Wednesday, September 21, 2022

The Show Goes On ...


Harry and Meghan ... vanguard of a new age, or just a coupla kids out to grab the world by the ass? To get their share of the pie? But, God bless 'em, on their own terms.

So sad a day, last Monday. September 19, 2022. RIP Queen Elizabeth II. Truly, a Great. End of an era, most certainly.

But ... where’s Meghan? Well, she’s all over the news today. So brave of her and her hubby to disavow the shackles of royal convention, only now to be seemingly caged in a pop culture palace and strapped to the conventions of even endless media scrutiny. And, by the way, apparently quite enthusiastic and skilled at playing along.

Which begs the question, did the media scrutiny come first, or is it the sly working of the publicist’s plan for media exposure?

With the demise of Queen Elizabeth II an era has indeed ended. What is too follow. Seems it's up for grabs. Harry and Meghan appear to be going for that brass ring. But, will the old terms they may unwittingly be operating with work in the new age? I think they'll give it a go. Sally forth, dearies. It'll be a good show, if anything else.

I have the same suspicious question on David Beckham and how it's all over the news that he humbly stood in line with the rest of the hoi polloi to view the Queen's coffin laying in state. Even, reportedly, declining an invitation from an MP to take cuts. I can't say for sure his true motives, but ginning up media attention for self interest to keep himself in the public eye is something at which I'm sure he's quite adept. On that taking cuts, I'll give him credit for declining that bit of inappropriate obvious display of privilege.

So it goes. We shall see.


Tuesday, September 20, 2022

"Reality Distortion Field"

 

Life in Relation to Death — Chagdud Rinpoche

Life in Relation to Death

Chagdud Rinpoche

DEATH AND DYING IS A SUBJECT that evokes such deep and disturbing emotions that we usually try to live in denial of death. Yet we could die tomorrow, completely unprepared and helpless. The time of death is uncertain but the truth of death is not. All who are born will certainly die.

People often make the mistake of being frivolous about death and think, “Oh, well, death happens to everybody. It’s not a big deal, it’s natural. I’ll be fine.”

This is a nice theory until one is dying. Then experience and theory differ. Then one is powerless and everything familiar is lost. One is overwhelmed by a great turbulence of fear, disorientation, and confusion. For this reason it is essential to prepare well in advance for the moment when the mind and body separate.

There are many methods, extraordinary and ordinary, to prepare for the transformation of death. The greatest of these results in enlightenment in one’s lifetime. In enlightenment, death has no relevance to one’s state of being. Enlightened realization is deathless, but it requires flawless meditative practice.

If deathless enlightenment is not accomplished during one’s lifetime, the transition of death itself offers another supreme opportunity to attain enlightenment. But again, realizing the potential of this opportunity depends on having mastered certain meditative skills.

Enlightenment is the highest attainment of the death transition, but it is not the only one. If meditative realization is incomplete yet one has developed the power of prayer, there can be liberation into an environment of perfect bliss, free of suffering, by invoking the blessings of enlightened wisdom beings.

To accomplish the meditative skills and power needed to direct our mind at death, we must learn about the relationship of life and death, about the process of dying, and about the transitions from the moment of death until rebirth. In this way we become familiar with death and are not caught by surprise as the process begins to unfold.

Warned of a hurricane, we don’t wait until the storm pounds the shore before we start to prepare. Similarly, knowing death is looming offshore, we shouldn’t wait until it overpowers us before developing the meditative skills necessary to achieve the great potential of the mind at the moment of death.

DEATH AS WELL AS BIRTH, sickness, and old age are the four basic afflictions of the human condition. They are obvious and inescapable, in our personal experience and the experiences of other people. Yet these four afflictions fall within the larger categories of suffering that are experienced by all beings, human and nonhuman alike.

One of the greatest sufferings of sentient beings is the pain they experience from not getting what they want — or getting what they think they want, then finding it is not enough or that it is not what they really want. These constant frustrations are intrinsic to the impermanent, changeable nature of cyclic existence.

Then there is suffering atop suffering, which means that no matter how bad it is, it can get worse. On the day you lose your wallet, your tooth begins to ache and you get a furious call from your boss. Or on a larger scale, countries plagued by famine are also wracked by war.

Suffering pervades cyclic existence like oil pervades sesame seeds. Like the oil, the complete pervasiveness of suffering is not always apparent, especially in phases when pleasure predominates and things seem to go well. Yet, just as oil becomes obvious when the hard little seeds are ground and pressed, so latent suffering is directly experienced when our layers of egotistic assumptions crack under the oppression of cyclic existence.

Why is it like this? The answer is that we are subject to karma, the inexorable law of cause and effect. The question that follows logically is: What causes karma? The root cause is the poisons of the mind. Our mind is basically confused, because we do not recognize its absolute nature. Lacking this understanding, we slip into an erroneous framework, which is duality.

We first grasp at a “self” who perceives and an “object” that is perceived. Seeing the object, we define its size, shape, and color. Then we judge it: “It’s pretty. It’s ugly. I like it. I don’t like it. It makes me happy. It makes me unhappy.” Finally, we feel either attachment or aversion: “I want it. I don’t want it.” This is where suffering begins.

[Padma Publishing 1987]

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Guru Yoga ... [It's not what you think.]


DZONGSAR JAMYANG KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

In Vajrayana, in order to enable the guru to help us and work on our dualistic ego-centered preoccupations, we are supposed to think that the guru is no different in wisdom than the Buddha. This is the highest form of mind training. We are literally making a hero out of someone who, because he sees our potential, has no qualms about challenging and even abusing our narrow minded and habitual patterns. This is a very radical, difficult and revolutionary method. From a conventional point of view, or from the point of view of ego-cherishing, the whole notion of the guru-disciple relationship is something almost criminal. Yet the point to remember is that the only purpose of the existence of the guru is to function as a skillful means to combat habits of dualistic conceptualisations, and to combat the tricks and tenacity of ego-clinging. In this way the guru is a living manifestation of the teachings.

It needs to be emphasized that it is our perception of the guru which enables the guru to function as a manifestation of the dharma. At first we see the guru as an ordinary person, and then as our practice develops we start to see the guru as more of an enlightened being, until finally we learn to recognise the guru as being nothing but an external manifestation of our own awakeness or buddhamind. In a subtle way then, it is almost irrelevant whether or not the teacher is enlightened. The guru-disciple relationship is not about worshipping a guru, but providing the opportunity to liberate our confused perceptions of reality.



Chagdud Tulku - Ngondro Commentary 

No one ever reached enlightenment without a mastery of guru yoga so profound that he or she was able to receive — without any resistance, distortion, or doubt — the transmission of the guru's pristine awareness.
The Buddha Shakyamuni himself said that, without the lama, there can be no buddha. The supreme good fortune to receive this mind-to-mind transference of realization arises from pure samaya with our lama and preparation of our mind through purification and the accumulation of vast stores of merit. Our mind stands ready and receptive, like a well-tilled field waiting to be sown.

Transmission may occur in a formal empowerment or teaching, or it may come when we are least expecting it. Stories abound of Buddhist practitioners experiencing dramatic, nondual revelations of absolute nature when their teacher struck them. The most famous of these stories concerns the mahasiddha Tilopa striking Naropa, who had begun as a great Buddhist scholar, then completely surrendered to Tilopa's instructions even when they seemed exceedingly eccentric.

After his years of devoted service to his guru, Naropa's moment of supreme realization dawned when Tilopa suddenly hit him on the head with a shoe. From that point on, his realization matched Tilopa's — there was no longer any separation between his mind and his teacher's.

More recently, in the first decades of this century, the previous incarnation of His Holiness Penor Rinpoche was entrusted into the care of the unsurpassed master Khanpo Ngaga. Because he was an undisputed incarnation (tulku) of Drubwang Pema Norbu, everyone knew the boy had elements of greatness, yet he seemed a bit dense for one who had embodied brilliant qualities of scholarship and meditative realization in his past lifetimes.

One day Khanpo Ngaga and the young tulku went for a walk. When they arrived at the top of a hill outside the monastery, the boy respectfully laid out his zan (a Buddhist robe, resembling a shawl) on the ground as a seat for his lama. Khanpo Ngaga sat down and handed the tulku his shoes, an unusually fine pair that someone had brought from China and offered to him. As the boy placed the shoes on the hillside, one of them tumbled down and fell into a mud puddle.

With lightning swiftness, Khanpo Ngaga snatched the other shoe and whacked the tulku's head with it. For some moments the boy stood dazed, but far from knocking him stupid, the jolt opened wondrous recognition of the empty nature of things.

In the days that followed, from that single glimpse of absolute truth arose vast understanding. No scholarly discourse, however arcane, remained beyond the tulku's comprehension. From that point onward, the dharma qualities he had cultivated in his past lifetimes blossomed naturally.

Usually, however, transmission unfolds gradually rather than in a single, dramatic moment. Each time we hear the teachings, their meaning for us reaches a deeper level. Each time we interact with our lama, our resistance softens. We begin to see the barriers set up by our own karmic patterns and habitual concepts.
The teachings of the dharma provide us with manifold methods to overcome those barriers, and each time we use them successfully we increase both our faith in the effectiveness of dharma and our faith in the lama's realization. Our inner resonance with the lama grows stronger, and our longing for union, our devotion, our reliance on the lama evolve into a kind of spontaneous responsiveness.

Outwardly everything may appear the same; inwardly our heart is full and our mind expansive. Boundaries fall away before transcendent knowledge of the empty nature of everything. We realize that all along the lama's realization has penetrated the dense layers of our obscurations.

Now, as those layers clear away, our openness allows us to receive our teacher's mind-to-mind transmission, nondually, beyond words. Words cannot capture the experience or even the individual qualities of the lama's pristine awareness — boundless compassion, transcendent knowledge, nondual recognition of the three kayas as inseparable.

Naming points the way, but in actual moments of transmission, all the complexities of names and concepts fall away before infinite, ineffable simplicity. We rest in the absolute lama. Anyone who has truly experienced this extraordinary transmission has no less than the deepest reverence for his or her guru and will never turn back before attaining enlightenment.
We begin guru yoga in the Dudjom Tersar Ngondro by visualizing ourselves as Vajrayogini and, in the space in front of us, Guru Rinpoche, inseparable from our own lama, embodiment of the quintessential form of all lineage lamas.

In the context of the practice, Guru Rinpoche reigns as the symbolic lama, the focus of our prayers and aspirations, the source of blessings and empowerments. We pray to Guru Rinpoche, imploring him to hold us in continuous compassion, during this and future lifetimes and in the intermediate states between lifetimes.
Having prayed in this manner, we begin repetition of the Vajra Guru mantra — Om Ah Hung Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hung — a mantra so powerful it brings liberation to whoever continually recites it with devotion.

In the course of ngondro, we recite one million two hundred thousand mantras, one hundred thousand for each of the twelve syllables. We should open to the direct perception that repeating the Vajra Guru mantra actually manifests Guru Rinpoche's presence, that its resonance represents him in the form of sound, that the mantra as speech remains inseparable from his body and mind.

The Vajra Guru mantra incorporates the essence mantras of all enlightened ones. Om invokes the blessing of Guru Rinpoche's enlightened body, vajra body; Ah invokes his vajra speech; Hung, his vajra mind. Om Ah Hung together indicates that Guru Rinpoche encompasses the inseparable three kayas.
The mantra also holds the power of the five aspects of pristine awareness, usually referred to as the “five wisdoms.” Vajra purifies anger and invokes the mirror-like wisdom of the vajra family. Guru purifies pride and invokes the wisdom of equanimity of the ratna family. Padma purifies attachment and invokes the discriminating wisdom of the padma family. Siddhi purifies jealousy and invokes the all-accomplishing wisdom of the karma family. Hung purifies ignorance and invokes the wisdom of dharmadhatu of the buddha family.

Vajra Guru (dorje lama) taken together indicates the unsurpassed realization and qualities of Guru Rinpoche as a supremely accomplished being who has brought the path of Vajrayana to consummation. Vajra means that, diamond-like, his recognition of absolute nature cuts through ordinary concepts and poisonous emotions. He has attained the supreme mastery of the inseparable three kayas and accomplished all qualities of enlightenment through transcendent knowledge and pristine awareness. Guru means that Guru Rinpoche embodies the gathered qualities of all enlightened buddhas of past, present, and future.

Padma indicates that Guru Rinpoche is the nirmanakaya emanation of Buddha Amitabha, lord of the lotus family. Siddhi refers to the two kinds of accomplishment, ordinary siddhis such as supernormal powers and the supreme siddhi of enlightenment. Hung invokes Guru Rinpoche's blessing to grant the two siddhis.

The mantra recitation concludes with the bestowal of the four empowerments (see the meditation instructions below).

The realization of this formal practice extends into daily life, where it forms the basis of pure perception. All form is experienced as the form of the lama, all sound as the speech of the lama, all mental events as the mind of the lama. This sacred outlook imbues every moment with the potential of guru yoga.

Friday, September 09, 2022

Big Brother's Foot In the Door is an App

This today from the folks who are running the show in New Jersey ... thanks to "Bluetooth proximity technology".

Add Your Phone to the COVID Fight. Download COVID Alert NJ.

COVID Alert NJ is New Jersey's free and secure mobile app that anonymously alerts users if they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.

The app also provides users with up-to-date information on New Jersey reopening news, key COVID-19 metrics, and a user-friendly symptom tracking tool. COVID Alert NJ uses Bluetooth proximity technology. The app will never record any identifying data. All users will remain anonymous.

How it Works: Download COVID Alert NJ on the App Store or Google Play Store. Opt-in to receive "Exposure Notifications".

As you go about your day, the app will use Bluetooth to sense any "close contacts" — other app users who are within 6 feet of you for 15 minutes or more within a 24-hour period.

When your app senses a close contact, your phone will exchange a secure random code with the close contact's phone. It's important to note that your location and name are never disclosed.

If you test positive for COVID-19, the New Jersey Department of Health will issue a verification code through SMS/text message to the phone number associated with your positive test result. The verification code will allow you to anonymously notify your "close contacts" by uploading your app's close contact codes.

Each day, the app will compare your list of close contact codes to the list of codes associated with positive COVID-19 app users. If there's a match you will get an Exposure Alert, along with appropriate next steps.