We have the incredibly great fortune to have encountered the precious teachings of the Buddha as well as living teachers who offer us the opportunity to study those teachings and assist us in training in them. Such a situation is a source of rejoicing that fills my heart with gratitude. It doesn’t matter that the path is long and difficult; it is the journey itself that is important.
In tantric Buddhism we find the principle of vibration or sound expressed in the inner practices of transformation where we imagine and develop a mandala, or a pure vision of the dimension of a particular deity or enlightened being. It’s a facsimile of the dimension of a deity, a spontaneous effulgent radiance of reality, in order to transform our limited dualistic vision of reality into the total vision of enlightenment and realize the qualities of enlightened wisdom through that particular deity.
The word root guru has a sacred meaning, that my teachers define in a very specific way: the person who not only tries, but succeeds in bringing about a complete change in your mind to such an extend that the grip of duality is loosened and that the nature of mind is totally laid bare in its naked state and can be accessed whenever remembered for the rest of your life. Perhaps the meditator only finds out many years later who the primary guru was.
The hawk that swooped from the poplar lifting a black baseball hat from my head looped back to his nest Drawing blood the next time,… Read More »HAWK SPEAK
Chogyam Trungpa creates a subtle link to the power of this Shambhala ancestral sovereign and that is why I was interested in exploring, on this latest journey to the Forbidden City. But the best part of the story was in something special the emperor created and also that he gave the 5th Karmapa something that links Chinese history to the Kagyu lineage forever. My journey there is part of that link.
The meditator can take the inner journey of experience through Vajrayana’s twenty-five levels of understanding reality. All twenty-five share the same essence of oneness, the awakened mind of all buddhas.
A year ago I was hospitalized and created a new mandala each day for healing purposes. It helped me calm my mind, and each day the mandalas improved as well as my health, an amazing parallel healing process, both physical and spiritual from the very deep tissue level.
Today we celebrate article number 108 from LEVEKUNST art of life with a reminder of the symbolic meaning of the mala with its 108 beads.