totally stiff; then it is nothing but an unyielding piece of animal skin. It is the same way with a human being’s attitude. We must soften our hearts, and this takes deliberate effort. We need to make ourselves gentle, peaceful, flexible, and tame, rather than being undisciplined, rigid, stubborn egocentrics.
This softening of our heart is essential for all progress, and not just in terms of spiritual practice. In all we do, we need to have an attitude that is open-minded and flexible. In the beginning this act of improving our attitude is definitely artificial. We are deliberately trying to be a bodhisattva, to have the compassionate attitude of wanting to help all sentient beings. This conscious effort is vital, because it can genuinely soften us up from deep within. If we do not cultivate this attitude, our rigidly preoccupied frame of mind makes it impossible for the true view of ultimate bodhichitta to grow. It’s like trying to plant seeds in a frozen block of ice atop Mount Everest—they will never grow, they will just freeze. When, on the other hand, you have warmed up your character with bodhichitta, your heart is like fertile soil that is warm and moist. Since the readiness is there, whenever the view of self-knowing wakefulness, the true view of Dzogchen that is ultimate bodhichitta, is planted, it can grow spontaneously. In fact, absolutely nothing can hold it back from growing in such a receptive environment! That is why it is so important to steadily train in bodhichitta right from the very beginning.
The word “Dharma,” in the context of this book, means method. The Dharma is a method to overcome the delusion in our own stream of being, in our own mind—a way to be totally free of the negative emotions that we harbor and cause to proliferate, and at the same time it is a way to realize the original wakefulness that is present in ourselves. There are ten different connotations of the word “Dharma,” but in this context we are speaking of two types: the Dharma of statements and the Dharma of realization. The Dharma of statements is what you hear during a lecture or a teaching session. Within the Dharma of statements are included the words of the Buddha, the Tripitaka, as well as the commentaries on the Buddha’s words made by the many learned and accomplished masters of India and Tibet.
Through hearing the explanations that constitute the Dharma of statements, and through applying these methods, something dawns in our own experience. This insight is called the Dharma of realization, and it includes recognizing our own nature of mind. In order to approach this second kind of Dharma, to apply it, we need the right motivation. Again, this right motivation is the desire to free oneself of negative emotions and bring all beings to liberation. We absolutely must have that attitude, or our spiritual practice will be distorted into personal profit seeking.
Basically there are three negative emotions: attachment, aggression, and closed-mindedness. Of course these three can be further distinguished into finer and finer levels of detail, down to the 84,000 different types of negative emotions. But the main three, as well as all their subsidiary classifications, are all rooted in ignorance, in basic unknowing. These are the negative emotions we need to be free of, and their main root is ignorance.
Someone might think, “I approach Dharma practice because my ego is a little bit upset. My ego is not very intelligent, not quite able to succeed. I come here to practice in order to improve my ego.” That attitude is not spiritual.
Here’s another attitude: “My ego works so hard. I must take care of my ego. I must relax. I come here to practice and become relaxed, so that my ego gets healthier and I can do my job.” That type of attitude is okay, but merely okay; it’s just one drop of a very small motivation.
We can, in fact, have a much larger perspective. As long as we harbor and perpetuate the negative emotions of attachment, anger, closed-mindedness, pride, and jealousy, they will continue to give us a hard time, and they will make it difficult for others to be with us as well. We need to be free of them. We need to have this attitude: “I must be free of these emotions.”
When you leave this retreat at Gomde, I want you to go home naked. You can think that you left your negative emotions there as a donation! Honestly, that is the purpose of such a place. It is not right to go on retreat or hear teachings with the attitude, “I must go there in order to get something; I must achieve something.” Instead, have this attitude: “I am practicing a spiritual path in order to lose something—to get rid of my attachment, my anger, my closed-mindedness, my conceit, my competitive jealousy.”
Next, I would like to suggest that you practice in such a way that you are at ease with the whole process. Gradually expand that attitude of ease to encompass more and more. Once you’ve freed yourself of all these annoying emotions and become naked, it’s not like you can just lean back and take it easy. That is not sufficient. You can awaken a sense of responsibility for all the other sentient beings who are exactly the way you used to be, tormented by negative emotions. You can begin helping them—first one, then two, then three, and finally all sentient beings.
Otherwise, what Gampopa said may come true: If you do not practice the Dharma correctly, it could become a cause for rebirth in the lower realms. That may happen for many people. In fact, it happens more frequently among old practitioners than with beginners.
Someone may relate to Dharma merely as a kind of remedy to be used when confused or upset. This of course is not the real purpose of spiritual practice. In this kind of situation, you do some practice till you have settled down, and then you set it aside and forget all about it. The next time you get upset, you do some more practice in order to feel good again. Of course, reestablishing one’s equilibrium in this way is one of the minor purposes of practice, but it’s not the real goal. Doing this is a way of using the Dharma as if it were a type of therapy. You may of course choose to do this, but I do not think it will get you enlightened. Feel a little bit unhappy, do some Dharma, get happy. Feel a little bit upset, then feel fine, then again feel unhappy. If you just continue like this, holding this very short-term view in mind, then there is no progress. “Last night I didn’t sleep—my mind was disturbed, and the dog was barking next door. Now my mind is a little upside down, so I need to do a session to cure it. Okay, this morning I’ll meditate.”
Do not practice in this way. Dharma practice is not meant merely to make oneself feel better. The whole point of spiritual practice is to liberate oneself through realization and also to liberate others through compassionate capacity. To practice in order to feel better only brings one back up to that same level—one never makes any real progress. At the end of one’s life, one just happens to feel good till the end of one’s last session and then that’s it—nothing happens beyond that. With this attitude of merely feeling good becoming the type of Buddhism that spreads in the West, we may see a huge scarcity of enlightened masters in the future. They will become an endangered species.
Please understand that the pursuit of “feeling better” is a samsaric goal. It is a totally mundane pursuit that borrows from the Dharma and uses all its special methods in order to fine-tune ego into a fit and workable entity. The definition of a worldly aim is to try to achieve something for oneself with a goal-oriented frame of mind—“so that I feel good.” We may use spiritual practice to achieve this, one good reason being that it works much better than other methods. If we’re on this path, we do a little spiritual practice and pretend to be doing it sincerely. This kind of deception, hiding the ego-oriented, materialistic aim under the tablecloth, might include something like “I take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, so I must be pure.” Gradually, as we become more astute at spiritual practice, we may bring our materialistic aim out into the open. This is quite possible: people definitely do it. But if this is how you practice, you won’t get anywhere in the end. How could one ever become liberated through selfishness?
There comes a point when we start to lose faith in the illusions of this world: our level of trust in illusions begins to weaken, and we become disappointed. Using spiritual practice to nurture our ego back into good health while still retaining trust in these illusory aims does not set us free. True freedom does not mean having a healthy faith in illusions; rather, it means going completely beyond delusion.
