Trust Yourself 2

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Trus%ng yourself…
Part 2 of 2
Eifel Retreat, Days 2 and 3
James Low
Eifel, Germany
2-‐5 April 2009
Transcribed by Anne Conn
Edited by Barbara Terris
www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

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Excerpts
… In dzogchen, nothing can spoil medita4on except not medita4ng. …
… This is the work: to both allow whatever arises to come and go, and to stay relaxed and open as
spacious awareness, which has no essence, no defini4on...
...The deeper the medita4on goes, the more unformed and, therefore, the more infinite we
experience ourselves to be. This gives rise to all possibili4es of spontaneity and power. Because you
develop more clarity, you see situa4ons more easily. It then is very important to be extremely careful
in everything we do, very harmonious, very aCuned, very soD and delicate...
...The more we see our own confusions and the confusions of others, the more this increases our
sensi4vity to others, our compassion, our aCunement to their situa4on. It also opens the sense that,
just as we have confusion and the possibility of awakening, so do they. Therefore, not making
ourselves an object or an instrument, neither do we make other people an object or an instrument. To
turn people into something that we use for our own agenda, our own purpose, is the deep way to
pervert all the teachings...
...Recognise that from the very beginning our nature is pure. I am not a thing. I am not an en4ty. My
nature is ungraspable, like the sky. This infinite openness gives rise to all phenomena. Res4ng in a
state that allows phenomena to come and go, the distorted ego-‐winds gradually dissolve, and there
is clarity and spaciousness. From the clarity and spaciousness, a deep sa4sfac4on arises, a
contentment, which means you have no need to go and do things. You can just sit quietly and not be
so hungry for experience...
...Dzogchen is not much concerned with seriousness. Whether you’re serious or you’re foolish,
whether you have a seCled life or you have a crazy life, whether you are rich or whether you are poor
– none of these things impact the rela4onship with the ground, because everything arises from the
ground. Everything has the same nature or, in the language of mahamudra, everything has one taste.
This is the taste of emp4ness. When you have that one taste, it doesn’t maCer. Your life arises
according to its circumstances...
...To be alive is a very individual thing. We’re not homogenised, we’re not clones of each other.
Respec4ng the individuality of others – and finding support through their difference and their
individuality to be our own individual self – is very important in dzogchen. We’re not trying to control
other people and make them the way we want them to be, rather we are actually experiencing their
vibrant difference as an affirma4on of our difference...
...In the history of Buddhism, many people have got lost by following dreams of power. Power is a
dangerous thing. Since the ground of power is emp4ness, and if it has an authen4c compassionate
inten4on, then yes, it may be very useful. But it’s very easy to fall in love with power. So, again and
again, we should examine, 'What is our mo4ve in doing prac4ce? What is our mo4ve when we
interact with other people?’...

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Table of Contents
Refuge prayer and the bodhisattva vow ...........................................................................................1

Simple focusing practice .........................................................................................................................5
Dedication of Merit ....................................................................................................................................5
How we can get lost ..................................................................................................................................6
Four Noble Truths ...................................................................................................................................6
Six Realms ...................................................................................................................................................6
Causes and circumstances ...................................................................................................................7
Four stages of karma .............................................................................................................................9
Consciousness and awareness ...........................................................................................................10
Awareness ................................................................................................................................................11
Our aim ......................................................................................................................................................12
Trusting ourselves ................................................................................................................................14
The importance of lineage and transmission. .............................................................................18
Is there anything enduring and unchanging? ..............................................................................20
Three Aa practice .....................................................................................................................................21
Opening to the sky ..................................................................................................................................23
Attachment and identity. ......................................................................................................................25
Story about two disciples who understood differently ..........................................................32
Grasping at the sense one has an inherent self ........................................................................34
There is no security ................................................................................................................................36
The meaning of 'emptiness' ................................................................................................................37
The ego is like the maIia ....................................................................................................................39
How energy manifests ........................................................................................................................39
Instructions for practice: ‘Who is having this experience?’ ...................................................41
Editing isn't necessary ..........................................................................................................................43
Some aspects of tantra ...........................................................................................................................47
Teaching lineage .......................................................................................................................................50
Typical problems that arise in meditation. ..................................................................................55
Suggestions for when you practice on your own .......................................................................56
A tantric meditation, and some history of Padmasambhava ................................................57
Relaxation is the essential point .......................................................................................................60
Questions on happiness, sadness and difIiculties ....................................................................69
Trust ourselves .........................................................................................................................................71
Trusting others .........................................................................................................................................72
Dedication of Merit .................................................................................................................................76

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Refuge prayer and the bodhisattva vow

We will con1nue with this theme of trust and trus1ng ourselves. Generally speaking in buddhism this
begins with the idea of taking refuge. We have this verse which in Tibet was the most common, the
most widely used, of all the refuge verses.
I go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent

Until enlightenment is gained.
Through the virtue of practicing generosity and the other perfections
May I attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.
The meaning is quite straighDorward, that we take refuge in the buddha, the teaching of the buddha,
and the assembly, the group of all the people who follow the buddha; and we do this un1l
enlightenment is gained. So this is an inten1on not just for this life, not for the immediacy of our
circumstances, but for all our future lives. One of the func1ons of this is to have a vast sense of 1me;
that in this life we have all our very familiar concerns, our daily pressures, ques1ons to be resolved,
things to do. These can bring the focus of our aIen1on into the details so that we forget a broader,
wider, more infinite sense of possibility.
To say, ‘I take refuge in all my future lives’ immediately gives a sense, well, ‘Who will I be in a future
life?’ We don't know, so there's a sense that we want to develop an intension that goes beyond
circumstances.
Most of the 1me, what we want to do is determined by the par1cular circumstances. For example,
the weather gets warmer, we take off our winter clothes, we put on some lighter clothes. Then
when the summer comes we put on sandals, and so on. Our aIen1on regarding our clothing is
determined by the seasons, or is determined by a social event. If you're going to a very formal event
you wear a par1cular kind of clothes, if you go to an informal event you wear different clothes.
We're fine tuning what we want to do and how we're going to do it according to circumstances.
But this is saying something different, this suggests, 'I want to send out, from myself, a kind of ray of
light that will go on forever, for ever and ever and ever, and I always want to stay on track with that.
This is what I'm about under all circumstances. This is something not to deviate from, not to forget.'
That is to say, this solu1on will apply under all circumstances. That's something quite radical. And
that these objects of refuge, or trust, are reliable under all condi1ons. The buddha is reliable;
buddha here represents both a historical person who awoke to something, but also our own
poten1al, our own nature. It's grounded in an idea that, beneath all the movements of personality,
is something unchanging and enduring. It's not a solid fixed substance; it's a state of being which is
light, open, present, ungraspable. This is our true refuge, and we take refuge in this forever.
Whereas in your life you take refuge in your work and then you re1re, and when you re1re, all the
things that you did when you worked start to fall away. The structures of your personality, your
mobilisa1on in terms of a 1metable, the need to remember the details of the work situa1on, all
these things that were very, very important start to fall away. Just as, earlier in your life when you
went to school, you had to know your 1metable, prepare for exams, be there, know which teachers
were okay. There was a whole mass of knowledge which determined your existence, and then when
you leV school, gradually it vanished, and nowadays we don't think about school very much. It's just
gone.
But here we want something that will endure through 1me, which will con1nue in a reliable way. So
taking refuge in the dharma is both taking refuge in the teaching of the buddha, which is referred to
as dharma, but also the nature of how things actually are. So it means, 'I want to rest myself in the
actuality of things, not my phantasies about them, not my dogma4c beliefs about them, not cultural

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interpreta4ons.' That means, in order to really get that refuge, I have to have a direct experience of
it. Otherwise it's just another story.
Chris1ans believe in heaven. In buddhism you can believe in all kinds of pure lands. Everybody's
selling something for you to believe in. Belief's very easy; but belief is one step beyond, it's
somewhere else. The actuality of our situa1on is, unless it's here in the palm of our hand, we don't
have it.
How do we get that direct experience for ourselves? This is the real meaning of refuge, so when we
recite the refuge we say the words, but it becomes real as we start to be able to actually have it. It's,
first of all, expressed as an inten1on, and then that inten1on starts to become manifest as a sense of
being plugged into something, being connected with it. As long as it's all coming from our side, the
danger is that it can always slip away, but at a certain point you can feel, 'Oh, this is where I am.'
Maybe you've had this sort of experience in learning a par1cular kind of job, that at first its a sort of
aspira1on, but you're not quite sure how to do it; and then at a certain point you develop a kind of
unconscious competence. You just know how to do it, and then you're very much on the inside.
You're part of that ac1vity, whatever it is.
So it's the same way – one of the reasons we recite the refuge again and again is to find ourselves on
the inside. Taking refuge in the sangha is both a homage to all those who've done the prac1ce in the
past; it's making a connec1on with the lineage, because in buddhism there's a strong stress on the
importance of the kindness of others. Without the kindness of others we wouldn't know what we
know, we wouldn't find our way.
In our world now we can go into a bookstore and buy a book on anything, and you can read the
book, or go onto the internet, a you can get a lot of informa1on; and that informa1on seems to just
arrive. You just Google something and then you get pages of stuff and you read it and now you know
it. Now it's yours. In a par1cular way you've stolen it. It might seem strange to say you've stolen it,
because in a sense it's given, but it hans't been really given to you.
In the Tibetan language the term that they use for stealing is 'taking what is not given.' If you buy a
book from a bookstall, in a sense it's given, but it's not given to you, and there's quite a difference if
someone gives you something. Because now you've got the sense that it's for you, rather than 'It's
just there and I can have some.' It's no longer impersonal and anonymous, and that's one of the
meanings of sangha, is to belong and to feel part of the way in which understanding is handed from
genera1on to genera1on.
It's also connected with the idea of non-‐duality. That our enlightenment or our awakening, our
opening, is inseparable from the opening of everyone else. That we can't have it just in a box as a
private possession. For it to be real, it has to be connected with other people. Which means that
sharing rather than geXng is part of how we proceed, and that doing prac1ce together from 1me to
1me is a very useful thing to do.
But even if we're prac1cing mainly on our own, always being aware of all the other people who
prac1se gives a sense that there is a weaving together of a universal inten1on rather than a kind of
lonely hero. The lonely hero is a major archetype in western culture. We have it in a lot of Greek
myths, of se_ng out on a journey to find something. Even if you go with a team of people, there's
usually one par1cularly named hero, like Jason who goes with the Argonauts to get the golden
fleece, and that hero overcomes difficul1es and then gets something which is then theirs.
The approach in buddhism, in dharma, is very different. It's about a feeling that something has been
turning for a very long 1me. We talk of the wheel of the dharma. When the buddha first taught he
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set in mo1on this wheel, and the wheel keeps turning, and we join in the movement of that wheel so
we then become part of something. This is important because it's not all up to us.
Very oVen in our lives we feel 'I'm the only person who could do things properly.' Certainly when I
work in the hospital and I sit in mee1ngs with my colleagues, I despair at their stupidity, I delight in
the wonderful brilliance of my own mind and I just feel that they should shut up and listen. They, of
course, have exactly the same a_tude themselves, so everybody talks and nobody listens, and that's
very normal.
Finding a way of collabora1ng with other people is enormously important, because it means that I'm
not here to be more successful than anyone else, to rise above anyone else, but that what I have as
the most important part of me, is inseparable from what you have as the most important part of you.
All the unique configura1ons of our features and our histories, the things that we take to be the most
defining characteris1cs of ourselves, from this point of view, are just surface phenomena; they're not
the real thing at all. When we meet together, we don't meet in difference, we actually meet in
sameness, a sameness which generates infinite difference; but that difference is not in conflict with
sameness. That is to say, we all have the same buddha nature, but we will each express it in our own
unique way. We're not being homogenised into some machine, we're not going to be cloned into
some totalitarian regime with uniforms and so on.
You can be exquisitely yourself, but not lonely, not isolated, not living in a world of one;
simultaneously you can be connected with the universal bonding of the buddha nature of all beings.
So, that's what the refuge in the sangha speaks to.
The second two lines of this prayer, 'I will use all the virtues that I accumulate, all the fruits of good
ac4vity, for the benefit of others. I will use it to gain enlightenment, and let this enlightenment
spread out to all beings.' refers to the bodhisaIva vow. That, then, gives us something to do. If you
really take the bodhisaIva vow you will never be bored, even if you're in the airport and the plane's
delayed, and you're wai1ng, and you think 'Why is this happening again?' Why are we there? We're
there to save all sen1ent beings – while wai1ng for the plane, while going to the toilet, while making
a cup of tea. Why are we doing this? For the sake of all sen1ent beings. It's the ul1mate form of
adding value, because it means that any ac1vity, the real nature of it, the real underlying purpose, is
to help all beings. It's not that I'll do this first, and I'll remember the dharma aVerwards, but that
being available for others, as a vow, is something we remember, and in never forge_ng it we always
know who we are, and where we are, and what we're to do. I'm a person taking the bodhisaIva
vow, I'm here to help all beings, wherever that is. If you're in the supermarket and you're queuing,
that's what it is.
Recently some friends and I went to a little restaurant by a river and it was very nice, and the sun was
shinning, and aVer an hour the food hadn't come. So we start to think, 'This is a very slow place,' but
we looked around and everyone else seemed to be ge_ng their food. All the five poisons, pride,
envy, jealousy, everything's flying around very quickly. But why are we there? It's very easy to forget
a dharma inten1on. We're there to have fun in the sun. 'This is nice, nothing to do. This is great.
Summer4me.' But why are we there? For the sake of all beings.
This is what it means to take the bodhisaIva vow: that you never forget. Under all circumstances,
the reason for your existence is there. This is why it is such an absolutely essen1al prac1ce, and this
inten1on can be merged with anything else. It doesn't stand in contradic1on. It's not an either/or.
You can be dancing with the bodhisaIva vow. You can watch TV with the bodhisaIva vow. You can
do whatever you like with the bodhisaIva vow. What it is is the basis of the movement out. It's the
basis of moving into the world, into being with others. It means that 'Since I have said that I will help
all beings, I need to thing about what I do, what I choose to do with my 4me.'

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'How will I help beings?' If somebody is thirsty, you can get them a glass of water. If somebody is
sick, you can take them to the hospital. If somebody is not enlightened, how do you help them?
What helps beings to get enlightened? That's why we have to get enlightened first ourselves,
otherwise we wouldn't know.
The bodhisaIva vow also drives your own quest for enlightenment. If you're only thinking about
your own enlightenment it becomes very narrow, but as soon as you want to help other people it
becomes 'physician, heal thyself.' If you want to provide medicine for all beings, you shouldn't be
dying at the same 1me.
So the first part, the refuge, is about an inten1on to turn one's mind towards dharma ac1vity, to
develop a dharma iden1ty, and the second is an inten1on to help others, and the two merge very
closely together, they work collabora1vely.
We recite this three 1mes. Recita1ons of many buddhist things are done three 1mes. It's a way of
reinforcing the meaning, establishing it clearly in our mind. But it also gives a chance to be with the
sound that we make as we recite it, because the meaning doesn't just lie in the seman1cs, in the
meaning value of the words, but [also] in the experience of breathing and making sound. Sound is a
quality of vibra1on which shiVs our orienta1on, how we are. Most of the 1me we listen to people
speaking in terms of what they're saying, the meaning of what they're saying, but, clearly, how they
gesture, shiVs in the tonal quality of their voice, also have an impact. So chan1ng is a way of using
resonances, resonances which have been developed over hundreds of years of prac1ce, as a way of
loosening oneself up inside and remaining very open.
Let’s recite the prayer three 1mes. You can visualise the historical Buddha in front of you, and
around the Buddha are many books which represents the dharma, and many monks, yogis and
yoginis who represent the sangha."
Refuge Prayer and Bodhisattva Vow
སངས་$ས་ཆོས་དང་ཚ)གས་+ི་མཆོག་.མས་ལ།
SANG GYE CHO DANG
TSOG KYI CHO NAM LA
buddha dharma and
sangha of supreme, best (plural) to
assembly
To the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent
1ང་2བ་བར་5་བདག་ནི་7བས་8་མཆི།
JANG CHUB BAR DU DAG NI KYAB SU CHI
enlightenment until I refuge for go
I go for refuge until enlightenment is gained.
I go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Assembly of the excellent until enlightenment is gained.
བདག་གིས་9ིན་སོགས་བ:ིས་པའི་བསོད་ནམས་+ིས།
DAG GI JIN SOG GYI PAI SO NAM KYI
I doing generosity other perfections doing, practicing virtue through
འ=ོ་ལ་ཕན་?ིར་སངས་$ས་འ@བ་པར་ཤོག།
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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 beneWit of all beings

May I attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.
Simple focusing practice

Now we con1nue doing the simple focusing prac1ce we did earlier today, focusing on the flow of the
breath going in and out, or on some external object. The value of this kind of prac1ce is that it gives
a capacity for sustained aIen1on, but, in par1cular, the capacity to see the point where you loose
the focus of your aIen1on and get absorbed in an arising idea. For all the deeper systems of
medita1on this is the central point: we establish a moment of clarity, and then suddenly we're gone.
Suddenly we're into something else. We didn't see it coming, the thought seemed to catch us, and
we're lost in it, and we follow it for as long as it wants to hold us, and then we're back. Then we try
to maintain the aIen1on again, and again a thought or a feeling, or whatever catches us.
What we want to do later is to start to really examine this point and to see what it is. But before that
we have to simply have the capacity to maintain a focused aIen1on, and as soon as we get lost,
bring our minds gently back, because it's the capacity to return to being on track with minimal
disturbance that's very important. So oVen we have developed a kind of internal cri1c, a nega1ve,
judging a_tude inside ourselves that when we do something that we regard as being a mistake, we
don't just recognise that we've made a mistake, but we whack ourselves for it, and that creates more
mental turbulence.
So in this prac1ce we're working to take all the judgement away, and stay on the level of simple
recogni1on: 'I'm not where I should be, back to where I should be. Not where I should be, back to
where I should be.' Anything that you add onto that will simply knock you further off on the other
side, and the whole thing becomes very turbulent.
It's got various aspects to it. One is, it's teaching tolerance of mistakes. It's saying that for us,
mistakes are normal. Don't be so surprised, don't make a big deal about it. You're going to get lost,
that's what you're here for, this is called samsara, this is the place where lost people are. Are you
here? I think we can assume you're lost. So ge_ng lost is not the issue, just recognising 'Oh, I got
lost,' and back. 'Oh, I got lost,' and back. 'I got lost,' and back, and the more smoothly you can make
the return, it will make it easier to stay relaxed and calm and watch the details of the process of
being lost. This is, from a dzogchen point of view, why we do this kind of prac1ce.
Si_ng in a comfortable way, shoulders open so you can breath deeply and easily, finding a focus for
the aIen1on, and we'll just sit like this for about twenty minutes or so.
Sitting practice
At the end of our prac1ce we direct or dedicate the merit to all beings which is a way of sharing out
all merit that we generate through our dharma prac1ce. That is to say, it's another way of including
all sen1ent beings in whatever we do.
Dedication of Merit
དགེ་བ་འདི་ཡིས་Dར་5་བདག།
GE WA DI YI NYUR DU DAG

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ཨོ་$ན་F་མ་འ@བ་Gར་ནས།
OR GYAN LA MA DRUB GYU NAE
འ=ོ་བ་གཅིག་+ང་མ་Iས་པ།
DRO WA CHIG KYANG MA LU PA
དེ་ཡི་ས་ལ་འགོད་པར་ཤོག།
DE YI SA LA GO PAR SHO
By this virtue may I quickly aCain the glorious Guru's stage, then may I put all beings without even
one excep4on, on that same stage!
How we can get lost

In thinking about trus1ng ourselves, perhaps I’ll start with a general Buddhist account of how our
situa1on is established. It’s a par1cular reading, or a par1cular version of events, but it indicates
various ways in which we can get lost.
Four Noble Truths

Tradi1onally in Buddhist explana1ons we put the problem first and the solu1on aVerwards, as a kind
of diagnosis, and then some sense of a treatment. This follows from the Buddha’s first teaching of
the Four Noble Truths. He said, 'First, there’s truth about suffering.' Suffering is available everywhere;
suffering ranges from a sort of discontent, not being at ease with one’s self, to anxie1es, fear, worry,
and so on. A sense of not being at ease.
He said that this arises from causes: causes of aIachment; causes of not seeing things very clearly,
and then ac1ng on the basis of an unclear percep1on.
He said there’s a way out of this, there is an end to suffering. That is to say, it's possible to have a
radical shiV from the kind of behaviours and a_tudes that generate suffering, and to enter into a
different realm; what nowadays we would call a sort of paradigm shiV. That samsara, the cycle of
repeated existence, is one kind of paradigm, and nirvana is another paradigm. It’s a set of
rela1onships, a kind of view, and a set of behaviours that move together to create a par1cular mood
or quality of experience.
And fourthly, the Buddha said, 'There’s a way out of this, which is the path,' and he talked about an
eight fold path, dealing with seeing things clearly, behaving in a clear way, developing a right
understanding, and so on.
So, first of all, if we look at the structure of our situa1on according to the tradi1onal view, from the
Buddhist point of view we have been born many 1mes. Each of these lives has involved us engaging
in an environment which impacts on us, and also moving towards that environment. To be alive is to
be contextual. We are both agents, that is to say people doing something, ac1ng on the world, and
we are also recipients, people who are shaped and moved and condi1oned by events.
Six Realms
The ways in which we can be born are set out in terms of six realms. On the upper realm we have the
gods, then we have the jealous gods, then the human beings, then the animals, then the hungry
ghosts and then the hell realms. Some people will see these in very concrete terms as actual places;
some people see them as more psychological domains.
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The reading of them as psychological domains is a rather western turn, because we believe that
human beings are the best thing ever. We believe in humanism, and the gorgeous Leonardo Da Vinci
showing the perfec1on of the human form. We are the real thing; and of course we have good
books, like the bible, that confirm [this idea]. God made a liIle cake and he put us on the top, like a
liIle angel or princess. Because of that we think these other realms are some bad day that we might
have, some kind of depression or deep anxiety. Then we feel like we’re in hell, so that’s like hell.
From tradi1onal point of view of actual rebirth, there are truly places that you go to. This body that
we have now is not the only game in town. We human beings are determined to make it that by
killing off every other species, if possible. Only humans would be leV, but maybe we won’t be
successful. But clearly, this body doesn’t last for long.
There are birds, there are cats, there are dogs, cows, and so on. Are these completely separate from
us? From a buddhist point of view they are beings with sen1ence, sen1ent beings. Beings which can
feel and think. That is to say, their nature and our nature is not very different. We are born at this
1me with a human body, which gives us a par1cular capacity to manifest, but that can also be lost. It
can be diminished. We can be reborn as a cow or a dog, and if you’re a cow or a dog there’s not so
much you can do. You’re much more at the mercy of other people.
So the idea of rebirth is important for various reasons. Whether it’s true or not, who’s going to prove
whether it’s true? But as a working hypothesis it’s quite useful, because it 1ckles you a bit and makes
you, sort of, less serious and less set in the fixity of your view.
If you just imagine that you’ve come into this situa1on as a human being, then we have to think,
'Why?' 'Oh. due to causes and condi4ons,' and the par1cular form that you have in this life is also due
to causes and condi1ons. Some children are in accidents when they’re young. They run across the
road and a car hits them and the rest of their life is in a wheel chair. That’s a causing condi1on. Some
people are born with degenerate illnesses and they have very difficult lives. Other people have very
healthy easy lives, because the body is good, they're intelligent, they grow up in a family where
they’re not aIacked, and so on.
So, how we evolve is not just something from the inside out, but it’s our luck in what we meet. So,
why are some people lucky? 'They’re just lucky.' That’s a bit thin. From the buddhist point of view,
luck is a morally created thing. The stress is that the universe is essen1ally a paIern of balanced
rela1onships, and whenever we behave in ways that are unbalanced that creates a counter move. So
if you steal a lot, in a later situa1on you will lose a lot. If you’re very violent and aIacking and
domina1ng and controlling towards people, some kind of difficul1es will come back to you, some
physical sufferings and so on.
Causes and circumstances

Our situa1on is one created by causes and circumstances, and these causes and circumstances don’t
last forever. When we review our own life, we can see that at different periods in our lives things
have gone well, things have gone badly. Some1mes life seems to expand and it’s very easy;
some1mes it’s very, very difficult. We don’t know why. Some people look to astrology to give some
explana1on. From a buddhist point of view primarily we think, 'Oh. This is the manifesta4on of some
par4cular cause. Some par4cular condi4on and that’s why I behaved in this way for a while, and then
it passes and I find myself behaving in another way.' That is to say, while the impulse or the tendency
was arising, I was fused with it, I was iden1fied with it, and it was as if that is completely defining
who I am. And then it’s gone, suddenly I’m doing something different. You see that with children a
lot, that they’re really into one thing and then they stop doing it, and then you say,
'Oh, you haven’t been on your bicycle for a while.'

'No, I don’t like bicycles.'

P a g e | 8
'Two months ago you were every day out on your bicycle up and down in the road.'
We’re not so different, we just hide these things beIer as adults.
Part of a buddhist view is to observe yourself, and to see how these waves or flavours run through
you for a while and then shiV, and then shiV, and to start to see that it’s like winds blowing behind
us. A wind is coming from the north and then one from the east, and each wind takes us in different
direc1ons. These are seen as the results of events in past lives. Because of this, if we take this view
seriously, it means there are many, many latent causes present inside us. Like as if we were some big
hor1cultural warehouse full of many, many different kind of seeds, but some storm has hit this
warehouse and all the seeds have got tumbled and mixed together, and every 1me you plant
something you don’t know what’s going to come up. It’s like that. Suddenly something grows up
inside us and whoo! We’re like this, then we’re like that.
The interes1ng thing here is that we tend to iden1fy with what is happening, even if we don’t like it.
Say, for example, we have a period when we feel rather depressed and hopeless. We feel depressed
and hopeless. We can also say, 'I don’t like to be this way, I don’t want to be this way, but I am this
way.'
So, an arising is both something coming at us, which feels a bit persecutory, but it’s also how we’re
moving out into the world. It’s the site of our being for a while. Moment by moment these arisings
shiV. That’s one of the things we no1ce when we do medita1on, that the mind is not stable, it’s not
seIled. Different kinds of thoughts, feelings, and so on are always arising, and we don’t develop our
own thoughts. That’s the amazing thing, and it’s one of the real benefits of medita1on, that we start
to see the thoughts that come in my head are only mine because they’ve arrived there.
For example, you’re si_ng at home and you hear a liIle click, and you know that the postman’s put
some leIers through the leIer box. You go down to get 'your' leIers. But they’re not your leIers,
someone else wrote them. They’re somebody else’s leIer to you; but as soon as it comes through
your leIerbox it’s 'your' leIer.
In the same way, when you sit in medita1on, some thought, 'click!' comes into your head. 'Oh, my
thought! Why have I got this thought? Wrong address.' So where do these thoughts come from?
Very strange things come inside us. Somehow they are us, but somehow they are not us. This, of
course, makes it difficult some1mes to trust ourselves. We find that we are rather impulsive. That we
decide not to something, and then we do it.
Who is the one who does it when we’ve already decided not to do it? A wind, a tendency, a habit
blows through, and suddenly we are inside that. We could say 'We have given ourselves over to that
tendency,' or 'That tendency has caught us.' It can feel in both ways. Some1mes there’s a sense of
self abandonment, and some1mes we’re taken by it, as if some strong force has taken us into that
paIern.
This, of course, makes it difficult to trust ourselves, because we are not the one who is doing what
we do. This is a very tricky thing. Who is the one who performs our ac1ons? On one level, on a
formal level, on a legal level, we do. But who is the actual one who does it? In English we might say, 'I
found myself dot, dot, dot. I found myself suddenly wan4ng to phone a friend.' That is to say, some
thought arose in your mind and you go along with it, and you do that, but who is doing that? 'I' pick
up the telephone, but where did that come from? Something, in a sense, which was not me, because
it wasn't in my conscious area of concern, comes in, and I find myself in that.
P a g e | 9
Four stages of karma

From a dharma point of view this is how karma extends itself: that we are the ones who appear to be
doing things which are outside our conscious control. We go along with something which appears to
be the right thing to do.
As some of you will know well, there are four different stages in the development of karma, and
they’re quite useful to reflect on. The first stage is called 'the basis,' and it means having the sense
that subject and object exist. If I exist and you exist, if the environment exists external to me, then,
indeed, I am being impinged on. Things are coming and striking me. And I am also ac1vely out there
looking for things, things that I like and want more of, things that I seek to avoid. This is the basis.
Without this dualis1c orienta1on karma won’t arrive. The Tibetan gloss for karma is ac4vity which is
a cause, having consequences, le gyu dre. This ac1vity, which has a cause in terms of its impulse, has
consequences later on because it’s happening in a network where things are connected. 'I am a thing
among other things, and so, what you do affects me, and what I do affects you.' If that is the limit of
my sense of who I am, then I'm always going to be involved in this kind of reac1vity.
The second stage is called 'an inten4on' or 'a thought.' So, we’re si_ng here and suddenly we have a
thought. Maybe suddenly you see the sunshine shining on the carpet and you think, 'Oh, I’ll go for a
walk later.' It’s a nice inten1on to have. Some par1cular trigger has given rise to this thought; then
we seek to actualise the situa1on.
That’s the third stage. We come into contact with the context and try to make our inten1on manifest,
to make it become real. So, in the aVernoon you set out to have a walk.
Then, on the fourth level, you have the comple1on of the sa1sfac1on that comes from agreeing,
'Yeah. I went for a walk. The sun was shining. It was lovely.' That is to say, I am completely in
harmony with my ac1on. Then the whole thing becomes quite solid. If the fourth stage is not in
harmony … For example you go for a walk, the sun’s shining, you’re going down the forest path, you
trip over a stone and you twist your ankle, and you hobble back in pain thinking, 'Shit. I don’t know
why I went for a walk,' then going for a walk is now not a good idea.
So the fourth level is about a kind of repentance. Say, for example, you have small children and
they’re running around and they're causing a lot of chaos and you shout at them. If aVerwards you
think, 'Oh, why did I shout? I never mean to shout at my children,' but something happens and you
do that. So the fourth stage offers the possibility of contradic1ng what has been done in the earlier
stages.
Of course every religion has some idea about this: the importance of repentance, of recognising
when an ac1on has not been wholesome or helpful. If possible, if the ac1on is not a good one, it’s
beIer to stop it at the third stage. To not actually do it. So, you might have an inten1on to do
something selfish or harmful and there's something quite exci1ng and enlivening about that, but you
think, 'Oh. No. I won’t.' OVen we do that because we review the consequences. We become aware
of the inexorable, the inevitable chain of cause and effect. If the seed is planted the fruit is going to
come, so, 'I should be careful. I won’t do that.'
We can also stop the ac1on at the second stage of the inten1on. An inten1on starts to arise. We can
either indulge it and develop it, or release it. We experience this when we do the kind of medita1on
we were just doing. We’re si_ng, a thought comes. It seems to capture us and we go into a chain of
thoughts. The sooner we recognise what’s happening, we can leave that chain of thoughts and come
back to the breath. The more we follow the chain of thoughts, the more energy they seem to have,
the more solidity and reality they seem to have. So, developing the capacity to release inten1ons is
very important.

P a g e | 10
Then we can also make a change on the first step, which is to say the percep1on to subject and
object are strongly real. If we can stop construing the world in terms of self and other, with ourselves
as a consciousness living inside our body looking out – with hopes and fears, wan1ng to get good
things, trying to avoid bad things – then the agita1on of that can be allowed to release, and then we
can be more relaxed, more open to the circumstances.
What we call an individual self is a par1cular kind of vibra1on, or a par1cular kind of knot.
Some1mes it’s described in terms of aIachment, we are aIached to an idea of an individual self, but
essen1ally it’s a par1cular sort of absorp1on, that we are caught up in something. Just as you might
hear a song and like it, and then it buzzes around in your head, the idea of being a self-‐exis1ng
person, an individual agent, also vibrates inside us.
The ques1on is how to release that, and that’s the work of all the different dharma paths. They’re all
concerned to stop these four stages of karma. In par1cular the first stage, because that first stage is
like the root. If you imagine these four stages like a tree, the root and then the trunk and then the
finer branches going out and then the leaves, if you repent aVer an ac1on that you’ve done that’s
like plucking off a leaf. If you stop the ac1vity it cuts the branches. If you stop the inten1on it’s like
cu_ng the trunk, but liIle sprouts can s1ll come out of it. But if you cut the basic dualis1c view,
that’s like cu_ng the root. It doesn’t grow anymore. That’s why Buddhism has a view of libera1on, or
awakening: because there is a root. That’s what the Buddha taught in that first teaching. There is a
root cause to samsara, to all our suffering, and, if we cut that, everything goes free. You don’t have to
spend the 1me like a gardener taking out the weeds, pruning, plan1ng, and so on. Everything comes
free by itself.
But, of course, we find ourselves in a situa1on that’s not quite like that, because most of the 1me we
are at the mercy of the various thoughts and feelings and inten1ons that arise inside us. We
recognise aVer the fact, aVer the event that something has occurred, and because of that, trus1ng
ourselves is difficult.
Consciousness and awareness

This raises two ques1ons. One: can we gain a beIer content to our mind? That is to say, can we have
a beIer quality of thought, a more ethical kind of thought, a more easy sense of being in rela1on to
the world so that we don’t become full of envy, or anger, or whatever? But it also raises the
ques1on: well, who is the one who has these thoughts? That is to say, we can focus our aIen1on on
clarifying the content of our mind, or we can focus aIen1on on the mind itself. Who is the one who
is having these thoughts? Because if the one who is having these thoughts can be opened up, then it
becomes less important what the content of the mind is.
If you are an alcoholic and your favourite drink is, say, cognac, then, if possible, you’ll drink cognac. If
cognac is not available, quite possibly you have a hierarchy of desire. You might think, 'Okay, then I’ll
have the whiskey.' If the whiskey’s not there, 'How about some gin?' If gin’s not there, red wine. If
red wine’s not there, white wine. And so on, all the way down un1l you end up with methylated
spirits, domes1c cleaning materials, and so on. A good alcoholic will drink anything.
In that way you can spend a lot of 1me organising external behaviour and in some Buddhist paths
that’s very important. For example, for monks and nuns there are many, many rules and regula1ons
to try to protect them from engagement with disturbing situa1ons. The idea is that the mind is very
unseIled and trembling, and if you put an object near it, it will go into a vibra1on with that object.
Because the mind is so fragile, so sensi1ve, it’s beIer to keep dangerous objects at bay; and there is
some truth in that. We have to be careful of a kind of hubris, or infla1on, whereby we imagine that
we are much more sorted and clear that we are. Vulnerability is always there.
P a g e | 11
Some of you will know this story that Gampopa tells in the famous book The Jewel Ornament of
Libera4on about a man who, when he was young, was a general, a great military commander, and he
got 1red of killing and he decided to prac1se media1on. So, he took his vows and he started to
prac1ce medita1on, and then he went and did a retreat in a cave in the hills, and every day when he
did his medita1on he would make some offerings, and at the end of the offerings he would go and sit
outside and scaIer some of the food from the offerings and the birds would come and eat it. One
day he was si_ng and he throws out this food. Many, many birds arrive, and he thinks, 'Oh. If I had
as many soldiers as there are birds, I could go down into the valley and defeat all my enemies.' So, he
leV his cave and went down in the valley and put on his armour and become a soldier again.
These tendencies that are in our mind, they don’t just vanish in an instant. We can’t just say, 'I'm
going to relax.' This is, on one level, the very frightening thing about Buddhism: as soon as you start
to believe in many different lives, it’s not just going to a therapist and thinking about how difficult
your childhood was and what your parents did to you and so on, and then you resolve these neurosis
and you’re sorted. In all your past lives you had parents, and many of them were probably living in
Vienna and quite neuro1c, so you need an awful lot of therapy. That’s what happens when these
tendencies arise in our mind; we don’t know where they all come from.
Clearly there are two things here. One is when we look, for example, at other people, we can think,
'Oh. You are separate from me, so if you speak to me or you do something towards me, in the space
between me and you I can think about what you’re doing.' That kind of object is reasonably easy to
handle. What is much more difficult is our internal objects: thoughts, sensa1ons. We don’t have any
perspec1ve on them. We don’t see them coming. They’re already inside us; they’re already us. That’s
why media1on is difficult. The real objects which are dangerous to us are not the external objects. In
the story of the man [medita1ng] in the cave, the birds aren’t dangerous. The birds come, they
s1mulate something. What is dangerous is the thought in his head, the memory, because it’s arising
in him, as him, because he’s iden1fied with it – that’s the real danger. As soon as he goes into the
thought and the thought goes into him, that, then, becomes the site of his iden1ty. That’s who he is.
He went 'Ah, I’m a soldier. What am I doing here?' and then he’s off into a new ac1vity.
Part of the prac1ce of media1on is to become more aware of the subtle ways in which we fuse with
the content of our mind. This is difficult because the way in which we process our experience... in
buddhism it would be what we translate as consciousness; the Tibetan gloss is a kind of the knowing
of forms, or a forma1ve knowing. That is to say, I’m conscious of something. I’m conscious that it’s
the morning. I’m conscious that there’s a lot of informa1on here so you might get a bit
overwhelmed. I can be conscious of lots of things. That is to say, 'I am aware of this. I have my
aCen4on on this.' Consciousness always takes an object. We’re always conscious of something, and
it’s because of that that subject and object are turning all the 1me.
Awareness
But the Buddha pointed to another aspect of our existence, one we might call the buddha nature, or
the enlighten mind, and this is not a consciousness. It’s not a specific, unique, individual moment of
experience of something. Rather, it’s a panoramic awareness in which subject and object are
revealed.
That is to say, I’m si_ng here. I’m looking at you. I’m conscious of you. I am conscious of you, but I’m
also aware of being conscious of you. I can just be conscious of you. I can just be in it and then it’s
quite intense, but I can also have a more relaxed awareness, 'Oh, I’m conscious of you, I’m conscious
of you. You’re wearing red. You’re wearing brown,' and so on. The awareness con1nues to reveal all
the different moments of a par1cular conscious rela1on with an aspect of the environment.
It’s this difference which is the basis for awakening, or enlightenment. Consciousness will always be
busy, consciousness will always be messy, and this mess leads to a situa1on where the more you try

P a g e | 12
to 1dy it, the more it creates another disturbance. If you have a room that has a lot of dust in it and
you start brushing the dust, the dust will go off what it's seIled on and go off into the air. Then for a
while, as long as it’s floa1ng in the air, you think, 'Oh, that looks clean,' but leave it half an hour and
it falls back down again. So, because we are linked into this mesh of connectedness, when you try to
clarify one part, what we tend to do is just displace the disturbance into another part, and then it
comes back to us. Which is why the effort of purifica1on is endless if one approaches it in the wrong
way.
There’s an famous story of an early Kadampa Lama who went to his teacher and said that his mind
was always disturbed, and he wasn’t sure what to do with that disturbance. His teacher gave him
two piles of stones, one white stones, one black stones, and he said every 1me you get a nega1ve
thought you put a black stone in front of you, and every 1me you get a good thought you put a white
stone in front of you. At first, the person would sit for their media1on, and at the end of it they
would have a big mountain of black stones in front of them, maybe one or two white stones. The
months went by, and then gradually a big pile of white stones, maybe one or two black stones.
Eventually he had no black stones at all, so he went to his teacher and said, 'Oh master. Look! Now
my mind is clear.' He said, 'Okay. Now con4nue medita4ng un4l you have no stones at all in front of
you,' because if you s1ll have thoughts, good thoughts, and you’re iden1fying with these thoughts,
and these thoughts seem to be the basis of who you are, you cannot stabilise the nature of what
manifests. Sooner or later some wind of bad karma will blow you, and more bad thoughts will come
and then you’ll be shocked: 'But I thought I was sorted.'
This is the difficulty. We don’t actually live in a sort of New Age view of onward and upward, and
everything becoming more beau1ful and more sorted. In our world, things go up and they go down,
so if you’re trying to sort things out into this good category, bad category, the work is endless. You
just keep yourself on a kind of treadmill going round and round and round.
Our aim
In par1cular, from the point of view of dzogchen, our aim is to awaken to the actuality of an
awareness which is both separate from consciousness, and non-‐blocking of consciousness. Separate
from it, in that, it is a domain which is untouched and unchanging; but not blocking of it, because, in
order to be in the world with others, in order to manifest a compassionate connec1on with others,
you have to be able to register what is going on. It’s not that our experience of others, our take of
events, is wrong or deluded. It’s just that it’s not the whole game. It’s not the only game in town.
What we’ve just been looking at is the fact that many things manifest for us, as us, which are not us.
So my sense of being an individual, an autonomous subject, having a willpower, a des1ny which is my
own, which I’m going to forge... we start to see maybe that’s not real. Maybe what happens is I’m
aware of my life as it occurs, but I’m not in charge of it. What the Buddha’s indica1ng is that the
suffering of samsara arises because we try to control that which can’t be controlled. We try to be the
king or the queen who will dominate the realm of experience; but, actually, as we manifest, we are
par1cipants in the ongoing, evolving field of experience. We’re not in charge of it. The body changes.
We get a bit sick. All sorts of things happen to us. We didn’t cause these on the level of being a
conscious subject. We may well have caused them, or planted the seeds of their arising, in terms of
ac1ons in past lives which generate them.
We’re having to work with a field which is beyond our control, and that’s where an awareness, which
is not an en1ty, is vital, because as long as we iden1fy ourselves as an en1ty like other iden11es,
then we’re all just banging into each other. Our life is then like one of these pin ball machines where
you pull back a handle and you set the ball off, and as it goes off it hits the bumpers, lights come on
and it gets bounced and thrown around. It’s what happens in reac1vity all the 1me.
P a g e | 13
Rather, stepping back, we can have a state of clarity which reveals that ac1vity. It’s not that you have
to avoid the world and be frightened of the world, but the one who is busy and involved is energy,
and energy is always changing. That is to say, who we are is not a thing.
For example, I am speaking now. We can say, 'These are my words,' but in my experience I’m si_ng
here and words are coming out. I don’t know where they come from, and then they're gone. They
come up from some place, they go out, and they’re gone. I am aware of being here with you, and
words are coming out and being gone. To say, 'I am talking to you' might imply that I know what I’m
going to say. But how could I know what I am going to say? Then I would need to write it on a bit of
paper and pretend we’re having a conference: 'Here I’m giving you something I prepared earlier.' I
don’t know if you’ve ever presented a paper at a conference; you find your mind being distracted.
So, you’re reading the paper and, because it’s a conference, you have to have read it a few 1me to
know what you’re going to say, so your mind's thinking of other things while you read your paper.
If you want to be here, the peculiar thing is, in being here and being present, you’re present as an
observer. This is what being present is. You’re present with the ac1vity of yourself as it manifests, but
you’re not doing it. In the dzogchen tradi1on this is seen as an absolutely central fact: that the
illusion of an ego, a personal causal agent, is one of the great obstacles to freedom. Our awareness is
never captured, never trapped. Our energy is never ceasing, but energy arises as part of the field.
That is to say, we speak to different people in different ways. How they are influences how we speak.
We’re s1ll speaking, but we’re speaking to them, with them. How they are is the co-‐determinant of
our speaking. Our speaking is not from some liIle personal factory inside that has this standard
commodity. When we’re really speaking with someone, when we’re communica1ng, it’s fresh.
Of course, a lot of the 1me we do have a factory inside us. Our personal neuro1c factory; and in this
factory there’s 24 hour produc1on. We also have warehouses of familiar thoughts, and of course it’s
very expensive to keep things in a warehouse, so any opportunity we get we want to pump it out our
mouth and get some relief. So, we tell people the same old stories again and again. We do a number,
and this number is a kind of death. It’s a death, because it kills communica1on. It kills the mutuality,
the to-‐ing and fro-‐ing of really mee1ng someone, but it also deadens us to the fact that these
thoughts and feelings are not solid.
When you’re obsessed about something, when you’re hurt about something – maybe you feel your
boss gives you a bad 1me at work, or there’s something wrong in your rela1onship, or you’re worried
about your kids – when the mind goes round and round these things, they become more solid, more
real, and it becomes very important to talk about them. But, of course, when you talk about them
you make them more real. Usually there is no solu1on to these kind of problems. Kids are weird for a
while. Parents get old and sick. There’s not much to do about it. They’re going to be old and sick, so
you start to worry about them. 'Okay. I can do that.' It won’t change the situa1on. So, then you think,
'I’m so worried about my mother. What will I do?' Nobody knows. People get old. What are they
going to do?
The mind then becomes preoccupied with a problem that should be solved, but it’s not a problem to
be solved. Essen1ally the person's saying, 'I don’t like to have these difficult thoughts and I don’t like
to be lonely with them. If I tell you about them I’ll feel beCer.' That’s an instant gra1fica1on. There’s
some relief in doing that, but structurally what you do is you reinforce the meaning of the content.
You take your thought seriously, you rest inside the thought, and now you have to talk about it again.
Now you have to talk about it again.
When people develop obsessive compulsive disorder and they find they have to check the door, or
the fire, or wash their hands again and again, to anyone observing them, they’re quite mad! There is
absolutely no need to do it, but in their head there is an absolute need to do it, and that’s a very
terrible thing when that happens. The thought that arises in the mind has cut off from how the world

P a g e | 14
operates. The map in the head and the territory outside are now at 180 degrees, there’s almost no
connec1on between them. But the person con1nues to act according to their map, and, of course,
they bang into the world again and again, and gradually their life will become very small, because
they can’t go out of the house and they can’t... oVen they end up just si_ng in a chair. They can’t
touch anything and they don’t want anyone to touch them. It’s a terrible, terrible situa1on. We can
have the same sort of event in a much soVer form when we get caught up in something.
Trusting ourselves
The central thing about, 'How do we come to trust ourselves?' has these two aspects: first of all,
looking at the content of the mind, seeing what is the actual nature of thought, feeling, sensa1on,
and so on; and, secondly, observing the one who is having that experience. Looking, ourselves, at the
immediate moment in which we are aware of what is going on, and through that, star1ng to
separate the experience of awareness from consciousness. Consciousness is the aspect of our mental
func1oning that always takes an object, we're always conscious of something; and awareness reveals
phenomena, but it is not standing in rela1on to them. That is to say, it's not condi1oned by them,
which is how the Buddha described nirvana: it is the uncondi1oned. But as soon as we become our
individual, personal self, every event condi1ons and moves us.
Are there any thoughts or ques1ons about that?
Question on progress.
Student: Well, I kept thinking about progress, the western idea that we can make progress and
improve ourselves, and this negates that completely. And yet, it seems to me, that’s quite something
that we also just struggle with as an idea in western culture.
James: Buddhism has no no1on of progress in the modernist sense, because Buddhism is
linked with tradi1on. Buddhism says the truth was revealed a long 1me ago. The best thing you can
do with your life is try to understand the truth that was revealed a long 1me ago, and if you spend
your life being very busy with modernist projects of development, there will be no 1me to find the
truth revealed in the tradi1on.
Modernism, in its new interna1onal capitalist form, is so totally opposed to tradi1on of any kind, that
things are being rooted out again and again, poli1cally, socially, and that makes the con1nua1on of
dharma in the world very unlikely. But, it makes the con1nua1on of human beings in the world
unlikely too.
Student: But, there’s also the idea that we have that we can make progress, whereas, in a
certain sense, this undermines that.
James: But progress towards what?
Student: The idea that we can go forward, that things will improve, that if you do something
about it, it gets beIer. And that’s not what we’re doing really. I mean, we are as an aspira1on
towards Buddhism, but in any other sense, not.
James: The thing about change is surely that, with each level of change, we iden1fy with the
new level. We learn how to do it, even if we don’t par1cularly like it. We might be a bit nostalgic, but
we tend to lock onto the level of the culture that manifests in our childhood. That becomes the main
template for how we think things are. So kids growing up now are completely into computer
technology, and people of my age, not so much.
P a g e | 15
A hundred years ago, many people would have had a well, and they would have gone to the well and
got the water from the well. These people managed to wash every now and then, they managed to
make soup and to make tea. They lived. So inside their frame of reference, they were doing okay.
Then, when you get a tap with running water, you think, 'Hey, this is preCy good. I don’t need to go
out to the well.' Then when you get a running tap with hot water, 'Hey, this is fantas4c.' So, you can
say that’s progress. But progress in terms of what? For the people who just had a well, and had no
no1on of hot water on tap, life was okay. These people, because they were having to take the cold
water from the well, probably got a bit more arthri1s in their fingers, but people also get arthri1s
nowadays, even though they’ve got hot showers.
So I think progress is one of these kind of illusions, that each 1me we move on, we think, 'Oh, this is
it! This is beCer. We can’t go back.' 'This is beCer' is part of the lie that tells you this house only has a
front door, it has no back door. You can’t get out the back door, you can’t go into the past. You are
condemned to walk into the future. Therefore, let’s say 'The future’s great. This is good. Ah ha!' You
can’t go back. It's gone. It's gone.
The modernist fantasy of progress is a denial of impermanence, because it’s a fixa1on. 'The future
will be beCer, it’s looking up. Hey, let’s end poverty!' So some rock and roll bands get together, 'End
poverty now.' Fantas1c idea. For a while, people cheer, buy the t-‐shirt, 'Yes, yes, yes.' Any sign of
poverty ending? No. Any likelihood poverty will end? No. But, 'Let’s end poverty.'
Human beings are very stupid. That’s what the Buddha taught; he said, 'You want to believe in
something.' You’re very lucky, you’ve come into the place where beliefs are pumped out ten a day,
and modernism gives you more beliefs than you ever had before. You can believe in anything. Good
luck.
So that’s what progress is: progress is an ever escala1ng realm of fantasy. Because, what do we
want? You go into the supermarket, you know, twenty kinds of chocolate, five different kinds of rice.
All of these things, 'Which one will I have?' Depends what you want. 'I don’t know what I want. I
don’t want to fucking think about twenty kinds of chocolate. I don’t want to think about it,' but you
have to. That’s progress.
Student: Because it has the idea that if you can do things in a prehistoric kind of way, like the
way you use your caIle to thresh your corn, it’s completely backward, and they’re primi1ve and
we’re terribly sorry, and we must try and change this. It’s a bit like that, you know, people who
belong to that world, that's something we should discard, and I think that affects even our way of
approaching medita1on or teaching.
James: That’s right. That’s right. When our lives are very, very fast, it’s very difficult to enter
a state of medita1on. I remember being in Ladakh some years ago, and one of the young Ladakhis I
knew had set up a mill for grinding the corn. And they would grind the ordinary corn, but they also
ground the roasted corn that they used for making tsampa, which is what Tibetan people eat quite a
lot. Roast the barley, and then you grind it, and eat it. And he was saying how, when he got his new
mill, he made a whole batch, and he took some to his family. His grandmother said, 'Oh, this tastes
really bad. Why would you want to eat this? It doesn’t taste nice. We do it by hand, that is much
beCer.' And he said, 'Yeah, but, Gran, if we did it by hand we don’t have 4me to do anything.' She
said, 'Well what do you want to do?'. But of course, he was a young man, he wanted to go into town,
sit in the café, talk to the foreigners, and so on. But granny’s just si_ng there, grinding her corn and
doing her mantra, because you can do mantra and grind corn, but you can’t do your mantra in the
café talking to people, being modern.
This is part of the problem. What these machines do, is they create this god of efficiency, which
means we get the task done faster so we have more 1me to, dot, dot, dot, whatever you like. You

P a g e | 16
have free 1me. What will you do with your free 1me? Get a video, go eat a pizza, fulfil your human
des1ny? That’s a real ques1on. You do these things but you get a bit bored with them.
One of the things that progress has brought is boredom. It’s a very interes1ng thing, if you go in
quiet countries, like in India, if you go into a village, you see lots of people si_ng around, and they're
cha_ng. They’re not bored, they’re just cha_ng. They’re not doing anything, nothing is happening,
but they’re not bored. The condi1on of many people nowadays is absolute boredom, and so we have
ever increasing use of cocaine. Cocaine speeds you up, then you can go to a nightclub and you can
get more experience. And the experience, the intense experience, is the an1dote of boredom,
because actually, these ac1vi1es are not sa1sfying.
This is one of the central ques1ons for us in these days together is, 'What is the nature of
sa4sfac4on?' Does being busy and ge_ng a lot give more sa1sfac1on than doing something very
simple? Does the fact that you work hard and you make a lot of money and you become very
successful and people admire you, does that give any real sa1sfac1on? Because, essen1ally, what
you do is you create yourself as a product, yourself as an en1ty, and the more you exist as an en1ty,
and you get these quali1es that pull you up, you then have the anxiety something will change and
bring you down. So you’re a successful musician, and then your next two records don’t sell and you
will go back into oblivion, and that’s not very nice.
So how should we live? It’s an absolutely central ques1on, bearing in mind that the dharma is not
concerned with ‘progress’ in the modern sense of the word.
How our assump+ons constrain us.

We’ve looked at some of the factors whereby the sense that we have of our own authority and our
own control over our situa1on may be an illusion. How we are changes according to the many
different condi1onings and causal movements that arise and so it would be unwise to trust
ourselves.
Generally speaking, it’s beIer when our poli1cal leaders are able to listen. At certain 1mes, we’ve
had very dictatorial leaders who didn’t want to listen to other people, and when you get that very
hierarchical structure where everybody has to listen to only one voice, things become rather
dangerous.
Part of recognising that we’re not so reliable means we should try to trust other people. Now, just as
we’re not very trustworthy, they also are not very trustworthy, but somehow, through conversa1on
and sharing and communica1on, we can each illuminate bits of our lives. That’s a very important
principle. That is to say, 'I’m healthier when I’m in contact with other people.' The ques1on, of course,
is how we’re in contact with other people.
We can try to coerce other people into reinforcing what we believe, agreeing with us, and so on; we
can select people who are likely to agree with us. That becomes a bit of a travesty; it’s a mockery of
the principle of communica1on. But if we can, in a hearDelt way, try to describe our experience and
listen to other people’s response, as you would have in a good group therapy, that opens up the
possibility of seeing our blind spots, our hidden areas, but also seeing the very rela1ve nature of
what we take to be real.
In London, quite some 1me ago now, the snowdrops came up, and then the crocuses, then the
daffodils: the flowers of early spring. And then I come here and I’m very surprised; the daffodils
aren’t out and the snowdrops are s1ll here. 'Oh, things are very slow here,' but the people who live
here probably think, 'Oh, things are very quick down in the valley.'
P a g e | 17
The more we can see: what feels strong and real and true to me is just the logic of my situa1on, it
has no inherent validity in it, and if the factors were different, things would be different. That’s one
of the important things of communica1on, is really awakening to, 'Other people have other lives.'
We’re not all homogenised, we’re not clones of each other. To be alive is a very individual thing, and
so respec1ng the individuality of others – and finding support through their difference and their
individuality to be our own individual self – that’s a very important part, par1cularly in dzogchen.
We’re not trying to control other people and make them the way we want them to be, but we’re
actually experiencing their vibrant difference as an affirma1on of our difference.
Rather than feeling anxious because other people don’t agree with us, try to be curious. Curiosity is
at the heart of any inves1ga1on of ourselves, and curiosity can take us into looking at things as they
are. The word that’s oVen used for wisdom in Tibetan, sherab, means, essen1ally, a kind of curiosity.
It’s a kind of knowing which is checking things out, which is looking into how they actually are.
If we start to see that we’re not quite trustworthy, then what do we have to do in order to be more
trustworthy? This is where the different kinds of Buddhist paths open up. Some will say that you
have to remove your obscura1ons, purify your sins, and so on. Some will say you have to integrate,
or make a strong connec1on, with a symbolic, divine form, which will give you a bond, a link into
your true nature.
In dzogchen, which is the school or the view that we’re most focusing on, it’s that we have to start to
try to see exactly who we are. Now, we’ve always been who we are; that’s what we are. And yet, we
don’t see it. That’s something very strange. How is it that we don’t recognise who we are? Because
we are looking at something else.
If you look in a mirror when you’re cleaning your teeth, that mirror tends to show you your head and
your shoulders. You could look in that mirror for a hundred years and it wouldn’t tell you anything
about your feet. Your feet are s1ll there, but while you’re looking in the mirror... the person you see
is just this. [James indicates the top part of his body.]
In some ways it’s just a simple as that, that when we talk of ignorance in Buddhism as being the root
of samsara, you can take that as having a kind of moral quality: 'I’m ignorant, I’ve messed up in some
way, I’ve got it all wrong, I’m an idiot.' Some1mes it’s presented in that way, that we have to waken
up and this involves becoming a beIer person before we do that.
But actually, ignorance is a dynamic ac1vity of ignoring, moment by moment, not paying aIen1on to
what is there. We don’t ignore by not aIending to anything; we ignore by aIending to one or two
aspects of the picture, and by being so fixated on them we don’t see the other aspects.
This is not an uncommon thing in terms of prejudice. For example, you might meet someone with a
different skin colour, from a different background culture, and you might immediately feel a
par1cular knowledge about them, or, 'They are like that.' It’s very easy to be prejudiced because we
can assume things about people. That’s really all ignorance is; a prejudice is when you don’t know
something, but you tell yourself you do know something. That we don’t know very much about
African people, but, 'Oh, these Africans, they’re like this and this and this.' Who is this person in front
of you? 'Oh, he’s one of them.' But, in that sense, it’s a phenomenological blindness, and we have
the same thing about ourselves.
To be in samsara is to be prejudiced toward yourself. To say, 'I’m like this, I’m like that, this is what I
do, this is what I like, what I don’t like,' And then we live inside that prejudice, and because it’s a pre-‐
judice, because it’s a coming before, it’s already always installed as our basis when we come to new
situa1ons. So, we see the world through the lenses of these assump1ons. Assump1ons about
ourselves and assump1ons about other people.

P a g e | 18
From the point of view of dzogchen, that’s why it’s difficult to trust ourselves. Because we don’t
know ourselves, all we have is certain prejudices about ourselves.
When we’re small, big people tell us lots of things about us. They say we’re good at this or bad at
that. They encourage us to do something. They say, 'Oh, you’re likely to do well in that because of da-‐
da-‐da.' People give us readings about who we are, but, of course, we have a lot of poten1al. Our
poten1al is being read by the big people around us in terms of their interests, in terms of their
prejudice, so they are selec1vely valida1ng things about us which makes sense to them, not
necessarily which make sense to us. But, because when you’re small, your survival is based on
pleasing the big people around you, you tend to get 1lted towards fi_ng into the image that they
have of you, and when you get used to that, you build up a certain competence in being that
par1cular kind of person.
As we get older, we become more aware that if I want to move out of this thing that I’m competent
in to something new, which may be beIer, I’m going to have to be incompetent, and I don’t want to
incompetent. I want to be competent. So, I’m competent at being me, but I’m stuck.
Now I have a crossroads. Will I choose to go into this uncertain territory of learning something new,
full of hidden sharks and snakes and we don’t know what, or will I just stay inside my box doing more
of me? But it gets a liIle bit tedious, a liIle bit 1ring, and that’s really what condi1oning is. We build
up condi1oning by doing the same thing again and again, becoming more competent, more familiar
with par1cular paIerns.
There are these two aspects and we don’t see other possibili1es, because the blinkers are now
welded onto our head. Even if we do catch a glimpse of something, there is a resistance because of
the anxiety, not just of the incompetence, but of a loss of iden1ty. Who will I be if I am not the one
who is like this?
This, again, is why medita1on is very important, because it’s like a safe laboratory in which we can
put the familiar building blocks of our iden1ty under inves1ga1on. If you do it out in the world it’s
more dangerous, because in the world when you’re communica1ng with people, you have to be able
to give a coherent sense of yourself. But in medita1on, we can start to ques1on, ' Am I really like
that? This is what people have told me about me, this is what I have come to believe about me, but
when I look around I see other people doing these things that I could never do. How do they do that?
What special thing have they got inside them that allows them to speak in that way or behave in that
way? What’s this lack in me? '
And maybe it’s not a thing inside you. Maybe it’s just the permission to be mime1c, to copy, to
imitate, because that’s of course how children largely learn. So, if we’ve been told we can’t imitate
things, that there are certain things that are forbidden, we don’t do it. But all that we have is
mimicked. We speak language; we learn that by copying what people said. It’s the only way to learn
to speak a language. Now that we speak it, we speak it, but we are speaking something that has to
be understandable by other people. So, in expressing ourselves, we have to do it in a way that other
people can receive.
The importance of lineage and transmission.

This would point again to the fact that making use of other people is enormously important. Other
people show us the way out, which is why in buddhism they stress wisdom and compassion, not as
two separate forces, but the more compassionate you are – that is to say, the more you get close to
other people and really have a sense of them – the more you see something about yourself, so it
reinforces wisdom. And the more wisdom you have – being able to observe yourself, see how you
come into being – the more loose you are and the more able you are to go out and meet other
people. These two are mutually reinforcing.
P a g e | 19
In order to trust ourselves, we have to inves1gate a liIle bit about what is not trustworthy. However
maybe now would be a useful 1me to look at the dzogchen view of our iden1ty, of who we are.
Because of this habit of ignoring who we are, it’s very difficult for us to recognise by ourselves. We
actually need other people to help us. Now, this may seem, from a narcissis1c point of view, rather
humilia1ng. 'Well, if I’m me and I know who I am, I don’t need you to tell me.'
The reason other people can help us is that self and object, self and other, are not separate. However
because we are sealed inside ourselves we may feel 'I, me, myself,' and 'If there’s something wrong
with me I’m going to sort it out. I have this capacity, I can do it.' This feeling of autonomy is the heart
of the problem. We have always needed other people, because other people are us. Our existence is
other people. We wouldn’t be here without a mother and father. We wouldn’t be here without
school teachers. We wouldn’t be here without the people who make the means of transport. We
wouldn’t be here without the people who brought Tibetan buddhism to the west. We wouldn’t be
here without all of these factors.
All that we have encountered is us; we’re not separate from it, and, therefore, in the tradi1on, it says
that there are these lineages of transmission. That is to say, we find ourselves by looking in the
mirror of someone else. That, at first, someone mirrors to us who we are. By looking in that mirror,
we start to be able to experience it for ourselves.
But of course, we live in the west in a 1me of great autonomy, great individuality, where people feel
self-‐made; they feel, 'I am my own person.' From a dharma point of view, that’s not likely to be
helpful in the long run. It can make you feel good for a while. For many people, it makes the process
of ageing much more difficult, because if, when you’re young and healthy you think, 'I’m just me and
I can do this and I can do that,' as you get older and your capacity to do things gets less, it’s a bit
more challenging, because now you have to accept, 'I’m a 4red old person and I can’t do very much,'
and that’s not the place many people want to sit.
So, what the tradi1on is saying is, from genera1on to genera1on, the Buddha, in this case,
Kuntuzangpo taught Dorje Sempa, Dorje Sempa then taught Garab Dorje, Garab Dorje, taught
Padmasambhava and so on, and in the tradi1on, some1mes we recite the names of all the people in
the lineage. This is highligh1ng we all need help. It’s a very important principle. We can’t do it on our
own, and the idea that we could do it on our own is a sort of madness. It’s the madness that has
been in European thought for a long 1me. Actually collabora1on, sangha, being with others, giving
and receiving is the way that the energy of the world weaves itself together.
This is why lineage transmission is important. Not just in terms of the formal content of it, what’s
said and what you might try to experience, but as a principle that says, 'Yes, I need to find myself
through the other, because in finding myself through myself, I just visit the familiar places inside me,
because this is the bit that I’m used to looking at. I can’t see the bits that are hidden from me.' By
making use of the transmission, we can then come to experience ourselves more fully, more
extensively, and then through that, we in turn can help other people to recognise more of
themselves.
When the dzogchen teachings came into the world of human beings, it came through a being called
Garab Dorje, which means a sort of indestruc1ble happiness, it means contented, self-‐fulfilled. He
described the process as that one has to seIle into one’s own nature. One has to just relax and find
oneself in the place where one has always been, and we do that by not res1ng on the factors which
take us to places where we have not been: that is to say, our name, our history, our friends, family,
and so on. Although these are familiar and part of our manifesta1on, they’re not our real nature
because they are momentary and changing, and the real nature is described as vajra, which is a
Sanskrit word, and it means indestruc1ble.

P a g e | 20
Everything about our life is destruc1ble: our health, our money, our families, our jobs. There is
nothing which we can be sure will be protected un1l we die. All sorts of factors can arise to influence
us. Because our nature is interac1ve with other field phenomena, it’s always open to being changed
and destroyed. So, is there anything about us which will be enduring and las1ng?
Is there anything enduring and unchanging?

This is the key difference between a worldly view and a dharma view. In the worldly view, we imagine
that our ego iden1ty, our personality, can be secured. So poli1cians become concerned about their
legacy, about how they will be remembered. They want their name to endure through the centuries.
But anyway, they’re dead. The fact that people know your name is not anything at all.
From a dharma part of view, every bit of our existence will vanish except our own true nature, or
buddha nature, and this buddha nature is inseparable from everything that we are. So, we are both
impermanent and permanent.
What is this permanent nature? It’s described that, from the very beginning, our nature, or our
mind... if we use the word mind, it can appear as something kind of mental and linked with thought.
It’s not about thinking. It’s not about the quality of our thoughts. It’s more like the quality of being,
of just the pure, open presence that we experience from 1me to 1me.
This quality of presence, of being alive, of being just here, is described as being 'naked.' That is to say,
it is not something which is covered by anything. So, when we iden1fy with our thoughts, when we
get caught up in worries, in memories and so on, this becomes a kind of clothing. It wraps us around,
and we become so fixated on the clothing, we don’t see what is underneath. In fact, we might have
some intui1on that underneath the clothing there isn’t anything. That makes us more desperate to
apply more clothes.
The teaching is: this state of nakedness doesn’t need any cover because to be naked is to be open
like the sky. When we see the clear blue sky, from 1me to 1me clouds pass through it. White, fluffy
summer1me clouds, dark rain-‐filled clouds, and then they’re gone. And then they’re gone. And each
1me, the clear blue sky is revealed. You can’t grasp the sky. It exists as an open poten1ality. It can
reveal many things, but it’s not a thing itself. This is what it means by 'naked.'
When we sit in the medita1on, we don’t find anything as such. We find the clothing. We can see the
clothing, we can see our memories, thoughts, and so on, but we don’t see the person.
Some of you may have seen the old American B movie The Invisible Man. Some reac1on goes off in a
chemical laboratory and he becomes invisible, and he can only be seen if he puts his hat on. We’re a
bit like that. We are invisible, and we become visible according to these quali1es, these aIributes,
these ways of manifes1ng.
But the root nature is not a thing. We will never find a self-‐substance. When we look for ourselves, if
we look in the manner of trying to find an apple or an orange, something we can stand in rela1on to,
we won’t find it. That’s why this mind, or nature, is said also to be raw. It hasn’t been prepared by
anything. It’s like a fresh carrot. It hasn’t been cooked. No salt’s been added. It’s just crispy and fresh.
It’s raw.
We think of all the different ways in which our sense of self is cooked. We know how to be socially
appropriate. We speak to different people in different ways. We’re cooking, or preparing, our
manifes1ng energy all the 1me, and that’s quite appropriate. But the ground nature, the source out
of which our movements and our experience arises, this has never been cooked. It’s not mixed with
anything else. It’s just simple, uncontrived.
P a g e | 21
The nature of our mind is open like the clear blue sky. It’s not an en1ty, it’s not a thing, but it is the
quality of our existence. So, when we do the medita1on, we relax, we open. Many things arise: our
familiar thoughts, feelings, sensa1ons. Not blocking them, not trying to edit or create a par1cular
paIern. We just allow them to manifest, and staying in that state, gradually, like the early morning
dawn, liIle faint light coming in the sky, we start to experience this open quality.
All of this stuff is going on. Changing, changing, nothing remaining; and yet, the basic, bare, naked
awareness, is always there. What it is, you can’t grasp. And yet, it’s always there. This is the nature of
rigpa, or awareness. This is seen as the essence of the buddha nature, the dharmakaya, and out of
this manifests all the poten1al of our experience, but as a flow of energy. Energy manifes1ng
moment by moment from the ground, not as a par1cular this or that, but just fresh, just fresh.
Okay, so maybe we can do some media1on with this.
SiXng prac4ce
Three Aa practice
In the medita1on we’re not trying to block our thoughts, we’re not trying to improve any situa1on.
Simply, to allow whatever arises to arise. The buddha said, 'Everything is impermanent,' and this we
can experience, because all mental phenomena arise and pass.
In this prac1ce, we do it with our eyes open; you can do it with your eyes closed if you prefer, but
generally we do it with the eyes slightly open. Our gaze is slightly raised, we’re looking into the space
in front of us about an arm length and a half away. So, not far, far onto the distant wall, but just
res1ng in the space in front. In this, we can imagine the white leIer Aa. In the Tibetan tradi1on,
some of you will know what it looks like, but you can also imagine it just like a capital 'A.' The leIer
Ah indicates the ground, open, empty nature. It’s a symbol for shunyata, for emp1ness. It means
also, the dharmadhatu, which is the sphere, or the ground nature within which everything manifests.
This leIer Aa is surrounded by a ball of rainbow-‐coloured light. The rainbow coloured light
represents the fact that wisdom expands out of emp1ness. Wisdom is not built up, moment by
moment, by dis1lling experience the way we would normally think of it in the west. We don’t
become wise by doing lots of things and reflec1ng on them. Wisdom is the natural, free giV that
shines out of this empty nature.
So we imagine this in front of us. Then we recite the sound of Aa three 1mes, and as we recite it, we
let all our preoccupa1ons with thoughts, with feelings, sensa1ons, and so on, we let this be released
out into the space, so that the space in our heart opens up into the space in front of us. The fixa1on
on the leIer Aa is there just to hold our aIen1on, and then we let it dissolve into space as we rest,
opening into the space in front of us.
Because our eyes are open, we see, with our peripheral vision, the colours and shapes around us.
And we just allow everything to be as it is, internal phenomena, external phenomena, and we remain
just relaxed and open. And whenever you find yourself 1ghtening up or being absorbed in a thought,
you can just release into the out-‐breath. Just let out the slow, deep out-‐breath, and then relax back in
that state.
Okay, we try that for a while.
Three Aa practice

P a g e | 22
We can do this prac1ce many 1mes. It’s always beIer when one begins, to do it for shorter periods,
because it’s not a wilful ac1vity. We’re not trying to do something; it’s really about the separa1ng of
the open awareness from the flow of energy.
In samsara, iden1ty and energy get mixed together,. We think 'I am the one who does this. I am the
one who makes things happen. It is me who is doing this.' However in nirvana the awareness, the
openness, is completely present, and the energy flows out of it, itself. That is to say, the open,
relaxed nature is the source of our movement, but – because this open nature is not a personal
phenomena, it’s not 'I, me, myself,' it’s just an open state, an unchanging, infinite, open state –it is
both exquisitely ourselves and just there.
The energy that arises is just the energy of connectedness, of movement. It’s not me doing this to
you, or you doing that to me. That’s what makes the big difference: that you start to trust that
energy will flow in an easy way throughout the field. In this way we are not replying on the belief
that we will get it right for that would take us back to the fantasy that ‘it’s all up to me’. There’s a de-‐
centering, or a dis-‐placement, of the individual sense of self from being the key focus, the basis of
everything. With this we see that what we take to be “I, me, myself,” is part of the energy of the non-‐
dual field. It’s a way of rela1ng to the world, of being in communica1on with the world, but it is not
the source, it’s not the ground of being. It is a fruit of being. That’s the essen1al shiV, or awakening,
or difference, that we want to bring into being.
When we do the prac1ce, we’re not trying to make anything happen, we just relax. AVer a while,
we’ll find ourselves tangled again, because we’ve been doing entanglement for a long 1me. When
that happens, don’t try to untangle it. Just relax, and you’ll observe it goes free by itself.
This is the basic principle of what’s called rang drol, or self-‐libera1on. All phenomena go free by
themselves: objec1ve phenomena, subjec1ve phenomena. They appear to be there, and then they
dissolve. Something else takes its place. The more we experience that, the more we can see, 'I don’t
have to be so busy,' un1l eventually we can trust, 'I don’t have to do anything.'
The essence of dzogchen medita1on is to do absolutely nothing at all. That doesn’t mean that
nothing will happen. Everything will happen, but you will have got out of the way of thinking you’re
the one that does it.
It’s about seeing that the ego, or our personal sense of self, is a par1cipant, but not the whole thing.
For example, when there is an important project, the person who's in charge of the project is oVen
seen as the maker of the project. Like in London, we have this big cathedral, St. Paul’s, and you can
see wriIen everywhere, 'This was made by Sir Christopher Wren.' But clearly, he didn’t make very
much of that. He made some drawings on a bit of paper. It was made by many, many people. He
par1cipated in it, he had part of the work, that’s for sure, but not the whole work.
In the same way, the ego is part of what is going on, it has a part to play. It’s the site at which our
energy manifests into the world. But it’s not the ruler, it’s not king, not the queen, not the one who’s
in charge. What we’re doing in the medita1on is a subtle readjustment. A readjustment in which, in
order to find more freedom, we give up the responsibility.
Now, the ego’s fear is, 'If I give up the responsibility, I’ll become nothing. Who will I be then?' The ego
will not be annihilated. The ego is always there, everybody has an ego. There is nobody walking this
earth without an ego. It doesn’t maIer what 1tle they have, BoomBoom Rinpoche or whatever, they
have an ego. That is to say, they know the difference between their mouth and their asshole. They
know the difference between their shoes and someone else’s shoes. That’s what an ego does: It
iden1fies these things. If you didn’t have that, you’d be mad.
P a g e | 23
The idea that in Buddhism you destroy the ego is a completely stupid and wrong transla1on, and
very, very unhelpful. What is being destroyed is the sense that this func1on is self-‐exis1ng, that it’s
truly something, that the ego is a thing; and, also, that it is the central func1on, it is the key player, it
is the one who knows what’s what. All that happening is a rejigging, a de-‐centring.
What is the king? The king is awareness. There’s a famous dzogchen text called The Kunjed Gyalpo
which means, 'The king that does everything,' or, 'The queen that does everything.' This is the mind
itself. Everything that arises, everything you’ve experienced since you were born, has been the
arising as the experience of your mind. We don’t normally experience it in that way. We think, 'This
happened, that happened. I went here. He said that to me,' and so on, but, actually, it is the mind
itself radiantly giving off this energy, displaying itself. This is our nature. Just as the sun in the sky is
illumina1ng the world, constantly sending out rays of light, so this open dimension of being,
constantly is manifes1ng ourselves and all phenomena.
This is the basic dzogchen view. Maybe we can do the prac1ce again.
Three Aa practice
When we imagine the leIer Aa, you can see it as represen1ng the heart, or the essence, of all the
teachers, all the gurus of the lineage, but also, all the teachers that you’ve had in your life: your
parents, school teachers, all those beings who have linked with you and extended your world.
Because that’s really what this is about. It’s a coming back, a remembering ourselves, a coming
together of ourselves through our connec1on with others.
So all these beings, enlightened forms, condensed or represented in this leIer Aa, and when we say
the sound of Aa we integrate the space in our heart with the space in front. Then, relax in that state.
The Aa just melts into the space.
We sit in that state allowing whatever comes to come, not pulling things we like toward us, not
pushing things we don’t like away from us. Just relaxed and open.
Three Aa practice
Opening to the sky

With this lovely weather, outside in the aVernoon we can do a varia1on of this which is called
opening to the sky, namkha arté. You simply find a place, if possible on a slope with the sun behind
you, and the open sky in front of you, and just sit in a very relaxed way, opening your gaze out into
the infinity of the sky in front of you.
Some1mes you see lots of things star1ng to move in the sky, liIle white dots, and so on. Just stay
very relaxed and open, and allow whatever is there to be there, and the very spaciousness of the sky
gives quite a support for the prac1ce.
This is a prac1ce to do again and again. It’s trying to get the taste of a state which is not changing.
The more you can see what is changing, both external phenomena, internal phenomena, and, in
par1cular, all the points at which you think, 'This is me, this is who I am. This is how I am.' When you
start to see that all these building blocks, or founda1ons, on which you’ve constructed your sense of
self are just phenomena turning, like a fish turning in a pond and you see its shiny back just breaking
the surface, that’s what it is. But we relate to it as if it were some proof that there is something solid
and enduring and defini1ve about who we are.
So the essence of the work is just to stay with the evanescence, the ungraspable impermanence of
the phenomena as they manifest, and with that, the sense of, 'Who is the one who is aware of this?'

P a g e | 24
Because, if our mind is not caught up in what is going on, if it’s apart from it, things start to be just
like a flow. Not a flow as if it’s in front of us, because this body also is part of the flow, so the one
who is looking is not held back like an observer looking at something in the distance; but it’s more
like a pervasive light, an infinite expanse of luminous emp1ness within which all these phenomena
are going on.
If you take some 1me and prac1se more, you can start to get an experience of this.
In the aVernoon, for those who would like, we can go for a walk up into the forest and do some
nature sculpture, which involves seeing how our body works with the shapes in nature, the forms in
nature. As a prac1ce, it’s about seeing: the more relaxed, the more open we are, a par1cular
aesthe1c sensibility, a sense of shape, colour, form, starts to come together, and you can create
structures out of whatever we find there in nature, and that’s a very nice way of being in the
prac1ce.
Questions about practice

Any thoughts?
Student: If I look, do I try to see everything clearly? Because my view gets a liIle bit hazy.
James: Then you can keep it like that. Some1mes it might get a bit clearer, then it won't.
The essen1al point is don’t interfere, just allow things to be however they are, even if they appear
very strange. Because so much of the 1me, we have been imposing control and order onto things, to
make them fit the way we want them to be and as we relax the control, oVen things get a bit
strange, or they move around. Just allow that to happen and then a different kind of clarity arises.
Student: If I start falling asleep do I deal with that or just nod off and come back?
James: No, falling asleep would not be very helpful. More breathing is required, a liIle bit of
oxygen, so deeper diaphragm breathing. The reason we get 1red is because we are out of balance.
We are oVen driving ourselves too hard, being busy with many different things. Then when we come
to sit s1ll the exhaus1on rises up and we fall asleep. So if you are always sleepy when you go to
meditate that would indicate that it is 1me to review the quan1ty and quality of ac1vity on your
daily life.
Student: Do I develop the observer by observing it?
James: Well, in a sense you’re already loosely observing the observer, le_ng it reveal itself.
The observer is our intelligence when it’s located in a par1cular point. We have a point of reference,
'I am looking at things from here.' The observer is always somewhere, and, of course, where we are
will always determine what we see. What we always have is the view from 'here.'
For example, if we imagine we are walking in the hills, every step you take opens up some new
image, and closes down another. As we do the medita1on prac1ce, we experience being located in
different things. Like, some1mes you might be iden1fied with a pain in your shoulder, or with a
thought of, 'This is me,' or, 'Why is that?' or just some clear observing posi1on.
The thing is, don’t fall into it, don’t push it away. Just stay with it and it will dissolve, and then
something else will be there. So the 'observer' is an arising energy posi1oning, and then it’s gone.
But if we go into it, and then iden1fy with it, it will start to repeat itself and then it takes on that
sense of iden1ty.
P a g e | 25
The 'observer' is a kind of feedback loop. It feeds very rapidly into judgment, and opinion, and ideas,
so it’s a basis for elabora1on. And, what we want to do here is keep things as unelaborated as
possible. Let all the elabora1ons go by themselves, and so that’s why it’s said to be naked, bare, just
uncooked, uncondi1oned.
Whenever a phenomena like that arises and it says, 'I’m the real thing, trust me,' … uh oh. Just wait
with it and it will go. And then, something else and something else. This is the thing which is so
unbelievably difficult, because our real nature is not a thing, it is never ever what we imagined it
would be. It is both less than and more than. It’s less than in the sense you can’t get it.
Now, it’s easy to say, 'Oh, it’s something you can’t get,' but when you actually experience that, it’s
incredibly annoying because you can’t get it. And yet, it’s more than nothing, because it’s this infinite
presence, and it’s our very energy of trying to work out what it is, that creates this sort of endless
turning and turning.
Again, it's back to relax, trust. Because, my real nature is not mine. It doesn’t have my name sewn
onto it like a child with his school socks. It’s just …, and it’s me; and the 'and it’s me,' as it were,
comes aVer whatever it is. And that’s what’s difficult.
Break
Attachment and identity.

Let’s again look at aIachment. Because we come to rely on an iden1fica1on with habitual paIerns,
with condi1oning, it’s more difficult to recognise our own open nature. Moreover it binds us into a
world of ac1on and reac1on that con1nues to generate condi1oning paIerns.
In the general preparatory prac1ces in tantra, we prac1se offering a mandala. And the mandala
consists, at its most formal outer aspect, of an image of the world. In the centre we have the great
mountain, Mount Meru, and it’s surrounded by four main con1nents, eight subcon1nents, and so
on. You get a detailed descrip1on of these factors, and this is offered to all the great buddhas and
bodhisaIvas.
On an inner level, we offer our own possessions: the things that we have in our life, the things that
we like, that we’re aIached to, that give personal meaning to our existence, we also offer these to
the Buddha.
Then, thirdly, we offer our own body. The body which is the site of our basic sense of who we are.
We can offer it in details, looking at the different parts of the body, the func1ons of the organs, and
you imagine releasing these, so that you let go of that. Such offerings are made because of the
benefits of prac1cing generosity, but par1cularly, to cut a habit of iden1fica1on. As we looked earlier,
in the buddhist view, we go from one life to another. In a previous life we didn’t have a body like the
one we have now. In a future life, we’re not likely to have that body.
When we explore what’s known as dependent co-‐origina1on, we look at the many different factors
that give rise to the manifes1ng of our body as it is now, and that maintain the presence of this body
in its current shape, and as long as these factors are opera1ng, then we have the con1nuity of what
we take to be ourselves. But of course, these factors can change at any 1me: we become sick, we
move towards death, and so on.
So when we make offerings of our body and our possessions, it’s actually a prepara1on for death,
because a 1me will come when all the things that we take to be ours will be leV behind us. Someone
else will inherit them. They may value what they’ve got or they may send it to the rubbish dump.
That will depend on their choice. Because the people who inherit what is ours don’t necessarily look

P a g e | 26
at the world through our eyes. They don’t have the same values or associa1ons as we do, even if
they’re our children.
When my mother died, there were many, many things in the cupboard that were important to her.
There were photographs of her old aunts, and so on. I never met these people. I’m never going to
meet them. So, put them in a box someplace; for me it’s nothing, but for her that was her family.
It’s in that way, as we offer things, we start to see how par1cular our take is. How we have given a
par1cular contouring to the objects and quali1es that exist in the world around us. And by offering
them, we come to see, oh, although there is a familiarity, in some ways a suppor1ve familiarity, in
these objects, it also creates a kind of prison. Because while we have these things, we don’t get any
other things.
For example, my mother had some old porcelain. Some plates that had come maybe from her
grandmother, and these were considered to be the best plates and the best cups. Because you
couldn’t buy them in the shops anymore, you had to be very careful if you were washing them not to
break them, otherwise very big trouble would come. But also, because they were the best ones, you
couldn’t use them very oVen , and now, they’re a liIle bit old fashioned so you wouldn’t really want
to use them. But they’re not rare and very wonderfully expensive an1ques. So, they’re something;
they’re full of value, but not a real value, a family value. And because they were there, my mother
would never want to buy anything new, because she would say, 'But we have these, but we have
these,’ although, we don’t use them.
In the same way, in regard to our personality, we can be aware of the par1cular traits that we have,
and through our iden1fica1on with them they become close to us. They become defini1ve of who
we are. This is both comfor1ng and restric1ve. If we get rid of them, if we relax our deep
iden1fica1on with them, then a space opens up for who we might become. And that can be quite
frightening because then you’re faced with ques1ons, 'What do I want? Who am I? How will I live?'
Very big ques1ons. Maybe beIer to just hang onto what we’ve got.
What I’ve outlined so far in terms of offerings, tend to be the idea of offering good things that we’re
aIached to, and normally we think of aIachment in that way. When we move into the prac1ce of
tantra, par1cularly with the prac1ce of the more wrathful dei1es, offerings are made of substances
that would be seen as more nega1ve. You can offer your anger, your jealousy, your pride, because
these gods are able to make use of that. And it is for the same reason: that these are things we’re
aIached to.
One of the things that’s oVen quite surprising, no maIer how many 1mes I encounter it in the
prac1ce of psychotherapy, is how aIached people can be to paIerns that do them no benefit at all.
To con1nue recycling, revisi1ng, re-‐inhabi1ng territories where there is only desola1on and loss and
hurt. But of course, desola1on, loss, hurt, self-‐hatred, these are very good objects of aIachment.
They have a par1cular kind of glue to them because these are things no one’s likely to steal from you.
People might steal your money or your motorcar or your boyfriend, but they’re not going to steal
your jealousy. They leave the shit with you.
So, for people who’ve lost a lot, feeling that they’re totally rubbish, that they’re hopeless, they’re
worthless, and they’re useless becomes a very formidable, a very powerful, point of self-‐
iden1fica1on, because this is something you can be sure will last for a very long 1me. If you believe,
'I hate myself, I’m stupid, I can’t do it,' if you block yourself from going into the world and miss out on
chances because you turn everything back in on yourself, this is a way of maintaining a fixed iden1ty.
So part of freeing ourselves is to be able to offer up all the most nega1ve points of aIachment,
because they are, in some ways, the most subtle ways in which we mix together trus1ng ourselves
and not trus1ng ourselves.
P a g e | 27
For example, if you have a deep, core belief which func1ons inside you that says, 'I’m unlovable,'
then, clearly, many interac1ve situa1ons will be difficult in life because you will feel other people
don’t like you and you’ll avoid real contact with them. If you trust in that belief, it’s useful because it
will always give you the answer of what to do, which is to avoid. You won’t need to work out some
micro strategy in this par1cular situa1on because you know, 'People won’t like me; therefore, this is
what I can expect.' In that not trus1ng of oneself, not finding any value, or radiance, or goodness in
yourself, you find a stable base: self-‐hatred. It seems to be the case that self-‐hatred has become a bit
more prevalent in the culture. That there’s a sense that there’s some way in which we can experience
no redeeming, no rescuing posi1ve aspect in ourselves.
Perhaps in prior 1mes, in western cultures where chris1anity was stronger, there was a no1on of a
soul, and that the soul and the self could be put into some kind of rela1onship. So that, basically, the
soul belongs to god and remains pure, although obscured, but the ego self can be mixed up. But as
the no1on of a soul vanishes, all there is is just our ego personality. And if this is not func1oning well,
if this has been massaged with many nega1ve views, with cri1cal comments in the process of
childhood, then self-‐hatred, hopelessness about oneself, doub1ng oneself, becomes a kind of
perverse bedrock to existence. It becomes the place where one can find a kind of mastery.
There’s a famous English poet called Milton who wrote about the loss of paradise, about Adam and
Eve being thrown out of paradise, and in this he describes Lucifer, the bright one, the shining angel
who was next to god, being cast down into hell because he crosses god. And Milton has Lucifer say,
'It’s beCer to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.'
This is a very powerful no1on. If you have a strong nega1ve belief, you can think, 'Well I’m totally
rubbish, and you’re all rubbish, but I’m totally rubbish.' There’s something very definite, something
very solid, very infinite in its energy if you don’t care. You can see that with young people when they
start to get taIoos. The ones who have the taIoos moving onto their face, they’re moving into this
extreme situa1on. Once you have a taIooed face, you’re basically saying, 'Piss off. I’m rubbish, you’re
rubbish. Just piss off.'
In gangs, like in South American prisons, in South African prisons, it becomes, as you get further into
the gang you get more taIoos on your face. It says, 'I don’t go back. There is no return. This is where I
am. I’m the king of hell.' This is an unbelievably terrible, lonely, anger-‐filled place to be.
So, part of the work, in terms of star1ng to really trust ourselves, is to look at all these false bases of
iden1ty. They’re not false in that we don’t use them at all, they’re reasonable bases of ac1vity, but
they don’t formulate a core iden1ty.
When someone has a belief, 'I’m stupid,' or, 'I’m ugly,' or, 'I’m unlovable,' that idea is defini1ve of
oneself, and so it seems to act on and shape who one is. But, it’s also a place where you can rest. You
know where you are. You know what you are when you’re in touch with that.
From the point of view of dzogchen, as we’ve started to look, our core iden1ty is like space. It’s
infinite, it’s unborn. Like the clear blue sky, it has no corners to it: no top, no boIom, infinite
expanse. It is vajra, it’s indestruc1ble. So how could it be that a being whose nature is indestruc1ble
comes to think, 'I’m stupid and unlovable. I don’t want anything and I just want you to go away and
leave me alone.' This is an absolute tragedy.
But,the buddhist teaching is that all of us are in that situa1on. We may not be in such an extreme
posi1on, but we build our house on sand – the sand of the ever-‐changing movement of the content
of our mind. Moment by moment, we are strongly iden1fying with what goes on, 'This is this, this is
this, I am this, I am that, I am that.' And each of these iden1fica1ons, although in terms of
manifes1ng – being alive, being connected – is quite radiant and pulsa1ng, when it gets reified,
objec1fied, when it gets made too solid, you lose the sense of the underlying spaciousness out of

P a g e | 28
which it arises, and it starts, through repe11on, to appear to be an enduring, constant factor of who
you are.
Maybe life’s going not so badly and you meet a friend, and it goes badly wrong, and you fight and
you think, 'Well, why does that happen? Why do I always fight with people?' Very oVen a thought like
that arises. Actually, you haven’t been figh1ng with anyone for a long 1me. Things have been quite
peaceful, you’ve been ge_ng on with a lot of people, but a cri1cal incident arises and the response is
to have a globalised statement about it. 'I can’t do this. Why do things always go wrong for me?'
They don’t always go wrong for you. Clearly, you couldn’t be alive if things always go wrong for you.
It’s the par1cular over-‐intensifica1on of that moment, to turn it into a definite statement of a core
iden1ty, 'This is who I am. This moment shows who I really am. All the rest, it doesn’t maCer. It’s this
one. This is where I’ve revealed myself.' We see how there are these liIle nexus points, these liIle
knoIed points of closed energy that whirl round and round, and seem to suck in so much of the life
force, and like a dark planet, when the rest of our life goes near them, we get sucked into orbit and
we go round and round them. It’s very difficult to wake up from that.
The prac1ces of generosity offers us the opportunity to observe ourselves more clearly. We need to
see how our ordinary habitual a_tudes differ from the view set out in the prac1ce. In order to do
that, we have to prac1se again and again, scraping the layer of judgment off the descrip1on. Because
when a phenomena arises, if we already know what it is, if we already know, 'This is a sign that I’m
stupid,' you’re not going to examine it in any detail. It’s the quickness of our learning to appropriate
the situa1on, to pull it back into a fixed reading, that func1onally makes us stupid.
We need to hang out with the phenomena long enough to get an accurate descrip1on of what it is,
then to observe it and how it func1ons, and when we do that it will reveal itself as one thing that’s
moving, and moving, and moving, and moving. Actually, its changing nature, its transient nature, will
be revealed.
Then we can start to have a sense of how we might work with that energy when it starts to manifest
again. How one could either u1lise its power, if that’s possible, or deflect it so that it goes on without
causing too much trouble.
One of the things we might do just now, is just take a liIle 1me and reflect for yourselves on what
are some of the core nega1ve beliefs, or the core points of limita1on that seem to, on a bad day,
define who you are. So, I invite you just to sit and reflect on that for a few minutes, and then, when
you’re ready, try to communicate a liIle bit about it with your neighbour. I think we can be quite sure
that there is nothing that anyone would say that is not shared by everyone else. We, we tend to be
somewhat similar in our perversity.
Reflec4on and discussion.
So, see if there’s anything you’d like to say about that experience. Is it an easy thing to talk about? It’s
a bit of a generalisa1on, but one of the differences between buddhism and therapy is that in
buddhism there’s a lot of aIen1on to structure and func1on. So, they would say, for example, 'All
beings have the five poisons,' that is to say, stupidity, aversion, desire, aIachment, jealousy and
pride. These are part of the basic structure which arises when you don’t see your own nature, and
because it’s just like the weather, there’s no shame in having them. It’s just how you have it.
But in therapy, because one tends to be more concerned with one’s personal history and personal
story, these facts about ourselves, these ways that we func1on, oVen feel terribly in1mate. And,
therefore, it can seem quite shameful to talk about them to someone else because of the general
cover up: that we always have to pretend to be more sorted than we are, more balanced than we
are, more helpful, more ethical, and so on. So the strong, nega1ve self-‐judgment is something which
P a g e | 29
we wish wasn’t the case, and yet it is the case; and, the reason it’s the case seems to be something
personally to do with us.
Whereas, from the buddhist point of view, ignorance doesn’t mean you’re a stupid person; ignorance
means that there is a tendency of the mind in which its own rapidity acts to disguise from itself what
it is. That’s what it is. It’s a process, and that process has a func1on, which means that all sorts of
deluded, illusory thoughts are generated. When you recognise that, you don’t get caught up in it. It’s
like that, it wasn’t your fault, you’re not personally to blame, but you are implicated when that game
is running.
I think from a dharma point of view, that’s why it’s important for us just to try to get to basic
descrip1ons of what happens; and, the more we hold back from them, as if it were something
dreadful, that, in itself, shows the quality of aIachment we have to them – that we’ve already
empowered these places as being hyper significant in rela1on to who we are. We shouldn’t have it,
but we do have it, therefore, this tells us something about who we are, and if we tell other people,
they will then know how terrible we are. That is to say, it will fuel not only our objec1fying of
ourselves, 'I am like this,' dot-‐dot-‐dot, but now they will know, 'Oh, he is like this,' dot-‐dot-‐dot; and
that’s quite a frightening place to be.
In that way, cover up, deceit, illusion is how we protect ourselves from what we take to be the reality
of the shit inside – trying to appear beIer than we are. But of course, we can’t really cheat ourselves
in that way because we have to live with it, and because we are covering it up, we can’t resolve it, or
work it through, or get into a new rela1onship with it. James: But it’s also linked to the
no1on of authen1city because, again, the thing that’s happened in modern culture is the idea that
you should be an authen1c individual: you should speak your own truth and be true to yourself.
From a buddhist point of view, this is a very strange idea because the self is not a thing, it’s not
authen1c, it doesn’t have any truth in it. It’s actually con1ngent and situa1onal. And, beneath this
manifesta1on, is an infinite emp1ness. And when the ego loops behind it, or underneath it, and sees
that nothing is there, it becomes very frightened, and that fear leads into these strong asser1ons,
trying to stabilise some kind of ground.
What we do in the medita1on is try to make friends with emp1ness, to recognise that emp1ness is
one aspect of our experience, and manifesta1on is another aspect, and these two are not in conflict
or opposi1on, but they’re part and parcel of the same, unified, integrated field.
So, a nega1ve belief in trying to determine a par1cular take on who we are brings a solidity that
stops us enjoying the movement of being this or being that. This is part of the problem, that the
more internal thoughts you have, self-‐referen1al thoughts, it builds up a narra1ve which is
restric1ve. It stops us responding into the moment.
This is a very central area in buddhism. The way in which the sense of having a discrete, individual
self is generated out of causes and circumstances. In spring we see all the liIle birds flying around
picking up twigs and liIle things in order to make nests. When we are children, we are just like liIle
birds: we make a nest, a nest of a self, out of whatever twigs we find. If you grow up in a crap family,
the liIle twigs you make your nest from are not very useful , but you need to have a nest. You need
to have an iden1ty. So you weave it together out of all this stuff, and that’s what you’ve got. Of
course, if you’ve ever found a bird’s nest and you try to unpack it, it’s both strong and very fragile. If
you pull too much at it, it starts to fall apart. That’s the same with our sense of self.
This morning, we were looking at the transmission of the understanding about our nature. It’s
saying, from the very beginning, our nature has been open like the sky. It’s not a thing, it’s not an
object. But, we don’t experience this. We experience ourselves as an object, as some thing which can
be judged, evaluated, moved in different direc1ons, increased and diminished in value, and so on. An
object in a world of other objects.

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What is that? What’s the process of experiencing ourselves as an object? It’s a stream of thoughts,
feelings, and sensa1ons. Sensa1ons in the body: our belly tenses up when we become fearful, our
breath goes into the upper chest, the frontal lobes get a bit knocked out, and so on. We’re used to
having a soma1c experience in rela1on to what’s going on. We have the flow of our emo1ons, the
flow of our thoughts. These are all dynamic. They don’t last very long, but, we weave them into a
con1nuous narra1ve of ourselves.
Most of the 1me, we have some sort of background commentary going on about who we are: an
evalua1on which is confirming the sense, 'I exist and I’m doing okay, not so good, very good.'
Basically, just like that, you’re ge_ng a con1nuous performance review linked with, 'I’m happy,' 'I’m
not happy,' 'This is good,' 'This is not good.'
This kind of checking out and evalua1ng goes on all the 1me, and it’s exactly how we relate to
external objects. You go into a restaurant and you think, 'Oh, this is not very good.' 'That tasted
beCer.' That’s what we do with objects. You go to a movie and you think, 'Oh, that bit’s good, but
that actor’s terrible and why don’t they …' You know, we’re constantly carrying out a cri1que in which
we can see the good things and the bad things.
Now, that’s all very well if you’re looking at a bunch of apples and deciding which one you’re going to
eat. But, when you apply it to yourself, as this subtle flow of phenomena which are ungraspable, you
reify, you turn into a fixed, en1ta1ve form, something which is actually moving, like the wind in the
sky. We turn this bright, shining, ever-‐fresh quality of our existence into these rather jaded, 1red
categories of evalua1on. This is what ignorance is. It’s a hell of a lot of work because we’re always on
the job, always correc1ng, improving, defending; because we’re having to maintain something which
is actually always falling apart.
We want something stable, but, according to the tradi1on, the only stable thing we will ever find is
our own unborn nature. This is the only unchanging, reliable thing there is. Apart from that,
everything is the manifesta1on of energy. What we say, what we think, what we feel, even our past is
changing because we will tell stories of our past to other people. When historians meet together,
they never agree on their interpreta1on on the Hundred Years’ War, or whatever, because it’s stories,
it’s different ideas, it’s different views.
There is nothing stable in the world of manifesta1on, so the category error is to say, 'I can stabilise
this world,’ and this is the func1on of neurosis. Neurosis is an extreme aIempt to stabilise that
which is unstable. You know, things like depression can feel the same; things like panic aIacks. The
person who describes them will say that they’re always the same, but, if you go into the lived
phenomenology of it, each one is absolutely unique. Each episode of depression or chronic back
pain, all phenomena are transient. In the moment that they arrive, the par1cular colora1on that they
get from the other con1ngent factors means that they are never, ever, ever repeated.
So, part of the category error is that we live our lives in rela1on to an abstrac1on. In our childhood,
we develop certain interpreta1ons of the world, and out of these we create a map, and we then
con1nue to apply that map in the world, although, the terrain, the topology, the country has shiVed.
The map is out of date. But, because we’re aIached to the map and it seems to give us a definite
knowledge and a definite clarity, it’s easier to hang on to the map and ignore the territory than live
fully in the territory and revise the map.
That’s the heart of buddhism, is to say: awaken to things as they are. Be here now, be with what is
here. Not media1ng it through these maps, these distor1ons of the visual sense: veils, screens,
lenses, and so on. And if we do that, we live in a dynamic world. There is nothing solid, nothing
substan1al to rely on. But, we’re s1ll here. We don’t fall through a hole in the floor. Life goes on, and
it may actually be a bit beIer because it’s a bit looser.
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The burden of the past can be put back, and we can live with all that we had without holding it on
our back in a rucksack, but, as Heidegger says, 'We have it to hand,’ and if things are to hand, you put
out your hand and there it is. That’s all we need to do. We can trust that we can be here, precise, in
the immediacy of the moment, rather than carrying the truth on our back, which we constantly have
to deliver.
Student: What do you do when you want to check whether you’re on the right course?
James: Well, you wouldn’t want to check on it. Who’s got the right course? Who knows
what they’re doing?
Student: That’s what you do... you drop everything you care about, self-‐cri1cisms, all these
things, and, you’re trying to be spontaneous, or you are spontaneous. But then, 'Am I doing it right?'
James: Well why would you worry?
Student: Because anxiety arises...
James: Well then … , but anxiety arises and anxiety passes. If you cleave to the arising
moment, that it will tell you the truth about your true nature, then that’s samsara. If you see the
arising moment, whether it’s posi1ve or nega1ve, as something transient, then that’s nirvana.
They’re very different. Everything is theatre. There is nothing real in this world at all. The Buddha
said many, many 1mes, 'It’s just an illusion,’ but, we have to par1cipate in the illusion. And you have
to work with them in their illusion, but very gently and nicely. That is to say, you’re in the world, not
of it; you’re not caught by the story, but you can play the story. Your freedom perhaps gives them a
sense of freedom as well.
This is the idea of the bodhisaIva manifes1ng into the world in the manner of a dream. For example,
when you have the story of Prince Siddhartha, who goes on to become Buddha Shakyamuni, in the
tradi1onal accounts they talk of the twelve stages of the Buddha’s life, the twelve acts of the
Buddha. In the later mahayana tradi1on, they say that, actually, the Buddha was always living in this
Tushita paradise, and he sent an illusory body down into the world that showed these twelve stages
in the manner of a dream. People who met him thought, 'Oh, this is a real person,' but the Buddha
himself knew this is just like a dream form.
So this is part of it: not to take things too seriously. And that’s why looking at these core, nega1ve
beliefs is very important, because these are ways in which we give a very compacted, solidified basis.
The basis of experience is emp1ness, but we don’t get that. What we feel is, 'The basis of experience
is me. This is happening to me, you did it to me, I’m doing it to you.' And these two points are very
solid: self as a receptor, self as an agent that’s doing things. Both seem completely real, and every
1me they’re ac1vated it gives a kind of confirma1on, 'I exist as this. I am who I am.' Yes, I have a
history, and so on, but 'I am me. I am me.'
This solidified sense of me-‐ness is what is cri1qued in buddhism as aIachment to self. It’s not the
fact that we have a par1cular body that is the problem, it’s that we believe that it has an inherent
self-‐nature, that it exists in itself, not dependent on circumstances. 'I’m just me exis4ng as this.’ Of
course, it’s true that I experience myself as exis1ng as ‘me’ and my experience seems to show itself
in different forms as I interact with the world. However this ‘existence’ is actually my presence, the
clarity of awareness which has no fixed content, essence or true self-‐existence as something
substan1al. To say there is no existence is an unhelpful extreme and to say we truly exist is another
unhelpful extreme. For in fact we exist in the manner of a dream, as an illusion.
That’s another of the category errors. How we are shows the ways in which our energy manifests in
the world as being with others, but it doesn’t define who we are. This is, of course, the anxiety in the

P a g e | 32
world. Everybody is saying, 'Tell me who you are. What are you?' You know, 'Where’s your passport?
What’s your na4onal security number? What are your competencies? What’s your CV?' And we all
submit to saying, 'I am an object. I am a thing.'
Break
Story about two disciples who understood differently

There's a story that some of you know; it’s a story about the origin of an aspect of the tantras, and
it’s par1cularly important to be aware of it in terms of the prac1ces that we’re doing here. It’s a story
of the son of a rich man who heard that a teacher of dharma was coming to the country, and so he
went off to see him.
He saw the teacher, and, of course, as the son of a rich man, he always travelled with his servant, so
his servant came too. The teacher said, just as we have been looking today, he said, 'The mind is like
the sky. It is completely free of any defilement, free of any obscura1on, it is indestruc1ble. You
should meditate on this.' So, they both went away and did their own prac1ce.
AVer some 1me, the son of the rich man announced, 'I have really understood what the teacher
says. Because my mind is completely pure and perfect, I can do whatever I like because nothing can
harm me, nothing can stain me,' and the servant said, 'I don't think that’s right.' The son of the rich
man was very arrogant, so he said, 'We will go to the teacher and check.'
So, they went back to the teacher, and the rich young man told the teacher of his realisa1on, and the
teacher said, 'You are completely deluded. That is not at all what I said.' The young man was so angry
he insulted the teacher and leV him and separated from his servant. Then he went off.
His servant con1nued to prac1se, having understood that the mind is like the sky, completely empty,
and therefore that staying relaxed in this state, there is no need to get into any extra business. Nor is
there any is need to perform any par1cular ac1vi1es.
However the rich young man was so fired up with his sense of power that he travelled through the
kingdom doing whatever he wanted. Eventually he died, and for many different life1mes he was born
as dung beetles, as worms, as a denizen of the lower hells, and so on.
Then one night there was a pros1tute who had sex with three different kinds of demon in that night,
and the consciousness of the young man entered her body and she became pregnant. In the course
of her pregnancy she died, and the corpse was dragged down to the cemetery because she was a
low woman and nobody wanted anything to do with her.
As the mother’s body was cooling down the baby started to claw at her body and clawed his way out,
and went onto her breast and sucked all the milk out, then sucked all the blood out and ate her flesh.
As he ate her flesh, he became stronger and stronger. He had wings on his back, which he had
inherited from one his fathers, one of the demons. In the cemetery he found many wild animals, so
he killed a 1ger and wrapped it around him. He killed an elephant, and wrapped the skin around him.
He took the blood of beings and put it on his forehead, and he massaged human fat into his cheeks,
and dusted himself down with the powder of dead people.
He moved out of the cemetery and he killed every man he met, he raped every woman he met, and
he dominated this whole world system. Then he moved up Mount Meru, the central mountain,
killing and destroying. He destroyed all the monasteries, and so on.
Eventually, all the Buddhas came together and they thought 'We must do something to control this
monster,' who was called Matramutra, the mother-‐ea1ng demon. Eventually they manifested a form
P a g e | 33
of Dorje Sempa, who entered into his body and bubbled him up and transformed his inside so he
manifested as the form of Hayagriva who is one of the tantric dei1es.
There are many, many other details in the tradi1onal telling of the story, but the most important
thing for us at this 1me is the very first part. The teaching on the nature of the mind is not about any
kind of instrumentality. It’s not a permission to do anything in par1cular. The instruc1on is to rest in
that relaxed, open state, and to recognise that energy arises and passes by itself. When you
appropriate the energy, when you say, 'This belongs to me,' this is the beginning of confusion, and
this is the ordinary confusion of samsara. But, if on top of that, you put a special permission,
'Because everything is empty I can do as I like,' then the door to hell is completely opened because
that’s a state of great madness. It’s completely wrong. It destroys any sense of karma, any sense of
cause and effect.
The deeper the medita1on goes, the more unformed and, therefore, the more infinite we experience
ourselves to be. This gives rise to all possibili1es of spontaneity and power; because you develop
more clarity, you see situa1ons more easily. It’s very, very important to then be extremely careful in
everything we do. To be very harmonious, very aIuned, very soV and delicate.
In the history of Buddhism, many people have got lost by following dreams of power. Power is a
dangerous thing. If the ground of power is emp1ness, and it has an authen1c compassionate
inten1on, it can be very useful. But it’s very easy to fall in love with power. So, again and again, we
should examine, 'What is our mo4ve in doing prac4ce?What is our mo4ve when we interact with
other people?'
The more we see our own confusions and the confusions of others, this can increase our sensi1vity
to how they are, our compassion, our aIunement to their situa1on. It also opens the sense that, just
as we have confusion and the possibility of awakening, so do they; therefore, not making ourselves
an object or an instrument, we don't make other people an object or an instrument. To turn people
into something that we use for our own agenda, our own purpose, is the deep way to pervert all the
teachings. It’s very important to remember this.
Because the mind is like the sky, relax; and if you find yourself wan1ng to mobilise and in any way
use the dharma as a jus1fica1on for your own five poisons, for your self-‐centred drivenness, then a
big alarm bell should ring inside. This is very dangerous. The fact that Buddha taught that everything
is empty doesn't mean that we can hurt people, or exploit them, or make use of them. Not that I
think you’re likely to do that, but because we all have the poten1al for these tendencies in ourselves
you never know when you can get lost, because none of us si_ng here know what kind of winds of
karma will come from past lives. In the past there were many bad people. Where did they go when
they died? Maybe we are their reincarna1on! We shouldn’t be too confident that the bad people are
always someone else, somewhere else. So, for that reason, given that sudden shiVs in our nature can
arise, it is important to be very aware of how we can get lost. We get lost not because we are
intrinsically bad but because we are heir to many intense tendencies of which we are barely
conscious.
For that reason, I would encourage you, if you have 1me and if it takes your fancy, try to examine,
and maybe write down, some of the core mo1ves that drive you in this life, and the core beliefs that
you have about yourself and your en1tlement, because one of the things that modern democracy
has done is to make everybody en1tled to have things. But from a dharma point of view we’re not
en1tled to anything. Everything arises from karma: there is no Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau social contract
that you can take into a government office and say, 'Give me my money.' But we all can do that; if
you get unemployed, or sick, some money comes in your hand. There is a kind of ring of safety.
So, what are the basic beliefs that we have inside ourselves? Especially remembering the general
Buddhist teaching of these five poisons or afflic1ons: stupidity, which is a kind of mental dullness in

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which we don't see the impermanence of phenomena, we don't see the emp1ness, but we take
them as strongly real and try to make use of them; desire or aIachment, in which we feel some kind
of deficit inside ourselves and think that an external object, whether a person, or possessions, will
somehow fill that deficit; aversion or anger, in which we experience someone, or some situa1on, as
a threat to us, and feel that we mustn’t be contaminated by it; jealousy, in which we feel that we are
being squeezed out of something we are en1tled to; and pride, in which we feel some par1cular
privileging of ourselves, a stable en1tlement to have good things coming our way.
Buddha taught many 1mes that all of us have these five poisons. They can be transformed into the
five wisdoms. They can be released and integrated as the energy of emp1ness, but in order to do
that we have to recognise that they’re there. So being more aware of the kinds of mo1va1ons we
have, the kinds of avoidances we have, the hungers and longings, is very helpful as the basis of, 'Oh,
this is what I’ve got. This is my luck in this life, this is my tool kit.' Especially in the tantric tradi1on,
they say it’s best when you’re young to have a lot of poison. The best yogis are very crazy when
they’re young, because it means they have a lot of energy. If your life is very nice and sweet, not so
powerful. If you have a lot of crazy energy you can transmute that into something of value.
It’s important not to be too afraid of being in touch with these poisons because they are a kind of
fuel; they are a raw resource that we then have to learn to work with. But first of all we have to know
that we have them and observe how they operate.
When we do that first kind of medita1on, there is a clear focus of inten1on and there is a definite
object that we can come back to again and again. In the second, we don’t have any clear object. The
object of medita1on is whatever is arising in the mind. So, we’re not having to hold onto any
memory of what is the par1cular focus for what we do. Whatever arises, we try to stay open to it,
and in that way, gradually, we start to experience more of the content of our mind. We reveal
ourselves to ourselves, and the main thing there is to observe how every aspect of yourself that you
can iden1fy with, that you can rely on, is just passing through. It’s there, but it’s there as a
movement. It doesn’t remain, and we can see that our life is composed of gestures into the world.
Gestures which have an impact and, yet, have no real dura1on. This is very important.
Grasping at the sense one has an inherent self

Generally, in the buddhist tradi1on, they say one of the main problems that we have is grasping at a
sense of an inherent self. It’s called dag dzin in Tibetan or atmagraha in Sanskrit. Dag and atma both
can mean a self, like a person. It means like 'I,' but it also refers to the sense of an inherent self-‐
nature, because when we say 'I,' we’re talking about something that seems to have and essence,
some true, substan1al core.
If we have a glass, the glass seems to exist. It doesn’t seem to fall apart in my hand. We can say that
there is a glass-‐ness to the glass. It seems to have an inherent, innate iden1ty. It is what it is. This is
seen as a very, very big problem, because this is a place where we become stupid very easily. We get
taken in. The glass that you see, if I let it slip from my hand, will hit the ground and break, and then
we won’t have the glass. From the Buddhist point of view, this is a sign that the glass exists as a glass
only due to the presence of maintaining factors. If these maintaining factors vanish there will be no
glass, and that everything we see in the world is held in place by maintaining factors.
These maintaining factors are not stable, but they do give the illusion of the con1nuity of true
en11es, en11es which seem to be internally defined. All the different buddhist schools have their
own par1cular cri1c of the falsity of this posi1on. Most generally, you have the idea of dependent co-‐
origina1on: that’s the idea that every phenomena, every manifesta1on, everything we can call an
en1ty, arises on the basis of factors. That is to say, there is always a cause to everything, and the
cause is not exhausted with the manifesta1on, because part of the cause is that it generates a
maintaining situa1on.
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In Tibet, for example, before the Chinese came there were many monasteries, and in the
monasteries they had many pain1ngs and statues. Many of these were a thousand years old. They
had been kept there, not simply because somebody made them, but because of devo1on, because
of valuing them. They were seen as being truly valuable. Then when the Chinese invaded, and
par1cularly in the Cultural Revolu1on, the Red Guards, generally young barbarians, came in with no
interest in the past. They were ac1vely encouraged to see the past as a prison to the freedom of the
people, and so they destroyed these ar1cles. That was a point where the structure of the
maintaining factors was removed.
In the same way, in order to bring democracy to Iraq, the Americans have destroyed many of the
ancient remains in Iraq. Tiles, which have been there for three thousand, three and a half thousand
years were crushed into dust, because the Americans decided to run tanks up and down them. So,
the maintaining factors of, 'This is important, this is our history,' even in a Muslim country where they
don’t really like representa1on, allowed the con1nuity of these factors, but then someone comes in
with a completely different mind set, a different set of values, and the maintaining factors collapse.
This would be the buddhist way of understanding that the..., with something like a glass, it looks
en1re in itself, but actually it’s more like a puppet. There are many invisible strings aIached to this
glass, and these strings can be pulled at any 1me. Somebody could be distracted and so the glass
drops. The house here could decide to change what they have, which they have done, and so this is a
new kind of glass. I didn’t see this glass before. So, someone in the office decides we have to go up
market a liIle bit and get beIer looking glasses so they buy a whole bunch of these. This will be here
for a while. They're rather fragile glasses, as far as I can see, and many people using them repeatedly,
they’re likely to break quite a lot. So they might not be here so long, because, of course, the people
who run this place have a lot of investment in it. It means a lot to them, but it doesn’t necessarily
mean very much to people coming in from outside.
This view is saying there is no inherent self-‐nature, no essence in any phenomena. It’s the same with
our selves. We sit here in this room, fairly close to each other, some of us have arrived here bearing
giVs. GiVs in the form of colds, which we have generously been sharing with you as we cough and
spluIer. You’re very welcome. So you also will have something to take home with you. It’s like that.
Now, how does that happen? Because we breathe in and out. Our body is not sealed. We have holes
in it. If we didn’t have holes in our body it wouldn’t be very easy to func1on. Things have to come in,
things have to go out.
We cannot seal off or defend ourselves. Because of this, we find ourselves responding to the
environment in various ways. In ways which are directly biological, in ways that are cultural. For
example, we’ve developed, in Europe, a cult of the sun, so whenever the sun shines, we all feel
happy and want to sit in the sun. If this was a hundred and fiVy, two hundred years ago, ladies
would certainly not be going in the sun, because there would be privilege for their beau1ful white
skin, so they would wear a big hat to protect themselves from this demon.
In that way we can see, if you start to do a cultural analysis, everything you see is generated by many,
many chains of significa1on, many moments of belief, developments in technology, the survival of
certain forms in the market or their demise. Again and again, we can see that what appears to be
solid and real, reliable, is not. In America, you have the collapse of Lehman Brothers. This is a very
big interna1onal financial ins1tu1on. People saw it as reliable. It regularly got a AAA ra1ng as being a
good place to put your money; and, in fact, it was not very reliable. So this is what a brand or a logo
does: it sets up an abstract iden1ty behind which all sorts of changes are going on, but it’s as if it’s
the same.
In England, as prices go up, we have these standard confec1onary items, bars of chocolate. People
want to buy their bar of chocolate and they don’t want to pay more money. So the manufacturer just
keeps shrinking the size of the bar of chocolate, so it looks like the same thing. But it’s not. In that

P a g e | 36
way they want to keep the logo, they want to keep the iden1fica1on, 'I want one of those,' but the
thing you actually get, the palpable, tangible thing, what you’re giving your actual money for is
shiVing. So what’s being transacted is a name, and the name creates a kind of phenomenological
blindness: res1ng on the name, we don’t examine what is there.
This term inherent self-‐nature, belief in inherent self-‐nature, is a way of describing our tendency to
rest on the maps in our head, to rest on the assump1ons that we have about the true, inherent
existence of phenomena. On the basis of that, we then start to move these phenomena around in
our world, like figures on a chest board where we have some kind of game plan, so that we increase
benefit to ourselves and diminish difficulty for ourselves. However, of course, these chess moves are
not reliable or safe.
Since the financial crisis, the percentage return that you get in investment accounts in a bank have
gone down a great deal. Gone down from six percent to about one percent. Many pensioners who
had put their savings into a place thinking it was very safe, now find it’s not very safe. The holidays
they thought they would have, the adjustment to the house they thought they would have, they now
can’t have. Who has stolen this money? It was their money. But of course that’s an illusion, it wasn't
their money. Money is symbolic, money is not a thing. Even gold is symbolic. The price of gold is
going up and up and up, because people believe in it more. When you worship something it takes on
value. When you don’t manage to worship it so much, it goes down in value.
There is no security
There is no inherent secure territory anywhere. Nobody can guarantee us anything in this life. None
of us know how long we’re going to live, none of us know if we’re going to be healthy un1l we die.
None of us know whether family members are going to do well or not. We don’t know how the
culture will develop, we don’t know how the financial situa1on will develop. We just don’t know very
much, but an awful lot of 1me is spent in trying to work out what will happen so that we can secure
the territory, and that effort oVen leads to great sadness and a sense of betrayal.
From the point of view of dzogchen, manifesta1on in the world is in the nature of a par1cipa1on,
that we are part of a large system in which we cannot know exactly what is going to happen. It’s not
possible to know what is going to happen. These are absolute fantasies that there are some people,
somewhere who really know what’s what. This is not true. Many people believe the Karmapa knows
what’s what. I doubt it, because the Karmapa's not free to move around the world because he gets
visa restric1ons and so on. It’s very difficult to be an omnipotent world ruler, and at the same 1me
be trapped because of bureaucracy.
We have fantasies of freedom. This comes from people not wan1ng to believe in the Buddha's
teachings. Buddha's teachings are very hard, they’re like chewing stones. They’re not very bright and
shiny; it’s not a kind of new age, transpersonal vision that there are these great magicians who come
from Tibet, and they're going to send rainbows into us, and we'll all be happy. What it’s essen1ally
saying is we’re swimming in shit and every 1me you start to sink a bit you get a mouthful of it, so you
beIer keep swimming. I think that’s really what its saying.
Dependent co-‐origina1on means you’re bound into a matrix which is beyond your control, and you
have to learn to be very light on your feet. This is the whole basis of dakinis. Dakini means energy
moving in the sky. It means not trapped on the earth, not in a marsh, but light and able to respond to
par1cular situa1ons. Fantasies of control are one of the great illusions, and the fantasy of control is
always based on the idea we know what’s what. We know what the situa1on is, and because we
know what the situa1on is, we can proceed in a proper way.
They've just released some government documents in England, and at the 1me when Fidel Castro
took over in Cuba, he wanted to develop a public transport system, so he ordered busses from
P a g e | 37
England. There was a tanker, a big, big ship, full of busses and it was sailing down the Thames, and
suddenly it was rammed by another ship and it sank. The government papers revealed that this was
orchestrated by the CIA, with whom Britain has a special rela1onship. Our dear brothers.
One of the sayings of my teacher, C R Lama, was, 'I don’t trust anyone, and number one, I don’t trust
myself.' This is really true. So, coming back to trus1ng ourselves, we can see that this is much more
complicated than just trying to work out who we are and then being authen1cally true to that,
because the world that we are caught up in is full of liIle pockets of vested interest. People have
their own par1cular ways of collabora1ng or not collabora1ng.
One of the real challenges, for example, in the Tibetan community is that the different sects, the
different schools of Tibetan buddhism collaborate and move in the same direc1on, and don’t destroy
themselves. But this is very hard because, actually, historically, they didn’t like each other very much.
It’s the same in Britain with the schools of psychotherapy, they hate each other. Every one think the
other is stupid and wrong. But now the government wants to control the psychotherapists, they have
to define what they do, but they spend most of the 1me saying, 'I don’t want to sit in the same room
as you!'
So, collabora1on becomes very difficult and we can see why, because in each of these situa1ons, in
the Tibetan case, the Nyingmapa know what the Gelugpa are like, and the Kagyupas know what the
Sakyapa are like, and the psychoanalysts know what the cogni1ve behavioural therapists are like.
And so, because everybody knows what the other is like, they give inherent self-‐nature. They say,
'You are that,' and 'Because you are that, I can’t do this with you,’ so everything becomes very frozen,
and a kind of staccato bumpy ride, because you cannot get into flow, because it keeps freezing in
terms of these defini1ons
Actually, collabora1on requires a soVer edge, it’s rebalancing away from the earth element. The
earth element is always privileged under patriarchy, and all our cultures have been under patriarchy
for a very long 1me. This means that the voice from on high, the sky-‐god voice, is taken to be
defini1ve, offering true knowledge of things, and the prohibi1on of law and structure. This views has
been given much more importance than collabora1on and that’s a real problem for us now.
The meaning of 'emptiness'

The idea of inherent self-‐nature is cri1qued also through the understanding of emp1ness. Emp1ness
means, essen1ally, empty of inherent self-‐nature. So when the Buddha says, 'All condi4oned things
are empty,' everything in this room is empty, what does it mean to say that I am empty? Clearly we
have our physical func1ons: we can speak, we can walk, we can talk, and so on. All of these appear
to have a kind of con1nuing validity.
Empty doesn’t mean that there is nothing there. Emp1ness is truly the heart of the Buddha’s middle
way. It’s not that things are strongly real; it’s not that things don’t exist at all; but things exists in the
manner of a dream. As it says in the Heart Sutra, 'Form is emp4ness. Emp4ness is form.' This means
that this thing that we are is manifes1ng, moving and changing through 1me. It’s not solid. It
manifests according to different kinds of condi1ons.
For example, when I was younger and lived in India, I could sit a long 1me cross-‐legged. Now, I sit
mostly si_ng in a chair, so when I sit cross-‐legged it's not so easy for me. It’s like that. When I first
went to India, si_ng cross-‐legged was very difficult, because I was used to chairs. So my life has gone
from chair, to floor, to chair. Each 1me, each transi1on is a bit painful, and then the body adjusts and
then, 'Oh I can do this!' but what I could do when I was younger, I can’t do now, because the causes
and condi1ons have changed.

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Although I say, 'It’s my body,' I’m not in charge of it at all; it has a life of its own, it responds to all
sorts of things. When I used to do retreats in the monsoon, it’s very, very wet, and so the joints get
very sore. When it’s hot and dry, the joints don’t get so sore. There’s nothing you can do to stop your
joints from ge_ng sore. It’s like that. Our body is part of the world.
So emp1ness means, whenever we use language, whenever we speak and we seem to describe
things as truly real, we have to listen to the nature of speaking. Words tumble out of our mouths,
move on currents of air as vibra1on, and they create an impact. They create an energe1c impact, and
then a seman1c impact, and ideas then go through someone else’s mind, and then some vibra1on
comes back as they reply, and these vibra1ons are going on all the 1me. That is to say, our speech is
very dynamic; it’s not solid. It moves in 1me, and our body is the same. The body’s existence is in
1me. You can see it more easily with speech, because you say something, then you stop speaking
and there’s a silence. The body seems to be always here, but no one in this room is si_ng without
moving. The body moves. Bodies are meant to move.
When the body is moving, as you turn, you see something different. Your world is actually different.
Actually in a sense that the act of exis1ng; this moment is revealed when you look this way; then you
look that way, you have a whole new world. This is something different. You see different shapes, you
see different colours. This is all you’ve got, but we don’t live in that world. We live in a world of ideas,
where we’re sor1ng things out and saying this is this, this is that. We’re, somehow, in here, but not in
here, but here is where we are.
The more we understand emp1ness, the less we come to rely on the map. Because the maps that
we've built up, the interpre1ve maps, are paIerns of memory, condi1oning. Over-‐reliance on the
map can hide both our own poten1al and the poten1al of the field around us, condemning us to
repe11on/compulsion. We need to enter the world naked yet with resources to hand.
If the accre1ons from the past are wrapped around us like some kind of suite of armour, or some
defence, then we are always media1ng what is immediately there in front of us, and we don’t see it.
And what we mediate it with is the sense that things are truly real, that they are strongly real. So in
our heads we work out game plans, things to do, how we're going to proceed. For some things this is
necessary, but it’s what we can recognise is: when you sit down and, say you have to plan some work
you’re going to do, you’re wri1ng something down or you’re working on a computer screen; all that’s
happening there is impermanence. Everything in our life in impermanent. Now, instead of si_ng on
the sofa watching TV impermanence, you’re si_ng in front of a computer planning next week
impermanence. Every 1me you press one key a leIer comes up, and now you can’t keep pressing
that key because it won’t make much sense. You have to press another key, and then you have to
press another key and then another. That is impermanence in ac1on. That’s all it is.
There is nothing but movement. This is all that there is. The ques1on would be, why do we add on
top of that this reifica1on, this crea1on of en11es, objec1fica1on, making things appear to be
separate and internally structured and grounded? This is called ignorance. We do it because we’ve
fallen asleep to the immediacy, the freshness, the dynamism of being alive; that life is the interplay
of subject and object. It’s the non-‐dual display of the clarity, the brilliance of the Buddha's mind. All
of these movements, all that we seem to be doing, is revealed to us in terms of our own awareness.
So, having some understanding of emp1ness is very, very important, and the simplest way to do that
is to start to examine your use of language. When you hear yourself talking about something, making
a comment, a judgment, or even just a descrip1on, what is at stake in that? I would suggest to you
that, usually, there are two things. One is that you want to communicate with the other person, and
so what you say has to make sense to them in some way; so what is at stake is a sort of social
iden1ty, and the to-‐ing and fro-‐ing of communica1on. The second thing is the no1on that 'I exist.'
P a g e | 39
The ego is like the mafia

So our communica1ons, even our internal communica1ons when we’re thinking about things, have
both a linear movement, that is to say they go from me out to you or from one part of myself to
another, but they’re also self-‐reflexive. That is to say that there is a kind of comeback, there is a
payoff, a dividend that comes back in the sense of, 'I am the one who is doing this.' So when I say,
'Oh it's not as warm today,' I'm making a statement, but I am also telling myself 'I am exactly the sort
of person who knows what the weather’s like.' There’s a very subtle massaging going on of this core
sense of 'I exist,' and 'I know things.' This nexus of self-‐iden1fica1on, the subject who endures
through 1me, who knows things; this is being reinforced again and again.
This is part of how samsara con1nues, because, actually, the communica1ve gesture, 'It's not as
warm today,' is fine. It can just be flowing out. It’s this liIle flip back that we have to watch, in which
there’s a sort of skimming off, the way the mafia managed to get their ten percent. So the ego is
si_ng in there, behind the big desk all the 1me. Ten percent of everything. That makes quite a rich
person in the end. And of course we get a bit paralysed by that, because what the ego is doing is
saying, 'Without me, you wouldn’t survive.' This is what the mafia says,
'This is a lovely restaurant. I love your restaurant. Eh? You like your restaurant to con4nue?
Huh? I protect you. You need me.'
‘I don’t need you at all. You look very dangerous, go away.’
So the ego insinuates itself just like the mafia. It’s saying, 'I have a necessary func4on,' but it is
crea4ng that necessary func1on. That is to say, the problem is created out of its own effort. In
medicine this is called iatrogenic, which means it’s a disorder created by the interven1on of the
doctor. So what appears to be the cure is actually the poison; and of course once the pa1ent is
poisoned, the one who’s poisoned him now has a job for life: 'Now you know you need me.'
So who is this person who is making this claim? What is the true founda1on of it? Nothing at all. The
ego is simply a nexus of energy. You might have done this on a summer night: when it gets dark, if
you’re si_ng by a fire, you pick up a s1ck of wood and you turn it round and round, and it makes a
circle of fire. You know that there is simply one point of fire on the end of the s1ck, but what you see
is a circle of fire. This is an illusion. It’s an illusion created by ac1vity. The repe11on of the ac1vity
does that. Just in the same way, these old cinemas working with film, and it’s frame aVer frame aVer
frame. You accelerate it to the speed and you have the image, and the image seems to have a
par1cular con1nuity.
The ego exists as an energe1c nexus, which by repe11on recons1tutes itself again and again.
Although it claims itself to be self-‐exis1ng, its nature is empty. It arises, as all things do, like rainbows
in the sky. Empty of inherent self-‐nature, pure radiance. Just this. Just this. Just this. Moment by
moment, out of the infinite space, the dharmadhatu, which is inseparable from our unborn
awareness, rigpa or vidya. Energy is manifes1ng. This is all there is.
How energy manifests

Energy can manifest in two forms. As many of you know very well, in dzogchen we say there is one
ground and two paths. The one ground is infinite emp1ness, the unborn nature. The two paths: one
path is to recognise this, in which case everything is revealed as the flow of energy, dynamic, fresh,
always moving; and the other path is the path of grasping an illusion, in which samara is generated
out of the construc1on of the fantasy of en11es. From the very beginning there have never been any
en11es, but if you believe in en11es they will become real.
Children show us very clearly how this is done. If you watch children's television with them, you see
all these characters, and they know all these characters. Or from school they bring home these funny
liIle plas1c figures, and they tell you all about them: they come from a planet, and this one’s got a
stone on his hand, and this one has a special sword. They inhabit this whole world. This world
doesn’t exist. This is fantas1c marke1ng by a toy company to sell cheap bits of plas1c for incredibly

P a g e | 40
inflated prices, because the child is, of course, not buying plas1c. They’re buying symbolism, and
they move in that imaginal realm.
This is what we do in terms of the ego. We say, 'This is a glass of water.' The child says, 'This is a
space ship.' The child says, 'This water comes from Mars and, if you drink it, your nose will grow very
long, and it will go into your mouth and...' Children have a great 1me doing that, because they know
that everything is just what they say it is. But we all agree, 'No, no, no. As society, this is a glass of
water, and if you want to get through your exams and get a good life, this is a glass of water.' So,
gradually, the child’s imagina1on comes to feel... there are two things: there is fantasy and reality.
Fantasy is for the weekend, and reality is Monday to Friday, nine to five. So live in reality and then
you get the money to indulge your fantasy. So all the 1me you’re being told reality is good, strong,
real, that’s where the ac1on is; and fantasy's just some liIle holiday that we have.
Buddhism says exactly the opposite. It says, from the very beginning, everything is like a dream, like
an illusion. It is the belief that it is strongly real, that it’s solid, that creates the problems for you. If
you see it as an illusion, you won’t become incompetent. Worry, seriousness, heaviness, importance,
authoritarian correctness, all of these are seen as establishing value.
When I go into work to the hospital, I go on the tube that many business people go on. They all wear
the suit and the shirt and a 1e, and if you wear a 1e as a man, it makes you a proper person. In the
hospital the doctors have to wear a 1e, because the 1e shows that they are important people. What
kind of madness is this? They also have a hole in their bum and the poo-‐poo comes out. [Laugher]
This is more normal in their life than the 1e, but people wear the 1e and it says, 'Don’t fuck with me.
I’m an important person. Back off.'
These are symbolic gestures, and when we believe in these gestures, thinking collapses, and it’s
taken for granted. There’s a kind of en1tlement that goes with it. People in the financial industry felt
en1tled to award themselves huge amounts of money for doing very liIle. The more they did that,
the less connec1on they had with thinking that the woman working in a super market checkout,
who’s turning in her chair and ge_ng a bad back... what is she earning? What is the minimum wage
in rela1on to what somebody's earning as a bonus? There’s no rela1on at all, because in the realm of
abstrac1on there’s no limit. You can just make anything happen. So what we’ve clearly seen is the
financial industry is a fantasy realm. Everything is illusion, but people thought, 'Oh we thought it was
governed by rules and reality. We thought these people were respectable. I mean, they wear 4es.
They’re good guys.' Then you find that they’re fantasy merchants, and the wilder shores of the
ac1vi1es of hedge funds, and so on, are exactly specula1ve gambling. It’s fantasy. It’s gambling.
But the whole thing is gambling. The whole world is gambling. Why is that so terrifying? It’s terrifying
for us because we think it shouldn’t be like that. We think there should be respectable people doing
a proper day’s work for proper reward, and then we’ll know where we are; but it’s never going to be
like that. It never has been like that because lying, chea1ng, funny games go on. What is lying but
saying, 'I’m not going to play your reality game. I’m going to lie to you and you won’t know the
difference.’
So that says it looks like everything is self-‐evident. Everything is laid out. We know what’s what, but
actually we don’t. Things are what they are said to be. These are group hallucina1ons, mass
hallucina1ons. People believe in things: they believe in communism; they believe in na1onal-‐
socialism; they believe in the free market economy. Everyone goes, 'Wow,' and then it crashes. What
will we believe in now? Something else.
These are dangerous 1mes. There’s a strong likelihood of more right-‐wing movements coming into
the culture, of people thinking about war again because, when things get too uncertain, people want
to have defini1on. This is where I think buddhism is enormously important, because buddhism says,
yes, everything is indeed impermanent and unpredictable, and there are two answers to some of the
P a g e | 41
anxiety that this can generate. One is to go towards the earth element: solidity and control,
especially very 1ght control. And the other is to relax into space, and the more spacious you are, you
can work with circumstances, you'll find a way through; and in that spaciousness you'll be able to
con1nue to be able to relate to other people. But if you go towards control, things will get very
frozen and very solid.
This is why when we do this medita1on with our eyes open, we are offering hospitality to whatever
arises. Maybe we get bored, maybe we feel stupid, maybe we think this isn’t media1on. All sorts of
strange thoughts can arise. Just allow them to be there. Give them space and then they go. Give
them space and they go. The more you try to correct your mind, the more you try to be in charge of
it, the more you will be imprisoned by the ceaseless flow of thought, feeling, and sensa1on.
This is exactly the same in the external world. Instead of people collabora1ng together, dominance
and control gets installed, and that leads to some people being seen as very intelligent, very special,
and most people being seen as very stupid.
From the buddhist point of view, this is not helpful. All beings have buddha nature. The Buddha
taught 84,000 dharmas, that is to say, he went out of his way to find different ways to teach dharma
to different people. He didn’t say everybody has to be ready to enter my world on my terms, which
of course is the rule of a fascis1c structure, where the determinate of what is okay is established by
those in power, and everyone else has to adapt or die.
Part of the richness in doing this type of prac1ce ourselves, is that we become more flexible. We
become more able to manifest different things according to the needs of different people. I think
that’s a very nice thing to have for oneself. It also means we become less frightened of other people
because we start to see there is no inherent self-‐nature in anything, including other people. Other
people are a moveable feast; they are dynamic and alive, and it has to be our skill, our capacity to
work from our different chakras, engaging with them in ways that keep the movement light and
meaningful.
This is really an essen1al thing to observe for yourself – how you use language. Try to just see the
difference between a simple descrip1on, a judgment, an over-‐invested opinion, and where the
solidifica1on, the iden1fica1on with a transient belief, as if it was who I truly am... just try to observe
how that impacts you and other people.
Break
Instructions for practice: ‘Who is having this experience?’

Now we go back into the medita1on and do some explora1on. We start with the three Aa prac1ce,
just to relax and open. And then we start to try to have a sense of the one who is present, the one
who knows, the one who is there. Whether we call this our mind..., some1mes the word 'mind'
makes it too subject-‐to-‐object, thinking about something. So, you’re there, lots of events happen,
thoughts, feelings, and so on. Things you see. ‘Who is the one who is having this experience?’ We try
to look. Where does it come from? Clearly, a thought arises, a sensa1on arises. It registers, and then
it’s gone. What does it register with? Who is this one that it registers with? We’re looking, where
does this presence come from, if anywhere? Where does it remain, if anywhere? And where does it
go to?
Enter into the prac1ce and look; and the way to do this is to do it very, very gently, very soVly. You’re
not staring at something, you’re not a private detec1ve inves1ga1ng a problem. Something is there.
We have to let it reveal itself, almost as if you’re trying to find a deer in the forest. You know it’s
there. You have to be very, very quiet, and eventually, it will come and walk by. But, if you’re too
ac1vely looking, that will distort the field because then you have an inten1on. Because, 'looking' is

P a g e | 42
always looking for something. Here we want to see, in a sense, without looking. We want to see what
is there.
It involves just this; when we relax, we have a more panoramic vision. We’re not staring at
something; just open. We’re quiet and we’re recep1ve, but just with this slight edge, this experience
of being present. Where does it rest? Is it dependent on anything else?
What we were looking at before the break is our ordinary sense of self. We can give many stories of
what it depends on: it depends on our childhood, it might appear just to depend on itself, it might
appear to be dependent on the circumstances around it. But, we can always say why I feel the way I
do: 'I feel I’ve got a cold.’ 'Oh, when did you get that?' 'Oh, I think it was two days ago. It must have
been from da, da, da.' We’re constantly giving these story lines of seeing how a moment is res1ng
on something.
Now, we want to really look: what is our basic awareness, our presence, res1ng on? Okay, so we can
try that a bit.
Three Aa practice
We’ll do this again soon. And again, the reason to do it for just short periods of 1me is that we’re
trying simply to relax into an open state, and to awaken to the nature of that state. So it’s not an
effort of will, and, if you’re not used to doing the prac1ce and you do it for a long period of 1me, you
tend to start straining and trying to do something, or else just collapsing into whatever’s arising.
So use just the freshness of the beginning for a short period, and then, as you get more used to it,
you can do it for longer periods.
Clearly, thoughts are coming and going. When we iden1fy with the thought, the thought becomes
figural and anything else goes into the background. This, again, is one of the reasons for prac1cing
with the eyes open, because we have this peripheral vision sense of the colours and shapes around
us, we have sensa1ons of the body, thoughts, feelings, and so on. And suddenly we’re in something,
and when you’re in that, that becomes the figure and everything else has receded. Not even just into
a background, but it is an invisible background; you’re not aware of it. Then, this thing which was
figural diminishes, and something else pulses in.
So you get this movement of pulsa1ons, of seemingly true phenomena, going from one thing to
another, like going across an old river on stepping stones. One, two, three; and, if you stay on the
stepping stones, you don’t get wet. If you stay with the thought, you don’t experience the space
around you.
Just observing the impermanence of whatever is arising, and aIemp1ng to stay just relaxed and
present with everything, just observe how you go down into a par1cular form. Some1mes you get
that in a dream, you’re falling down into a kind of tunnel or into a sort of spiralling vortex. Suddenly,
you’re caught by something. Who is the one who is caught? AVerwards we can say, 'Oh, I was very
distracted, I kept geXng lost in these thoughts.' That’s a narra1ve, that’s a storyline about what
happened. We want to observe, more precisely, what is it that happened? Is there anybody who gets
lost?
If we’re doing the first kind of medita1on, where we’re focusing on our breath, then 'I am trying to
stay with my breath,' and if I get caught up in a thought then I can say, 'I have lost myself in the
thought,' because I was meant to be looking here, but now I’m looking here and in it.
P a g e | 43
In this prac1ce, the thoughts that arise include all the thoughts of 'I': 'I am 4red, 'I’m bored,' 'I’m
happy,' 'I need to do this when I get back home.' All these sort of thoughts arise. They, perhaps, show
us that what we take to be the 'I' that is woven into the later narra1ve is, itself, just a thought.
Who is the one who is aware of the thought that contains the message, 'I am the one who’s in
charge?' The awareness and the ego-‐focused consciousness are not the same. The ego is always
saying, 'I’m the king here. I’m in charge. I know what’s what.' This is the content of a story. If we
believe the story, we don’t see what’s actually going on.
So, again and again, relax, open, just very fresh, and observe the transience of these phenomena.
And whenever you find something that seems to endure, that seems to be a true basis of yourself,
stay with it. Don’t push it away, don’t hold onto it. Just stay present with it. This thought is presen1ng
itself as who you really are. See what happens. Does it really remain? Does it go? So, that’s the work
that we need to do.
Practice
Editing isn't necessary

Yesterday we were looking a liIle bit at some of the habitual, nega1ve thoughts we might have: the
judgments we might have about ourselves. We also may have habitual posi1ve thoughts about
ourselves, par1cular ways of affirming our iden1ty, believing in ourselves.
In this kind of prac1ce, the fact that we have visited a par1cular thought or a complex of thoughts
again and again creates certain kinds of problems, because these paIerns then become very
comfortable, like a pair of old shoes. They’re well-‐worn in, and so, when they arrive, you seIle into
them quite easily. They’ve got a sort of added poten1al to appear completely true in themselves.
It’s not that they’re not true; they’re true in terms of our func1oning in the world, and, as we look,
they direct the sorts of choices that we make when we’re in the world with others. But, from the
point of view of medita1on, we want to really recognise the impermanence of these phenomena.,
which means allowing the thought just to go by itself. In Tibetan, this is called rang drol. Rang means
self, drol means liberate. It means you don’t have to push thoughts away. Even if you love a thought
and you want it to stay, you can’t make it stay. Even if you hate a thought and you find it shaming or
terrifying, you can’t push it away. Thoughts go in their own 1me. In fact, the more we try to keep
things or push them away, the more turbulent the mind becomes.
Self-‐libera1on is really just another aspect of impermanence. By really seeing the func1on of
impermanence, you recognise that the edi1ng work of the ego is largely unnecessary, because all of
these factors go free by themselves. The more you can experience the content of your mind as it is,
and see the rich range of all the stuff that arises inside you, some peaceful, some disturbed, some
ethical, some unethical, all sorts of selfishnesses, and so on – it’s like an actor who has hundreds of
tubes of different coloured paint, and he can keep mixing and refining that on a paleIe.
All of these different thoughts and feelings are resources which could be useful in certain
circumstances. Some1mes it’s very helpful to be very angry. Some1mes it’s very important to be
proud, because it involves establishing a par1cular territory if somebody’s trying to invade you. In
the dynamics of office poli1cs, if you can’t hold onto your posi1on, then life gets very difficult. So, in
the right context, for a par1cular period of 1me, delivered in the right way, there is no thought in the
mind that won’t be useful.
The more we edit, the more we say, 'I like this. I don’t like that,' we’re actually restric1ng the
resources that we have available to help us manage situa1ons. If you try to be a very nice person,
and you always want to be kind and thoughDul and helpful, then there are many ac1vi1es that you’ll

P a g e | 44
say are wrong: you don’t want to shout at people, you don’t want to hit people. But some1mes we
need to be quite aggressive to control a dangerous situa1on. Somebody wants to aIack you, you
have to be able to defend yourself. If you’re out walking with your kids, somebody comes to aIack
you, or a mad dog comes running at you, you have to be willing to use all your energy to drive that
away. But if you think, 'Oh, I want to be a nice person. I don’t want to do these things,' again, your
map is determining your rela1on with the territory, and it may not be very helpful.
There are many func1ons of allowing the mind to be by itself, to roll as it does. In Tibetan it’s called
rang bab, which means falling by itself, like a waterfall. You sit in the country and you see a waterfall.
There’s always a sort of spray going off, and the water seems to come down and it suddenly shiVs.
It’s the same way, the mind is just tumbling down. It sort of goes apart into pieces, then it coalesces,
and so on.
By allowing that to happen, you start to trust, 'Oh, things find their own way,' and, in par1cular, you
trust, 'I don’t need to be in charge.' That is to say, the tense ego-‐sense of, 'I need to be in control,'
relaxes. Everything is allowed, and nothing is damaged. This is a magical children’s party where the
kids do whatever they like, and aVerwards the carpets are cleaned, because the mind’s nature is
vajra; it’s indestruc1ble. No maIer what happens, it won’t be destroyed.
Consciousness will be changed. If a series of difficult thoughts arise in the mind, a feeling will come
up. On the subject side, as it were, feeling comes up, 'Uh, I don’t like this,' or, 'I feel strange,' or, 'I feel
anxious.' That’s just another arising. If you take that as the template of truth, the touchstone of what
is really true, you lose the plot. It’s just another thought; 'I feel strange.’ Sit with that, it goes,
something else comes.
What we start to see is that what we’re doing all the 1me is, it’s almost like the reverse of how the
cinema operates, we’re taking the flow of experience and we’re chopping it up. We’re chopping it up
into frames, and then reac1ng to these frames as if they’re intensely real. If we stop the chopping,
we see this seamless flow: good thoughts, bad thoughts, expansion, contrac1on. All kinds of
movements are occurring, and they keep going, they keep going.
They say, 'The mind itself is unborn.' We can’t find our mind as a substance. It has never come into
existence. This is the true nature of Prajnaparamita. And on the other hand, thoughts, feelings,
sensa1ons are unceasing. There is no end to them.
The work is to bring the openness and the flow together, to bring the wisdom and the compassion
together. Samsara is when we become over intoxicated with the manifesta1on. We start to think it’s
exis1ng by itself, as we looked before, like the glass exis1ng in itself, the thought exis1ng in itself; and
we don’t see that the open dimension, the natural condi1on, awareness itself, is inseparable from all
the thoughts and feelings that arise.
So this is the work: to both allow whatever arises to come and go, and to stay relaxed and open as
this spacious awareness, which has no essence, no defini1on.
Again, we can go into the prac1ce, and, this 1me par1cularly, perhaps focus on ‘What shape is the
mind?’ See if you can find any limit to it, any boIom or top or sides. Is there anything that appears to
be outside the mind? And this 1me, in order to start, we won’t do the three Aa, we can just relax
into the out breath. Just releasing three, slow, easy out-‐breaths and just relax into that state
itself.
Practice
Let’s take a few minutes, and communicate with a partner what your experience is like.
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Discussion
Question: freezing and flow

Student: My thoughts and feelings change so quickly. How can I get stability?
James: Whatever is arising is, as you see, moving and changing. Saraha oVen used the
example of water and ice: when you’re relaxed everything is flowing; and then suddenly it freezes
into one thing and you stay in that; and then it flows again. So what is that freezing? What is that
power of iden1fica1on? Because, of course, to be in the world with others, we have to take up a
posi1on, we have to do something.
So can the flow be integrated with space and also integrate the freezing? Being somebody, doing
something, going into work, saying hello to people, these are quite solid experiences. The ques1on
is, 'Where do they come from?' which leads to the ques1on, 'What shape is the mind?'
The church bells that are now ringing are very helpful because they raise the ques1on, 'Are the bells
outside my mind or inside my mind?' Do they come into my mind? If they come into my mind, what’s
the door? Is it through the ear? Is then my mind something inside. Or do we hear the bells directly,
so that the bells register where they are. Science tells us vibra1ons come into our ears, but our direct
experience is that we hear the sound where it is. In the immediacy of things, where is the mind? We
just need to keep looking at what is actually occurring
Question on how to look at your mind

Student: For me it’s the ques1on, 'Where is the mind?' it’s impossible to answer. My thoughts
are coming and going, and coming and going, and it means nothing. So how shall I observe where
they come from? There is no place, and I can’t say they are coming from my head; they are just there
and then they go away again. I can observe sensa1ons or feelings, and I can say feelings are more
here, or more there, and my sensa1ons – but my thoughts, they come and go.
James: They come and go. And where do they come and go?
Student: From nothing, I don't know. I can’t... I have no idea how to look at this.
James: Hm. That’s the thing, it’s not like looking at anything else. It’s allowing things to
register, in the way that the open sky reveals whatever is going through it, whether it’s an airplane,
or a bird, or a cloud. It’s not showing the airplane, it’s not doing anything, but its very spaciousness
allows whatever manifests to reveal itself.
It’s very easy to see the airplane and track it across the sky; much more difficult to see the sky. We
think, 'Oh there’s the sky,' but if you really look into the sky, like this exercise I was sugges1ng
yesterday, you start to dissolve. You and the sky become the same thing; then you can’t get a handle
on it. You can’t grasp it. It’s exactly that. So it’s moving to be closer with something which is
ungraspable, and the only way to do that is to recognise that you yourself are ungraspable.
The ungraspable object, which in Sanskrit is called dharmata or in Tibetan, cho-‐nyid, and the
ungraspable subject, ciCata in Sanskrit or in Tibetan, sem nyid, become inseparable. But, as long as
we go into an observing self, that is to say, 'I’m trying to make sense of it,' this 'I' is self-‐reflec1ve; you
can know, 'Oh yes, I’m good at this,' or 'I’m not good at this,' or 'Why can’t I understand this?' You can
try to grasp your own tail in that way, but awareness itself has no head, no tail. Can't grasp it.
So keep relaxing out of every posi1oning, because if you observe these posi1ons, these observing
posi1ons, they’re always transient. They illuminate something; they’re useful, but they’re also
transient. What is the mind itself? According to the tradi1on, it never changes. So if something is
changing, by defini1on it’s not the mind itself. The more we keep le_ng go of all this stuff, what’s the

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remainder? What is it that is unchanging? And it reveals itself in a different way: not as something
coming towards us, but 'Oh!'
Any other thoughts?
Question: finding the shape of your mind is like watching a sunset

Student: I thought that there’s a big difference between the normal three Aa prac1ce we did
and using the ques1on. I really felt like I had a task to find out ‘What shape is the mind?’ And I was
hurtling. I had too many thoughts, and then I thought that I was thinking about the ques1on, and it
really was... I couldn’t let it go of the task to find out what shape is my mind.
James: Hm. Yes, maybe it’s a bit like watching a sunset. There’s nothing to think about; you
just sit on the beach and the sun’s going down. It’s that sort of looking. But again, the danger is you
go spaced out. If you go spaced out, you go to one extreme. If you get busy in your mind trying to
make sense of it or thinking, 'Oh, if only I had a camera I could...' You can’t catch it, either. So it’s just
being with it. And when you are with it, you find the non-‐duality of self and object, because there
isn’t anything to get.
It’s when the searching ceases that you’re already there. Of course, as many religious tradi1ons,
especially Rumi would say, if you keep searching you’ll never find it; it’s already there. In the buddhist
tradi1on they say, 'If you keep washing coal it won’t turn into chalk.' Everybody has to have buddha
nature. You can’t make yourself a buddha; you can’t become a buddha. Enlightenment is already
there.
All the work that we do trying to improve ourselves is useful on the level of energy, but is never
useful on the level of recognising the real nature, because the real nature is unchanging. So, if you
develop the paramitas and you develop generosity, endurance, and so on, these are wonderful
quali1es for being in the world with others, for being useful, but they don’t help you to understand
your own nature. Because the nature is not produced by anything, it’s not developed by anything, it’s
not destroyed by anything. It’s never been obscured.
So in buddhism we spend a lot of 1me removing the obscura1ons from something which is
unobscured. This is a paradoxical prac1ce. What is the obscura1on? Me. What is unobscured? Me.
So, self and self, in these two forms, are moving together. And to be too obsessed with doing
purifica1on is not helpful, because the mind is pure from the very beginning; and yet there are
obscura1ons. What are the obscura1ons? Always impermanent, adven11ous, coming and going.
They are there and not there. The mind is always there. The mind never goes, never comes , it stays,
but these thoughts are coming and going.
Removing obscura1on simply means relaxing addic1on to thought: relaxing addic1on to the arising
as if the arising will tell you the truth about the ground of the arising. Arisings tell us the truth about
arisings, they never tell us the truth about the ground of arising. The ground of arising? Nobody can
say. We say, 'naked,' 'fresh,' 'like the sky,' and so on. But, when you experience this... 'Shit!'. So, it’s
funny.
So, again and again, we have to not be too busy. Not be too busy. Busyness is useful for developing
quali1es or working with energy, but busyness will simply obscure the nature of the mind, because
what is it that obscures the mind? It’s not something other than the mind.
There’s this strong tradi1on that’s coming to European thought from Mani, who was one of the great
prophets in what is now Iran. He developed this very dualis1c view of the upper pure sky god and
the lower dark water god. And this strong dualis1c tendency con1nues; it’s been one of the big
problems in Chris1an theology: the ques1on of evil. You know, where does the devil come from? It’s
P a g e | 47
a very big ques1on: did God make the devil? Why would he make the devil? So, then you have the
story of Lucifer we touched on yesterday.
In dzogchen, it’s a completely different view. It says non-‐duality is the nature of things; everything
has been inseparable and pure from the very beginning. Inside that, if you take things the wrong
way, all sorts of fantasies and dreams will spiral out, and they will appear to be the case, but they’re
not the case. There is no 'other.' There isn’t a devil. There isn’t a samsara factory and a nirvana
factory and they’re kind of in compe11ve produc1on.
Samsara is a subset of nirvana: they have the same ground, except one has just got a liIle twister in
it. Obscura1on is not different from the radiance of the dharmakaya. If you see the dharmakaya,
then you recognise, 'Oh, that’s what the obscura4on is.' But, if you’re in the obscura1on, you won’t
see the dharmakaya because you are hallucina1ng to yourself. It’s like children who eat a lot of
chocolate and drink coca cola in the evening, and they don’t want to go to bed, and they run around
the house and drive you crazy, and they’re buzzing and you think, 'Uh oh, this is bad news,' but they
think, 'I’m having a good 4me! This is wonderful!' But actually, you see the sugar like a volcano going
through them.
This is what’s happened, that we've become intoxicated with thought, and we’re asking thought to
do something it can’t do. We’re asking thought to be stable, reliable, and show us the meaning of
life. Thought will show you how to drive a car, how to hold a knife and fork, how to wipe your bum,
but it won’t show you the meaning of existence.
Question on identification and the ego

Student: Even in this flow of thought, some of this func1on of grasping at an ‘I’ that's
unstable, … I find it quite difficult. This iden1fica1on with something, I don’t even have to define it,
it’s like this or like that, know what kind of person I am, but it’s really, it seems, at least, stable.
James: Well, it’s stable in that it doesn’t exist. I mean, the thing about the ego is, because it’s empty,
it can be anything. And this is why the first person singular is fabulous. You can apply it to anything.
You can say, 'I’m hungry,' 'I’m 4red,' 'I’m Bri4sh,' 'I’m superman,' you can be anything you want.
This is why we have theatre, why we have movies. We actually like movies because movies show us
people ac1ng. We pay money to get people to show us that iden1ty is an illusion , but, we don’t
really want to believe it ourselves. And the reason it func1ons is exactly because it’s empty; because
the 'I' is empty, it can be anything at all.
When you try to grasp it you can’t find it, and yet, it’s always being something. And that is the point
where samsara and nirvana are just kissing, very gently. LiIle spring1me lovers mee1ng for the first
1me , because nirvana is saying rigpa, this unborn awareness, completely open and empty,
everything is arising, and the ego is empty and saying, 'It’s me, it’s me, it’s me.' So, one is open and
relaxed, le_ng things go, and the other is open and empty, moving into iden1fica1on of the
situa1on. It’s exactly the same, that’s why they say, 'One ground and two paths.'
Break
Some aspects of tantra

As we looked a liIle bit at the beginning, we have these different languages in Buddhism. Some are
more focused on a symbolic kind of discourse, and some on a more direct one. For example, in
tantra, we had the no1on of mandala. The Tibetan word for mandala usually is kyil khor. Kyil wa
means to spin or turn and it refers to the point in the middle, and khor means circumference, going
around the outside, so, it’s like a wheel.

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Another term for the palace that’s built inside a mandala, because although it looks flat, it’s actually
a three-‐dimensional shape, a zhalye khang, which means infinite house. The mandala represents the
fact that the size of any object can vary enormously. Everything can shrink right down, or expand
right out. Our world is expanding and contrac1ng all the 1me.
When we see a mandala it’s a form which can include everything. When we sit here, if we feel
ourselves inside our skin-‐body, we feel the big world outside and the world is very, very big and we
are very small. When we relax and open, there is no limit to our size. Our dimension has no end to it,
and so in that sense we are infinite, and in the infinite space of the mandala everything is included.
Just as inside our body we have a central pipe, the avadhu4, running from the base up to the top of
our head. This pipe can come out through the nose, as well, and [go] in at the navel, but, the central
thing is, through the centre of the body is an empty pipe.
The avadhu4 represents emp1ness, it means the body is created around an empty core. In yoga
prac1ce, you bring the winds of the body into this pipe. That is to say, you bring all the agitated
energy, which gives rise to sudden disrup1ve movements and disturbance, you bring all of that into
the central channel.
But this central channel is not necessarily something the size of your finger inside the body. The
central channel also expands to include the whole universe. So you can bring the universe into the
central channel, or you can just see, the whole universe is already in the central channel. Everything
is immediately in emp1ness and in that there is enough space for everything just as it is. Nothing
needs to be squeezed, nothing needs to be expanded. Everything is perfect just as it is. It comes into
being, then it goes out of being.
That’s why construc1ng things like mandalas is very useful. The circular shape is very containing. A
circle has no beginning and end, and just working with that shape gives us the sense that all the bits
of our lives are within the containing space of presence. Something begins and ends; we do a bit of
work and have to go away, so much change, can any meaning be found in this? Yet there is an
intrinsic meaning of all these events being inseparable from space. This is very different from the
modern, terrible no1on of mul1-‐tasking where everything is in liIle bits. Yet actually the moving
sequence of our life has no beginning or end. Everything is in one great flow. One great circle. The
more we have space for ourselves, the more we find that everything is in its proper place.
Another way of thinking about the movement is to experience it in terms of a dakini. Dakini is a
word that has many different meanings. In India it can mean small village goddesses who cause
trouble, like village spirits. Some1mes they bring disease, and so on. There are many different levels
of them, and they go right up to the jnana dakinis, or the wisdom dakinis, who represent the energy
of wisdom.
The mind is moving. What are these thoughts? If you think in terms of a tantric situa1on, the central
figure of the mandala sits in the middle and doesn't move so, in a typical Nyingmapa mandala,
Padmasambhava would be si_ng in the middle, and around him many dakinis are moving. That is to
say, our basic buddha nature is seIled in the middle; it never moves, it doesn't change, but, around
it, many thoughts and feelings are moving. They move in rela1on to this central figure. You can say
that they are the messengers of the central figure, or the joy of the central figure, the playfulness of
the central figure. In that way, energy arises from the rela1onship between rigpa, awareness, and
emp1ness.
Dakinis – it’s a way of experiencing the dynamic energy of the world as a blessing, instead of being
troubled by disturbances, by sudden phone calls, or people being unreliable. This is just the dakinis
playing.
P a g e | 49
One of the famous chod prac1ces, probably the most popular one, wriIen by Jigme Lingpa, is called
Khandro Khajang, which means the laughter of the dakinis, but it’s a funny kind of laughter. It means,
like, 'Wake up, you asshole. What do you think you’re doing?' kind of laughter.
You could read all the turbulence in the economic markets, climate change, as a kind of terrifying
laugh of the dakinis, that are saying, 'Wake up, what are you doing? You put your blinkers on. You’re
asleep. You’re going on. You want everything to be stable and secure. Don't you recognise what this
is? This is a very brief chance you have to wake up and you’re spending it trying to get a beCer car,
wan4ng to have three holidays a year. This is not what you should be doing.'
The dakini principle is about a communica1on which can be one of connec1ng and reuni1ng with the
ground, but its parallel and more ac1ve force is the disrup1on of the situa1ons which have become
separate from the ground. So when we find ourselves locked in our everyday concerns, you get a
whack some1mes. Of course, there are many tradi1onal stories about par1cularly scholars, like
Naropa, when he was James at Nalanda University. He’s si_ng quietly in his room, studying away.
This voice shouts at him from outside, 'What are you doing?' He goes outside, 'Go away.' Some ugly
old woman is there and she asks him some ques1ons, and he doesn't know the answer. He’s very
shocked and he says, 'Why are you here?' She says 'You should see my brother.' So, he goes off and he
meets her brother, who is Tilopa, who is a yogi si_ng on the banks of the river. You should learn that
whole story, it’s very beau1ful, and the key point is the interrup1on where somebody has become
sealed. Someone’s poten1al has become sealed by becoming too refined. It’s very important for
roughness and crudeness to come back into the world.
One of the func1ons of tantra was to link birth and death. Tantra is concerned with substances like
menstrual blood. It’s concerned with ashes, with the cemetery. It’s concerned with the points of
crea1on and dissolu1on. The middle period of our life, where we feel a bit sorted, where we know
how life is, easily becomes too smoothed over. And the dakinis, in so many of these stories, come to
bring people back to the body, in all its biological disrup1ons, but also back to vulgarity. In that sense
they also have part of the quality of the fool and the trickster, which you get in many tradi1ons.
It is completely inappropriate for a monk to be vulgar. Monks have to be very precise and exquisite in
their manners, and charming, and contained. The force of dakinis and yogis is something quite
different. It’s to shake things more so that the seeming clarity and certainty is disturbed.
One of the amazing things that happened aVer the Tibetans had to flee from Tibet, is that they came
to India and within a very short period of 1me they were building monasteries again. Now, in India,
there are hundreds and hundreds of monasteries, very big monasteries. The monasteries were
knocked down in Tibet. Without one thought they have built monasteries again. Maybe there’s some
lesson in having monasteries knocked down. Maybe something else could happen, but, ‘No, no, quite
happy to have monasteries.’ Very, very big monasteries. Very oVen empty monasteries made of
cement. The point there is, if you get a shake, maybe the shake means something. But it’s very
difficult, if you have a tradi1on and you have to maintain the tradi1on, to do something new.
Namkhai Norbu very oVen says, if you're imprisoned and you’re trapped in by bars, it doesn't maIer
whether the bars are made of gold or iron, they’re s1ll going to keep you in. So the bars of a tradi1on
can be very, very controlling because there is always a lot to do. There are pujas to be read every day,
water bowls to be filled and emp1ed, the floor to be polished and clean. Monasteries keep many
people busy all the 1me. Cleanliness is next to godliness, this is a no1on that we associate with
Luther and Calvin, not really with the Buddha.
Actually, it doesn't maIer whether you’re clean or dirty, whether your life is peaceful or not
peaceful. In the book The Yogi’s Handbag Book, or Simply Being, at the beginning when Chetsangpa
is talking about teachers he said, if your teacher is a businessman and wants to make a lot of money,
and exploits other people, that’s fine. If your teacher is a monk and keeps all the rules, that’s fine. If

P a g e | 50
your teacher is drunk all the 1me, that’s fine. It doesn't maIer. You won’t know if something has
value from the form of it. The level of form is the level of conven1onal reading: this must be good
because it looks like that; this will not be so good because it looks like that. But that is the ego
categorising things and pu_ng things in boxes.
Actually, what is meaningful in life is what connects with us. It doesn't really maIer how it is, if it
connects with us, that’s the one. And so we have to trust our belly, and that’s the really important
thing. However to do this you have to be free to deal with the consequences which arise. For
example, in the old days, people would fall in love, but they might know that their parents wouldn't
approve of the person they'd fallen in love with. Then they had to decide: did they leave the family
or do they marry the person their parents have chosen for them? Do you go with the conven1onal
line, in which case you inherit the farm and life is easy but you’re stuck with someone you don't
want, or you go with the person you want and tumble into life and you don't really know what to do?
It’s a similar thing. Any kind of encapsula1on can be both a refuge and a prison. Any kind of freedom
can be libera1on and a desola1on. Each of us has to work out what kind of path is sui1ng our
par1cular configura1on of our own balance of the skandhas, and so on.
Dakini is a very inspiring way of thinking about the nature of our energy, because when something is
moving in the sky, it’s influenced by the winds. We experience many winds in our life. We have
internal winds: energe1c winds, mood winds, depressions, anxie1es and so on. External winds: winds
of the season, and so on. This is what we have to work with. The more that we can be at home in the
experience of ourselves as dynamic and energe1c, then we have to find ways to work with these
circumstances.
You know, there are some birds that can fly 2,000 miles without res1ng. It’s amazing; and the dakini
is like that. The dakini doesn't need to come down and rest on the ground, and in that sense it’s like
our energy. To keep moving in the sky, to keep moving in space, so that medita1on isn’t a kind of
holiday from daily life.
When we go into work, if you work in an office, there are all kind of rules. You can go in in the spirit
of the dakini and you see everything is moving, everything is changing. Pick up the telephone, the
telephone has wires, these wires are carrying messages going everywhere. The electronic world is
the world of the dakini, isn’t it? Everything is moving, unreliable, changing all the 1me. S o , i t ’ s
about not being fixed in a box. Not taking the world too seriously, but having to work with what is
there.
Before we go on I'll say a liIle bit about these teachings that we've been doing and where they come
from.
Teaching lineage
I got many teachings on dzogchen from my main teacher, Chimed Rigdzin, par1cularly in the middle
1970’s. For about two years we worked a lot on this kind of stuff, and I got many instruc1ons from
him. I also got instruc1ons from Dudjom Rinpoche, Chatral Rinpoche and Kangyur Rinpoche. These
are through different kinds of lineages, but they all go in the same direc1on. I also, later, did some
work together with Namkhai Norbu on some texts, and also got some instruc1on from him. But the
main tradi1on in this is from the Byangter and from the termas of Chimed Rigdzin.
In that tradi1on, dzogchen is integrated with the other paths, so tantra and dzogchen, are not seen
as par1cularly separate, mainly because tantra is concerned with the con1nuity of existence. It’s
concerned with placing every moment of experience on the thread of emp1ness. Because tantra,
rgyud, means con1nuity, like the beads on a necklace held in place by a string.
P a g e | 51
So every moment, which seems to be something in itself, which seems to be just this thing, has a
hole in it, and that’s a hole of emp1ness, and it strings along, and it strings along. So the beads of
empty experience keep flowing; this is the real meaning of tantra, and dzogchen is not so different.
Tantric methods and the dzogchen view is very, very common in the Nyingmapa and Kagyupa
prac1ces.
What we were looking at was a liIle bit on obscura1on. We’ll look a liIle bit more at that, and then
come back into medita1on prac1ce. As I was saying, in many of the teachings they are concerned
with obstacles on the path, obscura1ons, overcoming the defilements, transforming the five poisons,
and so on. There is a lot of stress on purifica1on.
In dzogchen they speak of two forms of purity. There is the original purity, called ka dag. Ka means
origin, or beginning, or that which is always there. Dagpa means pure, and this is the innate purity of
the mind. From the very beginning, the mind, because it’s not a substance, because it’s
indestruc1ble, has never been mixed with, or contaminated by anything else. This is the natural
purity of all beings.
Now, beings don’t recognise this. Why not? Because of adven11ous faults. Adven11ous means it has
an advent, it has a beginning. Something happens, and there’s an obscura1on. When this is purified,
you have what’s called dri ma dagpa, that’s to say the purity which is free of defilements, and that is
the purity which is aIained through prac1ce.
In the different styles of teaching and prac1ce, you can focus on the primordial purity, or you can
focus on gaining the purity that comes through prac1ce, that is to say, through iden1fying some fault
in your mind, and ge_ng rid of it.
In my pocket I have some eucalyptus pas1lles. I can take them out of my pocket, and I can put them
back in my pocket. Do we have faults in our mind in the way I have a packet in my pocket? This is a
ques1on, because if you think that your mind is a container, and it’s got some kind of dirty water in
it, then you want to pour the dirty water out and clean it very well. So how you go about thinking
about the work that needs to be done in medita1on prac1ce depends very much on the view that
you hold of yourself, what understanding you have of yourself.
Tradi1onally the dzogchen view is seen as being at the very top, at the apex of nine different stages
of prac1ce, because the view of dzogchen is that, from the very beginning, the mind is completely
pure. Therefore, there is nothing to purify. Therefore, stop being busy.
You come down a step and you say, 'Oh, there are many subtle obscura4ons. You need to be very
careful and not geXng caught up in these. You have to purify the base that could be obscured.'
These are different views. They see the world differently, so it is absolutely central for each person to
come into rela1on with yourself and work out what rings true for you. There’s no point in just saying
'I am completely pure from the very beginning,' and inside you’re full of self-‐hatred and full of nasty
liIle thoughts. That wouldn't make much sense. But if you can recognise, 'Oh, all of these nasty liCle
thoughts that tell me I’m small, I’m stupid, I’ve wasted my life,' if you can see that all of these
thoughts are just arising and passing, then the purity of the mind is there.
That is the most important thing. What do you choose? Here is a plate of chocolate. Here is a plate of
shit. Both are brown. Which one do you want to s1ck your spoon into? That’s what they say: one
ground, two paths. We have the choice. The choice isn’t decided by the Karmapa si_ng on a throne,
not by the Dalai Lama, not by any big lama somewhere. You, yourself have to open to it because the
view has to be lived. If the view is not really going through your bones, through the very marrow of
your existence, then the medita1on will always go wrong. This is why we spend a lot of 1me looking

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at the view. It’s not a philosophical exercise. It’s to get the absolute clarity, 'Oh, yeah,' and then we
take that into the prac1ce.
But if we feel, 'Well, that’s a nice idea. Maybe it’s true for some people, but I don't think it can be true
for me because really I’m like this, for me it’s going to take a long 4me.' What you are essen1ally
saying is 'I, my ego, am the one who is deciding the limit of my capacity.'
The tail, the dog; who is wagging what? If the ego is wagging the real buddha nature, you have a
problem, because the teaching is: the mind is pure. 'That’s all very well, but let me tell you something
about me. Last week, I had a really hard 4me...' and this is how the mind’s working. That’s your basic
choice. When a thought arises, do you fall into it, do you believe it? Or do you rest and let the
thought go free? This is the ongoing path of the separa1on between samsara and nirvana.
When it says, ‘from the very beginning the mind has never been obscured,’ it means this open
awareness, which is present now, although it’s full of all kinds of thoughts and feelings, has never
been covered by these thoughts, because they are its own radiance. Earlier we were looking at this
prac1ce, 'What shape is the mind?' When we really look and look, what sort of walls do we find to
the mind? What is the top of the mind? What’s on the right side, the leV side?
Si_ng here, maybe a car goes past, or an airplane, or the bells start to ring, it’s always the central
point: are they outside the mind, or inside the mind? When you experience the sound arising, and
you're already there and open with it, the sound is registering in the mind. The sound is coming from
where?
Well, if the mind has no limit, there is nothing outside the mind. So, there cannot be any impor1ng
into the mind. Therefore, these thoughts, experiences, motor cars, airplanes, are coming from your
mind. They don't have anywhere else to come from. The factory that made the airplane comes from
your mind. It’s very interes1ng to prac1se dzogchen in the airplane, knowing that I’m si_ng in the
airplane that’s in my mind. That’s exactly how it is. The mind is not the brain. The brain is something
experienced by the mind.
The infinite mind, because it has no limit, is the basis for everything. The ground of everything. It
gives rise to samsara; it gives rise to nirvana. It means all the self-‐doubt that we have, all the hatred,
all the mistakes we’ve ever made, have arisen from the pure, uncondi1oned state. Why do they arise
in that way? Because of a spin that is put onto things through a disturbance of energy. When we hold
things 1ghtly, this creates a vibra1on which is a sort of distor1on. It’s like waving your hand in front
of face; you can’t see very clearly. When you drop your hand you see more clearly.
The ground nature itself is not obscure, but what you have is an auto-‐intoxica1on, in which we
become mesmerised by our own crea1vity. The crea1vity of the ground falls in love with itself. In one
of the early Upanishads, it said god was lonely so he decided to make the world. Why did dualism
arise? From the dzogchen point of view, nothing has really arisen. Everything is an illusion, but it is a
peaceful illusion. It’s a perfect illusion. It’s not troublesome. It’s not frightening. The more we relax
and open, the more we feel at home in the world. Obscura1on is the illusion generated by a thought
fixa1ng on another thought.
For example, on a very ordinary level, you might think, 'Oh, I wish I’d learned Italian. I must do that.'
So, you iden1fy there is a me who has a deficit, which is to say knowledge of Italian, and this is then
not just a fact, but there comes an, ‘Oh,' which is, ‘Ah, shit, I’m going to Italy again in the summer. I
won’t be able to speak the language. It’s so annoying. Why didn’t I learn some over the winter when
it was cold. Now spring is coming. The evenings are geXng beCer. I want to go out, blah, blah, blah.'
This is the kind of thing that goes on.
P a g e | 53
So what is happening there? Who is disappointed in who? One thought is commen1ng on another
thought. Energy is playing with energy. This is like children in the playground: some1mes they play
nicely together, some1mes they want to push each other over. Some1mes our thoughts collaborate,
some1mes they’re in conflict.
In my work I oVen hear people say they want to kill themselves.
– 'You’re going to kill your body; whether you’ll kill yourself or not, you don't know.'
– 'When I’m dead, I’ll be dead.'
– 'Ah, how do you know? You don't know where you came from before you were born. How
do you know where you’re going to go when you die? BeCer stay alive 4ll you find out.'
This is not the standard Public Health interven1on with suicidal pa1ents, but it tends to be quite
effec1ve, because, of course, when you want to kill yourself, you’re living in a bubble of, 'This is
terrible, I can’t bear it.' This is a very small football pitch to be running up and down on. It’s one or
two thoughts chasing each other. Immediately, you introduce some metaphysical overview, ‘What is
this?’ There’s a bit of space.
So always, always, we’re looking at the dynamic nature, the impermanent nature of thoughts,
sensa1ons, feelings, and observing how, when they come together, they create paIerns, and these
paIerns appear to be real. Like a child playing with a Lego set. Take the building blocks and build it
up, and suddenly there’s a tractor, or there’s a crane, and they can play around with that, and when
they get bored they take the parts and build something else.
In the dzogchen tradi1on they say that everything is created out of sound and light. Sound and light
come together in the manifesta1on of the five elements, the five elements feed into the five
skandhas, the five wisdoms, and so on. The whole world arises in this way. It’s dynamic, ever-‐
changing.
When this is not realised, we take it as solid and real. We take the five elements as self-‐exis1ng, not
as emana1ons of transient light. Not as this emerging focus. This is the central importance of
understanding what the view means, that one should examine oneself again and again, and make
sure this is the view, 'Do I really believe it?' Let it massage itself deep into the core of your being.
It’s an incredible no1on. From the very beginning, my nature has been pure, and nothing has
destroyed this, nothing has defiled this, which means that all the various sins and faults don't mean
too much.
I remember, years ago, in India, there was a women who went to see a great yogi called Apo
Rinpoche. She had had a very disturbed life, and she had been a pros1tute and done many, many
things, and she spent a long 1me telling him all the faults, all the things she'd done and she was
crying and incredibly upset, and really despairing, and wan1ng to know just what on earth could she
do. Eventually, she kind of wound down, and he said, 'Oh, is that all?’ She was able to hear that.
So who is the one who did all of these things? What was done? Due to causes and circumstances,
you find yourself in a situa1on, and you do this and that. Maybe you put heroin in your arm, maybe
you steal something, maybe you sleep with your best friend’s wife, you do something and then you
think, 'Oh, god, why did I do that? This is terrible. Everyone hates me. My life's falling down.' What
has happened? Some disturbance of energy has happened, that’s what’s happened. Of course
people cry, people get angry, they shout, they say 'I’ll leave you,' and so on.
These are the disrup1ons of life. What was there before was not carved in stone. It was due to
causes and condi1ons, and due to causes and condi1ons it changes again.
This is not to say that, because the mind is empty, you can do whatever you like. It’s not to say that.
But it’s to say, for people who really do the prac1ce, look at what you do. Whenever you judge

P a g e | 54
yourself harshly, observe the impact of that. You become smaller, you lose energy, so much work to
do, and then you’re bea1ng yourself to keep going. You cut yourself in the name of becoming a
beIer person and you actually make your situa1on worse.
Forgiveness is very, very important. This is why the second form of purity, the purity of having
removed the defilements, is also important. You can do it instantly if you recognise that, from the
beginning, the nature is pure. And energy, when it’s not grounded in that pure nature, will be crazy.
Of course. That’s why these things arise, because people don't know their real nature. All the
troubles in the world arise from this: the Taliban, al Qaida, George Bush, Guantanamo Bay, all of
these things arise from the same thing. What the tricky businessmen have been doing, the lying and
chea1ng, the cover-‐ups, all arise from the five poisons.
The five poisons have the nature of emp1ness, but when you don't recognise the emp1ness, they
become a site of iden1fica1on for the desperate ego, and that’s why people lie and cheat and
squeeze other people. They don't do it because they’re bad, but because they’re being caught up in
a whirlpool of distorted energy. The root of that whirlpool is emp1ness. This is what we need to see
in ourselves. When we are not grounded, when we go into a spin, what happens? You can find
yourself caught up in quite destruc1ve thoughts, lusDul thoughts, crazy thoughts.
Who is the one who is whirling? 'I am.' Who is this I? ‘Emp4ness. Ah, ah.’ This becomes peaceful very
quickly. Like in a big city, you get these wind tunnels where you get lots of high buildings together,
the wind goes down and it gets accelerated as it’s put into it. If you give space to it, these whirls,
they disburse.
These are the central points of the prac1ce. First of all, recognising from the very beginning our
nature is pure. I am not a thing. I am not an en1ty. My nature is ungraspable, like the sky. This infinite
openness gives rise to all phenomena. Res1ng in a state that allows phenomena to come and go, the
distorted ego winds gradually dissolve, and there is clarity and spaciousness. And from the clarity
and spaciousness, a deep sa1sfac1on arises, a contentment, which means that you don't need to go
and do things. You can just sit quietly and not be so hungry for experience.
In Tibet, people would spend many, many years in caves. When people got older they would oVen
think, 'Oh, I’ll go into a retreat un4l I die.' Nowadays, when people re1re, they want to go on cruises
around the world and see the pyramids before they die, and get to the Galapagos Islands because
there is so much to see and get. But one island is like another island. One pina colada is like another
pina colada. The more and more experience... actually, aVer a while it’s quite boring. What will you
see? One beach is like another beach. It’s just water and sand. Some people go around,
– 'The best beach in Europe. It was really great.'
– 'Oh, did you have sand?'
– 'Yes!'
– 'Did you have water?'
– 'Yes!'
Going into retreat means being in a state of sa1sfac1on. It means that, if I sit on my seat, the whole
world will come to me. Because I have so many karmic connec1ons, every kind of thought, any kind
of feeling and sensa1on will arise. When you read The Songs of Milarepa you can see this is true. He
had dreams and visions about all sorts of things.
But when we become desperate inside, the existen1al emp1ness becomes a mo1ve for more
consumerist consump1on. What we need to do is to open up the existen1al emp1ness, the
desola1on of the ego not being sa1sfied, into the natural state of emp1ness, the unborn nature, and
through that you have a very different experience. So that, as the lonely state of the anxious ego is
allowed to relax and rest into the infinite aloneness of awareness, 'Hoo,' very peaceful. Then, from
that state, agitated ac1vity is not going to arise.
P a g e | 55
Break
Typical problems that arise in meditation.

Now I'll say a liIle bit about typical problems that can arise in the medita1on and how to deal with
them.
In the book Simply Being, there are two main chapters which deal primarily with medita1on
problems. The basic problem, which they define across many, many different examples, is coming to
a conclusion about yourself. So, for example, Patrul Rinpoche says, 'Some great meditators say they
feel sad and hopeless and then they can’t meditate,' and then he says, 'And some great meditators
feel always anxious and excited and so they can’t meditate,' and so on. There's a whole list of these
things, but in each, the essence of it is we come to a conclusion. We think, 'I am like this, so I can’t do
that,' 'I am too stupid to do this,' or 'My thoughts are too disturbed to do this.' It’s that very
conclusion or decision which creates a barrier: what you’ve done is you’ve solidified the sense of self.
You’ve given a nega1ve script, and you’ve turned away from the prac1ce saying it’s too difficult.
The answer in all the cases is, generally, just to say don’t fall into the content of this belief. Don’t get
caught up into the seman1cs. Relax, and stay gently with the one who feels they can’t meditate. So
whenever we come into a state of lostness, of confusion, when the mind is very busy and agitated,
when the mind is sort of spaced out and dispersed, even if you feel you can’t get any handle on
what’s going on, just stay with it, very, very gently.
For example, if you are out walking in the mountains and suddenly a mist comes down, the most
important thing is to sit down. Then, aVer some 1me the mist will go. If you haven’t starved to
death, you can then stand up and walk home. But if you walk about in the mist, in the mountains,
you’re likely to do some damage. It’s the same.
In the medita1on, as some big mist comes down, you just think, 'Oh, I am in the mist.' Then the mist
is gone. But, if you try to react against it, if you take opposi1on against it, then you will come to a
sense of, 'I have to work on this. I have to remove this.' So now, there is an obstacle between me and
the medita1on. This is the mistake of not remembering the view. The view says, 'All things arise from
the ground nature.' Their nature is emp1ness. Their quality is clarity, if you just stay with it.
At first this is impossible to understand because we imagine clarity to be something like switching on
an electric light. As the room gets darker, we switch on the light. The light then illuminates the
darkness. So we imagine clarity as something very bright. Clarity, from the point of view of dzogchen,
means recognising that all phenomena are grounded in emp1ness, so even a feeling which is very
heavy and sinking, if you stay with it, it is just the subtle energy of the dharmakaya. It is not a bad
thing, it's not a wrong thing. It is just a par1cular form of energy.
When children are small, most of the toys they get are in primary colours. They’re very bright:
yellow, red, green and blue, so on. That looks very nice for children. As they get older, they get used
to different colours. And if you’re a professional painter, you have to be able to work with brown and
grey and be able to mix into tones which go into darkness and a kind of difficult feeling. Because
that’s also part of art; it’s not all just bright colours.
So it’s a very big mistake to imagine that clarity just means shining clear and very bright. It’s not like
that at all. It means being fresh with whatever is happening. Not abandoning yourself when 1mes
get hard. Not thinking that the hard 1me is not as good as the good 1me.
In dzogchen they say, 'If you go to heaven, go to heaven. If you go to hell, go to hell.' It means,
whatever is arising is what’s arising. It’s landed on your plate. Don’t worry, it will go away. If you’re
always in reac1on, saying, 'I only want what I like, and I don’t want any things I don’t like,' then you

P a g e | 56
will be trapped in the samsaric energy field, which I hope you have some more sense of now. In
samsara we are in the energy, as energy, moving energy, but thinking we’re not energy. When we
relax and open, we see that all of these forms are energe1c and, as such, they will self-‐liberate.
Calm, relaxed, open, that’s the most important thing.
Whenever we come into the medita1on prac1ce, if we’re ge_ng lost, if we’re ge_ng in something
and, especially, if you then start to build on a series of strange things, and you say, 'Oh this is
hopeless, I can’t do this,' 'Why don’t we do something more simple?' – whatever the construc1on
would be – at that point, just relax into the out-‐breath and stay with whatever is there. Stay present
with it. You don’t want to collapse into it, which would be fusion and iden1fica1on. You don’t want
to back away from it and open up a perspec1ve, because that would be the separa1on of subject and
object.
Awareness and whatever is arising have been inseparable from the very beginning. Inseparable here
means not one thing, not different things, but non-‐dual. Means it’s there in the same place, just as a
cloud is in the sky, the cloud is not the sky, and the cloud is not out of the sky. It’s in the sky, but it’s
not contamina1ng the sky.
These experiences in the mind are in the mind. They’re in awareness; you’re already aware of them.
Relax into the awareness which is present with whatever is arising, whatever it is. A bit of you might
be thinking, 'But I don’t like this,' 'This doesn't feel good,' or, 'This must be wrong.' Don’t worry about
that part; allow it to be there. If it is now the dominate image that’s coming up, you just stay with it.
Not collapsing into it, not believing it and becoming it. Not trying to get rid of it as something spoiling
the medita1on. Because in dzogchen, nothing can spoil medita1on except not medita1ng.
As long as you hang in there, and you’re present with what is going on, that is medita1on. It’s not
defined by the quality of the thought, it’s defined by the thought being integrated in its ground
nature. And that’s the big difference from many other systems of medita1on where you’re trying to
refine a par1cular quality of thought, you’re trying to visualise a mandala in a par1cular way, or
whatever it would be
Okay, so we do the three Ah prac1ce, and try to bring some of this understanding in.
Three Aa practice
Suggestions for when you practice on your own

When you do this prac1ce on your own, you can experiment with what’s the most useful period of
1me to sit for. If you sit for too short a period, you won’t be able to seIle into it, but if you sit for too
long, you’re likely to become either distracted or find yourself pushing, neither of which is very
helpful.
If you don’t have much 1me in the day, some people like to meditate in the morning. Some people
like to meditate in the evening. Again, you can find out what’s a good way for yourself to proceed.
It’s also very helpful in the course of the day just to sit quietly and release into the out-‐breath, and
just open. You can be like that for a couple of minutes. You can do that when you’re at work, when
you need a break. Generally speaking, and you can explore this for yourself, when the out-‐breath is
func1oning the amount of thought greatly diminishes. When you’re inhaling, there’s more ac1va1on
of thought and feeling and so on.
P a g e | 57
The out-‐breath is very useful if you find yourself being a bit wound up or troubled by something, or
aroused; just focus your aIen1on on the out-‐breath and make it longer than the in-‐breath and you’ll
find your whole system calming and seIling down.
As we looked earlier, this kind of medita1on is both simple, because there’s not much to do, and yet
very difficult, because we want to do something, we find ourselves doing something. Again and
again, we just explore, ‘What is the reason for being busy?’ What are we trying to achieve by being
busy? What’s at stake if we’re not busy? And a lot of it, of course, is simply habitual. That we’ve built
up these reservoirs of tension in ourselves. For that reason, prac1cing something like yoga or tai chi
is very useful, learning some pranayam is very useful.
Generally, observing your breath is very useful and, maybe every hour, just to check in, what is your
breath like? What is your breath like? When you’re walking down the street, what is your breath like?
We spend a lot of 1me, usually, thinking about things we don’t need to think about, being a bit
worried and preoccupied, and we could actually think of the breath.
When I was in India, I did many, many mantras. OVen, I find myself, now in London, thinking about
something and thinking, 'Oh, all these thoughts, you’d be beCer off thinking mantras,' because when
you recite a mantra, the mind is not busy. You don’t produce anything, it doesn’t cause any harm,
and it doesn’t connect you out to anything else on the rela1ve, substan1al level. When you’re doing
the mantra, you might be imagining rays of light going out to all beings, but that’s happening on a
level of subtle energy; whereas, when you’re in your preoccupied thoughts, worrying about
something, or planning something at work, or whatever, it creates tensions in the muscular system,
breathing changes, and it energises par1cular habits of inten1onality.
It’s quite a good kind of spring cleaning to review how much unnecessary ac1vity you run. Now that
the economy goes down, people are looking at their household budget and thinking, 'Oh, can we
really afford to do this?' So, we should maybe do a buddhist budget and review your expenditure on
thought. Is it a bit excessive ?
If you don’t have any mantra prac1ce you can just take up a very simple thought, 'May all beings be
happy,' and when you’re walking down the road or going for a walk, you just run that in the back of
your mind. It fills the space so other thoughts don’t come in. It’s generous and warm and expansive,
so it keeps the energy up and clear, and it’s very simple. Just run it again and again and again.
This is the basic idea of a mantra, a protec1on of the manas, the mind, is that it stops all these liIle
tendrils of thought, all the points where habitual urgency and the need of the ego to be busy, come
in contact with s1muli from the environment. So, keeping a simple, neutral thought or mantra
running is very useful. And then, if that’s integrated with breathing and relaxing, you have a very
simple path.
Another very simple thing to do for clarifica1on is to be aware of breathing in, slightly holding the
breath, and breathing out. You can breathe in on Om, hold on Aa, and breathe out on Hung. So you
just have these three leIers which represent the body, speech and mind of all the buddhas, the
essence of enlightenment. You have them running through you all the 1me. It’s quite simple, just as
you breathe in, just have the sense of Om. You don’t need to make any sound. You hold on Aa, and
breathe out on Hung.
Break
A tantric meditation, and some history of Padmasambhava

Now we do a liIle prac1ce in the more tantric style. Some of you have done this before. It’s really
using the essen1al structure of all tantric prac1ces, in which we see the Buddha or Tara or

P a g e | 58
Padmasambhava in their form, if you have that kind of teaching, or in their essen1al form there’s a
ball of white light, or rainbow-‐coloured light.
We imagine it in front of us in a clear blue sky, and in an instant this ball of light appears. It contains
the essence of all the buddhas, and we recite 'Om, Aa, Hung,' which, as I said before, is the body,
speech and mind of all the buddhas, and it evokes that blessing from them, so that rays of light come
from this ball of light into us.
We first of all imagine a ray of white light coming to the forehead, and a ray of red light to the throat,
and a ray of blue light to the heart, and then all three lights coming together. This is the purifica1on
of body, speech and mind. It is also the receiving of the four tantric ini1a1ons directly from the deity.
We do this for some 1me un1l we experience our body as full of light, like a clear crystal shining with
this rainbow light, and then at that point we stop reci1ng the mantra and the ball comes to the top
of our head, where it comes down into the centre of our heart. Then our body, which is made of
light, turns in and just descends down into that ball, so that our body and the ball of light are
inseparable.
This is the only focus of aIen1on we have; we are not concerned with anything else. The whole
universe has dissolved into this ball of light. Then this ball of light gets smaller and smaller, down into
a 1ny point, and then it vanishes. Then we rest in the open state of emp1ness and, gradually,
thoughts, feelings, sensa1ons come; and, gradually, we experience ourselves back here in this room,
seeing other people, and so on.
At that point, we can iden1fy all the forms that we see as being inseparable from the Buddha’s body;
that is to say, form and emp1ness. All sounds that we hear, inseparable from the Buddha’s voice, like
mantra, sound and emp1ness; and all thoughts, feelings, sensa1ons that arise are like the
movements of the Buddha’s mind. In that way, we can con1nue in the prac1ce with a heightened
sensi1vity to the non-‐dual expression of all the phenomena we encounter.
Today is the 10th day of the lunar month, and, tradi1onally, this is a day of remembrance for
Padmasambhava. The Tibetan calendar is a lunar calendar and it’s also a calendar with a sense of
different days having different power. In the Chris1an calendar we have Christmas and Easter, and
these days would be seen as special in terms of their significance to those who believe. According to
the Tibetan way of thinking, certain days are par1cularly auspicious, and if you do dharma prac1ce
on those days, you get a mul1plica1on of the benefit.
Also, Padmasambhava said to the people of Tibet before he leV that he would par1cularly remember
all those who did his prac1ce on this day. Padmasambhava was born in the country of Urgyan, which
is probably in what is now Pakistan; people have different ideas about where it was. He was born in a
lake. He didn’t have a mother and father because he arose as an emana1on of Chenrezig out of the
heart of the buddha Amitabha. At a 1me when the people in that country were suffering a great
deal, there was drought, there was famine, there was unrest; and the blind old king of the country,
Indrabhu1, was instructed by the dakinis to pray, and they taught the king and his cour1ers the
Seven Line Prayer, and from reci1ng that, the mind of Amitabha was moved.
First, rays of light came down into the centre of this small lake of Dhanakosha, transformed into a
lotus, then the leIer Hri came down and transformed into a shining eight-‐year-‐old boy, who was just
si_ng there. The rays of light went spreading out everywhere. Indrabhu1 sent his cour1ers to find
out what was causing it and they said, 'Oh, something marvellous is in the middle of the lake,' so, the
king went with all his cour1ers. When they arrived they brought the boy onto the land and the king
said 'I am the King Indrabhu4. Who are you?' and he said,
—'I am the unborn saviour.'
—'Who is your father?'
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—'I have no father.'

—'Who is your mother?' '
—I have no mother. My father is the sky. My mother is the movement of the sky.’
The king was very amazed, took him home, and made him his adopted son. He lived in the kingdom
for a long 1me, un1l, when he was about 16, one day he was dancing on top of a tower with his vajra
and his bell, 'La, la, la, la, la,' and he threw the vajra in the air, it twirled through the air and landed
on the head of a liIle baby and killed it. So, people said, 'Oh-‐ho, this boy is not so good. Out.'
So he leV the holy land of Urgyan, quite relieved to get out because he didn’t really want to be a
king. He was being set up for the job. There are many ways to leave your father’s house. Maybe he is
the most enlightened troubled teenager there has ever been.
From there he went over across into Central India, to what is now near Bihar, to Shitavan Forest, to
the cemetery there. And there he met a dakini, Lekiwangmoche, the karma Indrani dakini. When he
met her, he received some instruc1on and then she took him onto the 1p of her tongue and
swallowed him, and he passed through her body, through all the chakras, and came out of her
vagina, and through that he gained all the main tantric teachings.
He went on and had many, many adventures, which you can read. His biography is now translated.
Gradually he made his way to Nepal and up into Tibet, where he taught many, many teachings to his
main students who were twenty-‐five close disciples, including the king. Then aVer some 1me he leV.
Last year we reprinted a transla1on of A Prayer in Seven Chapters, which are the prayers that he gave
to key members of that group of twenty-‐five disciplines at the point when he was leaving Tibet, and
these are prayers which we oVen used to recite in India.
But before he leV Tibet, he hid many teachings. He hid some in the land, some in the water, some in
the air, and some in the minds of his students so at later 1mes they discovered these teachings,
which are called terma, or treasure teachings. The teachings that are in the lineage I follow are
primarily terma teachings.
So he’s seen as the person who truly established tantric buddhism in Tibet. He’s a great master.
There are many, many stories about his life which are wonderful to read, and on this day we
remember him. He is par1cularly seen as somebody with great warmth and power. His power was
seen as important for controlling the local demons in Tibet, but also for insuring the safety of the
dharma in Tibet for a long 1me, which indeed happened – a thousand years, not a bad 1me.
In this 1me, the Tibetan refugees do a lot of prayers to Padmasambhava, including groups who, in
Tibet, would not have been connected with him. So he’s become a central deity around which a
great deal of devo1onal prac1ce happens. Some of that is quite external, where people are just
saying the prayers and saying, 'You are a big powerful person, please help me.'
But in the tantric prac1ce, the main giV, or the main generosity of the dei1es is that they are in a
state of non-‐duality, and so, when we pray to them and open to them, they merge right inside us.
They don't make any barrier. It’s as if they are the mirror in which we see our true nature. So, in
praying to Padmasambhava, we’re not praying to some strange deity, we’re not entering into a cult.
We are making use of his compassionate display to enter into a state in which we recognise the
emp1ness of our own mind, and then the radiance of the manifesta1on arises from that state. It’s a
very important part of the tradi1on.
We begin with the clear blue sky, which represents emp1ness. Imagine this as much as you can.
Some people can imagine or visualise very clearly, for other people it’s more difficult. If it’s not clear

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for you, the main thing is the feeling tone. Just the felt sense 'Here is the site of all blessings. Here is
the actuality, the living presence of all the Buddhas of the three 4mes.'
In the middle of this clear blue sky, there arises a ball of light, about 5 cm across, shining; you can see
it as white or rainbow-‐coloured, it doesn't maIer. Then holding this as the focus of our aIen1on,
feeling the radiance coming from it, we recite Om, Aa, Hung again and again. And we feel these rays
of light coming into the body: white into the forehead, purifying all the limita1ons of the body; red
light into the throat, purifying all the limita1ons of speech; blue light into the heart, purifying all
limita1ons of mind. Then all three lights, together, un1l our whole body is full of rainbow-‐coloured
light, and the outer skin becomes transparent and we are just a body of light.
Then we stop reci1ng Om, Aa, Hung and the ball comes over to the top of our head and descends
into our heart. Then our body turns in, like a ball of mercury, and shrinks into this ball of light so that
we are completely fused; and then that ball gets smaller and smaller and smaller, to a point where it
vanishes; and in that point, the mind has nothing to rest on. It is completely open, and we sit in that
state for some 1me.
Practice
Relaxation is the essential point

Three Aa practice
In this three Aa prac1ce that we’ve just done, one of the things I think you can start to no1ce the
more you relax, is that thoughts and arisings move into aspects. One is subject, one is object. What
we take to be 'I, me, myself,' as we’ve been looking, is a quality of looking at the quality of the energy
that arises from the ground.
Subject and object are seeking something from each other: the object seeks recogni1on, and the
subject seeks some kind of fulfilment or gra1fica1on. So subject and object are always chasing each
other, thought aVer thought aVer thought. You could say that the subject and object are always
seeking to have sex. They’re always seeking a kind of fusion, and that’s what happens. We sort of fall
into the thought.
One of the side effects of sex is that it can produce babies. This movement inside our mind belongs
not really in the Buddha family, but in the rabbit family. So the movement of our mind makes many,
many, many babies. One thought leads to another, to another, to another. This is what’s happening
all the 1me.
In the tantric tradi1on you see these depic1ons of the male and female forms in what’s call yab yum,
in sexual contact, but these gods don’t have babies at all, and part of that is because there the
depic1on is the fusion of emp1ness, or the ground, and whatever is manifes1ng in both subject and
object forms.
This is, again, the central difference: if you are res1ng in a consciousness, a consciousness will always
take an object, and so there is this endless intercourse and mul1plica1on in the movement of more
and more fascina1on, and there is no end to this. When we are in the medita1on, if we are res1ng in
our familiar habita1on, our sense of, 'I am me,' and individual self, it will always be busy with
thoughts. That’s not a personal mistake. That’s simply the structure. That’s what goes on there.
If you go into a bar you’ll find people drinking alcohol. If you go into a café people will be drinking
coffee. It’s like that. So, if you recognise, 'Oh this is what consciousness does,' it’s very unkind to keep
asking consciousness to do something it can't do. When you ask yourself to become enlightened, this
is absolutely persecutory. It’s like asking small children to 1dy their bedroom. They look at the toys,
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they don’t understand what 1diness would be. You say, 'Pick up these toys,' they pick them up and
they start to play with them. That’s what consciousness is doing. It’s always playing and being
involved with things.
Of course language comes into this. We talk about, 'May I become enlightened for the sake of all
sen4ent beings,' but this is essen1ally a false proposi1on. The one who is seeking enlightenment can
never become enlightened, because enlightenment is not gained by seeking. It’s a kind of illusion.
What you have, on the path to enlightenment, is the purifica1on of the energy from a gross form to a
more subtle form, and at that point it's easier to relax into the state of the ground and see these
subtle movements.
You can also do it immediately from a gross form, and in the history of dzogchen there are many
stories of yogis without any purifica1on who could just recognise their nature. The nature is this
unborn nature of the mind. The radiant awareness, which is not the same as consciousness.
So in the prac1ce, the central func1on: relax again and again, not blocking the flow of energy, subject
and object, but just watching what it does. And the more relaxed you are, the more present you are,
you find that subject and object, although they’re interac1ng, they don’t have so many babies. It’s
like teenagers. If they’re in the house and they want to have sex, but they know that their parents
are just next door, then maybe they have to be very careful because they don’t want too much noise.
It’s like that. A liIle bit of restraint is there. Everything seIles down.
Being relaxed is really the best thing, and it goes back to the central theme about trus1ng ourselves.
From the point of view of dzogchen, to trust yourself is to be completely mistrusDul of yourself, that
is to say, the ordinary sense of self: be very suspicious of its claims to power, its claims to uniqueness,
its claims to importance, because it’s just a passing movement of energy.
The self is impermanent. It returns again and again as do all phenomena which are impermanent,
but essen1ally it’s evanescent. It’s just a contextual arising, like the reflec1on of the sun on the water
on a summer’s day. You see the waves rippling, and the lights moving in all direc1ons. There's a lot of
brilliance, but there’s nothing there. Like the reflec1on of the moon in water. Like a mirage on the
road in summer 1me.
This is an essen1al point for the medita1on. Otherwise you can spend years and years and years
thinking you’re doing the prac1ce, when you’re simply staying in a familiar house of the conven1onal
ego iden1ty. This doesn’t need to be improved, because no maIer how you improve this house, it
will not take you into a state of awareness.
Awareness is not something to be bought, it’s not something you can sell. It’s not something you can
lose, it’s not something you can find. It’s always there. So,no maIer how much you improve yourself,
you won’t improve your chances of recognising the ground. The ground is recognised by stopping
being intoxicated with the crea1vity of the ground, which is to say thoughts, feelings, sensa1ons, all
the manifest experiences of life. You yourself have to work out what is the basis of the intoxica1on. It
may be that le_ng go is easier if what’s arising in your mind is less crude, less driven, less agitated;
but, essen1ally, the key point is to trust that when you fall, you will fly.
Many dzogchen texts describe things like the wing beats of the great garuda, or the wing beats of the
great eagle. It means, when you fall into emp1ness, then you find yourself floa1ng. You’re not res1ng
on solid ground. We have never ever had solid ground. Solid ground is the illusion that one thought
aVer another aVer another is crea1ng something fixed.
This is the essen1al point, relaxing again and again. That the one who is busy is not the one who is
going to provide the solu1on. This is what marks dzogchen as being completely different from every
other path. All the other paths are concerned with development; this is not a path of development.

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Most of the paths are concerned with something quite sacred, you have to take them seriously.
Dzogchen is not much concerned with seriousness, because whether you’re serious or you’re foolish,
whether you have a very seIled life or you have a crazy life, whether you are rich, whether you are
poor – none of these things impact the rela1onship with the ground, because everything arises from
the ground. Everything has the same nature or, in the language of mahamudra, everything has one
taste. This is the taste of emp1ness. When you have that one taste, it doesn’t maIer. Your life arises
according to its circumstances.
People have different aIributes. Your quali1es and poten1als don't affect anything expect the
movement of energy in the world. Some people have a very beau1ful voice and they have the
confidence to use that, other people don’t. Some people are very at ease in dancing, other people
are not. Some people find talking very easy, other people don’t. What these quali1es do is show how
you interact with your energy with other people. You can spend 1me changing and developing these
quali1es, that’s fine. But you have to know that is energy that's being developed. There’s no self
there being developed. All the self is is these par1cular paIerns of energy.
The essen1al ques1on for us is, 'Where do I come from? What is the ground of my being? What is my
true nature?' and this we find by relaxing back into it, because it’s always already there. It’s not
hidden by anything except the light of the ground. This is the really important thing to see, that when
the energy chases the energy, they play a game in which they forget where they've come from.
Like if you have children and they’re playing around and they make a lot of noise you say, 'Oi, be
quiet!' They don’t hear you. You say, 'Oi! This is your father talking. Shut up. I have some rela4on to
you. Number one: I made you. Number Two: you cost me a lot of money, so shut up.' This is exactly
the same as thinking of the ground nature.
The ground nature is the parent of everything, but these children, they cause a lot of trouble. They
run around and they say, 'Heh! I’m in charge! I’m in charge! I do what I like,' and of course they get in
trouble. This is called samsara. If the children can recognise they have a parent, they’ll be very
pleasantly surprised, because this parent is very permissive. The parent will say, 'Do as you like, but
just remember where you came from.' It’s not an authoritarian parent, it's not a patriarchal parent.
It’s just one that says, 'Don’t forget where you come from,' because if you remember where you
come from, you don’t get so lonely, you don’t get cut off and it’s not all res1ng on your shoulders.
There’s a terrible despera1on in being an autonomous individual person, a lot of responsibility.

Energy is constantly faced with problems it can’t solve: 'How shall we live? What should we do about
global warming? Is recycling a waste of 4me?' So many things that people think about, and there’s
no end to thinking because there’s no end to all this endless stuff of the world.
You won’t find peace by having beIer thoughts, but by relaxing. At first, just with a glimmering
sense, something is going on that you can’t grasp, and it seems to be reliably there. The things that
you can grasp, well, they’re already gone. As soon as you grasp them, they’re gone. That’s the big
shiV that we again and again have to look at, examining the falsity of the appropria1on of iden1ty.
When we say, 'Don’t trust yourself,' it means 'Look at how you cheat yourself.' In dzogchen the
principle of self-‐decep1on is very important, because only we can work out how we cheat ourselves.
We are so prone to interpreta1on that it can be difficult to use the teachings to deconstruct this
tendency. We are so used to making meaning, and believing in the meanings we make, that we oVen
take our obscuring ac1vity to be a path of clarifica1on. That is why we have to look very carefully at
what we are up to. We want to move from reliance on assump1on to spontaneity and this requires
the direct experience of the empty ground of all phenomena.
We have a na1onality, German, or Bri1sh, or French, or whatever; it doesn’t tell us anything. We are
male or female, this only tells us about how our energy operates in the world. According to the
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dharma we are born many 1mes. Men will be born as women. Women will be born as men.
Everything we say about ourselves is only rela1ve. The domain of rela1ve truth. It depends on
factors.
This is the nature of energy, so when we say, 'Don’t trust yourself,' it means don’t trust any
proposi1on, any statement from yourself that says, ‘I am this, I am that.’ Any strong idea you have
about who you are, or what you are, or what you need to do, this is a movement of energy. It may be
telling you something very useful, but only about how your energy can be changed. It doesn’t tell
you about the ground nature.
From the tradi1onal point of view, this is very important in rela1on to the process of moving towards
death because, as the body starts to move into the death process, the outer form of the five
elements starts to collapse. There’s a fading away from power, and the earth goes into the water; the
water into the fire; the fire into the wind; and then with the subtle trace of consciousness, this most
subtle wind dissolves through the central channel into emp1ness. At that point there is nothing. This
is called the possibility of awakening into things as they are, into actuality of existence, cho nyid.
At that point all the turbulence of our energy is a real problem because, although it’s calming down,
we have this iden1fica1on that something should be going on. So now there is a completely open
moment, and there’s nothing there, but we get agitated by it. Instead of recognising, 'Oh,' and that
becoming an infinite openness, the subtle trace of the ego feels kind of overwhelmed by this
openness, and so wants something to happen. That then triggers the manifesta1on, first of the
peaceful Gods and then the wrathful Gods, in which presen1ng forms come very powerfully, very
shiny. Then roaring, 'ARR!' All sorts of strange movements and this creates a disturbance which then
flicks the consciousness out into rebirth in some other realm.
So from the point of view of dzogchen, the more we relax and open, at the point of death you can
just relax into that infinite open state, and then the impulse to move into manifest form is refined in
terms of a compassionate inten1on. You’re not driven into that because you have to, because you
don’t know how to be s1ll; but s1llness itself con1nues to manifest forms, and when these forms
manifest, the ground and the manifesta1on are linked together.
This is the meaning in the Tibetan tradi1on of tulku, when these lamas are called tulku. Tulku means
trulpa, which is emission, manifesta1on, and ku, the body of the Buddha, which comes into the
world on the basis of compassion. It means these people should recognise the ground of their being,
whatever is happening to them, wherever they are born.
Through the prac1ce, we also become reborn as tulku. From the dissolving prac1ce we did last night,
this three Aa prac1ce, you can come to an ongoing sense that, moment by moment, everything is
light and fresh and arising from the ground, and at that point everything is possible. But because the
anxious, impulsive basis of ego-‐iden1ty has been replanted back into its own ground, the drive to
protect oneself, the drive to make oneself important, or special in some way, dissolves, and then you
can just be whatever the situa1on requires. You can be invisible and unknown, or you can take up a
posi1on according to the circumstances. If the circumstances change, you can put yourself back in a
box, but because you don’t need to, it’s not driven by some inner hunger or requirement.
That’s the meaning of peace, that’s really what contentment is. It’s not a big happiness, but it’s just
whatever comes, comes. Whatever goes, goes, because the ground of one’s being is not in the
energy. Energy arises from the ground. Energy doesn’t create or condi1on the ground. It doesn’t
determine the ground. So, if life opens up and goes well, that’s one thing. If life closes down and you
find yourself being sad, lonely, unloved, sick, if you stay with the ego’s judgment on that it’s terrible.
If you integrate that experience into the ground, it’s just what’s happening.

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This is the essen1al point, and it’s oVen described tradi1onally in terms of the image of a mirror,
because when we look in a mirror, we don’t see the mirror, we see ourselves. When you look at the
mirror you might see the frame, if there’s a frame around the edge of the glass, but as soon as you
actually look in the mirror the mirror-‐ness of the mirror is invisible. What you see is the reflec1on.
In the same way, when we look around this room we see many, many reflec1ons. Many images that
are arising, images which are devoid of inherent self-‐nature. These are revealed to us by this mirror-‐
like quality of the mind. The mind is emp1ness and clarity. Clarity means, in this sense, no
obstruc1on and no distor1on to what is there.
Normally our experience of the world is built up in terms of projec1ons. We have many unconscious
associa1ons built up in this life or past lives, many tendencies which distort what we see. The more
we relax into the state of the mirror, we see things just as they are; which is to say, just as light. That
allows us to work more directly with what is there.
Whoever we know, we also don’t know. We know something about someone. We know how they
were yesterday, then something happens and they shiV, and you say, 'Oh, that’s not the same
person,' and of course, it’s not the same person. The greatest violence we can do to anyone is to
assume that they are the same person they are today as they were yesterday, because causes and
circumstances will have changed.
We think we are helping people by remembering them, but to re-‐member is to put the members, the
parts of the person together, and we put them according to our image. Like the police have these
iden1-‐kit photos, and somebody's been aIacked and they go and look for the eyebrows and the
ears and the nose, and they make this composite picture. That’s what we do, we create an image of
the person, and when that composite picture is created, it becomes the screen through which we
encounter people.
So part of this path is to allow ourselves to be as open and empty as a mirror, and trust that that will
show us what is required. That we don’t need to distort our percep1on by bringing a lot of stuff into
the situa1on, but 'Sufficient unto the moment. Sufficient unto the day.' In the Chris1an tradi1on they
say, 'God will provide.' Muslims say, 'Inshallah.' It’s the same way in dzogchen: they say, 'Don’t be too
busy yourself.'
Chris1ans say, 'Give us this day our daily bread.' They know the farmers out in the field, and if the
farmer doesn’t do the work, the bread won’t come, but anyway, God gives everything. That’s a very
dualis1c way of experiencing the same phenomena we are talking about here. This ground nature,
the mirror-‐like clarity reveals everything, and within that we have whatever is required.
In the dzogchen teaching they talk of three aspects of our existence. The first in Tibetan is called
ngowo. This means something like your true face or your true nature. This is what we’ve been
looking a lot at. It’s open, unborn awareness. The mind, which has never been created, it’s never
been changed or altered by any circumstances, so it’s open and empty like the mirror itself.
Arising in this, is the richness of the poten1ality of our situa1on. That is to say, all our imagina1on, all
our experiences, the colours, lights, sounds and so on, that we experience. This is called rang zhin,
which also means 'own face,' but it means like a quality or aspect. It’s like when you see someone
you can get a sense of their health by their complexion. So rang zhin is like the complexion, it’s how
the radiance of the heart opens out through the face. When we sit in the media1on, it’s open but
there’s all this stuff. The openness, the hospitality, is this ground nature, and the fullness, the
richness of everything which is immediately there, this is the second quality. Some1mes it’s
described as lhundrup, which means instantly made or spontaneously manifes1ng.
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So when we do the medita1on everything is there. Sit, everything is there. A car goes by, church bells
ring. Things are not announced in advance; our existence arises moment by moment, fully formed,
just fresh. The more relaxed and open we are, here it is, here it is. Then the third aspect is, inside this
rich, panoramic view, there are gestures which arise. These are the gestures which occur within the
field of reflec1on. So, we find ourselves moving, speaking, ea1ng and so on. This is the quality, in
dzogchen it’s called thug je, which normally means compassion, but here it means, just, you could
say, par1cipa1on, being part of, a kind of nonviolent, apprecia1ve, co-‐emergence with the situa1on,
and it’s a co-‐emergence inside the mirror.
Nothing ever escapes from the mirror. The mirror is infinite, like space. It’s tradi1onally what is called
the dharmadhatu, or cho ying, it means the dimension in which everything arises, and we
experience aspects of this all the 1me. Wherever we go, we turn our head, there’s this, there’s this,
immediately there. You don’t have to conceptualise it. It’s just immediately there, and inside that,
we’re moving. We’re gesturing.
When these three aspects are integrated, our being in the world is without problems, no maIer
what the situa1on is, because as we move towards something with desire, or with aversion, what is
this? On the level of samsara we say, 'I like this and I want it,' or 'I don’t like this and I don’t want it.'
In that moment we’ve cut the head from the body. We are floa1ng in this cerebral realm of
conceptualisa1on.
You can have exactly the same response, but you experience it as the energy of the ground. Just
because those statues of the Buddha don’t move, doesn’t mean that the Buddha himself wouldn’t
move. If you ever hang out with any lamas you will find that they have par1cular prejudices. They like
some things and they don’t like other things. I used to imagine that they would like everything,
because I had this very naive, simple view: if they are perfect everything must be possible for them.
And maybe everything is possibly, but what they actually do is fairly predictable. Some like tea, some
like coffee, some only drink hot water, and so on.
So energy comes into the world in par1cular forma1ons. This is described oVen in terms of the
image of a rock crystal: when light shines into it, the light refracts according to the par1cular faults,
or flaws, or crack lines inside the crystal, so it takes on the colora1on of our situa1on.
From the point of view of samsara, we can say this is condi1oning, this is limi1ng; but in this world
you have to do something. If you turn to the right, you’re not turning to the leV. If you turn to the
leV, you’re not turning to the right. In this kind of a body, you’re either doing one thing or another.
When you go into breakfast you can’t eat everything. You probably could, but it’d be difficult. So you
take some of this and some of that. That is to say, choices are part of life.
So it’s a central ques1on for meditators, how to stay in this open state and make choices, especially
when some of the choices are imposed on me by the power of the situa1ons. I find myself having to
do things that I don’t want to do, so then that easily sets off a lot of mental func1oning. From the
point of view of dzogchen, always stay relaxed and open in the state of the mirror, and the gesture
will arise. The more mental perturba1on, the more disturbance, the more confusion we generate by
thinking about things, doesn’t clarify the situa1on.
What we are actually doing is elabora1ng and crea1ng a new situa1on where you have the simple
issue plus all your thoughts. These will be added on top of it. How could the problem be solved by
thinking? Because the problem is, anyway, a temporary situa1on that arises due to causes and
condi1ons. If you think back on your life, I’m sure you can remember all sorts of problems that were
difficult. Problems as a child, as a teenager, problems in school, then in work, problems in
rela1onship. Mostly these problems have gone. They were there, they were very real, and then they
were gone. Problems will come again. There is no person living that doesn’t have problems. The Dali

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Lama has plenty of problems. Would anybody like to be the Dali Lama? No. It’s not a happy life, it’s a
very difficult life he has.
The idea that dharma prac1ce is somehow going to be like a big iron and flaIen out all the bumps of
the world, it’s not like that. In fact, the more you progress, the more problems you can be with, but
the central thing is not to be persecuted by the problems. Samsara is full of problems. A lot of the
1me we don’t want to face the problems, we live in fantasies, in avoidances, ego defences,
disassocia1on, and so on. So, awakening to be in connec1on with everything is to be very much in
touch with difficulty. The ques1on is, 'Who is the one who is in touch with difficulty?'
If you open yourself to the real nature of the world and the pot of yourself is very small, you will get
overwhelmed. In the area of psychology, social work, and so on, people get burned out. It becomes
too much with trauma day aVer day, and at a certain point they’ve had enough. They can’t cope. This
is the problem of the pot, not the problem of the problem.
As long as we remain a small ego self, our capacity is very, very limited. This is why if we take the
BodhisaIva Vow, we have to really think. In fact, only a bodhisaIva can take the BodhisaIva Vow.
When an ordinary person takes the BodhisaIva Vow, if they are at all intelligent, the next thing they
do is cut their tongue out so they never make that kind of vow again, because you say, 'I will save all
sen4ent beings.' Okay. There’s a big queue of them outside the door. What are you going to do? 'I’ll
pray for them.' They don’t want prayers. They want something.
How can you save all sen1ent beings? Only by being in a state which has enough resources, which is
big enough to save all sen1ent beings. This is the state of the mirror. So,the more we relax, the more
we open, just like a mirror, nothing to do. We do the three Aa prac1ce. We’re just si_ng. The mirror
shows everything that’s there: it doesn’t distort, it doesn’t privilege the things it likes, the things it
doesn’t like. The very nature of a mirror is to be without choice. This is, again, very important.
The open, unborn nature doesn’t make any choices, but energy is nothing but choices. When your
energy manifests in the world, it’s always in a field already occupied by other beings. This is pointed
out in the tantric prac1ces where, when you visualise a large mandala, the first thing that arises
usually is the mandala house, and then the god arrives and sits in the house. First of all, you have to
have the house. The house says, 'The world is there before you arrive.' Each of us was born into a
world that was already func1oning. Our parents already had lives, good or bad, extended family,
memories of the war, and so on and so forth. There was a lot of turbulence and agita1on. That’s
what we came into. So energy is always moving into a territory that is already occupied.
This is why grand gestures of imagining that one is going to save everyone or do things in a very clear
way is very dangerous. That is to say, abstract inten1ons, which kind of fly through the sky like a
great rainbow, what use are these? We believe at the end of the rainbow there is a pot of gold. Has
anyone ever found this pot of gold? No, because the rainbow is never where you can get to it. So,
these big dreams of what we’re going to do with our life and how helpful we’ll be, … not worth
anything.
From the point of view of dzogchen, moment by moment, the luminous field is unfolding, 'What will
I do here? Here? Here?' There is only the immediacy of this gesture. The rest is just some strange
confec1onary, because the big plans that we make, immediately you have a plan, you have to impose
it, and if you impose it you’re going to have power. You’re going to have to coerce other people to do
what you want. If you want to have a monastery, you’ve got to have people to build it. Then you’ve
got to have people to maintain it. These people, while they’re maintaining the monastery, probably
are full of samsaric thoughts. Not so useful.
You can have a worldly life. Europe is full of empty church halls. You can do your workshop in a
church hall. Personally, this is my bigoted view, the building of monasteries is ridiculous. First of all,
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because we don’t have any monks and nuns in Europe. Nobody wants to be a monk or nun so why
have a monastery? This is essen1ally a room with some statues in it. It’s a lha khang, it’s a god’s
room in Tibetan. There’s only two monks here, and both of them are Tibetan. There’s not a queue of
western people outside wan1ng to get their hair shaved.
That’s a very important thing to be aware of, that one has to work with circumstances. The
circumstances in the west are not the same as Tibet or India. We are the people living in the dharma.
We need to somehow think about what circumstances work best for us, which means living in your
own skin, being aware of the aspects of yourself you can’t trust – which is primarily over-‐privileging
energy as if it were substance – what we looked at yesterday, ahamkara, the impu1ng of
permanency, of a true essence, an inherent self-‐nature to energe1c forms which are always
changing. And then, from that, start to see how you can be together, what sangha means. How you
can support each other. What does that mean now in terms of what you need?
These are the three main aspects: open, immediate, and precise. The precision of coming into the
world, moment by moment, is dependent on being fully part of the immediate arising. When we are
in our head, when we're daydreaming, when we’re planning, when we’re full of anxie1es,
depressions, and so on, we’re not part of the immediacy of this field. We’ve taken a holiday
somewhere else. But our life is actually here. We are embodied as part of the world. That is to say,
the world comes to us through the senses, and we move towards the world through the senses.
In that sense, subject and object as energy, in order to flow gracefully together, have to be able to
hear each other. That way you get polyphony rather than the usual cacophony that we get.
Cacophony is when you get this disordering of sounds – when you get monologuing, when you get
someone insis1ng on being themselves under all circumstances. Essen1ally we have to work with
circumstances, which means the polyphony of your voice coming into a world of other voices, and
finding a way of being harmonic. When the polyphonic tradi1on of western music was being
developed before and around the 1me of Monteverdi, it was s1ll a 1me when they had the no1on of
the music of the spheres. That the planets were held in place by their emission of sounds, and as
they moved around there was a harmony in space, and that the music of polyphony would echo that,
and that you could balance and heal the world by polyphonic music.
Tibetan tradi1on has many similar ideas, that what is outside and what is inside are the same. The
key thing is to maintain the connec1on: this is the sense of compassion. Not compassion in the grand
sense of, 'I am going to help people,' which is an idea. Actually helping people means finding an
interface, a way of being present with them, that makes a difference, and we can only do that if we
see their face. But we can’t see their face if half our vision is in our head trying to work it out.
Any thoughts or ques1ons?
Question on falling into thoughts

Student: For me, it’s very difficult to not fall into the thoughts. On previous occasions you
have given the example of the theatre, how the mind is like the open stage and we need to observe
the play without being caught up in it. Is it only medita1on that helps us to do this?
James: Yes. Through this we come to recognise the nature of fixa1on. Moreover we need to
examine, 'Who is the one who is doing this? Who is the one who claims to be me?' 'I fall into the
thought,' we can all understand what that means, we’ve all had that experience. This isa great
mystery, how we move from clarity to confusion without seeming to make a choice and in fact we do
it despite our clear inten1on to not do it.
Now, this 'I' is like Janus. It faces in two direc1ons: one is samsara, one is nirvana. If we relax, who is
the one who claims to be 'I'? You look, you don’t find anything; this is the unborn mind, so then
you’re in the state of the mirror. Who does it? 'I did it. This individual self,’ and then you follow

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another track. How do we iden1fy this tendency? Do we look to the energy aspect or the ground
aspect? The energy and the ground are inseparable. The reflec1on and the mirror are inseparable.
Therefore whichever way you look you will find the same truth of emp1ness.
The ego 'I' will always be there. You’ll never get rid of your ego; but the ego, if you recognise what it
is, it’s not your ego anymore. It’s just the movement of energy. But we are so addicted to seeing it as
self-‐exis1ng, and it becomes the primary reference point. Just as a small child will play happily
around its mother and then wanders off, and then, maybe a dog goes by and the child gets a bit
agitated, looks around to see if mother is s1ll there. In the same way, this sense of individual self is
like the mother: it’s the reference point. So, we can do crazy things, then, 'Haah! Who am I? What
am I doing?' and we come back to wan1ng to have this fixed base, 'This is who I am. I know who I
am.'
The more you see, moment by moment, that, actually, you are many different things, and they
display themselves through 1me and you can’t go back in 1me – that who you were yesterday is
gone, the person who ate your breakfast doesn’t exist anymore, who you are now is dependent on
these par1cular circumstances – the more we realise that, then the sense of a composite, enduring
self vanishes.
In ge_ng lost, we start to be able to be present with it. I mean, the image of the theatre is a
metaphor that helps illuminate some things, but, of course, we’re not si_ng in the audience looking
at the stage, because the mirror and the reflec1on are inseparable. So it’s as if we are in the
audience, but we’re not apart. It’s happening here, and this awareness is unspeakable. Nobody can
say what it is; but we can say, 'I,' in terms of substance.
For many life1mes we had this tendency of solidifica1on, iden1fica1on. That’s a problem. So, again
and again, just relaxing and watching that movement, and then releasing it. But, it’s the central
point. It’s the central point, and what causes that binding back in, is the lack of deep relaxa1on. If we
have turbulence, it sets up disturbance in the channels in the body, and that vibra1on then makes
these liIle hooks, so it comes like Velcro and you just lock on.
Really relaxing. Really relaxing is about observing preoccupa1on, about really seeing that worry is a
waste of 1me. To stop worrying is really the most beneficial thing you can do, because, immediately,
you’ll have a lot of energy and you’ll have a lot of 1me. Worry's completely silly. BeIer to flick
through a nice fashion magazine. Nonsense is beIer than worry , because at least nonsense is
honest, whereas worry is dishonest. Worry says, 'I’m doing useful work,' but it doesn’t do any useful
work at all.
So beIer to be frivolous than serious. And the more we do that, the more we see, 'Oh yeah, stuff is
always coming,' and this double move, 'I am this stuff,' and, 'I am not this stuff.' That is to say, 'I am
this energy.' It’s undeniable. I am 'I, me, myself,' but the ground of the real nature of that is
emp1ness, which is unspeakable because it’s impersonal. It’s not a 'me,' and yet I arise. How I arise
doesn’t condi1on, or determine, or define, or tell me anything about the ground; it only tells me
about the energy, and that’s the most important thing to really recognise.
Whenever we fall into the thought, and then we say, 'Oh, I shouldn’t have done that,' that’s a bit of
energy speaking to another bit of energy. It’s not describing the true nature; but, these conversa1ons
can go on forever and ever. There’s no end to conversa1on, so, we’re just going, and going, and
going.
Nowadays in therapy, people get fascinated by the dialogic, and they want to read Bakh1n and De
Saussure, and so on. These are all jus1fica1ons of conversa1on. Modern European thought is
obsessed with this, like Blanchot’s Infinite Conversa4on: the idea that culture is a conversa1on. This
is a very helpful understanding for buddhists because, indeed, that’s what culture is, because culture
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is samsara. The belief in cultural values, in theatre, art, and so on, these are beau1ful things; but,
when taken at face value, at what they present themselves as being, they are great seduc1ons that
pull us into a reified no1on.
So observing these internal conversa1ons, and seeing them just as the interplay of energy forces:
nothing is really created, but it appears to be the case, just as when you have the buddhist tradi1onal
example, the reflec1on of the moon on water. Clear sky, full moon, pond: reflec1on. When the clear
sky and the full moon and the pond come into juxtaposi1on, when they are aligned, the reflec1on
arises.
In the same way, when this energy moves together, it creates the illusion of a fixed self. Who is the
one saying, 'I exist?' It’s an illusion. It’s like a ghost. Ghosts claim to exist, but they’re just ghosts. So
something which doesn’t truly exist in itself says, 'I truly exist,' and we say, 'Yes, I’ll buy that. Sounds
good to me. Yes’.’
Questions on happiness, sadness and difficulties

Student: But if we who are here weren't worriers, we wouldn’t sit here.
James: Great! Then I would be lying in bed in London reading the Sunday papers.
Student: Would this be beIer?
James: No, it would just be different.
Student: Just thinking we are in the illusion of mee1ng you.
James: Yes, that’s the thing. Worry is … as the Buddha said, suffering is generated from
aIachment, and aIachment is in many ways fixated on the idea that history can be reversed. Adam
and Eve go out of the Garden of Eden, have a look around, say, 'Uh oh, this doesn’t look very good.'
They say, 'Oh, God, we’re terribly sorry. We made a mistake.' God says, 'Oh, lovelies, come back in.'
We always imagine that this is the Garden of Eden. We imagine this should be nirvana, life should be
beIer. This is absolute persecu1on.
And now we have all these people selling the philosophy of happiness, posi1ve psychology. This is
another devil shit hole. It’s a really, really, really poisonous idea because life for most people on this
planet is not going to be happiness. It’s simply a peIy, bourgeois indulgence which people who’ve
got enough money can pamper themselves and get psychological support so that they feel good. But
in order for them to feel good, to get the money, they’re involved in an exploi1ve interna1onal
system which beggars and frustrates the ambi1ons of many, many people in the world. It’s perverse.
How can you be happy when the basis of your happiness is hur1ng other people?
It’s an absolutely self-‐referen1al delusion, and buddhists are very deeply implicated in it. Producing
lots and lots of books, 'How to be happy.' If you’re at all compassionate, why would you be happy? If
you’re at all compassionate, you’re going to be disturbed to a certain extent. The ques1on is not to
be overwhelmed, not to be worried, not to be constantly upset; but you’re going to be touched and
moved. Much more we’re concerned with how to be alive, how to be present, which means being
happy when it’s 1me to be happy, and sad when it’s 1me to be sad. This idea of pictures of smiling
lamas everywhere. It’s crazy. At least the Dalai Lama oVen looks very sad. No wonder.
Student: But doesn't being sad mean he’s sad that there is a disturbance of energy, and so
that you don’t see the ground? Isn’t that the situa1on then?

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James: Well, the ground, it shows both happiness and sadness. It doesn’t privilege
happiness over sadness. If you stay with the ground, the ground is the unchanging thing. Awareness
is our own true refuge.
Student: I think that’s exactly the problem: the awareness of awareness, when there is
turbulence of energy, and being sad, being in a crisis, that brings all this turbulence. I mean, extreme
happiness brings that turbulence and you’re just in that, but….
James: But then, if you’re connect with the ground you wouldn’t just be in that.
Student: But what about pain? You have strong pain, so you get swept in.
James: It’s very, very tough luck to have a lot of extreme pain, because it’s very hard to stay
in a medita1ve state with extreme pain. There are many condi1ons which are extremely challenging,
but I’ve certainly seen meditators able, when they’re very sick or when they have great physical pain,
just to con1nue. The pain’s there, but it’s not their primary focus. And that’s not dissocia1on, it’s
integra1on. The pain is given its place, but, because the mind is very big, it’s okay; but, if the mind is
very small and you have a lot of intense pain, all you’ve got is pain. Pain fills your pot. You feel
overwhelmed, you think, 'I can’t do anything un4l this goes away.' But if one can relax, it’s just there.
That’s our luck. All of us will get pains in our bodies for sure.
Student: And what about the ripening of the karma that we talked about? All the obstacles
and enemies that can arise?
James: Well, disturbance is always happening. Difficul1es are always happening: external
difficul1es, internal difficul1es. The ques1on is how do you consider your difficul1es? If we are
prac1cing and somebody..., say they have a cold or something, 'Oh, that’s terrible.' It is not terrible,
they’ve got a cold. You know, we are much too soVly sympathe1c, and this is a real aIack on
people’s prac1ce because our task is to integrate our situa1on.
Solicitude and pity and generosity and being nice, for meditators, is completely insul1ng and
harmful. For ordinary people, it’s very nice. Somebody says, 'Oh, you don’t look too well. What’s the
maCer?' That’s fine, that’s ordinary discourse. But, if you’re prac1cing medita1on, what is arising?
The difficulty is we have a story in my mind, 'Oh, this is terrible.' Then someone else confirms, 'Oh
this is terrible,' you’re a thousand miles from your prac1ce. Your prac1ce is to be with it:
'What is it? Who is saying it’s terrible?'
'I’m saying it’s terrible.'
'Who is the one who is saying this is terrible?'
'Me.'
'What is this me?'
This is the work again, and again, and again. So, actually, being solicitous, you know, thoughDul
toward people, is very difficult.
In terms of the ripening of karma, problems will always arise. We are in problem depot. This is where
problems come, this is called samsara. To expect there are not to be problems here would be a very
big mistake. This is not the Garden of Eden. Therefore, when problems come, why would we be
surprised?
A lot of the work on trauma shows people who expected never to have problems don’t do very well
with trauma, because it blows their metaphysical structure out of the water, 'I never expected it
would happen to me.' People don’t expect to get sick, they don’t expect to die. How could this be?
How stupid can we be?
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This goes back to worry and hopes and fears. If you just accept, 'This is samsara. This is a shit hole.
Hm, smells familiar. Smells right,' then you can relax. And the ques1on is how to live in a shit hole
without being covered in shit, which is what the prac1ce is. If you start being worried, you fall into
the pit. Careful, careful. Do the prac1ce.
But, for sure, bad things will come. There has never been a Garden of Eden that we know of where
real people have been. Human life is difficult, and this Buddhist wheel of life, the one developed by
Nagarjuna, shows the six realms very clearly. These six realms are depicted as being in the mouth of
Yama, the god of death, because everyone in the six realms dies; and up in the corner is a Buddha
and he’s poin1ng over to the other corner where there is a empty circle, which represents nirvana.
So in this world as it is, in terms of our ordinary percep1on, we will only have suffering. In this world,
if we awaken and we relax and open, we won’t have suffering. One ground and two paths; but it all
depends on where you are with the prac1ce. And belief won’t help, dogma won’t help. You can’t say,
'I hereby declare samsara to be nirvana,' and give some royal edict, 'From this day on, my followers,
this is now nirvana. Let us be happy and dance.'
Everywhere there are a lot of difficul1es. Our choice is to take them personally and to enter reac4vity
or to relax and open to the play of circumstances, responding as required by the immediacy of the
circumstances rather than by our self-‐referen4al interpreta4ons. That’s the big difference. If we’re in
this skin bag, we’re going to get a punch on the nose. If we’re more spacious, we see this liIle skin
bag being punched on the nose, and then it bleeds for a bit, then the bleeding stops, then some ice
cream goes in the mouth.
That’s what happens to everyone. One day you’re sad, next day you’re a bit happier, gets a bit beIer.
That’s the real difference between a life in prac1ce and a life out of prac1ce. If we’re not in prac1ce,
we’re evicted: we’re at the mercy of all these forces and they’re very big and we can’t control them.
If you’re in the prac1ce, you also can’t control what is delivered to you but you can determine which
inbox the email is put in. When the event is coming towards you, where are you situated? In this
narrow, karmically derived, dependent co-‐origina1on posi1on, ‘I, me, myself,’ ‘ This is me,’ ‘I like,’ ‘I
don’t like,’ or, more relaxed and spacious. This is the heart of the dzogchen work.
Break
Trust ourselves
When we do the three Aa prac1ce, trus1ng ourselves means, first of all, establishing who we are. In
terms of the prac1ce we've already looked at different aspects of how this is. One is opening up this
inquiry into 'Where does the mind rest? Where does it come from? Where does it go to? What size is
it, what colour is it?' and so on. You can really, directly take 1me examining your own mind.
When you develop a sense of the infinite nature of yourself, this is very, very radical. Radical is linked
to radix, the root; that is to say, you replant yourself in the true ground. You root yourself in what
you actually are, which is this unborn openness. Then, trus1ng yourself is not about trus1ng the ego-‐
dimension as the total truth about yourself, because it's in the very nature of manifesta1on into the
world to have some problems and difficul1es. I don't think there's likely to be anybody who is fully
sa1sfied with everything they do and how they do it, so some discomfiture with the level of
manifesta1on is going to be there.
On that level, of course, you can't trust yourself because energy is always manifes1ng in an
environment with other people, so how could you know that you're good? I've been a therapist for a
long 1me, I've seen many, many pa1ents, and yet the experience is no authorita1ve guide as to how I
might respond in the new situa1on.

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So it's not 'If we accumulate enough knowledge of the world we'll somehow get to a safe place.' I
think this is an illusion. What we find is more capacity to be really connected with things, but some
doors are going to remain closed to us. Therefore, to the idea that you could say 'I'm competent at
this, I'm good at that,' well, we're good at it according to certain circumstances, according to
condi1ons, because this is how energy manifests.
But when we talk of trus1ng ourselves, it's to trust the state of the mirror – the innate, unborn,
natural condi1on out of which everything manifests. This is the central point of shiVing the focus of
trust away from trying to construct ourselves as a trust-‐worthy person, to relaxing and trus1ng the
ground nature out of which the energy our manifesta1on comes, however it comes. And by being
more at home in that, we find ways of making it work in situa1ons.
This is what we can keep doing in the prac1ce.
! Three Aa practice.
Trusting others
In rela1on to compassion, there is a ques1on about whether we should trust other people. Given
that all beings are wandering in samsara under the power of the five poisons, why should we expect
other people to be clear?
A buddhist point of view is very different from one generated out of the European enlightenment,
which speaks both of a poten1al for good in children, from Rousseau, but also the possibility of
having a ra1onal existence. This has been central to the development of academic educa1on since
that 1me, public educa1on: the idea that all beings can be developed in a way that allows them to
use ra1onal thought to control their behaviour.
Freud’s explora1ons of hypnosis, and then his development of an understanding of the unconscious
and the importance of dreams in revealing that, indicated that something else was going on for
people, that they were not the masters of their houses.
That view was quite a powerful one in European culture for a while, but now there’s much more a
return to a cogni1ve orienta1on: clarifica1on of the thinking func1on, the reliance on so-‐called
scien1fic evidence, randomised controlled trials and so on, where they say there’s an objec1ve
evidence for this, and if only human beings prac1sed and followed these methods they will find the
right way of thinking, and their thinking will control their disrup1ve affect, and then life will be
beIer. Everyone will be socially adapted and will be happy. This may not be the case.
This certainly wouldn't be the reading of our situa1on from a buddhist point of view. In the Bible,
Jesus says, 'Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.' This is preIy much the buddhist
posi1on. Now, who is going to forgive them? We’re not asking god to forgive them. We have to
forgive them.
That is to say, if you imagine that people are more sorted than they are, who is responsible for the
trouble that arises? Is it these people, because they are locked in their procedures, their paIerns,
their assump1on. Or is it us? If we take people as being more sorted than they are, we’re not
working at their growing edge, we’re asking them to leap over a hoop that we’ve set much too high
for them.
So part of compassion is to perceive other people’s situa1ons as clearly as possible. The more we
explore ourselves and we understand the nature of stupidity... which, again, in a buddhist sense is
not a cogni1ve stupidity, but rather the tendency to reify, to take situa1ons as solidly real, to fall in
love with the dream. We know this in ourselves. We know about aIachment, about longing, desire,
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feeling that we need an object to complete us. We know about aversion, the feeling that bad
situa1ons are going to destroy or contaminate us. We know about pride. Feeling that we’ve got
something that’s important and precious and it needs to be treated with respect. We know about
jealousy, in which we fear that what is ours is now under aIack due to someone else’s desire for the
object to which we are aIached.
There are many, many other afflic1ons that are outlined in the literature, but these basic five we can
know in ourselves. We can then start to know them in other people, as well. When we see them in
opera1on, simply poin1ng them out is not going to make much difference. Some of us have known
about these things opera1ng in ourselves for a very long 1me, that intellectual understanding has
not necessarily brought about a great deal of change, so the idea that you simply point out
someone’s faults and they say, 'Oh, thank you so much. I never thought of that. Marvellous.'
The word trust, in a sense, is about abandoning responsibility. When you do trust exercises, and you
stand on a chair and fall off it, and people in the group catch you ... it’s a sense that if I give up
responsibility for myself, something will be there to catch me.
From the point of view of dzogchen, the only thing that could be trusted in this way would be the
vajra, the unborn, indestruc1ble buddha nature. The nature of our natural state. Everything else,
because it is dynamic and changing, will be unreliable because you cannot necessarily predict how
things will be. We can’t predict how other people will be, situa1ons will be, the world economy will
be. If you are traveling home this aVernoon, you don't know what the traffic will be like. The roads
could be very busy, or they could be quite peaceful. It can be busy in a place you don't expect, and
peaceful in a place you don't expect. We don't know. We know very liIle.
So interpersonal dzogchen, being in the prac1ce with others – especially with others who have no
connec1on with the prac1ce, who you can have no thought or assump1on that they're doing
something, that they're developing themselves, or trying to awaken in any way – involves a very
precise sense of people’s limit, and moving towards their limit. Our job is always to find where the
other is in their territory, and not expect them to come to our territory.
In the Mishnah Jewish commentary, it says of one person with regard to another, 'If you take the first
step towards me, I’ll walk the rest of the way towards you,' and I think that’s a very important idea.
That, just by being in the experien1al field with another person, in a sense they’ve taken the first
step. They’ve entered our existence. So, what is our responsibility? A very big obstacle at this point is
the no1on of fairness, the no1on, 'Why should I? Why does it always have to be me who does it?
Why don't the other people do more?' The earth's not flat, the world's not fair.
So, given that it’s not fair, it’s very helpful if we drop it this thought all together, and we just think,
'This is what needs to be done,' and we do it. Why do we do it? Because it’s our prac1ce. We’re not
doing it as a means to an end. It’s not a business deal. We’re not trying to score points over the other
person, or build up some kind of scorecard to accumulate merit and wisdom. You can also think of it
in that way, but it’s much fresher just to experience the movement of energy.
How much energy do we have? Well, we have our own condi1oning. We have our physical condi1on
and so on. But it’s also possible, if you stay fresh, to find infinite resources of energy in yourself, even
if you’re sick or unwell. If you don't aIend to these limits, if you don't limit or condi1on yourself by
these beliefs, more is possible, more is possible, and that 'more' is impermanent, and when it arises,
it arises, and then it’s gone.
Why would we want to do that? Because, for our side, we live in these cages. We live in the beliefs
that we have about ourselves, that we started to unpack, and that you can go on examining for
yourself every 1me you catch nega1ve or restric1ve thoughts about yourself, beliefs that you can’t
do something, or beliefs on the other side that you have to have something and otherwise you’re

P a g e | 74
going to be upset. We can become aware of these cages, and start to walk through the walls of them,
because the walls are always made just of thoughts and beliefs. They are not real, they are not solid.
If we look around, we find other people doing the things we can’t do.
In terms of the prac1ce, taking risks for ourselves and going the extra mile, doing the extra bit, it’s a
huge advantage to us, and the most important thing in that is: don't count the cost. Switch off the
meter. We’re not a taxi, you know. Our business is running, we’re moving. We’re dynamic creatures.
In Tibetan, we’re called dro wa, which means ‘to be moving’. So, moving with others, seeing others
as an opportunity for us to find out more of ourselves by revealing ourselves anew into the situa1on,
this is a beau1ful giV. So, in that sense the limita1ons of others is a perfect opportunity for us.
However the view we are following would indicate that 'I am not going to be limited by the limit of
the other, for the freedom that I develop in not being limited by that limit has no limit.’ If I try to keep
myself safe by developing power over the other I make for myself a prison with golden bars. What
am I going to do with power over the other person? That situa1on is gone, and then we're into
something else, and we're into something else so we need the freedom to respond to the new
situa1on.
It’s important to step out of some kind of game theory, some kind of strategic planning and working
out moves, and just being in the freshness of the situa1on. There are many, many stories of this in
the Tibetan tradi1on.
Many of you will know the story of A1sha’s cook. A1sha was an Indian monk and a great scholar, and
he was invited to Tibet in the eleventh century. Ge_ng to Tibet at that 1me was a long, long journey.
You could have horses for some of the way, but you also had to walk up these mountain paths. If any
of you have been in the Himalayas and you’ve been on these old-‐fashioned paths, they’re quite
scary. They’re very narrow and so on.
Anyway, he got all the way to Tibet, it’s a different culture. He’s teaching the dharma, and the people
would come to see him and he would invite them to eat, and someone said to him, 'You know, what I
don't understand, you are a very great lama, but the food you eat is terrible and your cook is always
insul4ng you. Why do you keep this cook with you?' And he said, 'Oh, this cook is very useful to me,
because everyone else is very nice and very sweet to me so I can develop the illusion that I am an
important person. But because my cook treats me so badly, I have to remember that I’m nothing at
all.' That’s very helpful.
So learning to make crea1ve use of the environment, to see every situa1on as an opportunity for us
to develop flexibility, responsiveness, and moving away from trying to control the situa1on and
especially trying to keep establishing the familiar posi1ons that we know, is absolutely central.
Okay. Are there any last ques1ons?
Student: What you men1oned, to do the first step toward the posi1on or the energy of the one you
are facing … this idea is the same a_tude as you have when you prac1se tonglen, isn't it?
James: Exactly, it's very like in tonglen.
This is a very interes1ng area, because in tonglen we exchange what is posi1ve and happy and
successful in our life for the difficul1es and pains and sufferings in other people’s lives. One reason to
do this is because the root of our path is about integra1on, about not being separate.
In the course of our own life, of course, we all get some troubles and difficul1es. Some things work
out well, some things don’t work out well, but there are many things that we are protected from, so
we’ll never really know whether we can manage them or not. So when we prac1ce tonglen, we open
P a g e | 75
ourselves to unimaginable sufferings. We bring the pain of people who are quadriplegic, who are
always paralysed. As we dissolve that into ourselves, we can imagine the suffering and the pain, the
shame of always having someone wipe your ass for you, all these difficul1es that many people suffer
from.
The ques1on, then, is how to inhabit that, because part of tonglen is we exchange posi1ve for
nega1ve, but at the end of it if we’re s1ll thinking, 'This is posi4ve and that’s nega4ve,' it hasn’t been
so successful. It’s like the story of the monk with the white stones and the black stones. The more we
do tonglen, at the end of it, the good and the bad should be the same because, actually, we’re not
afraid of the nega1ve. We can inhabit our pain and other people’s pain and accept it.
Now, acceptance, here, is not the same as approving of it, colluding with it, saying, 'Oh, it doesn't
maCer.' Pain is pain. No one likes pain. But pain is not defini1ve of the end of the world, it’s not
defini1ve of the end of myself. It’s not an insuperable barrier. That is to say, I am s1ll me, although
this has happened, and this takes you right to the very heart of the understanding of the buddha
nature: because the mind’s nature is vajra, it’s never been scratched or moulded or changed in any
way. No maIer what happens we remain indestruc1ble. The quality of the reflec1on doesn't damage
the mirror.
Trauma is the impac1ng of one situa1on on another. Trauma means damage, doesn't it? It means a
wounding. So a wound is a lesion that goes, in the physical sense, through the skin’s surface of the
body; some cut is made, something is fragmented inside. We all have this sense of damage, maybe
we’ve broken a bone in our life, or some bit of us that used to work doesn't work so well now, and
we see that that’s a limita1on. What is limited? Our energy is limited.
When I was younger I didn’t need glasses, as I get older I wear glasses in order to read because my
eyes don't work as well as they did, and even with the glasses I like to have a bright light so that I can
read more easily. There we can see there is some degenera1on of the organs. This is a quality of
energy. We are lucky to live in 1mes where we have op1cians and we get glasses and then it’s not so
bad. An an1dote has been applied to the deficit.
But if we stay with the deficit itself, and we think 'I am diminished,' what does that mean? These are
the points where you can really see whether you’ve understood the dharma or not. When we get
upset that we are diminished, this is the discrepancy between my ideal, my idea of who I am, who I
should be, and what I actually get, and the ageing process brings many experiences of that. So, best
to let go of the ideal.
How can we be diminished? This is what it means in the text when it says 'If you go to hell, go to
hell.' In tonglen we get the opportunity to be close to terrifying experiences, horrifying experiences,
and we get the experience of trying to rest in the state of emp1ness. Without blocking the full
impact of the experience, we try to establish the direct sense, 'nothing is damaged.' Because our
true nature is emp1ness, it’s indestruc1ble. The personality can be very strongly affected. The body
can clearly be very strongly affected. 'What is the root of my iden4ty? Who am I?' This is really what
we’ve been looking at over these last few days.
So a prac1ce like tonglen, which many of you have done here in the past, helps us to keep checking,
'Am I playing a game or am I really integra4ng? Am I willing to be with whatever my life situa4on is?'
and the fact of some life situa1ons is that many things are impossible. Some people are looking aVer
rela1ves who are not well in various ways. That means going on holiday is difficult, having a social life
is difficult. You could say, 'Oh, I’m not having the life I wanted to have.' That brings us back always to
the point, ‘Can I live the life I have? ‘

P a g e | 76
All the fantasies we have of how to make things different, all the possibili1es of mobilising our
capacity to change and control may not be so useful. Clearly, you can persecute yourself with a
fantasy of things being different, so maybe giving that up makes sense.
But, if you could change an external situa1on, why wouldn't you do that? Well, because a lot of the
1me we don’t have the capacity to change external situa1ons. If you prac1se with the smaller
problems, if you prac1se staying with them, being present with them, if big problems come, that will
get beIer. But if you always mobilise your resources to make improvements, then when big crises
come you don't know what to do. Because now you’re in a situa1on where you can’t mobilise, and
the very effort of trying to change the situa1on simply makes you more agitated, because you feel a
failure, and stupid, and so on. So tonglen is very helpful.
The fantasy of mastery is pervasive. It’s also very present in the teachings around the Buddha. The
story that when Prince Siddhartha was s1ll in his mother’s belly, in Queen Maha Maya’s body, the
court astrologer said to his father, 'Your son will either be a great world emperor, or a great yogi, a
great spiritual teacher,' and on the basis of that, the king created a special educa1on to protect his
son from anything that would lead him in a religious path because he wanted him to be a king.
This is an archetypal myth of the great person. There are myths of this kind in all cultures, and it’s the
idea that if you realise something, you will have power. Indian religion is absolutely full of stories of
siddhi and riddhi and how through the power of tapasya, of aesthe1cism, the great ancient yogis
were able to coerce the gods into gran1ng blessings or boons, par1cular giVs, and so on.
From the point of view of dzogchen, this is just like a children’s fairy tale. These are myths of power.
In Germany, you’ve experienced totalitarian power and it’s not much fun, and especially the people
in East Germany, who had one kind of totalitarian power and then another kind of totalitarian power.
Whatever factory it comes from, it doesn't taste very good.
So re-‐examining the nature of power is very important, because the fantasy that, somehow, 'If I get
enlightened I will be able to do this and that and that,' it’s like a child saying, 'When I grow up, I’m
going to have a big car and I’m going to have a horse, and I’m not going to go to bed, and I’m going
to eat ice cream,' and blah, blah, blah, blah.
'When I’m enlightened, the rainbows will come out of my head, and anyone who experiences these
rainbows will develop wings and fly up to paradise.' I have read these texts myself, and I read them
with my hands like this and tears coming out of my eyes, because they’re very beau1ful. Just as
when I was a small child I used to wait for Father Christmas, and on Christmas morning I would go
down very early to look under the Christmas tree.
There is nothing wrong with these things. We have to know what they are: they are ways of
channeling and direc1ng energy. But if you look at your mind, you can see power is an illusion.
Awareness is very different from power, awareness gives rise to power. There’s a term rigpai tsal, the
energy of awareness. This is what all of our thoughts and feelings are, but this is the power of
par1cipa1on, of engagement, of mee1ng. It’s not the power of dominance, control, pseudo-‐security,
and so on. This is very important, I think, to remember.
Okay, shall we do some final prac1ce?
Three Aa practice
Dedication of Merit
དགེ་བ་འདི་ཡིས་Dར་5་བདག།
P a g e | 77
GE WA DI YI NYUR DU DAG
ཨོ་$ན་F་མ་འ@བ་Gར་ནས།
OR GYAN LA MA DRUB GYU NAE
འ=ོ་བ་གཅིག་+ང་མ་Iས་པ།
DRO WA CHIG KYANG MA LU PA
དེ་ཡི་ས་ལ་འགོད་པར་ཤོག།
DE YI SA LA GO PAR SHO
By this virtue may I quickly aCain the glorious Guru's stage, then may I put all beings without even
one excep4on, on that same stage!

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P a g e

Eifel Retreat, Days 2 and 3

2-­‐5 April 2009

Transcribed by Anne Conn

Edited by Barbara Terris

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

… In dzogchen, nothing can spoil medita4on except not medita4ng. …

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Table of Contents

Refuge prayer and the bodhisattva vow ...........................................................................................1

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Refuge prayer and the bodhisattva vow

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

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Refuge Prayer and Bodhisattva Vow

DRO LA PHEN CHIR SANG GYE DRUB PAR SHO

Through the virtue of practicing generosity and the other perfections

Simple focusing practice

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

How we can get lost

Four Noble Truths

Causes and circumstances

'Oh, you haven’t been on your bicycle for a while.'

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Four stages of karma

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Consciousness and awareness

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Are there any thoughts or ques1ons about that?

James: But progress towards what?

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

How our assump+ons constrain us.

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

The importance of lineage and transmission.

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Is there anything enduring and unchanging?

Okay, we try that for a while.

Three Aa practice

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Three Aa practice

Three Aa practice

Opening to the sky

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Questions about practice

Student: Do I develop the observer by observing it?

Attachment and identity.

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Reﬂec4on and discussion.

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

James: Well why would you worry?

Student: Because anxiety arises...

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Story about two disciples who understood differently

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

Grasping at the sense one has an inherent self

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

The meaning of 'emptiness'

www.simplybeing.co.uk ©2009 James Low

The ego is like the mafia

How energy manifests

2-‐5 April 2009