BokJinpa06-01-Notes

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BokJinpa06-01

April 21, 2006

Meditation

Importance of seeing emptiness.

After meditation: Did you get distracted by the wind outside? How close were you to seeing emptiness directly? We've been meditating together for two years. How far have you gotten? How many people have reached shamatha?

It's hard to get the mind to do what we want. It's been two years, and we've made progress, but have you gotten to the goals that you want to reach yet? You still have further to go. Maybe it's frustrating not to be able to say that you didn't hear the wind outside because you weren't in deep meditation.

It's important to go into deep retreat because it's hard to change the mind when you're distracted by outside things. But even the bodhisattva path, meditating every day on emptiness and compassion, takes lifetimes. We don't have time for lifetimes. We need something more radical to jar us out of our stupor, and for this we have the tantra path, especially dzok rim. That's what we're talking about in Padampa Senge—his second lam khor—the path of the inner body or channels or inner winds. This inner body exists in the same place as our gross body, but on a subtler plane of existence. It's something that isn't as readily apparent to us.

The inner body is a physical body but more subtle. You take the difference between a hard object and a ray of light. You can still measure the ray of light. That difference is the same as the difference between a ray of light and our channels. But we picture them as a ray of light because that's the most tangible way to express it. It's in the same body but in a different plane, so you can't be engaging in gross stimuli all the time and still experience your subtle body.

These inner channels and winds that run in them are like the root or basis of our physical existence. Our life comes from these winds. And the reason this is important to us, the premise of the inner body teachings, is that the winds are connected to our thoughts. The winds and the mind ride in tandem, connected as one, like a rider on a horse. And that is the way we can affect the thoughts in a drastic way and see emptiness directly in this life, even if you think you're far away now. These practices are very powerful and have a strong ability to change the mind and pierce through all the obstacles.

What is the def. of mind? Clear and aware. GMR says if you had a nuclear explosion and everyone was killed, the mind would be unaffected because it has no physical existence. The cause of mind is the moment of mind before. So how does something purely mental ever touch something physical? (mental image). How is it possible for the mind to meet the body? We have a picture of our mind and it's lodged somewhere in the body, but in reality it has no physical substance. So how could it ride on a wind?

Your mind can go to the edge of the universe and back in a second. It's not confined by time or space or enclosed in the physical body. So when you have anger, why do they say your thoughts are running in your right channel? If physical and mental things are separate, how can they ever touch?

You see with a physical eye, and it detects colors and shapes, which are also physical. It comes through the eye and stimulates things, and an image is formed. How is that transferred to a mental realm.

Evan: all physical things are mental images.

But we don't think of things that way. We think we have a physical body that can get hurt, etc. indep. of our projections, and when we get sick we go to a doctor and not to the debate ground.

The mind and body are connected because we know when someone taps us on the shoulder. The mind is affected by the body, for example if we don't get enough sleep. What we're dealing with is the body as a physical representation of the mental world at that moment and the mind as a mental representation of the physical, and they are caused at the same moment by the same karmic seeds. We have a mental image of our body that dates to when we learned biology. When we eat we have a mental image of the food going through various tubes, etc. in the body. Or when we breathe we imagine the air going through the lungs, etc. It's a mental image, and it functions like all mental images. And like all belief systems, the more faith we have the more they work. If you measure light in waves, for example, it responds as waves. If you measure it as particles, it responds as particles.

So the idea of dzok rim is that we are recreating our whole body, creating a whole new set of mental images. Are they real? As real as your stomach and pancreas, no more and no less.

What happens to your mental image of your physical body when you start to study medicine? It becomes more real. You picture it in detail. When we were in Bodh Gaya, the only people who got really sick were the two doctors, because they knew what kinds of bacteria were there, etc.

When we're remapping our body, the more you meditate, the stronger it gets. The subtle body gets to be the one you function in, rather than the one you grew up with from biology class. So the more you practice this, the more the inner body comes to life, and the inner body is present all the time. You live in the realm of the subtle body, and things like gravity start to have less effect. That's the principle behind this practice of visualizing the inner channels and winds.

The great yogis saw this map and saw it as a mirror of inner awareness. They started to try to shift the thoughts in a more powerful way than before, for example to create bodhichitta. You can only go so far by forcing it. But in this practice you are using the winds to push it in a drastic way. Why is it more drastic to work with the body than the mind directly? It's more tangible. The body is the medium to control the mind and the link is the breath.

So you start to see the importance of these practices. If you really thought that getting the winds into the central channel was the most important thing you could do in this lifetime, you should go to teachings on it.

Verse 16: Use the practice to fill the three channels with wind. Then taste the spontaneous, free of elaboration. Know the basis, the suchness body in its own purity—this is the advice of Jnanapada.

When you do this kind of practice and get the winds in the channels, the perception of emptiness becomes spontaneous.

Free of elaboration means being in the perception of emptiness. The winds collapse into (the heart), and all the mental images collapse, your breath stops and you see emptiness.

Our Buddha nature is the cause for us to become enlightened. But how can an unchanging thing be a cause for anything? It allows everything, but it doesn't act.

Back to practice—byor ba—to fill the three channels with wind. But byor ba also means joining or juncture, etc. In Skt it means pratiyoga—to fix the mind or to join. Padampa Senge is making a pun about the practice he's talking about, joining the channels.

Meditation. Hollow body, 3 channels meeting 4 fingers from navel. Spinning light there sending bliss. Breath makes it stronger.

Verse 17: Take aim and direct the winds through the channels and the five tangent winds will be made fit for work. You'll see qualities surface in so many ways—this is the advice of Karmavajra.

The five winds are srog 'dzin gyi rlung (life wind), thur sel gyi rlung (downward clearing wind), mnyam gnas kyi rlug (equal wind), gyen rgyu'i rlung (upward moving), and khyab byed kyi rlung (all-pervasive). The winds aren't separate but take the form of the type that is needed.

When it says take aim, it's gnad gi nunpa, or targeting a crucial point in the body.

Les srung (le su rungwa)—becoming fit for the task or fit for work. How are tantric retreats making us fit for the job? They get your mind and body into a supple enough place that you are fit for your job of getting your winds in your channels. It's like you have a hard piece of clay and you have to knead it to be soft before you make something out of it, fit and supple. If you practice with the five main winds, then the five secondary winds will be made fit for the job. Then good qualities will start to surface in many ways.

Once you become lerunged, then three things happen: 1) automatic sense of doing virtue and watching your vows. Like in retreat there's an automatic urge to protect and care for all life forms. There's a sense of not wasting resources. Everyone had the same thing happen in retreat—we use so much more than we give. So then you reduce your needs so you won't be consuming so much.

2) less interest in baser things in life. Like food is seen only as fuel to keep you going, and there's no base desire for it. Your dreams might change so for example instead of conversations with people, you dream of practicing.

3) you start to be aware of your channels and winds, to be able to feel, hear, and see them. You have to be in a much different plane, more subtle than what we are used to, in order to get to this state. It's so quiet that when you're watching the stars and the moon rises, it seems inordinately loud. Time slows down and you become aware of half-seconds. This can only happen when you're in a place where you're not moving so much and seeing the same thing every day. Then you don't have to look at it, and the pattern is fixed. The grosser things you had to do before you don't have to do anymore. The schedule is the same, etc. The retreat is freeing you to get to a higher plane of reality. It's forcing you to become so bored that you have to go deeper. At the beginning you're restless and just want a book, it's an uncomfortable place that you go to to push you to a higher place. Then you realize that the uncomfortable place is actually what frees you, because your mind is free for higher things.