Голоса трёхлетнего ретрита (2013, разные места, Аризона), занятие 4

[Speaker 1]
So, I want to first thank all of you who have made the effort to come for this special weekend. All your scheduling, and driving, and flying, I kind of remember it all. I hope that you'll come back a year from now and see where we live, in our valley and our mountains.

I'd like to thank our precious Lama Geshe-la for making it all possible, the way he sustains the thirty-two of us, with his boundless efforts and energy. It's simply a miracle, it's just a miracle, that we have this opportunity. I would like to thank Lama Christi McNally for her leadership in the first year of our retreat.

She served us so well, and her advices helped us go deeper. And then there are the holy caretakers, Rob and Nicole, Venerable Chuky, Arita Scott, Tahiya, and Joe, and Chuck, and all those who come and go and help you, and volunteer. They do it with such grace and style.

I think I speak for all of us in here that we're so grateful when that truck comes by and delivers everything. And I think we've gotten better at driving them less crazy this year. It took a while, but we're getting better.

I'd like to thank all of you here and those throughout the world who continue to financially sponsor us on a monthly basis, this possibility. It means so much, and I don't think you're going to be disappointed when we're set free. And then there are those special ones in my life, you know, they continue to privately take care of me, they send in all these special goodies, you know, fresh flowers and Japanese insects.

And then they have to deal with my neurotic obsession with vitamin supplements, you know, the emptiness of liquid blue-green algae. But I hope some of them are here, I think I know they are, and thank you so much. So, I thought I'd just briefly give you an overview of what I'd like to talk about today.

First, you know, what's it like for me in three-year retreat, a day in a life, like a snapshot of what it is for me, what it is for me in deep retreat and then also in break. And then, well, you know, the daily kind of schedules, the diet, creating the conducive conditions to go in, the practices, some I can talk about. And then the title for the main talk is Surrender, Purify and Transform, and I'll tell you more about that when I get to it.

But first I want to talk about us, the 32 of us, this holy family. I don't think this will ever come about for me in this lifetime. Again, I don't know, but to be in here with my fellow renunciates, you know, they have the courage to go deeper, and they believe in this path so deeply, and we take care of each other so beautifully, on all levels, it's unbelievable, emotionally, dharmically, socially, intellectually.

When the events of last year occurred, we helped each other process it all, and it brought us closer together. They're some of the most gifted, talented people I've ever known, writers and musicians, teachers and linguists, yogis, great cooks, and number one, great practitioners. And, you know, we're comfortable with calling each other on our stuff when we need to, because we know it's good for us, it's important.

It's a testimony to our teachers, how we live in here with perfect world view, it's unbelievable. So we'll be let loose, and you'll have to get to know us all over again in a year. So we just came out of a two and a half month retreat, it was our longest period.

We decided a few months ago that we might as well rally in our last year and go deeper, stay in longer in the deeper two periods. So we did ten weeks, and it seemed to work out really well. About the middle part of it, I started to get a little worried, because I wasn't picking up any kind of disturbances, and I wrote Nicole a note, like, is everything okay out there?

I kind of live a little bit further back from the Maine Valley, and I just wanted to check in and she wrote me a sweet note saying, yeah, a few maintenance things, no problem, everything's great. So we decided to do this two and a half months, and it really worked well, and we'll do one more and then we'll barley seed down to another two months, and then in March we may finalize our retreat. So when we go in, I kind of have this habit where I'll take four or five days and I'll just kind of chill and then begin to prepare the zong, my zong.

The first day is really fun because you get to make these special offerings that you make from scratch and they're very intricately detailed. You give yourself over to it, it's a four or five hour process, and they're for your altar and they're for various deities. And it gets you in, it starts to move your mind back into your deep retreat, you start to process less about the outside world and what happened in the break.

Then the next day I do purification ceremonies for my cabin and my little meditation room and the altar and my seat and myself. Beautiful ceremony, you really want to make your space pure again. And then the next day I'll do a protection circle around my cabin outside and put up the four boundary markers to define my zong.

On one level you're limiting yourself from these four cardinal directions, not to go over your boundaries. So then you're ramping up your meditation practice, you're maybe getting up a little earlier than normal and you're rescheduling your own kind of rhythmic sleep pattern. And then maybe the fifth day you're ready to go in.

I'm in bed usually at 9.30 when it starts and I set the alarm for 2.30. I usually wake up before it goes off, it could be my age, I don't know, they say it's less sleep when you turn 60 or more. It could be true, I tend to think that I don't need as much sleep as I used to. But then you're up at 2.30 and I chill a little bit, I make a cup of tea, I wash my face, I brush my teeth, I just sit down, kind of focus on the morning. It's the most magical time to practice in my mind, the silence is just deadening. I go out sometimes and I look at the stars before I go in and sit, just get a feel for the night. And then at 3 o'clock I'm on my cushion and I don't really, I can't really talk about our practices, but I can say that the main practice, the all-encompassing practice entails several individual practices.

And within those individual practices there are visualization practices. So the first session is three and a half hours long for me on average. It's the most important session in some ways for me.

It sets the tone and it sets the pace for the day, but it's also the time of night, that special time when many consciousnesses are still sleeping. There's a purity about it and there's a magic about it. And so I utilize that first session to go deeper.

And then I'll sit for another hour and do mantra. I usually, to save my knees, I sit in a chair and I just do an hour of mantra, or a special mantra. And then around 7.30 or so, it depends, if I'm not too tired I'll stay up and read, but usually I'll just take a nap and lay down for maybe an hour and 45 minutes. So I don't get kind of, you know, windy. You can get a wind condition and then you kind of get zapped out a little bit. At 9.30 I roll out the yoga mat and do asana practice. About eight months ago one of my fellow retreatants gave me the transmission. She's a senior teacher of Mr. Bikram directly, and she taught me the famous 26 yoga asanas of Bikram, without the 110 degrees. But I needed a challenge in my yoga practice.

I'd been practicing for pretty much consistently 12 or 13 years, and intermittently before that. And so this was it. It just connected the dots for me.

And I realized that his genius was in the sequence, the order of how he put it together. And there are 26 of the original 84 hatha yoga asanas that date back 3,000 years or more. The science of opening up the body, that subtle body.

And it's the ultimate complement to your meditation practice. When done with pure intention, it can do wonders for your physiological body, but as well your subtle body, and hence your meditation practices. So I've been a Bikram fan now for eight months, and I really love the system right now, and it works for me, and I feel great.

And then 11.30 comes around and I'm starving, because I don't eat anything in the morning. And that changed in here too. I went pure Ayurvedic in the last year or so, and I got to actually cook for the first time.

Being a New Yorker, you have 84 choices in a square mile of your house, and I had every takeout menu in the neighborhood, because it was easier for me to actually take out than spend $22 on one single meal. Cheaper. But this was really a change for me.

The Ayurvedic system is so complex and very sophisticated. The physiological aspect of your body is kind of decoded by a series of questions and answers, and then you know what not to eat and what to eat more. So basically what it boils down to every day is, I have a vegetarian thali, but it's all cooked from scratch, because there are sticklers about don't ever eat leftovers, don't put it in the fridge, just throw it away, because the energy is kind of lost.

So it's very traditional combinations of food. A dal, a rice, some quinoa, spicy vegetables, vegetable korma or something, chapati, and then a spicy lassi with ginger and cardamom and some sweet. I actually am now making my own chutneys.

[Speaker 2]
And pickle.

[Speaker 1]
So I really got into it. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to make it all. And then you just swap it down into 18 minutes.

You clean up and then you're done. It really works for me in here, and I think it will stick with how I eat from now on. So after that I have a break for about an hour, and I always generally do one or two review courses in retreat, and I'll read something related to Dharma.

And then by 2.30 it's time for my second session, and that's the same practice, but it's a shorter version, the second session. It's about three hours long for me. And you know, you give yourself...

I don't even keep a clock in my meditation room. When you go into deep retreat, and maybe the second or third week, you stay longer sometimes in certain parts of your practice. You could sit for maybe three and a half or four hours and not know.

But generally it's a three hour session, and then it's a little bit of mantra, and then it's a break at 6.30, 7.30, around there. If I'm hungry I'll make some soup or a little bit of salad, just to hold me over. And then a final meditation, which is an analytical meditation usually on emptiness, or it could be a visualization practice that Holy Lama Geshe-la gave us within the tantric path.

But it's nice, it tops the day off, and it generally is about an hour and 15 minutes. It could go longer, but it runs about that. And then I read until I get tired, and I'm back in bed at 9.30. And that's my day. And then maybe every 10th or 11th day I just collapse. You just have to be careful not to ride the edge of your womb, and not to get too close. And so I skip my first session on that day, and I sleep in, and I kind of just rest, and I nurture, and I nap and read.

I still do my four hours of meditation, but I don't do yoga that day. And that's kind of what it's like for me. And you do that for two months, and then you barley see it out at the end, and you become a little bit less, you're not pushing yourself as much.

And then it's time for a break. And one of my colleagues, they said we should change the word from break to reality check. It's true, we have to check in with each other.

And so we reunite, and we do our sadhana practices together. A couple of days right after we get out, we do a beautiful puja, a three and a half, four hour puja. And all of us take turns participating in the puja, but it's such a good way to purify the mistakes and various things that may have come up for you in retreat.

And we do Buddhist confession together, which I'll talk about a little later. And we share meals together, we talk about our experiences in lay realm, we help each other process, if necessary. Some of us don't come out at all, we just stay in.

And you don't see them. Some of us teach silently. Some of us do yoga together.

But it's really a decompressing time. It's really nice. And then Holy Lama Geshe-la comes the week before.

We go back in usually for a few days, and he teaches us, and then he does a one-on-one individually with all of us, which is priceless and precious. And then we're all exhausted, and we go back into retreat. So it's kind of a snapshot of what it's like.

And some of us are having the realizations that we came in for. It's really quite something, the process. It's amazing.

So when I was thinking about talking, last year Geshe-la asked me to speak, and then we canceled our original Sangha Dhammayan. But it gave me time to think about it. And I was in one layarung, and three words just kept coming into my mind.

Purify, surrender, purify, and transform. And I wasn't into it. I wanted to do something different than that.

But it wouldn't let me go. It just kept coming up. And finally I sat down one night with a blank pad, and it just kind of flowed out of me.

And as General Gyatso said yesterday, I dusted it off about two months ago, and it still was pretty valid. So I kind of distilled it a little bit, and tweaked it. But first I just wanted to...

Well, you're in this temple today, so you obviously are aware, and you know the lineage of Geshe Michael. You find a qualified teacher, you do the ACI 18 Kodasutra program. It's all there.

All the way from three principal paths, up to what the Buddha really meant, and everything in between. Shantideva, applied meditation, how karma works, the diamond cutter, emptiness, emptiness, emptiness. You develop a meditation practice.

I don't know, my earlier years, my 30s and 40s, I practiced Zen meditation for many years. I came up with the best... For a daily practice it was like an hour and a half a day.

45 minutes of walking meditation, and then for about 8 minutes, and then another 45 minutes sitting. I used to do that before I went to work. It seemed like the ticket for me.

It worked for me. It was such a good experience, because it gave me a solid foundation in those 12 years when I was practicing the meditation. And with that, if you don't do a daily practice, you're just...

It becomes an intellectual exercise. It doesn't distill. You don't allow yourself to chew on the wisdom that is being transmitted to you.

So, it's an essential. And now, our lineage is a yoga practice, and it doesn't have to be an hour and a half. It can be 45 minutes a day, but you find that niche, you find what works for you, because it is an essential practice to create really important conditions, physiologically and subtly, to help have realizations.

And you need to do it, of course, with pure intention, but it's such an invaluable tool. And then you serve a project, or you serve the world in some way. I don't think I'd be in here if it wasn't for the Asian Classics Input Project, and the time I served that project.

Every scholar on the planet who's translating precious books uses our database, and it's in great hands right now. And then you raise your bar, and you take your vows. It's a big point of departure, and you take your lifetime language vows, and you take your Buddhist other vows, and you keep a six-time-a-day book.

And it's an important moment in your Buddhist career. And then you create the causes to enter the 18 Course Study Program under the guidance of a qualified teacher, the tantric highest yoga tantra. So it's all mapped out for us.

It's completely mapped out. So within the path of accumulation, the path of preparation, there are different levels of surrender, purification, and transformation. Surrender is a sticky word.

It smells of weakness, and it's probably its Webster definition. I'm talking about surrendering into yourself through a proven process under the guidance of a qualified teacher who knows more than you do. Our Tibetan tradition has over 41 lineage holders who have maintained and distilled and self-realized the complete paths of both sutra and tantra.

Surrender takes guts. It means that you're willing to take on a radically different worldview than you're living now. It means that you're willing to go deeper into yourself over and over, to constantly leap when it's necessary, to remove old habits of thinking, old patterns of behavior that keep you fearful and confused.

Some of us come to surrender after a good dose of crash and burn. You know, those unexpected tragedies that weren't part of your life plan, and they happen, and they're real. But they may trigger a temporary but real taste of renunciation that could ignite in you a search for answers.

Many of my friends have found this path after a high-voltage jolt. So-called tragedy. And then there are those of us, some of us, who seamlessly seem to reunite with the path, like they just continue from their past life and enter the path again due to their volumes of merit that they bring in.

It's something beautiful to see. So, in surrender, we're surrendering to where we are on the path and not some bullshit fantasy about being a high practitioner. Your teacher knows where you are.

They know exactly what to give you to liberate yourself. Trungpa Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of Naropa University and the international organization of Shambhala Centers, he wrote Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in the 70s, and he talks about this. We like the spiritual outerwear in our culture, or the spiritual lifestyle, and we fool ourselves.

And in surrender, we're in a constant process to expose this pesky self-existent me or mine, which never really existed to begin with, but it keeps us in samsaric cycles of suffering. Lama Yeshe, he called it self-pitying egoism. I think Rob used something like that yesterday, which is true.

And then in surrender, you develop a deep faith in your teacher, your lama. And I really believe without the deep faith in your lama, in your teacher, you may lose the chance in this lifetime to see the direct perception of emptiness, let alone enlightenment. I like this verse by Arya Nagarjuna.

He says, Give up every other form of offering completely. Undertake instead to make perfect offerings to your lama. By pleasing them, you will come to attain the highest wisdom that knows all things.

What merit is it that could not be collected? What deep, hard spiritual practice would you not be doing by making offerings to your lama, the warrior of diamond, who brings you to that which is unsurpassed? So we hammer away on the cushion.

We deconstruct all our false convictions, our negative emotions. We start to climb the ladder towards single-pointed concentration. And you get comfortable in the archaeological dig of your own mind.

You begin to remove your addictions, one by one, whatever flavor they are, their causes. I think a phenomenon of our time is this mass addiction to confusion, the invasive babble and spin, the countless hours wasted on this surf webbing game, web surfing game. It's a senior moment, I think.

So, our great-grandfather, Chittiram Rinpoche, he put it simply, he said, if you're practicing dharma, your mental affliction should lessen each year. And if you can't say that, you're not practicing dharma. And it's true.

I remember, people used to come to me and say, I meditate, I meditate, and my meditation never improves. And I think it's because we have to do something about the psychological concepts that weigh us down. I think it's the negativities that have to be purified in order to attain realizations.

So, Lama Geshe-la, last night, he started the first class on the Lamrim with the Four Powers. It's like the express stop to purify on a daily basis. It's an eight-minute process before you do your primary meditation, a preliminary within the preliminary.

The thing I love about the Four Powers, the Four Forces, is that it's non-denominational. You can apply that to any religion. Choose the holy being that you trust in, and then do the Four Powers.

Jesus, or Mohammed, or Gandhi. We take refuge in our Lama as the Buddha, and your highest view of emptiness. And then you do recall your negative actions of the past 24 hours.

The little ones and the not-so-little ones. You apply an intense intellectual regret, not a guilt, to these misdeeds, and you commit to yourself to restrain from doing them again. But it has to be realistic.

To set yourself up for self-defeat, you've got to be realistic. If it's three hours, you're not going to commit that misdeed again. Take it.

Don't say four days or something. It's a very important part of the Four Powers to hold that commitment of restraint. And then you find the antidote that works for you, a special mantra.

It's such a good way to start your meditation. It could help, and something could happen in that meditation when you do these Four Forces, Four Powers. Another way to purify that we do is the Buddhist confession.

I really like it. When we come together, for break, we do it together. It happens on the New and Full Moon, as Geshe-la mentioned.

You sit together silently with your six-time-a-day book, and you start to review your misdeeds first, and anything else you want to add to it. You write them down on little slips of paper, one by one, every one of them. More is better.

And then you sit and you write your meritorious actions one by one on slices of paper. And then we go out at night and have a beautiful fire and do a Buddhist confessional ceremony for fifteen minutes. And then one by one, you throw your negative deeds into the fire with a mind that is charging to diffuse those afflictions as you throw them into the fire.

So the karmic result will be lessened dramatically. You create that conviction, and it really will have a result that karma may actually not happen to you, the negative result. Then we have popcorn and cocoa and tea and cookies, and we just sit and enjoy each other's silence.

And then one by one, you throw your beautiful meritorious actions into the fire with a mind that's charging them with wanting an exponential result and for it to ripen quickly. But it leaves you with a sense of beautiful clarity at the end. It's really a beautiful practice.

I want to teach it to students when I get out. And then we do, in our practice in Lerone, and it's part of our main practice, we do a purification practice called the Hundred Syllable Mantra of Buddha Vajrasattva. I think it's, for me, it's probably the most powerful purification practice on the planet for me.

I love that practice. I spend time in it when I do my sessions. There are elaborate forms of it, and I thought I could give you a very foundational part of that practice.

We have a particular Vajrasattva practice that's secret, and it is a tantric practice. I think if it rings true to you, and it feels correct, you can certainly ask the... There are so many qualified teachers in this room who can help you with getting a transmission on this practice.

But Buddha Vajrasattva is a diamond warrior, a diamond hero. He's a symbolic aspect of the inherent purity of all Buddhas. And his mantra is the actual practice.

You recite the mantra as you do a specific visualization of him. And the one I thought I'd share is that you visualize Buddha Vajrasattva about a half an inch or a quarter of an inch, half an inch above your crown chakra. He's a magnificent pure white light, like lightning.

That beautiful white. And he's holding a diamond in bell and sitting in full lotus posture, diamond posture. He's wearing beautiful adornments of silk and jewel ornaments.

He's sitting on a thousand-petaled white lotus on a moon cushion. And in his heart is a moon cushion with the letter Hum right in the center of it, surrounded by the syllable mantra, the hundred-syllable mantra. So it's very small, very tiny.

Like you could fit it on the tip of your index finger, the Hum and the moon and the mantra. And he radiates, he generates white rays of light that fly out in all the ten directions. And fly out to the Buddha Verses and the holy enlightened ones that are always around us.

And those light beams touch their Hum syllable and then return into the mantra, into the Hum. And you're reciting and visualizing this, you're reciting the hundred-syllable mantra. And then instantly upon the return of all of this charged light, he begins to radiate light through your crown.

And from the tip of your toes to the crown of your head, he purifies every cell in your body as you recite this mantra. And if it rings to you, you can ask your teacher. But it really helped me tremendously.

In my early days, I was working for a corporation and I made a donation at the time to FPMT, to Lama Zopa's organization, and they sent me a gratitude letter. And inside the letter was these two little booklets, pocket booklets. One was how to transform your so-called ordinary actions of the day into an act of bodhicitta, like washing the dishes and brushing your teeth.

And the other was the hundred-syllable mantra, its meaning and then visualization practice. So our corporate offices were about, I don't know, 30 miles outside north of New York on the Long Island Sound. So I'd hop in my car at lunch and I'd go to this little park by the beach and I would do the practice for like a half an hour and then eat something and go back to work.

But I really felt strongly that I created the causes to enter the tantric path partially because of that. Two years later, I was given a complete transmission of the highest non-exclusivity of the tantra. So these are ways to purify.

And then, you know, you continue to practice nicely, as Ken Robichaud used to say, sincerely, consistently, because it won't work if it's not consistent. And then transformation starts to happen to you. Your inner and outer world starts to change.

At first it's small stuff, but it's really not small stuff. But they happen on a regular basis. I really like Robert Thurman's definition of a Buddhist adept.

It's practitioners who follow the path of transformation of tantra. He calls us voyagers into the soul. And it goes something like this.

Those who voluntarily abandon the pseudo-security of this planet of delusion with its solid ground of ordinary individuated suffering, you launch yourself through the death dissolutions to the very subtle between states to deepen her wisdom by exploring the unconscious and by expanding her compassionate heroism by serving countless universes of beings on a subtle level. And then to be reborn into the human body to assist those to liberation, others to liberation. It's such a great definition of what we do in here.

You know, we try to do that every day in deep retreat, and it kind of catches the essence of the highest onyx cell of the tantra. So these little things start to happen to you, and I thought I could give you a couple of things that happen. A couple of retreats ago, midway I wanted to review ACI Course 6, The Diamond Cutter.

It's 17 years ago, this month that Geshe-la first taught it. And there were like 14 people in the room, and actually one of our retreatants was there. And it was so much fun to go back and read the translations, the commentaries, and listen to the audio, and even read the transcriptions.

And I did a class a day for about 12 days. And I finished on a Tuesday, and the next day was delivery day. And so I went out to get my supplies, and I opened up my food bin, and there was a beautiful pitcher wrapped in a velvet red cloth.

And I knew it was a Tibetan pitcher because it was 18 and a half inches long and four inches wide. And I unwrapped it. There was no note.

I was curious to know who sent it. And I lifted up the cardboard protector, and it was The Diamond Cutter in Tibetan and English. And nobody knew I was doing a reading course.

And then this last retreat, it always happens like right in the middle I start to get grumpy, like my knees are killing me. I don't know. I lose my concentration.

One day, it was one of those days, I was in the middle of my second session, and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't keep the object. I couldn't practice it.

And I just gave up. I got off the cushion, and I made some tea. I sit in a place where I can look out and see our two beautiful mountains that are in our part of the land.

And it was quarter to five. The sun had just gone over the mountain. It's such a great time of day to watch the light.

It's magical. And I was sipping my tea, and there were these two fairly large, cumulus-type clouds over the mountain, and they were transforming into this peach-rose color, illuminated by the sunset. And I was just nurturing, drinking my tea, and a few minutes later I look up, and there's this perfect white heart in the center of the cloud.

And it's surrounded by this glow of rose-peach color. And I just was smiling. It was pristine white.

It was just there for about a minute, and then it dissolved. You have these eureka moments, and they kick you back in. They confirm something in your heart that you're okay.

Don't worry. Everything's going as planned. So I did get back on the cushion that day, and I finished my session.

And then some other funny things begin to happen to you. I have my secret agent out there who supplies me with certain things, books and things. When I think about what I may need, I write it down.

I usually restrain first to see if it's real, so I don't bug them. So I hold it for about a week or two weeks. But she doesn't know that I don't send a lot of things out to her that I want.

But they start to come into you. They come in from students. It's funny.

So yeah, these things start to happen to you. Your outer world is changing, and you're aware of it. But the real transformation happens on the cushion every day in your deeper trees.

You're cooking for a few weeks, and then you may experience a mind that suddenly has no boundaries, no awareness of separation or a self. As if you were immersed in everything, or everyone. As if you were immersed in joyful communion.

Your sense of linear time just evaporates. And when you later on realize that you stopped breathing for minutes, and you get a taste of that, and you want more. Or you just finished your three-hour session, and you're doing your mantra, and your heart cracks open.

And you see a tiny white diamond in your heart, in the depths of your heart, with rays of light coming out. And you know that it's absolutely possible to save every living being from their suffering. And then your wish to do so goes deeper.

You get a little taste of bodhicitta. Enough to move on, keep going. Real bodhicitta.

And then a day later, you're back in the trenches. It's just uncanny. You thought you took care of something you did twenty-two years ago, and it just kind of pops up.

But you feel more joy on and off the cushion, on a regular basis. You know deep inside of yourself that there's nothing that you can't change. But then it's break, and we reunite.

And you see the transformation in each and every one of us. It's unbelievable. You know, we struggle, and we battle in our own ways.

But then when we break, and we come together again, you see your own transformation in the eyes and faces and warmth of your fellow brothers and sisters. And we just share each other's company. We're so grateful to be in here.

We're working really hard, and we're not going to disappoint you. Thank you so much.