!!TOP!!331 2013 Oct Kamalashila Trekcho VN BT Days 1 4 Webready PDF

The
View and Practice of Trekcho
Eifel Autumn Retreat, 2013
James Low
Kamalashila Institute, Germany, October 17 – 20, 2013
Transcribed by Vera Neuroth

Edited by Barbara Terris
© James Low www.simplybeing.co.uk

1
WHAT BRINGS US TO THE DHARMA? 2
What does buddhism suggest we do? .........................................................................................................................4
Take refuge ............................................................................................................................................................................5
Make friends with instability .........................................................................................................................................8
DIFFERENT WAYS TO CONSTRUE THE WORLD 9
The hinayana path of control ........................................................................................................................................9
The mahayana path of circumstantiality .................................................................................................................9
The tantric path of aesthetic continuity .................................................................................................................11
TAKING UP A VIEW (OR ETHOS) 15
En-roling and de-roling .................................................................................................................................................15
The three pot faults ..........................................................................................................................................................16
Devotion dissolves reiFication: belief in emptiness dissolves belief in substance ..................................21
REFUGE 24
Trekcho is cutting, but not cutting away ...............................................................................................................27
Massage the dharma into ourselves and massage ourselves into the dharma .....................................29
There is no end to samsara but neither is there a beginning ........................................................................31
GURU YOGA USING THE LETTER A 32
How the mind is like the mirror ..................................................................................................................................33
TULKU TSORLO’S TREKCHO COMMENTARY: VIMALAMITRA’S SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL POINTS 35
Point 1: With a soft hope, put yourself in place ...................................................................................................37
Point 2: Beyond language, beyond any need for focused activity ...............................................................38
Point 3: Don’t enter into preference or judgement ............................................................................................39
Point 4: Don’t make a distinction between positive and negative action ................................................41
Point 5: Do not rely on mental analysis ..................................................................................................................44
Point 6: It will show itself directly .............................................................................................................................46
Point 7: The three kayas appear in vision on the path ....................................................................................47
KHORDE RUSHEN EXERCISES TO SEPARATE US FROM SAMSARA AND NIRVANA 48
Exercise 1: Using your body, experience each of the six realms and nirvana .........................................50
Exercise 2: Falling into ease, naldu wabpa ...........................................................................................................53
Exercise 3: Body in the shape of vajra .....................................................................................................................55
Exercise 4: Sealing ............................................................................................................................................................57
Exercise 5: Semdzin practice using a blue HUNG [1] ........................................................................................57
Exercise 6: Semdzin practice using a blue HUNG [2] ........................................................................................59
Exercise 7: Sleeping .........................................................................................................................................................60
LOOKING INTO HOW DIFFERENT DHARMA VIEWS FIT TOGETHER 60
First turning of the wheel: three marks of conditioned existence ...............................................................60
Second turning of the wheel ........................................................................................................................................62
Tantric ideas start to develop here ...........................................................................................................................64
Three kinds of compassion ...........................................................................................................................................66
Emptiness is central to hinayana and mahayana ..............................................................................................71
Seeing yourself through the other .............................................................................................................................82
TREKCHO PRACTICE OF THE THREE SKIES 83
‘As is’ and ‘as if’ ..................................................................................................................................................................85
Three basic principles: appearance and emptiness; clarity and emptiness; awareness and
emptiness. ......................................................................................................................................................................86
Dreams and dream yoga ...............................................................................................................................................90
OUR MIND IS EXPERIENCE AND OUR WORLD IS DISCONTINUOUS 97
How dzogchen integrates all phenomena as the path ......................................................................................99
Knowledge is violence ..................................................................................................................................................101
Three kinds of ignorance ............................................................................................................................................103
In the land of gold ..........................................................................................................................................................108
Bad thoughts also arise from emptiness ..............................................................................................................109
Dzogchen compassion ..................................................................................................................................................111
LEAVING 114

2
WHAT BRINGS US TO THE DHARMA?

Over the next four days we have a chance to look at the dzogchen prac8ces connected with trekcho.
Dzogchen is a very old system connected with Tibetan buddhism but it also has lineages independent
of that. It translates as ‘the great comple8on’ and it points to the fact that whatever is required is
always already here, that there is a natural comple8on or perfec8on in existence.
This point of view is not one shared by all the buddhist paths and so first of all I’ll try to locate this
kind of prac8ce in rela8on to the general buddhist structure and hopefully show that these different
paths are all addressing the same issue.
The fact seems to be that we are drawn towards different paths according to our own tendencies –
you could call these karmic tendencies, the propensi8es of our own personality and history and so
on. Some people are very commiHed to the idea of struggle, of giving themselves a hard 8me, of
focusing on difficul8es to be overcome. Dzogchen is not likely to appeal to people with that
orienta8on because it seems too easy. Other people are more lazy stupid people who try to avoid
difficul8es in life and they would be very aHracted to dzogchen! My own teacher always said that it’s
beHer to be simple and stupid, because if you are too intelligent, then you can always find something
to think about and so you’d spend your whole life in the labyrinth of your mind, chasing one idea
aLer another.
Generally speaking, we come towards dharma or some kind of prac8ce because we find ourselves not
fully at home in ourselves or sa8sfied with our situa8on. We feel that something is wrong. Something
is not quite working in the right way, and therefore we need to do something different. Usually this
manifests in terms of a sense of either lack or excess. We feel something is missing in ourselves – we
lack something and therefore we want to get something to make ourselves complete. Or, we find that
we have an excess of something, maybe an excess of emo8on, an excess of anxiety, of blaming
oneself or other people and so on, and therefore we want to diminish that excess.
Finding the middle way between these two tendencies is the central teaching of the Buddha.
However that middle way is not going to be achieved in a stable manner if one is constantly adjus8ng
one’s own situa8on. It’s not as if we can see ourselves clearly as all of a piece, that we can just look in
a mirror and see who we are.
The fact seems to be that we are revealed to ourselves situa8onally. So for much of the 8me you
might get on quite well in your life, you seem to be successful, you have friends and so on, and
suddenly the place where you are working is closed down. You’re unemployed. You have less money,
you can’t par8cipate in the things you were doing before and you find that your life is shrinking. In
the economic climate that has happened to many people across Europe.
In such moments we can see that the sense of who we are, which felt like ‘me’ – it felt like a kind of
internally defined presenta8on, a manifesta8on of the essence of myself – is actually con8ngent. That
is to say, it’s dependent on the interac8on of causes and circumstances. The ‘me-‐ness’ of me, what
feels like the truth of my own existence, is not something inside me, but is something which emerges
in rela8on to the environment. Therefore who we are is revealed to us through our par8cipa8on in
the environment, which is changing. So, bad events can make us very sour and biHer or angry and we
think, “Five years ago I wasn’t like this! Five years ago I was happy and friendly and now I’m
depressed and I don’t want to see people. How can this have happened?” Very easily. Because five
years ago, when things were going well, they were going well because of a paHerning of
3
circumstances, which gave rise to these experiences. They were temporary phenomena. They were
not who we really are. Causes and circumstances change and we find ourselves manifes8ng as a
different form.
So this is the beginning of the buddhist understanding of the nature of impermanence – that
whatever we take ourselves to be, is not stable or reliable; and therefore we have to live with a sense
that our iden8ty is fraudulent. Fraudulent in the sense that although we inhabit it as if it is the
presenta8onal truth of who we are — that I am myself, obviously, it’s not obvious at all. Because how
I am today is not how I was yesterday. The fact that we have moods, that we have different kinds of
thoughts and sensa8ons, that our rela8on with our body shiLs according to hormonal cycles, to
vagaries of the weather, to ge[ng cold, sicknesses, illnesses, and so on.
The fantasy of the stability of personal iden8ty is one of the things which blinds us to the actuality of
our co-‐emergence with many different factors. That we are called into being by the environments
that we are rela8ng with. That we don’t exist prior to the situa8on. That we never know what’s going
to happen. If you go to work in the morning, you don’t know how you are going to be in the course of
the day. Maybe you open the computer and there is some really shiHy e-‐mail and your day is ruined.
Before, you didn’t feel like that. Just a few words appearing on a screen and then — “Oh! My life is
not so safe.”
How come we are so sensi8ve? How come our mood is changing? We can look on this as some kind
of psychological problem, “I should be more authenCc. If I was authenCc, if I was true to myself, then I
would be reliable and predictable in how I manifest into the world.” But is this true? When we look at
the poli8cians, they are changing like the wind, moving this way and that way, because their agenda
is to stay in power.
We have a similar kind of agenda; we’re not flying in such a big space, but in the small spaces of our
lives we seek to maintain the con8nuity of our sense of self and the structures of our existence.
Friendships, rela8onships with family, work, feeling okay about ourselves and so on. This structuring
of iden8ty is always at the mercy of the winds which are blowing around us. It’s not something which
we can stabilise. So from the buddhist point of view, the effort to stabilise your iden8ty is essen8ally a
waste of 8me. It’s a cul-‐de-‐sac, it’s a dead end road.
For example, there are many kinds of personal development groups you can go to, to find out more
about your personality and develop yourself in all kinds of ways. There are many forms of physical
development and groups you can join. These can out you more in touch with your body; you can join
a singing group, be more in touch with your voice, you could learn to understand your mind more…
All of these can be useful, but s8ll we will fall over events. Things will happen which we hadn’t
predicted; which we don’t like and we don’t like them, because we can’t fit them into what we feel to
be our shape. These events which come are events that we want to reject, because if we offer them
hospitality, they will cause us to change our shape. And changing our shape at the mercy of events
oLen gives us a sense of insecurity, of anxiety – “I don’t know who I really am!” For some people, the
experience of becoming a mother, for example, is extremely trauma8c; it completely un-‐grounds
them. They lose their connec8on with how their life was before and for years and years they can
wander in a wilderness of not really knowing how to relate to themselves, or the baby, or the people
around them.

4
The same thing can happen with redundancy, with losing your job, with sickness – but it can also
happen for no apparent reason. One day you just wake up and you are no longer quite at home in the
life that you thought you had.
What does buddhism suggest we do?

So, what is buddhism proposing? Generally it is to understand that the investment that we have in
our iden8ty, in our felt sense of who we are, is a misplacement of our energy. That is to say that our
poten8al can go in two main direc8ons. It can go in the direc8on of wisdom, to understand the
ground of the basis of who we are, and it can go in the direc8on of compassion, to allow us to be
more related to the people around us, to our situa8ons, to be more flexible and responsive. But
when this poten8al that we have, this richness of our crea8vity, when this is harnessed and gathered
together in the func8on of maintaining our own sense of self, then it’s very easy to have no sense of
wisdom and no sense of compassion.
If, in the face of these constantly turning events that surround us, we are trying to hold ourselves
together, then clearly the central concern that we have is the maintenance of a self-‐image, or a self-‐
construct. This is very preoccupying and very diminishing. If our aHen8on is turned out onto the
world and focusing on other people – on how they might be and how we might relate to them – this
also blocks us from looking more directly into ourselves and examining what it actually means to be
‘me’.
We have many ideas about who we are. We have our history, our stories, where we live, what kind of
work we do, what kind of pleasures we manage to extract from the world around us, and so on. It
may seem as if this forma8on of iden8ty is the totality of our existence. Moreover this is confirmed
by whatever educa8on we got, the kind of work that we do, the family expecta8ons. If you become a
parent, then children want you to be their mother or the father; that’s their main interest in you.
They are not really interested in whether you are happy or not. They might be interested in whether
you’ve got some money to spend on them, but mainly they are interested in you fulfilling a func8on
towards them.
It’s the same when you go into work. You get some money for what you do, but it’s inside the
template, inside the framework of other people’s expecta8ons. Somebody has an agenda and a
no8on of what you should be doing. So as soon as you enter into the workplace, you are formed into
a par8cular kind of iden8ty and you are expected to fulfil that while you are in that building.
So – all day long we are ge[ng reaffirma8on or encouragement to give more of the same, to present
ourselves as being more of the same. It’s quite unusual to meet somebody who really invites us to
inquire into who we are. Once we start to inquire into who we are, that will make us less predictable
to the other person. Which means that the other person then has to be more thoughaul and
aHen8ve when they interact with us. Imagine if we were mee8ng together on the basis of being
aware! That would be very different. I don’t get that when I go to work in the morning nor, I imagine,
do you. The whole structure of the clinic where I work is a choreography wriHen a long 8me ago by
nobody remembers whom but we are all s8ll dancing to this par8cular kind of tune. And that’s
usually the case in ins8tu8ons. You cross the threshold, you start to hear the music that’s playing and
if you don’t get in step, you start to get trouble. So the possibility of inquiring into the nature of our
existence and iden8ty doesn’t occur very oLen. Especially the inquiry as to what is this world that
surrounds us.

5
Buddhism essen8ally begins with an invita8on to put our assump8ons into ques8on, assump8ons
which act as the glue that holds the shape of our world together. Now, why would we want to bother
doing this? If you hold your life together, and you live in a wealthy country where there is reasonable
healthcare and plen8ful food then life is not so hard. Why shouldn’t you just have a pleasant life? Do
a bit of work, get some money, enjoy yourself...? Why would you not do that?
Well, from a buddhist point of view, it’s because the very act of trying to fulfil oneself through
sensory enjoyment, through fi[ng into a system, generates a kind of aliena8on. No maHer how we
try to fit in, even when we are very willingly offering ourselves – “Give me a job!’ “Give me a place to
be!” “I want you to say you love me and be with me forever!” – even when we are trying to find a
niche, a liHle corner that we can occupy and stay safe in – in finding that refuge, that site of iden8ty,
we are alienated from our own poten8al.
That is to say: in finding this, we forget that. In signing up to this package deal, there is a whole lot of
ourselves to whom we are saying, “Stay in the shadow”, “Don’t trouble me.” Some of us are troubled
by these things. We think, “Maybe there is more to life!” “What’s the purpose of doing this?” We
work away, we try various occupa8ons and ac8vi8es, but something is missing. We start to see that
the lack is not a lack for something different, something special – the lack is the lack of a par8cular
way of inhabi8ng our existence that allows us to be at home whatever is occurring. Because if you
look for the special – whether it’s a special rela8onship, or a special occupa8on, or having special
children, whatever the special is as a par8cular forma8on – it’s going to be limited. And that
limita8on is going to make it more difficult to engage with other aspects of life experience, because
you have commiHed yourself to something small.
Whereas if we see that actually my lack is that having created this structure of myself – much of
which was created by our par8cipa8on in a family matrix when we were small – we didn’t know we
were crea8ng ourselves. We were just trying to hang in there and survive and not let our brother
beat us or whatever it would be. We learn these various moves in order to find a way forward but this
par8cular shaping of ourselves is not something which is not really viable. It’s a wrong turning. So
le[ng go of who we think we are, of the habitual assump8ve structure of our existence, is something
very important.
Take refuge
This leads us to the first level of buddhist prac8ce, taking refuge. Tradi8onally we take refuge in the
Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. Why do we take refuge? Because we realise that we can’t trust
ourselves. It’s very scary to realise you can’t trust yourself. You can’t trust the content of your own
mind. You can’t trust your feelings. Most of us have made mistakes in life through our feelings. We
think something is going to be good, we start some love-‐story with someone, whatever, and aLer a
while it goes wrong, and then we wonder, “How could that be? It seemed so right but now it’s gone
wrong. I was sure this would work, but actually, it’s not working out at all. The feeling that I had,
which said, ‘ This is right’, is clearly not correct; it’s unreliable.”
So I can’t trust my feelings, I can’t trust my thinking and I can’t trust my sensa8on. All of these lead
me into fragmen8ng paths. What will I rely on? Well, one can rely on the Buddha. Why do we rely on
the Buddha? Because he is far away and won’t cause trouble. We rely on people who are alive, whom
we meet but they always cause us trouble. However to the Buddha we say, “We completely trust you!
We are not going to meet you, so we trust you.” We rely on the dharma, the teaching, because it’s
radically different, it cuts across the trajectory of our life; it offers a re-‐vision, a new way of seeing
6
what we seem to be caught up in. It’s almost like if you were out camping and you are going to put up
your tent and you spread out the tent and lay out the lines and peg it down and then you put the
central pole in the tent. As soon as the pole goes in, the tent rises up. The dharma teaching should be
like that. They should open up a space. However a lot of the 8me we are in the collapsed tent. Our
life is s8cking to our face; it’s too close, we can’t see very much, we’re caught up in it. We lack
perspec8ve; we don’t have distance from our events.
Taking refuge means that there is more to life than I have at the moment. I lack something, but what I
lack is not more of the same, but a beHer version of it. It’s not that I need a beHer job or a beHer
partner or a different kind of diet. Although all of these factors can produce some temporary rela8ve
improvement, they are not going to bring about a fundamental or structural change. Refuge means
needing to find something which will be reliable under all circumstances.
When I look at my own mind, sensa8ons, feelings and thoughts are all transient. They are all
situa8onally arising. Therefore they are unreliable. We have enthusiasms for different 8mes and
when something seems very real, very true and we give ourselves to it one hundred percent. Some
8me later the energy ebbs out of it and it flows away. The thing that once was shining and bright is
now dull or even vanishing. This is our experience. It’s not an illusion. It’s just how it is.
In taking that kind of refuge, we want to orient ourselves towards something, towards a new
possibility, a possibility of awakening to something else. What is it from which we should awaken? A
reliance on our own mental construc8ons to establish a sense of the reality of our situa8on. To
renounce this means not to rely on cogni8on. It means freeing one’s mind from the semio8c web,
from the interpre8ve matrix of reliance on language and interpreta8ons according to par8cular
thought-‐structures, and star8ng to see directly what is there.
Essen8ally refuge is about peeling back the excess of mental ac8vity which we have used defensively
to generate a sense of meaning and thereby to start seeing whether there is any natural or intrinsic
meaning already present in the situa8on. So long as we feel that we, in our individual ego-‐sense, are
the makers of our own lives and that our existence is all up to us, then clearly we have to make our
existence.
What are the ingredients available to us? We don’t have bricks, we don’t have cement. We don’t have
flour or water to make this. What have we got? The ingredients are memories, hopes and fears about
the future, thoughts, feelings, sensa8ons, things we’ve read in books, things people have told us,
things you see on the television, things on your computer – there is a lot of stuff. How will we know
the right things to choose? What are the right propor8ons of the right things to choose? Well, we
don’t know and that’s why we get in a mess. It’s very obvious. We know this is in our lives. We think
something is really the most important thing and then we find out that it’s not.
Human beings are unreliable
So, looking at what we are made of is a central path and, for as long as we are ‘making ourselves’, we
will use the habitual ingredients which are to hand and this will lead us astray, according to the
tradi8on of buddhism. In order to look in a different direc8on, we need to organise or reorient
ourselves in a different direc8on. This is the func8on of medita8on. Medita8on is primarily
concerned with the detoxifica8on and disempowerment of the phenomena which arise as the
contents of our experience.

7
That is to say, when we sit in the medita8on, some thought arises and catches us and carries us away.
We start to think, “Oh! This is important.” because in our daily life the content of our mind is what we
are. We are thinking about this, we’re doing that, we are looking at that, we have things to do, we
make some phone-‐calls – it all seems very important. Certain thoughts and feelings are invested with
an ul8mate meaning. “I have to do this.” “Listen, I have to be there.” “I have to do this, don’t interrupt
me just now, this is really important.” If we didn’t do it, the world wouldn’t end, but we would feel
bad. We would feel bad. If you get to school late for the kids, someone else will be looking aLer the
kids; they might be pissed off with you, that you’re late, but anyway, they are not going to let the kids
just wonder off in the street. So, “I’ve got to be there!”
Yes, it’s a good idea to be on 8me if you can, but the extra anxiety which is added on, is usually not so
much the anxiety about the external event, but the anxiety about the collapsing of the image that
one has about oneself: that one is both efficient and reliable. Efficiency and reliability are the joint
curses of consumerist capitalism which is grounded in the nature of factory produc8on, of machine
produc8on. Efficiency means that there should be no wastage. Everything should be func8oning
without any excess or deficit; it should be on the point all the 8me. Reliability means that if you’ve
done that on Monday, you should s8ll be able to do it on Friday. This essen8ally means that you
should become a machine. Machines can be programmed to do the same thing endlessly.
Human beings don’t do very well under that. Human beings are unreliable. That is why it’s a very
important thing in life, as much as you can, to tell other people, “I am inefficient and unreliable!” “Do
not depend on me. If you want to depend on something, depend on your buddha nature. But don’t
depend on me.” Otherwise you bind yourself into a prison of constantly adjus8ng yourself to the
socially viable form which other people expect you to inhabit. This is a func8on of aliena8on. There
are many problems in the applica8on of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s analysis, but the analysis
itself is very, very accurate: the machine culture is deadly.
From a buddhist point of view this is especially true because we are concerned on a general level
with dependent co-‐origina8on. That is to say whatever is arising, is arising in rela8on to other aspects
of the experien8al field. There is nothing which stands alone, nothing which is defined in and of itself.
For example at the start of today’s teachings, somebody came in and switched on the electric light.
It’s beHer that we have a light now and so we can look at everything. But the light is only working
because there is the wire which goes into the wall to get the electricity, which only works if people
here pay the bills to the electricity company; and the electricity company can only con8nue to
produce that if it has some kind of fuel running the generator, whether it’s wind power or coal or
nuclear, whatever it would be. The coal depends on there being coal deposits, the wind depends on
the wind blowing and the nuclear depends on the decisions of the government.
So everything is dependent on something else; it’s not exis8ng by itself. When you carry out that
analysis, we see that there is no truth in the light being a light. The light func8ons in rela8on to the
electricity. It func8ons also in rela8on to somebody switching the light on. So it is a func8on which
comes into play due to the interac8on of causes and circumstances. It’s not a true thing in itself. It has
no truth. We also have no truth. We arise as we do, in various ways, according to the circumstances
of our life. These circumstances change and we manifest in a different way. This is not a sign of some
moral weakness in ourselves. It’s not a sign that we should try harder. It’s a sign that this is how
things are. Our mood is affected by what we hear.

8
A few days ago, various people sent me e-‐mails about the murder of Akong Rinpoche. I knew Akong
Rinpoche many, many years ago, in the early days of Samyeling, before it was even Samyeling. It’s
very sad. So when I got this e-‐mail, I felt sad. Why would I not feel sad? I didn’t want to feel sad. I
didn’t send out e-‐mails to people saying, “Hey, I’m geQng a liRle bit happy, maybe even a liRle too
high. Perhaps you could look around – is there any bad news? Please send it to me, to help me drop
my mood.” You know, the whole world is not a psychiatric clinic just for me but something happened
far away in China, people found out about this, the informa8on was sent and I read it and I’m sad.
Oh! What a tragedy to happen! That mood runs through my day a liHle bit, because it makes me
think again about impermanence and the way that people with a good inten8on can be aHacked by
people who have a bad inten8on. It tells me again that virtue is no protec8on. This is very frightening
for me.
I don’t know about you, but I like to live in a fantasy that if I’m a good boy, good things will happen.
And I see that this is not the case. Shit! Then I remember, “Oh! Karma!” Maybe although I’ve maybe
been a liHle bit of a good boy in this life, my past lives – uh-‐oh!... not so good. So, many bits of shit
are going to fall from the sky. This is very scary. My life is influenced by circumstances. No, that’s a
wrong formula8on. My life is the experience of the influence of circumstances. It’s not that I have a
life apart from circumstances and they bang into it. What we experience in being alive is like being a
marketplace where these various forces are se[ng up their stalls inside us. We find ourselves saying
something or not saying something. We don’t quite know why. We miss our chance to say something.
A door is opened but we don’t go through it. Or a door is almost closed and it says, “Don’t go through
here” but we s8ll push our way through. This is what we find ourselves doing.
What would normally be seen as a problem for surviving in life, like not being efficient and reliable, is
actually something very interes8ng. We see that the structure of modern life is an extreme form of
aliena8on from the opportunity of seeing how things are.
Even now, when the farmers have all kind of modern machinery, they are very much s8ll commiHed
to looking at the sky. It is much easer ge[ng the harvest in when it’s dry. You can bring the harvest in
wet, but then you have to get machines to dry the grain and that costs extra money and puts up your
price and then it’s not compe88ve to sell it. So farmers know about being at the mercy of
circumstances. Sailors and fishermen out on the sea – they know about winds and storms; it really
makes an impact. For someone running a liHle shop – they know about economic downturns,
because it affects their profit-‐margin and whether they can stay open.
Make friends with instability

A lot of our experience of life is quite unstable. This instability is not the sign of a mistake – it’s
actually how it is. The excess of consumerist capitalism has created the fantasy that you can have
simple produc8on. When the Chinese economy was doing very well and pumping it out, we had an
endless flooding of the shops with cheap Chinese clothes.
Just now I am wearing these cheap Chinese trousers which cost me four pounds, not very much
money. They last for about six months and then the dye starts to wash out. I’m not very concerned
with looking smart, so it’s okay for me. It’s cheap, it’s really cheap. If you want to wear a pair of Levi’s
you pay almost ten 8mes that or more. The Chinese economy was making that happen, so in the area
in London where I live, which is a poor area, everybody is looking kind of hip, because they can go to
a shop called Primark and buy a complete set of clothing for about thirty-‐five euros. It’s amazing. It’s

9
all done on the basis of some big hall with five hundred people working away on sewing machines for
ten hours a day and ge[ng paid very liHle. That’s how we get cheap clothes.
This is dependent co-‐origina8on and it arises due to condi8ons. The economic condi8on in China
changes and the price of the clothes in Primark goes up. It’s like that. It’s not stable. Instability is the
central thing to understand, because if you see that instability is not a mistake and not a punishment,
but is the actual nature of our situa8on, then maybe we should make friends with it. If this is how it
is, then we’ve got to live with that, rather than constantly seeing it as a problem, as something to be
solved or removed.
DIFFERENT WAYS TO CONSTRUE THE WORLD
The hinayana path of control

In the theravada or hinayana path, there is a lot of concern with trying to stabilise situa8ons by
avoiding immersion in turbulence. Renuncia8on is the means to simplify life and vows are taken to
simplify your food, the 8me you go to sleep, the sort of clothes you wear, the contact you have with
other human beings and so on. This slows everything down and creates a lot of space around you.
Even then there is s8ll turbulence. One of the things that monks and nuns have to do is to make
public confession of their faults, because they s8ll make mistakes. Why do they con8nue to make
mistakes when they live in a monastery and they have nothing to do but dharma? Because it’s very
easy to make mistakes. Mistakes are what we do. So again and again they say, ‘I will not make a
mistake’ and again and again they have to say, “Oh, I made a mistake, I’m very sorry. I will try harder.”
Then again, “Oh! I made a mistake.” We spend our whole life doing that.
Why do we make mistakes? Because we are not in control. But you should be more in control. So the
path that is set out in the hinayana is a path of control. It says,
—Here are the rules; if you follow these rules you will not get lost.
—I’m not doing very well.
—That’s because you didn’t follow the rules.
—But the rules are very hard to follow!
—Yeees... but you must try harder.
So you spend your whole life trying to be somebody who you are not.
If you do that, you can make some development, but what you will not do, is find the space and the
8me to see who you are. Because who you are is shit. And who you should be is gold. So when you
are looking at the gold, the shit smells bad. But if you start to look at the shit, you might find you can
turn it into manure and you can put it into the ground of your existence and beau8ful flowers can
grow.
So essen8ally, if you start with judgement, if you start by impor8ng fixed dogma8c knowledge, that
may give you a strength and a clarity, but it brings with it a kind of mental dullness. Because
essen8ally you are an agent of the machine, you are trying to implement a preordained
understanding of the world. The fact is that if you want to awaken, you can’t really do it by becoming
a clone. It’s a very precise and unique and direct experience to awaken.
The mahayana path of circumstantiality

In the mahayana buddhist tradi8on – it’s called the ‘great path’ or the ‘broader path’ – there is much
more concern with wisdom and compassion. Here the issue is to try to see the empty nature, the
10
ungroundedness, of all phenomena. There is no essence in anything that we see, in ourselves, or
even in the cons8tuents of ourselves. Not only is the sense of self empty, but our thoughts, feelings,
sensa8ons, memories and so on are also empty. Empty here means that they are not things; they are
temporary configura8ons. They are the coming together of various possibili8es which create a
paHern.
So for example we are si[ng here just now. Every thirty seconds somebody moves a bit, so the
paHern of how we are changes in its precision, but generally speaking, people are wearing par8cular
clothes and they’ve got par8cular kinds of postures. Tomorrow morning when we come back in,
people will probably be wearing slightly different clothes. They might even be si[ng in slightly
different places. So we could say: we are here today, and we will be here again tomorrow morning.
How we are here can be hidden or disregarded by our commitment to the fact that here we are
again.
When we look around... oh yes, everybody seems to be here. Here as what? As themselves. But they
look a bit different from yesterday... That’s irrelevant. They are the same. But maybe they are thinking
something different from yesterday? Maybe they feel different in their body. Maybe they found the
maHress too soL or too hard; maybe they were in the dormitory and someone was snoring;
maybe…? All kinds of things have an influence on how they feel that morning. So although on a
formal, abstract level we are s8ll all here, in the lived, experien8al actuality we are not the same. This
is a vital, vital point because most of the 8me we live our lives concerned with abstrac8ons. With
assump8ons, with cogni8ons. That is to say: by thinking about things we create mental images
embedded in language, which we move around as if we were establishing true meaning. But when
we look at the actual phenomenology, what we actually have – and we have nothing else – what we
have is colour, shape, sound coming in the ears, smells in our nose, taste in our mouth, sensa8on on
the body, all of which is interpreted. The means whereby we interpret these is also changing. Not
only is the sensory input changing according to the way the sun is going down, and how the balance
of natural light coming in the window is mee8ng the electric light in the room, but the kind of
thoughts which are arising for us to make sense of what is going on – this also is not predictable or
reliable.
So the outer field is always changing and the interpre8ve matrix is always changing. That is to say, in a
buddhist language, they are both empty. ‘Empty’ doesn’t mean they are not there at all; it means
they are devoid of inherent self-‐nature or self-‐existence. There is no truth in them, except the
presenta8onal truth of the fact that they arise and pass.
Therefore the truth of phenomena is not to be established by analysis, but by aesthe8c apprecia8on.
If you are here, you get it. If you are not here, if you are away off in your head, you don’t get it. What
you get is a thought. You catch the thought. No. You are caught by the thought. Thoughts catch you
and take you on a liHle journey going here or there. That’s not what’s here. What’s here is colour,
shape, smell, taste, the experience of the body and how the senses are interpreted. This is all we
have. We may have a lot of knowledge that we can call on to make very sophis8cated paHernings of
interpreta8on, but this is something aLer the fact. AYer the fact.
So from the mahayana point of view, the essen8al point is to see that we are always implicated in our
own experience. It’s not like when you are at home and you hear a noise and you think, “Oh,
something has come through the leRerbox”, and then you look, “Oh, here is a leRer. A leRer has come
to me.” There is ‘me’ and there is a leHer, and the postman who brings the leHer. It’s not like that. As

11
if they were three separate things; the subject, the object and what is connec8ng them. Actually –
what we have is experience, which is a unified field in which subject and object emerge together.
So in the buddhist tradi8on they say that consciousness is not permanent. Consciousness is
situa8onal. That is to say, most of the 8me we are not very connected with taste-‐consciousness. Then
maybe you feel hungry and you become more aware of saliva in your mouth and there is some taste
to that. Or maybe you have a bit of food trapped in your teeth and it comes loose; now you have
something to chew on and you get a moment of some taste in your mouth. But if that’s not
happening, the mouth is usually fairly neutral. Taste, which means the consciousness of taste, arises
in rela8on to the object of taste. It’s not permanent.
It’s the same with hearing. If you are reading a book and you are very absorbed in it, somebody may
start speaking to you and you say, “What? What?”, because your aHen8on was in the book. The ear-‐
consciousness was not being ac8vated, because the focus of aHen8on of consciousness was blocking
the impact of the sound of someone else’s voice.
This is very important. Because it means that the consciousness out of which we build the sense of
the con8nuity of our sense of self, this consciousness, the mental consciousness, which organises
these five sense-‐consciousnesses, is itself con8ngent. That is to say – it arises in rela8on to
circumstances. It’s not self-‐exis8ng. Consciousness, mental consciousness, arises and passes. If it’s a
very beau8ful sunset and you are out just looking at the colours, you might have no thought about it
at all. You are just touched and moved. Maybe you find yourself crying, it’s just very beau8ful. Oh! ...
Or you are listening to music. Oh!... And then aLerwards you enter into some evalua8on of some
comment or judgement about what has occurred. But in the moment of being fully at one with the
music, the mental consciousness is not ac8vated, because there is no processing of the experience.
What you have is the most simple, direct manifesta8on of hearing-‐consciousness.
Okay. So I feel that I exist, I am me, and I con8nue through 8me, and I can tell you stories about my
past, so I have a sense of the con8nuous shaping of my own existence. This is what appears to be the
case. When we start to look at it, we see that events or moments are discon8nuous; the
consciousness which registers these events is discon8nuous – and yet we have a con8nuity. So the
con8nuity of ourselves is not the object of our consciousness, neither is it the consciousness itself.
Maybe it’s something else. What could this be? This is the area of inquiry which arises par8cularly
with the yogacharya school, where they say that it is the mind; But this mind is not the same as the
transient consciousness, the situa8onally evoked consciousness. This mind is the ground-‐mind, the
basic awareness, which illuminates everything. This theory strongly influenced the development of
the tantric prac8ce.
The tantric path of aesthetic continuity

In tantra one is concerned with the con8nuity of experience, revealed as an aesthe8c unfolding. That
is to say, the immediacy of the manifes8ng of what is our existence, moment by moment, is not
organised by an interpre8ve matrix of cogni8ons and feelings, which would necessarily happen aYer
the fact, but it happens in the immediacy of the arising through the recogni8on that everything we
see is the body of Padma Sambhava or Tara or Chenrezig or any of the dei8es, that everything we
hear is the mantra or the voice of the deity and that all the thoughts, feelings and sensa8ons in our
mind is the mind of the deity. It’s just this. We don’t have to make sense of it. We don’t have to work
out what it means, we don’t have to find a use for it. We are here present, trus8ng. This is as good as

12
it gets. This is the divine mandala of all the buddhas. You don’t want to improve it. What would you
improve? It’s fine as it is.
This is a radical, radical transforma8on of our orienta8on. And, if it’s going to occur, it requires the
dissolving or the transforma8on of the ego matrix, because our ego makes sense of the world in
rela8on to our felt sense of our own personal iden8ty. That is to say, we look around the world and
we choose the items that we like and we connect with them, we want to bring them towards us. And
we see the items we don’t like so much and we want to push them away and have as much distance
as possible from them. The ego is edi8ng. That is its func8on. It’s con8nuously trying to do a triage, a
sor8ng-‐out of what is occurring, in order to maintain the con8nuity of paHerning which it is. It is only
a paHern which is maintained.
However it’s a very invested sense of paHerning which is organised aLer the moment of occurrence.
So the ego-‐consciousness is indeed a form of consciousness. This is why our sense of self is
discon8nuous. Why we are labile, why we move from one mood to another. When we are happy, our
posture is in one way, the kinds of gestures we make are in a similar way and so on. When we are
very sad it’s different. Our face looks different, our breathing changes, the skin-‐tension changes, the
posture, the gestures all change. Where was the person who was happy before? They don’t exist
anymore. It’s not somebody’s true self – “Oh, I’m so glad you got over your depression; it’s good to
see you back in yourself again!” This is a sort of crazy thing to say, it’s madness. But this is a normal
kind of speech.
That happy one is gone. The one that comes back is happy plus sad. If you’ve ever been really
depressed, then the basis of your sense of self is – krrk – it has a crack in it. It’s not going to be a
simple circle any more because you now know, “Oh!... Boof... I can’t trust that I’m in charge of my
life.” This is very, very important.
In tantra to dissolve the ego-‐self we take refuge in the deity and develop devo8on towards the deity,
trust in the deity, and we put all our energy into the deity. This is why, generally speaking, it’s not a
good idea to do many different tantric prac8ces, if you are using it as a prac8ce as a path of
libera8on, because that will disperse your energy.
If you start to do prac8ce as a means to an end – “Oh! I have some obstacles, so I beRer do some
Vajrakilaya pracCce!” – that’s like having a problem with the drains and phoning up the drain-‐
company to come along and clear your drains. This is actually a quite a conflicted way of approaching
dharma because it is saying that the one who is in charge is me. “I have an obstacle, I’m going to
overcome the obstacle… [humming mantra-‐style]...Ah! The obstacle is going now… [more humming]...
Oh, thank you for giving me this holy pracCce. Now I can kick this shit out of reality...” Who is in
charge? The ego. Nothing has been transformed. You can go mad doing this kind of approach.
Much beHer to say, “Holy mother Tara, I am the size of a peanut. You are the whole universe. Please
save me, please take care of me. I know nothing, you know everything!” The more small you become,
the more big she becomes. Then you have the miraculous transforma8on wherein the small becomes
big and the big becomes small. She shrinks herself into your body, you merge into her and then
suddenly you are the infinite expanse of the dharmadhatu. This is the heart of this kind of prac8ce.
The essen8al point is that if you want to open, you have to let go of what is closed. The closed cannot
get openness as if it was a fashion-‐item. It’s not a Gucci handbag. The ego dissolves because the ego
is the energy of awareness – it’s up its own arse.

13
When you lose your way, when you get caught in the spiral of con8nuity, it is not that you have gone
from awakening into samsara; it’s not that you’ve got lost by going somewhere else. You are in the
same place, but not awakening to where you are. If you want to awaken to where you are, it has to
be simple.
The problem with a great deal of Tibetan buddhism in par8cular is that the tradi8on has been going
for a very long 8me and each genera8on has produced wonderful people who have visions and
develop new prac8ces, and in this tradi8on they don’t like to throw anything away. However we live
in a modernist culture where we are always throwing the past away, because our interest is in the
future. In buddhist tradi8ons they hold on to everything. So in the early days there were four or five
big dei8es whose medita8ons were prac8sed. Two thousand years later there are thousands and
thousands of prac8ces, all of which are very helpful and very special, but which one will you do?
Maybe you should try to do as many as possible? Because they are all good... ?
But what is the point of the prac8ce? The prac8ce is designed to develop wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom means to recognise that your own mind is empty. That is to say, you are not a thing, you are
a poten8al which keeps manifes8ng. The poten8al manifests out of nothing. This is a mystery. This is
not something that the analy8c mind can understand. We have to taste it. So we have to enter into
the prac8ce to taste it.
Compassion is the manifesta8on which arises from the wisdom which is the recogni8on of the empty
nature of the mind. So wisdom and compassion are not two things, they are inseparable. They are
always joined together. Joined together as not two things. Space and clarity or emp8ness and
manifesta8on – these are always together and this is what tantra is concerned with. This is the
an8dote to what we ordinarily experience, which is that I exist, I am me. That is to say, something is
here, somebody is here, this is manifesta8on and not non-‐exis8ng, and I am me. The ground of who I
am appears to be myself. I am standing on my own ground. “Don’t you tell me who I am. I am going
to tell you who I am.” You know how indignant we get if other people start wri8ng our stories for us.
We say, “Hey! I’m me. Hey, don’t ...! I am the basis of myself.” This is samsara. This is all it means.
What is the actual basis of your existence? If you observe your mind, moment by moment – here we
are! This is amazing! Ever-‐changing crea8vity, which is unfolding... Where does it come from? It’s not
coming from the postman, it’s not coming ‘special delivery’. It’s here. Where does it come from? This
is what we will be looking at later in the medita8on so that we start to see the nature of our own
mind. Then we see that the manifesta8on arises out of – and yet s8ll within – the empty, open basis
of existence, what is called the dharmadhatu, or the infinite hospitality of the buddha’s mind.
This doesn’t mean that you have to change anything in your life. You s8ll go to work, you talk to your
friends and avoid your enemies, and so on. You can have all the limita8ons of existence, but as they
are arising, moment by moment, they are fresh. That is to say: you see them as immediate in this
moment. And if they are in this moment, you can change them. If you want to change your life, it’s
much easier if you think that this moment is happening for the first 8me.
In tantra the focus is on aesthe8cs: on returning to the phenomenology of sensory experience, the
vitality, the vividness of what is coming directly through the body. Essen8ally it’s a return to the body.
It’s not about purifying the mind, because the mind is func8oning through the body. The body is the
mind; it’s an aspect of our existence and in this encounter that we have with the world, this is what’s
happening. Moment by moment, this is what’s happening.

14
So, if we want to know who we are talking to, we have to look at them, we have to see them, and
their face will show us. The face shows many, many things. It shows whether people are interested or
bored or confused, it shows whether they are happy to con8nue the conversa8on or not – this is
what we get. And if you aHend to it, maybe it’s enough. If you then add on to this all your stories
about who the person is, maybe you don’t see how the person is. Because it’s the ‘how-‐ness’, the
presenta8on. ‘Who’ is always a narra8ve. Does a person need a narra8ve? We are telling the person
who they are in the very moment that they are speaking to us. Now if a lot of our aHen8on is
concerned with the interpreta8on of the other, out of our interpre8ve matrix, we are likely to lose
the other.
The otherness of the other

The modern Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, had a major impact on modern European
philosophy by radically cri8quing Heidegger’s no8on of being, in par8cular. He said that what we face
is the otherness of the other. There is a fundamental alterity, a fundamental otherness, to other
people. To claim to know who another person is, to ‘catch’ them, this is a huge crime and is the basis
of the loss of ethics.
If you want to be ethical you shouldn’t know about other people at all. You should aHempt to open to
the other in their otherness and let their otherness reveal itself to you. Now, that is fundamentally
radical and it is very much the view of tantra – not to layer the world with our projec8ons, which is
our way of incorpora8ng what we meet inside our mental structure, but to try to be of service by
allowing all the poten8al of our self-‐constella8on to arise in a paHern, which somehow meets the
other in their otherness. The implica8on of this is that self follows the other.
That’s very interes8ng. Think how oLen, when you are having a conversa8on with a friend, you’ve got
something you want to say to them. You really want to let them know what you think. You come first
and they should listen. Then maybe you will listen to them ... if you have to…! Ge[ng your own point
through is very important.
From this point of view, what you have to say is a construct. Now, it may be, between parents who
have kids and so on, that there are things to be talked about and sorted out, or at work there are
things to be sorted out. But a lot of what we want to say to someone is a package which we have
created inside our self. And if we give this to the other person, what are they going to do with it?
They are chewing our dinner! That’s maybe not what they want to eat. “No – but you really need to
listen to what I have to say; it’s very important!” Who is it important for? Not the other person. It’s
important for you. “But it’s important to me that you hear what I have to say.” Why? So that I have in
me what’s in you. But when it was in you, you were not happy with it. So – instead of you le[ng go of
your unhappiness, you’ve given it to me. And when I now try to help you with your unhappiness, you
tell me I haven’t understood it and so you have to tell me all over again! Couple-‐conversa8ons are
oLen like this.
In tantra the prac8ce is to try to stay open to the immediacy of the moment of unfolding by not
infec8ng it with iden8ty. That is to say, we try not to infect it with the construct that we have about
who we are. We trust that the field of experience is not one of an exchange between me as a
separate self-‐en8ty and you as a separate self-‐en8ty, but is the immediacy of a co-‐emergence of the
en8re field which, in the tantric language, is the mandala of all the buddhas.

15
TAKING UP A VIEW (OR ETHOS)

I have briefly set out some aspects of the hinayana approach, the mahayana approach and the tantric
approach and now I would like to say something also about the dzogchen approach, because it’s very
different. However before I do, it is very important for you to appreciate that the yanas are all just
different ways of construing the world, of making sense of the world. They are a kind of ethos and are
described in the tradi8on as ‘a view’. There is a view, which leads to a medita8on, which then leads to
an ac8vity, and finally leads to a result. These four factors are used to organise the prac8ces of all the
different levels or yanas that one can engage with and is why it is important to understand what is
the view.
Why do we view the world in this par8cular way, and what is the medita8on that goes with that
view? You need to understand that if you are going to do a prac8ce, you adopt the view. You take up
that way of viewing and you inhabit it. You don’t mix it up with something else. Because that is what
it is.
It’s a bit like as if you are an actor and years before you have had a great success in one par8cular
play. That was your moment of glory but now you are on hard 8mes and you have to act in many
plays you don’t like. However you remember that moment of glory and halfway through reci8ng the
lines in the tedious play you are currently stuck in, suddenly you want to be Hamlet again. That’s not
very helpful, because the play that’s on now, even if it’s a crap play, is not Hamlet. So ‘the view’
means that when we understand a view, this is how we view. It’s not something we add alongside our
ordinary way of thinking.
In order to adopt a view you have to displace your ordinary structure of conceptualisa8on and
replace it with this viewing. So what I was beginning by describing: the impermanence of the
actuality of our ordinary assump8ve way of living, is very important. Because if you realise there is no
self-‐substance to what we believe, or the habits that we have, and if you can see also that all these
forma8ons are impermanent – then why shouldn’t you drop them?
En-roling and de-roling

If you are an actor, when the play has finished, you have to go home as yourself – because you are
only ac8ng in that play when you are on the stage. It is a situa8onal iden8ty. For so long as you are on
the stage, it’s very important that you remember your lines and remember how to place yourself on
the stage in rela8on to the other actors. That’s the choreography of that iden8ty. But when the play
finishes and the curtain closes, you de-‐role.
So one way of thinking about dharma prac8ce is to understand it as a ceaseless movement of en-‐
roling and de-‐roling. En-‐roling and de-‐roling. In an instant I become Arya Tara. Now I look like this,
now I say this kind of mantra, my body is moving in this way – now the medita8on dissolves, now I’m
James Low, doing what I do. Then I’m doing this, then I’m doing that. En-‐role, de-‐role. En-‐role, de-‐
role.
That is to say – it’s not that when you do the medita8on you go into an altered state, into some
different reality, and then you come back to yourself. To prac8se in this way is a waste of 8me. It will
get you nowhere. What we want to understand is: when I en-‐role as myself, this is just a role. It’s not
true. I’m not who I think I am. By thinking, “I am who I am”, I get into a role. I am en-‐roling. It’s just a

16
role. It’s a game. It’s not true. It’s an illusion. Like a rainbow in the sky, like an echo, like a mirage – it’s
a role. We enact it out of compassion. But it’s only a role.
There is no true personal iden8ty. This is the fundamental work of all the dharma paths. Because as
long as you stay commiHed to ‘I am me/myself’ and ‘this is who I am’, then everything else will just
be different kinds of clothing that you put on and underneath you will be yourself. The dharma won’t
help you. You have to not only take off your clothes, you have to take off your skin, you take off your
flesh, you take off your nerves, your arteries, you take out your heart; you dissolve everything. There
is nothing. And then – here you are. Form and emp8ness – emp8ness and form. Tara is empty, Tara is
manifes8ng as form. James Low is empty – James Low is manifes8ng as form. Form and emp8ness.
This is the heart of the dharma work: to fundamentally put into ques8on what is the basis of my felt
sense of personal iden8ty.
The three pot faults

Pot fault 1
Buddhism generally iden8fies three basic faults which can occur in studying or listening to the
dharma. They are called ‘the three pot faults’. The first fault is to be like an upturned pot. Since the
pot is upside down, nothing can go into it. The second fault is to be like a pot with a hole in it, so that
whatever is put into it leaks away. The third fault is to be like a pot which already has some dirty old
food in it and so every piece of new food that goes in, no maHer how fresh or good, will be
contaminated by the old food.
These are very, very helpful no8ons. Because the first one, the upturned pot, is about being
impervious, being nonporous. That is to say that instead of being like a sponge which can receive, we
are more like a ball of steel. The more established we are in our own belief-‐systems, the more we
have a dogma8c aHachment to a par8cular sense of ourselves, the more we seal ourselves off from
what is new.
In dzogchen the classic image is the mirror. The mirror has no protec8on against what is put in front
of it. Whatever is put in front of the mirror, it reveals inside itself. This is the very opposite to being
impervious. The mirror is not even porous, it’s not absorbing something – it’s exactly showing the
reflec8on of what is there. So it’s very important for us to think: what are the points of resistance?
Let’s again use the earlier example of an actor en-‐roling and de-‐roling. An actor is somebody who has
to act in order to be an actor. Is an out-‐of-‐work actor an actor? Actors oLen spend a lot of 8me not
ac8ng and this is not very good for their mental health. So, actors really become themselves when
they are ac8ng. This would indicate that we have a tendency to be in a role, that we are always
looking for a role. It is important is to allow ourselves to be in the role which is given to us by the
situa8on. So to be impervious is to be like an actor who won’t listen to the director. The actor who –
maybe because they are stupid or very famous – says, “I am myself and I will do what I do.” If they are
very famous they might be allowed to get away with it, but generally speaking it’s not a good idea.
To take direc8on means to allow someone else to see something you don’t see. The actor is
concerned with their own par8cular script, with the lines they have to say, the gestures, how to be
embodied in that par8cular character but the director is holding in mind all the characters, the
dynamic of the play, the various scenes that go on, the props, the ligh8ng… The director has to have
all of this in mind. The individual actors don’t need to do that.

17
So when we come in touch with the dharma, we are inside this bubble of our ego-‐iden8ty in which
we have all worked out ways of making sense of what is going on, we have our evaluatory systems,
our beliefs, our habits, and so on. This is what we have to put into ques8on. And if we don’t put them
into ques8on, we will not absorb anything new because we will enter into judgement with what is
there. I am si[ng here, looking over at you si[ng there, and I am thinking about you across this
perspec8ve. You can do exactly the same thing in your own head. Somebody says something to you,
“Hm! I’ll have to think about that.” Some8mes of course that’s a very wise thing to do. We have to
stand in rela8on to this new proposal, maybe in a work-‐situa8on or whatever, but it means that I’m
going to look from my exis8ng posi8on at what you are proposing and in terms of the framework of
interpreta8on which I’m going to apply, I will see whether I will give much status to what you are
saying or not.
Again, this is the centrality of the self-‐exis8ng ego. So we are going back to the basis: we take refuge.
Why do we take refuge? Because we are lost. If we are lost, we are not the boss. Most of us have
experienced in our life a boss who is lost. And the thing is that if the boss is lost, you can’t tell the
boss that they are lost. Not a wise move in any organisa8on! So you have to learn to manage the lost
boss. This is the func8on of medita8on. The ego has to be placated, be put on the side, so that you
can do the prac8ce.
Something new has to be given space. However if the new is always going to be judged and evaluated
by the old, by a pre-‐exis8ng structure, you will be engrossed in mental ac8vity for a very long 8me
since there will always be some new thoughts to be had about it. So the whole purpose of faith and
devo8on in the dharma is not to become a clone. Don’t become a mindless member of some sect
which is going to dominate you. Rather, give yourself the chance to experience something new, be
fresh into a new situa8on in which you wholeheartedly offer yourself. Try it out and you see what
happens because you can’t know un8l you engage. If you sit inside your pre-‐exis8ng knowledge and
think, “Well, I’m not like that.” Maybe somebody says, “Listen, I grew up in a catholic family. I had this
stuffed into me when I was a kid; I’m not going to do any devoCon any more. I don’t believe in that.”
This is a hurt reac8vity. This is not a place of wisdom. It may well be that you have changed your
orienta8on, that the beliefs that were fed to you as a child no longer seem very relevant. That’s one
thing. But to then say, “I’m never going to believe in anything, I’m a raConal person. I’m going to
evaluate everything for myself,” that means that you are the measure of all things and that’s a choice.
You can live your life like that, but maybe, when you look at your own existence, it’s not going so well.
So if you are the measure of all things, you are not doing very well. Maybe then you could have some
other way of evalua8ng something. Which is to think, “I will take in some new informaCon and I will
act in accordance with that and see what happens.” This is what is called prac8ce. We prac8se in the
mode of doing that. Then gradually we start to do it.
For example, let’s say you decided to learn to play golf. You go to the golf-‐course and you are
introduced to these various kinds of clubs. This is a metal shaL with something on the end of it. And
you are told, “ This one you use to hit the ball a long way; this is what you use if your ball goes into the
sand pit, and this is what you do when you go onto the smooth bit of grass we call the green, in order
to put the ball in a hole.” So there are different clubs for different func8ons. What do we do with
them? You pick up the liHle puHer, the thing that puts the ball in the hole, and you hit it, “Whack!”,
and the others say, “No! This is very gentle...hmm... you have to caress this stuff, like that...!” Then
you pick up the driver, the one that sends the ball a long distance, and you go “Hoop” and they say,
“No! You have to go fully back like that...!” In this way you are introduced into the prac8ce of golf. You

18
prac8se through a rela8onship with the club. If you look at the club it will show you what to do with
it. The delicate liHle puHer – you don’t hit something hard with it. Why would you do that?
So the prac8ce of golf means allowing the way of doing golf to come into you, so that you become a
golf-‐er. And you become a golf-‐er by doing golf, and you do golf the way people do golf. You don’t do
your own way of doing golf. “I’m not going to do it this way, why should I?” Because then it wouldn’t
be golf.
Golf is a social consensus ac8vity. It’s a contract. All the people going on to the golf course agree to
hit the ball in the proper direc8on. Were you to decide to hit it in another direc8on and think, “OK,
I’m on the first hole but I’d like to have a drink now, so I’ll knock it straight over to the sixteenth hole”
– then of course the ball would slice across and hit someone on the head, because you are not going
in the right direc8on. It’s very simple. It’s very straighaorward.
It’s the same with medita8on prac8ce. What is the prac8ce? The prac8ce is learning to enter into the
prac8ce. The prac8ce is set out as something to be learned; we learn it and we apply it. We don’t
apply it on our own terms. And this is where it gets difficult, because if you are not applying it on your
own terms, your own terms are redundant. But it’s by applying your own terms that you exist.
Therefore there is resistance to doing the prac8ce.
Most people who decide they want to prac8se medita8on experience resistance. They don’t actually
do as much medita8on as they would like to do. Why not? Because they don’t like to meditate. Why
not? Because there is nothing for me to do when I’m medita8ng. I’m watching the breath going in
and out. Hey! I’m an educated, sophis8cated person. I can do rather more in life than watch the
breath go in and out! Now you are redundant. None of your quali8es are wanted on the voyage. “But
I exist. I’m enCtled to assert my own existence. I will do it my way.” This is what we face. This is why
it’s called a pot fault – because when we don’t absorb the prac8ce and do the prac8ce, and we mix it
with our own idea, we get very lost. Par8cularly for western people, since we are learning something
which is a cross-‐cultural experience, there are many cracks in the transmission due to language and
culture and so on, many cracks into which we can insert our own idea. It’s not that your own ideas
are not valid, but they are valid for something other than the prac8ce of medita8on. Just as they are
valid for something other than the prac8ce of golf. Prac8cing golf doesn’t require you to invent a new
game.
Pot fault 2
So the second pot fault is to have a hole. You forget things and let them leak away. Why is it leaking?
Because you don’t hold on to it. Why don’t you hold on to it? Usually because of distrac8on.
Something else seems more important. For example in Britain, there is a huge amount of non-‐
compliance with physical and mental health treatment. People who have asthma, who have diabetes,
who need dialysis for kidney failure, who are on beta-‐blockers and so on, don’t take the medica8on.
People who are on psychotropic medica8on oLen change the dosage according to their own idea.
Why is this? Because they don’t want to. Because they have an idea about themselves which is not
the same as the idea of them that the doctor is expressing. The doctor says, “Now you have diabetes.
You have to change your diet and you have to make these injecCons. This is what you have to do.” The
person thinks, “I am me! I don’t... why am I... why have I got this condiCon? I don’t want to have
diabetes! And if I don’t want to have diabetes, I won’t have diabetes! If I don’t want to eat cabbage, I
won’t eat cabbage.” So I won’t put the insulin into my body.’ All this costs the health-‐system a lot of
money. It’s the same with the prescrip8on of an8bio8cs. Many, many, many millions of prescrip8ons

19
go out every year and the course of treatment is not completed. We all know that unless you
complete the cycle of the an8bio8c, it sets up further reac8on and resistance against it.
So why do people act like this? Because to hold on to it is challenging to our sense of self. We don’t
want something to be the case. In Britain men don’t go to the general doctor very oLen. Women go
much more frequently. Men have a big resistance to the idea that they might be sick and as a result
male cancers are picked up much less frequently. Prostate cancer has much less research funding
going into it than say, cervical cancer, because women’s group get together and they really push for
funding. They run campaigns, they do sponsored ac8vi8es, they generate funds and it’s a very big
public thing. But prostate cancer or tes8cular cancer don’t exist very much at all in terms of funding
and public knowledge. And so men don’t check themselves and they don’t go to the doctor and if
they get some sign they ignore the sign. This is not to say anything is wrong with these people – this
is our human nature.
However if that applies to a health condi8on that could threaten your lifespan, why would the same
resistance structure not apply to medita8on? So this is what the pot fault is poin8ng out. It’s not
saying, ‘Just don’t leak!’. It’s saying, “You have to keep an eye on your self and learn to work with your
resistance. Work with the fact that you are divided against yourself and a bit of you says ‘yes’ and a
bit of you says ‘no’. A bit of you says, ‘I want to do it’, but another bit is going to pull back and avoid
it.”
This is because we are split internally. We are dualis8c creatures. Self and other are dualis8c, but self
and self, or internal subject and object – they are also dualis8c. Inside also we fragment into many
voices, and so we betray and upset ourselves. That is why it’s very important to think, “What is it that
I’m not hearing? What is it that I’m not aRending to?”
Impermanence, one of the ideas set out, is very challenging. We don’t want to know about
impermanence. We don’t want to know that we are going to die; we don’t want to know that
children are going to grow up and leave home; we don’t want to know that we are going to get old;
we don’t want to know that all kinds of situa8ons that we have will not con8nue. We don’t want to
know this. But it’s a fact. Old age, sickness and death is a fact.
So how can I prepare myself to know that impermanence is the case and stop myself believing a
fantasy? Why is fantasy more interes8ng to me than the actuality? Because if I go into a mental world
– a compensatory delusion that I will live forever, that I will never be sick and so on, the way that
many of us live – it’s a way to maintain our happiness and the unimpeded trajectory of our own
desire. If I want to wake up from that, it’s painful. You have to know that what you think is secure, is
actually insecure, and therefore we progress one step at a 8me. Whatever big plans we have,
whatever hopes we have, may or may not arise. The best way to make the plan come into being is to
be careful with this step and this step and this step... If we want a career to develop, we have to be
careful every day. If we want a rela8onship to survive, we have to be careful every day. Just having a
big plan is not going to solve the problem if each day there is quarrelling and figh8ng.
So it’s exactly the same with the fault of having a hole in the pot. Each day we have to observe how
our inten8on leaks away, how our knowledge leaks away and is replaced with our egoic habitual
forma8ons. If we are not construing the world, if we are not making sense of the world through the
framework of dharma, we are doing it through our own habitual construc8ons. And if we decide we
want to change our habitual construc8ons, we have to remember to do something else. It’s like that.
If you decide to stop smoking, then you have to stop sniffing the air when someone else is smoking.
20
You have to think, “I don’t smoke.” And the main thing that helps people stop smoking is to have a
new iden8ty, “I am a non-‐smoker. I don’t smoke.” If that is what you sit in, then why would you
smoke? “I don’t smoke.” Whereas if you think, “Ah, I used to smoke... I like to smoke but I don’t,
because of my health” then there is a tension inside that posi8on. What we need is a radical re-‐birth,
which takes us back again to the basis, to refuge.
It is said that if you take refuge in the buddha, dharma and sangha you shouldn’t take refuge in
anything else. Now this might sound like some narrow-‐minded sectarianism but what it actually
means is that you shouldn’t take refuge in cultural things outside. It means you shouldn’t take refuge
in the shit that’s in your head. So every 8me you want to follow an obsessive paHern, you have to say,
‘No!’ I work a lot with people who are suffering from obsessions and it’s very hard for them because
the feeling is, “I have to do this! I have to do it.” The obsessive thought links into a behavioural
compulsion. “I can’t stop my body doing this”, whether it is washing towels, washing hands, checking
the door, or checking the fridge. Whatever it is, “I can’t stop myself doing this, because I think I have
to do it.” So the obsessive thought, ‘it must be done’ hits the body and it’s unimpeded. Should
somebody try to stop the person doing it, they become very agitated, because it feels so necessary to
them. It’s not necessary, of course. There is nothing in the outer world that demands that this be
done but it takes people over.
It’s very helpful to study a liHle bit about psychopathology, because we all suffer from it, some people
in a gross fashion, some in a more subtle fashion. As soon as you start to meditate, you realise that
you are fairly mentally unbalanced; that you have very liHle control over the content of your own
mind; that you are subject to whims, to fancies that carry you hither and thither all over the place.
And this is very dangerous because it means then that you have no protec8on. What are you going to
hold on to?
This is why in buddhism taking refuge means, ‘I want to hold on to something.’ Then when these
winds of karma or these winds of habit are blowing, you can say, “No, I don’t do that. I am not a
smoker.” – “Yeah, come on, you used to smoke.” It’s one of the things that happens when somebody
who uses heroin, then decides to stop. They don’t phone the dealer for a week then the dealer
comes round to see them, gives them a liHle bag for free, “Come on, you’re my friend.” Why? Because
the dealer wants the business. The dealer is trying to hook them back in. It is very difficult when
someone offers you a free bag of smack to say, “No, I don’t use any more.” You have to be re-‐born.
This is why in the twelve-‐step model for addic8on they talk about relying on a higher power. The ego
is divided. The ego says, “I’m going to stop drinking.” but the ego also says, “I want to have a drink.”
And in this internal baHle, if you’ve been drinking intensively for a long period of 8me, the drinking
bit of you is usually going to win. That is why it helps you to think that there is a higher power or a
higher force.
It’s very similar in the dharma. We think, “Oh, I rely on the Buddha. The Buddha is my friend. Tara is
my friend. Padma Sambhava is my friend. And I am going to pray to them or visualise them or say
their mantra. I’m going to hold on to that.” Then when these stormy winds blow around us and we
are carried into our habitual forma8ons, we recognise it, “Oh!” This is the basis of the dharma
prac8ce. If we are under the power of very gross forma8ons, it’s quite difficult to resist them. It can
be done, and as the dzogchen texts that we’ll go through set out, you don’t have to simplify your
mind to do the prac8ce, but you do need to really commit yourself to the prac8ce.

21
Pot fault 3
So the third pot fault is where the pot already contains some dirty food. Now, everything you learned
at school is ‘dirty food’. Everything you know is ‘dirty food’. We are nothing but a toxic porridge! It’s a
fact. Some people believe in Charles Darwin, some in the European enlightenment, some in Voltaire,
some believe in democracy, and so on. My own teacher always called democracy ‘demon-‐cracy’,
because he said that with the ‘demos’, the ordinary people – in charge, it would be worse. Whether
democracy is good or bad is not the ques8on. Like all belief systems it is a mental construc8on, which
reveals some things and conceals others. Every revealing is a concealing; this is a fact. Wherever you
posi8on yourself, some things are revealed and some things aren’t. In this room, we are quite a few
people. Each of us is si[ng in a par8cular posi8on and so the room is revealed to each of you in a
par8cular way. Nobody else sees the same structure as you see. That is to say – your posi8oning
reveals certain aspects of the room and conceals others. We don’t see what’s behind us, for example.
Whenever you bind yourself into a belief-‐system, you bind yourself into blindness.
The difference with the buddhist belief-‐system is that the goal of the belief is to deconstruct the
nexus of belief. It’s a self-‐libera8ng belief. It’s a bit like homeopathic medicine. We use the poison in a
modified form in order to bring relief from the symptom. So, we are devoted to our own beliefs, to
our neuro8c forma8ons, to our assump8ons. We believe in them. They seem to be true for us. The
prac8ce then is to develop a conscious inten8onal belief in something else, so we believe in this
goddess Tara. Tara, you are green, you are beau8ful, your heart is only compassion, hold on to me,
protect me, please save me. When you believe that, she is good and I am lost. So I now have
something to hold on to. This is the first part of the prac8ce.
Devotion dissolves reiHication: belief in emptiness dissolves belief in substance
The second part of the prac8ce is to use the belief in emp8ness to dissolve the belief in substance.
We are visualising Tara, we are reci8ng the mantra, and we imagine rays of light are coming from Tara
into our body. As the rays of light come into our body, all the ingredients of my self, all my habit-‐
forma8ons, all my concepts, my feelings, and so on, are being transformed into light. Now my body is
full of white, blue and red light moving together. Then Tara comes to the crown of my head, she
dissolves in light, her ball of light goes down through my central channel into my heart, so there is a
ball of light in the middle of my body of light. My body of light dissolves into her ball of light. These
two lights are merged, because there is no difference between light. This ball of united light of Tara
and me, our inseparability, dissolves smaller and smaller and smaller, un8l it’s one 8ny point, a liHle
Cgle. That point vanishes into emp8ness. We sit... no front, no back, no top, no boHom, no past, no
future, no name, no language – just open. If we do the prac8ce with great faith, this openness can
last quite some 8me. Then gradually sounds, feelings, thoughts start to arise. They arise inside the
mandala of the goddess. This is the mandala of the goddess. Light, purity, beauty – this is it. Not
something else. This is a func8on of the prac8ce.
The devo8on dissolves reifica8on; it dissolves the solidifica8on that comes from believing in en88es.
So, belief in en88es is dissolved by belief in a nonen8ty. That is to say, if you believe in emp8ness –
which is not different in its nature as a belief from the belief in substance – the belief in emp8ness
will dissolve the belief in substance, so that emp8ness and emp8ness meet together, sky mee8ng sky,
out of which everything is transformed. This is the basis of the prac8ce. So when we hold on to some
pre-‐exis8ng belief and we don’t let go of it, we don’t allow it to go, then we can’t get the full blessing.
We can’t fully taste what it means to dissolve into emp8ness, because we are hanging on to some
part of our self.

22
That is why the tantric prac8ce developed. Although the general mahayana system they had the
fantas8c analysis of Nagarjuna which really showed in a very clear way the emp8ness of all
phenomena, this is cogni8vely based. It is based on the applica8on of a mental analysis, and it
happens aYer the fact of the experience. However if you want to do it into the immediacy of the
experience it has to be aesthe8c. It is mood-‐generated, so for example when we experience Tara in
front of us and we pray, we are praying like liHle children. The hairs on our body stand up, tears come
from our eyes, we feel small, we feel helpless, we feel stupid. Everything vanishes. “Just save me,
save me!” Like a small child crying in the middle of the night who has nothing else to hold on to, they
want their mama – “Mama! Mama! Mama!” – “ Tara, mother, save me, save me!”
In that moment you have leL all the sophis8ca8on of your thinking and so on. All your iden8ty is
washed away, just “Ooh...! Haa....! Oh...” – just like that. Very simple. But it’s only for the pure of
heart. Pure of heart means ‘Don’t have a dirty pot.’ It’s really simple. Jesus says, “Unless you become
like liRle children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” It’s completely true. LiHle children are
desperate. They are desperate in their joy, desperate in their pain. Like this. Desperate. This is what is
very important. Unimpeded despera8on. Nothing else maHers.
Now, this is the prac8ce of tantra, not the prac8ce of dzogchen but it’s also very useful. The key thing
for our purpose is to start thinking about what is the dirty food in our pot? What are the assump8ons
that we cling to, that we believe in? Some people believe they are very special, other people believe
they are very un-‐special. Some people believe they have no value at all. Some people will believe that
their value as a human being is in their beauty, some people believe it in their strength, in their
intelligence, in whatever it is. This is a construc8on of your self. This is something which is held in
place by your own con8nuity of memories and iden8fica8on.
The work we have to do is start to recognise what it is we are aHached to. What are the actual
func8oning cons8tuents of ourselves? When we go later to eat food, how do you interact with other
people? Other people show you your capacity to move forward and make connec8on or avoid
connec8on. I want to suggest that aLer the food we won’t meet for any further prac8ce tonight, but
you take some 8me and you sit, and you really try to observe and recall how it is you construct
yourself.
When you present yourself to other people, when you introduce yourself, how do you introduce
yourself? When you are with other people and they recognise you, what is it that you like to be
recognised as? What is it that you don’t like to be recognised as? How do you stand in rela8on to
receiving cri8cism from other people? Are you very sensi8ve? Are you open to other people having a
different point of view about who you are and what your value is? This is the loosening-‐up ac8vity
that we have to do with ourselves. So long as we are holding on to these, it will be very difficult when
we come into dzogchen to relaxing into openness. Because the anxiety that arises is, ‘If I let go of this,
I will not be who I am’.
Hopefully you are now understanding that it’s not who I am, but it’s who I think I am! So if I let go of
this, I won’t be able to use it as an ingredient of the construc8on of this confec8onary of who I think I
am. This brings us to the fundamental crossroads, the place where the higher tantras and dzogchen
separate out from ordinary mental ac8vity – where we let go of iden8ty as a construct based on
paHerns of thoughts, feelings and sensa8ons, and we open ourselves up to the direct experience of
being. Of being present, here. And that our being is filled with an endless succession of contents.

23
These are the contents which we take to be our iden8ty, just as the mirror fills itself with an endless
sequence of reflec8ons. These contents are not who we really are. These are the transitory,
temporary, con8ngent, rela8onal, dialogic manifesta8ons of our energy as part of the world energy.
But if we hold on to them – if we believe that they are not energy, but rather are something solid that
is who I actually am and that le[ng go of them will be the collapsing of myself, the destruc8on of
myself – then this anxious resistance is likely to make prac8ce very difficult.
It’s about examining ourselves, ge[ng to know ourselves, and observing directly: what is the func8on
of maintaining these par8cular beliefs and assump8ons? What sort of a self or iden8ty do they create
for me and what is the fear about who I would be if I let go of them? And I would suggest to you that
if you really look at these beliefs, you will find that you haven’t had them forever. That there have
been periods of your life when you were alive and you did not have these beliefs func8oning in you.
So they are not intrinsic, they are not innate, they are not born into you, they are not the ground of
your iden8ty. They are the temporary structures of your iden8ty, but the way you make them
func8on as your iden8ty is to trick yourself into believing that they are in fact intrinsic.
This is called ignorance. Ignorance is taking something which is dependent co-‐origina8on, which is a
manifes8ng from many different factors, and to say, “No! I reject cause and effect, I reject this
complexity, it is what it is and it’s me!”. We just don’t get it. We are holding on to “ This me, how could
I be other than myself? I don’t want to change!” In this case we have a lot of work to do because we
have to loosen this up a liHle bit and start to see that this is just a paHern and I haven’t always been
like that. When I was five I wasn’t like that. When I was ten, I wasn’t like that. Even today I haven’t
been like this all the 8me... But under pressure I return to this as a kind of core posi8on as if it were
the real truth about who I am.
The more we see the dynamic, moment by moment manifes8ng, of the infinite rich diversity of our
experience, we start to see that this narra8ve of self-‐defini8on is bullshit. It’s a cover-‐up. It’s a
persona. It’s a false passport and actually we don’t need a passport because here we are. And when
we are here, we have all our poten8al. However when you are exis8ng in your self-‐construct you have
very liHle access to your own poten8al. So the more defined the self is, the more narrow the
spectrum of access we have to our own existence.
That is the invita8on – this evening you take some 8me, you can come and sit in here if you like, you
can sit in your room or go for a walk and reflect, but just start to observe the par8cular paHerns of
self-‐iden8fica8on you get into. It’s also helpful to have a look at other people and listen to what they
say. And then you think, ‘”Hey! They are not me! They are not me! They have two legs, two arms, a
mouth – but they are not me! They don’t believe what I believe, they don’t eat what I eat, they don’t
say what I say. And yet they are alive! How do they get away with it? How come they are not
arrested? Because I have to keep doing me being me in order to conCnue! If I wasn’t doing me, where
would I be? Well, hey – I might be like them! But they also have two feet, two arms, one nose…” Life
goes on, even if you are somebody else.
Comment: How can they live when they are not and I am?
James: Exactly! I think it’s outrageous! This is another problem of democracy!
[End Day One]

24
REFUGE
We will begin with this prac8ce of taking refuge; we do the refuge with the body and the voice and
the mind. So with the body we put our hands together in front of our heart; when you do that, you
make an energe8c circle that runs through the heart and it’s a way of unifying the energy in the body.
We bring ourselves together, because we are oLen very dispersed out into the world. Of course this is
also used as a normal gree8ng in India, so it’s a way of honouring the other person. It’s also a way of
showing that you are not going to aHack the other person, because your hands are now bound
together.
With our voice we recite in a slow, open way, rec8fying the balance between sound and meaning.
Usually when we are speaking, or when we are listening to someone else, the focus of our aHen8on
is on the meaning being conveyed but when we are reci8ng in this way we are trying to hear sound as
sound. We are trying to see that sound is open and ungraspable and yet on it and through, it we
integrate meaning, since we are using words which have a meaning. But the sound comes first. So
this is a very useful prac8ce in our daily life when we are talking to other people. Here in our throat
we have a vibratory system which takes the wind, which belongs to the world. We breathe in then as
we breathe out, the air is set in mo8on and it takes on these sound quali8es which are shaped by the
mouth and in this way we offer the basis for interpreta8on by the other person. If the other person
doesn’t have access to the interpre8ve matrix, if they don’t understand our language, then they are
not going to know what’s going on. So the primacy of sound is vital. Again, it’s a way of lessening or
soLening our over-‐reliance on concep8on, on intellectual interpreta8on, on the cogni8ve func8on –
that the cogni8ve func8on comes aYer the direct experience of the unfolding of our existence. This is
one of the reasons for reci8ng in this way.
With the mind, we focus it. You can focus it in various ways. You can focus it into the meaning of the
words – here we recite it in Tibetan and so it can take a while to learn the meanings of these words –
but more par8cularly the inten8on is twofold. The first two lines say, “I am going to take refuge now
and in all my future lives in the buddha, the dharma and the sangha.” This means that I’m taking up
an orienta8on. I’m taking up a trajectory of inten8on, a direc8on for my existence. This is what I am
about. This is the fundamental bias or direc8on for my existence. The second two lines express the
bodhisaHva vow, saying that on the basis of generosity, the virtue of sharing and giving, and of all the
other virtues – which means the six or ten paramitas, the transcendent virtues of generosity,
morality, pa8ence, diligence, mental stability, wise discernment and so on – by developing these
many virtues I will develop the quali8es which are required to help other beings.
So, for myself I’m taking refuge which gives me an orienta8on, and for others I’m going to develop
the quali8es necessary to help them. When we take refuge in the buddha, we take refuge in the
buddha nature. The buddha nature is the quality of the mind which is emp8ness. It is the lucidity, the
clarity, which is there prior to conceptual interpreta8on. This is essen8ally the dharmakaya, the mind
of all the buddhas and it is the true nature of our own mind.
When we take refuge in the dharma, the dharma is the teaching which spreads out into the world.
It’s a communica8on. When we study buddhist books or aHend buddhist teachings, we are engaged
in a dialogue of some kind; we are communica8ng and building up a sense of connec8on. This is the
func8on of the sambhogakaya, the radiance of the buddha’s mind or the way the buddha
compassionately manifests – a pure reality, like a pure buddha-‐land or a mandala. So when we are

25
taking refuge in the dharma, we bring into our mind and our body and our voice a clarity of not
relying on the habitual forma8ons of our own thought.
When we take refuge in the sangha, which is the group of prac88oners of dharma, this represents the
nirmanakaya, which is the way the buddha manifests into the world. It is how we come into our
embodiment with our body, our voice and our mind, how we are with others. So being with other
people involves an aHen8on to how the other person is. Sangha essen8ally means ‘meeCng’. Sangha
in Hindi, and in Sanskrit also, means ‘a coming together’, a joining together of various forces. So when
we meet other people, we join with them.
In north India they have the great sangam which is at Allahabad, where the Ganga and the Yamuna,
two sacred rivers of India, meet together. At the point where these rivers meet, there is a third secret
river which arises under the water and is called the Sarasva8. Sarasva8 is the goddess of wisdom in
the hindu tradi8on. It is like that in our existence, if we are open to the other person and we aHempt
to connect with them as they are, then some third unifying quality seems to arise, which is the co-‐
emergence. So instead of having to work out how the other person is and how therefore we should
speak to them, when we have two polari8es that we are trying to unite, by holding the two together
at the same 8me, simultaneously, you have the co-‐emergence. You find yourself saying.
Sangha is the possibility of star8ng to trust immediacy and spontaneity as true ethics. Now for most
of us this is very radical. When we are children our parents tell us to be careful and look before we
rush into things. But in the dzogchen tradi8on too much thinking is seen as poisonous. And it’s a
possibility that immediacy, an immediacy which is not mediated through the ego’s habitual
preoccupa8ons and therefore is not an impulsivity is just flowing through us as part of the interac8ve
field and that this is the basis of the nirmanakaya, which is the manifesta8on of the buddha in the
world. The buddhas don’t have to think what they are going to do; they find themselves in the right
place. So in that sense it’s a bit like jazz improvisa8on, in which only by forgeaulness of one’s own
posi8on, of one’s own inten8on, can there be a co-‐emergence of the movement together. When you
stay inside your own agenda, your own no8on of what has to be done or what should be done, you
are going to interrupt that possibility.
Of course this requires a great deal of trust. This requires that I’m not going to prepare in advance.
I’m going to allow it to happen – which is very naked, it’s very exposed. What will happen if I arrive
and nothing will be there? Many people have anxiety dreams in which they find themselves walking
down a street with a naked body and they think, “Oh no! I’ve not got any clothes on, I’m naked!” In
English we talk about re-‐covery and in mental health systems they speak of people re-‐covering aLer a
breakdown. What do they do? They cover themselves up again. Maybe the reason they had the
breakdown was because they were so covered up! Authen8city is very dangerous; because
authen8city means that I have to trust that I will find myself being okay. Which does not mean of
course that I will get it right in the formal sense. However if we make a move and it’s a mis-‐take, that
is to say I’ve taken it the wrong way, then we trust the possibility of the next moment, which is that I
can take it again! Life as an unfolding process means there is always another chance. There is always
another chance.
Buddhism’s problem with aHachment is that we enter into a judgement about the situa8on and come
to a concre8sa8on, a final evalua8on, “Ah! I did something really wrong; this is terrible!” We put the
full stop in at that point and we freeze it, “ This is a really bad thing; I did a bad thing, therefore I am a
bad person.” With this heavy conclusion you start to collapse inside. And if you collapse inside, how

26
are you going to be able to come back the next moment? So it’s not that you shouldn’t apologise if
you make a mistake, but we have to work into the next moment and the next moment. If we keep
impor8ng the problem from the past into the current situa8on, it will always become very heavy.
Which is why in life the more we can be alert in the moment, be connec8ve and adjust when we
make mistakes, then when we say ‘the wrong thing’, do ‘the wrong thing’, then the next moment can
be a new beginning, and a new beginning, and a new beginning...
This is the basis of trust – not that things will be perfect in a formal sense of “I will never cause
trouble to anyone else, I will always make happy the people with whom I am connected.” That would
be impossible. But what we can do is avoid building up mental pictures of ourselves and other
people, so that we don’t go down the path of thinking, “Oh, you broke your promise before and now I
know I can’t trust you again.” or “Oh, I tried that once and I couldn’t do it so I won’t try again.” and so
on. Such very solid, substan8al statements freeze the world.
Dzogchen is about relaxing, keeping relaxing, about a new beginning, and a new beginning. Each
moment is experienced as exactly fresh, unless you import the past into it. As a non-‐dual approach to
medita8on and to life, dzogchen is concerned with the immediacy of the present moment and trying
to step out of this weaving between the past, the present, and the future. Of course this is very hard,
because we have a lot of tendencies to develop a strong story.
Essen8ally the sangha or the nirmanakaya means to be available, and to be available, and to be
available... To be available in this moment in an open way means that the last moment has to be
gone. You can’t have the last moment and this moment together if you want this moment to be open.
If I pick up my pen, then immediately my hand is imprisoned; it’s imprisoned by the pen. The
freedom of the hand to do the many things a hand can do, is limited as soon as it has something in it.
It’s the same with the mind; we get in a bad mood, we get distracted, we become caught up and
confused with anger, pride, jealousy, and so on. These are pre-‐occupa8ons. That is to say: we are
occupied; we are filled up before this moment. And when you do that, how will you be open? You
cannot offer hospitality to the world in the moment if you are carrying the past. So this is something
quite radical because usually we are saying that my safety, my security, is dependent on bringing the
knowledge from the past into the present moment and applying it in order to manage and control a
situa8on. To bring about the outcome which is the one that I desire.
So there you have the trajectory that the line of development of the ego’s inten8on is edi8ng out
many possibili8es, and it’s also func8oning as a set of clothing that covers us in our assump8ons and
so is quite comfor8ng. If you take this off, you have to trust. In the chris8an tradi8on one prays, “Give
us this day our daily bread.” Not, “Give us tomorrow’s bread as well”, but give us today’s bread. May
we have what we need, now. Not the accumula8on, because each day is new, each moment is fresh.
Capital accumula8on is highly problema8c in many ways. The richest people in the world, what do
they do with billions of resources? They have to move them around and get other people involved.
Excess is very difficult since you cannot have excess without having lack. The two always go together,
and when you have lack, you have disturbance, the disturbance of hunger. When you have excess,
you have disturbance, the disturbance of resources moving around in any direc8on. In the papers in
London last week there was a report of two Russians who were in a night-‐club in London and they
had a compe88on that started at midnight to see who could build up the biggest bar bill. And one of
them managed to achieve a bill of £65,000 in two hours! This is the problem of excess. If you have
excess, you have to do nonsense with it. Just nonsense. And if you have lack, then you have a
problem too.

27
That’s why the buddha said that if you want to prac8se the dharma, it’s best to be in the middle. If
you are very poor, you are born with a lot of hunger and you feel you’ve missed out. There is a lot of
envy, other people have this and other people have that. This empty hunger can be a displacement
from seHling in yourself, because you always need more, you always need some special deal to make
up for the lack of the past. This is difficult. If you are very rich, you are used to ge[ng everything very
easily which means that the hard work required to do the prac8ce becomes difficult. Whereas if you
are in the middle you have enough pleasure to know that you can make use of pleasure, but you have
enough pain to know that you need to be careful.
So we can now recite together, slowly. In front of yourself you can visualise the buddha surrounded
by dharma-‐books, surrounded by many monks and nuns if you like; or you can just imagine a clear
open blue space within which there are many rainbow-‐lights moving around, because this is the
radiance of the five elements, the five wisdoms, the pure forms of the buddha.
སངས་རྒྱས་ཆོས་དང་ཚོགས་ཀྱི་མཆོག་རྣམས་ལ།
SANG GYE CHO DANG TSOG KYI CHO NAM LA
Buddha dharma and sangha of supreme (plural) to
assembly best
To the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent
བྱང་ཆུབ་བར་དུ་བདག་ནི་སྐྱབས་སུ་མཆི།
JANG CHUB BAR DU DAG NI KYAB SU CHI
enlightenment until I refuge for go
I go for refuge until enlightenment is gained.
བདག་གིས་སྦྱིན་སོགས་བགྱིས་པའི་བསོད་ནམས་ཀྱིས།
DAG GI JIN SOG GYI PAI SO NAM KYI
I doing generosity other perfections doing, practicing virtue through
Through the virtue of practicing generosity and the other perfections
འགྲོ་ལ་ཕན་ཕྱིར་སངས་རྒྱས་འགྲུབ་པར་ཤོག།
DRO LA PHEN CHIR SANG GYE DRUB PAR SHO
all beings to benefit in order to buddha accomplish may it happen
May I attain buddhahood for the bene?it of all beings
I go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent

Until enlightenment is gained.
May I attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.
Trekcho is cutting, but not cutting away

So now we will start to look at dzogchen and we are going to focus par8cularly on the aspect of it
known as trekcho. Trekcho which means ‘cu[ng’ or ‘cu[ng through’ or ‘deeply cu[ng’. It means to
cut away the iden8fica8on with paHerns of interpreta8on so that the immediacy and the simplicity of

28
what is arising can be revealed to us. When the subject and the object come together – and they
func8on in our experience as the experience of real en88es – this is an ac8ve, or a performa8ve, or a
dynamic moment. Something is coming into being. It’s coming into showing itself in a par8cular way.
It is not there in a self-‐existent manner.
In trekcho we are always cu[ng things. However we are not cu[ng them away. It’s not that we are
saying that samsara is like some terrible growth in the body that a surgeon has to cut out. Samsara is
not something to be removed. It’s something which has to be allowed to have its own actuality. That
is to say, the ego’s job is to interfere, to cause trouble, to fiddle about with things and not leave them
alone.
You know how some8mes we get in a bad mood, something has happened to upset us? We go on
and on about it. We come back to it again and again even though we know this doesn’t improve
anything, but somehow we feel a need to say, “This shouldn’t have happened.” Lots of things
shouldn’t happen, but they do happen.
So actuality means staying with what actually happens and observing what that means. When
something happens, it arises and it passes. Always. There is not one thing that has ever arisen and
then stayed there forever. Impossible.
Language is changing, par8cular forms and usages of language. Many languages used to have high
forms, polite forms, for speaking with people from a high social status. These have tended to wash
away with the increasing democra8sa8on. There are changes in spelling; changes in script in German,
for example, to make it simpler and easier of access. French language too; people are always trying to
change it, to make it more easy and then the big Académie Française protests and says, “No, you are
insulCng Voltaire, we must return to the proper grammar.” But nobody understands grammar any
longer; nobody is confident to write anything in French because they are bound to make mistakes, it’s
very difficult…
So in that way we can see that the things we take for granted don’t exist. Taking something for
granted, taking it as if it truly exists, is the big mistake. However the way we free ourselves from that
is to aHend to the actuality of the moment of the event. To be with the event as it reveals itself and
then vanishes. When we see the vanishing of the event, then you have ‘cu[ng through’. The ‘cu[ng
through’ is not something that we, the ego-‐agent, have to do. We simply put ourselves in the way of
seeing that it is happening.
For example if you had an old-‐fashioned 8 mm. home-‐camera system, you could run a liHle movie of
people on holiday, and you get taken in. You see the children running around on the beach and
having a good 8me. Then you can slow it down and see it frame by frame by frame. It is the speed at
which this celluloid is running through the point of the illumina8ng lamp which creates the illusion of
con8nuous ac8on. It is an illusion. There is no con8nuous ac8on. What you have is a series of
separate frames. We even have liHle books which you flip to some ac8on, running down the stairs or
whatever. You just flip the pages and you see it actually seeming to happen. This is an illusion.
And this is again where we have to consider our intelligence. We are very smart. We are very well
trained; we all had years and years and years of educa8on. Which means we are quick. We are quick
to turn the pages. Which means we are quick ‘to get it’, to get something, to apply our interpreta8on.
When you are a small child and you’re having to learn spelling, it’s usually quite a painful process,
because most languages have some degree of irregularity in spellings whether it’s with verbs or
29
nouns. And so children have some tears coming out of their eyes, because they don’t understand,
‘But why is it like this?’ And the big people say, “I don’t know. It just is.” – “But it’s stupid!” – “Hm,
maybe, but anyway, if you spell it the other way you’ll get in trouble at school.” At that point the child
can see something about the spelling but the big person is saying, “Don’t see that! If you see that it’s
a bad way of spelling, you’ll be in trouble. You have to pretend that an irregular spelling makes sense.
Then you will get a good mark in school.” In this way being stupid is the basis for intelligence. Being
intelligent is the basis for stupidity. It’s a real paradox in life, isn’t it?
Massage the dharma into ourselves and massage ourselves into the dharma
In trekcho we start by looking at the immediacy of our experience and seeing how it’s constructed. As
a basic preliminary we engage in the inves8ga8on of the nature of our mind. Many of you have done
this prac8ce before; it’s something which is very, very important to do un8l you get a definite taste or
a real experience because there is no point in just having a lot of dzogchen theory. This is not about
theory; theory is unhelpful. It may be a pleasant hobby – buying a lot buddhist books to read, si[ng
in a café talking about who said this and why they said that – but it’s not very useful. Maybe you
could get a job in a university but generally speaking it will cause you more trouble.
We have to massage the dharma into ourselves and also massage ourselves into the dharma so that
this way of viewing reveals itself. This is not the same as learning something ar8ficial. For example,
you might decide, ‘I am going to learn Italian.’ So you massage Italian into yourself by listening to
some tapes or reading grammar books or going to a class, and then maybe you go on holiday to Italy
and you keep trying to prac8se speaking Italian and so you try to massage yourself into conversa8ons
with Italians, in a café or in the market. The language then goes in two direc8ons and gradually you
become more and more competent at speaking Italian. This is something ar8ficial. This is learning,
which is useful, but it’s adding something on. It’s again covering up, or extending the range of, your
manifest possibility.
What we are concerned to do here is to see: what is the basis out of which we manifest? What is our
own mind? We have many ideas about who we are, we have many ideas about our iden8ty, the
purpose of our lives, how we want to live, where we want to live, who we want to live with, and so
on. All of these are constructs. If we are lucky we will be able to bring many of these hopes or
paHerns into fulfilment; if we are unlucky it will collapse. Because these are construc8ons. The
ques8on is, “Who is the constructor?” Who, in the language of the Dharmapada, is the builder of the
house? What is the mind itself, which reveals to us the various ways in which we construct our self-‐
iden8ty? In this we are not looking at the content of the mind, we are not being fascinated by the
seman8c content of our thoughts, the intensity or diversity of the tonality of our feelings, the nature
of our sensa8on as hot, cold, pleasant, unpleasant, and so on; we are not entering into an evalua8on
of what’s there, but rather we are observing the process of being present.
Now – you can observe your hand. You can put your hand out in front of you and you can look and
you see fingers and a thumb. We know how to do this. We know how to observe a motorcar. When
you are going to cross the road you see a car coming down the road and you become quite good at
working out the speed that the car is going at, and whether you can get across the road before the
car comes, or whether you have to wait. This is a very important survival skill. We are involved in
evalua8on. So there is an observa8on of some thing.
But here we are observing the one who is observing. So we are looking for the self-‐luminosity of the
mind itself. That is to say, ‘ The only way to see your mind is to be your mind in the moment of its own
30
self-‐luminous clarity.’ So if you go looking for your mind as if it’s an object, what you will find is always
thoughts, feelings and sensa8ons. Any conclusion you come to will always be made out of thoughts,
feelings and sensa8ons, because they exist in our mind in the form of objects. This is the content of
our mind, the stuff which is there, in the moment, passing through and then gone.
We know how to do this. We are very, very deeply trained in how to do this. Not only that, but when
we do that ac8vity of thought-‐construc8on, we create value which can then be released out of our
mouth, or through our pen, or fingers on a keyboard – and that value can be taken into the world and
exchanged for money or status or some form of relatedness. The mind itself is not a commodity,
though. You can’t trade it. It has no market-‐value at all. Being present and aware doesn’t buy a bag of
beans. Being able to blah-‐blah-‐blah about the dharma at least gets me my airfare paid. It’s like that,
isn’t it? You get something for words, for just being present. Maybe somebody puts, you know, 10
Pfennig in a liHle bowl in front of me… It’s very important to see that.
One of the difficul8es, but also dangers, in le[ng go of our fixa8on on the content of the mind is that
we drop out of social currency. What we call ‘society’ is an endless field of interac8ons of value
crea8on on the basis of transac8ons of par8cular commodi8es. So, if you want to do a par8cular kind
of job, usually you have to get a cer8ficate. You might be very, very experienced and skilled in doing
something, but if you don’t have the right piece of paper you may not have access to doing that job.
There are plenty of people who get a piece of paper that lets them be a psychotherapist, but I
wouldn’t trust them. But they have a piece of paper. And there are other people who are very soL,
very aHuned, who are there, – but they don’t have a piece of paper. A piece of paper doesn’t really
guarantee anything except that you get a job. That is to say, we live in a transac8onal world and the
currency is thought construc8ons, assump8ons, paHerns of iden8fica8on and so on. These prove to
other people that I have a value which is useful to you. And if you make use of this value, that will be
helpful – be helpful to me and be helpful to you. “Fair exchange is no robbery”, we say and if there is
a fair exchange of value, then both people feel sa8sfied. So we have to be aware when we prac8se
medita8on that we are going to leave that economy of constructed value and see what is there when
we let go of construc8on.
Tibetan has many words that get translated, in English, as ‘natural’ or ‘nature’. ‘Nature’ is a
problema8c word, in English anyway. Many people would say that there is no ‘nature’. Everything is a
concept. Nature outside – the trees and so on – these trees were planted by people, by a forestry
business. Then a big truck arrives, men get out and – ssssss, sssssss, ssssss – and they cut it all down;
they put it on the back of their truck, they take it away and they sell it for money. These trees are
there because of human inten8on and not there out of ‘nature’. In this whole world nowadays, there
is almost no ‘nature’ leL, because human beings need to run around interfering with everything.
So, the ‘natural state’, what is that? It means something uncontaminated by human thought. Human
thought is not necessary. What do human beings do with their thought? They develop all kinds of
plans – plans to build big dams, plans to save the world, plans to invade other countries, plans to feed
the poor and so on. We are constantly intervening and changing. So much foreign aid has gone into
Africa and yet so many African economies s8ll don’t work very well. Why is that? Because it’s very
difficult to help other people. Yes, it’s very easy to come up with an idea of how you will help other
people, but when you try to implement it, the plan doesn’t quite fit what is actually there. Why?
Because people lie and cheat. “We go there to help the people.” But the people in the government
take a lot of the money and put it in their pocket and put it in Zurich. Why do they do that? Because
they can! Because they can. “But they shouldn’t do it! Couldn’t we just tell them – please, don’t do

31
that!” No, because they are powerful people and if you are a powerful person, what do you need to
have? You need to have a big house, you need to have a big car, you need to have some armed guards
of course. So in order to have that, you have to have money. And your children need to go to school
in Europe. Of course. It would be shameful if they didn’t. How can you be the president and have
your children go to the local school? It’s impossible.
You can see the logic of how signifiers are endlessly weaving themselves together in this semio8c
web – one thing leads to another, to another, to another, to another.
There is no end to samsara but neither is there a beginning
Buddhist texts say, “ There is no end to samsara.” and dzogchen texts say, “Samsara has never begun.”
It’s exactly the same idea. No end to samsara means that if you stay on the level of complexity, one
thing will always go on and interact with another and another and the picture will get more and more
complicated. To say, “Samsara has never begun”, means that if you stay with the simplicity of the
natural state, all of this energy is simply paHerns arising and passing, which establish nothing at all.
These two things are both true. They are simultaneously true. This is the nature of non-‐duality.
So in trekcho, ‘cu[ng’ means to allow the natural libera8on of phenomena. We do this by cu[ng
away the habit that we have of having to make sense, of having to make value. The ego, as the nexus
in ourselves of the tendency to generate meaning, has to be put into ques8on. We are very, very
busy. Why are we so busy? What is the nature of the necessity for busyness?
When I was at university in Edinburgh, because I was not very devoted to my study, I used to wander
around in the library and I used to go up to the fourth floor in the library where the archives and rare
books were stored. It was completely desolate, nobody was ever there. There were thousands and
thousands and thousands and thousands of books on chris8an theology, because Edinburgh used to
be a big training place for missionaries. I would walk up and down these stacks, looking at these dusty
books. It was a cemetery of passion. People had wriHen these sermons, these explana8ons of the
love of Jesus Christ and so on… and now it’s gone. But at the 8me that they were wri8ng, a hundred
and fiLy years ago, this was a live currency. This could get you a job, it could get you food, it could get
you a posi8on. It was a social transac8on – inside the metaphor of that 8me. Now churches are
closing and not many people want to become preachers, or become ordained in the Catholic Church.
So this is an example of how whole construc8ons come into being and then close down. When you
are inside them, they seem meaningful. But what was the point?
Well, it had meaning for those who believed in it. This is why when we examine our own mind, we
are essen8ally examining our belief system. This includes our belief that we are en8tled to be
respected. Why should anyone respect us? Why shouldn’t people kill us? What is our value? This is a
very important ques8on in life. Many people are murdered in many countries all across the world
because of how they are iden8fied. That iden8fica8on at one 8me may have meant friendship,
inclusion and being part of something but when the poli8cal situa8on changes, the same
iden8fica8on can be a death-‐warrant; if you belong to that group you will be killed.
This is what we have to look at, to see the con8ngent, the rela8ve, the interac8ve nature of meaning.
As long as we sit inside the belief that our own construc8on of our self and other people is true, then
it’s very difficult to make any progress. We are all very sensi8ve; people say things which upset us and
then we become defensive. This is very normal, but of course it’s very difficult to step out of that,
because we feel, “This shouldn’t happen! Other people shouldn’t make us feel bad. If other people

32
were more careful we wouldn’t feel bad.” That is a fair enough kind of belief, but life doesn’t happen
like that. Always people will say things which hurt us. It is just inevitable.
So, pain is very important in buddhism, because pain tells you that something has run across your
sense of en8tlement. We get hurt and upset because the shape that we want to have about who we
are and our importance in the world and our value has been put into ques8on by someone else’s
behaviour. We can go into emo8onal reac8vity or we can start to wonder, “Why would I ever imagine
that somebody would always be thinking that my parCcular construcCon is the main thing which is
occurring in the world at any one Cme?” This is what we encounter in medita8on.
When you sit with your own mind you are not interac8ng with other people. You are experiencing the
factors out of which you construct your sense of self, and as long as that process of self-‐construc8on
seems valid and important, and indeed vital to your con8nued existence, it will be very difficult to
realise its illusory nature. So that’s what we are concerned with in the prac8ce of trekcho.
GURU YOGA USING THE LETTER A
So the first thing we do is some medita8on and we will do it through the general guru-‐yoga system.
Guru-‐yoga means iden8fica8on with the pure nature. We can do this in the space in front of us.
About two arms’ length just hovering in space we imagine a white leHer Tibetan leHer “ཨ” or you can
imagine a capital “A” – surrounded with rainbow light, five-‐coloured light which represents the five
wisdoms. If you can’t visualise clearly it doesn’t maHer, just open yourself into the space, because
space itself is the primordial ground of purifica8on. Since it is the basis out of which everything arises
and into which everything vanishes – the great space of existence.
Imagine that this leHer “ཨ” embodies all the values and all the quali8es of all the buddhas and then
we make the sound of “Aa” three 8mes and as we do that, we bring together all our energy into this
empty sound of “Aa” and in making the sound we release the tensions in our body, in our voice, in
our mind and open into integra8on with space. We sit with this leHer “ཨ” for a few seconds, then it
dissolves and we are just res8ng in space. What we call our body is here; what we call the room is
here, because our eyes are open. We are not staring at par8cular things, we are not entering into
thoughts and concep8ons about what is there, we are just being present with the en8re field of
experience.
Being present is not being present as myself, thinking about what is going on, but it’s just allowing the
thoughts and feelings and sensa8ons to arise, and the colours and the shapes and the noises – maybe
you see other people’s bodies moving and so on – just staying open and open and open. The nature
of the mind is open recep8vity. The tradi8onal image is the mirror – the mirror is always open, it
shows what is there. So we sit in this mirror-‐like state, allowing whatever is occurring. Then, aLer
some 8me, just very gently have a look or try to catch where the mind is res8ng. Is it res8ng on
something? Does it rest on some aspect of your body, is there a sensa8on which feels like you? Some
people might feel it in their head or in their heart or in their shoulder. Does it seem outside, does it
seem inside...?
Whenever you come to a conclusion about this, whenever you seem to have some definite sense of
where the mind is, just stay with that and see what happens. If your conclusion vanishes, maybe it’s
not how it really is. If, when you see something, it is con8nuous because it is the actuality of the

33
situa8on, then maybe it’s true. So just again and again observe: what is the mind? We all have a
mind, we are here, but this is the mind not as the process of conceptualisa8on, which is the
movement of the energy of the mind, but the mind as the basic awareness which reveals the
movement of the energy of the mind and all the forms which arise from it, whether they are outer or
inner.
[Medita8on]
How the mind is like the mirror

This is a very fundamental prac8ce that we return to again and again and if we really engage with it, it
can show us something very important. For example – when you came into this room, especially
perhaps on the first day, you were looking around at the different mats and wondering where you
might sit. You might no8ce the altar and the thrones and various things. It’s very unlikely that when
you came into the room you saw the space. The eye is caught by the func8onality of aspects of the
room as they relate to one’s own interest or desire. The room actually is the space, within which all of
these func8ons are possible. Without the space, these things wouldn’t be there – there wouldn’t be
mats and altars and thrones and flowers. But the space is ignored because of our fixa8on on the stuff
which is in the room.
In the same way with the mirror – when we look in the mirror, we no8ce the reflec8on, we don’t see
the mirror; the mirror itself is invisible but shows itself through the reflec8on. In the same way, when
you sit in the medita8on and you look for the mind, what you see is the thought, the feeling and the
sensa8on. It’s not wrong, it’s not bad, you don’t want to get rid of that – they are there because of
the mind. This is what the mind shows itself as, which is why in the dzogchen tradi8on we don’t try to
improve the mind, we don’t try to develop the mind, we don’t try to get rid of bad thoughts and
replace them with good thoughts – we simply enter into the state of hospitality which is the nature of
the mind and stay present with whatever is arising in it.
The mind itself is not a thing that you get. Just as you look in the mirror and you “get” the reflec8on;
you see the reflec8on of your own face or the room behind you. You can get that, you can say
something about it – but what can you say about the mirror? There is nothing to say about it. It
doesn’t show itself. You can say something about the frame of the mirror or the surface of the mirror,
that it needs cleaning; or even the back of the mirror, if it’s an old silver mirror, that it’s fading away,
but the “mirrorness” of the mirror, the actual mirror, is not something that you can ar8culate
anything about. And the mind is exactly the same.
If you go looking for the mind as if it’s a thing, you will get the mind, but the bit of the mind that you
will get is the energy of the mind which is the manifesta8on that shows itself as thoughts, feelings
and sensa8ons. This is not the wrong thing to get – it’s how you get it, because if you see that when
you get a thought you get the presence which reveals the thought. The presence is you in the
moment that you are present with the thought. But you are not present as anything – you are
present as the thought.
In the moment that a reflec8on arises in the mirror, the reflec8on fills the mirror. There isn’t a mirror
apart from the reflec8on. The reflec8on and the mirror are non-‐dual; they are not two separate
things. So we are pervaded by, we are filled with, our experience as it arises in the moment, just as
this quality of energy called ‘dang’ It refers to how if you take a crystal ball and you put it on some
red cloth, it will look a bit red; if you put it on a blue cloth it looks a bit blue. The crystal ball is

34
translucent, that is to say light passes through it and it takes on the coloura8on of its environment.
Likewise when you are si[ng in the prac8ce, some8mes your mind is clear, some8mes your mind is
foggy, some8mes the mind’s excited, some8mes you have old boring thoughts, some8mes you think,
“I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what meditaCon is, I don’t know why I’m here.” Many
different thoughts can arise; this is what you’ve got.
This is the reflec8on in the mirror. It’s not that you need to get rid of this and get another kind of
thought. Every thought that you get, whether it seems good or bad, simply has the status of the
reflec8on in the mirror, or like a mirage, or a rainbow in the sky. The main thing is to see that this is
manifes8ng because there is a presence, or an awareness, which shows it. This presence is not
something standing in rela8on. I’m si[ng here in this room and I look out and I see you. I see you
across the distance between us, because my percep8on of you is based on my eye being able to see
you. For some people I see the whole face, for other people I see only half the face because someone
else’s head is in front of them. That’s the view that I have from here. I am observing you. I am
observing my hand... I am observing the glass of water...
If you look like that in the medita8on you will get nothing so the thing to do is see whatever is arising
without iden8fying with any par8cular arising as being the subject. That is to say, subject and object
forms arise together, but presence is neither subject nor object. This is very important.
Awareness is not individual subjec8vity; it’s not an aspect of your personality. It is the clarity which
shows the en8re field – the field of subject and object. So the mind some8mes looks like a subject
and some8mes it looks like an object. It is neither a subject nor an object but it can look like that, just
as the mirror can show many different things. However if you grasp at the content of the mind as
being the mind itself, you get deluded. If you try to get rid of the content of the mind in order to find
the mind itself, then also you get deluded because the content of the mind and the mind are always
together.
That is why in some medita8on prac8ces they try to slow down the level of thought un8l there is no
thought at all. What’s the point of that? No thought at all? You can’t say ‘hello’, you can’t say ‘good-‐
bye’. You can’t say anything. It’s useless, because we live in the world with other people. If you want
to connect with other people, you have to say something. Who is the one who says something? I say
something. What is the nature of ‘I’? Open space.
The open space is not a personal possession of ‘I’, it’s not something I have, like a pen or a watch.
Awareness is first. This is why in the tradi8on they always have these words that refer to ‘primordial’.
In Tibetan they say kadag or ka, which means ‘from the very beginning’. It means that awareness is
there before the content of awareness. The mirror is there before the reflec8on. The poten8al of the
mirror is not dependent on the arising of the reflec8on. So, your mind itself is just open. And this
openness shows itself as subject and object.
If you are in the cinema and it’s a good film, you are not si[ng in your seat looking at the movie. You
are in the movie. Right? You are in the movie. The object is the subject. Whereas if it’s a terrible
movie, you are si[ng in your seat thinking, “Why did I waste the money?” Because you have no
connec8on you are returned into yourself. So we don’t want to merge in the object; neither do we
want to stand apart. Boredom or distaste separates us from the object and fascina8on binds us into
the object. These are the two extremes. The middle way is the mirror, which reveals the subject and
the object as they interact. Whether it’s boring or exci8ng, good or bad – these are temporary
forma8ons. The other and the self arise together.
35
In the zen tradi8on, they oLen say, ‘When the mind moves, the ten thousand things arise.’ It means
that when subjec8vity comes into being, everything in the world appears, because these are the
interpreta8ons of the mind. In the same way, when we engage in the par8cularity of our self, then we
have liking and not liking and so on. It’s just like that. We have to allow the space of these
possibili8es, but our experience is the field. Each of us is si[ng here with the sense of being in our
skin-‐bag, with the sense of having our individual existence, but what do we see? We can’t look up our
own nostril. We can’t look into our own ear. What we see is other people. Other people are our
experience. You are my world. You are what I get. We always get something which is not us. Always.
This is it. The object, the other, and the self arise together. They are not two separate things. It’s not
that I see you. No, I experience I, and I experience you. The ‘I’ which is me, myself, my experience in
my body and the ‘I’ which is awareness look similar but individual consciousness and awareness are
not the same. Individual consciousness is self-‐referen8al; it always has a feedback-‐loop confirming
that I am the one who is the owner or possessor of the experience.
Awareness has no ownership. Like the mirror it just shows. This is the fundamental nature of the
enquiry that we return to again and again: to relax and open into the state of awareness which
doesn’t block consciousness, which doesn’t block any object, but allows them to arise and pass.
When you get caught up in something, the one who gets caught is consciousness; is ego. Ego or
consciousness is the energy of the mind.
Energy wraps itself around energy and makes new paHerns. The mind itself never gets involved.
That’s why it is said, ‘pure from the very beginning.’
OK, so now we will have a break and when we come back we can start to look at some fundamental
points.
[Break]
TULKU TSORLO’S TREKCHO COMMENTARY: VIMALAMITRA’S SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL

POINTS
We will start now to look at some of the basic ideas of trekcho as presented in the teaching notes to a
commentary wriHen by Tulku Tsorlo, who was the main teacher of my teacher, Chhimed Rigdzin. It
brings together many tradi8onal readings of this aspect of ‘cu[ng’ or ‘cu[ng through’. He begins his
introduc8on by looking at seven points which are set out by Vimalamitra. Vimalamitra was one of the
early dzogchen masters, who brought together many wri8ngs and wrote many instruc8ons on
dzogchen which are s8ll studied and prac8sed in Tibet today. So I will go through these seven basic
points because they give an orienta8on to this path.
We have to remember when we are reading this, that the presenta8on of these ideas is inten8onal.
He is wan8ng to bring about an orienta8on in the minds of the people who study this so that they
should be able to go into the path. So – whatever is said is not ‘true’. This is the fundamental basis of
buddhism: that the actual situa8on cannot be spoken. The prajnaparamita, the transcendent
wisdom, cannot be said, it cannot be expressed in any way. Whatever we say is an approxima8on,
and these approxima8ons will always be influenced by par8cular belief systems that might include
rivalry with other schools. For example some teachers of dzogchen spend a lot of 8me poin8ng out
that nobody else teaches the pure dzogchen, that everything else is a bit suspicious, but trust me...
Other people teach through more analysis of the links and rela8onships across. The inten8on is the
same – to orient your mind towards the path – but the style of teaching represents the par8cular
36
personali8es of these teachers, whether they are more located in the family of anger, in the family of
pride, in the family of jealousy and so on. If you recognise the nature of your infec8on, it can become
an inflecCon, that is to say: it can be a 8lt or a turn which is not so poisonous. If you don’t recognise
it, it can take you into a lot of dogma8c conflict and in the history of Tibetan buddhism there has
certainly been a lot of figh8ng between different interest groups.
When we read these texts and study them – especially when we are doing it at several steps removed
through our European languages which involves a lot of transposi8on of technical terms with the de-‐
contextualisa8on of kinds of meaning – we have a difficulty. We want to use the words to open our
heart – because if the heart doesn’t open, we don’t get much progress – but at the same 8me we
need to have a clear head to think about the problema8cs of this transfer of knowledge. Knowledge
about something. The actual state is not something that you can know, it’s non-‐cogni8ve or
precogni8ve; it’s, if you like, a quality of being. Of course the word ‘being’ is highly problema8c in
European languages. Being can be seen as something essen8ally poisonous and many writers say that
we have to go beyond metaphysics and ontology into the field of ethics. They say that ethics is first
philosophy or that ethics is the ground, and the primordial otherness of the face of the other is the
only basis for proceeding in life. However, what we are confronted with, moment by moment, is the
fact that we exist.
In Buddhism there is a lot of cri8que – Nagarjuna would say that there is neither existence nor non-‐
existence. Who said that? Nagarjuna said it. How do we know Nagarjuna said it? Because at one 8me,
living in India, he existed and he wrote it. So for him to say, “There is no existence” is manifestly
nonsense. He existed, but he didn’t exist as Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna is a name applied to the existence
of... – of what? Of that par8cular illusory phantom form. Now you can say an illusion doesn’t really
exist. But of course neither does it not exist. But it does exist.
When you go to the cinema and you see a movie, it’s not real. Especially if you look at a cartoon all
the characters have been drawn in a studio and they don’t exist; you can’t find these creatures,
Donald Duck and so on, You can’t find them anywhere. But they exist. They exist because we give
credence to them. That’s one level of existence. That is to say, we build up an image and we talk
about them as if they existed.
But here, I’m using the word ‘existence’ to mean the basic fac8city of the presencing of ourselves,
moment by moment. It’s an undeniable fact that we are alive, whatever we call that. You can put it
into the language of knowledge, but that oLen obscures a lot of the rich complexity of our
experience because if you say ‘knowledge’, then of course you want to have pure knowledge.
In the Greek tradi8on from Plato and Socrates – in par8cular with Plato – this is a huge idea: that you
can find a way to arrive at a pure knowledge. You know Plato’s image of the cave? We are trapped in
a cave, we look at shadows on the wall and on the basis of this we imagine all sorts of existences, but
we don’t see it directly. It also says in the Bible, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then
face to face.” We will see directly. So what would that mean? In zen they talk about ‘seeing your
original face’ but that face and the seeing of it is a state of existence, or experience, or being.
It is very difficult to put this into words and as we hear it and as we think we get something, we have
to hold it very lightly and take it almost like a kind of hypothesis. It’s a way of illumina8ng something
and then I can take up another orienta8on and it illuminates something else. However there is a
problema8c in that undefinedness, in that you can miss out on the power of deep faith and
orienta8on.
37
Point 1: With a soft hope, put yourself in place
In Vimalamitra’s first point no dis8nc8on is made between an intelligent mind and a dull mind. If we
have extraordinary devo8on to the lama and the teaching and if we have diligence and unwavering
dedica8on to the path, then even although we may be intellectually dull, we can s8ll realise the view.
This is very nice, because we are not all very bright!
What it says is that you have to do it for a long 8me and you have to do it with devo8on. That is to
say, you have to believe it’s worth doing and believe that the prac8ce itself is more important than
the distrac8on. When we sit to do prac8ce, we usually get distracted and the mind wanders off in
different direc8ons. In order to come back to the prac8ce, we have to believe that it is more
important than the distrac8on. Distrac8on is something that we do know how to do. We do know
how to get into our thoughts and feelings and so on. So Vimalamitra is saying that realisa8on in
prac8ce is not dependent on our intellectual acuity – on a sharpness of mind that lets us analyse
phenomena – rather it is about what we do in the prac8ce.
We put ourselves in the way of something. Again and again you put yourself in the way of something.
Like an ornithologist looking for a rare bird... Day aLer day he goes into the forest; he has some idea
where this bird might be – and he waits. If he falls asleep, maybe the bird will come and shit on his
head and fly away again, so he can’t fall asleep. He’s got to be there. But if he is too restless looking
around for the bird, that distrac8on is going to drive the bird away.
So you have to be present with hope but without too much desire. That is to say, you have to have a
soY hope. You have to have a trust: it will occur. It will reveal itself, because it is my natural condi8on.
It is what is there. The clouds of obscura8on will clear. And they will clear if I don’t keep thickening
the clouds by my own par8cipa8on in them.
Some8mes medita8on is very clear and we get some insight and some understanding and some8mes
that vanishes. It is not a linear progression. We are not going from stage to stage to stage. Rather
what happens is that we experience moments that are clear, moments that are not clear, moments of
excitement, moments of dullness and all of this has to be allowed.
The answer doesn’t lie in the content of the mind. This is the central point, because when we are
intelligent, we are looking for a par8cular kind of clarity that will let us announce, ‘Ah, now I get it! I
get something!’ But there is nothing to get. So essen8ally it’s a falling away, and the falling away
means pu[ng yourself in the way of the falling away, if that makes sense. So it means that when he
says it’s important to have devo8on to the lama and the teachings, it means just to trust that the
teaching is saying something about your own condi8on. Reading about your condi8on is not the
same as tas8ng it. If somebody doesn’t know what ‘sweet’ is, you can tell them lots and lots of words
about ‘sweet’, but it won’t convey it. You will have to put some honey or sugar on their tongue and
then they get the experience. So it’s about the experience, but an experience you have to open
yourself to.
To allow the honey to come onto your tongue you have to open your mouth; you have to open your
mind to the possibility of this coming. But just opening yourself and si[ng and wai8ng – it won’t
happen.
Somebody started some therapy with me and in the middle of the second session she said,
—I don’t think we are making any progress. What to do? I sCll feel very bad.
—Why would you not feel very bad if you have been feeling bad for thirty years?
38
—Yes, but aren’t you going to help me?
—Maybe I can help you have paCence to have more suffering for more Cme and not be
so troubled by it. That might be as good as it gets. It might not change.
So here we can see all the tradi8onal buddhist values that you might have studied already in
Shan8deva’s wri8ngs or in the Heart Sutra, or in the paramitas. All of these quali8es, all the quali8es
set out in the Abhidharma, are essen8al here. They are not highlighted, but these are the background
quali8es that allow us to be there for the long haul, the long journey of pa8ently awai8ng – not as a
demand, not as a sense of ‘I am going to find out how to do this’, but as a kind of passive acceptance
which is not pathe8c. It’s not collapsing, it’s not a sadness, just a relaxed openness. Not leaping into
the future, not leaping into the past.
For Tulku Tsorlo this is the first fundamental point from Vimalamitra.
Point 2: Beyond language, beyond any need for focused activity
The second point is that words are not necessary for the aHainment of buddha. We realise the true
meaning directly without depending upon a single word. This is in contrast to other views and
approaches which depend on an elabora8on of the view. That is to say, “We are not trying to go from
here to there.”
So, on Sunday I go from here to the airport. If I stay here, I won’t get on an aeroplane. Aeroplanes are
not available in this village. So I have to go from here to there. Just as we might think that now I am in
samsara and I want to go to nirvana but nirvana is somewhere else, it’s not here. What he is saying is
that this kind of conceptualisa8on, which easily brings in the images of development, of
improvement and of achievement, is not necessary.
Now, this will sound like a contradic8on to what I just said before. But the key thing is how we
balance ourselves or posi8on ourselves in rela8on to that. Not relying on words means not se[ng up
a big mental image which you then try to align yourself with. For example, in tantra the prac8ces
generally require a text and the text can be several hundred pages long, with many different
visualisa8ons, descrip8ons of the deity and their mandala palace, the things to be offered, the
confessions of faults and so on. These ritual prac8ces in Tibetan are called buddha which means
‘ac8vity’. That is to say, there is something to do and if you do it regularly and in a focused way it will
bring about a development of your energe8c structure which will give you certain powers and
facili8es including, hopefully, the capacity to relax and open.
But dzogchen is not talking about doing something because the mind is not made. We haven’t lost
our original nature, so we don’t have to find the original nature. We might say, “I’m not in touch with
my original nature, I have to find it.” but of course this is the problem – because you cannot find your
original nature. You cannot get enlightened. Stupid people wandering in samsara never get
enlightened. The only beings who get enlightened are buddhas. Obvious! So if you are a stupid
person wandering in samsara, all you can do is stop wandering in samsara. That’s the key point.
If you try to improve yourself, then you are star8ng with something and you want to build on it. You
are building an edifice. But the ground of the edifice is emp8ness. It’s anaRa, there is no inherent
self-‐nature, this is void, no substance is there, nothing to grasp. So what do you build up when you
develop? You build up mental pictures. You build up energe8c paHerns. You become beHer at doing
mudras, at making tormas, at chan8ng and so on. These are all things that you can develop, but the
mind itself is not something that can be developed. It’s there from the very beginning.

39
So when it says, “It is beyond words”, it means that it is beyond the necessity for focused ac8vity, for
gainful employment, for inten8onality. When we recite the bodhisaHva vow we make an inten8on
that we will help other people. We give our life a shape, a trajectory moving into the future; this is
something that I want to do. Why do we want to do this? Because it seems a good thing to do. If
somebody asks, “Would you like to be compassionate or would you like to be selfish?” publicly you
have to say you want to be compassionate. Whereas it might in fact be a very selfish thing to say you
want to be compassionate. We want to be good. Being good is something we believe we can do. We
can always try harder.
So when Vimalamitra says that it is beyond language, this means that it is outwith the semio8c web.
It means that we are no longer working inside this matrix of associa8on which language opens up.
We are entering into a domain of silence. And in silence many things can be understood which can
never be understood through language.
Point 3: Don’t enter into preference or judgement

The third fundamental point is having no preference for either posi8ve or nega8ve karma. There is no
reliance on causal processes, abandoning nega8ve ac8on and cul8va8ng posi8ve ac8on.
Enlightenment is intrinsic within and it arises spontaneously.
Now, within the frame of general buddhism, this is very challenging. It is saying that good ac8on is
not beHer than bad ac8on. But for what purpose? Clearly, in the house of compassion, in the field of
benefi8ng others, in communica8on, in connec8on with other people, compassionate ac8on is very
wise. Working hard to help others – that’s important. If you want to help others you have to develop
good quali8es. However you might want to help someone as a means of gaining their trust so that
later you could rob them. This is what confidence tricksters do. They convince other people that they
are trustworthy, thereby maybe ge[ng access to their bank account details or to their house and
then they take everything. In this scenario the inten8on was nega8ve but the ac8vity, at first anyway,
seemed posi8ve.
We would say that this is not a good thing to do. Not good in terms of what? Not good in terms of the
feelings of the other person. At first the person was happy because they thought, “Now somebody
really wants to help me. Oh, I feel so good!” Then aLer a while they think, “Oh, that person cheated
me, they took all my money and now I feel very sad.” So they were happy, happy, happy, and now
they are sad, sad, sad. This is the way of samsara and the trickster has simply become a causal force
inside that movement.
What is happiness? An event. What is sadness? An event. This might sound like bullshit, because
actually when we feel sad it’s not a kind of op8onal extra. It’s not like choosing a side dish of chips or
a salad. There is a big difference between being sad. Which we don’t like, and being happy, which we
do like. So being happy is beHer than being sad.
But for meditators this is a big danger because both happiness and sadness arise, they are both
transient phenomena, and they both pass. People who prac8se medita8on enter into a world which
is upside down from ordinary life. In seeing the equality or the illusory nature of all phenomena, we
see that the ascrip8on of good and bad is indeed merely that: we ascribe it. We write these values
onto the arising moment on the basis of the transient feeling-‐tones which arise for us. We don’t have
to do that.

40
So he is saying that in this path of dzogchen, bad ac8ons and good ac8ons are the same, that we
shouldn’t make any discrimina8on between them. You have to hear this very clearly. He is talking
about medita8on; he is talking about, if you like, the house of wisdom, of understanding your own
nature. He is not talking about being in the world with others, he is talking about being itself. So if
you want to understand your own nature, then if you no8ce that you are constantly edi8ng and
interac8ng with your thoughts in medita8on in order to make a nice profile and avoid a nega8ve
profile, this ac8vity in itself will block you opening to the actual nature of good and bad thoughts
being an illusion. They have no substance to them at all. There is no essen8al goodness in a good
thought.
‘I want to help all senCent beings.’ ‘I want to kill all senCent beings.’ These are gramma8cal
structures. Why would I want to kill all sen8ent beings? ‘This is terrible! It’s not terrible.’ Both are
sentences. ‘I love Mickey Mouse.’ This is a sentence. ‘When did you last see Mickey?’ ‘I saw him in the
comics this morning.’ ‘Ah. How is he doing?’ ‘Oh, he is quite happy today.’ It’s like that. We fall into
this illusion of taking something which is not real to be real.
Inside our human domain we are very concerned with happiness and sadness as a human situa8on.
So good and bad, right and wrong become very important to us. But in terms of the buddha mind, it’s
like the sky, it’s completely open. Whether there are clouds in the sky or no clouds in the sky – the
openness of the sky is the same. It’s the very openness of the sky which allows the clouds to come
into it. Then they go out of it. We like it when we see the sun shining in the window. We think, “Oh,
it’s a nice day now. The clouds are going away.” Then we feel a bit happier. But whether there are
clouds or no clouds, the sky is the same. Our rela8onship to the quali8es that we receive from the
sky, that is to say, the sunshine or the lack of sunshine, this impacts us and so we go up and down in
hopes and fears. But the sky itself is uninfluenced, like the mirror is not influenced.
So this important prac8ce is about cu[ng away the iden8fica8on with the obscura8on that blinds us
to our own basic nature. It’s about realising your own nature or your own face, and from that point of
view there is no difference between good and bad thoughts. It doesn’t mean that when you get up
and walk about on your two legs, that there is no difference, because ac8ons have results.
Incorpora8ng ac8vity in the world with others into the unborn nature is very finessed; it’s a very fine
kind of ac8vity, and we’ll look at that a bit later. But for now, we are trying to understand the third
point and it is an important one because some8mes when we sit in medita8on we are very aware of
not liking how we are. We enter into a nega8ve rela8onship with what we take to be a nega8ve
thought about ourselves, that the thought or the content of the mind is defining who we are.This is
the essen8al point: that iden8ty is dependent on the paHerning of thoughts, and therefore the
quality of the thoughts that arise determines the paHern.
The buddha nature is not the same as iden8ty. Being in the world with others involves a degree of
iden8ty. We hope that if we have to go into a hospital to have surgery, that our surgeon is not a
sadist. We hope that the surgeon is really on our side. We have to believe that, otherwise we
wouldn’t let them cut a hole in our body. So we want people to have a good inten8on. That’s obvious.
But in the medita8on that is irrelevant.
So if you have thoughts in your mind which are perverse in terms of conven8onal morality it’s about
offering space to these thoughts, le[ng them come and go. Not entering into reac8vity with the
transient content of the mind. The more we do that, the func8on of the ego as the editor of the
content of the mind starts to decline. But of course at first it’s a big difficulty. There is a parallel in

41
Freudian psychoanalysis, where the path is through free associa8on. What Freud found out was that
as soon as you try to encourage the pa8ent to follow the stream of their associa8ons or thoughts,
just to say whatever comes to mind, there is a lot of resistance. The resistance is based on inner
prohibi8ons – on being somebody who could have such a thought or say such a thing – and external
prohibi8ons – “I am not allowed to say this thing to other people, because what will they make of
me?” Overcoming that resistance is very hard, so that people can think, “I want to make love to my
mother” and the analyst says, “Oh, yes. InteresCng. Mmm.” So what does this mean? Ah, Oedipus
complex, papa, papa – it’s not so terrible. But for the person it’s a terrible thing as they agonise,
“How could that be the case? How could I want to do such a thing?”
The sense of self is challenged when it’s brought into rela8onship with some of these mental
contents which are discordant, which are disharmonious with our ego-‐ideal, with our sense of who
we would like to be. Of course this is why medita8on is oLen very painful and hard work. As we
release and relax, we are allowing more and more of the content of our mind to arise and according
to the tradi8on this is not just the content of what we remember in this life; it’s contents linked to
karma from previous lives, but also linked to this deep ground-‐consciousness, the alaya, the
storehouse consciousness or the basic ground consciousness, which is impersonal. A bit like Jung’s
no8on of a collec8ve unconscious. It’s not the same, but it’s saying that what I call ‘my mind’ doesn’t
have a clear wall around it. Not only am I influenced by what comes in through my senses, by what
people say to me, but I also have these antennae on the top of my head; I pick up things that are
moving in the ether. There is a kind of Zeitgeist forma8on which informs us and we find ourselves
moving in that way.
Why is that? Because there seems to be a 8me for ripening. So many 8mes things arise in our mind
that don’t make us very happy and so this point is fundamental. It is saying not to enter into
judgement about yourself or others. Stay open to whatever is occurring, give space, give equal
hospitality, to whatever arises. This immediately starts to deconstruct the five skandhas; because it
means the evalua8on that comes with consciousness has no func8on. It means that the next level,
the samskaras, the associa8ons, the habitual forma8ons also have no func8on. Then percep8on,
interpreta8on also has no func8on. Feeling good, bad or indifferent also has no func8on. All you have
is the immediate fac8city of form. Something is arising; it has shape and colour, smell and taste. Just
the raw presenta8on – and then it’s gone. So this is quite similar to what happens in vipassana
medita8on, where you try to allow the presen8ng of experience in its most simple form, without
conceptual elabora8on.
Point 4: Don’t make a distinction between positive and negative action
The fourth fundamental point is to make no dis8nc8on between virtuous ac8on and nega8ve ac8on.
We are not engaged in a goal-‐oriented path of striving. Nor do we depend on the purifica8on of
nega8ve karma through effort. This is similar to the third point but the fourth point is more
concerned with our ac8vity in the world. What does this mean?
A lot of our interac8on with others are constellated around a narcissis8c fear that the other person
will not like us and will reject us. So we cons8tute ourselves in a form which we think the other
person will like. Then I will see in your face that you like me and that will make me feel okay. But if I
see in your face that you don’t like me, then I start to wobble, and think, ‘Oh goodness, what have I
done wrong?’

42
We see ourselves as a puppet of the situa8on. It’s as if coming out of our heart we had millions and
millions of liHle strings and when we walk down the street we give a string to each person we meet
and we say, “Oh, just pull it any Cme, I don’t mind.” It’s like that. We are incredibly reac8ve to what
other people appear to think of us, and of course a lot of this is our fantasy projec8on.
This fourth point is telling us to stay with the immediacy of our behaviour in the situa8on. It’s not
that we become so lacking in discernment that we don’t know the difference between a helpful and
an unhelpful ac8on. It’s that we don’t become ar8ficial through trying to present ourselves as
somebody that we are not. That we don’t transact with the world through a facade, through a social
persona behind which we have a whole secret life. Because such a division of what you show and
what you are, is poisonous; it’s clearly a very profound form of duality. Our existence is what it is. We
have to live with how it impacts others. Some8mes it works well, some8mes it works badly. But it is
what it is.
If you set up an image of yourself and you try to achieve that, it’s usually because there is an implicit
contract in your mind which says, “Unless I please you, my world will not be safe.” That is to say, the
ground of my being is dialogic, it’s dependent on your acceptance.
A Sco[sh psychoanalyst called Ronald Fairbairn developed a very interes8ng no8on around this. He
said that the small baby or infant, when it starts to see that there are problems occurring in rela8on
to the environment par8cularly in rela8on to the mother, has two choices: either the mother is bad
or the child is bad. If the mother is bad, the world has ended, because what are you going to do with
a bad mother? So he says that a very common adap8on is that the child keeps the mother as good
and develops the no8on that in order to be good enough to be connected with the good mother –
which is what the mother really is – he has to become another kind of person. So they develop an
ego-‐ideal and then work hard to strive to be the child who can be acceptable and pleasing to the
mother.
This is a very interes8ng idea, because it speaks a lot to the structure of how anxious we are as
human beings. For as long as we live in duality, as long as the individual ego-‐self is separated off, we
are necessarily anxious about what other people think of us. We want to keep our good name.
Tibetan culture is a shame-‐based society, a bit like Japanese culture. In these cultures it is really very
important not to shame someone, because you get a very strong reac8on. In Japan there were
tradi8ons of killing oneself because it becomes impossible to go on living once you are shamed. There
is nowhere to go.
Now most of us have experienced shame in our childhood, and we know that we close down and
want to cut off from what is there. Of course we want to avoid that kind of situa8on and we usually
do it by learning various methods of social aHunement. How to fit in, how to be a bit invisible, how
not to be picked on, how not to stand out. In order to do that, we shrink ourselves a bit. We don’t live
the full spontaneity of our existence, because if we did that, we would make mistakes and people
would gossip about us. Therefore I should keep myself in a box. This is very normal.
All of this is very relevant to medita8on because it’s concerned with iden8ty, with the self-‐construct,
with the paHerning of these five skandhas, or five cons8tuents of the individual no8on of self, which
we constantly try to maintain in paHerns which harmonise with the vibra8on or the rhythm of any
given environment. A very tricky thing to learn.

43
Children have to learn that when they go to school. In the playground they run around and shout and
when they go into the class-‐room they sit s8ll. Why? Why should you do that? Why shouldn’t you
shout in the class-‐room? Oh – you’ll get in trouble. If you want to shout, do it in the playground. So
they learn to turn on the shouty-‐shouty bit of self and then, when they go into the class-‐room, the
turn on the ‘sit s8ll and listen to the teacher’ bit.
This is social adapta8on and it is very useful but it’s also completely ar8ficial. It’s the choreography of
social belonging and it is all about anxiety. When buddhism talks about ignorance as the basis of
samsara, by ignorance is meant ignoring the natural state of the open, empty givenness of
awareness. When you are not in touch with what is there, you are in touch with something else. You
are in touch with an illusion. You are imagining something which is not the case, and that makes you
anxious.
In tradi8onal Indian cosmology we are living in the con8nent of Jampudvipa. There are other
con8nents and in some of these other con8nents it says that the beings who live there, live for
twelve-‐thousand years exactly. So they know exactly when they are going to die. It’s not like that for
us. We don’t know. This insecurity is a given of our human situa8on and it’s not resolved by trying to
improve it.
So, when we want to be good people, we have to ask what is our mo8ve? OLen our mo8ve is a
manipula8on of the environment to reassure us about the validity of our own ego-‐iden8ty and that is
what Vimalamitra is poin8ng to. When he is saying that there is no differen8a8on between good and
bad ac8on, he is not saying that you behave like a pig, running around, ea8ng anything that’s put in
front of it. It’s not about being crude. It’s about observing the anxious, egocentric, self-‐referen8al and
self-‐cherishing uncertainty which informs the various choices that we make moment by moment.
Through this we can come to see that a lot of the 8me we are in what Sartre would call. ‘bad faith’.
We lie about ourselves because we want to be beHer than we are but we are too lazy to try and make
ourselves beHer. However what dzogchen would say is that you will never be beHer! It doesn’t get
beHer. Bad things always happen. That’s what happens.
When the Chinese came into Tibet, they tortured good people. People did that, out of hatred, out of
viciousness. Why would they do that? Those lamas were good! Maybe good to our way of thinking,
but not good to the communists. Especially not to the Red Guards, because the Red Guards had
another vision. They saw these people as obscuran8sts, as controlling and manipula8ng ordinary
peasants who worked in the field. They saw them as the enemies of the people, just mouths and
bellies and nothing useful. Who is the good guy? Who is the bad guy? Were the Red Guards right to
destroy these Tibetan monasteries? Was it all a big mistake? From one point of view, yes. From
another point of view, no. Having cleared away the monasteries in Tibet, now there are railways and
hotels and supermarkets. Excellent, if you like to travel on the railway. Excellent, If you like to shop in
a supermarket. Why shouldn’t the Tibetan people have railways and supermarkets? “Oh, but I always
wanted to visit Lhasa. In the old days they had these beauCful houses and it was so incredible...I’ve
seen these old films, I wish I could have been there then.” Because it would have been a nice holiday. I
would be going on a holiday from my pe8t-‐bourgeois life in western Europe where I have railways and
supermarkets and central hea8ng. “But it’s nice to see how people lived in the old days, it’s really
cute; and I’ve taken lots of photos...”
So, who is the good guy? This is what’s very difficult. What he is saying here, again and again, is to be
sensi8ve to the situa8on. Don’t enter into heavy dogma8c knowledge that you know what is good

44
and what is bad, because due to cause and effect, due to dependent co-‐origina8on, the paHerning of
arising is always complicated. This dependent co-‐arising, the paCcca samuppada, is a very profound
understanding: on the basis of this, that arises.
So, on the basis of Bri8sh people pushing into China to sell opium that was grown in India and
demanding that the Chinese authori8es allow more trade, western ideas started to come into China.
Then we had Sun Yat-‐sen who got a Europeanised educa8on and became interested in communist
thinking. Because of Sun Yat-‐sen we have the movement which developed into later into that led by
Mao Zedong. Out of that we have the long march and all these whole stories. This is arising on the
basis of that, that arises on the basis of this, that arises...
On the basis of this, that arises – this whole concatena8on, these whole chains of interac8ve
movement which give rise to the world we experience. At any moment you can freeze a frame, you
can cut out a sec8on and you can start to analyse it, good, bad, right, wrong. But when you see this
whole unfolding picture, it is so complicated. That’s what he is addressing here. He is not saying that
you just do whatever you like. Rather, he is saying, stay open to the ground, out of which
manifesta8on is occurring. Stay with the non-‐duality of self and other and in that precise moment
you act. You act without evalua8ng in advance whether it will be good and bad, because you trust the
unique specificity of the moment having its own logic or its own paHern.
Point 5: Do not rely on mental analysis

The fiLh fundamental point is not to rely on mental analysis. We realise directly the view, that is the
natural clarity, without relying upon a conceptual ground and path. We sit with our own mind. We
don’t have to have a theory about the mind before we do this. We are here, we have some no8on of
what the word ‘mind’ refers to – it refers to a capacity to be aware. One aspect of that is that we are
aware that we have thoughts. Some8mes we lose the awareness into the thought, ge[ng caught up
in the thought, but we can be aware of something going on. I am aware that I’m talking and that my
hand is waving around in the air and so on... These things are revealed to me as momentary arisings
in the field of awareness.
What is this awareness? You don’t need any theory of it. Of course in the tradi8on we have what’s
called ngotro, an introduc8on to the nature of the mind. The mind is empty, it’s naked, it’s raw, it’s
fresh. Sounds like a salad! What do you do with ideas? Unless you look at your own mind, they don’t
help you in any way. So you look in your own mind and you think, “Oh, the same old shiRy thoughts
coming again and again and again... It’s not fresh! Hm! If my mind is fresh then these old boring
thoughts are not my mind! Uff! Thank goodness for that!” So the word can be useful like a liHle
wedge that helps you to disconnect or get a bit of space, but what does ‘fresh’ actually mean? ‘Fresh’
is ungraspable. ‘Naked’, what does that mean? It’s not covered. Not covered in what? In all this stuff.
Okay, so these thoughts are coming. In fact even if somebody says something about the mind, it’s not
very useful. The main thing is that, si[ng on the medita8on mat, we look again and again through
being present with our experience. Experience is arising; we are not distracted into trying to observe
from a distance what’s there. We are not distracted into merging with what is there, but we are
present with whatever is arising in the moment. The ques8on then is, and we ask it very gently and
soLly, “Who is the one who is present?”
We are not asking it in the way of, “What can we say about this?” If somebody suddenly came into
the room, we could look around and ask, “Who is there?” “Oh, it’s John. John has come into the
room.” As soon as we see John’s face we know that this is John. That’s all we need to know. We see
45
John. There is John. What is coming into the mind? This is a thought, this is a feeling, this is a
sensa8on. That’s reasonably easy.
What is the mind itself? “Oh, it’s this.” “What is this?” “We can’t say”. “But what it is – oh!” “It’s
this!.” This is what is meant here. It’s not about analysing what you get. It’s about going back again
and again and again so that you see the inseparability of awareness from the contents of awareness.
The mind and the contents of the mind are not things to be put on different shelves. When you have
mind, you have the content of the mind. Thoughts and feelings are not a problem. They are not
something to be got rid of; they are how the mind shows itself.
So – what is the mind? We have to look again and again. Where do we look? We look at the thought,
we look at the feeling, at the sensa8on. But when I say ‘we look at it’ it’s not looking at it like
something there. It’s looking at it by being present with it. So we are si[ng in the prac8ce –
something is occurring – and we are there. What are we there as? We are aware. What is this
awareness? It’s not consciousness making sense of something, interpre8ng it, telling a narra8ve, a
cogni8ve analysis of it – it’s just registering, or showing. The way the mirror shows the reflec8on of
what’s inside it, awareness shows the content.
But the awareness is not a thing; you can’t pull it out from the thought. You can pull aHen8on out
from the thought. If you keep ge[ng caught up in thoughts, you can gently grasp your aHen8on and
bring it back. In Tibetan this is called drenpa, which means like a memory or recollec8on. In Pali or in
Sanskrit it’s like saC. SaC is the basis for the modern no8on of mindfulness. When you are mindful, it
means you have a recollec8on, a re-‐collec8ng of yourself, moment by moment, in the face of the
tendency to merge in whatever is occurring. So the SaCpaRhana Sutra is describing how, through
aHen8on to the body and the breath and so on, again and again there is the risk of being caught up
and merged in what is going on, but you call yourself back to where you always have been. It’s not as
if you go from Bonn to Cologne. You are not going from one place to another. You are not going from
distrac8on to aHen8on, but aHen8on is the means whereby the non-‐duality of straying and being
seHled is revealed.
So, what he is saying is, “Don’t rely on words. Don’t rely on concepts. Concepts will lead you to more
concepts, will lead you to more words.” So later when we do more medita8on, hopefully this will be
helpful, because what we want to avoid is giving a commentary about our situa8on. We want to
avoid telling a story about what is going on, a story which is simply a way of appropria8ng the raw,
fresh moment and pu[ng it into categories which have been established beforehand. That’s why
words are dangerous It’s not that you can’t talk about it, but you need to be able to observe what is
the func8on of speaking.
Speaking, generally, is the house of compassion. Speaking is rela8onal. We speak in order to

communicate with other people and try to be a bit helpful. But speaking cannot reveal wisdom.
Wisdom is revealed in silence; in profound absorp8on, in profound aHen8on, profound opening to
natural awareness. This gives rise to certain experiences which may be conveyed to other people, but
of course as we try to convey them, we realise that it’s never expressed quite right, so some8mes it’s
beHer to be in silence. WiHgenstein said that concerning the things about which we can’t speak, it’s
beHer to be silent. 1 This is very good advice.
1"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." („Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber
muss man schweigen.“)
46
If so, what is the point of all this dharma teaching? Well, partly it’s because we are all word junkies!
Point 6: It will show itself directly

The sixth fundamental point is to resolve the view through the senses. We have the absolute view –
‘absolute’ is maybe not the right word – let’s say ‘the infinite view’, and that view is introduced to us
as the object of direct medita8on. This is not actually very different from many of the forms of
vipassana. Indeed, vipassana, which in Tibetan is called lhagthong, is used as a technical term in the
field of dzogchen.
To illustrate this: we are si[ng in this room just now and, as we have looked at before, you look
around and you see many things – but you don’t. What you actually see is shape and colour. You
interpret many things by the applica8on of your cogni8on. As you start to relax the necessity of
organising experience in terms of these cogni8ons, what you have is pure percep8on. You have the
immediacy of the actuality of what is revealed through the senses; which is colours, shapes, smells,
taste. ‘What is this smell?’ ‘Oh, it’s like lavender.’ That’s a concept. If you just take your finger and run
it down your arm – whooo! This is a nice feeling...whooo ooo ... Sensa8on! What is that? It’s
completely ungraspable. Something is arising and passing and we don’t know what it is. We can’t say
anything about it. This is the world of the buddhas. It’s completely direct and you can’t say anything
about it and there is no need to say anything about it; it’s complete in itself.
Now you might think, “Oh, but surely dogs and cows have this! They are just in their senses, looking
around, big eyes…” No, because here the space of the heart, the dharmadhatu, unified with vidya or
awareness, rigpa – this shining clarity reveals itself through what is perceived. That is to say, vision is
the truth of the buddha nature.
Now this may be a troubling idea because we tend to imagine that we have a mind and the mind
makes sense of things. What this is saying is that what you see is your own mind. That’s very radical. It
is saying that the object is the subject. Wow! The object is the subject.
When you see the face of the buddha, or balls of coloured light, Cgles moving, or rainbow snatches or
you hear par8cular kinds of sound – this is the announcing of enlightenment. You might think that
this is just a huge Tibetan cultural construct and that no other culture in the world has ever come up
with these strange ideas. Maybe. But it points to something very fundamental. It points to the fact
that when we sit in the pracCce and the mind goes quiet – there is nothing. And there is something.
There is nothing, because we are not giving the names and giving the iden88es and having thoughts
about what is there. And yet there is some thing – in English we have to say ‘thing’ – there is a
manifesta8on, there is an arising, and it’s here.
This is appearance and emp8ness. Something is appearing, but it’s empty. It’s ungraspable, but it’s
also undeniable. It’s undeniable that there is a basic fac8city to manifesta8on – the manifesta8on is
the radiance of the mind and the radiance of the mind is the Buddha. This is the sambhogakaya. So
enlightenment shows itself as the radiance of the world. The world is your own buddha-‐mind.
“But what about motorcars? You mean to tell me that if I am not careful and I cross the road, my
buddha-‐mind in the form of a car is going to kill me? This is not really the kind of buddha-‐mind I want.
I want the buddha-‐mind that would take care of me and give me chocolate and champagne.” You
can’t find an answer to this by thinking. That’s why Vimalamitra says, “It will be revealed. It will show
itself directly when we put ourselves in the way of non-‐conceptual experience.” If you try to have

47
conceptualisa8on as a kind of meta-‐analysis, si[ng on top of the mountain as the ul8mate judge, as
the one who can work out what’s what, all you have is samsara. That is the problem.
That is why destabilising or de-‐centering conceptualisa8on as the proof of validity is quite a struggle,
par8cularly for very educated people. What this is saying is that direct sensory experience, the
immediacy which is before thought – this is the very proof. It reveals itself. Generally speaking, all
buddhist cultures have developed a huge aesthe8c sensibility, because as reliance on
conceptualisa8on falls away, beauty becomes very important.
For example up in the Himalayas, if you go walking in these valleys, you see liHle stupas and they are
placed in the most exquisite points. You could imagine Cézanne or Monet had been wandering there
and had given some advice – “No, no, over to the leY a bit…” – because it’s just the perfect place. The
feng shui is just exquisite. It’s a world in which the inside and the outside are not separated and so
the feeling-‐tone and the expression on to the environment is one uninterrupted cycle. And that’s very
important. What he is describing here is the possibility of opening ourselves in a way that, if you like,
re-‐balances the world by seeing that essen8al point.
Point 7: The three kayas appear in vision on the path
The seventh fundamental point is that the three kayas appear in vision on the path. The three kayas
are the dharmakaya, the buddha’s mind, the sambhogakaya, the clarity or the radiance of the
buddha’s speech, and the nirmanakaya, the manifesta8on of energy as it manifests in the world, or
the buddha’s compassion. These are not three separate things. So we will say more about the nature
of vision.
These three aspects of the buddha appear in vision along the path and so we actually secure the
everlas8ng, spontaneously arising, pure presence in the field of experien8al luminous primordial
purity.
‘Primordial purity’ means that the mind is not a thing; it’s not an en8ty. You can’t catch it as
something. It is infinite and empty. Here I am holding a piece of paper with some wri8ng on it. As
soon as we put finite wri8ng on the paper the poten8al of the paper is limited. The other side of the
paper doesn’t have any wri8ng on it so it has a lot more possibility. As soon as you make a mark, you
close down the poten8al of the situa8on. So primordial purity means that the mind itself, as an
infinity of awareness, has no borders. It has no sides, no top, no boHom, it’s not capture-‐able inside
any concept, it’s not good or bad, it’s not blue or red or green. It has no quali8es through which it
could be appropriated and therefore it is undefiled. If something is infinite, it has no limit. If it has no
limit, it means that whatever else is occurring is already occurring inside it. This is the fundamental
point.
If you go to the shops, even in a small village like this, you will see things on the shelf that had been
imported from other countries. They have been imported because you don’t have these kinds of
things growing in Germany or you don’t have them at the price that people are wan8ng to pay and so
on. They have come from somewhere else to here, because the nature of the German agricultural
system means these kinds of fruits cannot be grown here on an economic basis and therefore it’s
cheaper to import them. The limita8on of the German ecology, climate and so on leads to
importa8on, according to the desire of people to eat kiwifruit and so on. A limit to Germany, a finite
Germany, therefore things come from outside Germany. That’s preHy obvious. But imagine Germany
was infinite. There is only Germany. If you want kiwifruit, you get it from the hot part of Germany.

48
You don’t go to the cold part. “No, no, they don’t have kiwifruit in the cold bit, but in the hot bit – yes,
of course, we have millions of kiwifruits. Here, have a handful! Go on, they are free.”
If there is no limit, everything is inside it. It’s very important to have this sense. It means that in the
medita8on we are aware that everything is in the mind. We don’t do it with our eyes closed, si[ng
inside ourselves and then opening our eyes, “Oh no, the room is sCll here! I thought I was
enlightened, but I’m sCll stuck in Germany, what am I going to do?” We do it with the eyes open; we
are aware, but the awareness is infinite. Everything is in the mind. The room is in the mind. The mind
is not in the brain, in the bone, in the skin, in the room. The mind is infinite. The room is in the mind.
Germany is in the mind. In whose mind? In my mind. Not in your mind. Yes, I know you’ve got a
German passport, but it’s in my mind. It’s in everybody’s mind.
Each person’s mind is the centre of an infinite world. Everything is given to us. It sounds like
nonsense, but this is what you come to appreciate through the prac8ce. The immediacy of the world
is our mind. It’s not something coming from outside, through our eyes into our brain. Our mind is
neither outside nor inside; and what we call subject and object arise together into the same sphere.
So this is the basic introduc8on to some of the proposi8ons of dzogchen and we’ll con8nue with
more medita8on prac8ce in the aLernoon.
[Break]
KHORDE RUSHEN EXERCISES TO SEPARATE US FROM SAMSARA AND NIRVANA
Now we will do some exercises called khorde rushen in Tibetan which means separa8ng yourself from
both samsara and nirvana, or dissolving samsara and nirvana, or clearly defining what samsara and
nirvana are so that you free yourself from them.
Samsara here is seen in terms of the six realms; These six realms are the hell realms, eight hot and
eight cold hells and two indeterminate. Birth in these realms, or manifes8ng in these realms –
because you don’t get born into them, you just suddenly find yourself in them – is seen as the
manifesta8on of karma arising from anger.
Then you have the hungry ghost or preta realm, manifes8ng from the energy of envy, in which you
are constantly in a state of lack, of hunger, of necessity, but whenever you try to consume something,
solid or liquid, it turns into molten metal in your mouth and this you can never be sa8sfied.
Then there is the animal realm. There are many different kinds of animals. Some are trapped in fields,
taken to the market and slaughtered; some are castrated with knives; fish in the sea suffer all kinds of
pollu8on and muta8on nowadays due to the toxins in the sea. Animals are trapped in what we call
the food-‐chain, where the small creatures are eaten by the bigger and the bigger and the bigger, with
the ul8mate predators being human beings. The life of many animals is one of intense fear and
anxiety. When you see small birds, like sparrows, ea8ng something, they are in a state of complete
paranoia, looking around to see who is going to aHack them. So even while they are trying to get
sustenance, they are frightened of being killed. This realm of the animals is seen as the manifesta8on
of stupidity.
Then we have the human realm, which is seen as the manifesta8on of both pride and stupidity, or
some8mes of pride and desire. We know what human beings are like – quite predatory, quite

49
exploita8ve, deceiaul, selfish, and so on. Very concerned to take care of themselves and especially
skilled in the use of language to create all kind of mischief.
Then we have the jealous gods, or the demigods, that is those who have some power. They are
forceful in their bodily presence. The demigods, the asuras live in a state of rivalry with the gods, who
live in peaceful paradise situa8ons. So the asuras always imagine that they should be up on the top.
In their realm grows a tree with very beau8ful fruit, but the tree fruits and flowers in the god realm,
so the gods effortlessly get the fruit from the tree whose roots are in the asura realm. The asuras are
always really pissed off and engage the gods in baHle. When the gods cut off the arm of an asura, the
arm is hur8ng and the body is hur8ng as well but if an asura cuts off a god’s arm, he just picks it up
and puts it back on again. So it’s beHer to be a god! The asura realm is the frui8on of jealousy.
Then you have the god realms – the gods of form and the formless gods, in many different strata
which are seen as structured on top of Mount Meru. This is seen as the frui8on of the karma arising
from pride. In these realms everything is very beau8ful and wonderful and easy for a long period of
8me. Then when the karma that gives rise to this vision or this fantasy finishes, the gods fall out of
heaven and have to wander somewhere else. But just before they leave that realm, their fine clothes
become stained and start to smell, the flower garlands around their necks rot, so everybody can see
that they are dirty and unclean and they step back from them – so they go alone and in fear, leaving
the place that they knew very well.
So whether you see these as symbolic or you imagine that these are actual places, according to the
tradi8on this is the nature of the world that we live in: that we move from one realm to another, to
another, because we are caught up in experience. We don’t usually put our experience into ques8on
– we take it for granted that we are human beings and that this is who we are. When we see the cows
in the field we don’t imagine that in another life we could be like a cow. We think we are human
beings and maybe we don’t believe there is anything aLer our death, nor that we came from
anywhere before our birth.
This view of samsara is to put that into ques8on and say that no, actually there is an endless chain of
possibili8es and what you have at the moment is just one transitory forma8on, which can be
followed by many other transitory forma8ons. So using the image that we were looking at earlier
about roles, now we are en-‐roled as being human beings. When we die, we don’t know what role we
will take on. We have lived in this theatre of human beings as if it were our true situa8on, as if this
were a defini8on of our infinite capacity. But it’s just a brief moment in our forma8on.
When this situa8on dissolves, other causal factors can arise and take us to be reborn somewhere
else. We are blown hither and thither like a leaf in the wind, separated from the people we know,
separated from the situa8ons we know. When we die all our knowledge vanishes with us, according
to the tradi8on. Think of how some8mes you waken up in the morning a bit confused and you take a
liHle 8me to come back into yourself and relocate yourself according to your knowledge of your life,
what you have to do, and so on. Well, when you leave this life, it’s like a great amnesia. All the
reference points that you have vanish. So how will you know who you are, what you are, where you
should go? This is truly frightening and is a view shared in buddhism and hinduism. The other idea,
‘Oh, when I die, I’m dead and nobody can know anything about death and it’s just wipe-‐out’ could be
consoling and maybe it’s true. We don’t have definite proof. But maybe it’s not true. And if it’s not
true, and we find that there is a propulsion that takes us forward – because if we look back, all

50
through our life we’ve had many different kinds of propulsions, which have taken us from one state to
another, to another – then as these states move forward, we can end up anywhere.
So, the purpose of these khorde rushen prac8ces is to look at our body, voice and mind in rela8on to
these six realms of samsara and also to nirvana.
Exercise 1: Using your body, experience each of the six realms and nirvana
In terms of the body, this is a prac8ce usually done outside. Here you can just walk down the path
and out into the fields or the forest, where you have plenty of space. With your body you are
imagining that you are in a hell realm. So in the hot hell realms, everything is burning all around you;
it’s very frightening. Your body is being pierced by hot iron bars. In the cold hells, the body is freezing
and chaHering. There is no end to this complete turbulence; day and night, day and night it’s always
the same, the same, the same... There is no escape. Even in the intermediate hells, when you try to
escape, there are creatures that terrify you and as you try to climb a tree to escape from them, all the
branches are covered in sharp leaves which cut your flesh. There is nowhere to escape to. What we
do is we let our body move into the shapes that are connected with that. Then we do the same for
this hungry ghost realm. Endless hunger and need; running, looking, looking, but – terror! As soon as
we get what we feel we need, it turns into something we don’t need. So we have this endless
reversal, like in a nightmare; you think you are running down a passage into safety and suddenly it
turns into a new horror. You imagine that through your body. The same with the animal realms – fish,
birds, insects, all these creepy-‐crawly creatures under the earth and so on – just let your body go in
that kind of way. Then humans, different kinds of human experience; the demigods, and then the god
realms.
The purpose of doing this is to experience through the body the many possibili8es that you have of
your energe8c manifesta8on. Because as long as you stay in the familiar choreography of your
habitual bodily movements, it creates the con8nuity for the support that gives your personality a
sense of ‘this is who I am’. Most of us do the same kind of things all the 8me. Even if you go to a
dance or yoga class or something like that, you do it once a week and it’s something that your body
knows how to do. You know how to sit in the office or work on the computer. So your body has
established these par8cular kinds of rela8ons – now I’m cleaning my teeth, now I’m cooking, now I’m
having a shower...
All of these ac8vi8es reinforce the sense of who you are. So by bringing these other movements into
the body and doing it with full imagina8onal iden8fica8on – ‘This is how it really is.’ – really imagining
what it’s like to be a snake, slithering in the grass; imagine what it’s like to be a liHle frog, leaping
about; imagine what it’s like to be a buHerfly... “Oh! This is a possibility! This is possible – this is
possible. This exists as a possibility.”
Why is this s8ll possible for me? Because the factors of crea8on have operated. Our parents had sex
and we were conceived and then we were carried to term in our mother’s womb. Then we were
born, and we didn’t die at birth and we didn’t die in infancy. So these are the factors of causa8on for
our existence. The factors of maintenance are opera8ng at the moment and the factors of
destruc8on haven’t yet arrived. We could be si[ng here with a lot of cholesterol inside the liHle
narrow passageways in our body. A blood-‐clot could be wai8ng just ready to pop up into the brain.
Maybe some of you will leave here in an ambulance – we don’t know. Maybe liHle cancers crawl in,
liHle cells are ge[ng bored with being good... “Hey! Let’s have a party! Let’s turn into somebody else!
Hey!” That’s what they do, they mutate. They are not who you think they are. They want to have fun.
51
When you get cancer, the cells are just pu[ng on a fancy dress. That’s what they do. They say, “I’m
bored being me. I want to be somebody else.” “But what about me?” That’s what they do. And so
they become somebody else and in the process of becoming somebody else, they kill you. Because
they are not concerned about you.
The second aspect of this is to imagine your body in the form of nirvana, which means in the form of
the peaceful and the wrathful gods. So like Tara, or Chenrezig, or Dorje Phurba, you imagine yourself
maybe soL and flowing and very gentle, beaming and smiling, blessing everyone, full of radiant
happiness; or something very rough and angry or something very dancing and wild and full of sexual
energy. Whatever ways you manifest, don’t interrupt your own experience, even if you don’t know
very much about these dei8es. You have seen some images and from that you get some imagina8on,
because it’s all about whatever bits of construct you have latent in yourself. We are trying to bring
these out, so that you directly experience it.
Then we do the same for speech. You go back through the different realms of samsara and make the
sounds that you associate with them. Imagine that your body is plunged into a vat of boiling metal.
What noises would you make? “Oh! Oh! Help!” Maybe not, maybe something terrifying, maybe you
are screaming and squelching. Then you are an animal. What is that like? You are going into the
abaHoir, “moo, moo”, then you see someone going to shoot you, “Uaah! Uahh!” Whatever sounds
come out, let them come out. Just let these come out – because these are inside us. By making these
sounds you go into the iden8fica8on.
What you are working with here is to collapse the boundary that you have between ‘me’ as an
educated, intelligent human being and these other possible forms of existence. And they are not so
far away. There is not much holding us in place. Think of what is happening in Syria at the moment.
People who once had jobs, who had houses, who had families – now they are refugees. Separated
from the children. Watching members of their family being murdered. Having lost everything, they
have nothing. They have lost their dignity, they are living in a camp; they are shi[ng in a pit whereas
before they had a private toilet. Now they have to shit in a public place and people are looking at
them. How does that feel? These people are humiliated. They lose what they have. And what had
seemed there, merged into their existence, is suddenly gone. This happened in Europe too, less than
a hundred years ago. We had huge wars that wiped away many people’s existence. The fantasy that
our world will con8nue to be safe is very unreliable. We never know what strange factors will happen
in another country that will suddenly release this madness through our world.
So we let out the sounds of the different realms and we then go on to make the sounds of nirvana, of
the pure medita8onal dei8es; the sweet sounds, like of Chenrezig ... or of these more wrathful
dei8es, “Hung! Hung! Phat!”, roaring, shou8ng. Noises which tear the structure of the world apart.
Just imagine you surrounded by flames, blood is flowing out of your mouth, you have huge fangs and
you are devouring all the poisons of the universe. You are an unimpeded force, an implacable force,
nothing can prevent you – this is the force of Dorje Phurba; he destroys everything in sight.
Everything is emp8ness.
So in this state – how do you feel? Whaaa...! You have the posture, and you are making the sound. So
you do this for some 8me; and you keep doing it and keep doing it un8l you have exhausted it.
Then you go on to the next thing, which is the mental state. Sit and experience what it would be like
to have the mental experience of being in a hell realm; the mental experience of being in all these
different realms. What kind of thoughts are likely to arise? What kind of moods, what kind of
52
feelings? What kind of sensa8on? Try to feel it very par8cularly inside you, and so on through the
different realms.
The same way try to imagine the experience of being a peaceful deity – the spaciousness, the calm,
the lack of disturbance – completely at ease. Mantras flowing out of your mouth; mind free of
conceptual thought. Imagine yourself as a wrathful deity – a lot of energy flowing. The wrathful
dei8es have nine different dance movements – they are stomping, they are roaring, they are
tearing... What goes on in that kind of mind? Completely unimpeded movement of energy; no
shame, no blame, no fear – just the free flow, and it’s perfect.
In that way, we use our imagina8on to enter into the experience of each of these realms, and to do it
as fully as possible, so that we fully have the sense that these are not something over there, out
there, belonging to someone else. When you walk on a path in the forest you can see these liHle
beetles and we can imagine ourselves into the life of the beetle. We can imagine what it’s like to be a
bird or a 8ger or a snake. We can imagine a god. Why? Because you imagine this. ‘This’ is what we
imagine. Some of us will enter into states that we can’t imagine at this moment in 8me and that we
wouldn’t want to imagine.
Now that I am ge[ng older I have quite a lot of friends who are ge[ng sick or who have diseases
which are now ripening. Condi8ons like lupus where gradually the body starts to get more painful;
condi8ons in which the central nervous system starts to collapse; paralysis, mul8ple sclerosis; people
who were healthy, who were ar8sts, who were successful – now they are in a wheelchair. That
person, twenty years ago, could not imagine that they were going to be in a wheelchair… And of
course, when they are in a wheelchair, they are in a wheelchair and furious. Because they imagine, “I
shouldn’t be in a wheelchair!”
What we call acceptance is an imaginal gesture. To accept your situa8on as it is, is to be able to
imagine yourself into your situa8on and stop imagining something else about your situa8on. That’s
really what acceptance is. This is what is arising for the moment. And every 8me I imagine that
“Maybe it will get beRer” or that “It shouldn’t be like this”, this imagina8on adds another level of
grief.
For our purposes here, we are star8ng to get into this mood. This is a prac8ce, so when you have the
possibility, go into a quieter place and fully go into the experience. It oLen helps to begin as we did
earlier, by si[ng quietly, and doing the three ‘A’ prac8ce. You are opening to the space and then from
that space you allow these different manifesta8ons to arise.
So you do it: body of the six realms and then the divine/nirvana forms; speech – six realms and
divine/nirvana forms; mind – six realms and divine/nirvana forms; and then we meet back here.
Okay?
[Prac8ce]
Remarks on Khorde Rushen practice

So this prac8ce you were doing is something you can do again and again when you have more free
8me out in nature. It is oLen the case that when we get anxious and come into a situa8on where we
don’t feel at ease, we tend to withdraw and become a bit rigid and silent because we don’t see a
doorway out. Then, when we relax, we find that it’s quite possible to communicate with other
people. So this prac8ce is very much the same thing. Anything which traps us into a limita8on is not

53
only cu[ng us off from the field of our experience, but is cu[ng us off from our poten8al, because
our poten8al and the field of experience are the same thing. Why is it that some people find it
difficult, for example, to talk with children? They say, “Hm, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know
what to do.” And then they look inside themselves to try to find out what to do. But clearly, of course,
the main thing is to smile at the kids and you say, “What are you going to do this aYernoon?” and
they will start to tell you and you get into something.
That is to say: we lose the environment when we imagine that the answer lies in ourselves, because
when we look into ourselves to find the answer, we are looking in the wrong place. It’s by imagining
the poten8al of the situa8on that we evoke in ourselves the response which links us into the
environment. So by doing this rushen prac8ces again and again, you can see that all the six realms of
samsara and all the divine forms are there already inside you. When you get an ini8a8on into a
tantric prac8ce and the deity is described, what are you told? This deity has two arms and one head,
or maybe ten arms and fiLeen heads – many, many different combina8ons. As soon as you hear the
words, you can imagine fiLeen heads. How are they organised? It’s like when you invite people for
dinner, how do you put them round the table? You get a picture in your head. So these heads are all
in place and it’s like that – you imagine that. Somebody imagined it once and that’s where these
prac8ces came from. They come from the imagina8on. Everything is the imagina8on, whether it’s in
science, or engineering, or spiritual prac8ce. It’s imagined.
So – it’s a good prac8ce to do.
Exercise 2: Falling into ease, naldu wabpa

Now we do a very simple prac8ce, which is called naldu wabpa ("ལ་%་ཕབ་པ་) in Tibetan, which simply
means to relax. Nal is like in naljor, the Tibetan word for yoga, and it simply means relaxed, or at
ease, and wabpa means to fall or to rest.
So we rest the body in a relaxed posture; you let the body just fall at ease. You are not holding
yourself rigid, you are not trying to structure anything, but you are just at ease in your body.
Some8mes you can do it lying down or you can do it si[ng up, but it’s about just being at ease in
yourself, not straining to produce something, not doing anything ar8ficial.
The relaxa8on of the voice is silence which means that the impulse to speak is silenced. So if you are
doing this prac8ce on your own and you find yourself moving towards speech, whose first form is like
the many thoughts in the mind, just recite a long, slow leHer ‘Aa’, the sound of ‘Aa’, and then into the
silence.
For the mind it says, just be like an exhausted person. You are completely 8red. All you want to do is
just – ‘Ah... Just leave me alone.’ Like a cow in a field. Not a thought in your head, not trying to
achieve anything, just – you give up. If we had a television, we could put it on and… That’s what many
people do at the end of the day when they are 8red. But now we don’t put on the television, just –
nothing.
This form of relaxa8on is very important in the tradi8on, because although we have to do our dharma
prac8ces and do our work so on but it’s also important to really experience giving up. Giving up
effort, and realising that life goes on if you are not ac8ve. OLen we imagine that we have very big
shoulders and we carry many weights and responsibili8es on top of them and that if we didn’t do it, it
wouldn’t happen and so we have to be very responsible and so on – This is true in a certain domain

54
but if it becomes the governing image or metaphor of our existence, then we are on this wheel,
turning and turning and turning...
So we just sit for some 8me – just sit in a relaxed way, in silence, just the mind – empty. Not trying to
achieve anything. Just – Oh!
[Prac8ce]
Giving up is very important, because if you have the capacity to give up then you also have the
capacity to see whether a situa8on is workable or not. Many people stay in work situa8ons, in
rela8onal situa8ons, in family situa8ons for much too long. There is a certain point at which one can
say, ‘ This doesn’t work’. But you can only know that it doesn’t work if you are able to stop working.
Because if you always imagine that you could try harder or you could do a bit more, then this
mobilisa8on will set off yet another chain of involved ac8vity.
Le[ng go and giving up don’t sound very good. Giving up sounds like failure. “Giving up trying – I
mean, that sounds terrible! We’ve got to try – surely something can be done!” Well, something can
always be done, but very oLen it’s a mess. OLen we do things that shouldn’t be done, because we
want to do something. And the reason we want to do something is because it’s an affirma8on of our
iden8ty. So allowing something not to be done is very different. Why should we do that?
Le[ng go, doing less, is some8mes much more effec8ve than doing more. The par8cular orienta8on
of dzogchen is a kind of aesthe8c recep8vity. Recep8vity is not exactly ac8ve and not exactly passive.
The mirror, when it shows a reflec8on, is not just passive, because it’s the clarity of the mirror that
shows the reflec8on, but it’s not ac8ve either in the sense of edi8ng the image and making it appear
in a par8cular way.
So relaxing and allowing ourselves to do nothing is also the way of experiencing ourselves as being
nothing; and if you see directly that you con8nue to exist when you don’t do anything, then you have
a new star8ng point to think about, “What shall I do?” But if you are already doing something, you
start from engaged ac8vity. In English we have a saying, “If you want something done, ask a busy
person.” It’s like that – if you are a busy person, then you’ll do more and more, because you are busy.
People who are going slow – they oLen don’t get so engaged.
Of course people have their own rhythms, but here it’s about being able to see whether something is
useful or not. We can put a lot of energy into a situa8on to try to make it work. But what’s the actual
poten8al? Is something going to survive or not? If it’s a garden, what’s the quality of the soil, how
many stones are in the soil, is there a lot of clay, do I have rheuma8sm, do I have a sore back, do I like
digging in the rain? No, okay, so I don’t need a garden. It’s a nice idea, but it’s a lot of work. The idea
gets people into taking on something, which then, in its actuality, is not so good. So this is a big
func8on of relaxa8on. It helps as a general point of revision of the necessity of many of the ac8vi8es
that we have. Because there is always a reason to be doing things.
When I was in India I did a lot of prostra8ons and aLer I had finished them I went to see C R Lama,
because I’d been doing them up in the mountains. I told him that I had finished them now.
—Oh yes, and how do you feel?
—I feel very Cred.
—Oh, yes, and what’s happening in your mind?
—I’m too Cred to think.

55
—Aha, that’s okay then.
And then he explained that the main purpose of doing prostra8ons is to get 8red. That’s the main
func8on. Because if you get very 8red, then you think less and if you think less, then you can get
more success in your medita8on. But of course they don’t tell you that before you start!
Many of us have experienced that. You go out for a long walk in the country, and at the end you feel
very 8red, but you also feel very open, because the exhaus8on allows a non-‐connec8on. What the
exhaus8on does is bring the energy from the side channels into the main channels and then it into
the central channel. You go walking and walking and walking un8l liLing your legs gets harder and
harder and the mind is empty... nothing. In many situa8ons in life you can experience how that
exhaus8on or deep relaxa8on of le[ng go opens a path to non-‐conceptual experience. The
advantage of this is that it shows us that the non-‐conceptual experience is not a construct, because
it’s through the exhaus8on and the relaxa8on and the le[ng go, through the falling away of
construc8ve ac8vity, that the actuality, the underlying ground of non-‐conceptual awareness, is
revealed.
Exercise 3: Body in the shape of vajra

Some of you will know this. We have to stand up to do it; it’s not something to do if you are not
feeling very well. You are going to make the body into the shape of a vajra. So you have to be on your
feet, rocking on the toes and you bring the soles of your feet together as much as possible. It’s very
easy to fall over when you do this; and then you put your hands up so that your body is like in the
shape of a vajra. Hold this posture as long as possible, un8l the pain is excrucia8ng.
[Prac8ce]
At first it’s not a good thing to do for long because it’s a stress posi8on. And I don’t know if you
no8ce, but the mind becomes very empty when you do it. There is no thinking involved aLer a while.
Again, it’s an energiser to bring the energy into the central channel. You can do it with a visualisa8on
or sense of the symbolism: the head and the two hands like this represent the poten8al of the human
situa8on, called in Tibetan ngowo rangzhin thugje. It means the ground nature or the open poten8al,
the clarity arising from that poten8al and our energe8c manifesta8on moment by moment. The
lower part, the legs coming in onto the feet, the three aspects of that represent the three kayas, the
ripened buddha nature; and the middle point around the belly represents the integra8on of natural
purity and spontaneous manifesta8on.
ALer a while, if you do it for a long 8me, the body will start to vibrate and you might start to feel a bit
dizzy. The instruc8on is just to stay with that as the mind becomes more and more and more opened
and emp8ed. This vibra8on is coming about by the residual movement of the energy into the central
channels, so that there is less and less control over the structure.
These kinds of prac8ces are helpful to do, because they allow us to immediately engage in experience
without having to think. You don’t have to say any prayers, or have any analysis or any inten8on. Just
quietly, in a space where nobody is going to interrupt you, you take up that posture and you just hold
it. All you are doing is breathing out; you are not trying to control your breathing. Some8mes it may
be more rapid, more slow. Just let the body be in its own state.
Ques'on: Would you do that before si[ng medita8on?

56
James: You could do but it’s essen8ally a disorien8ng prac8ce, so it would depend on the
kind of medita8on you were doing. If you did that before the relaxa8on, that could be useful, because
that’s about just le[ng go. But if you were doing a prac8ce where you were focusing, then it
wouldn’t be too helpful because this prac8ce is designed to disrupt the habitual paHerns of our
aHen8on through a kind of radical dispersal into nothing. Whereas shamatha and vipassana are
disrup8ng habitual paHerns of aHen8on by giving a kind of beHer or purer focus for the aHen8on.
Gaining an experience

With all of these things you have to look at your own situa8on and see what works for you. All of
these prac8ces are just, as it were, sugges8ons; how we can embody them depends on our own
par8cular situa8on. We are using the prac8ce to gain an experience, that’s the whole func8on of it.
We are not doing it to become physically stronger, we are not doing it to achieve a par8cular
outcome, but rather we want to be present in the experience as it manifests due to the par8cular
ac8vity.
So, for example, when we were out in the forest and we were making these sounds or these body
postures, or you are imagining what it’s like to be an insect, or a bird – when you are in that, there is
a par8cular kind of experience. When you go from one animal to another – you imagine being maybe
a wild pig in the forest, and then you imagine you are a deer – it’s completely different, isn’t it?
Completely different. So there is the experience. This is arising, fully this; and then this is arising, and
then this is arising; which is why the instruc8on is to go seamlessly from one to another, to another,
to another. Each of these is a complete world which we inhabit – and then we are out of; we inhabit
and then we are out of...
And this is what’s going on all the 8me in our existence, except we are not so conscious of it. We are
si[ng in this room, we have this world; then we go out, maybe we go and have a pee or we go in to
eat some food, we start to talk to someone, you enter into that liHle world. And you are right in
there. And then something else happens and you are in that world. And it’s seamless.
And that’s why aHachment is so difficult to deal with. Because the transi8on across these different
spheres – we don’t no8ce, there is no cusp; it’s like a completely spliced movie, it’s just flowing. So
what’s then really important is not to try to go up and get an overview so that you can keep your eye
on the whole paHern, because that would be to take yourself out of it, but rather to be fully present
in each experience and taste the sensa8onal quality of the experience. Oh! This comes. And then you
see – what does this do? What happens to your breathing if you are a deer?
When I was out in the forest, I was a liHle mouse for a while; it’s very interes8ng to be a mouse,
because you are moving around and then you come to a fallen tree and then it’s, “Crikey! How will I
get over this?” Suddenly the world is very, very big. It’s quite frightening to be a mouse; you don’t
know what’s around you. Very kind of dodgy kind of feeling. And then you are like a deer and you’ve
got these nice long legs and you can leap over the branches – oh! hello! It’s completely different. The
breathing changes, skin tension changes – oh! We enter into a world, we are of a world; we enter into
a world, we are out of a world.
Ques'on: Some8mes we have to make a decision, say to have an opera8on or not, and one
expert says “Yes, go for it” and the other expert counsels cau8on. How do we decide?
James: That’s the problem in life, isn’t it: how will I know what is the right decision? The fact
is that you can’t know. You have to decide and then you have to deal with the consequences.
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Regarding the decision to have an opera8on or not, you can decide yes or no. But what decision will
lead to the best outcome, that you can’t know in advance because that’s not in the palm of your
hand. Once you decide something, then you have to be engaged in what’s going on, but in the end
we are stepping into a future which has not arrived. We may model ‘my happy future’ but whether
we will be able to inhabit that or not depends on many different factors.
Generally speaking, in the Tibetan tradi8on, they would say that the first inten8on is the best one
since it is the one that’s closest to your intui8on. Once you start to think about it and gather more
and more informa8on, without probably really understanding what all this informa8on means –
that’s a good way to get a modern head-‐ache, I think.
Exercise 4: Sealing

So, a prac8ce we will do now is called ‘sealing’ or ‘gya pa’ )་པ, which means to seal. Firstly the body is
sealed into its own ground. We do this by reci8ng ‘HUNG’ on the out-‐breath, a long, slow ‘HUNG’ on
the out-‐breath. You don’t visualise anything, you just go into this sound of ‘HUNG’, allow it to spread
out and allow the sound of it to fill your body.
[Prac8ce]
Exercise 5: Semdzin practice using a blue HUNG [1]

Semdzin are a group of prac8ces for establishing the insubstan8ality of our body and the whole
world.
The par8cular quality that is said to belong to HUNG is that it’s a very empty sound, but it’s also very
energising. In the Tibetan tradi8on it’s the symbol of the mind of all the buddhas. We use the
experience of energy to give us the sense of the interpenetra8on of phenomena.
So, we sit comfortably and say HUNG in a strong but short way. We say HUNG-‐HUNG-‐HUNG-‐HUNG
and imagine that from inside our body small, dark-‐blue HUNGs are spreading out. If you know what a
HUNG looks like in the Tibetan script, then you can use that, but otherwise you can just imagine a
small ball of blue light that’s issuing from your body. And this ball of blue light, or blue HUNGs – goes
out and passes through everything it meets, showing the insubstan8ality.
It passes through other people who are around you, through the walls, out of the walls into the town,
through the church, through all the houses – it’s passing through everything. So HUNG aLer HUNG
aLer HUNG is spreading out, un8l the whole universe is just completely dissolved into empty
radiance. Its insubstan8ality, its light-‐quality is revealed through the passage of HUNG through it.
Then you imagine that all these HUNGS are gathering back into your body, one aLer another. Now
you send out thousands and thousands of HUNGs, so now your body is filling with thousands and
thousands of HUNGs; every space, every cell of the body is filled with HUNG and you are con8nuing
to make this sound... This body itself is nothing but the radiant energy of HUNG, which is the sound
of the mind of all the buddhas. As is everything in the environment. Everything is just the bright,
brilliant, shining reverbera8on of the mind of the buddha.
Stay in this situa8on: no need for any conceptual thought. Just allow this sound to keep coming out of
you, spreading out, coming back. Keep going with the pulsa8on of the spreading out and coming
back, un8l you are deeply convinced that there is nothing substan8al in the world. Everything is just
energy and the pure form of energy is passing through all of these structures because all the

58
structures that we encounter, whether it’s our own body or whether everything else around us, are
held in place by our own cogni8on. We tell the world what it is. We tell ourselves that this is my body
and this is how it is. But in this prac8ce we enter into the non-‐conceptual energy of HUNG and open
that space up.
We will do this for about ten minutes. Again, keep the mouth open a liHle bit and just keep the power
coming; you can do it quietly or with some volume. It may be helpful to move between the two.
Don’t strain your throat; you want the sound to be arising and passing through the throat without
tension.
[Prac8ce]
According to the tradi8on you should con8nue to do this un8l you are completely clear that the
whole world, including yourself, is just like a rainbow. We do this HUNG; we put it through the air, so
that the whole world that we are si[ng on dissolves and we are just this body in space, filling up with
HUNGs. Then it becomes empty, and there is just this empty, translucent form, floa8ng in space,
same as with everything else.
The more you do it and you get into that state, at the end, when you are just si[ng, oLen the mind is
very empty. This is called the nyam མཉམ་, or medita8on experience, of mitogpa མི་-ོག་པ, the absence
of thought. Also there is a clarity, everything is just immediately available to us; and this is the nyam,
or medita8on experience, of the translucent clarity of all phenomena. OLen the body is 8ngling and
alive, in an ungraspable way. This is dewa བདེ་བ་or sensa8on, or pleasure. We see that our existence is
the movement of these three things. Something is here, without thinking, and it’s ungraspable
sensa8on. There is a pleasure, but you can’t hang on to it in any way and it’s completely clear. You
have the clarity of emp8ness – and it’s nothing at all. Like if you listen to this sound now...
[The chiming of nearby church bells can be heard.]
So if you open to the sound and don’t appropriate it in a conceptual manner – if you don’t think, “Oh,
that is the sound of the church bell. The church is at the boRom of the hill”, or, “It’s seven o’clock on a
Friday night and they are ringing the bell to bring people to a church service”, or something like that,
if you don’t wrap any conceptual elabora8on around it – this is something incredible. Just this
pulsa8on – dong, dong, dong... Where does it come from? It comes from space... Dong, dong, dong...
You tell the story, ‘It comes from the church’. It comes from the church for you. All the 8me we put
our interpre8ve matrix onto phenomena and through that we give ourselves the sense that there is a
meaning in the world which we can understand. We ascribe meaning; we give it to the situa8on. But
if you just stay with the openness, then through the prac8ce there is another kind of meaning which
arises, the immediacy of the sensa8on of sound arising from emp8ness.
In the buddhist tradi8on this is called the ‘absolute truth’ or dondam, དོན་དམ. It’s the immediacy,
uninterpreted fac8city, about which you cannot say anything. It just is.
Ques'on: So could you say that at the end it all boils down to pure sense-‐percep8on?
James: Well, you could say that as long as you are clear about whose senses they are.
Because if you think, “It’s my senses”, then you are going back to I, me, myself and the one who is
looking through my senses. However the instruc8ons are that we should meditate ‘sky to sky’. Our
59
mind is like the sky and what is in front of us is like the sky and the sky is passing through these open
eyes, through these open ears. The space of the heart is infinite, the space of experience is infinite.
So, yes, it’s through the senses, but not as in ’my senses’. For as long as we make this egois8cal,
grasping interpreta8on of the senses as ‘my experience’, we’ve already cooked it in a par8cular way.
Ques'on: What I mean is more like: if I taste something, there is the immediacy of the very first
liHle taste and then I ought to stay with that, without the overlay of describing it as nice, or not nice
or like this or like that. And so with all my senses. If a thought arises, it just arises and I don’t go into
the story. Is this what is meant by ‘pure percep8on’?
James: Yes, because the one who is having that pure percep8on is not the ego that’s relying
on consciousness as its means of iden8fica8on. Percep8on free of consciousness is the percep8on of
awareness, which is different. It is immediately meaningful, dondam, although you can’t say what it
is. Once you start to say what it is, you enter into another kind of meaning, which is not wrong, but
which is a parallel world.
Ques'on: So does this then mean that everything is enlightened? Enlightened form,
enlightened sound…?
James: It arises from the ground of openness. When we hear this sound, certainly I am aware
of ‘oing, oing, oing’... Then, if I don’t say, “It’s the church bell”, there is just “oing, oing, oing”… Where
it’s coming from I don’t know. “Oing, oing, oing, oing”... just this, “oing, oing”... If you stay open
without adding “What is that?” – there is no ques8on of “What is it?” – it is “oing, oing, oing”. That’s
what it is. It doesn’t go any further than “oing”. So, pure “oing”.
Ques'on: This morning you said it was not the content.
James: Yes, it’s not the content, because in the moment of that arising, this is arising in
space. What remains is the space of awareness where this ‘oing’ is passing through it. Like when we
do the HUNG, the purpose of the HUNG is that on one level the body is nothing but empty radiant
space; outside is radiant space and then, when you stop the recita8on, these very, very subtle
contents are there. Like these medita8on experiences, they are important to have, but they are a
kind of cul-‐de-‐sac, a side-‐track. You don’t grasp onto them, telling yourself, ‘I have arrived
someplace!’, but you just be with them and their empty nature reveals itself.
It’s not that you arrive where you get something, but the different quali8es of what is arising as the
content gives us the sense of the indeterminacy of the one who is the experiencer. The more you
define the object, the more you define the subject. So when I say, “Oh, that’s the sound of the church
bell!”, the one who knows it’s the sound of the church bell is me, with my educa8on and my
knowledge of this village. I know it’s a church and it oLen has bells that sound like that. So the
defini8on of the sound as on the church is also defining me. If we don’t put that object-‐defini8on on
there, the subject-‐defini8on doesn’t go on either.
This indeterminacy or ungraspability allows the content to be there, but it’s not the content that a
subject has in terms of the appropria8on of an object. It’s just some transient phenomenon moving
through. It’s appearance and emp8ness, like it is described in the Heart Sutra.
Exercise 6: Semdzin practice using a blue HUNG [2]

The purpose of this prac8ce is to give the experience of the illusory nature of all that we encounter.

60
Imagine out of our heart are dark blue HUNGS. This 8me the HUNG that manifest out of your body is
the size of whatever object it’s going to hit. If you are si[ng looking at a pillar that you want it to pass
through, it’s that size. If you want it to pass through some person si[ng in the room, then it will be
whatever size they are. If it’s going to go through a flower vase or a glass, it will be exactly that size.
The HUNG is exactly the same profile as whatever it’s hi[ng and it goes right through it. As it goes
through the object, it takes away any substan8al nature that you might imagine is in it.
It’s like a really thorough spring-‐cleaning, which doesn’t take out dirt, but takes out the substan8al
inherent self-‐nature that we impute and leaves the shining luminous clarity of appearance and
emp8ness.
If you know the shape of the Tibetan leHer HUNG, use that. Otherwise just imagine coming out of
you small balls of blue light, which expand or contract to fit whatever size. We do the HUNG short
and rapid, because this is a propulsive-‐impulsive driving this through, unimpeded through what’s in
the room, what’s outside, the trees, the cars, whatever you imagine, your home town – everything in
the whole world. Through the floor, through the ceiling, un8l everything is completely cleaned out
and is just radiant presence – the presence of the unborn dharmadhatu.
This HUNG prac8ce is something you can con8nue to do when you have 8me and are in a good place
to do it. You can con8nue doing it, par8cularly sending out all of these HUNGS un8l you get the sense
that the whole world is just this shining presence of shape and colour. Then bring all the HUNGS back
into your body, dissolving your own substan8ality again and again, so that you are an empty luminous
form in a field of empty luminous forms.
This is a good basis for then going into open medita8on prac8ce. We will do that for some 8me and
then, when we bring that to an end, we will go straight into the three ‘AA’ prac8ce.
Exercise 7: Sleeping

One thing you can try tonight, as you are falling asleep, just go into the state of relaxa8on, relaxing
the body, just really le[ng the muscles collapse, not holding a posture, be aware of the absolute
silence, you are not making any sound nor its inner echo of thought, and the mind just – ah...! The
day is over. And in that state you can fall asleep into openness.
Okay? Have a good evening.
[End of Day Two]
LOOKING INTO HOW DIFFERENT DHARMA VIEWS FIT TOGETHER

The central focus of what we are doing is around trekcho, an aspect of dzogchen; and yesterday we
did some exercises connected with that. I want to begin this morning by looking again at how the
view of the different styles of dharma prac8ce fit together, and in par8cular looking at the issue of
skilful means, or upaya.
First turning of the wheel: three marks of conditioned existence
In the Buddha's first turning of the wheel of dharma, he sets out the nature of suffering, which is
later developed as the ‘three marks of condi8oned existence.’ They are: suffering dhukka; the
absence of inherent self-‐nature, anaRa; and impermanence, anicca. These are neither theore8cal nor
cultural concepts. Everybody here has some familiarity with suffering. Suffering is described as having
61
two aspects. There is ordinary pain and the difficul8es that arise in life; this sort of suffering is
impermanent and is not usually par8cularly important.
Dhukka refers to the other suffering which is the mental representa8on of our suffering. An event
happens, the event is painful, for example your boss shouts angrily at you. It may last a short 8me but
if we develop it and create a mental representa8on, then the narra8ve line of that can last a very long
8me. It’s the mental picture, which is returned to again and again, that becomes the point of internal
conflict and torment. It acts as a veil between ourselves and the next moment so that we see the
next encounter through this structure of ‘He is angry with me’ and so on. That may be true, but if you
want to work well with your boss and are filled with a nega8ve feeling, it will be difficult to perform
well. So that’s really what suffering means. It’s the way in which we con8nue the nega8ve feeling of a
situa8on aLer it has gone.
Anicca, impermanence, likewise, is not a theory. We see it everywhere, par8cularly at this beau8ful
8me of the year we see the leaves changing colour, we see mushrooms popping up in the forest, we
see all the 8red insects at the end of the summer crawling to find a place to maybe sleep a bit for the
winter... We look in the mirror and we see our face ge[ng older. We sit to eat with a full plate, then it
is half eaten, and at the end it is empty. This is con8nuous, all the 8me. Everything is changing. This is
just what is here.
It is the same with anaRa, the absence of inherent self-‐nature. Inherent self-‐nature is described in
terms of atman, a Sanskrit word which is translated as a ‘self’, or in more modern language we might
say an ‘iden8ty’. We see an iden8ty out there in the world and we react to the iden8ty that we see as
if there were a substan8al en8ty which was its basis. In the earliest teachings, this was par8cularly
formulated around the idea of the person; so you have what’s called pudgala anatman drishC, the
view of the absence of inherent self-‐nature in persons. This is understood through the analysis of the
five skandhas, the five components which make up our personality. We’ve already touched on these.
Later this analysis is taken into the study of the dharmas, or the basic cons8tuents out of which these
five skandhas arise, and they also are seen to be empty of inherent self-‐nature.
Now we come to that through a teaching – because we don’t learn about it at school and it may not
arise in our own mind automa8cally – and we may then take up a kind of analysis which we apply.
That can make it seem that the understanding that we get is marked in a chain of cause and effect:
because I had these teachings, because they interested me, because I studied more, because I did the
analysis, I now see that there is an absence of inherent self-‐nature…
This can make it appear as if this is what in modern sociology would be called a ‘cultural prac8ce’, so
that we have a sub-‐group in the society who happened to take up this kind of mental ac8vity and
they generate this kind of epiphenomenon, the no8on that there is an absence of inherent self-‐
nature in phenomena. Other people follow different cultural prac8ces such as piercing and taHooing
and so on and they have a different apprecia8on of the world. It’s just a choice. This would be a
wrong understanding. The absence of inherent self-‐nature is there. The reason we don’t see it, is
because we are stupid. The analysis is there, not to create the absence of inherent self-‐nature, but to
remove the stupidity that hides the absence of inherent self-‐nature from ourselves.
So when you see it in that way, then you come into the resistance, that we don’t want there to be an
absence of inherent self-‐nature. We want things to be truly real. We want something reliable to hang
on to – whether it’s our job, or our passport, or our pension plan, whatever it is. We don’t want it to
vanish. We act on the basis of the assump8on that things are reliable and we don’t want to be proven
62
wrong. However when we look into the absence of inherent self-‐nature, that is essen8ally what we
are doing. We are seeing that the our assump8on that things stay the same is not the case.
For example, when I was younger, I did certain ac8vi8es that I don’t do now. Nowadays I don’t run
home from work, get out my football, go out into the street and kick it about with my friends. Why
would I do that? However when I was seven I would run home aLer school and do exactly that.
Certain features of the world, certain aspects of the poten8al of the phenomenological field, came
into the foreground and became figural for us due to the causes and circumstances of being of a
certain age, a certain gender and so on. Then, as we move through the stages of our development,
things which were once centre go into the background and something else replaces them in the
centre. When we look at ourselves we can see how we have changed through 8me. The body has
changed, the way we think has changed, the way we speak has changed, the gestures we make with
our body, and so on – all of this has changed.
There is no substan8al reality to our embodied being. What there is, is a manifest showing, which
takes the form of bones which can be broken, teeth which can fall out of the jaw, snot which can run
out of the nose, and so on. There is an undeniable fac8city to embodiment, but that doesn’t mean
that there is a true essence, an en8ta8ve ground nature which is genera8ng this manifesta8on. That
is the analysis that you find in the theravada tradi8on, in the mahayana tradi8on, in the tantric
tradi8on, in dzogchen and in mahamudra.
Second turning of the wheel

Then, in the second turning of the wheel of dharma, which occurred in Rajagriha – modern Rajgir in
Bihar – Buddha emphasised the emp8ness or lack of true existence of both self and phenomena
using a further tripar8te no8on of how the world is structured. The three factors are called tsenma
mepa, monpa mepa and migpa mepa in Tibetan.
Without signs: tsenma mepa

Tsenma mepa མཙན་མ་མེད་པ་ means ‘signless’; it is without lakshan, without quali8es or characteris8cs
that can be held on to. In modern language ‘without signs’ describes how the actuality of our
existence is not captured by the semio8c web, by linguis8c interpreta8on.
When we look around this room our experience of it is mediated through signs. We have signs for the
differen8a8on of gender, age, size, health, colours, func8ons... Some of the people coming here will
see things to which they have no sign to apply. They may have no precise signs which fit exactly but
there are useful general signifiers, such as ‘buddhist’. We may not know precisely what something is,
but anyway, it’s buddhist. Or, ‘It’s very nice’. That is also a sign, a kind of categorisa8on.
The sign economy is linked to nosology, is linked to categorisa8on and organisa8on. That is to say, if
you prac8se something like vipassana and you release and release and release the elaborated
conceptual interpreta8on, you encounter a world beyond language which cannot be appropriated.
This is fine, as long as you don’t have to do anything. However, to do something is to enter into the
world of signs, so the important thing is to be able to integrate emp8ness and signs. ‘Sign-‐less’
doesn’t mean that signs are a bad thing that you should peel off. Rather it means that when you use
language, when you say, ‘ This is red’ or, ‘I like the shade of red in your shirt’, or whatever – we know
what we are doing. We are playing a game. We are entering into a language game that allows us to
share constructs of meaning, the essen8al func8on of which is to alter the paHerning of energy. By

63
‘energy’ is meant the vibra8on of the immediacy of our experience. At any moment, something is
occurring; it comes and it goes, which is to say that it’s dynamic. It’s not a substance.
If we really start to see this, we realise that what we get is always an empty signifier. That’s all we
ever get in life. For example, I have a pen in my hand. I have got a pen. What is a pen? Well, not all
pens have a black body and a chrome end to them so it is this kind of pen. How do I know that this is
a pen? Because I am able to put this object into the category of ‘pen’, or apply the sign of ‘pen’ onto
this object; it goes in two direc8ons. Once I know that this is a pen, I know what to do with it. So the
concept of the pen, or the sign of the pen, organises my rela8onship towards this object.
This object could be used for many different things. For example, you could unscrew it and take the
end off and do an emergency tracheotomy on someone. You could use it as a straw. You could stab
someone with it. There are many things that you could to with this but because we have fixed the
sign of ‘pen’ onto it, these other poten8al usages are not normally going to be associated around it.
That is to say, this object stays in place. It remains situated inside the field of func8oning by the
defini8on of the sign. Does that make sense? That’s what signs do – they organise the par8cular
poten8al of an object. All objects have many more poten8als than are revealed through the common
usage of signs, which is why, in western culture, we have a privileged class of people. They are called
‘ar8sts’. Ar8sts are people who are allowed to use things in a way which breaches the no8on of the
sign. Think of Marcel Duchamp and the urinal. He buys a urinal, sings it and puts it in an art gallery
and people go, “Wow! What is that?!’ ‘How can that be art?” Ar8sts take the frame of the boundary,
of the standard interpreta8on, and move it across and that becomes suddenly surprising. Damien
Hirst takes a skull and puts diamonds in it and makes a lot of money. Why? Because people want
there to be something. There has to be something new. Modernism requires this. Capitalist
economies require this. It’s commodifica8on, that is to say, the produc8on of seeming en88es with
value. If you have enough status, you can make something have increased value simply by pu[ng
your name on it. If a pain8ng is aHributed to Picasso, it’s worth less money than if it has a liHle scrawl
at the boHom – because if he put his name on it, it’s the real thing and worth a lot more money. So
signs are very, very important. In some of the exercises we used yesterday we were talking about the
nature of the imagina8on. We imagine the world through the use of signs.
We encourage children to believe that signs and actual objects are the same thing. Let’s say you have
a book for small children with a nice liHle pain8ng of the countryside. Then you say, “Look, there is
the field, all the green grass... oh... and there are the liRle lambs, they are bouncing, bumpa, bumpa,
bumpa...-‐ Oh no! There is a big dog – woof, woof! The lambs don’t like that.” People talk to small
children like that. When you look at the page, there is no dog there, there is no lamb there – there is
just shape and colour. What the adult is doing, is pu[ng a sign onto the shape and colour and then
the child learns that you call this a lamb and you call this a dog. Through the power of representa8on
– the re-‐presenta8on of the sign onto the shape and the colour, as if this was the revela8on of an
en8ta8ve substance, exis8ng in itself – through this they become able to manipulate the sign-‐
economy of the world.
So, in the second turning of the wheel of dharma, Buddha is warning us to be careful of these signs!
Recognise that a sign is something you use, that it is a meaning-‐making method, but that it doesn’t
point to self-‐exis8ng meanings.

64
Tantric ideas start to develop here
This is where you see the beginnings of the direc8on of tantra, because tantra and dzogchen are
en8rely about par8cipa8on. That is to say, the field of arising and the experiencer of the field of
arising are always in intercourse. There is a con8nuous, or you could say a sexual, encounter between
the subject and the object, giving rise to the immediacy of the birth of the new experience, and the
new experience, and the new experience...
To say that the actuality of the world is devoid of signs is to say that signs signify the func8on of
significa8on. They don’t signify real objects. Or, to put it in the language of WiHgenstein, “language
speaks to language”. Language is a world of language. Language doesn’t pertain to the real world.
Some of you here speak German. In German you don’t say the same things as in English. Why not?
Because it’s a different language-‐game. When you are born into a language, into your mother-‐tongue,
you start to get the confidence that when these sounds come out of your mouth, other people will
understand you. It’s an amazing thing, how when you are with toddlers, all these words, some
nonsense words, come out of their mouths. They are building up this world and they are enjoying it
so much and then when the words come out of their mouth, other people listen. So now they have a
hook whereby they can grab people.
This is the first experience of power in the world: you can manipulate people through the use of
signifiers. That is to say, language is communica8on. If you can keep it on that level, then it’s very
helpful but when you start to believe that language is a defini8on of real en88es, then you have a
problem. So this is the main point in Buddha’s second turning of the wheel of dharma.
Without hope: monpa mepa

The second factor is called monpa mepa [4ོན་པ་མེད་པ], which means ‘without hope’ or ‘without
aspira8on’. That doesn’t sound too good but by ‘hope’ is meant ‘predictability’, the no8on of the
con8nuity of existence. Such hope of predictability becomes a way of relying on mental
representa8on, projected through 8me, as if it were something real. Let’s say, for example, that you
formulate a plan. You might decide you are going to go and live in another country, or you are going
to move town. This is a hope. Whether this will be realised or not depends on many different factors.
It oLen depends on money, on work opportuni8es, on visas, on health; there are many, many factors,
which arise moment by moment in the experien8al field. So when we develop a hope, we are again
pu[ng out a trajectory, a line of organisa8on across the unpredictable variety of poten8al
manifes8ng symptoms or signs which can arise.
Why should we not do that? Well, it’s not that you shouldn’t do it but that you have to realise what
you are doing. You have to realise that you are seeking to create a mental image of your existence. I
already have an existence. If I look at my own existence, it’s a liHle bit shapeless. When you get up in
the morning, even if your diary is well organised and your day carefully planned, you never know
exactly how it’s going to be. If you are a teacher you don’t know how many students are going to turn
up, nor what kind of mood they are going to be in. You don’t know whether they have done their
homework or not and you don’t even know how you are going to be. Maybe on your way to work
another driver cut across you and you come into the class s8ll angry from this. That’s your mood. So,
although you had planned to be doing something at 9 am, who will be doing it and in what situa8on
will it be happening, – that we don’t know.

65
So when we can’t even know the future one inch in front of our big toe and one second into the
future, to have this monpa we have to realise what it means. It’s an aspira8on; it’s a way of bringing
the mind into the unfolding field of experience, which means it has to be dynamic and it has to be
open.
Buddhism speaks of ‘the middle way’, not too loose, not too 8ght. If you have no hope, if you have no
plans at all, then it’s a liHle bit chao8c. If the plans get too 8ght and inflexible, then this 8ghtness
creates a pressure which inserts the no8on of hopes and fears, failure and success and this can get
difficult. So the middle way involves aspira8on, but aspira8on as a gesture of our energy into the field
of energy.
The Buddha said that suffering is not ge[ng what we want and ge[ng what we don’t want and the
ques8on is always, “How do we integrate suffering into our world?” Do we take suffering as a sign
that something is wrong and therefore that we should leave? Or do we take suffering as a sign that
we need to develop ourselves more, relax and open and integrate these circumstances? This is always
the challenge. To cut and run, to insert control, is easy in some ways, at least in theory, but the real
path is to integrate whatever occurs – with all its difficul8es.
So the absence of hope or aspira8on means not to be collapsed in the face of the non-‐fulfilment of
these hopes, but to act in the manner of the possibility of this being realised through crea8ve
adapta8on to the field. That is to say, in simple language, you have to hang loose. You have to stay
flexible. Rigidity is bad news. This is just a fact, isn’t it? Flexibility, responsiveness, is very important.
You can see that with the images that we have of these various dei8es. On the pillar in front of me
there is an appliqué of Padma Sambhava and he is si[ng with his right foot out, a posture that Tara
and Chenrezig also display. It means that he is ready to get up. He is ready for ac8on. If he was si[ng
in the lotus posi8on with the feet locked, then he is in medita8on and is very stable. But with his right
foot extended, he is ready to move.
This is the real nirmanakaya manifesta8on. When we come into the world, we have to respond to
circumstances. Some8mes we can exert some degree of control; at other 8mes we have to let
circumstances develop the shaping of how our existence is going to be. If you bring in the agenda of
hope and fear, success and failure, then you are likely to feel aHacked as an individual, “I’m not
geQng what I want’, ‘I know what I need.’ ‘I can’t bear it when it’s like this!” But maybe you don’t
know yourself; maybe this is just a self-‐construct that is a habitual forma8on and it’s actually the limit
of your poten8al. Your poten8al is always much greater than the narra8ve – the neuro8c, historically
developed narra8ve – of who you are. In that way we are the main aHackers of ourselves. We are the
ones who steal our own freedom through the strong asser8on of the defini8on of ourselves.
Without object: migpa mepa

The third factor that he talks of is migpa mepa [དམིགས་པ་མེད་པ་], which means ‘object-‐less’. Migpa
[དམིགས་པ་] means ‘to perceive an object’. When you perceive an object, the object that you perceive
brings you, the subject, into forma8on as a par8cular kind of shape.
In the mahayana tradi8on, wisdom is unpacked through the teachings on emp8ness and the first
elabora8on of the Heart Sutra and so on. Prajnaparamita literature, including The Diamond Sutra and
The Diamond Cu[ng Sutra, says that the bodhisaHva, who wants to help beings, is not a bodhisaHva.
This may sound a very strange thing to say. A bodhisaHva is somebody who works for the libera8on of
all beings, but if they want to help beings, they are not a bodhisaHva. How come? Because there are
66
no beings to be saved. That is to say – although the buddhist teachings begin with suffering, if you
take other people’s suffering too seriously, you will get into big problems. If you set out to rescue
people, if you see that people have weakness and vulnerability, you become part of the problem. All
human beings have a tendency to be lazy and to betray their own poten8al so whenever you rescue
people, you really are harming them. This is a basic fact.
That is why when we take the bodhisaHva vow, “May I bring all beings to enlightenment”, we have to
look into what is the basis of enlightenment? It is something they already have. It is not like “May I
bring all beings to the Costa Brava, because it’s very nice there!” Essen8ally, to bring all beings to
enlightenment means to bring them to themselves. How do you come to yourself? By star8ng to
know yourself. If somebody is playing vic8m then they are developing the fantasy of dependency: the
way to make myself safe is to get someone else to do my work for me. But if you play pathe8c and
blackmail other people with your emo8onal confusion and so on, you will never get independence.
Much of the work I do in the hospital is around this theme, working with people who have been
mental health pa8ents for years and years and years and who spend all their energies trying to get
money and free housing from the state, ge[ng special this and special that... But they are not doing
anything. That is why when the state takes on protec8ng people who don’t need protec8on, it
actually makes them weak and vulnerable. Then when these people reach older age they have
nothing. They have developed no quali8es, they have nothing at all. This is a real problem for them.
We become stronger through exercise. The mind becomes stronger through engaging with the
problems of existence. So if we are taking a bodhisaHva vow to help all beings, we must have
developed some quali8es and we develop our quali8es through difficulty. That is why rescuing is not
the thing to be done.
Three kinds of compassion

How then does this link into migpa mepa, the absence of object? Through compassion. The
mahayana tradi8on describes three kinds of compassion. There is the compassion of aspira'on, as in
the lines of the prayer, “May I bring all beings to enlightenment.” This is said to be like planning to go
on a journey and is compassion which takes sen8ent beings as its object, semchen la migpai nyinje
[སེམས་ཅན་ལ་དམིགས་པའི་8ིང་:ེ་].
The second kind of compassion is actually doing the prac8ce, and is said to be like going on the actual
journey. When you do your prayers or your medita8on you might visualise all sen8ent beings around
you, or you might radiate out light to them, or you might dedicate the merit. This is compassion
which takes dharma prac8ce as its object, cho la migpai nyinje [ཆོས་ལ་དམིགས་པའི་8ིན་:ེ་]
The third form of compassion is the compassion which has no object. And here is the link to the
Vajracchedika, The Diamond CuHer Sutra. If you consider that there are beings to be saved, then you
are engaged in reifica8on and have turned these into real people with real problems, which have to
be removed, so this is very solid. This third kind of compassion is called compassion which does not
take an object, migpa mepai nyinje [དམིགས་པ་མེད་པའི་8ིན་:ེ་]. From the very beginning, everything has
been impermanent and without inherent self-‐nature. There are no beings to be saved – and yet, of
course, there are.
What is to be saved is the ending of the intoxica8on with the illusion that there is a problem which
has to be solved. There is no problem. Earlier we were thinking about the absence of inherent self-‐

67
nature in ourselves; it’s not that we are struggling to establish the absence of inherent self-‐nature in
ourselves because that has always been there. That is a fact. It is hidden from us by our own self-‐
concept, by the elaborated fantasy of iden8ty which we have constructed with a lot of 8me and
energy and oLen with money as well. We have created our own obscura8on. It is the maintenance of
the obscura8on which hides the actuality. It’s not that you have to develop something which is not
there – you simply have to stop doing the obscuring ac8vity which hides what is there. That’s the
fundamental point.
If you understand that, then you see that all the dharma prac8ces are about deconstruc8on. They are
about stopping being intoxicated with ac8vi8es which have to be done.
So who then is going to save all sen8ent beings? I am. How am I going to do it? I don’t know, but I
want to do it. Okay. So, first of all we have to work out who is going to save beings. Then, who are the
beings to be saved and third, how are they to be saved. So, who is going to save beings is a buddha
established in the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. Dharmakaya means understanding
that your mind is emp8ness and space inseparable. Sambhogakaya is the natural clarity arising from
this understanding of emp8ness and space, and nirmanakaya is the moment by moment par8cipa8ve
engagement in the illusory field of becoming. That is to say: there is nobody going to do the saving.
Who then are the beings to be saved? They are two arms, two legs, a nose; or they have liHle wings,
or they are going, “Wau! wau! wau!” down in the hell realms, we haven’t counted all the people
here... These beings – what are they made of? When you look at someone you see their face; they
have got holes in various places and some holes go up and some holes go down. We are people with
spaces inside us! Then you might think, ‘Oh well, at least there are bones, but then you crack open
the bones and see that they have got some space inside. But bones are also full of all this gooey stuff,
so then you get a microscope and you look and you see the cells and inside the cells there is some
space. There is space, there is space, there is space...
In the beginning there is space, and something moves in space. What? Energy. Energy moves in space
and creates everything. Buddhists understood this a long 8me ago. Energy moving in space. So the
beings whom we are going to free are energy moving in space, not recognising that they are energy
moving in space because they believe that they are a substan8al person with substan8al problems
that need to be helped.
How then do we help them? If you try to help them by helping solve their substan8al problem, you
confirm the paradigm of ignorance that they are living in. So the work of the buddha is
deconstruc8ve. It is to help liberate people from the illusion that they are trapped in. And how do
they do that? There are many different methods. Some of the methods are like a parent to a child;
some are like a magician, using illusion to dissolve illusion. There are many different dharma
methods, but they have to be precise in rela8on to the person – the very same person who doesn’t
exist. That’s at the heart of it.
The buddha doesn’t exist, the person to be saved doesn’t exist, and the methods employed don’t
exist. When we say, ‘doesn’t exist’, it doesn’t mean that nothing happens. You could say it’s neither
exis8ng nor non-‐exis8ng. Something occurs, which is a movement through 8me and space and this is
anicca, this is impermanence. The impermanence of the subject, of the object, and of the connec8on
between them.

68
The compassion of not reinforcing people’s identity
So this third level of compassion – the compassion that doesn’t take an object – means to help beings
without helping them. Now, how do you do that? In the tantric system it’s done through visualisa8on.
You imagine yourself praying to Padma Sambhava, Padma Sambhava dissolving in you, and the whole
world arising as the mandala of Padma Sambhava. When you get up from the prac8ce you look
around – everyone you see is a form of Padma Sambhava and everything you hear is mantra.
So, on Monday morning I will be si[ng in my consul8ng room, somebody will come in and tell me
about their terrible weekend. Padma Sambhava is talking a lot on Monday mornings! This is how it is.
And the mind, every thought which arises, is the mind of Padma Sambhava. Dzogchen says not to
make any dis8nc8on between good and bad. So a pa8ent is telling me a very 8ght knoHed story, lots
of words pour out, maybe tears come out the eyes. If I think, “Oh my God, this is not a very happy
person!” or “Poor thing, this is really serious!”, then I am making it serious.
What does it mean to not be a happy person? Probably we have all been unhappy at some 8me. We
know what it is: It’s something which lasts for a while. If you can find somebody to take your suffering
seriously, then you set up a liHle drama. We all want our suffering to be taken seriously but it’s not
helpful. With children we do some8mes have to show concern for their suffering, but with adults, the
key way to help them is by not taking their suffering seriously and helping them see that the suffering
is a trope, a neuro8c forma8on inside which there is a paHerning of experience. To do this you need
first to no8ce when their suffering is expressed as a communica8on which seeks to elicit
confirma8on: “I am telling you my sad story so that you will know that I am having a bad Cme. And
you should help me not have a bad Cme.”
How do we help someone not have a bad 8me? Change the object, change the subject, deconstruct
the subject and object. These are the three possibili8es. If you say, “Oh, well, I’ll make a phone-‐call to
the social worker and let’s see if we can get you re-‐housed.” then you change the object. If you speak
to the subject, saying, “I think when you feel like this, perhaps this is bringing some echo of how it
was when you were a child with your mother, because she was like that!” then you are aHemp8ng to
change the subject, who might respond, “My goodness me, I hadn’t thought of that! Now I
understand why I am like this!” They are empowered to think about their life in a different way.
However for us as Buddhists, the key point is the rela8on between the two. How do we deconstruct
the glue which says, “This is real. I see that this is real. Let’s do something real about this real
problem”? Because this glue is what is called samsara.
Even if you are being very helpful, the basic structure of samsara is that of real people with real
problems. However the first teaching of the Buddha says, “It’s not like that! It’s absolutely not like
that.” Buddha taught the truth of suffering and that it has an origin. The origin is in the misconstruing
of the situa8on. So the issue is how the person stands in rela8on to their own suffering. If we confirm
to them that their suffering is real, we are not helping them stand in rela8on to the suffering. A
psychoanaly8c interpreta8on linking the present back to childhood can be useful in that it opens a
triangulated space, a space in which some new understanding can arise. But if a person is just in their
suffering, there is no space for understanding.
So this is a different kind of compassion. This is a compassion which is not taking problems seriously.
That is very, very important – not to take problems seriously. OLen we feel insulted when other
people don’t take our problems seriously. We think,

69
— You don’t care for me at all. You are not interested in what I’m saying! Can’t you see
I’m really upset?
– ‘Okay, you are really upset. Why should I be upset that you are upset?
—What?
—When you go to the toilet and have a shit, do I have to come in and look at it?
– OK, but if you cared about me... I’m trying to show you what my suffering is like . Can’t
you see?
– Yes, I can see. I can see that you are upset.
If you speak like that to someone you are likely to get slapped, because they want you to be
impacted. They want to get through to you. If you understand me, if you care about me, you are
going to feel upset because I am upset. Let’s double the trouble!
This is why when you see a lama doing their work, they have a lot of space. They sit on their throne,
people come in, people tell them all these sad stories, they are just looking, “Oh, yes. A le. These
things happen. Take these pills. Pray to Tara. Good bye. Safe journey.” They don’t get involved.
Buddhism has the social structure which says that the blessing of the lama is helpful, and this is very
important, because it means that the lama is allowed to make a radical interven8on. He can say in
effect, “If you want to be helped, pray to Tara. Don’t bend my ear. Me being upset that you are upset
– what good is that going to do? The fact that you are upset is saying something about you. Don’t
spread your shit out into the world.”
We live in a very narcissis8c culture where everybody’s distress has a social caché; it becomes a
currency and we have to rush in and do something. As soon as there is an earthquake, you get
counsellors and therapists flying out to do trauma work with people...
—Oh, my God! How did you feel when that happened?’
—I felt bloody awful! How do you think I felt?’
—Oh dear, that is so terrible, that you felt so awful. I am right here with you in your
suffering!
—No, you are not. My house has fallen down! MY house – not your house! Give me your
house!
Dharma is saying something very different.
Dignity, not idiot compassion

Idiot compassion, as C R Lama used to refer to it, is indulging in vibra8ng at other people’s distress.
Real compassion – nyingje 8ིང་:ེ་ in Tibetan, is made up of the honorific word for ‘heart’ or
‘mind’ (nying), and je which means ‘noble’ – means to have a noble mind. A noble mind is a mind
with dignity. When people become caught up in their suffering they lose their dignity. They become
helpless and useless and want to be saved.
The real way to help people is to bring them back to their dignity. So if you encourage somebody to
be a vic8m, dependent, useless and hopeless, this is really insul8ng the basis of their existence,
running counter to the teaching on ‘the compassion which has no object’.
What then is dignity? Dignity is the free movement of energy of the dharmakaya. That is to say, when
the open poten8al of the heart and the open poten8al of the experien8al field are able to interact
without media8on through our self-‐reflec8ve and self-‐reflexive, self-‐cherishing and egois8c concerns
we have a spontaneous mee8ng with the other person. But when we are caught up in a narra8ve of

70
ourselves and we want other people to engage in our world, this is an aHack on ourselves. It is also an
aHack on the other since people lose themselves through absorp8on in the story of suffering.
I grew up in Scotland and in the year of 1745 the armies of Scotland were defeated by the English
army which consisted largely of German soldiers, since the English King at the 8me came from
Hanover. The Scots felt that defeat very keenly and even nowadays, our response to a loss or defeat is
oLen “Poor me! We were robbed!” You hear that exactly when a Sco[sh football team loses a match.
This is the na8onal belief of Scotland – we were robbed! Soon in September 2014 Scotland will be
vo8ng on whether they want independence and that will be really interes8ng because if that
happens, we will no longer be able to blame other people when things go wrong for us. Blaming
other people is a very old story and it is hard to let it go. Why? Because it’s very juicy. Feeling
betrayed, let down and cheated gives us a very powerful self-‐iden8ty. We can run this for a long 8me.
“It’s not fair!” It is completely not fair, but what dharma allows us to understand are the dynamics of
not-‐fairness. And the first thing dharma says is, “It’s due to karma. If you get bad things, it’s your
fault. Don’t blame anyone else.”
This is very hard. This is very, very hard.

—I’m unhappy!
—Yes, okay, you’re unhappy.
—Yes, because they don’t do this for me.
—Why don’t they do that for you?
—They are not very nice to me.
—Why are they not very nice to you?
—I don’t know.
—Well, let me tell you: In a previous life you were a pig, and when you were a pig you
were very fond of eaCng apples. And you used to push through the fence and go into
farmer Giles’ farm and eat his apples. And now, because of this, you have no friends.
That may sound like a very stupid story, but in some ways it’s actually much more helpful to think that
now I am ge[ng the consequences of my ac8ons in the past. It means that it’s in the palm of my
hand to change this. I can recognise that I messed myself up, that my bad ac8ons have an immediate
nega8ve consequence for other people now, as well as a long-‐term nega8ve consequence for my
future manifesta8on, and so I have to take care! Rather than blaming other people and trying to get
other people to do what we want, we have to realise that this is my situa8on. I have this par8cular
neuro8c constella8on; I am narcissis8c, or I’m self-‐indulgent, or I’m very angry or very selfish...hyper-‐
sensi8ve, very prone to depression – whatever it is. This is my situa8on. And rather than feeling that
other people need to behave in a special way around me, because I can’t bear it, I have to do
something about it.
Tibetans have a saying, "It’s easier to cover your own feet with leather than to try to cover the whole
road." To cover the whole road with leather is a lot of work but if you put some leather on your own
feet then you can walk even on bumpy ground. So, self-‐responsibility is the first thing. Accep8ng that
this is my situa8on and I am going to have to learn to manage my delinquent tendencies. Whatever
my rela8onships with people, I am implicated in them. Of course they do something; but what they
do is in the palm of their hand. If I leave other people to get on with their responsibility and look at
what is in my own hand, then we come back to dignity and power.

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Emptiness is central to hinayana and mahayana
The three signs, mtsan, which I have been describing, point to the danger of reliance on
conceptualisa8on; we have a real problem with conceptual elabora8on. We take a small moment and
we run many, many signs around it, manufacture hopes and plans and inten8ons and then seek to
impose them by taking the situa8on as substan8al. All of this is an illusion and an entrapment.
The nature of emp8ness is the central point in both hinayana and mahayana views. Impermanence
means empty. It means, something is here – and then it’s gone. If it were real, it would endure
through 8me. Because it doesn’t endure, it’s clearly not real. It’s just a transient phenomenon,
moment by moment by moment. It's, 'just a jiffy'.
In the early buddhist medita8on and analysis they would iden8fy a period of the manifesta8on of
thought as short as one six8eth of a second, called sanC in Sanskrit -‐ finger-‐snap, finger-‐snap, finger-‐
snap... We grasp even this short flash and make it into a package. Even the revela8on of such pixel-‐
like moments are paHerned and paHerned and paHerned... and if we stay with that, the ques8on
then is, "How will we not be overwhelmed?"
Always we are at this crossroad: either opening to this overwhelming amount of stuff, or edi8ng it.
Stuff? If it’s 'stuff' I have to work out what that stuff is and this involves a lot of thinking. So the first
thing I do is edit it. I ignore ninety percent of what’s there and focus on the stuff that I know.Then I
organise the stuff that I know into paHerns that are familiar to me. This is our normal way of
conceptualisa8on.
However buddhism goes the other way; the organising factor is the clarity of the mind, is pre-‐
conceptual clarity. Without making sense of what is going on, you open to the sense of what is
immediately there. This is the vital heart of the prac8ce, and the one who makes sense of what is
immediately there is emp8ness.
The mind has been empty from the very beginning. When we recognise that the mind is like mist,
completely ungraspable – our mind is here, but whenever you think you’ve got it, it passes through
your fingers – there is no way to come to a certain defini8on about the mind. And yet, we are here!
Here we are. We are here as an awareness. Whatever we take our body to be, our voice, is changing,
changing... The contents of the mind, in terms of thoughts, feelings and sensa8ons, are also changing
and changing, yet the natural clarity of the con8nuity of pure presence is there. But it’s not
something you can ‘get’.
This is the basis of dzogchen prac8ce. If you recognise the kadag, the natural purity of the mind,
everything is in that.
Leave well alone: don't apply any antidote

The Americans have a phrase, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ In England they say, ‘Leave well alone.’ It
means that if something is okay, it’s fine and just leave it. We human beings find that very difficult in
everyday life as well as in dharma.
In the founda8onal moment of the dzogchen tradi8on, when Garab Dorje was leaving this earth, he
rose up into the sky and from inside a mass of rainbow light gave his final instruc8on, the famous
three statements. He said, “First of all, awaken to your own nature.”, meaning, taste or become who
you are. Nowadays we refer to 'being introduced to your own nature', or 'finding yourself'. Then he
says, “When you have that experience, stay with that experience. Don’t go looking for anything else;
72
don’t start to analyse it or have a theory about it. Don’t do anything with it, just keep it simple.” The
third statement is, “ConCnue in that way. Don’t go looking for anything beRer. Just relax and abide in
your own natural condiCon. Don’t elaborate it, don’t do anything with it.”
These are three statements and when you write them down in Tibetan you can write then in a single
line. In Tibet there were many many books and of these, many were destroyed by the Chinese.
Nevertheless many were also brought out reprinted. You can find thousands of books on dzogchen.
So how come we go from three short pithy liHle sentences to tens of thousands of books? Because
people like conceptual elabora8on! People just don’t leave well alone.
I was lucky that my main teacher, C R Lama, didn’t like to talk very much, so he always said everything
in a very simple way. And he said, “EmpCness, space, awareness. This is enough. You’ll see the nature
of your own mind, this is not very difficult. This is what you do.” He gave me the instruc8ons and said,
“Now don’t get lost.” There is nothing more than that.
We know that in the dzogchen tradi8on there are many, many prac8ces – we were doing some of
them yesterday. Why do people have all these prac8ces? Because it was a good idea at the 8me.
Somebody had a medita8on problem and they decided to do something about it. Why?
In the instruc8on that I got from my teacher, which I have included in ‘Simply Being'2 , it says very
clearly, “Whenever you have a problem in meditaCon, don’t apply any anCdote; stay with the
situaCon.” It says it again and again and again in many different ways because we are so stupid and
we don’t understand: ‘Don’t put your hand in the fire!’ ‘Don’t put your hand in the fire!!’ We always
want to do something. Why? Because we just want to do something. Control your breathing!
Kumbhaka! Pranayama! Okay, now I feel beHer. Of course you feel beHer, because you went from
something bad to something good. Oh! Bad is not the same as good? Hm! This is called ‘duality’.
Hm... You have gone from one kind of shit-‐heap into another kind of shit-‐heap, except this one tastes
like chocolate. That’s the only difference. This is very, very important because the fantasy of control
will condemn you to samsara.
You can learn many different methods for controlling the nature of your experience. These are
designed, not to shiY the experience, but to give you the experience of shiLing the experience. That’s
all. Once you taste that one or two 8mes, you don’t need to keep doing it. You realise that this was an
experience and that was an experience and this is the experience of changing experience. Basically
that’s all you need to know.
Wherever you are, it’s simply an event which is transient. If something horrible is happening – don’t
push it away. If something good is happening – don’t try to hang on to it. This is the teaching that
you’ll find from all the masters. Dudjom Rinpoche explained this many 8mes, Dilgo Khyentse
explained it many 8mes. Many, many teachings like this. But if you get into manipula8on, every 8me
you are walking down the street and you see an ambulance going by, you will recite, “OM MANI
PADME HUNG, OM MANI PADME HUNG…” But why? Why? Before the ambulance came on the
street, other people were coming near you, they have messed-‐up lives, why don’t you do OM MANI
PADME HUNG for them? Oh, but somebody is sick! We do something special for them!
In the Tibetan tradi8on they have mantras for everything. They have mantras for the fire, they have
mantras for ligh8ng a new fire, they have mantras for making beer, they have mantras for protec8ng
2 Simply Being: Texts in the Dzogchen TradiCon. 3 ed. [CPI Antony Rowe, November 2010]

73
the beer from going off. They have mantras for finding lost sheep and they have different mantras for
finding lost cows! This is a fact. When I was first learning Tibetan, I went on a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya
and I bought many, many books, because the Tibetans had these liHle stalls selling such books. I
brought them back to my teacher – “Look what I've got!” – and he says, “Yes, but you don’t have any
sheep, so…?!”
What does this mean? It means that human beings are endlessly crea8ve. If you realise that this
crea8on is simply the play of the mind, you don’t have to not do these things, but you have to do
them as the movement of energy, which is empty. The danger for us is that we start to believe that
these things are strongly real. In terms of prac8ce, you need one tantric prac8ce, one deity. You pray
to the deity, you dissolve with the deity, you go into emp8ness and you arise from that with the
clarity. One is enough.
Tibetans say of themselves, “In India, people do one pracCce and get enlightened. In Tibet we do a
hundred pracCces and nobody gets enlightened.” They have this saying. Because they have so much
stuff, and it’s all valuable! So what will you do?
Nowadays in England there are TV programmes about people whom we call ‘hoarders’. These are
people who can never let go of anything. Some8mes when you open their front door, it’s such a mass
of newspapers that they have to get down on their hands and knees and crawl through a tunnel to
get into the room and then it’s full of old bicycles and all sort of junk. People ask them why they keep
all this stuff? “Well, it could come in useful one day!” Yeah, I got this ini8a8on from Ding-‐Dong
Rinpoche and it was incredible! I know I haven’t done the prac8ce for ten years, but, you know, one
day I’m going to have the 8me and then I’ll do it because it’s really important!
Actually what it means is that ten years ago you said to Ding-‐Dong Rinpoche, “I will do this.” And
you’ve never done it – so you’ve cheated Ding-‐Dong Rinpoche, you’ve cheated yourself, but you s8ll
want to con8nue with the fantasy that you won’t cheat yourself. If you are going to do it, you do it. If
you are not going to do it, you don’t do it. If it’s hard to do one mantra every day, don’t ask for ten.
“Ah, but this one is special...!”
Even the dharma can be a distraction

The teaching tells us that the object is empty and the subject is empty. This is so important to
understand! The answer doesn’t lie in the object. It really doesn’t.
–I need to get this special blessing! I need this special iniCaCon!
–Why?
–Because it will help me.
–What will it help you to do? It will help you to feel you’ve got something.
–Poor, lonely person, I don’t have anything. I have a big lack. What do I lack? I lack my own
nature.
–How are you going to get it?
–Well, I’m going to see this lama and he’ll give it to me.
–Where does he get it from? It’s your nature! Maybe he stole it from you…
You see the logic of these things? This is human crea8vity.
Your mind is there. You have the possibility to relax into your own nature, or to distract yourself.
These are the two possibili8es. There is samsaric distrac8on – running around, making money,
causing trouble and so on – and there is nirvanic distrac8on – doing lots of holy prac8ces,

74
accumula8ng a big altar and so on. If you have a big altar you have a lot of bowls to clean every day.
Then if you don’t clean the bowls you feel guilty. If you’ve got to clean the bowls, then you have
something to do: ‘Now I’m cleaning the bowls for the Buddha!’ Hm... the Buddha likes clean bowls?
The Buddha is a really good housewife. Maybe he is a German Buddha? In his right hand he is holding
a vacuum cleaner… We do these things for us. So what do we get from doing these things? We
generate a sense of meaning and value and competency, that we ‘know what to do’. We know how to
do mudra, we know right tune for each prayer...
You see the danger. You can get lost in dharma just as easily as you can get lost in making money.
In the beginning the mo8va8on is very important, but in the centre, the most important thing is to
recognise the emp8ness of everything you do. And if it’s empty – and staying open to the emp8ness
is hard – making it overcomplicated is probably not going to help. So keeping it simple is the main
focus.
Garab Dorje says we should first, recognise who we are, or be who we are. Then, having got that,
don’t mix it up with our own thoughts. Then, just con8nue like that. That's enough, it’s enough.
“Yes, but what about ... what about…?” The danger there, as we looked at yesterday, is that
something arises inside us and we feel a lack: ‘I need something. I, the subject, need an object.' If you
are medita8ng, that is the moment where you recognise that you've blown it. Stay on the one who
has the lack. The lack is the energy of the mind. The mind is the ground which gives rise to samsara
and nirvana.
The fact that the mind is open doesn’t mean it only makes roses. It also makes neHles. It makes
weeds. If you look at the weed, the weed grows from the pure ground. If you look at the rose, it also
grows from the pure ground. The main thing is the ground. So when your mind gets disturbed and
troubled, when you feel lonely and sad, don’t look for the object to shiL your mood. Don’t look for a
special method; stay with whatever is arising in the mind. Be present with that situa8on and you will
see that the ground that the thought is arising from, and the ground that the subject – which is the
consciousness aware of the thought – is arising from, are both forms of energy. You then are the
ground itself. You are the awareness of the ground.
So the presence of the ground and the arising of subject and object configura8ons are not two
different things. Subject/object interplay is the forma8on of samsara arising from the ground. There
is only one ground. When you recognise that the subject/object forma8on is the energy of the
ground, it’s called nirvana. It’s called libera8on. So the key thing is to recognise the ground, not to
look for beHer objects.
[Break]
Projection: tantra uses it, dzogchen doesn't

One way to keep things safe is to put them in a bank vault. If you put something in a box it will remain
safe, for a while. However there is a story about the Nizam of Hyderabad, who at one 8me was the
wealthiest man in the world. He had many, many pearls and some were stored away in a closed up
room. Pearls need to have some fresh air around them. One day the door to the room was opened it
was discovered that they had all crumbled into dust. So this is something to think about.

75
One of the ways that we keep aspects of our self safe is to project them. Parents, for example, may
project what they themselves want into their children, sacrificing themselves so that their children
can enjoy. We can also project the goodness of our self into the buddha. We can imagine that we are
very ordinary, very small, and that the buddha is very good. Buddha is very special and I am not very
good. Then we can pray, “Please look aYer me, please save me.” On an outer level that’s a very
typical prac8ce.
In tantra, the dynamic between this projec8ve force and the stuckness of one’s own situa8on
becomes the dynamic for libera8on. You increase the force of the projec8on by saying very many
prayers, by praising the Buddha, Padma Sambhava, Tara, “You are wonderful, you are the best, you
are this, you are that, you have feathers coming out of the top of your head which means you save all
beings, you have lovely big earrings which means you pull the beings out of hell...” and so on. You
inspire yourself with all the symbolic descrip8ons which are indica8ng that this deity is fantas8c. You
then merge with the fantas8c. Having projected all the poten8al of the good into the object, the
subject and the object merge together and dissolve in non-‐duality. This is the helpful way of
deconstruc8ng the spli[ng dynamic of projec8on.
Dzogchen however does not make use of projec8on, since projec8on is always linked with spli[ng.
You can’t have projec8on without spli[ng and spli[ng means duality so it’s going to cause trouble.
The basic instruc8on then is that there is no buddha but your own mind. If you look for the buddha
somewhere else, you are going to get into difficulty. Saying, “The Buddha is your own mind” is not
referring to the contents of your thoughts per se, to how you conceptualise yourself. But if you want
to find the buddha, which is your own mind, you have to find your own mind. You have to be in
rela8on to the actuality of presence.
So your presence is here, moment by moment, otherwise you wouldn’t have any experience. But this
presence, as we looked at before, is like the mirror, which shows itself through the reflec8on. So
when you are walking around full of thoughts and memories, hopes and fears and so on, it may look
as if the content of the mind at that moment is the experience itself, but it’s only part of it – just as
when you look in the mirror you see the reflec8on, whereas actually you are experiencing the clarity
of the mirror, manifes8ng as the reflec8on. Without the clarity of the mirror you wouldn’t have the
reflec8on.
In the same way the presence of your mind is what allows you to be depressed, what allows you to
be anxious, what allows you to be confused. It’s not that you have to remove the anxiety and the
confusion and the habitual nega8ve thoughts in order to realise the clarity of the mind – but
depression is itself the radiance of the buddha nature. Now that sounds very strange, because usually
we say that depression, anxiety and confusion are the quali8es of samsara however what we want is
to get to nirvana where everything is beau8ful and shiny and open.
This is one way of thinking about it and is a method which appeals to many people because it fits in
with the common metaphor of ‘a spiritual journey’. We are going from here to there; we are going to
Jerusalem, to the Holy Land. Jewish people are very intelligent; they have the saying, “Next year in
Jerusalem.” It means, 'not today but next year'. Of course when they got to Jerusalem, they got
trouble. Bombs going off all the 8me so beHer to imagine that we’ll get there next year! The
'Messiah' means ‘the yet to come’. This means you can believe in the Messiah since projec8on into
somewhere else-‐ness is oLen the way we hold an idea together. Because we want to believe that
there is a ‘good-‐good-‐good’ and a ‘bad-‐bad-‐bad’. This is duality.

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Dzogchen says that there is one ground and two paths. Samsara and nirvana arise from the same
situa8on. How is this possible? How can the bad come from the same place as the good? Well,
because good and bad are an illusion, are illusory forms. In the sky we see dark rain-‐clouds, we see
storms and lightning and we see rainbows and sunshine; all of these are possible inside the great
space of being. The mind as infinity has no centre or circumference. We cannot say it’s located
anywhere and yet infinity is our nature. If something is infinite, it has no limit. If it has no limit, there
is nothing coming from outside. All of samsara and nirvana arises in your own mind.
If we say that my mind is my brain, my brain is in the bone-‐box of my head, my head is linked to my
body and so on – if we take such a materialis8c reading we start with the no8on of limita8on. And
something which is limited cannot become infinite. Not possible. Dzogchen teaching, which is
grounded in medita8on experience, says, “Don’t insult yourself. Never imagine that you are an
ordinary being wandering in samsara.”
Dzogchen is not interested in ignorance

The unique aspect of dzogchen, and where it differs from buddhism in general, is that it’s not
interested in ignorance. It doesn’t have a big theory of ignorance. Tantra has a lot of explana8ons
about ignorance, where it came from and so on, but dzogchen says that what we call ignorance is just
another transitory phenomenon arising in the mind. And the ground of it is the mind itself. Otherwise
we would always have the problem that the mind was here, then ignorance came and caught it, and
then we had samsara. So where did ignorance come from? Was ignorance inside the mind before it
came out? Is it like some latent disease which started to manifest? We know that people have
condi8ons like that. Where did ignorance come from? It comes from the mind.
How could the good mind give rise to something bad? Now, this is the troubled thought of somebody
who has never changed babies’ nappies. Babies are very nice, but they also pooh a lot. And the pooh
of the baby is kind of s8nky. But it’s also your own baby’s pooh. So you have one pooh, but you can
take it in two direc8ons; you can say, “Oh, my sweeCe, never mind!” or you can say, “Oh, yuck...” It’s
like that. You can say, “Lovely babies but sCnky pooh” or “It's all one package”.
Ignorance is luminosity. Look at your own mind. What do we mean by ignorance? Ignorance means
ge[ng lost, not understanding. We sit in the medita8on, we do the ‘AA’... Maybe it’s clear for a liHle
bit, then thoughts or feelings come and we go wandering off inside them. Why do we do that?
Because we are not focused; because we are not relaxed, because we are not aware. “If only my
meditaCon were beRer I wouldn’t be doing that.” This is the view of duality. BeHer not to go in that
direc8on.
Whatever arises in the mind, stay with what is arising in the mind, stay present with it and it will go
free by itself. If you stand in rela8on to what’s arising in your mind and move between these two
polari8es of fusion and ge[ng lost, of merging and then distancing, of desire and then aversion…
such two pulsa8ons keep us moving, moving, moving. And of course they confirm the idea that there
is something wrong with me! That I am not able to do this properly and that I have to try harder.
Such interpreta8ons are completely constructed out of signs, out of tsen. “‘This thought is bad!’ Who
says the thought is bad? I say the thought is bad. I am the measure of all things! I know how my mind
should be! I shouldn’t have thoughts like this! I want to be a good person. It’s terrible to have this. I
hate this ghastly meditaCon!” People get very disturbed because this is their mind and they don’t
want their mind to be that way. They want a beHer quality of mind!

77
You can’t have it. You have what you have. Our life is how it is. We might think, “Oh, if only I had
decided to do that a long Cme ago...” or, “If only I had met this person when I was younger...” or if
only, if only... 'If only' doesn’t help; you have what you have. Whether it works or doesn’t work, it’s
like that. So, what is it?
You are si[ng; a thought comes. Who does the thought come to? “I don’t like this thought.” It comes
to the one who doesn’t like the thought. “Hm... I like this thought.” It comes to the one who likes the
thought. The thought is being received by someone; that is to say, the thought comes as an object
through the subject which is a consciousness which has a valency of feeling. The feeling tone is either
posi8ve, or nega8ve, or neutral.
The receptor of the thought, the one who takes up the thought, who stands in reac8vity to the
thought is another thought. Thought follows thought follows thought. Some thoughts look like the
object, some thoughts look like the subject. What we call consciousness in its precise manifesta8on
moment by moment is a thought-‐paHerning.
For example, now I’m suddenly conscious of the microphones in front of me. Before I wasn’t thinking
of them, I wasn’t even looking at them but for some reason my gaze went down and I suddenly see
them. Oh! So now I’m conscious of them. Who is conscious of them? I am. Who is the I who is
conscious of them? The one that’s talking about being conscious of them. That is to say, the
subjec8ve thought-‐construct, the self-‐forma8on is standing in rela8on to the object-‐forma8on. But
there is also a sphere of awareness within which that’s happening, because when the consciousness
of the microphones vanishes, something else arises.
Where does it arise into? Into the field of clarity. What is this field of clarity? It’s ungraspable. Stay
with the field of clarity; stay with the one who is present with the experience without entering into
judgement about the experience. Let's take an example. We have some pain. Someone else asks us
how we feel. “I feel bad.” “Oh, that’s terrible that you feel bad.” Such sympathy is also nice, but both
the pain and the sympathy are transient movements in 8me and space. They establish nothing. The
pain is transient, the conceptualisa8on of the pain is transient, the expression of that
conceptualisa8on is transient and the other person’s response is transient. They are energe8c
dynamic forma8ons devoid of substance, revealed through presence. In this state, if you stay present,
the fact that a pain-‐forma8on is arising is harmless. It s8ll feels, “Ow!” Something is there, but it
doesn’t contaminate you because you are not res8ng in a narrow defined self-‐concept which wants
to reject having pain because “I don’t like having pain!” So, again, the more you define yourself as
something, the more you have to try and edit the arising, the emergent field of experience, in
rela8on to your self-‐concept.
Of course that doesn’t mean that you can just say, "Whatever comes, comes." This is the big slogan
for dzogchen, "Whatever comes, comes", but when you walk across the road you don’t want to be hit
by a car. So it means: whatever comes, comes – but...! Being careful crossing the road also comes,
because if it doesn’t come, you are dead!
Making choices also comes in the field of emergence. It's not passive, since then you would be a
subject willing to be baHered by experience and it would be a somewhat masochis8c posi8on. It’s
not that. ‘Whatever comes, comes’ is the experience of awareness. But awareness is inseparable
from the energy of awareness, so you have rigpa, awareness, and rigpai tsel [རིག་པའི་=ལ་], the energy
of awareness, which is constantly emerging into the field of experience. So whether we are talking or

78
walking or si[ng or ea8ng, this is the unfolding energy of awareness. It is inseparable from the
ground. It’s not a thing, and it arises, as the texts say, like the rays of light from the sun. Tibetans are
not interested in thermodynamics and the nature of the sun’s actual situa8on; they are just saying,
“This is a big ball in the sky, it never changes and it’s always giving out light.”
So the sun doesn’t change; so it’s like awareness, and coming out of it are rays of heat and light,
illumina8ng the sky. This is the ceaseless flow of the energy of awareness. Everything is the energy of
awareness. Everything is experience. There is nowhere else for anything to come from. So when you
have a thought, such as “I don’t like that other thought!” this is a thought about a thought. Where did
these two thoughts come from? They came from the same ground.
When I was a child I fought with my brother all the 8me – for years and years and years. Two
brothers, two children, born from the same mother. My mother used to look at us figh8ng and say, “I
don’t understand why you are always fighCng!”, because we were both her children. Maybe it was
the fact that we were both her children that caused us to fight all the 8me!
In the same way the great earth-‐mother, Prajnaparamita, the mother of all the buddhas, gives rise to
a lot of children, but these children don’t always like each other. So when you sit in the medita8on
and say, “I like this; I don’t like that” – this is the play of the children of the mind. This is the energy of
awareness showing the form of compe88on, rivalry, edi8ng and so on. Why is it like that? That’s a
very good ques8on. When I used to ask my teacher C R Lama ques8ons like that he would say, “Well,
when you get to Zangdopalri and meet Padma Sambhava, then that can be your first quesCon.”
Which is to say, “Keep quiet and don’t bother me with your nonsense.”
Buddha told a story to illustrate this. Somebody is walking in the forest when suddenly an arrow
comes and strikes them in the arm. Should they examine the arrow to see if the wood or the feathers
can help them iden8fy which tribe the archer belongs to? Or try to work out from which direc8on the
arrow was shot? Buddha said, no. The first thing to do is take the arrow out of their arm.
There is a 8me for curiosity and there is a 8me just to be very simple. Our main thing is to observe
how our mind is, and not be looking, “Why? Why? Why is it like this?” Rather, look at how is it and
where does it come from? If we ask the wrong ques8on it will take us into an endless sequence of
explana8ons and conceptual elabora8on. Look for the ‘how’ – how does this happen? It arises out of
emp8ness and it goes back into emp8ness. This is how it shows itself. One thought leads to a thought
about the thought, and then another thought… it appears that they have a commentarial form. One
is commen8ng on the other and the other – building up a composite picture. Yet each of them is
devoid of inherent self-‐nature. None of them is real. Each is the radiance of the mind.
When you look in the mirror or maybe turn it around, you see many different reflec8ons arising;
some reflec8ons you like, some reflec8ons you don’t like. What is the status of what you see? Only
reflec8ons. The reflec8on is empty. You can’t take a reflec8on out of a mirror since it has no self-‐
substance. You say, “Ugh, that’s horrible!” or “Oh! That’s beauCful!” These are reflec8ons. There is no
substance in the reflec8on to hold the iden8fica8on ‘beau8ful’ or ‘ugly’. Beau8ful and ugly is the co-‐
crea8on of the affec8ve quality or the aesthe8c moment of the revela8on of that reflec8on. Things
are illuminated by the quality of our par8cipa8on and this par8cipa8on is itself the radiance of
awareness.
Here's what to do. Let's say you have a thought like, “My children are awful, I wish they’d never been
born.” That thought came maybe because you were 8red or the children were annoying you or
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whatever. For some reason you had a moment of an8pathy. Next you feel guilty or ashamed, “How
could I have a thought like that? That’s terrible!” What is the horror in the first thought? “I am the
parent, these are my children, I love them. Because I love them I shouldn’t have thoughts like that!”
My image of myself as a good parent means that I should never hate my children. I should never
think, “ They’ve spoiled my life, ruined my body, taken all my money, stolen my freedom” since these
are terrible thoughts to have about my poor liHle children. You have had a nega8ve experience and
then you try to an8dote it with a posi8ve experience – because it’s terrible that that nega8ve thought
was there at all! It somehow poisoned me, because I want to be loving and kind and open-‐hearted.
Where did this nega8ve thought come from? It comes from the mind – it doesn’t come from
anywhere else. What status does it have? It’s a reflec8on. It’s like a reflec8on in a mirror. It has no
quality. What gives it its valency is the next thought.
'I want my children to die.’ A thought. ‘I want the bells to stop.’ A thought. I’ll go and shoot the priest.'
A thought. There is nothing wrong with the thought; it’s a thought. But then we have the reac8on to
the thought ‘It’s terrible!’ The thought in itself was neutral; it’s just something arising. It’s just a
thought. But we take the thought as if it were a showing of our real nature: because I have that kind if
a thought I am a bad person. I don’t want to be the kind of person who has that kind of thought.
That is to say: the big problem in medita8on is that we believe that the thought is arising from the
ego, that the thought is an indica8on of the ego, that the thoughts that we have are a kind of x-‐ray of
our soul. "Because I’m having thoughts like that, it shows that I am a bad person" or "I don’t know
how to meditate" or I’m selfish or greedy or cruel or whatever it would be. So the thought, ‘I want my
children to die’, which is transient, has already gone. This is gone! The reac8on to it starts to build up
some kind of fear and there is a condensa8on: I don’t want to be like that! This is terrible! So there is
a retrac8on and in that retrac8on you have more of a defini8on. This is the kind of thing that happens
for most of us all the 8me. The habit of reifica8on means that we block the natural process of self-‐
libera8on. No, that’s a wrong expression. You can’t block self-‐libera8on, because the thought ‘I want
my children to die’ has already gone; it’s self-‐liberated, it’s just gone. But we hang on to it, “It must
mean something; this horrible thought is telling me something about myself. Why do I have thoughts
like this? I hope nobody can read my mind...” This is why people immediately get anxious if I tell them
that I work as a psychotherapist. “Oh my God, you can see up my nose!”
My teacher told me...

When I met my teacher C R Lama, the very first thing he told me was, “ The buddha is not a nice man.”
This is incredibly helpful. The buddha is not a nice man. The buddha is the unborn dharmakaya, the
Buddha is the open space, the dharmadhatu, the buddha is not a thing, it’s not a person, it’s not nice,
it’s not not-‐nice, it’s not anything. It is emp8ness; the radiance of emp8ness – like the clear blue sky.
You read this in the texts again and again and again, "clear blue sky", open, luminous expansion
within which manifesta8on is occurring. “But I don’t want these thoughts in my mind!” Who says
that? A thought-‐sequence. So one thought evokes or calls into being another set of thoughts. And
each of these thoughts sets off another and another and another... You get this concatena8on, this
linked chaining of paHerning – this is how our life evolves.
Stay on the thought: lug gu gyud

In thogal [ཐོད་?ལ་] prac8ces they describe this con8nuous process of experience as lug gu gyud, or
dorje lug-‐gu gyud. Lug [@ག་] or lug-‐gu [@ག་A་] means sheep and gyud [Bད་] means a chain. You know
how you can see a whole series of sheep going one aLer another along a liHle track on the hillside?
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Sheep follow, follow, follow... Likewise we have these thoughts that follow, follow, follow... and they
leave tracks. If you recognise that the thought, in the moment that it arises, is nothing at all, then you
won't put extra valency into it. This is why the instruc8on is always, "Don’t enter into judgement!”
Don’t sit there, separated from your own experience, saying, “Bad! Good! I don’t want the bad! I do
want the good!" If you do that, you sit in the split; you are inhabi8ng duality and you are crea8ng
duality. Who is doing that? A thought.
However the thought hasn’t come from ignorance. This is the par8cular teaching of dzogchen. The
thought, ‘I don’t want this thought!’ is itself arising from the mind. The nega8ve thought comes from
the mind, the judgemental thought comes from the mind – stay with the mind itself. Patrul Rinpoche,
Nuden Dorje and other medita8on teachers always say, “Stay on the thought as it arises; stay on
whatever is arising.” In Tibetan, this is thog-‐tu [ཐོག་C་] and it means to stay with it, but stay with it,
not on top looking down, not in a posi8onal way, but stay as the presence within which the thought is
arising. Again, the middle way. Don’t merge into the thought, don’t separate yourself from the
thought.
It’s not like the kind of body-‐scanning that you might do in the early stages of vipassana, where you
take your aHen8on through the body and you aHend to what is occurring thereby having a very
simple internal dialogic rela8on – what aHen8on reveals and how it’s commented on. It’s not like
that. It’s that in the clear blue sky suddenly an aeroplane is going through it. Suddenly some clouds
are blown by the wind across the sky. Suddenly the clouds are raining. Then there is a thunderstorm.
Then there is a rainbow. We sit in the prac8ce; many things are arising and passing.
The mind itself, our mind, is the dharmakaya; it’s like space. The quality of the dharmakaya is that it
reveals the sambhogakaya. Sambhoga means enjoyment. That is to say, everything arises in this
mind. The dharmakaya is the source of everything and it’s omnivorous. It’s not vegan, it doesn’t have
any allergies; it eats everything! So it also eats shit.
Therefore when you sit in the medita8on and you have a 'nega8ve thought', as you call it, and you
say, “I am not going to eat this! I don’t want anything to do with this!” this is the proof to yourself
that you are not in an open state. As soon as you enter into judgement you have lost the ground of
your being. The ground of being, the dharmadhatu, is infinite like the sky, it has no prejudice. When
prejudice arises – liking, not liking – this is thought judging thought. Like me figh8ng with my brother.
“Why does he always get to do that? It should be my turn! Give me that!” Thoughts are compe8ng for
space, they are compe8ng for validity. “Me first!” – “No, it’s my turn!” This thought, then that
thought, then that thought...
Let go and you are there, let go and you are there...
The key thing is again and again, to relax, release, open. Let go and you are there. Let go and you are
there... This is the profound paradox, which, as I was trying to show earlier, is from the theravada
teaching, the mahayana teaching, the tantric teaching and the dzogchen teaching. They all say the
same thing: It’s by holding on, by aHachment to bringing the five skandhas into the sense of being a
person, by pulling together paHerns of thoughts and saying they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – this desire to be
the shaper or the house-‐builder, as described in the Dharmapada, – this desire is itself the energy of
the dharmakaya!
This is the most important thing to understand in the prac8ce: the ground, the openness of the mind,
gives rise to both samsara and nirvana. They are not two separate things. So when samsaric

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forma8on arises in the mind, don’t be disturbed, don’t try to turn samsara into nirvana by developing
beHer quality of thoughts, by suddenly saying some mantras to purify your mind. Stay with the
thought as it arises, on the point of the arising of the thought. The thought will dissolve back into the
space it has come from, like in summer8me you can some8mes see these small, fluffy white clouds
that just come out and then you just watch them dissolving back in the sky; coming out, dissolving
back in the sky...
Thought’s coming; you stay with it. Oh! It’s open... and you open. The openness is now – something
else is coming in, going out... In that moment the mind is spacious like the sky; you are not in a fixed
ego-‐posi8on looking at what is happening.
Dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya: how they link

There you have the link between the dharmakaya and the sambhogakaya. The sambhogakaya clarity
shows everything. Everything that arises in the sambhogakaya is grounded in the dharmakaya.
Within that richness of the field we have the experience of self and other. I am here, I look around, I
see different people’s faces and so on; and we have different rela8ons with different people in the
room; we speak to some people in some ways and to other people in other ways. It’s just like that, it’s
our karmic connec8on, whatever.
We come into being in rela8on to the other, within the field of clarity. This is par8cipa8on. The energy
which arises as ‘me’ is arising from the ground and par8cipa8ng with the energy that arises as ‘you’
which is arising from the ground. So the one ground arises as the immediacy of the field within which
each of us is, if you like, the centre of the world – although there is no centre. But it’s as if it is arising
out of us, because each of us experiences as if from our heart the emergence of this field, within
which we meet other people. What we can transact with other people or not is dependent on our
energy forma8on. Some people can be very close together, other people not so close. To get into a
judgement about this is not helpful, to observe the differen8a8on of movements of energy which
don’t establish anything.
This is called the nirmanakaya. Because the nirmanakaya means both to be available and to be
helpful. The main thing is to be available. We are available, but if there is no connec8on, then there is
nothing to be done. It’s just like that. With some people we have an immediacy of connec8on; we are
just ‘in’ something – for a while. Then maybe not. With some people that may last a long 8me, but
each moment of that is a showing, is a revealing inside the clarity of the openness. So the openness,
the clarity and the par8cipa8on are inseparable. And the moments of the par8cipa8on are always
arising and dissolving.
When you hold on to them there is a forgeaulness of the ground. If you grasp – like now I am
grasping a pen – I have the pen but I lose the poten8al of my hand. If I want the poten8al of my hand
I can’t hold the pen. So we have to know that you go into the par8cularity of the moment.There is
nothing wrong with that, but then it goes and you come back to your hand. This is what the texts
mean when they talk about being ‘fresh’, being relaxed and open and fresh. However if I have the
idea that actually I’m a writer, I was born to have a pen in my hand, then all the other poten8al of this
is lost. The limita8on of my poten8al is self-‐determined, in saying, “I am a writer.”
Nirmanakaya is ‘field-‐relatedness’ which is to say, you call me into being in a par8cular way.
Therefore how I am with you is caused by you as much as by me. This is the libera8on from the self
which comes through par8cipa8ve clarity. Because if you sit in yourself, then your own karmic

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forma8on or your personality, your likes and dislikes, become the limit of what you can do. Whereas
when you are thoughaul of the other, it takes you out. A common experience of this for people is
when they become a parent and have to get up in the middle of the night to do things for a small
child. Before that, they never did that. Now they do; they do that because the other calls them to be
other than who they think they are. The sameness of ‘themselves’ is disrupted. “I don’t want to do
that, but I have to.” The ‘I don’t want to’ is the enclosure or the self-‐forma8on. ‘But I have to.' And so
you get a movement out of that.
This is why, in the dzogchen tradi8on, the dharmakaya is rela8vely easy, the sambhogakaya is more
difficult and the nirmanakaya is very difficult. In the nirmanakaya we are in the world with other
people and we’ve got to keep being fresh. Building up strong thought-‐pictures about other people is
very temp8ng and also very harmful. It’s very difficult not to do it. Somebody says something that
hurts you and you think, “Oh! I don’t trust you very much now. Let me sit in that thought, ‘I don’t trust
you.’ I felt different yesterday, but today I am not so sure that I trust you anymore...” You sit in that
thought. You can get trapped by a thought.
The thing about a thought is that you can hold it like a pen whereas openness you can’t hold.
Openness is very scary. I’m open. Now what? I’m just open. I can’t know how I am going to be if I’m
open, because how I am going to be will depend on the people that I’m open with. That is to say: I am
available to become co-‐emergent with the field. Predictability, total control, mastery, planning – this
all has to be held very lightly, very soLly. It’s not that you become en8rely plas8c and you are
moulded by the other, but you come into being in rela8on to the field. This is the important thing.
Seeing yourself through the other

I remember years ago I was in a training in Gestalt-‐therapy. It was in a big ins8tute and there were
two rooms, with maybe sixty people in each room. There was a couple who came from America,
called Erving and Miriam Polster. They were, I don’t know, maybe seventy at the 8me. It was
incredible, because over these two days, each of them took one of the rooms, one day each, and was
working with a big group. As they went round – the group was in a circle and they went and worked
with each person – they would go towards the person and as they would walk from one person to the
other, their body would change. Their tone of voice would change. The gaze in their eye would
change. Because they would find a way of mee8ng that individual. Because there were a lot of people
they worked with each person maybe only for ten minutes, but each person got a very precisely,
perfectly cooked, dainty liHle meal that fiHed their palate perfectly. And you could see them
swallowing it and licking their lips. It was so exquisitely beau8ful...
These were people who had really learned to be flexible, to be available and flexible and to be for the
other. All that they had was for the other, but not on their terms – on the terms of the other. So
cooking themselves for the other was not a diminu8on of themselves, since they had realised the
most important thing which is that it’s the quali8es of the other that allow me to see who I am. If I
am always rela8ng to myself I just see the same old image whereas other people show us to
ourselves. We can’t see ourselves without the other. This is something very beau8ful.
So in this path, being with other people in a flexible and responsive way allows us to see our own
neuro8c structures, our own habitual paHerns of limita8on. Then we realise that when I am self-‐
referen8al, I abandon the other. In being true to myself I’m not available to the other. However in
being true to my ground I am available to the other. That is to say: when I relax and open and
manifest from my own ground I return to myself through my availability to the other but when I stay
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true to myself, to my own set of assump8ons and predic8ons and likes and dislikes, I’m not true to
the other, and I am also betraying myself.
So these no8ons of dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya are very prac8cal, they help us in
the si[ng medita8on, but also in the interac8ons that arise when we come out of the
medita8on.Clearly the key thing is to understand the dharmakaya. Dharmakaya is not something
‘high’. It’s not special, it’s not esoteric; it’s the actuality of our mind as it is moment by moment.
TREKCHO PRACTICE OF THE THREE SKIES
The style of prac8ce that we have been looking at is called trekcho [Dེགས་ཆོད་] cu[ng and it gives
instruc8ons on maintaining the presence of 'the three skies'.
The first sky is the outer external sky, which is the space that we see all around us. This becomes
invisible to us when we fixate on the substan8al reality of the things that we see which is why we
have spent a lot of 8me over these last days looking at the illusory nature of what appears to us.
When we look out and we see the walls, the people and so on, we have to recognise again and again
that this is our own crea8on. Our own mind is involved in the elabora8on of the image of what we
see. Everything we see is like a cloud or a rainbow forming in the sky.
The second sky is the sky of the channels, par8cularly the channel which is running from the heart
through the eyes. It’s said to be like the horn of a wild ox meaning that it is quite sharp at the point
when it comes out from the heart. It’s two and they come out through the eyes. That is to say that
the awareness relates to the world from the space of the heart into the external space through this
space of the channel. This is different from the pathways of conceptualisa8on and we’ll come on to
that a liHle bit later. Of course we normally have the idea that light is coming in through the eyes, but
we also have the experience in dreams of, if you like, visionary light appearing. Of course when we
think of the rela8onship between percep8on and conceptualisa8on, the light that is outside, if you
don’t conceptualise it, is just about nothing at all. It’s just colour. When you conceptualise it, it starts
to take on its form. So it’s actually the light of the mind which creates the ten thousand things. They
are not self-‐exis8ng out there by themselves. So this is part of what it means by ‘the light’, but it also
means ‘visionary light’, and we’ll explore that a liHle bit later.
Then the third sky is the sky of the heart. There are lots of elaborate descrip8ons about the nature of
the heart: that there is a sun and a moon throne and an eight-‐cornered enclosure that it’s in, rela8ng
to the petals of the lotus in the heart-‐chakra but in par8cular it means that the space of the heart,
which is the space of presence, is infinite like the sky. Ungraspable like the sky. And rich in the
poten8al to manifest like the sky.
So the linking of these three skies is that in any situa8on we are without agenda. This agenda-‐less
openness connects out into the situa8on there, through this empty pathway, the pipe that extends
out into the distance and this connects with the space outside. Now this is very different from our
usual way where we are inside ourselves and we are thinking about something that we see out there.
We are in a kind of informa8on-‐processing mode. This is a descrip8on of how to engage in the
immediacy of the situa8on.
So when we sit in the prac8ce and we are looking for the mind, the more confidence that you have
that the mind is not a thing which can be grasped, the more we live in a state of wonder or

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amazement at this inconceivable, beyond conceptualisa8on, richness, fecundity, generosity of the
ground source which reveals everything.
Everything we see is related to the mind. If we bring a dog into this room it doesn’t see the room the
same way as us. A frog doesn’t see the same way as us. The flies that come in the window in the
summer8me, the wasps and the bees – they don’t see this room. We are convinced that this room is
as it is because of the happenstance of having this kind of a body. Elephants, giraffes don’t see it this
way. If we were to flood the room and let in salmon and cod and other fish, they wouldn’t see the
room in the same way. This room exists in rela8on to us. It is not self-‐exis8ng. This is the most
fundamental fact. Therefore, what we see is our vision. And different people here will have different
views.
If we invited a representa8ve of the Taliban to this Buddhist centre as a special guest-‐lecturer and we
asked him, “Please give us your advice on how we should live!”, he would say, “Well, blow up this evil
place for a start! This is the house of Shaitan; this is the devil’s house. What are all these statues? We
have already destroyed many statues like these up in Bamian.” Because that’s what he would see. If
you are a muslim fundamentalist, you would see these buddhist statues as something terrible,
leading people astray, a doorway into hell. However if you are a buddhist, you think it is the doorway
into enlightenment. This is your par8cular vision. Is it leading to hell or to heaven? Who knows?
Because we are always trapped inside our own vision.
On the level of vision you go from one vision to another vision, to another. You may believe in
communism, or democracy, or anarchism, but anyway we are always believing in something. Some
people believe in one kind of music, then they shiL to believe in another kind of music. All our lives
we are caught up in a bubble of a belief, an ideogram of representa8ons, which encapsulates our
world for that moment – and then it’s gone. So as each world vanishes, we find another one, and
another one.
If we want to recognise the nature of our vision, we have to see the space of the heart, since the
vision arises from the space of the heart. Then you recognise that the vision is empty so its form
doesn't maHer – you recognise that it’s an illusory forma8on. 'Buddhism' is an illusory forma8on.
Buddhism is not ‘true’ and chris8anity is not ‘untrue’. The point is not that it is opera8ng in a scheme
of right and wrong. Buddhism is poin8ng us in the direc8on of seeing that which is neither right nor
wrong, which is the ground of our own experience.
This is why linking the experience of the outer sky to the sky of the heart is absolutely vital. And the
pathway of this channel which is extending from the heart through the eyes as an empty pathway,
unimpeded, unobscured, is vital as well. So when these three skies meet, you have a non-‐conceptual
apprecia8on of the world. That is to say, although concepts may be involved, they are seen as the
energy of the ground. They are not relied on in themselves.
Tibetan texts are oLen very confusing because they may say 'mi tog pa' or 'tog pa me' both of which
mean 'without thought'. It doesn’t mean that there are no thoughts at all; it means that thought is
not being used as a basis of iden8ty. In our ordinary life we are res8ng on one thought, res8ng on
another, res8ng on another.
If you see thoughts as a problem, then the goal of your medita8on is to gain a state where you have
no thoughts. But if you have no thoughts, then you paralyse yourself, because you cut off the energy
of awareness!
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Going right back to the mahayana sutras there are two main aspects which are brought together:
‘unborn’ and ‘unceasing’. The mind itself, the dharmakaya, is unborn. That is to say, it has never been
born as a thing. In the twelve examples of the nature of illusion, one example is the child of a barren
woman. If a woman is not able to have children, the phenomena of the world are her children. That is
to say, everything exists as something which has never been born. If it has never been born, this
means it has never come out of the womb. The womb in tradi8onal symbolism is linked with
emp8ness.
‘Unborn’ means empty, open like the sky, but simultaneously its nature is unceasing. So it’s not
‘empty-‐empty’ as in nothing at all, a kind of dead emp8ness, where there is just peace, tranquillity. In
some of the conceptualisa8ons it says that nirvana is peace, meaning that nothing is happening. Like
blowing out the lamp, nothing at all. No disturbance. But no disturbance also is half, because the
mind is always showing, or the nature is always showing something. To have a mind without any
ac8vity is a kind of meaningless proposi8on.
It’s not the fact that the thoughts and sensa8ons and feelings exist or manifest that is the problem.
The problem is what we do with them. If you recognise them as energy, they are not a problem. So
when we sit in the medita8on and we become aware of thought aLer thought aLer thought... and
some8mes you might feel like screaming, “Shut the fuck up! Just shut up!” Because it’s terrible. You
know, if you do a long retreat and you are stuck in a liHle room with your own mind, it’s very horrible
for most people. Because there is just this endless stuff, and stuff, and stuff... aahh! And you can’t
control it. And this is a very, very helpful awakening: that the mind is beyond control. This doesn’t
mean it’s out of control, it’s beyond control. That is to say, you have to make friends with it.
Milarepa and the demons

In this famous Tibetan story about Milarepa, when he is in the Cave of the Red Rock, he is trying to do
his medita8on prac8ce but every day the demons are coming and disturbing him and he is ill at ease
in his body, and then is forge[ng the words he has to say and he is just troubled by all these forces
around him. He does more and more prac8ces, more strong prac8ces to try to control the demons.
And he has no success. So aLer months of doing this, when he is really exhausted and is on the point
of giving up – he finally thinks, ‘Well, I’m living in this cave and the demons are living in the cave too
so maybe we should find a way to live together.’ And as soon as he does that and he puts an arm
around the demons, he starts to be able to integrate them as manifesta8ons of the shared ground.
Then everything becomes easy, because he is not struggling against his self. He is not going into
opposi8on. He is not fusing with them, but neither is he going into opposi8on; he is finding the
middle way which is to say, ‘There is space enough for everything.’ Because everything is the
movement inside space.
That’s a very helpful story. So when we sit in the medita8on, it’s not about trying to turn off thoughts
and feelings. It’s about allowing thoughts and feelings to be what they are, which is the energy of the
mind, which is unceasing. By recognising that it is what it is, what it presents itself as is integrated
with what it is.
‘As is’ and ‘as if’

To help unpack this we can think of the difference between 'as is' and 'as if'. Maybe as a child your
parents made liHle shadows on the wall, using their hands and fingers, and told you a story perhaps
about a rabbit or a deer walking along…? The ‘as is’ is a shadow, the shadow of the light onto the
hand. The ‘as if’ is when we recognise, “Oh! It’s a deer! Look, it’s got two liRle horns...” In fact it's not
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a deer at all, it's a shadow. That is ‘as if’; it's an interpreta8on which is put on to the basic ingredient
of the shadow. This is the realm of vipassana medita8on; you take the raw ingredients, you put them
together, you cook the cake and then you deconstruct the cake and you see the raw ingredients.
You start to see the rela8onship between the deer and the fact that it’s actually a shadow; and that
the shadow is res8ng on the hand and the light and the wall. These three things are opera8ng.
To say that the mind has no top or boHom, no beginning and no end is not a theory or proposi8on; it
is what we can see directly. We look at our mind – ungraspable, we can’t find this anywhere, nothing
is outside it, everything is within it. What is this? Well, maybe it’s a bunch of illegal immigrants!
Maybe the problem is that we don’t have enough border-‐control, because we have all of this stuff.
How are we going to sort it out? This is where we get confused. As soon as you think that what’s in
your mind is ‘stuff’, you are then standing in rela8on to the stuff.
This is the mind itself. Everything that arises is the energy of your own mind. So you don’t have to do
anything with it. It will go free by itself.
Three basic principles: appearance and emptiness; clarity and emptiness;

awareness and emptiness.
We are going round and round the same terrain from different points of view, examining the same
three basic principles. Because the mind is open it gives rise to many things. Whatever it is that
arises, vanishes by itself. Thus we have appearance and emp8ness, clarity and emp8ness, awareness
and emp8ness. When we talk of awareness or clarity or appearance, these are words used to
describe the nature of our experience from these three different points of view; they are not three
different things, they are all empty.
As we look around this room, relaxing the interpre8ve matrix, there is nothing. It’s a very bright kind
of nothing, but it’s nothing in the sense that if you don’t put out your concepts to create and grasp,
you will have nothing to hold on to. It’s nothing. It’s just light. The light is the radiance of the mind.
When thoughts are taken as giving shape to this light, then we seem to have something, but this
something vanishes.
This is the sequence that we do in the prac8ce again and again and again. We relax and open. We do
this with our eyes open because we want to allow the return to the link between the pipe that’s
coming from the heart through the eyes. Normally our conceptualisa8on, according to the tradi8on,
is running through two different pipes. It’s described in different ways in different texts, but it can be
described as coming through the two main side-‐channels or from the lungs, rising up and going
through our nostrils.
Our ordinary consciousness is developed through the rela8onship of this kind of movement; the
movement of conceptualisa8on. That is to say, mental energy or consciousness as the vehicle of
experiencing things has a different pathway from the immediacy of non-‐dual percep8on. You may
have no8ced that when you ask somebody a ques8on, they may reply, “Oh, hang on a minute.” and
close their eyes in order to think beHer. That's because we go into ourselves in order to do that.
In this prac8ce however we have our eyes open because what is out there and what is inside is the
same. That is to say, what is out there is what is revealed. It shows itself in its immediacy. ‘Non-‐
conceptual’ means that it’s not interpreted. It is what it is.

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So when we put our fingers on the wall to make a shape, even before we apply the word ‘shadow’,
there is an immediacy. Something which was not there is now there because between the light and
the wall, the hand has appeared as dependent co-‐origina8on genera8ng this appearance which we
call the shadow. But we call it a shadow before we even see that something is there. It shows itself.
All you need to know about it is there. Ah! It’s there! What is it?
When we say, “What is it?” we are adding value. We are not revealing value. From the point of view
of dzogchen, this is vital to understand – that when you think about something, you do something to
it. You add value, but you subtract value at the same 8me. That is to say, you don’t allow it to reveal
itself because you start to tell it what it is. So you move from the visionary to the conceptual. Does
that make sense?
For example, you are out in the hills running fast down a steep path, going from stone to stone to
stone. You foot lands on a stone and starts to wobble. Immediately your whole posture is changing;
you are re-‐balancing, without being able to think, because it’s very, very quick. You are re-‐placing
yourself in order to con8nue. Or if you are windsurfing. There is no 8me to think when you rebalance,
it comes as a direct rela8onship in which the wind and the board and the wave and the balance, the
body is all of a piece. It's what athletes refer to as ‘being in the zone’, it’s a state of non-‐dual alliance
which allows the spontaneity of experience to manifest. I imagine we have all had some experience
like that?
This is talking about something very similar. It’s saying that there is an intelligence, or a clarity, which
is opera8ng with the immediacy, the fac8city, of what is shown. Had you paused to ask yourself,
“What will I do?” when you were running down the hill or windsurfing then you would have
interrupted the non-‐dual integrated flow of connec8vity or energy that was occurring. You would
have displaced yourself into an abstrac8on, which would then be applied aLer the fact. But it’s too
late then; you would have missed the moment. You have got to be on the point, on the point, on the
point...This is absolutely how it is.
It’s exactly the same in medita8on. Once you start to try to make sense of your experience, you are
into another realm of experience. It’s not a wrong experience – it’s just a different kind of experience.
It is mediated or indirect experience, whereas what we are aiming for is direct experience.
Let's take an example from cooking. If you are used to ea8ng food with a lot of garlic or salt or chilli,
but for some reason then have to eat plain white rice and steamed vegetables, the food will not be
very tasty. You will be yearning for the s8mulus that comes from these intense flavours of the garlic
and salt and chilli. This is our situa8on. We are addicted to conceptualisa8on and when somebody
has an addic8on, whether it’s to tobacco or alcohol or any other kind of ac8vity, they find themselves
returning to that ac8vity because it seems to prove something. So if you are looking for a conceptual
proof, you go back to the familiar because it generates a sense of belonging and competence and
ease of being.
This is why medita8on has to be done again and again. Because we are in the process of ge[ng used
to what is actually there, which happens only when we allow ourselves to let go of the fantasy that
we have projected onto what is there. That is to say, we have been living in the realm of the ‘as if’
projected onto the ‘as is’ and so when we see the ‘as is’, it doesn’t have enough taste for us. We want
to sprinkle on the chilli powder! We add some more concepts. “Ah! So that’s what it is! Now I
understand!”

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When we say, “Now I understand!” – this is the beginning of being stupid. To understand means to
stand under something. If you stand under something, whether it’s a bridge or an umbrella, it keeps
the rain off your head. That is to say: You don’t have a direct rela8onship with the rain any more.
Normally you wouldn't want to have a direct rela8onship with the rain because you see it as the
enemy. In the same way, once you rely on the conceptualisa8on, you will not have a direct
rela8onship.
You see this in the familiar gestalt-‐psychology drawing where you get the outline of two profiles – first
of all you look and you see maybe two silhoueHes, and then you look a liHle bit and then suddenly
you see a candles8ck. And then when you see the candles8ck you try to find the faces again but they
are not there. Then you relax a bit and now you get the two faces again but you've lost the
candles8ck. And so it flips in and out. Both are there because they are only interpreta8ons.
In the same way, when we see the immediacy of the presenta8on, the ‘as is’, is like just the bare
shape on the wall and the ‘as if’ is also there as a poten8al. Both can be together, but when they go
together, because of our fixa8on or iden8fica8on with, or investment in, the ‘as if’ dominates. Once
you put the chilli powder on the plain rice you taste the chilli, you don’t taste the rice. The stronger
flavour, that is to say, the flavour that your tongue is seeking out and is used to, dominates what is
there. Rice, plain boiled rice, has a flavour but you won’t get it with a mouth full of chilli. Once you
fall into your conceptual elabora8on paHern, that’s what you get. You go for more of it because that’s
what you know how to do. We know this from our medita8on; we sit and again and again and we get
caught up in thoughts.
So we are returned to these three points of Garab Dorje. Firstly, open to the nature of the mind.
Secondly, don’t put it into doubt, which is to say, don’t look up your old recipe-‐book and decide,
‘Well, maybe a liHle bit more salt would help.’ It doesn’t need salt, it doesn’t need pepper, it doesn’t
need more boiling or roas8ng or cooking. It doesn’t need anything. It is what it is, as it is. Thirdly,
remain in this way with confidence.
This image of sky to sky is, I think, very helpful. Nowadays in the western world we think our mind is
up in our head. Asian cultures s8ll generally believe that ciRa, the mind, is here in the heart. It’s
centred in the middle of this construc8on (our body) and this source or radiant awareness releases
the illumina8on of the world. The illumina8on of the world allows us to par8cipate in the world.
When a baby is born it looks with its big eyes and it’s already entering into some kind of non-‐verbal
dialogue with the environment around. Gradually, as it comes into language and builds up a capacity
for conceptualisa8on, showing more inten8onality in the way it starts to work with the different
people who are around it. It offers different kinds of expressions to different people. There is a
cueing-‐in for reward and gain and comfort and so on. This is a learned opera8on, a construc8ve
process. The baby is manifes8ng into the world in an aHempt to maintain connec8on with the world
which guarantees its survival. Babies don’t do very well on their own. If you put a baby on the ground
for a few hours, when you come back it might be dead. It’s not safe there alone. Rats can come out
and aHack the baby, dogs can bite the baby; the baby has no protec8on at all. Birds can come from
the sky and peck its eyes out. They are helpless.
Clearly then just to be open like this is not very helpful. As Chogyam Trungpa wrote in one of his
books, if the purpose of medita8on was simply to be open, then you would need to have special
buddha hospitals where, as soon as people got enlightened, they would go and sit in a bed all day

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long and have someone come and feed them and wipe their ass because they are just so open.
Openness then, as openness, is not very useful.
What we want is the integra8on of manifesta8on and openness, of s8llness and movement. We come
round to this again and again. The mind is unborn; that means it’s open, it’s empty, it has no agenda
and it’s unceasing. Forma8ons are constantly occurring. These two have to be integrated. We, in
samsara, are on the side of manifesta8on; we know a lot about manifesta8on. Many of us here spend
our 8me in communica8on with other people, so we know all kinds of ways of linking and
connec8ng. What we don’t know so much is s8llness and in par8cular seeing that movement arises
from the s8llness; that the sound arises from the silence. It doesn’t arise out of the silence; it arises in
and through the silence.
The movement of the mind is within the mind because the mind is space. The mind is not something
inside yourself which is why the text says that in the heart there is a sky. When you sit in the
medita8on and you look for your mind, you don’t find anything. So the mind is ungraspable. But we
are here. We are alive, we are alert, we are fresh. So the ‘hereness’ of ourselves presents itself: Here I
am! Here I am! Here! But I look and it’s not here, here! It’s open and it’s present – it’s present as
something which can’t be caught. This is the sky in the heart. This manifests out through these
channels, the immediacy of what we perceive now in the space which is outside. So we can now
bring the integra8on of these spaces into the medita8on prac8ce.
[Medita8on using the three AAs]
Generally speaking with this kind of prac8ce it’s probably more helpful not to do if for long at first. Of
course you can build it up through 8me, but in a sense we are doing something somewhat
counterintui8ve because we also have to reflect on what it means to say ‘relax’ or ‘let go’?
Who is this instruc8on being given to? For example if you have a small child and they are not sleeping
very well, you might sing them a lullaby. First of all you might tell them a story and hopefully they get
a bit sleepy and then you might sing to them in some way. The purpose of doing that is to encourage
them to let go of their anxious agita8on, their desire to stay up, their concern with what’s happened
in the day and just to be lulled, to be eased, into le[ng go so that they can fall asleep.
Now, what does it mean to fall asleep? It’s not an ac8ve thing; it’s a kind of passive thing. In a sense
you do it, you fall asleep, but you do it by not doing it. That can be a way of thinking about what we
are doing here. When we say to ourselves, 'We are just going to relax the tension into this three ‘AA’
sound.', we release the tension not by doing something but by allowing that release, allowing
yourself to collapse in some way.
So who is going to be aware? It’s trus8ng that, as the ar8ficial light, which is the light of the ac8vity of
consciousness, goes down and you enter into a kind of darkness, this is the darkness before the dawn
rather than the eternal darkness. Otherwise it would be very frightening. Samantabhadra, the
founding buddha or adibuddha of dzogchen – the first, the primal, the forever-‐there-‐buddha – is
tradi8onally dark blue in colour. Dark blue represents the colour of the sky just before dawn, when
the darkness has vanished but it’s not yet a bright clear light. It is the poten8al of illumina8on. When
you turn off the light of conscious inten8onal control – being busy, ac8vely doing things – you enter a
state of passivity and wai8ng and it can be easy to then feel sleepy.

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Dreams and dream yoga
Normally when we fall asleep we may dream and we may not remember it, but then next thing it’s
the morning; or we get up in the middle of the night and have a pee or something. But when we were
asleep, we were asleep and there is very liHle recollec8on. This is why in the Tibetan tradi8on they
developed a lot of different forms of dream yoga, designed to help us to be aware that there is a light
which arises in the mind independent of external illumina8on. When you are in bed, reading a book,
then when you close the book and switch off the light, the room goes dark, you get sleepy and you
fall asleep. The external source of the light has gone, but in the dream something is arising. You find
yourself walking down the street or doing something. So where does that light come from?
This is the light of the mind and this is why this dream-‐state is considered to be very important,
because it gives us the basis for having a sense that the mind shows paHerns which are immediately
meaningful. Of course in a dream things are happening but not in a very well defined way. If you are
in the habit of keeping a dream diary and wri8ng your dreams in the morning, you will be aware that
you are already star8ng to edit. It’s very difficult to give a representa8on of a dream. Because of
course, dreams are three-‐dimensional, mul8-‐coloured, with all sorts of things happening in them.
When you write your account of the dream experience, it’s very edited and flaHened down.
When you are in a dream, the clarity which is there is quite strong. If you want to have more
experience of your dreams, one way to do this is to fall asleep relaxed and doing our three ‘AA’
prac8ce and then, as you feel yourself relaxing and ge[ng closer to the sleep, maintain the state of
the openness but just bring your focus of aHen8on to the point of the pineal gland where you
imagine a small ball of white light. Just rest in the open space. The bedroom light is off, you are lying
in a dark space, but now you have this white light. As you fall asleep this gradually becomes a way of
finding yourself in the dream. There are other techniques one can employ but for us, the func8on is
simply to recognise that the mind produces vision independent of external light.
As the light of ra8onal thought, of conceptual elabora8on, of interpreta8on, goes down, we become
aware of this different light. As with the example I gave before that plain boiled rice doesn’t taste as
intense as a prepara8on spiced up with garlic and chilli, so this light of the mind is not bright, it's like
the colour of Samantabhadra. Some8mes in texts you may read about ‘clear light’ and you imagine
there is some big arc lamp or shining brightly down. “Ah! Now I see it very clearly!” You might get a
temporary vision like that, but generally speaking it’s a bit shady.
We sit in that state and things are moving, and they are indis8nct. Why are they indis8nct? Well,
what is the func8on that brings about dis8nc8on? It’s organisa8on, it’s conceptual elabora8on. We
bring things into focus by adding concepts to them. Consider an old school photo. There are people in
the class and you are trying to remember their name. “Oh yes, he was good at football. Oh that one,
yes, he always wore short trousers… Aha, there is my old chum, wearing his glasses.” You start to
remember, as you bring general memories, it brings out the name that goes on to the person and
that in turn evokes further memories. So in that way we are bringing shaping through the applica8on
of thought. If you don’t do that, the picture stays a bit hazy; you recognise something, but you don’t
quite know what it is.
This again is very important. In the first stage of the prac8ce we have to allow ourselves not to know.
Because the not-‐knowing on the basis of being free of cogni8on is the beginning of being able to
know on the basis of the primal natural light. If you keep retrea8ng onto the conceptual elabora8on
as the only basis for knowing, you stay inside dualis8c conceptual knowing. At first you may feel a bit
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stupid and tempted to put on a familiar light. This is why ge[ng trapped in the flow of thoughts is
very temp8ng since it seems much more meaningful than just si[ng in an open way. You are si[ng...
nothing much is happening, it’s a bit hazy... the light is not very bright… “Blooming hell, it’s Saturday
night! What am I doing?! There must be more to life than this!” So you add the chilli. But if you don’t
add the chilli...
Question about the dreamlike quality

Ques'on: What does dzogchen say about the dreamlike quality of what we are experiencing
right now?
James: It would say exactly that – it’s a dreamlike quality and one has to resist making sense
of it. In the dream you are in something that you don’t understand – and yet it’s going on. So not to
understand is not the end of existence. That’s a key point. It's a bit like running down the hill – you
don’t understand what you have to do with your feet, but you are doing it, par8cipa8ng in what is
there.
It's like some of the group sessions I run in the hospital. Many people don't speak in the group and sit
trying to work out, ‘What do I have to say?’ but then by the 8me they have worked something out,
the conversa8on has moved on, so they end up feeling cut off and stupid. Gradually they come to
appreciate that if they don’t catch the moment, some other bugger is going to take the speaking
spot, and so they start to speak, and they stumble into it. They start to listen and they hear other
people stumble. That stumbling and fumbling and tumbling is what life is. It’s not very clear.
So dreamlike is exactly that: we have to act without knowing what the outcome would be. We are
always entering into an emergent field and therefore we can alienate ourselves from that vital
moment by the demand that we can put in our mind, as we’ve touched on before. Not to make a
mistake. In par8cular we can torture ourselves with retrospec8ve clarity. This is a very dangerous
thing.
—You know, if only I knew then what I know now!
—Well, it will never, ever be possible to know two years ago what you know now; it’s just
impossible.
—But I wouldn’t have done it! Why didn’t I know then?
—Because it was two years ago and you were living in that context.
—But I made a terrible decision, I’ve ruined my life, I’ve made other people unhappy, why
did I do it?’
—Well, you acted in good faith according to the informaCon you had at that Cme.
—But it didn’t go well!
That’s how life is. But again and again people torture themselves by imagining that you can have the
clarity that is achieved aYer the event before the event. It’s not possible. This is one of the dangers of
the European enlightenment and the privileging of ra8onal intelligence. This is an intelligence which
relies on analysis, but analysis is not in the moment. In the moment you have to act.
Family therapy is oLen done with a team, so the family is in a room, maybe four, five, six people with
perhaps one therapist. The other therapists are behind a one-‐way glass screen, or maybe with a
video camera, and in the ear of the therapist in the room there is a discreet speaker. The therapist is
with the family when they get a message from the team, “ Tell the eight year old boy to shut up.” The
therapist thinks, “I can’t do that!” Why can’t the therapist do that? Because they are caught up in the
dynamic of the family. And so nobody tells that boy to shut up. Again the team says, “ Tell that boy to

92
shut up.” This 8me the therapist says, “You need to shut up and let your father speak.” The boy is
suddenly very shocked – nobody has ever said that to him. This is really very helpful to understand,
because they say that within even one session, or even half a session, of being in the family matrix,
the therapist is completely inducted into it. So much so that become part of the family and start
having the thoughts which parallel into the family paHern of thought. And so they become useless.
This is why a lot of therapy is not very helpful, since part of our social survival is our malleability, our
plas8city, that allows us to merge in. We actually do need a team of people on the outside seeing the
dynamic and saying, “Interrupt it. Interrupt it!” That’s the only thing that’s going to make a change –
not going along with it. Collusion is always a big problem.
So si[ng in medita8on, is incredibly difficult. At least if you are si[ng in the room having a
conversa8on with someone, you’ve got a sense of perspec8ve. But when it's happening in your own
head, these thoughts coming from all direc8ons, it’s very easy to merge into them. The dreamlike
quality of experience means that we are indeed trapped in this unfolding.
To work with the dreamlike nature of the unfolding of experience, the key point is to see what is the
ground of the experience. Both as it represents itself as the object and as it comes as a subject.
Subject and object arise from the ground of the unborn dharmakaya. They have nowhere else to
come from. Therefore there is nothing to be gained by making sense of them. They don’t need extra
illumina8on; they are the luminosity of the ground.
Now, if in your dreamlike flow of experience you are having a bad day and you feel 8red and
depressed and hopeless, this is the energy of the dharmakaya. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a
problem to be solved by you perhaps speaking differently. But actually, of course, if you stay in that
state with this feeling, you see that this feeling liberates itself. Then when you have contact in an
actual interac8ve way with another person who made you feel depressed, you can allow them to self-‐
liberate as well. That is to say, you needn’t take them so seriously!! In this way you really are working
directly in the moment with the dreamlike state. But if you try to extrapolate yourself from the
situa8on and go up into this helicopter of ra8onal thought – hovering above the situa8on, calling in
conceptual abstrac8ons from other situa8ons, developing your model, your map, your plan of how to
behave – it may be suppor8ve, but in the moment – we just speak. That’s the whole thing. We speak.
We don’t know what we are going to speak or do – we speak.
Many European philosophers have explored this extensively, for example WiHgenstein, Heidegger,
Merleau-‐Ponty, Husserl. Again and again they point to the fact that embodied being means that you
reveal yourself to yourself in the moment of the enactment of that which you do not know. That is to
say, we show ourselves without knowing what we are going to show. I think dzogchen is poin8ng to
something very, very similar: that we cannot be in charge of things.
However, being buddhists, we have got to find a buddhist middle way. It’s not out of control, it’s not
under my control, but being present in it. Again, it's a bit like windsurfing, you are not absolutely in
control because there is the wave, there is the wind, there may be other people in the sea, but you
are moving with that. Or, walking through a busy city street, there are a lot of people and you are
finding your way. Your way involves not bumping into other people, but nobody could say in advance
what their way is going to be down the street, because nobody knows when somebody will suddenly
cut across them.
So, finding your way means that with each step the topology of what’s arising – the actual immediate
shaping of the phenomenological field – is revealed in the same moment as you reveal yourself by
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your par8cipa8on in it. This is really what the dreamlike state is. I think that’s very much like what a
dream is, isn’t it? It’s just sort of unfolding. You can’t rely on conceptual thought to make sense of it.
In my work in the hospital and in my clinic I see again and again how many people believe that
worrying will save them. They believe that worrying is a useful applica8on of mental ac8vity.
However all the evidence is that worry produces nothing but more worry. Worry is a non-‐effec8ve
pseudo-‐problem-‐solving ac8vity. If you want to solve a problem, you take a piece of paper and a pen,
you write down the problem, you then write down three op8ons and you choose one. That’s it! There
is nothing much more than that.
That is why dzogchen instruc8ons always say, 'Stay on the thought that is arising.' Even if you get lost
in one thought, as soon as you become aware of something else emerging in the field, open yourself
to it, don’t hold back from it, open yourself to it – not merging into it, you are just with it and that
returns you into the moment of the unfolding. The dreamlike state is exactly the cusp of the wave.
The wave shows itself in its death, moment by moment; you have the self-‐libera8on of whatever is
arising.
Just try res8ng on that point, which is nowhere. Of course you can only rest on that point if you have
no weight. And you can only have no weight if you experience awareness, which is not full of
conceptual thought as dis8nct from consciousness which is always heavy, since it is carrying the
burden of our thoughts, hopes and fears and so on.
Question about how to behave in the world with others
James: The real task in the prac8ce, as we’ve been indica8ng in so many ways, is integra8on.
That is to say, whatever is happening, is already part of the liberated field. OLen it doesn’t feel like
that, because we take up a posi8on in rela8on to it. And of course in our ordinary lives there are
certain established social choreographies, rhythms and paHerns of interac8on which have to be
followed. For example in a work environment, people need to turn up on 8me and work reasonably
hard and not leave a mess for other people to clear up. That’s what we call reasonable, respecaul
social func8oning.
If someone doesn’t behave in that way, then we need to respond to it. On what basis? This has a lot
to do with 8ming. We oLen think, ‘Well, let’s give them a chance. Maybe they’ll change. Maybe
they’ll do beHer.’ We don’t want to come in too strongly. But if you do that, two things happen. First
you go into a collusion with their bad behaviour, since you are going along with it and adjus8ng and
adap8ng to how they are. Secondly, by the 8me you do speak to them, you’ve probably built up quite
an energe8c emo8onal response to them. In other words you are probably preHy pissed off, and so
whatever comment you make is likely to have an extra charge. If they come in to work and do the
same thing which you have been unhappy about for a long 8me but have said nothing about, and you
then suddenly challenge them very strongly, they are likely to be quite shocked. This would indicate
that one should respond quickly.
First thought best thought

Tibetans say that the first thought is the best thought. We tend not see it that way. We like to think
things through, “I'll get back to you on that”, we say. “Look before you leap.” There is a fear of
impulsivity, which is why it’s important that when we observe ourselves, we learn to discern the
difference between an impulse and a spontaneous ac8on. Is the impulse the reac8va8on of a paHern,
which is already established in yourself. Being irritated at other people’s behaviour is something that

94
we probably all entertain in various ways but different kinds of things will set us off. Some people get
very irritated if they are on a quiet train journey and someone is talking loudly on a mobile phone.
Other people get irritated at people dropping liHer in the street and so on. Some8mes we have a
sense that ‘This should not happen.’ You could call that a superego forma8on. There is the ac8vity,
there is my reac8on to it, and there is the law. And the law is on my side, because according to the
law, what they do is wrong! Unfortunately, I don’t have a sheriff’s badge and a gun... How can they do
that? The answer to that ques8on is always very easy: they can do it because they do it. That’s what
happens. People do these things. Who’s going to stop them?
In London on the underground, lots of people nowadays put their feet on the seats. There are signs
up saying, “Please do not put your feet on the seats.” but who is going to arrest the person? Nobody.
So these are empty signs. This is ‘the death of the father’. The father has been dying for quite a long
8me now, and ‘the death of the father’ is very significant, because, as Nietzsche wrote, when you
have the death of god, you have a lot of confusion arising. If you take away the keystone, which locks
all the other stones in place, the arch collapses. So if you take out the meta-‐signifier, which is the
existence of god, which has held European civilisa8on in place for well over a thousand years, then
everything starts to crumble a liHle bit. Well, why should I? Why not? Everything is up for grabs. You
do as you like. Nobody can tell you off. This is an enormous sense of freedom, but it also means there
will be many different no8ons about how we should live, how we should behave and so on...
So to come back to an earlier ques8on, “On what basis do I challenge someone else’s behaviour?”
What you can say is, “I find that I don’t like it when you do that.” That’s all you are really en8tled to
say. They might reply, “Well, I’m not very concerned with what you like and what you don’t like.” Then
you have a sense of, “Okay, so it’s that kind of a person.”
To imagine that by finding a magic word to stop someone else in their tracks and make them a good
person, according to your frame of reference, then you are probably wrong. We have prisons and
many of the people in our prisons have been imprisoned before. They see the police as people to
avoid, if possible. They have no fear of the police. When you lose your fear – what then is going to
hold you in place? If you are not afraid of what will happen when you die, if you are not afraid of
being caught, then your freedom will tend to be perverse.
What is the purpose of speaking? If I get irritated, then I fill up with my own stuff, which I want to put
on to the other person. Most people don’t want to be vomited on. So they will resist it. Therefore try
to speak before you are full of vomit, even though it feels like righteous vomit to you.
From that point of view, the spontaneous, immediate response is beHer than one that’s been cooking
for a long 8me. However if you are going to act quickly you have to discern whether you are just
doing a number. Somebody was telling me this week that they were in a small café with a friend,
talking with a friend, when the friend suddenly got up saying, “I can’t bear this any longer” and went
to a table nearby and said to two women, “You have to speak quietly or move somewhere else
because I can’t bear the noise you make!” “Well”, I said to the pa8ent, ‘your friend was very lucky
they didn’t hit her.” The women got up and moved away. This woman was saying, “I can’t bear this!”
This wasn’t the first 8me in her life she had had this experience. She had a wound on her body, which
was being reac8vated by a situa8on and she responded from that, but in quite an aggressive way,
which bore no rela8on to these people. She didn’t give them any polite warning. She was right on
their case.

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So this is one of the advantages of medita8on: it gives us a chance to observe our habitual mental
forma8ons. What are my obsessions? What are the things that get to me? Because if I know that,
then I can observe whether or not as I am arising into communica8on with another person, I am
riding on top of a pre-‐packaged set of assump8ons. If I am doing that, then what I do is likely to be
inappropriate. That’s what I would suggest to you under those circumstances.
Being spontaneous is not the spontaneity of the individual as an individual, but it’s the spontaneity of
the connec8on of the field, the spontaneity arises through the coming-‐together of the emergent
field. It means a deconstruc8on of the sense of individual agency. As long as we feel that it’s all up to
me, then it’s going to be hard.
In my work as a therapist I see people; they come into the room; I sit down; they sit down; I look at
them; they look at me; they don’t say anything; I don’t say anything and then aLer some 8me, they
say
–Are you not going to say anything?
– What should I say?
– Well, I’ve come here for help. Are you not going to going to help me?
– How will I help you?
Then they get very angry with me. Because they think it’s my job to do the work. But I don’t know
what to work on, because they haven’t shown me what the problem is. This is very important, isn’t
it? In order to work together, to collaborate, there has to be a sense of how you engage. Which
means that both people have to show themselves. So when you find yourself ge[ng into a situa8on
where it’s all arising out of yourself, it gets very difficult. Now, of course we can’t collaborate with
everyone. If possible in life, we should try not to hang out with people we can’t collaborate with.
That’s the best thing to do.
Connections
Tibetans have a word, tendrel [-ེན་འEེལ་], which means a connec8on. Drelwa [འEེལ་བ་] means to join
and ten [-ེན་] means a support. It means that there is a basis for connec8vity. They would say that if
there is no tendrel, if there is no basis for us ge[ng together into something, we shouldn’t even try.
Why would you bother? The world is full of people. If somebody needs a doctor or a lama or a this or
a that, go to somebody you feel a connec8on with. The nature of connec8on is very, very important.
Over the years I have worked with many different translators. With some translators it’s very easy;
you are relaxed, you trust them and it’s a lyrical flowing between you. With other people it’s quite
difficult. With some translators I say only a few words at a 8me. Building up a long sentence phrase
by phrase is quite an interes8ng challenge for me, especially when my mind is racing ahead. Then
they ask, “What was that you said? Can you repeat it?” I don’t remember what I said because I’m
already thinking ahead. So in a sense I can’t really work with that person.
It is important not to operate on the basis that everything should be fine and that everybody should
try hard and that we can find a way. We may not find a way. What is the basis is that there is a
connec8on. Usually that connec8on shows itself very immediately. Even if the basis is very good,
even if there is huge poten8al when people meet together, it s8ll has to be developed by care and
aHen8on, because the seeds of destruc8on are in everything. All of us are going to die. Things can
survive, if people take care of them. If they don’t take care of them, they won’t survive. Even though
a good ground may be there, it has to be developed. However if a bad ground is there and even

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though you put a lot of development into it, you are not likely to get a good outcome. If you want to
say ‘yes’, you have to be willing to say ‘no’. You can’t say ‘yes’ to everything.
The buddha is not a nice man

Idiot compassion doesn’t mean being nice. I told you what C R Lama said: “The buddha is not a nice
man.” He might be helpful, he might be useful, he might be very aware and present, but he is not
necessarily nice. Nice is nothing very useful. The social forma8on of ‘nice’ is very similar to olive oil. It
allows people to slither and distort themselves and sign up to situa8ons when actually they should
have said ‘no’. Because they wanted to be nice: “I don’t like to upset other people’s feelings.” How
stupid is that? That means that other people’s feelings – other people who actually are messed up
and confused – are now going to determine the limits of your existence. To what end? What is the
purpose of that? “Well, I don’t like to upset people…”
Think of dependent co-‐origina8on, the chain of cause and effect. If you say ‘yes’ to a situa8on that’s
not valid, you are going to make a lot of problems for everyone, for yourself, for the other person and
so on. This is why – and I’ve seen this with many Tibetan lamas – somebody comes and says,
—Oh, Rinpoche, I want to study with you...
The lama looks at them, asks a few ques8ons and then says,
—I don’t think this is the right place for you. You should go somewhere else. No, you are
not for me.
—Oh? But Rinpoche, I have so much respect for you and really want to…
—Why? Why do you want to be with me?
—Because... because everybody says you are this and that…
—There is a lama everyone says is very excellent on the other side of the hill. Go there.
If it’s not there, it’s not there.
When we take the bodhisaHva vow and say, “I will work to help all senCent beings.” It means that I
need to develop a capacity to do what I can with certain people at certain 8mes. It doesn’t mean that
there is a one-‐size-‐fits-‐all. It really doesn’t. We can waste a lot of energy in life trying to make
situa8ons work that can not work. To do that is really unhelpful. Maybe I told some of you this
before. I had lived in India for a long 8me and when I came back I was trying to get some work. I
managed to get into a training for drama therapy and on the basis of that I later trained as an art
therapist and did other trainings. I applied for lots and lots of jobs. I remember going for an interview
at a centre for people with physical and mental handicaps. ALer talking with the panel one of them
said to me, “James, I don’t really think you want to wipe someone’s bum.” ... I thought, “You are right.
I don’t want to do that…” It was really, really helpful, a very helpful thing to say to me. Yes, I wanted a
job and I had a fantasy to help people, but they said, “ This is what is required. You don’t fit here. We
can tell. This is not for you.” So – it’s like that. It’s very helpful not to give people the sense that there
is a possibility of something, when there isn’t. Instead of using all your energy to make something
work that doesn’t work, that energy could be used to make something that could really work, work.
However you have to be very skilful if you are going to say ‘no’.
Perhaps it sounds to you as if what I’ve been saying for the last half hour is self-‐indulgent nonsense,
but it’s exactly the no8on of the nirmanakaya, how it comes into the world. The tradi8onal
descrip8on of nirmanakaya says that if there are people who need a bridge to cross a river, the
nirmanakaya manifests as a bridge. If there are people crossing the desert and it’s very hot, the
nirmanakaya manifests as a tree. It means it manifests according to the need of the actual situa8on.
You begin with the actual situa8on, with a reading of the actual situa8on. This means you are
condemned to your limited capacity to give an accurate reading of the actual situa8on. That’s what

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we are condemned to. We see ‘through a glass darkly.’ We don’t see as clearly as we would like to,
and yet we cannot avoid ac8ng. Yes, we are going to make mistakes, but if you wait un8l you get to a
level where you don’t make mistakes, you will never act. That is a problema8c of our lived situa8on.
[End of Day Three]
OUR MIND IS EXPERIENCE AND OUR WORLD IS DISCONTINUOUS

Now we move towards the ending of our brief 8me together… but the ending has been coming from
the very beginning, just as our death has been with us from the moment of our concep8on, just as
each moment thoughts arise – and then they vanish. Everything is arising and passing; there is
nothing to hold on to. This provokes anxiety for the aspect of ourselves that feels it needs something
to hold on to. This is why we spend our 8me trying to shiL the focus of our aHen8on from
consciousness, which needs an object, to awareness, which doesn’t need an object. As long as we are
rested in a dualis8c consciousness, the passage of 8me, the change of situa8ons, is going to provoke
anxiety. From the anxiety many things are evoked, anger, distrust, abandonment...
The issue is that of polari8es. Going back to the basic no8on of the five skandhas, firstly we have
form, which is the immediacy of shape and colour, and then we have feeling-‐tone, posi8ve, nega8ve
or neutral. We are drawn to some things and not to others however what we think is good (sugar),
may well be not very good; and what we think is bad (exercise), may not be very bad at all. Any idea
that the immediacy of the feeling-‐tone contains a natural intelligence is quite probably false, which
brings us to the key point – we cannot trust ourselves.
This is the most essen8al teaching of the buddha through all the different levels: we have to trust
something else. On an outer level we take refuge in buddha, dharma and sangha. In dzogchen we
take refuge, or we merge into, or we integrate, with the ground. Why? Because the ground is reliable.
It never changes, whereas we as individuals, as personali8es, are full of fluctua8ons, of feelings, of
warmth and closeness and distance, of hot and cold. We are awash with the polari8es.
The polari8es arise from the nature of duality. As soon as you start to say ‘self’ and ‘other’ – and this
is established through reifica8on, the crea8on of the no8on of things – you then have a lot to sort
out. Polari8es operate as organising principles. This person is taller than that person; this person is
faHer than that person; this person can run quicker than that person and so on. All through our
childhood we are working out where we stand in rela8on to the other people.
Clearly these opposi8onal categorisa8ons can be very helpful since they operate on the basis of the
law of exclusion. If something is hot, it is not cold; if something is tall, it’s not short. Of course we
know that that is rela8ve. If somebody is two metres tall, they are tall in comparison to somebody
who is one metre fiLy. If somebody came along who was two metres fiLy, the two metre person
would look small. But moment by moment – because we see things in this isolated imaging – we take
the totality of the moment as something within which we can have definite knowledge.
The buddhist teaching again and again points to the importance of rela8visa8on of whatever is
occurring – that everything is contextual. It appears to be like this, due to this par8cular
configura8on. When the configura8on changes it’s going to be different. The more we see this, the
more we see how we are cheated by believing in our own intelligence, by believing in the truth of our
own perceptual construc8on. By believing in the power of our own narra8ve to explain what is going
on and come to definite conclusions about ourselves or other people – all of this is simply situa8onal.
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Our mind is like space in that it is ungraspable and infinite, and it is also like the sun which arises in
space for it illuminates everything which occurs. When the light of the sun fills space this is the clarity
of non-‐duality. Our sun-‐like awareness, rigpa, provides the illumina8ng clarity of the mirror within
which many reflec8ons occur. Our ordinary mind is mixed up inside the reflec8ons and lacks both
clarity and spaciousness.
The important dis8nc8on in dzogchen is that we are not trying to let go of busy-‐mindedness in order
to be in awareness. We recognise that this is itself the energy of awareness. When we sit in the
medita8on, whether the mind is clear or not clear, when we are looking around and see things, all of
this is experience.
Our mind is experience. There is no experiencer of the experience, but the experience is revealed in
the clarity of the mind. The mind is not a point or a person. For example, I am si[ng here now and
however I turn my head, I have a par8cular experience; I turn my head and I have this experience,
now this experience and so on. So we are used to the no8on that if there is an experience there must
be an experiencer, that there is no experience without an experiencer. Who is the experiencer? It’s
me. But when we start to aHend to ourselves we see that what I call ‘me’, what feels like ‘me’, is itself
an experience. It’s arising and passing. There is no stable, con8nuous self. So, every 8me we act in
order to stabilise our own posi8on, our own iden8ty, we are aliena8ng ourselves further from the
ground, which is the actual basis of ourselves.
Essen8ally we wander in samsara like a child who’s lost in a big department store, crying out for its
mother, looking everywhere, having temper tantrums and falling on the floor. Actually the mother is
always there. The ground of our nature is present every moment. You cannot lose your own nature.
Everything that occurs is the energy of your own nature – including the experience of having lost your
own nature. The ground of our being is open all the 8me and when we rest in that we see all the
experience as the play.
This does not mean that we can suddenly make it much nicer than it appears at the moment, but we
don’t have to take it so seriously. However when we are trapped in paHerns, then how we behave
and how others behave can become truly disturbing. We start to sort it out in terms of hopes/fears,
right/wrong, closeness/distance and so on, always trying to locate ourselves or shape ourselves in a
posi8on that gives rise to safety, security and con8nuity. But there is no safety, or security, or
con8nuity.
Our world is discon8nuous. It is exactly discon8nuous. If we decide that we are not going to get up
and leave this room in the this dharma centre eventually the management will probably call the
police. Because there is a programme. Other people have booked to come here. “But we are here!”
We are only here due to causes and condi8ons. This is a rela8ve situa8on. When we first arrived we
may have felt uneasy but now that it is 8me to go we are feeling more comfortable. How do we join
together these moments, these transient moments, these events? How do we gather them together
into a paHern, because our anxiety makes us feel we need a paHern? This is our basic problem in life.
What sort of story will we tell ourselves to make sense of difficul8es that arise? Should I stay or
should I go? What’s the deal? What’s the issue? Is this good enough, is it not good enough? All the
8me we are trying to work out what is the meaning or the relevance of this situa8on? We are ge[ng
an input and then we are trying to process it and decide what are the implica8ons?

99
There are many different methods for managing or manipula8ng paHerns of experience and we have
looked at some of these already in terms of renuncia8on, in terms of aspira8on of the bodhisaHva
vow, in terms of tantra, linking everything into the mandala of the deity and so on.
All of these are ways of dealing with anxiety, with the fact that we don’t know. Our anxiety drives us
to find a way of helping ourselves to know something, but every revealing is a concealing. Here we
have this moment, which you could say is a fractal, or a paHerned piece of a much larger picture. This
fractal contains much smaller ones, just as this penul8mate session is just a fractal of the movement
towards our own death and contains the deaths of many, many moments inside it. Each of these
moments is unique and specific and will never be repeated. Each moment of our existence is here
and then it’s gone. ‘Unique specificity’ or ‘unrepeatability’ is simply another way of talking what
dzogchen texts describe as ‘fresh’. It’s fresh.
When each moment self-‐liberates or vanishes by itself, something new arises. Now we see the
con8nuity of things. When we get up in the morning we look around, we see people, we see their
faces. ‘Well, I’ve seen you before!’ Who have we seen before? What is the state of that person? It
may be very different this morning from how it was last night. It’s a new situa8on. If we want to
organise our experience of a person on the basis of a narra8ve of con8nuity that reassures us – that
they will s8ll feel the same about us today as they did yesterday thereby ge[ng a valida8on of the
con8nuity of our own individual experience – what happens is that we will be alienated from the
actuality of the moment. We will be relying on the abstrac8on of paHerns which maintain themselves
only by edi8ng out a great deal of what is going on.
How dzogchen integrates all phenomena as the path

This is our predicament. If we go for the con8nuity of iden8ty through paHern, we can’t aHend to the
emergent phenomenological field. If we aHend to the emergent phenomenological field, we have to
be with it as it changes, and who is the one who can be with that? Not the ego-‐iden8ty.
Consciousness cannot embrace all that is occurring, because consciousness, by its very nature, is
selec8ve. Awareness, like the mirror, is non-‐selec8ve, so you get more. But what do you do with all
that you get?
This ques8on can only be answered through prac8ce. You may have received endless explana8ons,
but you need to have the experience yourself of what the texts call ‘natural clarity,’ or ‘the clarity of
the self-‐organisa8on of what is occurring’. In the Tibetan language they have lots of terms such as
rigpa rang tsal [རིག་པ་རང་=ལ་] or rigpa rang nang [རིག་པ་རང་Fང་] the energy of awareness, or the
natural appearance of awareness, which all indicate that whatever is occurring is to be known simply
as the energy of the mind and not as anything else. That doesn’t mean a kind of homogenisa8on,
everything being put into a blender. Yes, everything has one taste which is the taste of emp8ness, but
each moment has its own unique specific taste. How will we know what it is? Because we will taste it.
Let’s say you are walking in the forest, seeing what is around you. The person who is with you wants
to tell you the genus and species of each tree plus some other informa8on about the tree.
—Oh, please be quiet, I am just looking.
—No, but do you know what exactly it is?
—It’s this! It’s this!
And this is the issue, isn’t it? When you go in the forest you get it. What do you get? You get this. But
what is it? ‘It’s this.’ ‘No, no, no…’

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So is the immediacy enough? It’s more than enough, because there is always a lot of it, a huge
amount of it. What do we do with it? There is nothing to do with it because – it’s gone. Then there is
the next moment and the next moment... and you find yourself just surfing through this experience
without any pockets. There is nowhere to put things. There is nowhere to hide things. There is
neither gain nor loss. The Dhammapada, an early buddhist text, says that there is no gain, there is no
loss; there is no winning, there is no losing. There is no accumula8on. The Heart Sutra says there is
no accumula8on; there is no enlightenment; there is nothing to gain because everything which arises
cannot be grasped; there is no grasper because the grasper is also an impermanent forma8on.
What we take to be the experiencer – I, me, myself – is the energy of the mind; it’s not a thing. Our
self has no self-‐existence, but that doesn’t mean we don’t exist at all. Clearly, we exist. But we exist as
an unfolding of energy which arises in rela8on to the non-‐dual field that it is always already a part of.
This is the way in which we aHempt to bring the integra8on of all phenomena as the path in
dzogchen. You don’t have the path unless you have the ground. The ground is to recognise the
unborn openness of the mind, to see that everything which arises in the medita8on comes from the
mind. We are doing the medita8on with our eyes open; everything in the room comes from the
mind... Not my mind, but the mind. What I call my mind comes from the mind; that is to say – the
mind in terms of awareness.
Mind as a cogni8ve interpre8ve capacity is simply one aspect of manifesta8on. Trees, dogs, horses,
motorcars – these are other aspects of manifesta8on. Everything is manifes8ng, interac8ng and
vanishing, manifes8ng, interac8ng, vanishing... The manifes8ng is the interac8on. The interac8on of
the ground and its crea8vity, the interac8on of the paHerns of the crea8vity as they move together,
and then the integra8on of these paHerns and the ground as they dissolve into where they have
come from. It’s not that they come from one place and go to another place. Nor are they going from
emp8ness into form.
There is no journey because there is no non-‐duality. When a thought arises in the mind, it’s like a
reflec8on arising in the mirror. It’s the manifes8ng of the emp8ness in the emp8ness. The emp8ness
shows itself as the image but the image is not other than the emp8ness. This is the unborn nature. So
whatever we get trapped in, whether it’s depression or anger or self-‐doubt or blaming other people,
all of these phenomena have no other source than the natural ground. When the natural ground is
forgoHen we can relate these paHerns to our childhood, the behaviour of other people, to a
menstrual cycle, to the hormonal structure of the body, to brain chemistry… There are endless kinds
of explana8ons that we come up with about why we have par8cular kinds of experience. There are
millions and millions of books explaining why we are the way we are.
From the point of view of dzogchen you don’t need any explana8on; if you just sit with yourself you
will see this is how it is. The explana8on is part of the crea8vity and the crea8vity can show endless
forms. Whatever of its forms you grasp – you are ea8ng shit, extruded out of the anus of 8me.
Absolutely disgus8ng, dégueulasse... But that’s what it is. You come to a conclusion about someone –
you have just shat out an image of them. This liHle turd of iden8ty and it is now floa8ng around in
your mind-‐stream. That person is gone away, is becoming somebody else but we are now stuck with
this mental representa8on, which we think is them. When we next meet them, we see them through
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Knowledge is violence
That is what is meant when people say that knowledge is violence. This is a very central no8on.
Knowledge is violence. The ego is violent in its rela8on with the world because it seeks domina8on,
supremacy, control of territory. It’s like how na8on states seek to preserve the con8nuity of their own
na8onal iden8ty. If you can’t protect the border of your country against invasion, how are you going
to protect the con8nuity of your culture, your language, your educa8on system and so on? You have
to keep the other out.
When we build up images of ourselves and other people, we want to maintain these paHerns and we
do that by construc8ng a boundary. You say something about someone and someone else asks, “Are
you sure? I don’t experience them that way.” – “Well, maybe that’s your experience, but anyway – this
is what I feel...” Because we want to return to this definite knowledge. Over the last few days we have
been looking at how dzogchen is not about definite knowledge based on the appropria8on of
transient paHerns of manifesta8on. It’s based on a definite res8ng in, abiding in, integra8on with the
ground of experience. This is the only unchanging thing. In the Tibetan tradi8on there are many,
many words for this gyur me [འGར་མེད་], mi gyur wa [མི་འGར་བ་], ne pa [གནས་པ་] and all mean that the
only unchanging thing is the dharmakaya, which is the recogni8on of the empty ground of
awareness. Everything else is movement. Every aHempt to stabilise movement will be a lie and the
insistence on the lie will be a violence.
What do we do with history? There are facts: the English invaded Scotland. The bastards! Which
English invaded Scotland? Well, they all do, all of them, all the 8me, endlessly, ceaselessly, forever, to
the end of 8me... No, at a certain period of 8me some of them did. So what are we Scots going to do
now? Do we hate the English? Should we look for their bodies and dig them up and break their
bones? Who is the enemy? The English. Which English? Any old English. Europe is riven with these
histories. All over the world, tribal groupings, na8onal groupings hold on to history, on the basis of
which they ‘know’ what other groupings are like. And ‘knowing’ what they are like, don’t trust them.
In Britain people were very suspicious of the legacy of Charles de Gaulle. He was a very tricky guy, for
all sorts of reasons. So the poli8cal and economic rela8ons between England and France have all
kinds of rivalries embedded in them. Knowing the history, having accumulated informa8on, what do
you do with it? It must mean something. What does it mean? I don’t know – it must mean something.
Therefore we have to use it. On the basis of this...On the basis of what Germany did in the war... But
which Germany? Which Germans? Many people s8ll hold this history. In Greece, they are star8ng to
make statements about how ‘all the Germans are Nazis’, because they are pu[ng an economic
squeeze on Greece. Modern Germans are not Nazis but there is an iden8fica8on which says that this
firm strong control is just another form of a fascis8c structure. So there you have a complex, an
archetype if you prefer, a mental forma8on, which is quiescent, which is peacefully res8ng in the
freezer for quite a long 8me, and then, due to causes and condi8ons, it is evoked and – waaahhhh...
All these unresolved pains and hurts of the past rise up, and on the basis of that you get some new
kind of conflict. We see this happening externally all the 8me.
The internal and the external structures are the same. We are not different from the socio-‐economic
poli8cal structure of the cultures we live in. We also take posi8ons; we also work out friends and
enemies; inclusion, exclusion... They say there are no real friends in poli8cs, only momentary benefit.
This is a kind of realpoli8k? We adjust things. We describe ourselves in different ways to different
people. Our sense of self, which we try to hang on to, is a very slippery tool that we use in different
ways in different contexts. It’s very unreliable, but it can be useful – some of the 8me.

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I am saying this to encourage you to be aware of the unfolding of the various paHerns of your iden8ty
and in par8cular with the emo8onal investments that you put into par8cular forma8ons, and try to
see what is the real func8on of this? Because every 8me you try to stabilise the self-‐concept, you
create a plane of difference with the environment around you, in which the varia8on of the field, as it
moves, becomes problema8c. In a moving field, trying to stabilise something is difficult. I gave you
the example before of me in the rush-‐hour in London walking across London Bridge. If I decide that I
am going to keep walking in a straight line, I’ll get a lot of problems, because there are many
commuters and they are criss-‐crossing, going in different ways, some people are walking slowly, some
quickly. If you look from above, it’s a very elaborate movement of human bodies in and out and
through each other with paHerns. Were I to walk in a straight line through that, I would bang into a
lot of people. So, the deal is that if you want to cross here, keep moving. Be reflexive, responsive and
work out where the space is between people.
This brings us back to the central point of the three kayas, or the three modes of enlightened being.
The dharmakaya has no form, no colour, no taste, no size, it’s unborn, it’s open like the sky, it’s
infinite, it doesn’t stand in opposi8on to anything else. This is the ground of our being. This shows
itself as the radiance of experience – experience which in its most natural form is free of conceptual
interpreta8on. That doesn’t mean that conceptual interpreta8on doesn’t exist in it, but it’s not
relying on conceptual interpreta8on. This is an unfolding, changing field and within this, we
ourselves, moment by moment, emerge con8ngently. That is to say, we emerge with the field, we are
co-‐emergent with the paHerning of the field. This is how it is.
Last night, people were dancing. The music changes, the bodies change. Different people dance in
different ways. It’s very nice to watch; somebody is dancing on their own, then somebody comes up
and starts to dance with them and the person who was dancing on their own maybe making three
moves, now has moved onto five moves, because two moves have come from somebody else. Ha?
It’s like that. This is exactly the example of how we live.
We get stuck in a rut, we are doing our liHle paHern and suddenly we meet someone – we start to do
something different! Other people show us the possibility of the infinite poten8al of our range; we
become other than who we thought we were. To remain stuck in a fixa8on about who you are, you
have to block out the world. Because the invita8on to become yourself – in the sense that the self is a
showing of poten8al rather than the revealing of an en8ta8ve essence – if you resist that, then
everyone is experienced as the enemy, because they are doing things to me, blaming me, judging me.
OLen we react like this when we are trying to hold on to an image of ourselves, because we feel
anxious about the groundlessness of our iden8ty. We feel that we should exist in a substan8al way –
because we imagine that other people are substan8al – and that we alone are insubstan8al. We
imagine that falsely.
There was some well-‐known research done on evalua8ng doctors. Doctors were asked to place
themselves in one of four categories of performance: best, good, not so good, worst. That’s all they
had to do. 85% of all doctors put themselves in the top quar8le. Why not? This is clearly an
impossibility. 85% cannot all be best. But this is how we are; our mental no8on of how the world is
and our place in the world is usually very inaccurate. We may feel that we are much worse than other
people or we may feel that we are beHer than other people. We may feel we are very good at
something when actually we are very incompetent. Our mental representa8ons have floated free of
actuality. Why? Because actuality is not a mental representa8on. Narra8ve is not actuality. Dzogchen
is concerned with actuality. Whenever we tell a story about ourselves, we are telling a lie, because all

103
stories are lies. “Once upon a Cme, long, long ago...in a far-‐off land...” This is how every sentence
should begin. Because this is how it is. We are fabrica8ng.
So in the prayer that my teacher used to say all the 8me, Ma Cho Tro Tral… [མ་བཅོས་Hོས་Eལ་] Ma Cho
means un-‐ar8ficial, free of ar8fice, not fabricated, not put together, not a construct. So in terms of
the five skandhas this means not a samskara, not this fourth skandha at all, none of that, none of the
habitual forma8ons of percep8on, none of the interpreta8ons of feeling-‐tone. Then it says Tro Tral.
Tro Pa, prapancha in Sanskrit, refers to a kind of polarised posi8oning. So, only one thing, many
different things, everlas8ng, impermanent and so on – It speaks to the genera8on of meaning
through binary opposi8on, through the structure of opposi8onal categories that were laid-‐out in the
philosophical movement of structuralism by Claude Lévi-‐Strauss and others.
Structuralism unfortunately vanished very quickly from the European horizon, but it’s probably the
most useful understanding for buddhists because you could show very clearly, by analysing the myths
and cultural prac8ces of the many different groupings across the world, how meaning is generated
through binary opposi8on. For example there was a very interes8ng study by Mary Douglas called
‘Purity and Danger’3, in which she looks at food paHerns, par8cularly Jewish food paHerns, and tries
to understand this whole no8on of milk and blood in a kosher kitchen. Why should these not be
brought together? These are symbolic things, because they are category defini8ons. Not all other
people make that same dis8nc8on. In fact, in some cultures blood and milk are mixed together and
this is considered to be a very powerful drink for the health. What structuralism points to, is the fact
that it’s the differen8a8on of groupings that is the matrix out of which we generate par8cular
meanings. Buddhism has been saying the same thing for a long, long 8me.
Three kinds of ignorance

The tantric tradi8on describes ignorance as having three stages, or levels or aspects. The first is called
co-‐emergent ignorance, in which the ground is present and there is the arising of confusion about the
ground. Like on a summer’s day you look and there is a clear blue sky and then you look again and
you start to see these liHle clouds manifes8ng. The Tibetan metaphor implies that the clouds arise
from the sky. For some reason the sky generates its own obscura8on. It is a similar idea to how the
Indian tradi8on makes a metaphor using copper and verdigris: copper, leL outside, will generate
verdigris and the verdigris arises out of the copper by itself, and that this green toned pa8na, which
emerges on the surface of the copper, is the copper showing a dulling aspect of itself, just as the
cloud fills the sky and hides the sky from us, and seemingly from itself. Likewise with co-‐emergent
ignorance, the clarity of the mind is there, but the clarity shows or reveals, is a sudden thought-‐
complex, which is full of ignorance. When this thought complex takes on a kind of iden8ty of its own,
there is a forgeaulness of the ground. The ground is there, this would not be there without the
ground.
It’s like when you look at the sky and you think, “Oh, no, it’s a cloud sky again. I hate these grey
days...” – the cloud is in the sky. When the cloud goes out of the sky we see the blue sky. The cloud
has nowhere else to be except in the sky. The sky, the blue sky, hasn’t been pushed out someplace
else by the cloud. Space is always full of things. These things are the occupancy of space. Space is not
displaced; space is not an en8ty like water from a bath. You get in a full bath too quickly and – shlupp
– water splashes over the edge, because the mass of your body displaces the equal volume of the
water. Space is not an en8ty like that. It never gets displaced.
3Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 2002)
104
Co-‐emergent ignorance, lhan chig kye pai ma rig pa, describes the arising of ignorance in the ground.
By the word ‘ground’ is not meant a flat surface; it’s more like a hologram sphere, a kind of infinite
expanse without any rela8onal co-‐ordinates, in which manifesta8on comes in any direc8on, so there
is this sudden – if you like – puff! a constella8on, a paHerning, and the energy inside that, in
becoming self-‐referen8al, loses the no8on of connec8vity with its own ground. It appears to be self-‐
exis8ng.
Another example: a spinning top. When first you see it, it is lying on the ground, but you pick it up,
set it spinning with a strong push, and then sit back and look, ‘Wow, look! It’s spinning!’ It seems to
be spinning by itself, it’s going round and round and round... If you don’t push it, it won’t spin but as
soon as you make the originatory ac8on, by which you put the energy of your body into the spinning
cycle, it holds that energy un8l it’s dispersed and exhausted, and then the top falls over. Just as, at
the moment of concep8on, the male and female essences come together and begin the development
of the cell structure into the foetus and so on – in the Tibetan tradi8on, the white seed-‐essence of
the male goes up into the brain and the red female essence goes down into the navel and they
remain there un8l you die and when you die they come together in the central channel and meet in
the heart and that’s the point of death – so these energies in the body maintain an opposi8onal force
and it’s the genera8on between them which is what we call life. When it is spinning, the spinning top
seems to be self-‐exis8ng.
In the same way, these thoughts, which are in our mind, seem to have a life of their own. One
thought leads to another, to another. This is called the second level of ignorance, called kun tu tag pai
ma rig pa in Tibetan and it means the ignorance of naming everything, or the ignorance of the
semio8c web, the ignorance of believing that interpreta8on is self-‐valid. I see that you are wearing a
yellow sweater. It’s a very nice sweater. I like this colour very much. So, I ‘know’ for a fact what you
are wearing this. Looks like it’s made of wool. Actually, what I see is a mass of colour. The fact that it’s
wool, the fact that I call it a sweater – this is added by my mind.
This is what this level of ignorance means: it’s that the func8on of the mind seems to be embedded
in the object. We see things as if they were exis8ng out there because the energy – like spinning the
top – that creates the yellow sweater is not in the yellow sweater. The energy of the spinning top is
not in the top – it is in the top, because I’ve spun it, but the top doesn’t generate its own energy.
What you are wearing is not self-‐defining as a yellow sweater, because if somebody only speaks
German they are never going to call that a yellow sweater. I, being an English speaker, and being lazy
and not learning other languages – for me it is completely a yellow sweater. I don’t really have access
to anything else to call it. Do you see what I mean? So the object appears to have its own essen8al
iden8ty and the fact that it’s emerging as a dynamic interac8on of the energy of the mind is forgoHen
to us.
This gives rise to the third level of ignorance, which is the ignorance of the stupidity of not
understanding karma; that is to say, just as we see the yellow sweater as exis8ng in itself, we see
moments of 8me exis8ng in themselves. So, if I decide to steal something – say I decide to steal this
watch and I put it in my bag. Then somebody asks, “Hey, has anybody seen my watch?” – “No, no...I
don’t know what’s happened...” Anyway, we are all leaving very soon and now I am at the airport –
“Hey, I’ve got a good watch! They are never going to find out who stole the watch. I have been
successful.” That event is concluded – full stop.

105
This mental interpreta8on is the same as saying, ‘You are wearing a yellow sweater.’ It seems to be
something exis8ng out there in itself: the theL of the watch is completed. But the theL of the watch
was a series of ac8vi8es, just as the iden8fica8on ‘yellow sweater’ was a series of mental
ac8vi8es.Both are maintained by the mental ac8vity. This watch is now only mine as the result of
these ac8ons. Unless I feel guilty and think about pos8ng it back to the person, I am now the carrier
of a watch which has a history involving my perfidy, my chea8ng nature.
This quality of my chea8ng nature is a dynamic inside me, which oscillates in rela8on to the
phenomenological field. Sooner or later it meets a parallel resonance and something manifests that’s
going to impact me. That is all really that karma means – it’s a theory of vibra8on. So the key thing
about the ignorance of being stupid or of not understanding karma means that you think an event is
concluded with no carry-‐over. But there is always a carry-‐over, and a carry-‐over, and a carry-‐over...
since we live in this ever linking, ever changing concatena8on of causal forces. This is dependent co-‐
origina8on. If you are a bit off-‐balance, the next moment you have to re-‐balance; and in re-‐balancing
you go off-‐balance. So we are always off-‐balance, seeking that central point of stability which we
never achieve. Imbalance, imbalance, imbalance, imbalance... Reac8vity, pro-‐ac8vity. Some8mes I
seem to be the agent ac8ng on the world, some8mes I am the recipient of the agency of others. We
live in this endless interweaving waving of mo8on, within which we make an interpreta8on that says.
“Well, that’s done. That’s finished. That’s over.” But it’s not over... because – there is a carry-‐over.
Wobbling: excess and lack

Lack in ourselves leads to ac8vity which generates excess. It’s very difficult to have an ac8vity which is
free of lack or excess. Some8mes, when I had nothing beHer to do, I’d watch gymnas8cs on the
television. I am endlessly fascinated – they have a wooden bar and someone stands on the wooden
bar and they do a double somersault and land on the wooden bar! I can’t imagine such a thing. The
fear that would come in my body... I remember as a child going to the swimming pool and climbing
up the stairs to the high diving board and staying there for what felt like a long 8me and then
climbing down again. Some fear took me over. I can do many crazy things – but that, I couldn’t do. So
I have that fear and watching these gymnasts do something I could not imagine being able to do...
Not only that, but they have to land on the bar and not wobble! How incredible! Then at the end,
they do a triple somersault backwards and land on the mat. Ah! And if their feet move, they lose
points...So there you have excess and lack. How do you get that middle point – it’s almost impossible
in life. Almost impossible. You get an Olympic gold medal if you can do that.
Most of us are wobbling all the 8me. This is the genera8on of karma. It’s that there is a pulsa8on –
too much, too liHle; too much, too liHle. This is the basis of the two-‐stroke engine and here, at night, I
can hear all the teenage boys – brroooooom – going down the roads, because it’s very exci8ng to
have a noisy liHle two-‐stroke engine. Put-‐put, put-‐put, put-‐put – the piston is going tup-‐tup, tup-‐tup...
This is what we do all the 8me; the heart – systolic, diastolic, systolic, diastolic... the lungs: in-‐out, in-‐
out... If you stop breathing you are dead. This is it. We are ac8ve creatures. Now when you look at
charts of the movement of the heart, they tend to be a bit irregular. As far as I understand, the
heartbeat is only completely regular when it’s flat-‐lining; some kind of fluctua8on is always going to
occur. Life is varia8on and varia8on means that it’s very difficult to get the right balance – this is what
karma means.
What is it that gives the extra charge into the ac8vity? Well, it’s our hopes and fears. We imagine that
if I steal the watch I’ve got something, defined on my terms. But of course the stolen watch carries its
own charge, because there is an aspect of me, maybe somewhat repressed, which is concerned with
106
guilt, with shame and with poten8ally being found out. So there is an extra frisson, a kind of
energe8c vibra8on which aHaches to this. It’s not a tranquil object. If we think about our lives, the
objects in them are charged with this.
Rigdzin Godem wrote a prayer in which he writes that he prac8ses renuncia8on and goes into retreat
and he simplifies his life and his mind becomes calm – but then he starts to become disturbed by the
valency of the everyday objects of his life. The bowl which he used to drink his tea out off started to
become more and more important for him. At first it was just something to drink his tea from but he
he is doing a retreat and there isn’t much else to look at and so he is looking at his bowl – and now
his bowl starts to ...hmmm!.. it starts to look very special, ‘my bowl!’ All kinds of associa8ons come
on the bowl. In that moment he could see that he is making the bowl what it is to him. Before, the
bowl was neutral. It was a just a func8onal u8lity. And now it represents his iden8ty. We see this
ourselves, don’t we? We put ourselves into the objects of our daily use, which means that we extend
ourselves out. And this extension makes holes in us.
Carlos Castaneda writes in one of his books that Mexican nagual shamans, who work with energy,
can read in someone’s body whether they have children or not. They say that as soon as you have a
child, holes appear in your chest, that you have lines of connec8on out of your body to this other, this
other who is now you. They say that your chest will never seal again. They say that people who don’t
have children are much more sealed. I think this is a very interes8ng way of looking: you can’t stop
this other being part of you – because they have been part of you, part of your existence.
The same can apply to somebody’s house, their motorcar, their job; it can even apply to their own
body. Somebody can be over-‐iden8fied with their beauty or their ugliness or scars on their body, or
excess fat, or the fact that they’ve got very hairy armpits! People get anxious about all sorts of
aspects of their body and this becomes invested with being a core-‐defini8on of who they are.
Because of this, the investment creates an excess of meaning and value, which then generates
ac8vity in all sorts of direc8ons.
So these three levels of ignorance operate together; they link into what I was saying about the nature
of binary opposi8on being the generator of meaning. Once you start to create substan8alised
differen8a8on of phenomena in the world, once you start to see the world as composed of things,
you yourself become composed of things. We start to experience sub-‐personali8es or aspects of
ourselves. We say, ‘I can get really depressed and when I’m depressed, I’m like this.’ It appears that
this is me in that way. However, this can also appear as something else that is me in another way.
These aspects then vie, they are in conflict or rivalry for posi8oning and so we have internal conflict
about how we are going to be.
From the point of view of dzogchen such an analysis is not so important, but I find it useful in that it
helps us to see why it is very difficult to relax. It is, if you like, is an explana8on of excess produc8on.
Just as Marx and Engels made an analysis of how capitalism works as the genera8on of profit. Profit is
something unnecessary, but the produc8on system can be turned towards the genera8on of excess
and then the excess has to be u8lised in some way. Usually it’s u8lised to produce further excess. So
profit generates profit, generates profit. There is the op8on for profit to be merged into the machine,
just as you can keep milk in such a way that the cream separates from the milk, or you can keep
shaking the milk and the cream will stay in the milk. You could set up a workers’ enterprise that didn’t
generate any profit at all because you calculated an equitable distribu8on so there was no excess at
all. Or you can have excess and then you have to do something with the excess.

107
Once you have this binary opposi8on structure in opera8on, with its valency of like and dislike, we
are going to go for profit. We are going to want to have an excess of what we like and a deficit of
what we don’t like. That’s the basis for economic transac8on, isn’t it? Germany has an excess of
Euros, but a deficit of mangoes. Because there are some people in Germany who like ea8ng
mangoes, they use their Euros to buy mangoes in a shop that buys them from the distributor that
buys them from the importer that buys them from the na8on that produces mangoes – this is the law
of economic exchange. It’s exactly the same in the mental func8on: what is outside, is inside. The
dynamics are not different. Once you invest certain aspects of your experien8al field with value you
will have to seek to maintain that value and u8lise the excess of value as a defensive realm to try to
keep out the things that would undermine the value. People pay insurance for their health-‐
protec8on. If you are very wealthy, you can go to a specialist clinic and pay again. You can use your
excess to protect your health. If you are very poor and you are living in America and you don’t have
any excess insurance in any way then you find yourself dying in the street in pain because you don’t
have access to that resource. Your deficit is part of the system of excess and deficit.
It is the same in our medita8on: some thoughts arise which are redolent in deficit. We don’t like
them, so we want to avoid them. We want to ignore them. This is like the injured person lying on the
road. Actually, we don’t want to be like the Good Samaritan; we want to be like the priest and the
Levite who cross the road to avoid him, because if the good meets the bad, maybe the bad will
contaminate the good. When the Good Samaritan helps this person from another tribe, and a fellow
Samaritan comes along and says, “Hey, what are you doing? Don’t you know this is our enemy? Why
are you touching him?” that Samaritan has to ask himself, “What is the basis of my idenCty? Is it to be
a person who responds to the suffering of another? Or to be a Samaritan. If I am a Samaritan, I should
do what Samaritans do, which is walk on the other side of the road.”
This is what’s happening in our mind all the 8me. It is why in dzogchen they talk about integra8on.
Integra8on means giving a big welcome to everything. I have started to translate the term
dharmadhatu as ‘infinite hospitality’. Dhatu means the space of all dharmas; the space within which
everything is occurring. Now this space is the space of welcome. Everything occurs inside it. It is
hospitable. It can accept everything without being overwhelmed because it is infinite. Ego-‐space is
not like that which is why ignorance is problema8c.
When we are in medita8on and we find ourselves entering into judgement, manipula8on, ignoring –
which can include falling asleep as well as being excited – all these different moves are absorp8on in
the intoxica8on of excess energy. That is to say: forge[ng the natural, non-‐dual integra8on of the
ground and the manifesta8on of energy. This is the key point in the medita8on.
The only way for freedom is integra8on with the ground. No amount of manipula8on of the paHerns
of arising is going to provide any enduring relief because these paHerns will always be influenced by
other events which are beyond our control. Whatever you try to set up in the world is difficult. People
who were se[ng up new companies before the dot-‐com bubble could do quite well and then the
bubble burst. Going back to the Bible, a pharaoh had a dream of seven fat cows and seven lean cows.
Eventually he found someone, Joseph, who interpreted this dream for him. If you start your company
at the beginning of the first fat-‐cow-‐year, your company can grow. If unfortunately you start your
company at the beginning of the skinny-‐cow-‐years, you will go bankrupt. Any structure is unreliable.
It’s at the mercy of field-‐factors which are beyond computa8on. The true refuge is the ground which
is already available.

108
In the land of gold
Buddhist texts oLen men8on a land of gold. If you live in a land of gold, everything is gold. No need
to wonder what things are because everything, regardless of its appearance, is gold. The gold may be
red gold or yellow gold, it may be shaped and twisted into all sorts of shapes, rings, brooches…, but
whatever its shape, it is s8ll gold. It does not stop being gold just because it has been made into a
different shape. Gold is easily worked, is very malleable compared to other materials and yet it can
hold its shape through 8me.
Similarly everything in our world is made of emp8ness. This is the essen8al point. In our world we see
men, we see women, children, cats, dogs, rivers, hills, buildings… and they all appear to us to be what
they appear to be. Yet all are the shapes of emp8ness. This is an empty man, an empty woman, an
empty child, an empty cat... The emp8ness is the ground, or the basis, or the fac8city, or the actuality
of the situa8on. The form it takes is the display of the poten8al. The ground, the poten8al, the
display and the manifesta8on are all empty.
Some of the shapes we encounter may seem to have a con8nuity through 8me. Yet the phenomena
of our world are not con8nuous. Children, for example, are not something we tuck away safely in our
pocket. They go to school, they go to sleep. The fact that you have children doesn’t mean that you
are always with them, con8nuously interac8ng with them. Your rela8on with them is the
con8nua8on of the mental image you have of them. When you see them again you recognise them,
you re-‐cognise them, according to your mental image of them.
When everything we see is gold, we don’t need to go work out what things are. The forms they take
are of only rela8ve importance – while what they actually are never changes. This allows us to relax
and open however the manifest forms change and challenge our expecta8ons.
This givenness is what is the goal of the prac8ce: to see the emp8ness in everything, to see the
goldness of gold. Such a prac8ce may seem ar8ficial at first because we are used to seeing a brooch
as a brooch and the gold is kind of invisible since it’s the shaping of the brooch that takes our
aHen8on. However through the prac8ce we focus on the fact that the brooch is made of gold – that
is to say, all appearance is the energy of the dharmakaya. We become gold-‐focused.
Later we bring these two strings together so that the shaping of the brooch and the goldness of the
brooch are in non-‐duality; they are not two separate things. That is the result of the openness of
awareness and the energy of awareness being revealed as inseparable.
The world shows many things and we respond with strong feelings about whether they are good or
bad. “Why”, we might ask, “would anyone go to the trouble of making brooches and rings? You could
just keep the gold as an ingot and store it in a safe. Then you know what your gold is. But all this
messing about and mixing it and doing funny things with it – that’s ridiculous. Gold is gold is gold.
Keep it simple.” But whatever occurs is compassion, communica8on – the interweaving,
interdependence and co-‐emergence of all forms. Whatever occurs, is the energy of the ground. It is
emerging as the semio8c web, the paHerning of manifes8ng appearances. To enter into a
commentary about what is going on is to enter into a labyrinth of representa8ons and this whole
wave of signifiers –nightmarish or delighaul – is all the energy of the dharmakaya. All is just energy
arising and passing. There is nothing which is outside this. No book, no movie, no human behaviour –
all of this is the energy of the dharmakaya.

109
Bad thoughts also arise from emptiness
So why would this good ground give rise to bad things? This is where it can become problema8c for
us if we privilege moralis8c thinking over true ethics. We ‘know’ what is good and what is bad: it is
very bad to torture people; bad people torture people. Okay, but where do bad people come from?
Bad paren8ng? Bad genes? Cruelty is also part of the world. We might not want it to be, but cruelty is
part of the world. “Violence”, said Malcolm X, “is as American as apple pie.” We might like not to be
cruel, but we are cruel, which is why from the point of view of dzogchen, we have to integrate cruelty
and emp8ness. We cannot simply say that we should expunge bad things like violence and cruelty
because we are them too.
Everything arises from the ground, everything is empty in its own nature, yet in our obsession with
good and bad, we suppose that bad things shouldn’t happen. Such is the logic of children. Children
say again and again, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
How is it that bad things arise from emp8ness? We only have to look at our own mind. If you sit in
medita8on and see the kind of thought-‐paHerns that arise inside yourself you will soon see that they
are not always sweetness and light. Selfishness, blaming, judgement, aspects of which with a liHle bit
of amplifica8on could easily turn into cruelty. We entertain thoughts about those who harm us and
we want revenge on them. What’s the best way never to see someone again? To kill them. Lots of
killing goes on. We also kill things off in our mind, “I don’t want to have that thought in my mind. That
thought coming in my mind is an insult to me.” “That kind of immigrant coming in my country is
destroying my culture.” It’s the same phenomenon: “If I allow this thought to be there, the very
presence of this thought will cause me to revise my image of who I am.”
Self-‐iden8fica8on under threat is the basis of cruelty. We probably all have some experience of this.
Remember being back in the playground at school? Did you ever hit someone, or hurt them? If you
did the usual reason is that they upset you. Why did they upset you? No, no – wrong ques8on. How
do they upset you? They upset you by running across the trajectory of your self-‐iden8fica8on. They
wouldn’t let you play with them. Or they stole something from you. You got really angry and wanted
your own back, you wanted revenge.
We do the same even in our medita8on. We try to 8dy out our mind. If this was happening on a big
scale, it would be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Bad thoughts to be rounded up and shot. But who says
which is bad? The good thought says the bad thought is bad, the bad thought says the good thought
is bad. If either could win, they would have total mastery. Get rid of the other and there is only the
self. I, me alone. Total mastery. All the demons of the universe are there as we sit on our medita8on
cushion. Where do these thoughts come from?
We are very, very lucky to have met this kind of prac8ce. I am very lucky. I got it from my teachers;
they got it from their teachers. It allows us to see that there is nobody else to blame. Observe
yourself. The paradox is that if you see this nega8vity arising and you neither push it away nor indulge
it, but simply stay present with it, it will vanish without a trace. If you merge into it, that merging
creates an excess, which is a charge. If you try to extrude it, it leads to a deficit or a lack, which, like a
vacuum, sucks in more thought. The path of self-‐libera8on leads to the seamless vanishing. If there is
no excess how is it going to manifest into the world?
The more you get used to the self-‐libera8on of the nega8vity in yourself, the more you are likely to be
ethical. It’s a real paradox. The more you accept and tolerate the fact that you are awash with all

110
sorts of complicated and difficult thoughts and feelings, and allow them to be there and to go free –
your being in the world will be less encumbered, you will be less preoccupied and you will have more
space to engage with other people as they are.
Ques'on: Does that mean that it eliminates karma?
James: Yes. Exactly. This is why Vimalamitra said in his seven points of mind-‐training that the
path of dzogchen is not concerned with good and bad karma. It’s not concerned to have more good
ac8on and less bad ac8on, because the good and bad ac8on, by both being self-‐libera8ng, means
that instead of the field of our opera8on being managed by categories such as ‘I need to avoid doing
bad and try to do the good’, the raw poten8al of a quality is there and it can be brought out according
to the need of a situa8on.
For example, I pa8ent a used to see had a small child. She had read that it is very unhelpful to say
anything nega8ve to children and that you should phrase every comment to a child in a posi8ve way.
However, as the months of the therapy went on, she would report how the child’s behaviour was
becoming more and more disturbed. She was not able to stop the child in its tracks and say, “No! I am
puQng my foot down. I am bigger than you, stronger than you. You do what I say.” This would not
cross her lips. She was always bending to accommodate the child. She had it in her mind that if she
blocked the child’s wishes it would experience an emo8onal distress which would be the proof that
what she had done was bad. ...and she didn’t want to do bad, because her parents had done bad to
her. This elaborated mental confusion meant that the child had no boundaries. What we worked on
in the therapy was her aHending to the face of the child when it was victorious – and there is a kind
of despera8on that comes on children’s faces when they are victorious, because they know that they
are ge[ng too big. They need to be reined back in. If they get a hug and are helped to seHle, then
they feel safe. When therapists work with very disturbed children, one of the things they are taught is
how to hold the child in a way that will let the child seHle. Some8mes you have to hold the child for
hours. You have to hold them so that they can’t bite you or hit you. You have to hold them and just
keep breathing and calm... and eventually the child collapses and seHles. They recognise that there is
a force bigger than them and if they allow it to be there, aLer all the struggling and resis8ng they
have put up, they find peace. But in order to get there, the therapist has to endure the child who may
be swearing, kicking, being furious and distressed. What is the cause of the distress of the child? It’s
not being held. It’s the fact that this out-‐of-‐control energy is struggling for mastery. If the therapist
lets go, what would be the next boundary? The police would have to be called.
It is not a case of ‘knowing’ what is right or wrong, good or bad, but that the energy of the situa8on
calls for the response. If we don’t have too much of an interpre8ve superstructure and we’ve
understood how to release our own impulsivity so that we are not projec8ng our own number on to
others, the possibility is that we will be able to meet the person where they are, with what they
need. That might well be saying, “Oy! No! Stop what you’re doing!” We would be able to see that the
distress of the child belongs to the child. For the child, learning to let go of their distress gives them
freedom.
Children have to be contained and allowed to seHle and to know that although they may feel terrible,
they are s8ll here and s8ll breathing and that it’s safe. “The person who is keeping me here in this
place where I don’t want to be, is my friend.” “But I hate them.” That’s the resolu8on. That’s where
love and hate go together.

111
Dzogchen compassion
This, I think is the basis for dzogchen compassion. Dzogchen compassion means coming into the
world and being with the other as cleanly as possible, as precisely as possible, without an agenda to
save them. I personally have no idea how anyone should live. The Buddha, in his first sermon, taught
the Four Noble Truths, one of which is the Eighaold Path, the fiLh path being Right Livelihood. He
taught the importance of a moral way of earning a living, one which harms nobody. So, should there
be soldiers of not? Personally, I am a pacifist. I signed up to be a pacifist when I was very young and I
used to go on peace marches and campaign against warfare. Other members of my family were in the
army. If we didn’t have soldiers, maybe our world would be worse. I don’t know. I took a posi8on, it’s
only my opinion, but I don’t think it’s ‘the truth’. How should people live? What should they do? I
don’t know. Each person has to find their way. What then does it mean to be a person? What does it
mean to find your own way?
If you are in touch with the ground, your way is likely to be easier. Easier than if all you have as
orien8ng factors are the impulses of your past karma, plus the assump8ons and associa8ons you
have built up in this life as well as your sensi8vity to the constant baHering of sense impressions
which happen all the 8me. Ethics is always in the moment. Morality, however, can be imported,
because morality relates to rules. “No smoking on the aeroplane.” That rule makes sense. You
wouldn’t say it’s an ethical choice whether you choose to smoke on the aeroplane or not. Each
passenger having to go up and ask all the other passengers, “Excuse me, do you mind if I have a
cigareRe?” Somebody might say, “Well, you asked me that half an hour ago, but actually I’ve changed
my mind. Now I want you to put your cigareRe out!” The human mind is changing all the 8me...
Laws have their area of opera8on but ethical conduct can’t be governed by the law. Perhaps you have
ques8ons about your rela8onship, “Is it good to be with this person or not?” Or, “Should my child
conCnue in this school or not?” Very difficult to know. You have to find your way. Now, for finding your
way it helps if you learn to read the land, if you learn to read the topology and not enter into an
assump8on.
When I was about sixteen I used to do a lot of hill-‐walking in Scotland on my own. I took one of these
ordnance survey maps and I had a liHle bag with a liHle tent and I’d go up all these valleys and camp
out. I was lost a great deal of the 8me. The mist would come down and when the mist comes down
you can’t see a thing and you are walking up a valley but all the valleys look the same. You march up
the valley, you get to the end of it and there is a big steep rock and you think, “Oh, no!” Night is
coming down, you have to sleep in the middle of nowhere, it’s very, very cold, you wake up in the
morning, you walk down the valley, go up another valley... These maps... Because when you are lost,
you are lost.
Then you have to learn to stop looking at the map. Learn to read the rivers. How much water is there
in the river? If there is not much water, what does that mean. Learn to read the direc8ons form the
sun. It’s much beHer to read the terrain than to read maps. All our educa8on is about map-‐reading. If
you have a map, you impose the map on the territory and it prevents you from learning to read the
territory.
Another example: if you go to a supermarket to buy fruit you oLen can only get them in a recycled
papier-‐mâché tray moulded to hold four items and covered in cling-‐film. They look fine. They are
within the expiry date so you buy them and take them home. Then you find that one of them is not
very good. You’ve been lied to by the label. Had you gone to the market you could have picked out
112
the fruit, examined it, made your selec8on and put them in a bag. Because someone else has made
the selec8on for you, you don’t learn what to look for when you choose a fruit that is just ripe
enough for you. That’s how relying on a map, or relying on someone else’s intelligence to tell you
what to do, can lead you astray.
So this is the scary bit about dzogchen. It says, ‘In the immediacy of our lives there is no guarantee.
There is nobody really to show us the way. Being alive can be very lonely. However if you integrate
lonely into the alone, you will feel beHer.’
The dharmakaya is alone. In the Tibetan language it’s called Cgle nyachig (ཐིག་ལེ་ཉག་ཅིག་), which
means ‘the one single Cgle’, the one ball or sphere of existence. The sphere represents infinity. The
mind is infinite. If it’s infinite, there is nothing outside. The dharmakaya has no friends. It’s self-‐
sa8sfied, it’s at peace, it’s alone. From this dharmakaya, many things are manifes8ng, including what
we call ourselves. When we forget this ground, when we are just in our skin-‐bag, we can feel very,
very lonely, ‘It’s all up to me, I don’t know what to do but I’ve got to pretend, because I’m in charge
and nobody is going to mess around with me anymore!’ We have all of this stuff. And it’s alone. The
lonely and the alone are not two different things and if the lonely is integrated with the alone, the
lonely won’t be lonely any more.
Even if you never find any good friend in the world – integra8ng in your own ground gives you peace
and space and the confidence just to con8nue interac8ng. This is why the third of Garab Dorje’s three
statements is telling us just to con8nue in this way. Not to go looking for anything else. Whatever
arises is the energy of the mind. Keep it integrated without too many hopes and fears. Good
moments arise, bad moments arise. Just stay open and open and open... Something good is
vanishing, “Ah! I’m so sad.” Something bad is coming, “Oh! I’m so afraid!” Keep open, keep open...
The bad thing will come – and go. The good thing will go away and maybe come back. Just stay open.
So, aloneness and openness is the ground. The ceaseless movement of this field of openness is the
field of the sambhogakaya, and within this field we have the field of momentary interac8on. That
interac8on will never be permanently sa8sfying. To look for sa8sfac8on as the ongoing outcome of
subject and object is ridiculous since it’s just not possible. Some moments are peak experiences; they
take us right up. Others are valley-‐experiences; they take us right down. We all tend to be labile in our
mood; we are expansive, then we contract; we are happy, then we are sad. We are unreliable. It is
okay to be unreliable, because we are unreliable. You falsify yourself if you imagine that the ego can
be reliable.
What we can rely on is the ground nature. So the real refuge is our own mind. That’s why in the
dzogchen tradi8on we say, “I take refuge in my own nature, which is the dharmakaya.” Within that,
the field of manifesta8on is moving.
Soon, when we leave here we will go out into our different worlds, and encounter different things;
some people are in classrooms, some people in hospitals, some people in offices, some people at
home, some people not well, some people busy with children and so on... All of these situa8ons
present us with unknowable complexi8es. Things will be happening – we are not sure what to do. ‘I
don’t know what to do’ is OK. Why should I imagine that knowing what to do is a likely possibility?
This is what dzogchen is offering – the possibility of trus8ng precogni8ve clarity. When you have the
sense of the intui8ve, non-‐dual, integrated spontaneity of the unified non-‐dual field of experience –

113
that is when you think it’s okay, in ordinary language! – then you relax. And you trust. And then it is
okay. It’s okay, because you trust. But once you start worrying, you triangulate the situa8on.
When you trust you are just in it – and you find a way. When you start to doubt yourself, you pull
back, you separate from the other and you integrate worries. Now you have a triangle: the situa8on,
me, and what I think about the situa8on. Then it gets worse and worse. So we dissolve the triangle
into non-‐dual connec8vity and life gets beHer.
This is what we prac8se again and again. It is a prac8ce so we have to do it all the 8me, all the 8me.
You can do the three ‘AA’ prac8ce very quickly, without any sound, just breathing out, ‘AA’. If you are
in an office you can just get up, look out the window, there is a bit of sky, release yourself into the sky
for ten seconds and integrate everything into the great sky. The sky, the actual physical sky – even if
you just see it between two buildings – reminds you of the infinity of space within which you are
moving. Everything is energy and space. So, if you have a heavy workload with lots of deadlines and
you feel persecuted and it’s all too much and you start to vibrate. “Oh...!” This vibra8on is the
movement of energy. “I feel tension!” This is just movement. Allow it to be there and it will go. If you
try to resist it, it will build up.
So this is our basic prac8ce and we do it again and again and life gets easier. I believe this to be true
and in my own life I have many difficul8es, many problems, and I don’t take them so seriously
nowadays. When I was younger, I took them very seriously and I was not always very pleasant to
know. I hope that as I get older, I am slightly more pleasant to know now... Because, you know, when
you are young and you have a lot of energy and you get angry about situa8ons. I would get very
furious and always be thinking, “Why is it like this? It’s all wrong! Ta-‐da, ta-‐da, ta-‐da...” I wasted many
years of my life, being in outrage at existence. It gave me absolutely no power to change anything.
The only thing it did was make me like a bear with a bad head. Now I see that, as all the dzogchen
teachers say, you have to collaborate. You have to work with what is there. Which means not
impor8ng the map, not impor8ng the agenda, not impor8ng the big game-‐plan, but first of all seeing
what is there – and respond. Receive and respond. If you don’t receive, you won’t know what’s there.
Then you respond to what is there. You don’t respond to what you would like to be there, not to what
you believe should be there – but to what is there!
Some8mes people are open to us; some8mes they are closed. If they are closed, ask them to be
open. If they are closed, do something else. If they are open, you can do something with them.
People are en8tled to be open or closed. I don’t know, maybe that’s completely the wrong term. They
are not ‘en8tled’ to be open or closed – they are open or closed. They don’t have to get a 8tle deed
from a government office. They are open or they are closed – and when they are closed, they are
closed. “What can I do to make you open to me? I need you to be open so that I feel okay!” My need
is a demand on the other. I am going to violently interrupt them in order to make me feel okay. That is
not really ethical.
How, therefore do I sa8sfy myself? Well, the only way to do that is to rest in the dharmakaya; which
is why we come back to the prac8ce again and again. Breathe out, relax, open – if it works out, it
works out; if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. But I’m s8ll here. Awareness – open – radiant …
That is the real difference in this kind of prac8ce and I personally believe that it is very, very helpful.

114
LEAVING
So, some people have to shoot off very quickly now whereas for other people, they have a bit more
8me. It can be an interes8ng prac8ce just to observe yourself in the process of leaving. Look around
and think that this may be the last 8me you are here. Observe the way the thought of ‘maybe I’ll
come back’ or whatever is a mental construct. This actuality, even if you do come back, will be
different. It’s never possible to come back to the same Kamalashila. Some of us have been coming
here for quite a while – and it’s always different. This is the unrepeatable irreversible nature of the
present moment. So it can be quite useful to really appreciate that I’m saying good-‐bye to this
moment. I’m not saying good-‐bye to Kamalashila and then I can say ‘Hello’ to it again – but in this
moment there is this Kamalashila, and in the next moment, there is another Kamalashila.
Try to stay present in the dynamic nature of the unfolding moment and observe how the abstract
conceptualisa8on, such as ‘Maybe see you again next year then!’ takes you out of this moment.
Inside this moment, it’s unrepeatable. The people whose faces we might know, if and when we meet
them again, will be somebody else. That is a real encouragement – that when we meet people, we
meet them in a fresh way. Do our expecta8ons about other people help us to contact them or not?
That can be a very interes8ng inquiry.
Okay, so good luck for the journey …!

115
Refuge and Bodhicitta Prayers
[very slow chanOng]
སངས་རྒྱས་ཆོས་དང་ཚོགས་ཀྱི་མཆོག་རྣམས་ལ།
SANG GYE CHO DANG TSOG KYI CHO NAM LA
Buddha dharma and sangha of supreme (plural) to
Assembly best
To the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent
བྱང་ཆུབ་བར་དུ་བདག་ནི་སྐྱབས་སུ་མཆི།
JANG CHUB BAR DU DAG NI KYAB SU CHI
Enlightenment until I refuge for go
I go for refuge until enlightenment is gained.
བདག་གིས་སྦྱིན་སོགས་བགྱིས་པའི་བསོད་ནམས་ཀྱིས།
DAG GI JIN SOG GYI PAI SO NAM KYI
I doing generosity other perfections doing, virtue through
practising
འགྲོ་ལ་ཕན་ཕྱིར་སངས་རྒྱས་འགྲུབ་པར་ཤོག།
DRO LA PHEN CHIR SANG GYE DRUB PAR SHO
all beings to benefit in order to buddha accomplish may it happen
May I attain buddhahood for the bene?it of all beings
I go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent

Until enlightenment is gained.
Through the virtue of practising generosity and the other perfections
May I attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.
Dedication
We dedicate the merit from all our studies together – imagine rays of light spreading out
from your heart to all the beings in the six realms, those who are happy, those who are sad,
those who are healthy, those who are sick, without any bias or discriminaOon, offering the
potenOal for awakening to all beings.
དགེ་བ་འདི་ཡིས་མྱུར་དུ་བདག།
GE WA DI YI NYUR DU DAG
Virtue this by quickly I
By this virtue may I quickly
པདྨ་འབྱུང་གནས་འགྲུབ་གྱུར་ནས།
PAD MA JUNG NE DRUB GYUR NAE

116
Padmasambhava, establish become, and then
Guru Rinpoche attain
Attain the state of the Lotus Born and then,
འགྲོ་བ་གཅིག་ཀྱང་མ་ལུས་པ།
DRO WA CHIG KYANG MA LU PA
Beings one even without exception
All beings without exception,
དེ་ཡི་ས་ལ་འགོད་པར་ཤོག།
DE YI SA LA GOE PAR SHO
That of state, into place, lead may it happen
level
May I establish them in that state.
By this virtue may I quickly

Attain the state of the Lotus Born.
Then may I establish all beings without exception
In that same state.

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The

View and Practice of Trekcho

Eifel Autumn Retreat, 2013

Transcribed by Vera Neuroth

© James Low www.simplybeing.co.uk

© James Low www.simplybeing.co.uk

WHAT BRINGS US TO THE DHARMA?

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What does buddhism suggest we do?

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Human beings are unreliable

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Make friends with instability

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DIFFERENT WAYS TO CONSTRUE THE WORLD

The hinayana path of control

The mahayana path of circumstantiality

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The tantric path of aesthetic continuity

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The otherness of the other

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TAKING UP A VIEW (OR ETHOS)

En-­roling and de-­roling

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The three pot faults

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[End Day One]

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I go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent

Trekcho is cutting, but not cutting away

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GURU YOGA USING THE LETTER A

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How the mind is like the mirror

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TULKU TSORLO’S TREKCHO COMMENTARY: VIMALAMITRA’S SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL

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Point 3: Don’t enter into preference or judgement

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Point 5: Do not rely on mental analysis

Speaking, generally, is the house of compassion. Speaking is rela8onal. We speak in order to

Point 6: It will show itself directly

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En-roling and de-roling