
Although actually there is no big barrier to climb over in order to escape from the apparent limitations and confusions of our usual situation in this world… a state of dis-ease, of ‘not ok-ness’ (even though I might believe, say… or even squeak… ‘i’m fine!’) … there is a big illusory barrier for the illusory ego to climb over to ‘get over itself’ and find itself in an appropriate relationship to awareness.
At different times over the last twenty years I have found all the dharma teachings that I have come across helpful and supportive in this gradual deconstruction process.
Taking refuge from my egoic/karmically distorted view of reality into the different more and ultimately reliable refuges offered in the dharma was a process critical to my ‘recovery’.
Simply ‘relax and release’ wouldn’t have cut the mustard!!! I didn’t even realise that I was not relaxed … or what I was holding onto…
…or who ‘I’ was beyond my assumptions.
The openhearted connection with the openness at the heart of Padmasambhava was profoundly helpful with that!
I remember about twenty years ago hearing James say in the first Macclesfield talk ‘You will never get enlightenment’…’The way out is through with and as everyone’.
What??? !!!
Many phrases in James’ teachings functioned like Koans for me – ‘I’m in the plane and the plane is in my mind’ – I spent years with that one as my companion on walks…
Then, like those little metal puzzles where two shapes seem inextricably interlocked, then suddenly you get it… and from then on that configuration is easy to release… and you have a better sense of how the others might come un-done.
To be free we firstly need to realise that our Operating System is infected with a virus….mistakenly identifying as a knowable some’thing’ who knows the truth… we relate to all phenomena as self-existing other ‘things’ – like cans of beans defined by their apparent qualities – or apparent lack of them…
and this delusion brings us into an overloaded, vulnerable, reactive, and diminished state…
How this comes about, how it is maintained…how to be free of it…all this is encompassed within many teachings of the Buddha you’ll find expressed in James’ Macclesfield teachings and many others.
Diverse teachings for diverse situations… different methods to help us …
The ego may be saying ‘you don’t need this… you can manage without’… but I’d be very suspicious of the wobbly ego’s capacity for wise discernment! These methods are for us, for our freedom from the not so merry-go-round…
Addressing this James said:
‘Many people just wish to mediate and don’t want to engage with belief and devotion but this is not advisable… never doubt the power of the ego! Devotion leads to humility…which leads to an evenness of regard to all sentient beings. It is a profound preparation for the practices of Mahamudra and Dzogchen.’
The extracts below, from the talk The Illusory Nature of Phenomena: Six Bardos (Transcript) • Eifel Retreat, Spring 2008 – Simply Being may be helpful… and also reading this – James’ commentary on the dokpa practice text What more reading?! Well you matter…your choices matter to the world… and you have a few days in which to decide. This is a wide-ranging commentary in just 29 pages covering Refuge Bodhicitta the Form and Emptiness of the Heart Sutra and more…including a very beautiful prayer for the world in these troubled times.
…The power of a tantric deity lies in their being absolutely free of solidity. The blessing of the deity is to free us from any sense of solidity. Faith is important in order to do their practice but to have faith in the forms of emptiness is very different from having faith in substantial forms. The goal is always to deconstruct, to dissolve, to let go of the object of fixation…
…In our preparation for death, it’s very important to do a kind of spring cleaning: to go through what we have in our mental house and ask ourselves what use it is to us. Imagine wakening up and thinking, ‘This is the last day of my life.’ — looking at everything we do with fresh eyes, but also saying goodbye to it. Every saying ‘hello’ is also a saying ‘goodbye’. This brings an immediacy and a freshness, but it also prepares us for saying the big goodbyes later…
…Who knows whether we go to a pure land or not? Inside of the tradition, we say that this is definitely possible. By practicing, by praying to Padmasambhava, we gather ourselves together to go on our journey. We might leave our packing till the last moment but a good buddhist will have their bag packed ready to go. What’s inside my bag? My faith, my good karma, my hope, and my meditation. What else are we going to take with us? Nothing else gets through the customs—it’s all taken away…
…Remembering with gratitude and respect that the teachings have come to us because of the practice of other people, and that we are dependent on other people for our liberation—people from the past and people in the present—this is enormously important in the whole tradition of buddhism…
* Thanks to Sean for the photo