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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,658
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - beyond Truth and Falsehood. 1
#23949147 - 12/22/16 01:16 PM (7 years, 1 month ago) |
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Introduction To... Longchenpa's - Maya Yoga - Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment - a Book of Dzogchen Precepts
As the tradition of Dzogchen has gained ground in the West, it appears to have produced two quite distinct responses. At best, a recognition of the natural state of being-the nature of mind as known in direct experience of it-is induced. Taking 'the position of consequence', yanking themselves up by their own bootstraps as it were, those who know the Great Perfection simply by hearing an introduction to it recognize the spaciousness of pure presence.
Then another response, from people who approach reality timorously, is awe and devotion. They meet the lineage-holding lamas like petitioners in the court of an oriental despot, knocking their heads on the floor, begging for a crumb from the high table. Then transported to a high level of radiance through the lama's grace, the supplicant basks in splendour until the moment arrives to return to the source for more.
The first response enables and enacts the immediate recognition of radical Dzogchen while the second reaction is a precursor of the gradual path of latter-day, elaborate or cultural, Diogchen. The first relies upon existential experience and the precepts of atiyoga contained in the ancient texts and the second depends upon a relationship with the father-guru, upon mahayoga meditation practi~e and the religious life. In the first case an assumption is made that the nondual awareness of pure presence is the natural state of being and that nothing can be done to attain what is already reality.
In the second case, the least confident and most humble of our assumptions about ourselves is that we are hopelessly lost in the mire of this birth yet we have glimpsed a bright light out there, far away in the distance, and we have identified an honest guide able and willing to direct us on the path towards it. The view on the second path-that we live in the relative world of shadows and seek the absolute realm of light-is in apparent discord with the radical Dzogchen view-that we are already in that inexpressible nondual reality in which absolute and relative are one. The difference seems as basic as that between chalk and cheese; the gradual and . the immediate paths are incommensurate.
In Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment Longchenpa allays the suspicion that the gradual and immediate paths are mutually exclusive, and that people from different worlds entertain them. Rather, the difference appears to be between different personality types recognising the same reality but from different perspectives, describing the same experience in radically different terms leading to different responses and different approaches.
This distinction is surely quite superficial like the difference between the two sides of a single coin. In the view of Longchenpa in this treatise the gradual and the immediate paths are the two sides of that same coin; they may be as far away as the earth is from the sky but they complement each other.
If mahayoga with its elaborate ritual meditation practices of visualization and recitation is taken as the method of partial fullfilment of the goal of the gradual path and atiyoga is seen as the source of the precepts of immediate realization, then likewise mahayoga and atiyoga complement each other and on the graduated path may be performed either in series or in parallel.
In The Trilogy of Finding Comfort and Ease, the first two volumes focus upon mahayoga and elements of the gradual path while Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment provides the keys to immediate realization and the radical view. In this introduction I have tried to highlight the atiyoga aspect. The admission of the unity of gradual and immediate allows the humility to admit to feet of clay and to the function of purification. It also allows the confidence based in the undeniable existential experience of Garab Dorje's first incisive precept that is conducive to maintenance of the secret praxis of maha-ati. So this short treatise of Longchenpa is a manual of primal awareness in the great Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. It provides the precepts that may instantly illuminate the buddha-reality that is our ordinary everyday experience. It asserts that we are presently under the spell of magical illusion and that by recognition of that fact we are, instantaneously, released from a conceptual cage into an enchanting reality that is pure pleasure itself. This is a manual defining human life lived as enchantment, where the ignorance of delusory samsara proves to be the insight into the Great Perfection of illusion. We begin in the heat of desirous attachment to our egoistic selves, and merely through recognition of our deluded condition, chilled out in the birthless and deathless space of reality, we find respite and release in the magical display of our everyday life.
The working title of this book has been Chilling Out in Enchantment, a rendering of the Tibetan title that expresses the name of the cool contemplation behind all our moment-to-moment twenty-four/seven experience. It is such contemplation that provides the sense of vast mystery, exhilarating and uplifting, to release us from the heaviness and density, the confusion and pettiness, of samsaric existence.
That title also carries the sense of a resolution of the dilemmas of dualism in a respite of relaxed, carefree refreshment, basking in the sun of intrinsic awareness. Through the precepts contained in this manual, published as Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment in deference to the scholars who have worked on the text before me, we familiarize ourselves with the natural, illusory, state of being, this state of wonderment, living a selfless phantasm of sensory pleasure and aesthetic appreciation.
This book, therefore, is about the nondual reality of Dzogchen as magical illusion, as maya, and I will use that exalted, profound, vernacular Sanskrit word in this introduction to evoke the magic and mystery, the light and the love, of Dzogchen. Maya, then, is the very nature of Dzogchen, nondual reality itself. In Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment the Tibetan master Longchenpa-a second buddha-in eight chapters of high Tibetan poetry elucidates and evokes that reality while exhorting us to recognize its immanence through the Dzogchen precepts of atiyoga.
The precepts that govern the recognition of the maya of everyday existence, the maya of ordinary mind, are woven like a magic spell into the elucidation of the eight famous analogies of maya collated by the great Indian pandita Nagarjuna-another second buddha.
All our experience of life is like last night's dream; it is like a magic show of an infallible master magician; it is like optical illusion; it is like a mirage in the desert; it is like the reflection of the moon in water; it is like an echo reverberating between mountain crags; it is like a cloud land which we call the city of the gandharvas; and it is like an apparitional emanation, like a phantom or a ghost.
Thus this book is a manual of atiyoga that opens the door into Dzogchen's nondual reality, the reality of maya - magical illusion, happiness.
That concludes the Introduction to Lonchenpa's masterpiece... If you are true seeker , a yogi, a yogini, a monk, a priest, a shaman, a student, a healer, a existentialist, a buddhist, a christian, a muslim, jewish - or any other religious tradition - a psychonaut, a layman , an atheist, an agnostic , or beyond all labels, or just a man ... All those with the eye to see I entreat you to preface respectfully , composed on the coming new year to this masterpiece that showed me that before I even finished a a chapter of - It dawned that my deepest wish had always been true.
Longchenpa:
"To understand what the buddhas mean in their impeccable revelation that all our experience has two dimensions of magical illusion, I have distilled here the elixir of sutra, tantra and oral instruction. Listen while I impart it to you in the light of my personal experience. "
http://promienie.net/images/dharma/books/longchenpa_maya-yoga.pdf (Link to Book In PDF format)
May this contribute to the Awakening of the Pure Mind of All Beings
With Love,
- The Blind Ass
Edited by The Blind Ass (01/01/17 04:03 AM)
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beforethedawn
Registered: 06/19/16
Posts: 1,859
Last seen: 4 years, 5 months
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - Truth [Re: The Blind Ass]
#23972068 - 12/31/16 11:36 PM (7 years, 29 days ago) |
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I'm really pissed off they worked it all out before me.
-------------------- Hostile humankind Can't you see you're fucking blind?
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,658
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - Truth [Re: beforethedawn] 1
#23972326 - 01/01/17 03:56 AM (7 years, 29 days ago) |
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I relate! Once I became aware of "It" I delved deeply into this and that discovering the same thing over and over but kept looking for something, feeling stymied - hence my user name, here is a quip that described my search for "It" perfectly:
"The unwise in their naivete, craving truth, are beguiled, lost in the jungle of five fold sensory illusion. Be aware of the error of fixating on something that is nothing! "
- that described my situation and condition well enough!
But now having grown realized that primordial confidence is never lost, and in doing so have recovered an indestructible trust and faith in our innate power, limitless potential. Being self imprisoned by this fictive world... & suffering the delusive appearances of an ignorant sleep comes from not realizing we are presently under the spell of magical illusion, and the recognition of this by direct intuition of that which enlightens, is to be instantly released from a conceptual cage into enchanting blissful reality - our home, primordially pure nature.
Longchenpa's eight analogies-dream, magical illusion, echo, apparition, etc. - serve as illustration of the 'always already' reality of the immediately cognizant experience of all events as maya, ever 'absent yet apparent'.
Tasting it for yourself directly is the sweetest bliss, like a secret wish come true, and I am relieved our ancestors elucidated it so beautifully and masterfully. Now I can simply find "it" without looking, relaxing into comfort with ease, living the dream.
-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
Edited by The Blind Ass (01/01/17 04:00 AM)
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beforethedawn
Registered: 06/19/16
Posts: 1,859
Last seen: 4 years, 5 months
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - Truth [Re: The Blind Ass]
#23972333 - 01/01/17 04:12 AM (7 years, 29 days ago) |
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Wow, my friend! Powerful words, true words, that totally speak to me because I can 100% relate.
Stay in touch!

I'm going to jump into the Mystery tonight, well, now. I'm going to see how far I can "trip out" with this multidimensional stuff.
The Mystery is the bliss.
How did we achieve this?
Stubbornness, I think. Well, I was just stubborn and sought and sought and sought.
-------------------- Hostile humankind Can't you see you're fucking blind?
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,658
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - Truth [Re: beforethedawn]
#23972349 - 01/01/17 04:56 AM (7 years, 29 days ago) |
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Safe Travels to you!
At first we may dream many fearful dreams, but mindful of the dream the fear dissolves of itself; when natural concentration is effortlessly achieved the yogin knows his dream as lucid dream.
And so...
May you relax with your wish into ambivalent space , like that from moment to moment, whatever transformation you desire will be accomplished in an unreal world... and doing this moment to moment may you multiply those forms 10x, 100x and more! to develop the facility to heal wherever needed. And further - travel wherever you wish, to pure lands, or foreign countries, or other personalities and lives where we may see the blessed ones and hear their impeccable words and achieve non dual wisdom, contemplation, and pure vision!
I am going to travel to another city later today and stay there for a few weeks to disentangle my daily life in preparation for this new year so I wont be around the Shroomery till I get back. But please Let us know your trip!
-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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LunarEclipse
Enlil's Official Story


Registered: 10/31/04
Posts: 21,407
Loc: Building 7
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - beyond Truth and Falsehood. [Re: The Blind Ass]
#23973403 - 01/01/17 03:53 PM (7 years, 29 days ago) |
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Cut and paste Ain't gonna cut it Get real And soon
Damn it!
-------------------- Anxiety is what you make it.
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beforethedawn
Registered: 06/19/16
Posts: 1,859
Last seen: 4 years, 5 months
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - beyond Truth and Falsehood. [Re: LunarEclipse]
#24006086 - 01/13/17 01:41 AM (7 years, 17 days ago) |
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Had a read through (not all of it), very good stuff! Good turn of phrase, and the precepts sit well with what I understand and help to clarify it.
-------------------- Hostile humankind Can't you see you're fucking blind?
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,658
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: The Blind Ass: From Seeking to Finding - beyond Truth and Falsehood. [Re: beforethedawn]
#24006414 - 01/13/17 07:23 AM (7 years, 17 days ago) |
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-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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