Голоса трёхлетнего ретрита: медитация три года спустя (2013, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Hi everyone, it's so great to be with you here. And Scott gave such a beautiful overview of what you guys are doing here, the caretakers, and all the amazing activities in the world. And it was so clear that his heart is so much into this.

Now we live in our own bubble, quiet. So thank you, Scott Lau, for introducing different skills, because this is going to come from a different direction. And it's a great pleasure to be with you here.

I've been missing you very, very much. I think we all have. And so I'd like to take this precious opportunity that I'm with you, first of all, to express my deep, deep gratitude to all of you who are so generously helping in so many beautiful ways to make this retreat possible and so amazing.

First and foremost, I would like to thank you, my kind and holy Lama, the kindest of all. And to all the holy teachers that I was blessed with in this life and even before, you have given all your life to train us in all we need to know. You have exerted an unbelievable effort and did the countless incredible things that were needed to bring these teachings to us.

These teachings have deeply affected my life and in ways that I would have never imagined before. As my birthday is here and the tsam come and go, I receive hundreds of greetings from students and from their students and from their students too. All filled with sweet love and exuberant joy and deep gratitude for the enormous benefits that these teachings have brought to their lives and the lives of those who surround them.

They are telling me of their growing joy, of happier families and children. They make tea for their bosses. They visit the sick, the imprisoned, the old.

Most of all, they rejoice in the precious worldview that helps them regain control of their lives and for having finally found a deep purpose and meaning in life. I see individuals, families, communities, and in fact an entire country being transformed by these teachings within a very short period of time. And so for me, it is not very hard to imagine how your teaching, dear Lama, will soon transform this entire world.

And we've seen it happen right in those videos. And then in your kindness, you have also created this place to allow us to practice the higher teachings and reach even higher states. It is impossible to ever thank you enough, even if I were to devote to this task the entire rest of my life.

I would like to thank you, my dear and beloved Ariela, from the depth of my heart. You have blessed my life for so many years, generously offering me your support, wrapping me with your abundant love. You are ever so dear to my heart.

And special thanks for your patient help with proofing and reviewing this talk. Thank you, my dear and beloved children. You are such a precious gift in our life.

We love you so much and are so proud of who you are for us as well as for all the others. And you are always ready to help and provide whatever is needed to take care of us. I and all of us here in retreat are incredibly grateful to you, our dear caretakers.

Year after year, you take care of us, bearing great hardships and at a great personal sacrifice. And you do so with persistence and care and love. Like rare precious jewels so hard to find, we want you to know how deeply we appreciate what you're doing for us.

I would like to thank you, my beloved students. Some of you are here tonight. You are living images of Dharma.

Your holy deeds, too many to count, are transforming your country in front of our eyes. You fill my heart with great joy and pride. Your boundless devotion and love, your perfect service to us coming all the way from afar, are truly amazing and are deeply touching our heart.

A big thank you to all of you who kindly sponsor us month after month and year after year. We thank you for your faith in us and in this holy path. Our thanks go out to all of you who are coming here to serve, giving up vacations and family time, and the kind people who helped build this place with their own two hands and with so much love.

We are so deeply grateful to you, dear friends. I pray in my heart that you all get a chance to also spend some time in retreat. This exquisite alchemical process that gradually purifies and transforms bodies and hearts and minds to become happier, more wholesome beings, better able to serve the world.

Lastly, I would also like to thank all of you, my dear and lovely fellow retreatants, retreat director and council, the in-sum and out-of-sum maintenance teams. You take care of all kinds of needs with so much kindness and love. You are the most delightful group I know, and you've all been so incredibly sweet in sustaining the spirit of this retreat.

As we practice here in retreat, we are sometimes blessed with some very sweet and beautiful states. To me, they come with a compelling wish to share them with all my friends. And so as I was preparing this talk, I came across some beautiful quotes with which I would like to begin.

The first is from the great Indian saint Swami Sivananda, in which he describes his sublime experience of bliss, which in Sanskrit is called ananda. I was lost in ecstasy. I was at once transformed.

I was drowned in the divine consciousness in the ocean of bliss. The ego has been entirely powdered. The watertight compartments have been broken down.

The flood of truth, wisdom, and bliss has entered everywhere in abundance. I have become that. I have become that.

I merge myself in great unending joy. I swam in the ocean of immortal bliss. I floated in the sea of infinite peace.

Ego melted, thoughts subsided. How can I describe this transcendental experience? Language is finite.

Words are impotent. Realize this yourself and be free. In my mind, our practice is very much about opening those watertight compartments of the heart that Swamiji is talking about, and allow the flood of truth and wisdom and bliss to come in.

And so opening the heart is the subject that I would like to talk about. The next is a quote by the poet Kabir. The yogi is utterly drunk.

His wisdom and renunciation made perfect. He drinks from the cup of love. He inhales and exhales only love.

His whole being is flooded with bliss. What a frenzy of ecstasy it is! The sky is ever filled with music.

The rain of nectar never stops. Without eating, I have tasted the sweetness of nectar. And without water, I have quenched my thirst.

Kabir says, It cannot be told by the mouth. It cannot be written in words. Like a dumb person am I who tastes the sweetest thing.

How should it be told? You can hear how Kabir combines in just a few lines renunciation and love and wisdom and bliss and amrita, the nectar of immortality. And it seems that love is somehow key.

And so the last quote I would like to read is again from Swamiji, this time singing of love. Love is a mysterious divine glue that unites the hearts of all. It is the greatest force on earth.

Love is irresistible. Its power is infinite. Its depth is unfathomable.

Its nature is ineffable. Its glory is indescribable. There is no virtue higher than love.

There is no treasure higher than love. There is no knowledge higher than love. There is no dharma higher than love.

This world has come out of love, exists in love, and ultimately dissolves in love. In this talk, I would like to relate those quotes to our practice and to briefly focus on several images, aspects of love. A magnificent string of jewels to adorn our heart that will make it radiant and filled with joy and will eventually lift us up to those exalted states of mind.

Some images are included to inspire us and others we will also visualize. Our time, however, is really short. So I packaged them nicely for you.

I wrapped them in verse, tied around with a thread of sutra and sealed off with a song of mantra. It would be amazing if you can take them home, unpack them there with care, and give them a serious try. That way, I hope that you too can taste some of those beautiful states.

I call this presentation, The Heart of Love. I bow down to my holy lama. Once I heard this teaching deep in my heart.

I was staying in retreat at Diamond Mountain, alone, removed from the outside world, surrounded by insects and lizards, spiders and snakes, rabbits and foxes, birds of all colors, and even a pair of bears. With me in my heart were my holy lamas, all of you, my dear friends, and all the precious beings of this entire world. Just like myself, all of these beings were seeking happiness, joy and bliss of the kind that is deep and that lasts and that satisfies the heart.

Many of them have already realized that to find what they seek, they must renounce the pursuit of worldly fleeting delights. Others were highly advanced bodhisattvas and masters from various traditions. And there were also sweet angels who worked behind the scenes to bless my quivering heart and to protect my mind.

Some angels appeared in disguise, posing as students that came and asked the very same questions that I myself was trying to figure out. How should we practice if we ever wish to achieve ultimate wisdom and bliss? And so I went into deep meditations on the teachings that I have received, and I saw perfectly that this cannot be done unless we grow and deepen our love.

This was then my reply to the ones in disguise. Here, holy ones, is what you need to do to reach ultimate wisdom and bliss. You must gain the wisdom that sees that you and your parts and the rest of your world are empty of any essence of their own, just like the Heart Sutra describes.

And to make your wisdom perfect and to reach the highest bliss, you must also perfect your love. The Buddha himself displayed for us an image of perfect love. His great compassion for the suffering beings propelled him to bear all hardships and practice until he finally reached omniscience and highest bliss.

He was then able to teach the beings in a way that was totally correct, and thus he became their protector. Then the Buddha had promised that in the future he will always appear to us in the holy form of our Lama. Our Lama, the one who steals our heart.

Perfectly pure in their conduct and loving, controlled and skillful and wise, and who knows every turn of the path, is the perfect reflection for us of the purity of the Buddha's mind. Like a guardian angel, our Lama is tirelessly working so that we can attain the highest bliss and is leading us there with each and every one of their breaths. Our Lama is always ready to embrace us wherever we are.

Their love and kindness to us are beyond all words to describe. And so our Lama is our foremost image of love. Having found this angel Lama, we serve them with deep devotion.

We surrender ourselves with thoughts of the deepest respect and love. We make supplication to them again and again with never ceasing unbearable yearning from the innermost part of our heart. This grow our love to immense dimensions and bring it deep inside.

This exquisite jewel of our love for our Lama will eventually drill through those watertight compartments so that the flood of wisdom and bliss can enter our heart in abundance. Under the divine care of our Lama, we then throw ourselves into the holy work of relieving the suffering of the beings and bringing them every joy. Our love for the beings is a bright and glowing jewel on our beautiful string of love.

But what kind of love is it? It is not a love that is only directed at our friends or those we consider as mine, with all others ignored or disliked. Neither is it a love that is selfish, wanting to get something for me.

It is not some temporary outburst of some vague emotion or feeling. It is a noble, gentle love, equanimous and non-possessive. A love that expects nothing in return.

A love that allows you to expand. The teachings describe such noble love as the four infinite thoughts. Maitri is loving kindness, a love that wishes that all sentient beings be happy.

Karuna is compassion that deeply desires to remove all the beings' suffering. Mulitha is the wish to bring all beings to the highest ultimate joy. Upaksha is equanimity, equal love for all beings, wishing that they too be free from attachment to those who are close and dislike to those who are not.

It is a dispassionate love in the sense that it is free of any selfish concern and it does not discriminate between beings. The yogi is an equal friend to all, whether they are close or not, beautiful or not, kind or not, wealthy or poor, young or old, wise or foolish, human or not. The yogis befriend even those who might have hurt them before.

And yet it is also a very passionate love. The yogis desire with all their heart to free the beings from suffering, to bring them every happiness and to help them reach ultimate bliss. The yogis train themselves in compassion.

They open their hearts to hear and feel the pain of the sick and of those who grieve. The pain of the lonely, the poor, the depressed, of those in terror, of those who have lost their hope. His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes compassion as the highest form of intelligence.

Every minute of compassion evolves our intelligence and becomes an enormously precious jewel in our minds. The practice of the Four Infinite Thoughts also plants incredible perfect seeds for our own happiness and peace. Those seeds will grow even more when combined with the wisdom that understands the emptiness of the three spheres of love.

That the way our beloveds appear in our life is a mere projection coming from us. That the same thing applies to us. And that the feeling of love is empty too.

In some moments we can feel it full on and in others we can't feel it at all. And so this is the sparkling diamond of inseparable wisdom and love. The love with no one it loves.

The deep practice of the Four Infinite Thoughts will eventually put us on the Mahayana path, the great vehicle to enlightenment from which we will never want to turn back. Working just for ourselves will forever appear as boring and narrow and bleak. Just like a hungry person rejoices when they see delicious food, so shall we now take joy in our efforts to clear other beings' pain and to bring them every joy.

Our love for the beings becomes overwhelming, consuming all of our thoughts. Its flame burning in our heart all day and all night. Whatever we do becomes suffused with love.

We breathe in love, we sing in love, we eat in love, we drink in love, we talk in love, we pray in love, we meditate in love. And so this is the radiant jewel of overwhelming love. Such love brings us amazing results.

Our heart becomes radiant and sweet and soft. The mind becomes clear and controlled. And then like a bird released from its cage, we soar to higher abodes.

In our next image, we will expand our love. And this we will do in a short visualization. So please find a comfortable position, close your eyes gently, and relax into your pose.

Scan your body for any points of tension and release those as well as you can. For a short moment, focus on your breath. Now bring to mind a being that is very dear to your heart.

It could be your lama or a teacher that you have that you very much love and respect. It could be a parent, a partner, a friend, a precious child that came into your life, or anyone else that you really, really love. Now imagine that being in front of you.

Allow yourself to experience deeply your love for that being, your gratitude for the blessing that they have brought to you and for who they are in your life. As best as you can, try to free your love from any selfish concern. And now combine your beautiful love with the wisdom that understands the emptiness of its three spheres.

And imagine it all as a small ball of diamond light right in the center of your heart. Make that light intense and strong, but also gentle and soft, like a mighty spring of the sweetest, gentlest love right in the center of your heart. Now begin to expand this ball of light.

See it gradually grow inside you until it fills your ribcage. And then it continues to grow and expand throughout the rest of your body. Your whole body is now completely filled with the gushing light of your love.

And as the ball of light expands, its power becomes even more immense. The light of your love now pervades and suffuses each and every cell of your body. Feel how every cell of your body is vibrating with an enormous force of life.

Your love burns away all impurities in your body, all your mental afflictions and all their effects. All sickness and suffering and pain are erased by your love as well. Get in touch with the feeling of a body and mind which only consists of the purest love, a body and mind completely suffused with light.

The gushing light of your love now pushes against your skin from inside until finally your skin loses its grip and the light is streaming out. Millions of rays of intense light of love pierce through every pore of your skin. Your love bursts forth like a mighty river that breaks through the massive dam that was blocking its path for so long.

The old bag of skin no longer defines where you, yourself, and the rest of the world starts. It is your love that defines you now, the edge of your sphere of light. Try to feel the sensation of this massive outpour of love from inside.

What kind of sensation is it? And where do you feel it the most? As your love is pouring out to the world, your heart is filled with incredible joy.

And as your boundary is melting to light, the excitement is growing inside. Now try to make the leap and see how all of this can turn into bliss. Like a huge balloon, you grow in size to cover the area and people around you with the light of your love.

Their bodies are part of you now. Feel the growing sense of bliss and excitement as your edge expands even more as you keep sending your love in abundance to this temple and to Diamond Mountain. You become a huge ball of love that covers Bowie, Arizona, the United States, all of this planet, the solar system, this galaxy, and every galaxy in existence.

You are an enormous and blazing sphere of intense love that touches all beings. Fully alive, you feel the pulse of all the beings at once with nothing to keep you apart. You are madly in love with each one.

Mentally, please tell each one of them, Allow yourself to completely melt into this sphere of wisdom and love. Let the separate you dissolve in its fire. Lost in love, all you can feel is enormous, ecstatic bliss.

Please resolve to keep and to not forget this extraordinary feeling as you take a few moments to bring yourself back to your body here and now. And now slowly open your eyes. And so in this visualization, we expanded our love to immense dimensions that cover all the beings.

We expanded ourselves too and dissolved the boundaries that separate us from our world. In the process, we were also cleansed and we experienced great joy and bliss. So that's quite a bit.

Please do not feel discouraged if you didn't feel all that bliss in your very first try. We all have obstacles to opening our heart or else we would all be swimming right now in that ocean of amrita, immortal bliss that Swamiji and Kabir described. However, the more we can grow our love and the more we can bring it deep, the more seeds we plant for bliss.

What is it then that gets in the way of expanding our identity and love like this? And what is it that blocks the experience of bliss? Major obstacles arise from any kind of infatuation or attachment to me and mine.

My knowledge, my intellect, my beauty, my talents, my status, my success. On our path to ultimate bliss, we will need to surrender any shred of the wrong kind of desire for self-gratification. Be it material or physical or emotional, wrong desire for people or honor or praise.

Big obstacles also come in the form of the three big poisons of the heart, our ignorance, our ignorant desire and our ignorant dislike. We all know how hard it is to feel love and compassion for others when our mind is controlled by anger or by strong desire. In those states, we can't even see ourselves needless to say the others.

And so the same blissful rays of love that we are trying to send out from our heart will bounce back from the walls that surround it and will act like x-rays revealing to us the hard and dense spots that are blocking the blissful flow of our love. In the beginning, we may find that many of those are hard feelings centered around people that we feel have hurt or mistreated us in the past and now we hold a grudge or resentment or ill will towards them in our hearts. Although they lack any essence of their own, such painful feelings can torture our minds and pollute our hearts for a very long time and they will certainly act to block the higher states of mind.

Then what can we do? A powerful way to help dispel the pain and to open our heart at the same time is through the practice of compassion and the exchange of ourselves with others with another and the power is even greater when such exchange is done with the people that we resent. Instead of focusing on our own pain, we open ourselves to theirs and then those terrible blocks in our heart become opportunities for progress on the path and it is not as hard as it sounds.

We make a firm and courageous decision in that space which is painful and hard I will open myself to the other person wherever they are right now. We put aside for a while our habitual preoccupation with ourselves, our opinions, our feelings, our stories, even our concepts of karma and seeds. We let go for a while the world that we live in to allow them to come in.

We muster up our most generous spirit and offer them a space that is safe and inviting and warm. I am here and I am fully open, ready to be fully with you. We listen and feel with our heart, we try to understand with deep empathy what it is that they are experiencing and we try to relieve their pain and give them what they want and need.

It is a beautiful form of art that takes some practice to perfect but it creates miracles almost instantaneously and has enormous effects. We get a refreshing break from the unrelenting torturous onslaught of the thoughts that cherish only ourselves. Our selfless motivation and strong compassion ripen the karma really fast and a miracle of connection happens that replaces the painful disconnect and for which we were yearning in our heart as if by magic the hard feelings turn into joy and love.

We get an enormous boost on our path and a deep crack opens up in the wall that surrounds our heart. With each additional crack that we manage to put in that wall the chances increase that the mighty pressure of our gushing river of love will finally bring those walls down as if by magic our bliss and wisdom follow close behind. And so this is the jewel of magical love.

Compassionate exchange is especially sweet when practiced regularly regularly between partners. It heals and resolves any tensions and struggles and creates over time the essential safety that allows the relationship to grow and the exchange then shifts to joy. A sweet intimacy is formed that allows the two to jointly pursue their highest dreams.

Their deep love allows them then to soar together to bliss. In our next visualization we will go into our heart. It will be another short meditation.

So again please find a comfortable position. Take a moment to relax into it and go to your inner space. Now please take a few short moments to recreate yourself as the huge ball of love Again please bring in front of you that beloved being from before.

Feel your great love for them in your heart. Remember the emptiness of all the three parts and then take a few moments to expand this diamond-like combination of wisdom and love to cover the whole world just like we did before. Melt everything into the light of your life.

Completely erase the artificial boundary between you and the rest of the world. Let your skin turn to light and dissolve. Try to feel the incredible joy and bliss from expanding yourself this way allowing all blocks and lines melt away.

We will now reverse the process. Imagine that this huge sphere that is filled with the intense light of your blissful love is now contracting in. From the farthest galaxy back to our own then down to our solar system to planet Earth to the state of Arizona to Diamond Mountain and then all the way down to the very center of your heart.

Imagine that nothing is left outside of this contracting sphere. Your world, its beings, and you yourself all contract into one single drop of enormous bliss and wisdom and love in the center of what was your heart. There, inside your very heart are all the objects of your love all the beings of your world each one a tiny speck, a seed little things inside your heart.

They are all your babies now. Gently cradle them with care wrap them with your love. If you tighten the image just a tiny bit more all distinctions between you and them are gone in the tiny and very intense space the terms I and them no longer make sense.

Loving you and loving them really become one and the same. If you turn the knob one additional notch then even the tiny drop disappears. All appearances are now completely gone to leave a clear and empty space allow that empty space to remind you of the emptiness of all phenomena and that they don't exist on their own they only arise and subside as mere projections of your mind.

And yet, no love or bliss are lost as the world and its beings dissolve your love and bliss grow even more. You bask in blissful rainbow light pure open vastness beyond any conceptual thought nothing but bliss and wisdom and love and this is now who you are. Now please relax that visualization gently come back to your body and slowly open your eyes.

This visualization too included several images of love. We first came in touch with the fact that all the seeds that project our world and its beings are forever within us inside our heart so we can never stop loving the beings since we can never be truly apart and so this is the jewel of eternal love. Then we challenged again the artificial nature of our boundaries and ideas of me and them which is the jewel of oneness.

It acts as a beautiful antidote to the deep-seated and often quite subtle feeling of aloneness that hides in our hearts our seeming separation from others and the more we succeed in removing those lines the more blissful it all becomes. Finally, with the mind suffused with love we got to touch the purity of shunyata the emptiness of ourselves and of all phenomena. If you do this meditation at home you can hang out in that space for as long as it feels for you fresh.

You may notice that as you exit these meditations you often feel radiant refreshed and awake. Even the room and the people around you seem somewhat brighter more sparkling. This is all part of their alchemical effect as they help to connect us to a higher reality to our pure and ultimate nature.

Allow that purity to inform every bit and part of yourself. Try to stay connected to it let it continue its effect. It will help loosen our strong belief in ourselves and our world as so solid and real and a strong tendency to view ourselves as a package of selfish tensions and vials.

We become a bit less obstructed a bit closer to who we are. Meditating on emptiness is also a great act of compassion as it takes us a step towards becoming a being of light and love projecting this out to our surroundings. And thus we can say holy ones that with emptiness there is no body nor any of your other parts and yet it is all suffused with enormous bliss and love.

As we practice this way giving it all our heart many new beads will add magic and luster to our string of jewels of love. Our love will grow from a mere thought to a heartfelt tender affection from there to a heart opening love of infinite scope then it grows to a love that is blissful that burns away all the draws in our bodies and minds. We glow with love inside and out we become incredibly happy we develop a passion to act for the sake of beings and finally it all becomes rainbow light and we perceive everything as divine.

We ourselves become the image of love people know it, can feel it are inspired by it we bless anyone who comes in contact with us. The Tibetans describe a fourth step progression it begins with the thought how nice it would be if all the beings were happy then you pray in your heart that this will actually happen without delay you then take personal responsibility you yourself will make this actually happen and you beg your lama and all enlightened beings to help you make that happen. Such unbelievably high level of love is what leads you to bodhicitta the wish for enlightenment our crown jewel of love.

You become a bodhisattva a warrior saint you realize that to accomplish your burning desire to benefit the beings in an ultimate way you must get enlightened yourself. Master Shantideva describes bodhicitta as the highest form of our chemical elixir which transforms this filthy body we've taken to the holy form of a Buddha of immeasurable value. Beyond all value.

And so holy ones we can say that every existing thing is emptiness and that the essence of all is love. The bodhisattvas use that knowledge to remove all their mental afflictions and obstacles and eventually are able to stop all suffering up to old age and death itself using their perfect wisdom and love that they then work to perfect their world. And so our next set of images is concerned with our connection to all the beings and our work in the outside world.

We will start again with a very short visualization. So please find again your perfect position relax into it and for the next three minutes please gently close your eyes. Now picture your outer universe as a huge globe filled with objects and beings with you at its very center.

Imagine that each being in your world is a point somewhere in this globe at a certain direction and distance from you. When you contracted the world into your heart in the previous visualization each being became a tiny speck a seed inside a small drop in your heart. Now imagine a very fine line like a thin ray of diamond light connecting each tiny seed in your heart to the being that is projected from it in the world outside.

Millions and billions of rays of light emerging from your core connecting your heart to every single being in your world. You can use the image of a tiny and very cute porcupine in the very center of your heart. She is made of diamond light and has infinitely many very fine diamond light quills sticking out of her tiny body in all directions of space.

Some quills are short connecting you to beings that are close others are long or very long connecting your heart to beings that are far. These quills are the very rays along which you project each one of the beings in your outer world from the tiny seed in your heart. The rays are made of karma the subtle mental imprints in your mind left there by all your past deeds of body, speech and mind.

And they now project every being and everything else in your world. When you're ready please open your eyes. As we grow our wisdom and love they will of course affect our deeds and speech and thoughts and those karmas will sink into all the rays that project the beings in our outside world.

There are so many beautiful things that we can send out to the beings in our meditation on those countless diamond quills. Beautiful, strong, healthy bodies that act in wholesome ways. Sweet speech that is able to please and to teach.

Loving thoughts always looking to help. A worldview that understands that how we treat others is what creates our world. Various powers and skillful means that enable the beings to help themselves.

All kinds of protection from danger from suffering, from fear. And as our growing love and wisdom affect and transform our world we too are purified and transformed. And so you work hard and practice over and over day after day.

Practices like these and others as well. And you pray to your lamas for help. You may not notice the gradual change but then finally the effort bears fruit.

A new freedom dawns in your heart. The old familiar resistance is gone. The harsh and abrasive thoughts that used to torture your heart those have nearly vanished now.

You find a place deep inside of serenity and joy and light and love that always continues to nurture you. Softness and sweetness fill your heart. You become the embodiment of love.

Like a hurricane wind that blows from behind the deep aspiration to benefit others is pushing you up to unimagined heights. It helps you cope with hardships and obstacles that would have otherwise been impossible to overcome. And you reach extraordinary states of mind.

And so our last image of love is the holy image of the bodhisattvas. These warrior saints become wonderful friends to the beings. Their compassionate look removes the agony of people.

Their sweet words bring joy. Joy and solace and peace. Their thoughts radiate peace and goodwill.

Their very presence brings hope and strength. There is grace in their gait. There is charm in their face.

There is sweetness and elegance in their speech. Their teaching becomes an endlessly gushing spring. And its sweet sound, profound and elegant, leads the beings to ultimate bliss.

Like Angel Chenrezig with his thousand compassionate arms, they care for all beings at once. Please listen, my friends, how the angels sing out their thoughts in the bodhisattvas' mind. I will free all those who have yet to be free.

[Speaker 2]
I will save all those who have yet to be saved.

[Speaker 1]
I will comfort all those who have no comfort. I will deliver all beings beyond all grief. Thus it is, holy ones, that warrior saints practice the perfection of wisdom and love and stay in this perfection.

This frees them completely from all obstacles in their minds as well as from every fear. They go beyond all mistaken thought and reach joy and ultimate bliss. All the enlightened beings of past and present and future times follow this perfection of wisdom and love and thus bring themselves to perfection, to the matchless state of a Buddha.

Thus are they the sacred words of the perfection of love, sacred words that are ever true, sacred words that cannot lie, sacred words of the perfection of love which I speak for you from my heart. So we have a tune for this. Let us sing them now, Kirtan style, and I will start.

Maitreya Karuna Mudita Maitreya Karuna Mudita Upeksha Shunyata Bodhichitta Upeksha Shunyata Bodhichitta Ananda Ananda Amrita Amrita Bodhisattva Bodhisattva Thus it is, holy ones, that great warrior saints train themselves in the perfection of love. All of this came to my mind as I stirred myself from my meditation due to the blessings of my holy lamas and the divine love in their hearts that came and affected my mind. If you too will wear on your heart this magnificent string of the jewels of love, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that every one of those Gandhas will also rejoice in their hearts.

Please, always carry in your heart your little diamond porcupines with countless rays of diamond light to countless beings near and far. Set your diamond rays ablaze with your mighty love. May it burn all that's impure in every being's mind.

May those beings too send out countless blissful rays of light to the beings in their worlds. May we all forever live in worlds of perfect love. Before we part, I would like to offer a song to you, holy lama, and to all of you as well.

The tune is borrowed from an old Hebrew song performed by Esther Farim, which I heard is one of our lama's favorites. So please join me in Kirtan style. I will start.

Come and stay, my precious lama. Come and stay, my precious lama. Upon the lotus in my heart.

Upon the lotus in my heart. Take me after you in kindness.

[Speaker 2]
Take me after you in kindness.

[Speaker 1]
Grant your wisdom and your love.

[Speaker 2]
Grant your wisdom and your love.

[Speaker 1]
Come, you all my precious lamas. Come, you all my precious lamas. Stay forever in my heart.

Stay forever in my heart. Take me after you in kindness. Take me after you in kindness.

Always teach me how to love.

[Speaker 2]
Always teach me how to love.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you so much. I love you with all my heart. I miss you very much.

[Speaker 2]
I love you with all my heart. I miss you very much. I love you with all my heart.

I miss you very much. I love you with all my heart. I love you with all my heart.

I miss you very much. I love you with all my heart. I miss you very much.

I love you with all my heart. I love you with all my heart. I love you very much.

[Speaker 1]
I love you very much.