Narcissus lays his head on the grass by the pool, and then he quietly disappears into the underworld, where he continues to gaze at the image in the waters of the river Styx. Our images, especially those that appear in life and play important roles in episodes of transformation, stay with us forever. Once we have entertained an image, it is always potentially present to our gaze. You visit the Uffizi Gallery and see Botticelli's "Primavera," and then for a lifetime you dream of it or you talk about it frequently as a measure of beauty. Unexpectedly it presents itself in a moment of thought or in a discussion, reminding you of its eternal presence. This fragment of the myth suggests that we might continually make soul out of our narcissism by preserving and tending to the images that have come to us throughout our lives. This is the basis of art therapy or journal-keeping: making a home for certain images that have been transforming. Certain photographs or old letters might be related to the pool of water. Culturally, of course, we are constantly invited into the depths of ourselves by the plays, paintings, sculptures, and buildings of past centuries. Art can be a cure for narcissism. The words "curator" and "cure" are essentially the same. By being the curator of our images, we care for our souls.

It's one of the paradoxes of spiritual practice: we need a path to travel where we already are.  SAKYONG MIPHAM RINPOCHE explains how to create the causes and conditions for realizing the enlightened nature we already possess.

Each time I leave a meditation retreat, I'm struck by the level of speed and stress in our environment.  I'm not just talking about Westerners.  Ther first time I went to Tibet, life there was very simple, but when I returned three years later, cell phones were ringing and the distraction was visible, even while I was conducting ceremonies.  Something else I've noticed lately is  that we're bombarded with bad news.  But the people I admire have always focused on the good news:  that we have in our mind wisdom, compassion, and all the other elements of enlightenment.

While living in stressful times does not ultimately affect our enlightened qualities, it does demand that we become more engaged in awakening them.  To transform the environment, we must begin with our mind.  We can't expect everyone else to change first.  As my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was fond of saying, "It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather."  The process of putting on a pair of shoes is the path of enlightenment.

On the ultimate level, enlightenment is already here, but on the relative level we need to engineer its causes and conditions.  The mind is a neutral situation, like a cotton sheet that we can dye any color we want, but unless we take hold of it, karmic tendencies--whatever habits we've ingrained in the past--will just take over.  The practice of the path is slowly orienting that white cloth and coloring it the way we want.  The path consists of three elements: view, meditation, and activity.

View is our orientation, and how we orient our life is intimately connected with our motivation.  Traditionally, the Buddhist teachings list three kinds of motivation: small, medium, and large. These levels of motivation describe how we evolve on the path of enlightenment.  When we wake up in the morning, where is our mind taking us?  Whatever it is, from motivation, everything else will arise.

If our motivation is small, we will use our day getting the "stuff" we think will make us happy--food, clothing, and friends.  If it's a little bigger, we might add some yoga to make us feel better.  We might even expand it further to think about the karmic consequences of our actions--but it's still all about "me".  With a medium-level motivation, we're no longer so fixated on our own happiness; the basis of our actions is loving-kindness and compassion.  We're maturing.  With the largest motivation, we put the happiness of others before our own.  This is the motivation of the Buddha.  If we get up in the morning and the first thought that comes to mind is, "There are so many sentient beings; even if I amd the last person on earth, I will stay here to help them," that is a very big view.  Motivation is just an attitude, and it's free.  So why not have a big motivation?

Why is view so important? View is how our mind is oriented, and the way our mind is oriented determines what we get.  Our realization is based on the size of our view.  The view of enlightenment is that we are taking charge of our own destiny.  Unless we take the mind where we want it to go, the environment will take the mind where it wants it to go.  

By setting our view every morning, we become very good at supporting ourselves in the second element of the path, meditation.  Meditation is essentially a dualistic process in which we place our mind on an object.  When we place our mind on something, the mind absorbs its qualities, because we're becoming familiar with it.  This isn't particularly a spiritual truth; it's our everyday reality.  For example, if the object is the anger you feel toward your spouse, you become more familiar with anger, soaking up its qualities like a sponge.  In the end, that meditation leads to action.  You yell at your spouse or stomp out of the room.

Meditation is a proactive approach to this reality of mind.  We practice choosing the object rather than being led by whatever thoughts and emotions randomly beckon.  We steep our mind in qualities that lead it forward.  We begin with the stabilization technique called sharmtha, "peaceful abiding, " in which we focus on the breath.  Through this practice our mind becomes settled and workable.  Why is this important?  We may have good intentions, but if we can't control our mind, we can never enact them.  For example, we want to be compassionate but we get discursive, distracted by our mental ups and downs.  Before we can cultivate compassion, we need to possess our mind.  That's what we do in stabilizing meditation, where we calm down and experience the space of mind just being there.  From that, our mind is much less speedy.

The mind resting peacefully has incredible implications.  If you're present for the moment, you're present for your life, and you can therefore observe what's going on.  If you can observe what's going on, you can make judgements, deciding where you want to go.  At this point--known as the present moment--you can change your karma.  You can reorient your whole path, because in terms of the future, you're in the driver's seat.  You are getting more enlightened.  You are waking up.

We actively reorient ourselves in contemplation, the second kind of meditation, known as vipashyana, "clear seeing."  Now we take a thought as the object of our meditation.  For example, we can focus on our motivation, stated very simply:  "I want to meditate," "I want to develop compassion," "I want to tread on the path of enlightenment," or "I want to become enlightened, no holds barred."  At other times we might contemplate a quality--generosity, exertion, discipline, or patience--that could support our motivation.

This is a practice of fabricating our enlightened qualities so that our mind naturally turns in their direction.  We know that we're innately compassionate, and we also know that we don't feel right now because there's a blockage.  So we contrive our buddhanature in order to reveal it.  We call this relative understanding.  That understanding may be brief, but we should not be discouraged .  By becoming familiar with the view, we are clarifying our future.

It's one thing to have the attitude of enlightenment and another thing to act in an enlightened way, which is conduct or activity, the third element of the path.  If we have proper understanding of our motivation and are getting used to our enlightened qualities, chances are we can deal with speed and stress more effectively.  First we can create space in our mind to see where we are.  Then we can reorient ourselves by remembering what we're doing.  That allows us to say, "Sure, I'm tired and in a hurry and my phone is ringing again.  Yet I can stay on the path by sticking with the ten percent of my mind that really wants to do this."  The more we develop the tools to move forward on the spot, the less influence the other ninety percent of our mind will have.  Our karmic tendency to drift into agitation and discursiveness will incrementally decrease.  View, meditation, and conduct give us a way to remember what we're doing and why we're doing it, and then enact our own enlightenment.  As we do that, we are stepping on the path.  We're making progress.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is the spiritual leader of Shambhala, an internation network of Buddhist meditation and retreat centers.  He is the author of Turning the Mind into an Ally and Ruling Your World.

The Mandarin Chinese word "hundun" can best be described as "chaos." The intention of Wuji Hundun Qigong is to consciously introduce chaos into our experience. I once met Nobel Prize laureate Ilya Prigogine who explained his prize-winning theory. He said, "All evolving biological systems must reach their maxim state of perturbation (chaos) before they take the quantum step up to their next higher state of order." He knew nothing of Qigong (consciously) but understood what Master Duan knew intuitively. All our destructive patterns are steeped in the locked and stagnant habits of our lives. Until we can "break" or change those patterns, we are forever trapped and our growth--and health--is limited. Introducing chaos, mixing things up a bit energetically, can promote our natural healing abilities to engage. Even momentary shifts from our patterned "safe zones" can provide us conscious, and unconscious perspective shifts.  

Outwardly, Wuji Qigong is an exercise and stretching system, focusing on synchronizing the breath with slow movements and guided visualizations. Upon deeper study, the transformative nature of this health maintenance modality becomes apparent. Balancing the Taoist and Buddhist traditions of China, Wuji Hundun Qigong seeks to strengthen the body (the mandate of the Taoists) while enhancing spiritual life (the essence of the Buddhist doctrines.) Ultimately, a merging of the two takes place, not intellectually, but through "wu xing" or deep, emotional understanding. Written and oral teaching can only seek to trigger and stimulate you, the true wu xing must come from within--as the truth derives from nature and is constantly accessible. Through cultivating your inner Qi and spirit, you become strong, not as an "individual" against the world but as an integral part of the world; a mirror reflecting light...Sincere practice with an intention to remain receptive is the key...as we come to realize the holistic nature of Wuji Qigong will effect the body, mind, and spirit."

Whether we realize it or not, we are all dreaming the world into being. What we’re engaging in is not the sleeping act we’re so familiar with, but rather a type of dreaming we do with our eyes open. When we’re unaware that we share the power to co-create reality with the universe itself, that power slips away from us, causing our dream to become a nightmare. We begin to feel we’re the victims of an unknown and frightening creation that we’re unable to influence, and events seem to control and trap us. The only way to end this dreadful reality is to awaken to the fact that it too is a dream—and then recognize our ability to write a better story, one that the universe will work with us to manifest.

    We are what we think.
    All that we are arises with our thoughts.
    With our thoughts, we make the world. —BUDDHA

The nature of the cosmos is such that whatever vision you have about yourself and the world will become reality. As soon as you awaken to the power you have, you begin to flex the muscles of your courage. Then you can dream bravely: letting go of your limiting beliefs and pushing past your fears. You can start to come up with a truly original dream that germinates in your soul and bears fruit in your life.

Courageous dreaming allows you to create from the source, the quantum soup of the universe where everything exists in a latent or potential state. Physicists understand that in the quantum world nothing is “real” until it is observed. The distinct packets of energy known as “quanta” (which consist of particles of matter as well as light) are neither “here” nor “there”; in a sense, they are everywhere in space/time until you or I decide to take note of them. When we do so, we tease them out of the web of infinite possibilities and collapse them into an event in time and space. These energy quanta like to link up with each other once they’ve selected a particular form of manifestation. As soon as they manifest, reality becomes fixed: Our reality is “here” instead of possibly everywhere.

But quantum events do not occur in the laboratory only. They also happen inside our brain, on this page, and everywhere around us. Even if they’re separated by millions of miles, or by days or weeks, these quanta of energy remain intimately linked; consequently, if we interact with one, we affect the entire system that this energy is part of. When we access any part of the dream, the great matrix of energy, we can change reality and alter the entire dream.

Modern physics is describing what the ancient wisdom keepers of the Americas have long known. These shamans, known as “the Earthkeepers,” say that we’re dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we’re only able to do this in the very small subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses.

The Earthkeepers I have studied with in the Andes and the Amazon believe that we can only access the power of this force by raising our level of consciousness. When we do, we become aware that we’re like a drop of water in a vast, divine ocean, distinct yet immersed in something much larger than ourselves. It’s only when we experience our connection to infinity that we’re able to dream powerfully. In fact, it’s our sense of separation from infinity that traps us in a nightmare in the first place. If this sounds like circular thinking, you’re right. Which came first, the nightmare or the sense of separation from infinity? The answer is that they occur simultaneously.

To end the nightmare—to reclaim our power of dreaming reality and craft something better—we need more than the recognition of how this process works. We need to have a visceral understanding of our dreaming power and experience it in every cell of our bodies. The intellectual comprehension of our ability to create reality mimics but then forestalls the kind of dreaming we’re capable of. If we don’t get beyond mere intellectual comprehension of this concept, we’ll end up lowering the bar and creating a far less glorious and beautiful experience of the world than what we’re capable of crafting. With a visceral understanding of our power to dream, we realize that we can share this experience of infinity right here, right now, and stop feeling dissociated and disconnected.

Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. is a psychologist and medical anthropologist who has studied the spiritual practices of the Amazon and Andes for more than 25 years.

The Relativity of Perception

"The primordial purity of the ground completely transcends words, concepts, and formulations."

-Jamgon Kongtrul, Myriad Worlds, translated and edited by the International Committee of Khunkhyab Choling

 

The definition of emptiness as “infinite possibility” is a basic description of a very complicated term.  A subtler meaning, which might have lost on early translators, implies that whatever arises out of this infinite potential—whether it’s a thought, a word, a planet, or a table—doesn’t truly exist as a “thing” in itself, but is rather the result of numerous causes and conditions.  If any of those causes or conditions are changed or removed, a different phenomenon with arise.  Like the principles outlined in the second turning of the wheel of Dharma, quantum mechanics tends to describe experience in terms not simply of a single possible chain of events leading to a single result, but rather of probabilities of events and occurrences—which, in an odd way, is closer to the Buddhist understanding of absolute reality, in which a variety of outcomes are theoretically possible.

INTERDEPENDENCE

"Whatever depends on conditions is explained to be empty..."

--Sutra Requested by Madropa, translated by Ari Goldfield

When the first chakra is disconnected from the feminine Earth, we can feel orphaned and motherless.  The masculine principle predominates, and we look for security from material things.  Individuality prevails over relationship, and selfish drives triumph over family, social and global responsibility.  The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine.  We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality.  Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place.  I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, "Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest?  Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.

The work with mirror neurons is proceeding furiously around the world. Christian Keysers and Bruno Wicker have shown that one person's emotions activate another person's mirror neurons [2]. At the University of San Diego Dr. V.S. Ramachandran is studying the link between mirror neurons and autism. In short, our brains are constantly reacting to the environment and literally changing based on the people around us.

“Mirror neurons are a kind of 'neural wi-fi' that monitors what is happening in the other people. This system tracks their emotions, what movements they're making, what they intend and it activates, in our brains, precisely the same brain areas as are active in the other person,” Goleman explains. “This puts us on the same wavelength and it does it automatically, instantaneously and unconsciously.

..we are tempted to give up when we find no simple remedy for the degenerative forces sweeping across our planet.  Yet in moments when we can reach out and celebrate life's beauty, in spite of its pain or sorrow, we discover something sweet indeed--our own wild and beautiful heart.

According to sacred tradition, the heart is not something emotional or sentimental; Hinduism and Buddhism regard it as the path essence; while Sufism understands it as a divine subtlety that reveals the deepest truths.  It is a doorway leading into the core of our being-- the living presence of spirit and soul.  When our heart breaks open,  breaks through to this deeper core, we waken from this paralysis into a greater depth of soul, and along with that, a deeper love for this world.

For if our heart gives rise to universal compassion, it is in our soul that we love particulars--this face, this grove of trees, this neighborhood, this world.  And it is our soul that suffers when, for instance, we see a beautiful, wild piece of the earth fall prey to yet another condo development or shopping mall.  Our heart might feel compassion for this injury, our spirit might recognize it as a part of the larger life and death of the cosmos, but in our soul, which so loves the particulars, we grieve or rage for this assault on earth's beauty.  It is important to let ourselves feel this kind of passionate response.  Otherwise, our soul too grows numb, just like the paved-over patch of earth.

To avoid going numb when encountering the pain of the world, we need access to the warrior within, the one who can ask:  "What deeper resource is this adversity calling on me to bring forth?"  In learning to make use of suffering to cultivate our capacities for strength, vision, love, faith, or humor, we forge the vessel of soul and begin to free ourselves from resentments or depression about the state of the world.  And we may find that the earth in her plight is calling us to waken like this, and that as we do so, she awakens as well, through us.  In this way, the broken-hearted warrior is able to keep on loving, in spite of everything.

When the heart breaks open, it marks the beginning of a real love affair with this world.  It is a broken-hearted love affair, rather than the conventional kind based on hope and expectation.  Only in this fearless love that can respond to life's pain as well as its beauty can we be of real help to ourselves or anyone else in this difficult age.  The broken-hearted warrior is an essential architype for our time.

As we engage our somatic crisis, whatever it may be, we realize that embodied meditation is a very different and far more fruitful way to practice than the disembodied path we have been following.  But this leaves us wondering just how to carry out our meditation in an embodied manner and inhabit our body in practice.  Most fundamentally, meditating with the body involves paying attention to the body in a direct and non-conceptual way.  This calls for very focused work and requires regularity, steadiness, and an ongoing commitment.  In fact, I would say that once we "catch on" to what meditating with the body is all about, we enter a path that will unfold as long as there is life.  At the same time, the experiential impact of the work is immediately felt, so there is confirmation of the rightness of what we are doing and as an evolving natural trust in the process that is beginning to unfold.

Meditating with the body involves learning, through a variety of practices, how to reside fully within our bodies.  What we are doing is not quite learning a technique, not quite learning how to "do" something.  Rather, we are readjusting the focal length, the direction, and the domain of our consciousness.  Thus, we gradually arrive at an awareness that is actually in our bodies rather than in our heads.  It's not something you actually learn to do; it's a way of learing how to be differently.

Forming the core of the training is a corpus of perhaps fifty "somatic protocols" that are arranged in several main groups.  One set of practices has to do with learning how to begin developing a pattern of relaxation within the body.  Another focuses on cultivating a relationship with the earth underneath.  A third attends to discovering awareness of the interior of the body.  A fourth concerns locating internal tension and learning how to release it.  A fifth group involves cultivating a sense of the inner space or silence of the body.  A sixth is oriented toward bring prana, or "inner breath," down to the cellular level.  And so on.  The practices lead people through a rich and multifaceted process of relaxation, developing presence within the body, opening interior awareness, reading the information the body gives forth, learning how to let the body come more and more to life, and finally surrendering to the body as the guide of one's life.  All these aspects are treated in detail in the following pages.  A brief summary of the protocols is given in the appendix.

As one enters the process of body work, it becomes critical to learn how to see in a new way.  As an illustration, I would cite an example provided by Malidoma Some.  Malidoma had been away from his village for a long time.  At the age of three, he had been kidnapped and brought up in a Catholic boarding school.  When he escaped and returned to his home nearly twenty years later, he wanted to get the light going on night.  In the West African village where he was born, though the people didn't have electricity, they had ways of creating light at night if they wanted to.  Still, at night they might say, "Let's turn the lights off so that we can see."  When Malidoma wanted more light, he was told, "No, if we light the lamps, we won't be able to see."  As the village elders explained it, you can't see anything real in the daylight.  The only thing you see in the daylight is what you want to see.  When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story.

It is very much the same way with our body.  We need to turn off the light of what we think, or our diurnal consciousness.  We need to descend into the night, the darkness that is our own body.  When we do so, we discover that it is not neutral or dead, nor is it a space that is just simply there for our consumption and our use.  Within the deep shadows of the body, within its darkness, we begin to discover a world that exists in its own right, quite apart from anything we may consciously think, expect, or want.  We begin to find that the body has its own wants--in a sense, it wants to be seen on its own terms and within its own frame of reference.  This can be a rather surprising discovery  for many of us who, as modern people, are so very alienated from the body.  We can't imagine the idea that the body might be a living force, a source of intelligence, wisdom, even something we might experience as possessing intention.  We cannot conceive of the body as a subject.  And yet, to carry out the body work, this is exactly what we need to do ... 

Some Aboriginal peoples describe Dreaming in terms of the dark side of the moon.  When the moon is not quite full, you see its bright, illuminated side.  You might call it a half moon.  But if you look closely on a clear evening, you can see the dark side, silently shimmering next to the more apparent bright side.  Like me, most people focus only on the bright side and miss the moon's dark face, that is, the Dreaming reality.
The bright side is only that portion of the whole moon that is illuminated.  Focusing only on the bright side of the moon and ignoring the dark side might easily make you think that dark side does not exist, while in fact we need the dark side to represent the whole moon.
The same is true for everything you see.  If you only focus on everyday reality, you neglect the Dreaming.  According to Aboriginal thinking, the Dreaming is the basic substance of the material world.  The Dreaming gives objects the energy that attracts and repels your attention.  If you neglect the Dreaming, you devalue the material environment because you ignore its basis and thus miss half of life.
The power of  the Dreaming is right here, behind the everyday world, as part of every object, the part you sometimes forget to notice.  From the Aboriginal perspective, everyday reality is the bright side of the moon pointing to the power of Dreaming, the moon's dark side.
In spite of my interest and long background in therapy, dreams, and shamanism, I had unconsciously assumed that the busy city and tall buildings killed the Dreaming.  That is probably why, whenever possible, I escaped to the countryside in search of Nature's pristine powers.
Uncle Lewis showed me that the city's reality exists because of the Dreaming.  Without it, nothing would be.  Dreaming is the energy behind everything; it is the life force of all living beings, the power of trees and plants, and the powers of motors, business, and financial centers.
An artist sense the Dreaming in the canvas, paper, and stone and knows that everyday reality is not only concrete.  Leonardo da Vinci wrote that artists should look into peeling plaster walls until they can see images emerging from the shapes of the plaster.  Similarly, Michelangelo called sculpting a processs of bringing out the form that already exists inside the stone.  Artists and aboriginal peoples have developed the ability to see the Dreaming, that is, the power behind the figures you see in your nighttime dreams and everyday reality