How I live the practice

[Guest guest]

My friend b, is on vacation, and though he is presently non-posting, I miss

him and would like to share his gift of humor, his writing skill, and

wisdom.

 

)))))Shawn

 

 

 

 

How I Live The Practice

 

I take pride in neither laziness nor hard work.I may have wasted the wise

instructions but such nostalgia only brushes a fanciful veneer over what

never happened. Although I haven't visited frightening burial grounds, I

haven't seen any place more frightening than attitudes based on the poisons

of emotional reactivity and the ensuing rituals of rejection spawned from

fixation of identity on the separate self-image. To these, I apply practice

the way lingam meets yoni:the eight concerns of happiness and unhappiness,

gain and loss, fame and obscurity, respect and disdain dissolve like a

rainbow.The poisons of reactive emotions becomes a cool drink, and thinking

that attaches to reactive emotions releases itself into its own nature.

Wherever I am, I engage in ordinary actions with few illusions of

self-will. Free from the distraction of purposefulness, I mix and stir the

subtle points of the wisdom teachings with everything that arises through

the gates of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and thinking.

This is of course to no avail, yet wasting time conscientiously is a

life-long art. I know that everything, good and bad, is a friend of the

natural. Everything I do conducts a current of various energies expressing

themselves as the play of complementary chaos and order, implicating nobody.

In the burial grounds of terrifying pattern-based existence, the fabulous

cities of enchanting sensory pleasures, the seclusion of transcending misery

in the lesser ways, the forests of appearances that have no independent

existence, the practitioner who knows the nature of things wears the hat

that keeps falling off his shrinking head, which certain comedians call " The

Fez of Stable Awakening Mind " . Such a practitioner enters power assembly

gatherings wearing superfluous earrings of knowing sound as empty, a chintzy

necklace of the amusing recitation of monosyllabic spells, dime-store

bracelets of the three vows predicated upon getting to the bottom of

intention, action, and experience, his forehead smeared with ashes of

self-arising understanding, and the belt of compassion and renunciation of

the emotional/sexual contraction. I wave the party favor that is the union

of method and understanding, and sound the hand drum of indestructible

original sound without copyright infringement or neighborly nuisance. From

the skull cup that preserves the bliss of holding smooth round things in my

hands I eat the ambrosia of whatever arises in the six senses, quench my

thirst with the poison of attachment to duality, and extract nourishment

from the debit cards of reactive emotions. I wander in the state of no

coming or going. The zombies of appearances of the eight concerns, the

cannibal demons of compliance with social convention, the sirens of

meaningful projects to undertake, the whole crowd of emotional reactions to

anything that arises, all become my paper airplanes tossed from a port hole

on a green ghost ship and swept away in the vast ocean of pure being. This

meeting in which form and emptiness are inseparable I rely on as the supreme

wink of the eye, at home or on the road. In non-referential great

compassion, Emptiness supreme in all aspects Is naturally present, arising

on its own, neither joined nor separate. I rely on the totality of the

universal functioning to perpetually manifest as the supreme Mahamudra,

regardless of which channel gets the highest ratings. I tired of

conventional thinking and activities and so I simply dumped them. I entered

the way of the fool. Ordinary forms and sounds neither are nor are not what

they appear. I don't care to make a distinction between private and public

behavior. I don't wander in the boat of external forms. The exercise of

awareness of this present activity is enough to keep us all

occupied. Everything I do in body, speech and mind serves others.

Nevertheless, there are no others. Thatís what I call service. Not

contaminated by holding to other and self, natural presence arises on its

own. This is the great power assembly that benefits others. All samsara and

nirvana are pure in this single mandala. Holding to ground, path and result

subsides. Knowing that deities and mantras are not separate and have one

taste I come to the place where all buddhas are not separate and I

experience directly the presence of naturally arising co-emergence. All

beings are originally fully awake. This seeing of the unseeable, whatever

you may call it, is fun!

 

Woohoo!

 

 

~Tsulak Trengwa

 

(Transliteration by b)