Essential practice => a way of living that can be fruitfully applied in whatever situation or circumstance we find ourselves in.

An ‘essential practice’ for the maturing of our humanness – what I have come to think of as a path of ‘natural awakening’ or ‘contemplative science’, or ‘buddhadharma’– involves much more than practicing or rehearsing something with the idea of becoming good at it. When we speak of the practice of medicine, we are referring to a ‘praxis’, an ongoing discipline that interweaves study, observation and skilled application. I use the phrase ‘essential practice’ to hint at or point towards an essential praxis, a core/heart attitude, or matrix of activities, that when thoroughly integrated in all aspects of our life and living, will support a maturing of our capacity to participate with wisdom and compassion in this vast cosmos-wide mystery of inter-relational existence.

Essential practice is not just another contemplative exercise. It is a way of living that can be fruitfully applied in whatever situation or circumstance we find ourselves in; whether engaging in particular forms of meditation, or participating in community, or raising a family, or going to work, or involvement in social or political action, or pursuing academic enquiry or artistic endeavours. It can be applied when we are healthy or ill, privileged or oppressed, inspired or just quietly trundling along. This essential practice is a discipline in which we realise that our path of awakening is inseparable from the evolving flow of our own particular life and living.

In the natural flow of whatever is occurring,
cultivate a continuity of profoundly nourishing ease
suffused with serene alertness and vivid discernment.
Whether walking, sitting, reclining or standing still,
allow everything to rest in its own place.

In the natural flow of whatever is occurring, cultivate a continuity of profoundly nourishing ease. “Profoundly nourishing ease” – What does this mean? How is the universe functioning such that I call it profoundly nourishing ease? What does it actually mean to be easeful – to relax?

The ‘profound’ aspect of nourishing ease hints at relaxation in every domain of activity whether subtle or grossly manifest: easeful physiology, easeful body, easeful emotions, easeful feelings, easeful speaking, easeful listening, easeful thinking, easeful remembering, easeful planning, easeful fantasising, easeful analysing, easeful striving, easeful presence – what does this mean? Each one of us has to ask this question and to ask in ways that deepen the evolving process of our own understanding. What is the experience of functioning in a way that resonates profound ease and relaxation? For some it might involve softening. Softening physical tension. Softening emotional compulsions. Softening opinions and habitual preference and bias. For others it might involve forgiveness, or patience, or love. How is the universe functioning when we experience it as easefulness and relaxation? (relaxation => ease => smooth, fluid, subtle, responsive, malleable, workable, effortlessly integrated)

Profound ease is not merely a passive endpoint. It is proactively nourishing, in the sense that it feeds us in a total and complete way: physiologically, emotionally, conceptually. It is the basis of a strong and vibrantly resilient engagement in life and living. Initially, I get brief glimpses of what this might mean. Then, familiarizing with this glimpse and attempting to extend it becomes my practice . This, in turn, inevitably will reveal further unexpected subtle states of non-ease. The non-ease invites further enquiry into what is ease and how might we encourage it.

Gently, persistently, encouraging, again and again.
Revelation arising from these enquiries become our practice,
which leads to further revelation,
and so it goes,
this deepening,
this continuous refinement,
this on-going mastery of ease and nourishment.

Ease . . .
no conflict,
exquisite delicate yet robust integration,
a complete acceptance/appreciation of the utter legitimacy of other,
these universes of being and beingness that we perceive.
Ahhhh . . .
profoundly nourishing ease
this capacity for radical inclusivity,
this presence of immeasurable love.

“Profoundly nourishing ease suffused with serene alertness and vivid discernment“. Don’t take this as an instruction and feel hurried to put it into practice. Rather allow yourself to ask; what does this actually mean for me, in terms of lived experience? ‘Suffused’ hints at being blended evenly with and through something. Inseparable from profoundly nourishing ease is a vibrant, utterly alive alertness. Such blending; effortless presence, a voluminous space of poised wakefulness, a capacity for spontaneous effortless responsiveness; a natural presence and presencing, this ever-fresh nowness, this unpretentious immanence. And with it and through it – ‘completely suffusing it’ – are perceived edges and boundaries: – precision; clearly this and demonstrably that. This is red. That is green. This is square. That is round. This is clear. That is cloudy. This is encouraging integration and wholeness. That is encouraging fragmentation and conflict. Become familiar with this way of being; engaged discernment/awakeness, co-arising with profoundly nourishing ease.

Investigate this state of “serene alertness and vivid discernment”. How is your digestion happening when these qualities are present? How do your senses function? How do you use your eyes or your ears in the process of engaging with others? What is the texture of your knowing and how does this relate to accompanying emotion, expectation and ways of relating? How is the universe functioning when it is manifesting alertness and discernment and how might you encourage these qualities?

Ease/alertness/discernment is the heart business of samatha/vipassana.
In mahamudra it is referred to as a co-emergence – sahaja,
an immeasurable matrix of interdependent, interbeing, inter-knowing;
no need to embellish, to exaggerate or diminish,
all of me present with and for all of you,
this great surrendering, this great allowing,
this great honouring and respecting;
not you as I wish you to be or even you as I perceive you to be
but you as you are in all your unknowable unfathomable fullness.

For beginners, these experiences are patchy. They may appear as moments of blessing and then vanish into god-knows-where. Gradually it occurs to us that cultivating a continuity of ease/alertness/discernment is a way of functioning that flavours all effective dharma practice.

‘Cultivating’ anything is a rich and complex activity. It involves preparing the earth, planting seeds, watering, feeding, weeding and harvesting. It involves observing, learning, remembering and continually composting. It involves patience, intuition, generosity and forbearance and a sense of sacredness appearing in the everyday and ordinary. In time, effortful technique and practice becomes effortless wisdom-in-action, and we realise that we are becoming skilled in this. Faith and trust and wonderment are dawning.

Now every aspect of living invites our attentiveness. Everything – every activity – and everyone is potentially precious, deep, vast and meaningful. Whether walking, sitting, standing or lying down, whether practicing meditation or raising a family or studying or working – whatever we are doing – allowing everything and everyone to rest in its own place, in its own fullness.

These are mysteries,
deepening day by day,
revealing lives of blessing
in gratitude,
essential practice,
sahaja.

Click here to view the fully formatted article in PDF

An object can always have a name. This designated thing sits in its space; sometimes a geographic space of physical linkage and relationship, sometimes an emotional or conceptual space; and we, from the perspective of our own place, can then name it. But what if this ‘object’ is a constantly changing, multi-dimensional, fluid process, and we who wish to name it are equally fluid and constantly transforming. And what if the worlds around it and around us are similarly transient? How can we put this into words? How can we name the unnamable? And out of this questioning, the even bigger question; how on earth can we meaningfully speak?

When teaching in class situations I find this conundrum easier to resolve, as I can accompany my words with gesture and movement and changing textures of rhythm, inflection and intonation. In writing, I can’t do this and so I often find myself dipping into verse form, or combinations of verse and prose, while all the time holding the aspiration that somehow the dancing of your whole being – your body/brain/mind/community in the act of responding to these printed glyphs – will bring forth a sense of meaning that links us in dynamic dance, an intimacy of intermingling lives arising as the un-pin-downable mystery of our co-existence.

Begin with this living.
this unity relating.
Not an abstract concept
but these particular cicadas,
this aural tapestry of pulsing song
of wind and trees and fuzzy warmth in left ankle
and this mysterious need to touch you so deeply that the universe
laughs in cascading smiles of consummation and delight.

Begin with the unity of experience that you are dwelling in,
the seamlessness that you are.
There are no gaps, no holes.
Sight and sound and smell and taste and touch and remembering and feeling and empathizing;
swimming through and with each other,
a flowing of experience,
the miraculous presence that is happening now.

Is this not how we live?
Seamless, awesome gob-smacked presence
living unities birthing stories of bits and fragments;
thrilling in the vibrancy of hopes and
fears and worries and wonderings,
this passion in action,
this wholeness containing all characters and places.

Feel your way into this.

It’s dancing, leaping, turning, balancing,
bending and surrendering always.
Flows of smell,
rhythms of texture
colours of knowing
patterns of now-ing;
Volumes of sentience within volumes of sentience
Sphere-like and spacious
No boundaries, all centred,
Galaxies singing
Worlds within realms
Realms within worlds these
Dancings of dancings
Musings of musings
Reaching of reachings;
Cells and mountains, molecules and stars, collectives and singularities,
this living,
this privilege.
Creation all over
magnificent, incomprehensible, staggering and beautiful.

And emerging with this ungraspable wholeness,
A particular angle,
a focus,
a view,
an observer’s experience;
Mine, not anyone else’s.
Me, not thee.
An ordering of everything seamlessly complete
A uniqueness, unlike anything that ever has been and ever will be.
And I evaluate . . . We evaluate.
And judge, and select, and restrict, and funnel, and channel,
Bringing forth each other,
Bringing forth infinite gradations and colourations of others,
Universes emerging,
Talents in process.
Yogis of the natural world.

Trying to understand it, I’m pulled to a byway,
stalled on the verge with traffic blurring by in all directions.
Contemplating reasons, evaluating everything – graspings for certainty –
Breathless and serious,
then back in the flowing
again and again,

And gradually . . .
very gradually
Activity so subtle,
A transient feeling
This wholeness in motion
This ocean of responsiveness,
This branching of immeasurable branchings
This confidence of specificity
This exuberance of dancing plasticity.
This celebration of all of me, celebrating with all of you.
– even cancer cells –
All of us,
experiments in beingness,
Birthings of birthings
Possibility offered
Bridges from now to now,
Knowing to knowing
Stories unfolding
Blessed be this
all!

These words are actually squiggles on a screen; black marks on white backgrounds. I sometimes think they have no more meaning than the black lines and dots of a musical score. Yet when accompanied by vocal cords and breath and feeling and memory and empathy –the bow of our breath stroking the cello of our communal bodies – music bursts forth, a kind of magnetic pull, inviting others to dance.

In the very midst of today’s media hyped egotism and lust for power
and celebrity, and global money and strongman blindness,
Naming the unnameable;
expressing the inexpressible,
being the living,
living the music,
musing the living – this interbeingness that we are.
May we learn to do this well.

In the immeasurable expanse of nature in process,
In faith and trust and wonderment we give ourselves to this suchness,
This seamless mystery of birthing and dying.

A few months back, I received an e-mail from people in Brazil who are translating some of my writings into Portuguese. They were having difficulty with the word ‘suchness’, which is not uncommon even for people fluent in English. They wondered if I had any suggestions. The following post is an edited version of my response.

Words we use in dharma exploration need to be employed with a light touch. After all, words are tools of communion, ways by which we creatures link with each other, bringing forth a sense of community, communing in and with a larger world. They are attempts to point out, or to invoke subtleties of healing and integrated living experience. The richness – the depth and breadth of our collaborative experiencing – is what is important, not the sound, or squiggle on a page we use to draw our attention, or someone else’s attention, to a particular thing or event. With this in mind it would be wise to approach words or phrases with respect and precision and, in a loose and possibly even playful way, giving them full rein to reverberate throughout the myriad domains and levels of our lives.

The meaning of a word has only partly to do with definitions found in dictionaries. Our visceral sense of meaning rests in an abundance of experience co-emerging on the heels of puffs of air and densities of vibration arising in the collision of sound waves and flesh; a transient assemblage of feelings, sensations, memories, and associations – a shifting body/brain/mind/community in action. Meaning depends on context. It depends on cultural assumptions, physiological functionings and ecological situations and circumstances.

To understand what I mean by ‘suchness’ let’s briefly consider its origins. We can trace it back to the Buddhist word ‘tathā’ which is part of ‘tathāgata’. Tathā means thus or such. Ga, from gaté refers to movement; coming, going, being – or even, travelling. Ta is a suffix ending indicating ‘ness’.

In ancient scriptures, the Buddha, recognising that the fullness of his own being was ‘immeasurable’, ‘inscrutable’ and ‘hard to fathom’, often referred to himself as ‘the tathāgata’; one who is a dynamic process; a coming-going-being of reality – such as it is. Speaking this way he avoided using the pronoun ‘I’ which had limited meaning in the minds of his listeners. Over time, Buddhist philosophers began to identify the essential quality of tathāgata as tathāta which became translated into English as ‘suchness’. The Oxford English Dictionary has many definitions for the word ‘such’. One way it is used is to indicate, “something as having a specified or implied quality to an intense degree; so great, splendid, marvellous” – such a wonderful fellow! In Buddhist usage, the words tathāta or tathāgata – ‘suchness’ – refers to ‘reality as it actually is’, ‘such as it is’, ‘magnificent and splendid as it is’ – reality – a dynamic all inclusive continuously gestating systemic wholeness in the act of knowing itself. Suchness is buddha nature in action.

In writing, I often specify suchness by using the phrase ‘this suchness’. By ‘this’, I indicate that I’m not referring to a generic abstract quality called suchness, but to the totality of beingness that is birthing this particular present moment – this suchness.

If you were sitting beside a cat and someone asked you “what is a cat?” you might point to the cat and say “thus is a cat”, or “such is a cat”. In doing so, you don’t just mean the shape of the cat is the cat, or the smell is the cat, or the physiology is the cat, or the word ‘cat’ is the cat, or the cattish behaviour is the cat. Differentiating the cat from its environment, you don’t mean that the floor is not the cat, or the surrounding air, or flowers and nearby garden is not the cat. Also, you don’t mean the neural matrix of your brain or a pattern on your retina is cat, yet without these, for you, no cat would appear. This uniquely magnificent and splendid moment of cat-ness involves a collaborative functioning of all of these aspects, and more.

Classical prajñāpāramitā writing,¹ often appears to define a thing by saying what it is not. This is easy to do. A cat is obviously not a banana. But it’s harder to say what the cat actually is in its entirety. To even begin to approach what something is, we need to nurture a continuously open mind of precise and playful curiosity and question. Aspiring to jolt readers into states of bright non-clinging awareness, the language of prajñāpāramitā texts is often negative in expression, for example, the famous statement, “there is no form, no feeling, no perception . . . and no four noble truths”, found in “The Heart Sutra”. Some philosopher/yogis recognised that although saying what a thing was not, was a logically accurate way of speaking, it could still be very misleading if it failed to sustain our curiosity about what that ‘thing’ is. It risked turning the ‘not’ – the absence – into yet another thing, a thing called ’emptiness’ or un-pin-downableness, which then easily became another object of certainty and so ongoing vibrant question fades into a complacency of non-enquiry.

‘Suchness’ is an English attempt to point out with one word the rich possibilities of the Sanskrit, tathāta or tathāgatagārbha – this gestating womb of suchness, primordial buddha nature, absolute truth, the true nature of being, the total field of all events and meanings. It’s the intermeshing totality of activities that we are. Look around you – your emerging experience – this suchness – this seamless mystery of birthing and dying.

English translations of Buddhist texts have already replaced tathāta and associated words, with the English neologism ‘suchness’. In these efforts to translate my writings into Portuguese, it might be better to leave suchness as ‘suchness’, rather than trying to replace this English word with a single Portuguese word. Instead it might be more useful to illustrate what we mean by suchness and then gradually, as more people speaking Portuguese become familiar with the term, a word or simple phrase might collectively emerge that can invoke this immense continuously creative domain of living experience.

In the immeasurable expanse of nature-in-process,
In faith and trust and wonderment,
We give ourselves to this suchness,
This seamless mystery of birthing and dying.

Spacious, loving, with feet solid in the earth,
We nurture the hints at blessedness,
The myriad faces and masks of luminous knowing.

Moving in and as this flow of compassion and deepening enquiry,
we engage with all beings in ways that support
the integrity, the stability and the beauty of the entire field of life and living.

Endnote
1. “Prajñāpāramitā writing” refers to a large collection of Buddhist texts that address the perfecting, or perfection, of wisdom which itself is closely associated with a correct realization of śūnyāta or ’emptiness’ – the basic space of phenomena, the un-pin-downable immeasurable spacious openness of inter-being/inter-knowing.

Click here to download a fully formatted PDF

We are constantly ‘explaining’ things to ourselves and sometimes,
we try to share these explanations with others.
Through this process, we make sense of the world.

An Embracive View

Essentially, all explanations are attempts to understand the same thing; this ineffable, continuously cresting wave of spontaneous presence and immediacy, that is our life and living. In a sense, this ever-present flowing of experience can never be completely and exhaustively explained. It simply and primordially is. Each one of us is effortlessly born into it. Each morning we wake to it. Wherever we look . . . there it is and even the looking itself, is what it is. What is changing, through time and evolving culture, are the structurally determined generative mechanisms that we are willing and able to accept as explanations for this mystery.

Through explanation we birth worlds.

Explanation and understanding go hand in hand with capacity for experience. What I experience, or even better, the experience that I am, reveals, or demonstrates, the nature of my understanding while simultaneously my understanding is a kind of explanation that facilitates and shapes my experience. Our previously lived experience reverberating in the form of memory, is what we draw upon and use in the process of explaining things. This reflexive process is both what we have to work with, and what we need to realize. The expansion of this process through time (mahāgatā) facilitates the diversifying of life. And so we discover ourselves to be participants in an evolving universe which pulses between the poles of creativity and conservation; diversification and consolidation. This is the ground of mahāmudrā where the practice, and the fruition of the practice, are not two – where all qualities are simultaneously co-emergent (sahaja).

Explanation or Assumption

Our moment to moment living is influenced by innumerable assumptions which underpin our search for a sense of meaning. By assumption I mean, largely unconscious paradigms (un-thought-out confidences about the nature of reality) through which, and by means of which, we situate all objects (ourselves included) in the matrix of this living world of our ongoing flowing experience. We operate with myriad assumptions, covering many levels or domains of experience. For example, most people unquestioningly assume that there is a real world outside themselves that they can correctly or incorrectly perceive. We assume that time is universally meaningful, that money is important, that there is progress in living which can be made or not made, and that there exists a natural hierarchy of values such that we will care for our families before we care for strangers. We assume that we have an inside and an outside and that we can own things and living beings. We assume that the functioning of an object is largely determined by the constitution of its structure. We assume that we experience representations of the world in our brain and that some kind of translation mechanism allows us to link with others. It would take tens of pages to list a small fraction of the unacknowledged assumptions that shape our living and values. If an assumption becomes more conscious, at that point we might begin to call it ‘an explanation’.

Our living involves continuously ‘making sense’ of currently arising experience. It is as if, in the midst of a specific moment of looking, I am asking, what is this density of colour, this blur of line, this particular symphony of sounds and smells associated with these memories of touch and taste? – so many questions: what? why? where? when? and how? Where am I going with this? Where is it leading? What does it imply? How does it work? Why is it this and not that? – and so forth. At a very fundamental level we are all asking; “What on earth is going on here?”

I’m not suggesting that this enquiry is necessarily intentional. Making sense of experience and our role in it is largely a subliminal, non-verbal process, yet it is through this internalized explaining that an impression of a seamlessly integrated world of experience emerges for us. Everything fits – these particular sounds and sights and memories and muscular sensations – arising as an undivided single occurrence. Everything is effortlessly ‘wholified’. There seems to be a natural logic to the situation, even if we don’t like it or agree with it. This knowing/feeling of seamless integration underpins our most basic sense of sanity. It’s not optional. We need this to be healthy yet few people ever think about it.

There appears to be a cyclical pattern here. With increased familiarity, what were once new explanations begin to etiolate into a mist of unconscious assumption. On the other hand, when illumined with curiosity and interest, assumptions can be revealed, transformed in the ‘a–ha’ revelation of fresh explanation. Our confidence in the validity of our experience co-emerges with this process of explanation/assumption. Understanding how we understand and then doing this well, is central to the path of liberation.

Over the last twenty years, I have been deeply inspired through studying the work of biologist Humberto Maturana, and integrating it with my understanding of the view and practice of Mahāmudrā. Maturana put a lot of energy into distinguishing two “explanatory paths” or basic approaches to explanation. One he called, a path of objectivity, and the other he called a path of objectivity-in-parenthesis. An essential difference between the two is that with the path of objectivity, we situate ourselves outside the thing or process we wish to describe or understand; as if we had a detached God’s-eye view. We often call this “being objective”. With the path of objectivity-in-parenthesis – sometimes written (objectivity) or “objectivity” – we situate ourselves in the system, or as part of the system, that we are trying to describe. I have found this to be a very useful way of considering things.

If you think about it, you will realize that any explanation is inevitably an explanation of someone’s experience. As such, the explaining takes place in the realm of languaging and observation. A successful explanation will suggest a generative process that if allowed to run would give rise to, or generate, the thing one wishes to explain. Inevitably, the explanation will be based on coherences of ones’ prior experiences. What else do we have to work with? The explanation however, is not the same as the generative process. The explanation happens in the realm of languaging – the domain of the observer – but the generative process takes place in or through the dynamic multi-leveled total organism/medium functioning.

Objectivity

Desire for truth; anger against, and frustration with, falsehood; and confusion arising over which is which; each of these three, and combinations thereof, arise in the explanatory path of objectivity. Here, we assume the existence of a fundamental reality or truth – a reality outside or beyond oneself – a reality that transcends any individual’s limited experience or opinion.1 This reality/truth is then seen as an ultimate arbiter, to be realized, if not by the gifted and wise then at least, by someone with their eyes and ears open. For people operating in the path of objectivity, to not see or accept this fact or truth – is often regarded as a sign of stupidity, or perversity, or ignorance. By eliminating falsity, what remains is truth, as if it were patiently sitting there, waiting for us to see or discover it. For many, this attitude/assumption has become an internalized, generally unconscious path, philosophy or paradigm of living. By grasping and holding on to what we are convinced is objective and true – by committing to such truth – falsity appears to be denied. In communities operating with this path of explanation, to not be able to discern truth from falsehood, is a sign of confusion, ineptitude or shear stubborn mindedness.

Historically, this explanatory path of objectivity without parenthesis, has become a social tool for coercing others. Our view or my view is right. It’s objective. It’s a fact. Your view is wrong. Upholders of correct view are called authorities: religious authorities, scientific authorities, legal authorities and so forth. And so we threaten others. Evidence based science demands that, if you are not insane, you will agree with me and support me. This approach to living leads to worlds of experience that are dense and hard edged, worlds characterized by limited flexibility, strong expectations and aspirations to control.

Objectivity-in-Parenthesis

The explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis – a transient, continuously morphing sense of objectivity that co-emerges with a shifting sense of self in relationship with others – arises dependent on the multi-domained and multi-dimensional autopoietic activity of living systems-in-process. This way of explaining invites understanding rather than demanding obeisance to a particular view. It invites worlds of mutual responsiveness and potentially, worlds of mutual respect. In this explanatory path there is room for innumerable views or expressions of (objectivity) – in theory, at least equal to the number of sentient beings. In a grand sense we could say that this dynamic process enables the diversity of life. Every situation arises as an invitation to deepen and broaden our understanding; an understanding that is flavoured with a sense of uncontrived attunement (of body, speech and mind) with others. If my ‘understanding’ of a situation is good, I will feel and act in a flow of in-tunement. If my ‘understanding’ is poor, I will feel more conflicted as things just don’t seem to connect.

One’s view of things is all embracive.
One’s thoughts are in tune with every situation.
All one’s actions spring from this.
(from the sadhana of Guru Rinpoché)

Objectivity-in-parenthesis is not the same as “subjectivity”. In our culture, to say someone is being subjective is to dismiss their experience as being merely an opinion or a personal view. ‘Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.’ To have an opinion, or to accept that the world you perceive arises in or through the functioning that is giving rise to you in this very moment, does not necessarily challenge a simultaneous assumption that there is an objectively real world that lies beyond your limited view. We often denigrate ‘subjective experience’ to at best a partial reflection of reality and at worst a dysfunctional disconnect from reality. This kind of ‘subjectivity’ is still part of the explanatory path of objectivity (without parenthesis). They are two sides of the same coin where subjective experience is always in contrast to a supposedly actual objective truth.

In the explanatory path of objectivity-in-parenthesis, each being’s experience arises in and through the co-evolving relationship of organism and environment. This could be conceived of as a radical expanse of inter-responsiveness in which we realise that our so called personal experience is seamlessly interrelating and inter-adjusting to the interrelating and inter-adjusting relationships of others. What each of us does matters and together we bring forth the world!

Guru Yoga and Mahāmudrā

As human beings, we are a communion of responsive subjects, not merely a functional arrangement of inanimate objects. The world of your experience is not just your own business. It’s not ‘merely subjective’. Everything we do reverberates through the world of doings which are the inter-being, inter-knowing worlds of everyone. With this perspective, I imagine a dynamic matrix; a continuously cresting wave of now. This is the living that we are. Beginningless and endless, it is our only experience and it is all we have to work with. As students of life it is simultaneously what we study, the activity of studying and, it is what teaches us. In Tibetan Buddhism, to realise the union of what we are with what teaches us (with what ‘gurus’ us) and to live in harmony with every situation, is to realise ‘Guru Yoga’. To be this realisation in the continuous flow of ongoing living is to ‘practice’ Mahāmudrā.

Since the totality of awareness
structuring this cresting wave of nowness
is the real Buddha,
In openness and contentment
I find the Lama in my heart.
When we realize this unending expanse of multi realmed knowing
is the very nature of what teaches us,
Then there is no need for dysfunctional assumptions
such as attached grasping (greed),
or weeping prayers (confusion),
or artificial complaints (anger),
By simply relaxing in this uncontrived open natural state,
We obtain the blessing of spontaneous self-liberation of whatever arises.
(paraphrased from “Calling the Lama from Afar”, a prayer by Dudjom Rinpoche)

A human life could be characterized as a continuous apprenticeship with a timeless master, the vast expanse of collaborative creation-in-action. This is biocracy manifest; a pattern of organizing in which every being is both a legitimate voice, and a responsive ear. Democracy is sometimes described as governance by the people, for the people. Even when it is practiced effectively it leaves out too much of the living world to be a health supporting way of organizing our affairs. Biocracy is governance by the inter-responding matrix of innumerable living systems which together are the evolving flowering of life that we are. Recognizing that the continuous process of making sense of our experience in relationship with others who are simultaneously making sense of their own experiences, is the ocean of inter-subjectivity in which we live; the need to do this well coalesces at the very centre of our being. Then, smiling, breathing and present, we can radiate in all dimensions and directions, illumining the world.

Endnotes and Concluding Remarks:

1. ” Reality – that which we connote in our Western patriarchal culture when we speak of reality – is an explanatory assumption, an imagined domain of independent entities that we use in order to give universal validity to our explanations of our experiences.” H. Maturana, “Biology of Love” p154

———————–

In the process of writing this short essay, I made a number of notes that I didn’t use. I’m adding them here with the hope that they might enhance your further contemplations.

———————–

An explanation is an answer to the question, how do things come about? There are other types of question: what, where, when, and so forth. In these types of question, there is always an implication that is sometimes clear but often isn’t. For example, the question, “What is such and such?” implies the existence of something that you wish to identify and categorize. Where is something, assumes a thing and a location. When did such and such happen assumes a reliable measure of time. If we were deeply interested in a particular subject, we might first ask how does it come about that I identify this thing and that I can ask, what is it? This is a valuable question because it makes us realize that the phenomena we are interested in must have arisen in someone’s experience (in this case our own) or else it wouldn’t exist. From here we might broaden our search for an explanation/understanding of how it manifests.

———————–

We live the explanatory stance of an individual observer (personal) while at the same time we are embedded in or part of the explanatory stance of an observer community (collective). There are myriad observer communities. For example: communities of scientists, of biologists, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians; of religious and spiritual beings; of musicians, democrats, fascists, capitalists, socialists, male chauvinists, feminists, agnostics, family lineages, nation states and races. Each has its values and ways of seeing the world and each, its own jargons and metaphors. As such, we can find ourselves – dependent on situation and circumstance – juggling an intersecting web of explanatory pathways. Much confusion and miscommunication can come from muddling very different ways of explanation. Is it a wonder that there is so much conflict and confusion?

———————–

An explanation is primarily an interpersonal interaction that takes place with a clear or unconscious or covert motivation. Is it an act of communing through understanding or primarily an act of divisiveness through establishing dominance, rightness, demonstrating one’s acumen and so forth. There can be innumerable motivations. An explanation can take place within one’s mind (for example, me explaining my thoughts or feelings to myself) with the same overt or hidden motivations we have when trying to explain something to another.

Samantabhadra appears as a mysterious presence in many Mahayana scriptures. Often referred to, but rarely appearing, he/she has an ephemeral quality – ubiquitous yet will-o-the-wisp – powerfully present yet difficult to define or meet with face to face. In the Tibetan Nyingma tradition, Samantabhadra is the name of the primordial Buddha. The same primordial buddha realisation, in the Kagyu tradition, is called Vajradhara. In the very extensive and inspiringly syncretic “Avatamsaka Sutra”, Samantabhadra is portrayed as primordial buddha nature and, as the archetype of ‘a great and courageous being’, a bodhisattva whose life is completely shaped by a vast and profound aspiration to awaken infinite skilful means in helping all beings. In some traditions the historical buddha, Sakyamuni, is considered to have been a living embodiment of Samantabhadra /Vajradhara.

Generally, Samantabhadra represents all aspects of bodhicitta, both relative and absolute and as such, represents the very heart of the Mahayana tradition. From this perspective, Samantabhadra (as bodhicitta) manifests through a spectrum of progressive maturation, beginning with ‘aspiration’ (the stage of accumulation). This is followed by: ‘application’ (the stage of preparation/integration), ‘maturation’ (the two stages of ‘seeing‘ and ‘familiarization‘), and realization of Buddhahood (the stage of ‘nothing further to learn‘). Thus depending on one’s realisation, Samantabhadra is seen either as various expressions of maturing bodhisattva-hood and or as an Adhi-Buddha.

The word ‘dharmatā’ indicates the original nature or condition of reality. ‘Dharmadhatu’ refers to the total field of all events and meanings – the utterly lucid, all encompassing, matrix of knowing. ‘Dharmakaya’ refers to knowing the dharmadhatu; or, put another way, the spontaneously present activity of the dharmadhatu knowing itself (self-knowing). To meet with Samantabhadra, or to realise Samantabhadra, is to be a living expression of dharmata, dharmadhatu and dharmakaya.

In western understandings of Tibetan Buddhism the word sadhana is often translated as practice and has become largely associated with specified sequences of prayers, and creative imagination, blended with mantra, ritual, and silent contemplation. This particular sadhana is much broader than that. Think of it as a praxis – an integrative way of living – a subtle hint from one heart to another that when activated, can lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of life and living and what it means to be a compassionate, fully engaged and thoroughly awake human being.

Click here to download the Sadhana of Samantabhadra in PDF format.

May this sadhana serve as a fountain of inspiration for beings who feel warmed by such an approach.

We have just finished a rich 9 day retreat here at Orgyen Hermitage, based around this sadhana. The retreat was called:

“The Heart of Mahayana”
– bodhicitta/bodhisattva –
Samantabhadra, Natural Awakening, and Contemplative Science

Unedited recordings of these teachings are now available. We have posted them on GDT with the idea that they might add depth of appreciation of how to work with this sadhana.

Click here to download Tarchin’s 2018 teaching on “The Heart of Mahayana”

Science developed from the human compulsion to explain things, either to another or to oneself. Perhaps this could be seen as the early stirrings of wisdom, prājña – an inherent inquisitiveness and curiosity of one’s own mind (one’s own field of knowing) that is both precise and playful at the same time. The compulsion to explain is itself founded on an assumption of what biologist Humberto Maturana often refers to as structural determinism, the assumption that things are composed of dynamically interacting components.

Non-scientific explanations, what we might call common, every day explanations, involve first of all proposing a generative process that if allowed to run should give rise to whatever it is we wish to explain. And then, accepting this as an explanation, based on a usually hidden and largely unconscious emotional bias or preference.

What makes science special is the criteria for accepting an explanation as being valid. First one becomes clear about what one wants to explain. Then one proposes a generative process or mechanism that if allowed to run should give rise to whatever it is you wish to explain. Then one deduces entailments or likely phenomena that should accompany this particular generative mechanism or process. We then create or contrive situations (called experiments) in which the experience or non-experience of these entailments brings confidence as to whether or not the proposed generative process can be regarded as a useful explanation.

There are two kinds of science. Conventional science is often carried out in the laboratory of a university or research institute. Contemplative science is carried out in the laboratory of our moment to moment living – the experiential knowing of the researcher. From a Buddhist perspective we might say that contemplative science takes place in the laboratory of the multi-realmed functioning of one’s own body/brain/mind/community.

I’d like to try to express these ideas in a more poetic way. Go outside at night, and reacquaint yourself with where you are – a patch of land on the surface of a revolving sphere of condensed stardust, nestled in the radiance of a star, all of this embedded in the wheel of the galaxy, all of it evolving in the gravitational embrace of many galaxies. This world of experience we are collaboratively bringing forth with others is a profoundly integrated matrix of intimately intermeshing living process. How does this happen? How did it come about that we perceive many interacting individuals? What responsibilities do we have for each other?

Ironically,
it seems I am blinded by light,
yet in the darkness,
I begin to see.

Clear night sky,
the wheel of the galaxy arcing around me,
the horizon – a halo of atmospheric dust and diffused star glow,
and I realise, yet again,
I am embedded in sangha;
moving trees, mountains, hooting owls and river sound,
and ghostly kinaesthetic presence.

Contemplative science begins with reverence and wonder
and a mysterious desire to understand.
It begins as reverence in the temple of the universe.
Embedded in the galaxy.
Embedded in the sun.
Embedded in the planet.
I look out, and in my mind’s eye see the vastness of space.
I look in, and see through eyes of anatomy, histology, chemistry, and physics,
nearly as far ‘in’ as I can see ‘out’
and I wonder who I am.

Consciously and imaginatively I cultivate my skills in extending
love for every member of this evolving community of interbeing,
this symphony of becoming,
this holoversing in multi-part harmony.

Breathing with green plants – transformed star dust –
whirling vortices of living systems, communing
through contact and exchange.
I cannot live without you,
– each and every one of you –
my immediate mothering, fathering, brothering, sistering sangha,
a family of burgeoning life.

Visualizing living on a sphere.
Rain and apples falling inward.
The entire planet entwined in the sun.
We began as a sphere,
a fertilized egg, buried in our mother.
Can we expand our vision of this journey?

Contemplating universe.
Differing densities,
clumpings of relating.
Some clumps called planets, some called stars, some called interstellar space.

Clusterings of clumpings
whirling presences of specified autocatalytic chemistries;
linkings, and linkings of linkings,
Rosaries of reflective process,
Garlands of flowering flowerings.
Richer and richer detail
more and more prolific,
Hummings of autopoiesis – the dawning of responsive awareness
aware-ing itself into existence,
and telling this story.

Contemplating embodiment, a process self-contemplating,
a universe of inter-responsive densities of knowing-in-motion.
Gyres of form appearing and disappearing,
flowings of becoming,
this river of living,
these accapelling symphonies:
jazz combos, folk groups,
rock bands, and marching drums,
choral groups, choirs, and orchestras;
interweaving gatherings of gathering;
continuous fantastic, extravaganzic improvisation,
linking and adapting,
conserving,
and stretching out on a limb – ecstatic in the risk.
Advancing and retreating,
‘finger-dancing’ all over
reverberating stories,
songs coalescing
shapings of shapings in form and knowing and
beyond forms of knowing.

And arising in this dance are concepts:
beginnings, and endings,
and birth and death,
and self, and others,
and matter, and mind,
and health, and illness;
these mysteries, opaque and thing-like,
mist-like appearing,
this torrent of musing music.

Contemplating this contemplation
and feeling
this privilege,
this blessing,
this . . . ??????

(In Lewis Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark” the one who actually finds the Snark
is last seen ‘disappearing over the horizon’ saying, “It’s a boooooooo !!!!!!!!”)

Releasing in contemplation
Surrender in all dimensions
The horizon ‘disappears us’,
as the choir crescendos
It’s an AHHHHHH !!!!!!!!
And then,
like Wittgenstein
Falling silent
Into the music.

And so,
the bodhisattva enters the inconceivable;
dancing in stillness.

The physicist, David Bohm, once wrote in “The Special Theory of Relativity” that, scientific investigation is basically a mode of extending our perception of the world – not mainly a mode of obtaining knowledge about it. I think this applies to dharma exploration as much as it does for science. If science developed from the human compulsion to explain things, either to another or to oneself, then in this sense, great artists are scientists who do this in uniquely innovative ways. May we humans everywhere, live in ways that encourage and support the innate natural tendency in our children and grandchildren, to courageously question and explore and to share their enthusiasms with all they meet on the way.

A philosophy of contemplative science can easily become a dense entanglement of language and concepts whereas a poetry of contemplative science can invite fresh ways of seeing. In this prose/verse I try to illumine some of my thinking about cognition and knowing. May the timbre of these thoughts quicken the edges and membranes we share.

Buddhists speak of ‘Mirror-like Wisdom’.
Biologists speak of autopoiesis.
Christ said that if he were to remain silent
the very stones would declare his presence.

Sheer existence itself is a form of speaking.
Speaking is relationship;
integrated collaborations,
dynamically interacting participant/components in the act of producing the very components that comprise the integrated organisation producing those components
and so on . . .
endlessly.

Each relatively autonomous living system,
is a dancing of cognition in the act of making itself, making a world.

Selfing/knowing appears as an edge,
a border place, a boundary, a membrane,
a space of distinction between this and that.
A distinction with preference.
A distinction with value.
A particular community responding to other.

Membranes that close in on themselves define interiors and exteriors.
This is a molecular domain,
a form of cognition,
a dancing of dancings of knowing.
Eukaryotic cells have exterior membranes but
their interiors are filled with membrane enclosed spaces.
Each enclosed space is itself a world of collaborative activity.
Worlds interpenetrating worlds without obstruction.
Knowings of knowings, within knowings.

Inside my skin belongs to me. It is very personal and I guard it carefully. Outside my skin is other. It doesn’t feel so personal. The entire world of experience that I am, arises as an evolving field of integrated knowings. Each one of us calls this by the same name – “my mind”. Strangely, I not only ‘have’ a mind but I appear ‘in’ my mind, as too does the entire world. Outside my knowing is unknowable. Yet the unknowable knowings that are you, are appearing in my knowing, and so the outside unknowable is thriving inside my mind. Inner can’t exist without outer and outer can’t exist without inner. The world exists within me while simultaneously I exist within the world. And so, where does this leave us? inside? outside? both? neither? This is a classic Madhyamika four faced conundrum, a philosopher’s maze and a madman’s nightmare.

Pause with me for a moment. Feeling the rhythms of your breathing, embrace the full aliveness that you are. We move. We respond to the worlds within and around. We are the respondings of worlds within and around, and this responsiveness is the first sign of our aliveness. We reach out while shifting within, this internal shifting shaping the ways we are reaching out. We are breathing, in a breathing world. Such knowings! Such breathings! Such feelings and formings, seemingly durable things, ephemerally solid in space – this space – this particular space of knowing which is you,reading these words and thinking these thoughts!

We live as edges – living edges –
places of meeting and merging and mingling:
you, me, him, her – each a hedgerow, a linear wilderness of becomings,
the abandoned ignored places where everything happens.
Caterpillars and nesting birds, ants and hedgehogs and copulating worms,
We exist as communities of edging,
Places where this and that meet,
Transient parliaments of cognition
Languaging manifest
Lives within lives
All doing it together
Babbling enthusiasms
Baby worlds learning to speak
These beginners
Minding.

The world around us is an ecosystem.
This is common public knowledge.
But the worlds within the enclosure of self
are also ecosystems.
This is rarely recognised or appreciated.

Coming to love the exterior world is widely praised.
How noble. How glorious. How good!
Coming to love the interior of the world is hardly thought of.

And yet my beingness is the collective conversation of these cusps.
Distinct becomings in heartfelt conversation
And me, the arising conversation posing as a monologue,
oblivious.

Such a mystery
This unexpected waking up
We stretch our arms and yawn a great releasing sigh.
Getting out of bed, we greet the day of the only life we have.
Getting out of the bed of unexamined assumption,
we greet in freshness
This living,
This quiet and natural and unspectacular impossibility.
Saying good morning to Mary
Two fresh universes flowing in and through each other
Gatherings of worlds
These birthings of newness
All of me present, with and for and in and through, all of you.

Hedgerows meeting
Wildernesses greeting
Timeless
Edges on the edge.
edging closer
and ever closer too.

1/9/18
Contemplating the awesomeness of surrendering into living. Life is a terminal condition. All living creatures die – 100% of them. I am living with metastatic cancer. In a week or so, I may have surgery to remove a cancerous left common iliac lymph node. There are no statistics to say that such a procedure with all its risks will increase the length of life. I have lived all my life with a terminal diagnosis, yet the naming of cancer is considered terminal whereas living is not. To surrender into the reality of living is to surrender into the reality of it always leading to death. Surrender into dying is therefore not necessarily different than surrendering into life. To utterly surrender. To willingly, lovingly, enthusiastically give myself into the flow of the mystery of living that is this moment and no other, this radical acceptance of observer coexisting with the process giving rise to observer/observed, is to refine in luminosity until everything is luminous. I am gripped with immense smiling just writing this. Surrender, not as a giving up or a resignation but surrender as ultimate life affirmation. May this become increasingly firm.

—————-

12/9/18
Three days in Tauranga hospital to remove cancerous left common iliac lymph node.

—————-

16/9/18
Abdominal surgery is like going into hibernation. The whole organism slows and digestion, elimination comes to almost a halt. Morphine and other analgesics tend toward constipation as does extreme inactivity. This morning, to my immense relief, my bowel began to ‘awaken’. And I remember, yet again, that awakening is a natural process. You can’t do this abruptly. It has its own timing. Gently moving the body, finding pathways of ease and smoothness, eating a supportive diet. Hospital food is often atrociously bad. Taking sufficient medication for pain, to support a relaxing of the system, and not so much that it becomes even more sluggish. It’s like a garden after a long harsh winter. The warm spring rains and longer days invite life to stir, to reach and thrum. The bees are flying. The birds are remembering something to sing about. And slowly, we begin again to dance.

—————-

18/9/18
I open my e-mail and find many messages of love and good wishes and feel blessed by such warm support. Please let these words be a reply to each of you. The question of how it went is understandable – but unanswerable. The only certain response we can give to such a question is, ‘by the grace of the universe’ and so we flourish, one day at a time. In about 3 weeks I will have a meeting with the surgeons to check the healing and to go over the pathology results. In 3 months I’ll have blood tests and at that time we will be able to make a story of how worthwhile, or not, the surgery was in terms of halting the cancer process or delaying it. The next few weeks will be very much devoted to healing from the surgery itself.

—————-

Mary and I are feeling immensely supported.
This journey of living and learning and sharing;
May it become clear for everyone.
May we soften our grasping.
May we embrace the mystery of this immediate universe manifesting all of us.
May we find refuge in heart felt reverence and functional love.
Thank you everyone – nurses and doctors and technicians and supporters and friends and companions and students and teachers – all.
May our lives continue to weave together well for the sake of everyone.
May blessings abound.

To read the fully formatted PDF version, please click here.

These verses are a recent arising, but they hint at contemplations that have flavoured my living for many years. As you explore with them, can you sense in the flow of your own experience, a quality of spacious hovering – scuba divers might equate this with a sensation of ‘neutral buoyancy’ – a space of constantly morphing multi-domain knowing in which everything matters, in which everything participates through simultaneously initiating and responding; where every ‘thing’ is, more truthfully a ‘thing-ing’; where your living and my living and everyone else’s living are so thoroughly intermingled and intermeshed that we discover an ecstasy, the bliss of being an immeasurable expanse of primordial multi-dimensional flow; an ‘ex-stasis’ – out of static, not static or fixed? The Avatamsaka sutra refers to realms interpenetrating realms, and worlds interpenetrating worlds. Perhaps it would be helpful to re-express this, not with concrete nouns but with verbs – hints of fluidity.

Smiling, breathing, present,
Entering the contemplation of slow reading,
savouring the kinaesthetic memories,
savouring the deep organismic knowings,
this ocean of your experience.

Mandala Offering in a Modern Key

Imagine grains of sand
Scattered across crystal clear glass floating in space
With light illumining from above and below and the sides.

Now, imagine placing your finger upon this glass,
And scribing shapes according to
Your current desires and the flowing
Process of sensitivity that is your current awakeness.

Smiling; breathing; present;
Imagine each grain of sand is a human life
And each human life is itself an immeasurable expanse of relating,
An intimate inter-responding,
A colonial grain of living mystery
A unique collective of ‘intentions’,
Delicately, sensitively, willingly,
meeting the world.

Imagine fingers of hope and fear,
Fingers of magnanimous aspiration
and everyday ho-humery.
Each feeling its way,
Now pushing determinedly ahead,
Now lingering in its tracks
Initiating and reciprocating,
Exquisite presences, presenting myriad
Patterns in a crystal space of illumination,
Lives evolving through relating,
Shapings of curiosity
Scribing themselves in spaces of knowing,
This space of knowing,
This space of you reading these words.

Imagine each cell of each human;
Imagine braiding rivers of blood and lymph
Mountains and valleys of muscle and bone
Weather systems of breath
Molecular transcribings
Membranes of knowing
The immensities of life and living evolving,
Perfectly compacted
In the form of particular human beings
Busy in the business of being the fullness of their lives.

Imagine each creature of the world
And each creature’s vastness.
Imagine each and every living beingness;
Scribings of patterning,
Melodic flowings, and
Kinaesthetic melody,
Dancings of need and collages of dream,
Transient, translucent
Assemblages of reverence and surprise.

Tracings of sentient sand on crystal tables,
Bountiful banquets,
Offered by everyone to everyone.

Imagine these spacious expanses of knowing
Slipping in and through and with and for each other,
Meeting and mingling
Criss crossing beams of light and lightness,
Mind-scapes of mist and cloud,
Sumi-e paintings of hint and intimation,
Ephemeral horizons of being and becoming
This world of illumination
This pulsating passion:
Humans going about their lives,
Bees in the flowers
Fish shoaling
Spiders spinning
Stars above and soil below
Forests and savannahs
Coral reefs and compost heaps
Seamless life;
Everywhere
These worlds of worlding
Each singing their music,
Collectively, – the music
Arising as the juice of your Body of Being.

Participating . . .

Your finger,
These grains,
Such mysteries,
This beauty.

With heart-felt respect, our offering

In confidence, and ever deepening faith and trust
Patterns of sand,
Scattered across crystal clear surfaces, abiding as space
With light illumining everywhere
This love.

End-notes

Body of Being
My father used to say that a poet was not able to see all the implications in their creation. After drafting these verses and re-reading them a number of times, the part of me that is grounded in Buddhist terminologies suddenly saw that “Body of Being” was a felicitous phrase, as it could intimate the Sanskrit word ‘Svabhavakaya’– a seamless summation of the three kayas: Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya.

Finger as Metaphor
For those readers who have attended retreats with me, the image of a finger tracing patterns might remind you of “finger dancing”. This is a potentially rich contemplative exploration involving two people that can give one an expanded, non-verbal taste of the sensitivities that are possible in mindfulness practice. It is done in two steps: the first, on your own, and the second, done with a partner.

Step One:
Stand with your weight evenly balanced on both feet and knees slightly flexed. Notice how the soles of your feet make contact with the ground. Imagine roots, growing from these points of contact, anchoring you deep in the earth. Now, close your eyes and begin to savour the varying textures and rhythmic processes that together make up your breathing. You may find it enhances your focus to breathe through your mouth and nose simultaneously. You will know that you are doing this if you can feel an alternating warming and cooling on your lips and at your nostrils.

With great sensitivity, relax into this mouth/nose breathing and explore the myriad shifting details of your entire body/brain/mind/community – a constantly changing dynamic of relationships – your body of experience in the act of standing and breathing. Physical sensations, feelings, emotions, memories and flows of thinking are inter-responding with and to each other. At the same time they are responding to phenomena taking place in the environment around you. Feel the subtle ripples of muscular adjustment that facilitate your ability to stand vertically, on the surface of a spherical planet, which is turning on its axis while whirling around a star. If you notice any physical or mental tensions or holdings, invite them to soften and relax. Smiling – Breathing – Present – feel your way into this exploration.

After a while, begin to extend and exaggerate some of the subtle physical movements that together compose this integrated activity of standing and breathing. Eventually, with the exception of your feet which remain ‘planted in the earth’, all you is moving. Chest relating to shoulders, to hips, and legs and arms and face. Abdomen and back muscles – your buttocks and thighs feeling their strength, your entire physiology is ‘dancing’, moving harmoniously with the rhythms of your breathing. Guided by gradients of pleasure and interest, engulfed in the music of your breath, explore the full range of possible movement.

Experiment with this dynamic contemplation while centering in or from your head. Then let the centre drop into your throat. How is this different? Explore moving from your heart. Eventually settle into your belly and stay with this until it become very familiar.

Breathing this body of moving experience,
Gently, lovingly, softly, forgivingly,
Interweavings of space and time and knowing
While rooted in the earth,
Letting go, letting be
Hovering, weightless
This smooth line of bliss.

Finish this session of practice by decreasing the range of movement until you are standing ‘still’, mouth/nose breathing, tracking the very subtle shifts and changes in this – your body of experience.

After you have become quite familiar with the possibilities of this meditation, you are then ready to explore ‘step two’ with a partner.

Step Two:
Begin by standing, facing one and other, a little less than a metre apart. Close your eyes and re-visit the over-all feeling of ‘stage one’ and refresh your appreciation for this fluid, sensitive, smiling, breathing, constantly inter-adjusting presence. After a minute or two, open your eyes. Raise you right hands, and bring your palms close to each other and make contact with the soft pads of your index fingers. Once you have made this physical connection, close your eyes and return to the explorations of stage one. Everything continues as you did before, with the exception that your index finger must remain in contact with your partner’s index finger.

Gradually begin to sway with the music of your own breathing, until it becomes a dance. Explore the possibilities of movement; the range and rhythm and the various kinds of restraint. Sensitively track the shifting landscape of your body/brain/mind/community – the continuously morphing body of experience that you are. Softening and releasing; again and again. Softening in the belly. Softening in your wrists, your knees, your face and arms. Go deeply into your experience while at the same time staying sensitively in contact with your partner’s finger.

It seems to be common for people new to this meditation to find themselves distracted by concerns about staying in contact, and who is leading and who following, and what might the other person be thinking, and so forth. Quite quickly though, most people when exploring this ‘finger dance’ discover a degree of blissful, attentive sensitivity that surprises them. The challenge of being tuned to oneself while at the same time being in relationship with another, seems to bring forth a degree of heightened attentiveness. In this way the exercise points to new possibilities. I can be responsive to a multitude of subtle shiftings in my private experiential field and simultaneously appreciate and respond to changes in the environment I am perceiving around me. Especially marvellous is the recognition that I can be in a state of deep contemplation while at the same time sensitively and appropriately collaborating with another sentient being.

Stage two ends by both partners gradually decreasing the range of movement until they are standing, breathing and contemplating with fingers just in contact. Then break the contact. Lower your hands to your sides and spend a few moment more, tracking these textures of being. Finish by sharing something of your experience with each other.

With a visceral familiarity with finger dancing it can become a metaphor that can be applied in any meditation practice. The ‘finger’ of our attentiveness, of our extraordinarily sensitive body of experience is in seamless contact with the chosen object or theme of meditation and we become one ecstatic experience. If you recognise this, you could try ‘finger dancing’ with your breath, or with a feeling, an emotion, an interpersonal situation.

In the verses of “Mandala Offering in a Modern Key”, I have used the word ‘finger’ to hint at our sensitive, participation in living. Relaxing deeply, opening in wonderment, one’s entire beingness becomes a ‘finger’ feeling its way in this dancing wholeness.

Mangala

A central meaning of ‘tantra’ is wholeness/continuity. Tantra is a path of wholeness understanding wholeness, a vision integrating all visions.

In the ancient cultures of Tibet, India, parts of southeast Asia and China, there flourished various wisdom traditions known as tantra. Today, tantra is sometimes associated with attempted mergings of spirituality and sex, but originally it had the meaning of ‘fundamental continuity’, or ‘the great continuum’. To study tantra was to study and engage with the continuity of life and all the known processes that compose it.

In Buddhist traditions of tantra, all aspects of knowledge intermesh to comprise a perfectly functioning integrated whole. Sense faculties, elements, cardinal directions, skandhas, paths, kaliyugas, pranas, nimittas, blisses, emptinesses, and so forth, were experienced as seamlessly inter-dependent, so much so that any single aspect only had meaning relative to the inter-activity of all the others. In tantra, no thing exists as an independent entity. It only occurs because of the relationships of uncountable other things and processes. In this sense we can say it is ’empty’ of independent selfhood. Here lies the possibility of understanding the intimate equivalence of form and emptiness (śunyatā), or knowing and ungraspable wholeness.

In today’s world it seems that generally we have lost sight of wholeness/continuity – this core vision of tantra. Instead we have created more and more categories of distinction and specialised expertise: physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, music, art, history, religion, geography, politics, economics, medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, psychology, neurology, sociology. A complete list would go on for pages. We have divided the world into organic and inorganic, micro and macro and nano and astro, virtual and real, secular and religious. Each, discipline proliferates with myriad subdivisions. Each has its specialized jargon; its explanation of the universe and opinions as to what is relevant or irrelevant and how life should or could proceed on this basis. The modern world has become flavoured with fragmentation and subsequent conflict. In public values and discourse, we have no modern equivalent for tantra, a path of wholeness understanding wholeness, a vision integrating all visions. This lack is contributing to a massive expansion of agony and suffering throughout the living world.

Even so called ‘holistic’ studies can support more fragmentation if they ignore or turn their backs on any facets that are contributing parts of the continuously co-creating living biosphere that we are. Original studies of tantra involved an integration of all the categories of experience and knowledge that were evident in the society of that time. There was never a university ‘department of wholeness’ that competed with architecture and social science for funding. With this in mind, a modern expression of tantra would need to invite and involve an integration of all the domains of experience and understanding that together are weaving into being the world of today’s living. A modern tantra would have to be a global tantra, taking into account the all the threads of knowledge found in all the cultures of this world. This would include their particular ways of approaching more integrated functioning, and their different understandings and methodologies for healing fragmentation and dysfunction.

In terms of such a realisation arising in a single human being, it is reasonable to query how possible this breadth of seeing/understanding would be? Yet surely we could begin to pose the question. Surely we could hold this possibility, by way of aspiration and a sense of deeply valuing such a prospect. Contemplating thus, I can’t see how we can improve on what the Buddha taught when he said that the dharma – the truth of our living – was to be questioned, explored and realised by the wise, each for themself. The conundrum of how to live well is not a task for experts. We are all participants and each participant participates. There are no exceptions. What we do affects the world. How we live and how we learn matters. No-one else can learn for us. No-one else can live for us. Forget about political parties, leaders, gurus, and charismatic personalities. In a multi-dimensional interdependent universe, an immeasurable living matrix, no single person or activity will solve for everyone else, the problems arising from fragmented living. This requires an understanding and a way of being that is freshly realised, moment to moment, in all our activities. At the same time we are doing this, we can support others as they attempt to do the same.

To end this spectre of fragmentation and to bring forth a truly modern expression of tantra, each one of us: you, me, him or her; whether young or old, healthy or ill, rich or poor, formally educated or not, each one of us, can learn to deepen our capacity to intentionally nurture the question. How might we personally contribute to bringing forth integrated living in a radically inclusive way? Each of us would benefit from recognising and validating our own individual form of holding this question – a living hwa-tou – until, as the Chan masters of old said, the ‘bundle of doubt’ or the ‘not-knowing’, begins to break up of itself, thus revealing understanding.

The greater the question, the greater the awakening. No question, no awakening. This classic Zen statement points the way in a very direct fashion. The first and most important step to healing and wholeness involves vast, wide ranging curiosity and question. Out of profound question comes, not answers, but action; not how we should live, but how we actually do live.

Perhaps the resolution of the challenge posed by climate change and its accompanying ecological breakdown, species extinctions and social upheaval will become the face of a modern tantra. May we discover the love and courageous fortitude to bring this about.

Profound teaching (dharma) is revealed in the fullness of our living.

At Orgyen Hermitage, we have shelves of books from various schools and traditions. Each of them grew from a view of the world. Each of them conveys a particular angle or breadth of understanding. Many of them seem to be saying very similar things.

Some writings are dense with intricate lists and persuasive argument yet, in attempting to absorb such detail, the reader risks loosing sight of how the subject matter is relevant to their actual living. Other writings are short and pithy, but can suffer from appearing to be deceptively simple, as if there we should be able to explain things with a simple metaphor. In this post, I shall try to feel my way towards being pithy and poetical in a way that is not overly burdened with Buddhist terminology. I do sense that, if we could become familiar with this vision of a world of interdependent co-evolving communion, we would discover the fulness of our living to be a great middle way – an inherently balanced journey or path, of living exploration. This would be a fulfilling way to live and a meaningful contribution to the world.

Click here to read or download a fully formatted PDF version of this post.

Starting Point

Question: How do I begin to practice/explore dharma?
Answer: Begin with your immediate lived experience, whatever it is and however it is occurring. What is going on here? Look into this with all your intelligence and all your sensitivity.

Such living is likely to be flavoured by a general on-going tendency to evaluate experience using terms that fall somewhere between: good and bad, right and wrong, valuable and useless, work and play, liking and disliking, worthwhile and meaningless, and so forth.

Look into this,
right now,
as you are reading.
Look into the experience of you looking.
See for yourself.
Of course, in order to do this,
you need to be interested.

Your immediate lived experiencing – whatever it may be – is a seamless intermeshing with other beings’ experiencings: atoms with atoms, molecules with molecules, cells with cells, organ systems with organ systems, organisms with organisms; you and your friend, you and a tree, you and a thought, a feeling, a memory, or a surrounding environment. Whether co-operative or conflictive; whether physical, emotional or conceptual; experience will always appear to be a nesting of interweaving relationships, collaborations involving innumerable domains and dimensions of activity, all channeled through lenses of earlier experience.

A common facet of this way of living is dualistic distinction making. There are many examples of this: subject and object, self and other, inner and outer, material and mental, conscious effort and letting be. As soon as we see one side of the dualism, the other side is automatically implied. Recognising this is the beginning of a life of dharma.

Here, in the midst of the rich matrix of our collaborative living, we cultivate skill in harmonizing relaxation and effort, acceptance and attentiveness, serenity and clarity – a robust balance of total relaxation/acceptance/ surrender, interwoven with actively engaged curiosity.

Consolidating Our View of Wholeness

Energised by this easeful presence and vibrant curiosity, continue to study/investigate/ explore the flow of interdependent relating that is your ongoing living. Investigate everyone and everything that you meet in ways that soften the sense of separation between self and other, good and bad. Learn to integrate intellect, emotion, bodily sensation and action, and intuition, until these seemingly separate ways of knowing, which are actually continuously morphing in and through each other, become deeply and stably integrated as ongoing living wholeness – an un-pin-downable expanse of inter-being/inter-knowing.

True Meditation

Now we cultivate our skills of resting in and as, this evolving integrated wholeness in action. With experience, with persistence and patience, cultivating this view of inter-being again and again, we gradually acclimatize to living this way in a widening range of situations and circumstances. This process of familiarization is true meditation.

More and more, we recognise that our ongoing experience – this activity of a universe as an expression of being/becoming – this collective activity which comprises our conscious and non-conscious experiential functioning, is all that we have to work with. It is what we do, what we experience, what we are trying to understand, and what we are. In this stage of meditation/practice, we familiarize with being this dynamic activity resting in and as itself.

Buddhist descriptions of meditation recognise two essential qualities. Samatha, often translated as tranquil abiding, is the acceptance/ surrender/beingness aspect of lived experience. Vipassana or insight, is the vivid detail and multidimensional appreciating/ discernment aspect. Refining our capacity for recognising this co-emerging samatha/ vipassana, without any compulsion to elaborate or justify, while at the same time compassionately engaging with a world of ‘others’, is a natural expression of dharma praxis. In Tibetan traditions this praxis of naturalness is sometimes referred to as mahāmudrā. The third Karmapa characterized this way of living as, “learning the subtle teaching of mind practice” – entering the subtle praxis of the immeasurable expanse of inter-knowing.

Fruition of Natural Abiding

Surrendering into this learning, this spontaneous creativity-in-action, we discover the fruition of practice – a natural way of abiding.

Abiding where there is no abiding,
A praxis of no practice,
A groundless grounding,
A seamless mystery/blessing of wisdom, compassion and non-clinging awareness.
This flowering of communion is dancing forth myriad radiant worlds.
Is there anything more wondrous to do?

Primordial Middle Way

Ah . . . such balancing!
One side, my physical experience,
Rich, present, vibrant and multi-dimensionally dynamic.
Another side, my thinking – thinking about objects, or thinking about you.
Rich, timeless, no-dimensionally dynamic
Where minding seems to be the only real thing.
Yet you – all you you-s – organic and inorganic alike,
Are continually shaping my visceral life,
Radiating implications
Continuously adjusting my course,
Chameleon dancer that I am.

Focussing on you, I risk loosing me.
Focussing on me, I risk loosing thee.
Needing each other, we learn our individual togetherness.
And so we feel possibilities in translucency
Softly, gently, translucentizing
Everything and everyone,
In love.

And feeling this dancing matrix of I and you – all of you,
I-s and You-s
Eyes and ‘U’s
Us/me/thee
Knowings interfused,
Expanding into and through and by means of each other.
Travelling with molecules, cells, organs, and process,
Baggages of talent,
Nothing left behind.
Reverberating in reverence, wonderment and wide eyed awe.
A balancing going nowhere,
While being everywhere.
This ever refreshing poised-ness
Delicate, detailed, exquisitely encompassing
Yet strangely demanding,
Requiring all of our being and all of our beingness,
All our talents and intelligence,
The total cost of a life.
The price of our total life.

And so we find ourselves
Giving everything.
Opening to include the stars,
And the unknown space between the stars,
And the unknown space between these thoughts.
Love, opening to embrace the universe,
This universe embracing itself
An unimaginable welcome-ship.
In love,
So utterly simple
Such balancing,
Such lightness.

And blessings abound
In the singing of birds
And these three passion-hoppers on this curving leaf.
And the distant phones ringing
Announcing myriad yet to be’s
With Thee.
This mystery . . .
This balancing . . .

I remember studying with the Ven. Namgyal Rinpoche in 1970. What attracted me was his alive presence, his breadth of knowledge and the immensity of view he continually revealed to us. Around that time, his book “The Vision” was published. Drawing on traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, Jungian psychology, science and sociology, he sketched out an inspiringly universal view of dharma directed towards supporting the skilful cultivation of well rounded, functionally integrated, wise and compassionate human beings. This expression of dharma, transcending sects and sectarianism, was both profound and practical in terms of aspiring to uplift everyone.  It spoke directly to the core of my being and I knew from the beginning I would give my life to this.

Though well equipped with energy and aspiration to study and practice with Rinpoche, I lacked the financial resources to travel with him for extended periods. To my amazement, on numerous occasions he invited the Dharma Centre of Canada sangha to supplement my scrounged together funds so that I could attend retreats and courses with him. In 1977 he sent me to Ottawa to teach and so began my life of dharma which has led to me writing to you today.

With this post I find myself in a position perhaps similar to Rinpoche all those many years ago. I am writing to let you know about the wonderful ongoingness of the dharma with new generations of students and teachers doing innovative work in the spirit of that universal vision we learned from Rinpoche in those early days. Jaime Howell and Juliana Griese who have studied extensively with me and with other teachers connected to Namgyal Rinpoche, are launching what will be called, “The Immeasurable School of Wisdom and Compassion”.  The first segment of this three year program will begin in Brazil this coming August.

Please visit their web site and celebrate the good work. I think you will find it inspiring. Watch the short video – my first movie appearance!– and if you are able, consider supporting the work by donating to a fund that will assist young students to participate in what I am sure will be a life transforming experience. I have already had the pleasure of working with some of these strongly motivated, remarkably talented young people who are becoming beacons of sanity to others of their generation. As I enter my 70th year, I feel like a happy granddad; quietly wonderstruck by his children and grandchildren and what they are doing! In this way of thinking, they are the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Namgyal – and so the vast braiding river of dharma flows on. This is inspiring bodhisattva work taking place in a crazy world that desperately needs it. Please help if you are able. Click here to go to the video and donation page.

May this flowing and flowering of universal bodhisattva activity,
Support the well being of everything and everyone,
Everywhere.

Sarva Mangalam

We are bombarded daily by reports of conflict, atrocities and proliferating social dysfunction. Surely many of us must be asking what, if anything, we can do about this nightmarish situation. The following essay is extracted from my e-book, “Sangha Work”.  Re-reading it the other day I felt it is as relevant today as it was when I initially wrote it 14 years ago.

—————————–

All of life is relationship – relationship in action. Atoms are relationships of electrons, protons and neutrons. Molecules are relationships of atoms. Minerals are relationships of molecules. Cells are relationships of all the above, both within and outside the cell membrane. Groups of relatively stable relationships are communities. One person could be considered a community. Our body is a continent inhabited by countless micro beings, a living fabric of interacting relationships. This seemingly separate human body inhabits the relating bodies of others which we call the biosphere. The world is a sangha, a community of interbeing. It’s what we are. Relating is co-operating and in the co-operating, we form a larger whole. In spite of so much ambivalence and difficulties in the area of relationships, relating is not an option. It’s already happening. Rather than struggling over whether to relate or not, a much more meaningful question is how can we relate in ways that are healthy and support wellbeing in everyone?

Sangha is a Pali word meaning community. When I use the term ‘sangha work’ I am using the word ‘work’ in an intentionally ambiguous way. When we say a clock works, we mean it is able to keep the correct time – it’s functioning. Sangha work is the work of discovering real community and realising that it has been functioning well, since the beginning of life. The entire world is sangha in action. Sangha work is work to bring forth a knowing of community – a sangha that is an interweaving of the talents and energies of many beings which all together make up a larger, functioning whole. Sangha work is relationship work. It involves doing what is necessary to cultivate a potential that is in everyone – the potential of being profoundly present for each other. Sangha work is work to awaken our valuing of community. It is work to enable us to interact skilfully together, even when difficulties arise. Sangha work involves actively nourishing whatever strengthens community. It means living in a continuum of bright, alert, responsive, well grounded, presence. Sangha work supports us in waking up to the vastness of what we are and, in so doing, developing the strength and confidence to be able to appreciate and interact with a diversity of talents and understandings in others – talents and understandings that are sometimes very different from those that are in us. Pragmatically, sangha work is about exploring how we can live together in ways that are mutually supportive. This is dharma in action.

What is community? Where does it begin and end off? Are there different types of community? What is special about a dharma community or sangha? How can we deepen our understanding of community? How can we deal with problems that arise between community members? How can we raise community to the highest level rather than sinking, through the tyranny of the group, to the lowest common denominator? How can we support community while simultaneously supporting the uniqueness of each individual?

At the time of the Buddha, the sangha of dharma practitioners was not considered to be separate from the larger society. Both sangha and lay community were profoundly intermingled and intermeshed. Each supported, inspired and nourished the other at many levels. To really appreciate and understand this, you need to be open to the possibility of a well functioning culture with very different sets of values than those we have in the market driven world of today. I’m sure ancient Indian society had many traits that we could easily recognise. A caste system separated people according to ethnicities of money, vocation and religious beliefs – not much different from the social strata that we generally take for granted today. One big difference though was that in India there was a huge respect for people who left their worldly careers in order to pursue truth and the quest of enlightenment. One could shave one’s head and wear simple robes and be called a samana meaning “one who is calming, tranquillising, soothing, allaying, extinguishing or destroying the passions of attachment.” The word samana also has the flavour of one who is honoured or respected – honoured or respected for grappling directly with the great issues of how to live well as a living, conscious, thinking, feeling being, immersed in a matrix of mystery – a mystery of birth and death and grief and feelings and curiosity and wonderment – this world we humans inhabit.

Two thousand five hundred years ago in India, there were all kinds of religious orders: communities of naked ascetics, communities of renunciates, communities of forest dwellers, communities of sadhus. In the sutras, the Buddha often referred to these gatherings of yogis and meditators that acted as de-facto families and homes for aspiring seekers. The main stream society at the time of the Buddha, not only tolerated what today might be thought of as dropping out, dole bludging, or simply antisocial, neurotic or at least irresponsible behaviour but, by and large, admired this way of living and saw it as a heroic quest. Even though the average person may not have felt that they could follow such a path (calming, tranquillising, soothing, allaying, extinguishing or destroying the passions of attachment), they were often happy to feed and give support to those who tried to do so. It was a way of contributing to the well being of the greater society, of participating in a larger scope of meaning. I suppose, in a manner of speaking, the samanas of old held the prestige of astronauts today. They were the rare, brave, determined, explorers of the ‘beyond’. Their lives were a visible compass always pointing a path of sane, integrated living; a reminder of something extraordinarily precious yet freely available for everyone.

In the 1960s many of us tried to form communities that aspired to something more meaningful than making money and blindly increasing the human population. Unfortunately we identified with a word that eventually helped to marginalize a lot of the good efforts. The word I’m thinking of is ‘alternative’. We pursued and celebrated alternative life styles, alternative healing and so forth. This was an understandable attempt to separate ourselves from the madness of a society that was arming itself with nuclear weaponry, engaging in horrific wars over political ideology, and learning to methodically condition, through advertising, even in the youngest of children, a life-long insatiable desire for acquiring merchandise. Unfortunately, our attempts to distance ourselves from this insanity meant that these ‘alternatives’ were at best, tolerated as benign aberrations, and so they had very little direct effect on the lives of most of the human population. Many of my friends became interested in Buddhadharma in its various forms. They helped to create meditation centres in mountains and forests, and teaching houses in cities but, by and large, these efforts ended up as little cliques and clubs that fell short of positively influencing the direction of the larger society. In those youthful days, when we tried to build communities for dharma study and practice, it often involved cultivating a sense of being at least slightly morally superior to the rest of the population who seemed to be blindly supporting the collective madness. ‘Dropping-out’ became synonymous with being a great yogi and, filled with self righteousness, we tried to ignore the rest of the world in order to lead what we hoped would be more healthy lives. We had quite a strong sense of us and them; in the dharma and not in the dharma. When this ‘us-ing’ and ‘them-ing’ became strong, it actually hindered our ability to realise true sangha. Unbeknownst to us, it tended to obscure our knowing of the deep communal nature of everything

When the Buddha began to teach, many came and wanted to live and study with him. His presence inspired people to wake up from the murky conditioned dreams of greed, hatred and delusion. To be fair, he probably had a lot less competition. Try to imagine the Buddha arriving in New York city today. Supporters would place advertising in the New York Times for a weekend retreat. It would appear along with the other 450 ‘spiritual’ workshops and related activities happening that weekend, not to mention the movies, theatres, nightclubs and glittery shopping. Perhaps at the time of the Buddha, when he came to a village to teach, a much higher percentage of beings would attend. He was the best show going, perhaps the only show!

In those days, to be ordained into the sangha was very simple. The Buddha said “Ehi bhikkhu” and snapped his fingers and that was that. Ehi means come. Bhikkhu in this context means wander. Come wander forth for the good of the many folk. Right from the beginning there was a sense that joining the order meant going forth from a life of blind habit to a way of living that uplifted everyone. In Tibetan, the word for bhikkhu is gelongand it carries the additional meaning of ‘one who is free to ask question’. Ehi Bhikkhu could just as well mean; come, wander forth, freely questioning and investigating the natural world of inner and outer for the benefit of the entire community of life. My waking up inspires your waking up. Your waking up inspires my waking up. Our lives are profoundly interwoven at multiple levels of being – multiple streamings of becoming. There is an orderliness to life – the laws of nature. That is why entering the Buddhist sangha is sometimes called entering the Order. Becoming ordained.

I imagine a relatively small group of beings, living and studying the dharma together. The wider, extended community was happy to give them support in the form of food, clothing, medicine and shelter and, in return, the sangha provided a very visible example of sane and mindful living. In this way, the sangha supported the society and the society supported the sangha. Each benefited the other. Sangha was not an alternative lifestyle choice. It was a co-operative endeavour the entire society engaged in, to support community building. Today we could call this, ‘sangha work’, the work of discovering the true communal nature that we are.

As the years went by and the fame of the Buddha spread throughout the land, more and more people came to join the community. Five monks became ten, became five thousand and I imagine the Buddha could have spent all his time snapping his fingers and saying Ehi Bhikkhu.Eventually he allowed the senior monks to ordain beings into the sangha in the name of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. In those early years the sangha was small and the monks quite gifted in their aspiration to awaken for the sake of all beings. They spent their days in a continuous exploration and cultivation of compassionate awareness. As the Order grew, however, the calibre of the monks gradually diluted. What would you expect? You could be a servant and get ordained. With the snap of fingers, suddenly, the tables were turned and your former master would be offering you food with respectful bows. As Namgyal Rinpoche once remarked, a lot of monks were in it for a free lunch! They were not necessarily mature in their aspiration to cultivate wisdom and compassion for the sake of all beings. In the grip of desire and lust they would hunger after the visiting men and women and sometimes get sexually involved. They would speak angrily when caught up in frustration and, sometimes, when floundering in general confusion and unawareness, they would lose the inspiration to meditate or engage in any exploration or practice at all.

The lay community of supporters began to grumble. Why should we support these lazy do- nothings? They went to the Buddha and complained. Understanding the suffering that was arising in these situations and recognizing the importance of harmonious interactions between the ordained community and the lay community, the Buddha ‘allowed’ the monks to have more and more rules, guiding their behaviour. By time the teaching of Buddhadharma was established in Tibet, monks had more than 226 precepts! In the early days of the Buddha’s teaching it would take a matter of seconds to ordain someone. When I received the full ordination from His Holiness the 16th Karmapa the ceremony took more than two and a half hours and I was the only person being ordained at that time.

Today, in many Buddhist communities, there is a clearly visible gap between the ordained sangha and the lay community. This gap manifests in numerous ways and has contributed to many unhelpful attitudes and beliefs. Monks and nuns and the lay community are identified as separate from each other by the clothes they wear and the life styles they follow. Too often, there has developed a belief that only monks and nuns have any possibility of awakening and this tends to support further beliefs that the ordained sangha is somehow superior while lay people are inferior. These beliefs are mutually colluding and often actively carried by both groups. This sense of separation has lead to all sorts of conceits, rooted in comparisons such as better than, worse than or equal to. In the process, the living dharma which was originally to help beings cultivate wisdom and compassion has often become so utterly obscured under rules and rituals concerning ‘us’ and ‘them’ that the Buddha himself would have been saddened to see it.

Turning to sangha work today, could we cultivate a sense of dharma sangha that is thoroughly inclusive? Not a sangha of celibates but a lay bodhisattva sangha – a community of beings who are waking up to their interdependence with all living creatures and cultivating their abilities to be of service to others. Could we work towards a sangha that was visible and concrete enough to give people a sense of belonging to something wholesome and clearly defined, while at the same time, spacious and open enough to not exclude? This means not excluding others from the sangha but also, not excluding the sangha from others. Could we cultivate a lay sangha that is non-hierarchic, yet carries a deep valuing of the wisdom of experience of those that have lived and practised before us? Could we cultivate a vibrant appreciation for the talents and life experience of each of the current members of the community? Could we bring forth a sangha that has the strength and resilience to act as a place of refuge and support for its members when they are lost in states of difficulty while simultaneously being flexible and responsive to the needs of the surrounding larger world? Could we live as a community of friends in dharma who support each other on the path of awakening love and clear seeing and through this, become an inspiration for others even when they are from very different walks of life?

The year 2005 seems to be a time of mounting sectarianism. Fear is has become a tool of governance. Suspicion of difference is on the rise. Race, religion, economic status, and political affiliations have become powerful motors for divisiveness. The challenges of ecological change continue to grow and yet we humans seem to be retreating from addressing and exploring in any practical, meaningful way the huge question and immense implications of true sangha. How do we live well together on this cosmically tiny sphere of living rock we call planet earth? Who are we? What are we? Where do we begin? Where do we end off? What are we doing? How is what I am doing affecting what you are doing? How can a thinking feeling human being function well in this vast mystery? Contemplate the stars. Contemplate the creatures living in a drop of pond water. Marvel at how a caterpillar can transform into a butterfly, how the moon stays up in the sky, how an acorn becomes an oak, and further still, how it is possible to raise any of these questions in the first place. Just to embark on such questioning is to enter into sangha work.

Every human choice bows like a slave in submission to
the absolute’s creative will,
yet this does not deprive us of freedom, or
of taking responsibility for what we choose.
~ Rumi ~
(Translated by Coleman Barks in,  “The Soul of Rumi.”)

Hearing the news of the Christchurch mosque shootings, I sit stunned with sadness and grief, first for the people directly involved, and further, that humans have have come to such a way of being. How can we as a community, hold this raw suffering along with all its causes, in a way that can augment wholesome unfolding? The practice of love, hand in hand with the clear and compassionate seeing of diversity inseparable from inter-being/inter-knowingness, is surely the most pro-active thing we can do. I pray we may all flower in this, quickly, for the sake of everyone.

The following verses began their journey into expression a number of months back. It is as if they were waiting to be synergised by these tragic events, refined in the fire of feeling to meet the moment. The fully formatted PDF version will be visually easier to read.  Please click here to download.

I am animate.
I am an animal.
I am born from life and living
And so, dear friend, are you.
Everything we experience reverberates with these truths.

Beginning with the fullness of what you are;
not what you name, describe or explain,
but what you actually are;
finding yourself awash
on a timeless beach of ever-fresh now,
discovering beingness anew.

Feeling the recurring waves,
Rhythmically similar,
yet individually unique;
pushing and pulling,
filling and emptying,
covering and exposing,
revealing and hiding;
A space of revelation.
This domain of gestation,
A birthing room of values.

What, on earth, is happening?
What, in mind, is happening?

Dancings of moon and sand and flowing liquids,
The seamless meeting of wet and dry;
emotion and detached observation,
inner and outer,
self and other,
knowing, known and knower.
And here, dancing this indescribable omni-process
involving everything and everyone,
We discover our breathing;
These flowings within flowings
Branchings and giftings
This tree of life and living
Connections of all of us.
Stardust to stardust, waves of probability proliferating
This breathing of everyone.

How might we call this suchness-in-action?
Looking?
Being ?
Softening?
Dissolving?
Bending?
Blending?
Stretching?
Responding?
Opening?
Praying?
Contemplating?
Meditating? Worshipping?
Reverencing?

Perhaps we could call it awareness
or awakening,
or continual transcendence,
or whole-ing,
or primordial healing,
Or do we need to call it anything?

Expanding into the gifting fullness,
living collaborations of sensitive responsiveness,
Volumes of sentience within volumes of sentience,
Oceans of knowing in the tiniest drops,
Creation creating
Always fresh and anew,
spacious, open and unpindownable.
Gratitude sparkling all over.

And what can we do but surrender?
each one of us,
all of us,
new modes of languaging
celebrating this perennial growing,
Freshly wrought today;
this beach, this sand, this salty ocean
cradled in radiance,
gestating the universe
This womb of mystery
ever preparing
in love,
and we see.

We are brothers and sisters;
Conceived and gestated and born and nurtured
and matured by our mother, Wholeness Inter-being.
And through our reaching bones and flesh,
extending and retracting,
drawn forward in wonder
and transforming as we go,
we learn our bodies;
babies, children, adolescents and adults
all of us making and remaking the stories of our journey
life-bards, each one of us
singing the world into being,
our mother tongue sounding forth in myriad cultural dialects,
through movement and gesture
touch by touch, we know ourselves into the world,
lives of mystery,
journeys of transforming understanding.

We are in this together.
Together we are born,
together we learn,
together we thrive,
together we suffer,
together we grieve,
together we console and,
together we die.

By we – I mean every manner of us:
humans of myriad shapes, flavours, colours and beliefs,
we mammals, we reptiles; we birds, insects and fish,
we trees and flowers, fungi and bacteria;
brothers and sisters all
we are in this together,
whirling round a life giving star
flowerings of sunlight
dancing in sunlight
knowings of sunlight
fabrics of radiance – bodies and minds
woven from a common source
sons and daughters all, singing our stories
celebrating this living creation.

Each one of us belong; needed and valued,
Each one of us, and all of us together,
mysteries of interbeing
continuously awash on primordial beaches of now
reaching forth with cautious sensitivity and finding ourselves
finger to finger,
heart to heart.
Moons of aspiration
Shedding tears for our forgetfulness.

May our communal heart, our goodness, our centre,
may it stay firm.
May we remember our whakapapa
remembrance in the functioning of flesh and bone and action;
not this sect or that group,
but the great and venerable whakapapa that joins and heals
This journey of all of us.

And through remembering,
our continuously transforming ever-fresh communion
becomes the womb and mother
of unimaginable futures and future beings
conceived in love,
yet to be born.

May the balms of love and healing and deep understanding
bless us to our core.

Sarva Mangalam

Winter is truly upon us, though in the Bay of Plenty, that means occasional frosts while gardens are still filled with blossoming flowers and green leafy vegetables!

The last few months have seen little activity on Green Dharma Treasury but we haven’t been completely asleep. In the background, much has been happening and we are delighted to share with you some of our recent endeavours.

Walking in Wisdom
This little book has been out of print for many years. We are happy to announce the publication of a newly refined edition – our first full colour book – complete with colour photos! It has come out very well. Copies can be obtained from the Wangapeka Study and Retreat Centre, or from Green Dharma Treasury or directly from us here at Orgyen Hermitage. The price is $18 NZ plus postage.

Tarchin Teaching on Video
From March 4 – 23, 2019 we held a retreat at Orgyen Hermitage in the Bay of Plenty NZ. It was called; “Heart Teachings of Mahayana and a Sadhana of Samantabhadra”. Once a day, eighteen people from five different countries gathered together to explore life and living using Tarchin’s recently crafted text, “A Sadhana of Samantabhadra”.

Each morning, the group would assemble in the Buddha Grove, (in the house if it was raining) and Tarchin would teach a section of the sadhana. Then, people would return to where they were staying and would spend the rest of the day, experimentally exploring the themes that were touching them most deeply.

Thanks to the collaborative efforts of Dan Burgess-Milne and Stephen Martin-Rolsky the classes were recorded and are gradually being made available. The first two classes are now posted with the help of “The Immeasurable School of Wisdom and Compassion” who is hosting the recordings on their youtube channel. Our thanks go to Jaime and Juliana of ‘Immeasurable‘for offering to do this.

Video class one – Introduction
Video class two – Preparation

Primordial Dharma – Audio
Tarchin recently gave the first class of what will be a series of monthly gatherings at Orgyen Hermitage. This is now available to download. Click here for a link to “Primordial Dharma and True Renunciation” You may find that you have to download this from the site before you can play it.

Ongoing Projects

Foundations of Mindfulness
In addition to the above projects, we have been busy revising and editing Tarchin’s “Foundations of Mindfulness”. In the past, this has been available in PDF and coil bound A4 editions. It was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil, yet no copy in English had come out. With the encouragement of many people we are hoping to publish this in English some time within the next 3 months.

New Publications
Tarchin is gradually drafting three new publications:
a commentary on his Sadhana of Samantabhadra,
a book on Contemplative Science and
a collection of poetry.

Many people have asked after Tarchin’s health. Since the last operation in September the cancer has been undetectable. In general, despite the inevitable ups and downs, his health is good enough to support his continuing work with people. We thank everyone for their ongoing support and kind good wishes.

Returning from a very full month of teaching and dharma exploration in Brazil we are delighted to announce some new publications in both English and Portuguese.

In NZ we have refined and extended, “Foundations of Mindfulness: A Manual for Meditators”. This is now available in book form where it joins “Walking in Wisdom” and “Breathing: The Natural Way to Meditate” to make what we are calling a ‘Mindfulness Trilogy’.

Foundations of Mindfulness is available for $20 NZ plus postage.
Mindfulness Trilogy, (three books) available for $50 plus postage.

In Brazil, three new beautifully presented titles are are now available.
Puja Diaria
Ciclo de Samatha
Refugio Verdaeiro
To purchase these visit http://www.assertivamindfulness.com.br/livros/

Recently, I found myself contemplating various meanings and permutations of the word foundation: – a place where something is found, or discovered; the place or ground from which something grows or is made; the basis, firm footing, substructure, underpinning or support for something. Things don’t just appear out of nowhere. Every being or entity emerges from a foundation, a history, a unique matrix of becoming – a shared process that links us all. To discover our foundations is not a different project from discovering what we/I am.

Rather than a singular foundation, it might be more fruitful to consider the possibility of ‘poly-foundations’ or at least a multi-faceted foundation – foundation as a collection of dynamic collaborative processes: one’s physiology, family, culture, local ecology, biosphere, billions of years of evolution-in-action, ungraspable suchness, the dharmadhatu. There are so many domains and dimensions. Each is a universe of unfolding in itself – a foundation or basis of nowness. How vast is your capacity to embrace? How big a universe can you be? Whatever its shape or form, that foundation will be an expression of dynamic structure, a continuous responding to shifts and changes taking place in the other domains of foundation – worlds interpenetrating worlds.

Given the above reflections, the term foundations of mindfulness overflows with hints and intimations. Evolving life is the foundation of what we call mindfulness while, at the same time, mindfulness in action is what deepens our appreciation of this mystery. Kalu Rinpoche once described mind as “that which knows”. We could call it the field or expanse of knowing. Mindfulness/awareness/responsiveness, however we call it, is a process of continual attunement. It is a dance, a choral symphony of becoming: atom to atom, molecule to molecule, organs, organisms, creatures, ecosystems and planets; ever refining responsiveness collaborating with immeasurable other responsivenesses in the process of manifesting the living experience that we currently are. In this sense, mindfulness is a foundation for ongoing bodhisattvaship – the sublime art of being this mystery, knowing itself, living together (planetary companions) with competence, awe-struck reverence, and love.

As wholeness,
I don’t relate to any other.
Yet,
Feeling into the primordial wholeness of present living,
I sense an ocean of relatings
occurring through many domains and dimensions of being.
Relationship is what I am.
It’s what you are.
Universes inter-shaping ,
these mysteries that are each one of us.
Resting in this praxis;
mindfulness dancing all over.
Learning
as subtle blessing;
this enquiry
this speechless wondering
this unshakable stillness.
Foundation in all its ungraspable mystery.

With warm thanks to everyone who helped make our recent visit to Brazil
such a rich and marvellous experience.

Sarva Mangala

This post is dedicated to the Australian fire fighters, medical responders, comforters, supporters and helpers – bodhisattvas of all kinds – who are courageously rising to the occasion, regardless of risk, to help and succour beings in need. I realise that many of you are far too engaged with immediate necessities to find these mere words of any value but a bit further from the flames, some might find them relevant. Wherever you are, may you be safe. May injury be healed. May a rain of blessing come soon.

(This post doesn’t provide a full suite of formatting options.  Click here for the fully formatted PDF version)

I watch the news from Australia,
from America,
from the Middle East,
it seems like everywhere . . .
The fire season is upon us;
a span of months,
but with implications for many years to come.

The world is on fire;
Burning forests, grasslands, croplands, and infrastructure.
Burning creatures, big and small.
Burning political expediencies, social intolerance,
racism, sexism and domestic violence;
pathologies of frustration-driven destructiveness.

The core fuel is fear, with its entourage of entailments;
fanned by turbulent winds of grasping,
narrow focussing,
hormonal and muscular dancings,
acquisitiveness and control,
and relational violence.

Winds of this fire-storm are drying the world;
Evaporating fluids,
the moistures of love and reverence and intelligent humility.
Its a catastrophic crisis of desiccation,
shrivelling people to infantile helplessness.
Too big, too much, too overwhelming to deal with.
In this gestating womb of a tinder dry mother,
we flare with the tiniest spark.

Look!
Look deeply into what we are doing.
Look what we are doing to our mother earth,
this mother nature,
this communal body and knowing that we are.

We are playing with fire!
Risking everything!
for a fantasy of immortality – as if this economy could go forever,
striving for never – quite – arriving peace and goodness,
investing in futures for an imagined comfortable retirement;
all flammable processes that will surely burn our grandchildren.

We must end this hypnotic lure!

Fire is dangerous!
We can’t control it.
We can’t reason with it
We can’t work with it.
Fire kills!

Living in dharma,
or, as Vaclav Havel said, “living in truth”,
this is the extinguisher of such fires;
an actual rain of blessing.

Living in truth takes place as an ever present now,
right here, in the life you are living,
– in the life we are together living.
This is where the fire can be quenched.

And so, immersed in this unfathomable dancing of inter-being;
each of us may be moved to ask,
What can we do?

And in this moment of genuine asking;
we stop,
we pause,
– a hiatus of poignant stillness –

Listening, midst the rhythms of heart beat and breath,
we begin to hear a response,
or perhaps we sense it,
so deeply,
that it feels more like a moment of intuition, whispering
in the juices of our body.

“Whatever helps to expand your appreciation and respect
for the mystery of living that we are.”

Breathing further,
contemplating the breadth of such guidance.

Then . . .
Expand this appreciative respect, in the domain of space;
one’s body, one’s home, one’s country, one’s world;
one’s family, one’s culture,
humanity, plants and animals,
the entire living world.
Cultivate the joys of connecting,
through seeing and listening and smelling and tasting touching and empathizing.
This we can do.

Expand it, in the domain of time;
feeling myriad cultures of ancestors
reverberating in this present experience;
Recognising that our actions today will echo
in the lives of generations
yet to come.

In short, we expand “appreciation and respect
for the mystery of living that we are” through
actively cultivating generosity,
and wholesome relating,
and patience,
and skilled use of directed energy,
and ever continuous caring and enquiry;
And all of this tempered with profoundly integrative understanding.

This way of living is the quenching of destructive fire.
The ultimate extinguisher.
The fundamental fire retardant.
It is the only sustainable way, for biological beings,
creatures who have no existence
apart from the activity of living
that they and we are.
This is truth.
This is living dharma.

I watch the videos from Australia and feel my heart quaking.
I think of friends in the fire zones.
I think of brothers and sisters in countries around the world.
I think of myriad living beings of forests, grasslands, tundra and oceans;
creatures of every dimension of life.
We are indigenous to this world.
It is what we are.
It is all we have.
It is our family, and home.
And in moments like this we realise
it is precious!

I pray these fires help to wake us up!
May they become the dropping penny,
the point of realising,
if we have not yet done so already,
That we can no longer play dangerous games
of political and personal celebrity;
games of power and heartless economic accounting.

The Bible relates how Christ threw the money changers
out of the temple.
Now look what’s happened!
Whether by stealth or connivance,
they have managed to slink back in.

May we discover, find, recognise, or realise,
the rarely appreciated blessing of
living in truth.
May we wake up to the real priorities of sustainable living.
This communion of sentience that we are.

In finishing this post, please join me
in the following aspiration.

We take refuge in love and clear seeing.
We live courageously in this world of birthing and dying.
Our hearts embrace all companions on this path of lucidity and freedom.

SARVA MANGALAM

Dear Friends
I hope you are all healthy and well in body and spirit. New Zealand is going into total lock-down tomorrow for at least a month. It is hoped that by doing this, many lives will be saved and the health system will not be overloaded to the point of collapse. We have just finished a very rich retreat at Wangapeka and emerged to find the world in a flurry of grappling with this big unknown. Mary, Andy and I are now back on our land and are making any preparations we can to keep us healthy over the next few months.

Because Mary and I are both over 70, plus the ongoingness of my cancer, we are in a high risk category if we were to get the virus, so we have decided to go into total isolation, at least until the end of April. That means we will not be having anyone staying in the retreat cabin or visiting outside without prior phone or e-mail arrangements. Andy has generously offered to look after logistics like food. Once we get settled into the new routine, I may offer some zoom classes. I’ll post notice of this on Green Dharma Treasury’s “Public Schedule”.

Yesterday, we finished uploading all the classes from the recent retreat, “Mindfulness and More” (in unedited audio files). If you would like to listen to them they can be found at GDT under “Audio”. Click here for Audio. One class a day would keep you going for a month!

Some people have experienced difficulties listening from the google drive. If so, I suggest that you consider downloading the files to your device. This way you could listen to them even if the internet becomes overloaded.

Mary and I are wishing everyone, good health, deepening insights
and an inexhaustible flow of wonderment.
A cyber hug to you all
with love and good wishes
Tarchin

Dear Friends

I am writing from a place I never seriously imagined before these Covid-19 times. The normalisation of social distancing, lock-down, unrequested retreat, and a prolonged plunge – an eternal diving – deep into the unknowing and unknowable not-knowingness of everything taken for granted; this interweaving of worlds, revealed ever more starkly as fragile, ephemeral, mist-like and wondrous.

These days, I often sit outside in the very early mornings, the star graced heavens framed by silhouetted tree tops. I am touched with the sounds of occasional rustling in the branches, cracks, clicks and scrapings, punctuated by owl hoot and moving breath and pleasure of attentive stillness. And what can we do but love? What can we do but deepen into this life-well of enquiry? What can we do but help wherever we can and share whatever we can? To you, reading these words I wish you good health, life focussing question, and the blessing of ever increasing wonderment.

We have just posted “A Sheaf of Poems – 2010 to 2019” It is a small offering in this time of challenge for so many. My aspiration is that some of these verses may reverberate in your heart. Click here to download the PDF.

Mary and I are both well and being caringly and lovingly supported by Andy McIntosh who has done everything he can to keep our bubble at Orgyen Hermitage, virus free. Wherever you are and however you are living, may the dharma inspire and infuse your life and the lives of all you meet.

with love and good wishes
Tarchin

Since the last Green Dharma Treasury posting, we have uploaded more teachings in both audio and video formats. There are 13 audio classes on the practice of Mahamudra given during a retreat that happened here in 2013, and a youtube video of a recent winter solstice class given via Zoom. Our on-going schedule for public teaching has become hugely reduced mainly due to Covid 19, but monthly zoom classes are taking place and they are announced under public teaching.

Two inspiring movies have come our way, both of which I highly recommend.

One is a contemplative allegory for natural awakening. It is only about three and half minutes but well worth watching in a quiet and contemplative space.  Click here to view this.

The other is a recent film about the life and work of physicist David Bohm. This is a beautiful and thoughtfully stimulating film.

Here at Orgyen, all is well with a steady stream of people coming to study and or to help out. We have had the driveway re-surfaced and have installed a new water tank which will help to get us through the increasingly droughty summers. The gardens are beautiful and are providing lots of fresh produce for the kitchen. Andy is offering weekly classes in Katikati and in Tauranga which local people are greatly appreciating.

Wherever you are and whatever your circumstance, may you be blessed with wonderment, and continued opportunity to explore this mystery of life and living as it is, and to share what is truly meaningful for you with those you meet upon the way.

with love and good wishes in dharma
Tarchin and Mary