Creation stage is mainly for undermining the deluded appearance of ordinary reality, and completion stage for undermining attachment to the reality of creation stage itself.
Sacred outlook is not an attitude or concept that you superimpose on your experience of defiled reality. This does not work. It is not sacred or pure, as opposed to profane or impure. It is seeing the actual nature of reality, stripped of all dualistic fabrications.
In order to experience the true form of vajra existence, that you are already buddha in any case, you need two aspects: ku and yeshe. Ku, or the body aspect, is solidity; it is the ground of sanity. Yeshe is the shining out or the celebrating of that particular situation. In Sanskrit, Ku is kaya, as in dharmakaya, and yeshe is jnana. Kaya and jnana cannot be separated; existence and manifesting always happen together, like positive and negative electricity.
In this view, buddhahood is something to be revealed rather that something to be attained. One image for this is the sun and a dark, cloudy sky. From the perspective of beings on the ground, it looks like the sun is obscured by the clouds. From the perspective of the sun, it is always shining.
Examination of Coming and Going…
On the path that has been traveled, there is no moving,
On the path that has not yet been traveled, that is no moving either,
And in some other place besides the path that has been traveled and the path that has not,
Movement is not perceptible in any way at all.
In order to attain our own liberation from suffering, the focus is on the egolessness of the individual. The process of realizing egolessness is like removing the layers of an onion.
The three prajnas describe the path from understanding to experience to realization.
The prajna that arises from hearing
The prajna that arise from contemplationg
The prajna that arise from meditating
Join us this Sunday for an in-person yoga gathering designed to nurture both body and community. Come move, breathe, and connect with others who share a commitment to living well and supporting one another.
Together, we’re building a healthy, sustainable community—one practice at a time. All levels are welcome, and we’d love to have you with us.
Sign up here: Sunday at 4PM
Hollywood Athletic Club
6525 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, USA
Join us this Saturday for an in-person yoga gathering designed to nurture both body and community. Come move, breathe, and connect with others who share a commitment to living well and supporting one another.
Together, we’re building a healthy, sustainable community—one practice at a time. All levels are welcome, and we’d love to have you with us.
Sign up here: Saturday at 6PM
Hollywood Athletic Club
6525 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, USA
Join us this Friday for an in-person yoga gathering designed to nurture both body and community. Come move, breathe, and connect with others who share a commitment to living well and supporting one another.
Together, we’re building a healthy, sustainable community—one practice at a time. All levels are welcome, and we’d love to have you with us.
Sign up here: Friday at 4PM
Hollywood Athletic Club
6525 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, USA
Join us this Thursday for an in-person yoga gathering designed to nurture both body and community. Come move, breathe, and connect with others who share a commitment to living well and supporting one another.
Together, we’re building a healthy, sustainable community—one practice at a time. All levels are welcome, and we’d love to have you with us.
Sign up here: Thursday at 12PM
Hollywood Athletic Club
6525 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, USA
You are the sky, the rest is just the weather…
First contemplate the preciousness of being free and well favor, it is so hard to gain and so easy to loose, now I must do something meaningful.
Join us to breathe, move and appreciating this precious human body…
The way we often express this idea is, “First thought, best thought.” Usually we have the feeling that this happens first, before other, or that. So whenever anything happens, the first thing to do is to take on the pain yourself. Afterward, you give away anything which is left beyond that, anything pleasureable.
When there is “I”, you take it-when there is “am”, you give it. It takes quite a lot of effort because it is a big job.
Whenever you feel that quality of “me”-ness, whenever you feel “I”- and maybe “am” as well- then you should think of these two saying:
May I receive all evils; may my virtues go to others.
Profit and victory to others; loss and defeat to myself.
The three objects are friends, enemies, and neutrals.
The three poisons are passion, aggression, and ignorance or delusion.
The three seeds of virtue are the absence of passion, aggression, and ignorance.
The practice of this slogan is to take the passion, aggression, and delusion of others upon ourselves so that they may be free and undefiled.
Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. There two should ride the breath.
Sending and taking is a very important practice of the bodhisattva path. It is called tonglen in Tibetan: tong means “sending out” or “letting go,” and len means “receiving” or “accepting.” Tonglen is very important term, the main practice in the development of relative bodhicitta.
Being a child of illusion means that in the postmeditation experience there is a sense that everything is based on creating one’s basic perceptions out of one’s preconceptions.
To realize that requires a lot of mindfulness and awareness working together. Here we are talking about meditation in action, or postmeditation discipline.
The idea of this slogan is that in the sitting practice of meditation and with an understanding of ultimate bodhichitta, you actually transcend the seven types of consciousness, and rest in the eight consciousness, alaya.
The first six types of consciousness are the sensory perceptions: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind consciousness.
7. nuisance mind, neurosis
The idea of resting one’s mind in the basic alaya is to free oneself from that sevenfold mind and rest in simplicity and in clear and nondiscrimating mind.
The antidote is the realization that our discursive thoughts have no origin.
We are not particularly seeking enlightenment or the simple experience of tranquility- we are trying to get over our deception.
Examining does not mean analyzing. It is just viewing things as they are, in the ordinary sense.
Our mind fluctuates constantly, back and forth, forth and back. Look at that, just look at that!
The reason our mind is known as unborn awareness is that we have no idea of its history. We have no idea where this mind, our crazy mind, began in the beginning.
Mind is unborn. But at the same time, it is awareness and clarity.
This slogan is an expression of compassion and openness. It means that whatever you experience in your life-pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, grossness, refinement, sophistication, crudeness, heat, cold or whatever, is purely memory. The actual discipline or practice of the bodhisattva tradition is to regard whatever occurs as phantom. Nothing ever happens. But because nothing happens, everything happens.
That ”nothing happening” is the experience of openness, and that percolation is the experience of compassion.
In the mahayana our main concern is how to awaken ourselves. We begin to realize that we are not as dangerous as we had thought. We develop some notion of kindness, or maitri, and having developed maitri we begin to switch into karuna, or compassion.
The development of relative bodhichitta is connected with the paramita of discipline.
Relative bodhichitta is related with how we start to learn each other and ourselves.
In order to arouse absolute or ultimate bodhicitta, we have to join shamatha and vipashyana together. Having developed the basic precision of shamatha and the total awareness of vipashyana, we put them together so that they are cover the whole of our existence- our behavior patterns and our daily life- everything.
The ultimate or absolute bodhicitta principle is based on developing the paramita of generosity, which is symbolized by a wish-fulfilling jewel.
Generosity is self-existing openness, complete openness. You are no longer subject to cultivating your own scheme or project. And the best way to open yourself up is to make friends with yourself and with others.
The Preliminaries, Which Are a Basic for Dharma Practice.
We should maintain an awareness of:
the preciousness of human life
the reality of death, that it comes without warning
the entrapment of karma-that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, only further entraps you in the chain of cause and effect
the intensity and inevitability of suffering for yourself and for all sentient beings
You cannot become part of the vajrayana circle unless that is trust.
That trust is based on some kind of fear; this fear is part of the natural awakening process of bodhicitta, but it is also a fear of your own inadequacies and shortcomings. Such fear is brought forth here very strikingly, very ordinarily, and absolutely directly.
Fear, doubt, and feeling of inadequacy are all part of the abhisheka process, but when you experience them, they should be crushed on the spot.
In Vajrayana transmission, you learn how to give up everything totally, how to completely surrender your body, speech, and mind. You learn how to relate with the teacher, and you give in thoroughly and utterly.
Giving in or surrendering means not holding back anything that you cherish: any personal pride, personal anger, personal jealousy, personal passion, personal ignorance or delusion.
Once you let go of all that , you begin to feel a sense of relief and joy.
At the mahayana stage, you begin to relate with the teacher as your spiritual friend. In the mahayana, it becomes more joyful to learn from your teacher. You begin to learn how to relate with others, how to relate with yourself, and how to appreciate the world.
