Dzogchen Cycles pith description

Oh ooh man we are calling in English we call this programs ocean cycles Hardison's transmission and this is a way of expressing a phrase that Rinpoche came up with many years ago it's actually name that he gave his community a very beautiful name about 4 o'clock in the morning I think in my house a few of us are sitting around zou Chen Ming tick so dou Chen of course is o Chen's oke means great it means complete and it well joke by itself means complete or it means perfect its complete in the sense that everything is included meaning that all of the practices that we are doing in ways that I'll say a little bit more about shortly our part of our imbued with our suffused with Seok Jin and Chen means great so the words o Chen you often see it translated as the great perfection you also see it translated as the great completeness and what it is identifying that name is identifying is that we all of us no matter what we look like from the outside we all of us right now already since forever are a great completeness but we can't see it it's like gold underground you know it's pure gold and there's nothing you have to do to that goal to fix it up but you have to part the earth or it's like a flame in a cup these are actually examples from one of the first text we'll be studying and the flame is fine it's burning it's shining you don't have to you know look for a flame but you do have to open the cup or perforate the cup many many metaphors like this so zou Chen the great completeness is a teaching much like Shawn if you're familiar with Shawn or Saunders in that it's starting point is that already everything that means everything in you and the depths of who and what you already are is perfect and we look at our lives and we that sounds pretty crazy and so we do some investigation and see how we can come to recognize this in ourselves and that's really what the path is about to see what's always been there so joke chin and then Ning tic Ming means heart and tic often is translated as essence sometimes as in this case essence so this phrase heart essence is well known in Tibet and there are numerous hard essence lineage traditions of zou chin in Tibet there is above all for us the long Chen Ying tick hard essence vast expanse our foundational practices that we do various teaching that there are the refuge and bodhichitta that we sing are from jigme lingpa anton rinpoche is considered reincarnation of Jamie Linga jigme lingpa and then so Gor Apache in about the eighth century according to traditional chronologies the mala Mitra about the same time long Djemba in the 14th century ji mailing by in the 18th century Azam Troopa very significant in bringing hard essence vast expanse the long changing take into the 20th century and he was the father as I mentioned of our own oz Impaler Rinpoche and Jade Simha in their previous lifetime so what am I saying I mean as saying if you don't believe past lives you know this won't make any sense to you no I think at the very least we can understand that energetically speaking and in the way that we hold these traditions we feel very very connected to them because we know Rinpoche and he is whatever this might mean to us symbolically or feel that it's literally true he has a profound connection with all of these junctional lineages with the long standing chick and the others that i mentioned and he also has his own lineage called the ascending tick the Luminess so we just call it early the luminous heart drop luminous for instance hard essence a lineage and these are his treasures that he discovered that he will reveal to him in his own mind and that we are now including in our program there was always our intention and hope that we would be able to include it but we couldn't do it until he said we could and so in Tibetan and so Chen Ying tick we can add quarrel Oh which means cycles which is our word so for sure it in English we're calling this programs open cycles it is centered on the long chanting take hard essence vast expense which is a full path from beginning to end it is the most I have heard the most widely practiced Jochen lineage in tibet there certainly are others which are wonderful and we are very much in a non-sectarian spirit in praising this we are not unprecise but you know you have to focus especially in the tibetan tradition there's this constellation of dazzling things over here in this amazing galaxy over here and honestly I know a lot of people who hop from one to the other and they're always sort of high but they're not getting a coherent path and this is that means a stages of the path moving through the stages I mean you wouldn't go to you know you wouldn't take algebra if you didn't know the multiplication table I don't think even now right they're not doing that there there are stages of practice we understand this when it comes to our own education and somehow often at least in this culture you know the the teaching gets unmoored from any kind of actually logical sequencing if people just you know a teacher appears here and they go and do this and they go and do that and that can be great as long as you oh where to put things so we all are teachers and we after them are really very emphatic that we proceed in a way that will actually build build skills and build possibility for us so that's why we call it the adoption cycles now the adoption cycles program itself begins with our week-long retreat in May it's May 5th or May 12th as Harvey said and this what we're going to and we what we're going to do at this particular retreat is the 7 trainings of long chimba launch and Rob chomp fourteenth-century considered the the greatest of the greatest really of nema philosophers and practitioners launch em launch and Rob John is wrote this it's a very short text actually that is the foundation for its open practice he explicit it interestingly enough he includes it in his very very esoteric collections of texts this is a text that is explicitly opening the way and then actually including in itself its ocean teachings and nods erm Rinpoche author member jate taught it twice he told me to teach it because he said it is if somebody has this as an entry way as a training ground he says I'll sign my name to it you would say that once in a while very dramatically I'll sign my name to it you will do well you will really move forth in a good way and indeed we use it with the commentary of G mailing but which has just come out in English I've had it thanks to Courtland doll for a number of years and whenever I've taught the seven trainings I have used it and now you will be able to read it in English and we are also gathering rematches own oral commentary on this you know what jigme lingpa makes very clear in in his discussion of this he uses stories you use little little dramas that we kind of use our imagination around and in the process learn a lot about ourselves which is of course the purpose of any teaching really to I think you know as Sasaki Suzuki Roshi famously said to study Buddhism is to study the self and to realize that what we thought was self oh and to realize that what we thought was self is not what we thought it was but that's what we learn when we study the self so always our intention as practitioners is to learn about ourselves to see what what's going on the good the bad and the ugly and that's why we need friends by the way to hold our hands and to say it's alright when we start seeing you know there's some rotten stuff in Denmark and when it comes out it can be really hard and we need friends we need spiritual friends not just people to drink off our anxiety with but really to look at it and grow from it and shed it finally so one thing that is very clear from the way Jimmy Linga uses these stories is that in doing these seven trainings in actually in each of the trainings we are moving from the sutra phase of practice through tantra and to zilch in itself and in fact the seventh training contains elements that are central to the famous and esoteric and usually very hidden practices of zalem the training in the channels and winds which is another way of training the body once we figured out that we have a body finally and as Westerners there's really a lot to train as we get in touch with more subtle aspects of the body so all of that is in these seven trainings of along chimba that's our first retreat now alongside of that and a very complementary to it there is something called that I've been calling seeing to being so in 2000 it is something which includes everything and he gave me four very very simple principles it was kind of like here's some seeds and I thought about them for a while a long time actually and then in 2007 a semi chim POC and also in the last few years when I've been able to go to China I told him I started teaching it at some of what I've taught here and in California and Portland and Olympia and actually in Switzerland also have been elements from this so you have seen some of it already it's really simple he identifies four faculties that we already have as I've mentioned before and then I have inspired by various things that he has said and and just putting together things in different ways organize these into four stages of seeing so he's just seeing everybody knows how to see in some sense everybody knows so in other words using our senses and when once we see things once we actually have a capacity for paying attention so that within the category of seeing this first phase of these practices all of our attentional practices are included we've done some of them already focusing open attention being part of a field connecting with your body in the process of paying attention all of this is part of what is meant by seeing here it's actually quite rich already but once we can see then we get curious what's this look at it more closely especially what's this Who am I what's going on so they're seeing seeking and as we look into things kind of we realize that things aren't as you know just like ice can melt really anything that we look at turns out to have an interior structure that can open up and show much more space in the situation than we ever thought was possible and so this fires our imagination we use our imagination much as we all do in Tantra also imagine using our imagination our vision and like a river flowing to an ocean very naturally we move through this process of engaging through particularly to these stages as different levels of practices seeing seeking vision and just naturally we land in being which is the heart and soul and so China which is actually a state and orientation that underlies the entirety of the path this is something that becomes very clear in our practice of the seven trainings as I said jigme lingpa takes us in each of them through really all of the stages of the path and we see that everything sometimes they be the the stages of the path are you know pictured and imagined as a kind of ladder or hierarchy and you know we climb up the ladder from Sutra to Tantra it soak in but really my experience and interpretation and I find this very reinforced by Jing mailing but is that really what we see is that so Chen our being our state of being our real nature that nothing could ever change or taint is present in everything it backlights the entire path it's not something that we claw our way towards it's something that we open towards through the different practices that we do so I've caught for that reason seeing so to speak flows into being it's a natural like maybe better than a river I could use the metaphor of a waterfall you know if we just follow the path we will come to this ocean of being that we already are river chase name for this was is one of his names for it in tibetan assim new wrong'd role which literally means something like my nature freeing everything or naturally freeing it's a very sochan phrase one of long chrimbus greatest works has this very same title so imagine my surprise when Rinpoche said that's what this is that actually was a teaching for me to understand how all encompassing this very simple set of principles that he gave me in which I've developed and then as I developed them I ran the by him and to my amazement and delight he was like yeah okay no where do we go from here he was like he was right away right right with it so that is our first retreat let me say something please so I just put a few very short addenda on to what an added one is that we really all have grown up in a book culture in this society and we think of knowledge as formulated on the pages of a book or on the the outlines of a blackboard and actually instruction in Tibet and in particular ended zouk Chen tradition that practice traditions is very very different and it relies on what are called oral quintessential instructions when quintessential means like really you know condensed condensed condensed condensed very very powerful and it's it's good that an sort of just said that the the name of the teachings because really what Rinpoche offered her was for quintessential instructions and the nature of these quintessential instructions that for us as students we take them in but we continue to contemplate them there really are like zip drives that have a kind of infinite capacity for opening so even the name semi wrong dole it's got four syllables the first two semi is nature of mind and the second two are wrong it's a kind of interesting word it can mean natural it could mean self and drawl means liberate you know and actually just translated one way I tend to think of it another way but that's just the richness of the phrase because wrong dole can refer to sort of the and this is pretty much true of some very very profound things in general and Tibetan practice can talk about sign kind of the the path is a path of natural liberation you're naturally liberating into the my nature but it's also the mind nature itself that is naturally liberating us so it's both in a way an effect of our practice it's very natural to liberate into the my nature but also it's actually very nature natural for our main my nature to liberate us and you know we think we're doing a lot of work in la da da da da but from a certain profound perspective our my nature is just liberating us we're not actually doing anything so it's just to say even something short most of these quintessential instructions tend to be quite brief very pithy but they have a lot of depth and can be a source of amazing over and over reflection the other thing and it's hard to really say this in a way hard to describe it and but I do think it's pretty unusual we've seen a lot of sanga's we've seen a lot of teachers and it's it's very very usual for wise Tibetan teachers to dispense knowledge it just is they are fonts of knowledge and then the students imbibe the knowledge it's a little bit really unusual for someone as vastly notoriously talented as odds-on rinpoche to sit down and collegially work with a woman really well a student any student but a woman and a student and so this speaks to a particular relationship that and has with odds-on rinpoche and there's backstory to that which we won't address right now but it really is unusual to hear about this collegial relationship and that this semi rongomai nature naturally liberating you know arises from this collegial relationship it's quite a blessing and you know and does not suit her own horn but there is a kind of historic and religiously significant aspect to that collaboration that just needs to be kind of underlined and put into bold print so now we come I think to the what well that was part of the one that was the first one that's the first part of the what so that's our first retreat we can't wait and we want to tell you now as succinctly because we want to have time to actually talk to you and hear what you're hearing and what questions you have about the program itself and its unique features and its benefits you will find on our dojin cycles landing page the actual outline of the schedule and least for the first year the second two years we're rearranging right now a little bit because they're going to include some of Rinpoche's on ter but just some highlights I think I'll be very brief about this because we want to one of the most unique things about the program well there's two unique things about the program there's the program itself what we're teaching and then there's the structure of the program which Harvey is going to talk about I think we can do that pretty pretty swiftly and then we can hear your questions and so you've heard about the first retreat which is in May then generally are the pattern for this program for the three years is there that there will be a week-long retreat probably usually around the first week of May there will be a fall and a spring weekend retreats for those of you who don't live in Houston you can do this online but for all the reasons that Harvey has said already about the importance of Tsung and community we really we're not just trying to dispense teachings actually we're really seeking to hold and and and encourage and nurture and celebrate and enjoy a community a community of practitioners so we do ask those of you who come into the program that you come once a year if you possibly can so that we'll know you and you will also as Harvey will talk about get a friend a spiritual friend who's a longtime student who can you know kind of help you and support you and your practice let me just say one thing down okay so it definitely is possible to get a transmission via video with via long distance with great spiritual teachers and with great spiritual teachings the blessing power of the teaching stream itself can be conveyed but I recently read a wonderful little snippet and it soaked and Tantra where it said that geese provide quintessential instructions to one another through beating their wings near one another and this is a kind of quintessential instruction and it really speaks to the fact that when we are in a community with one another not only are teachers providing blessings vertically but as geese just by being in a space one with another we are providing quintessential support and energetic support for realization with one another it's tremendously meaningful quintessential instruction to contemplate okay so we do want to have some in-person contact as part of this our fall retreat will be a short practice for accomplishing gora rinpoche from Rinpoche's on our own odds and Rinpoche zoning tick just handed it to me one day and so he has encouraged us to include it here we haven't taught it before but once we do it it is imbued with its adsorption teaching itself however these these surtex are beautiful and simple and exquisite in that everybody will understand it at different levels you know if you have it so chin orientation already you will understand something if you don't you will understand something it's quite short and then in the winter our loss our retreat we will do the the lu-chen the body offering or cheer practice from Jimmy Ling bazan Montreux this is very famous and it's hardly ever taught as far as I can tell and when we mentioned this to Rinpoche he said oh do mine too so we will teach it with he has full he has done a compilation of it which includes some other prayers and on so that's I guess February ish 218 and there will also I think in the second year we will also include the a so guilt from Rinpoche zone SL Ning take transmission and a few people have tasted that but it hasn't been made available until now he has said now is the time and this is just just an exquisite practice yes so that teaches a Dakini practice the the dhakini treasure will be part of the week-long retreat in the second year which will also ii yes my teachings antara that's our Dakini week-long with green tara anybody who's really participated in that has been very very touched and and and influenced it's just very very significant treasure but i think they were going to move on to okay listen yeah so what are is unique and what are the benefits of this program this program is going to include our first and third Tuesday evening teachings and our retreats and these will be continued to be open to all interested in sincere practitioners the program is really meant for people who hope to be able to commit some significant amount of time to daily practice according to every person's individual consideration and that will be slightly different for everyone and in addition the program as a program in addition to the Tuesday evening teachings and to the retreats per se people in the program will have a mentor assigned to them who will be able to consult with individuals about their practice there'll be a live webinar open only to program participants with the two of us every six - eight weeks there we there will be a once a month live facilitated web support discussion group only open to program participants there'll be a listserv dedicated to participants in the program and then once a year people who are in the program will meet with either an or myself personally or by Skype depending on what the logistics are and how this will benefit individuals that people will be able to fine tune their practice and their questions through meeting with their teachers and their spiritual friends and we are we are having a concurrent training program for the spiritual friends these are longtime students who we know well who we have invited to be part of that and we just had our first training on Saturday so they will be getting training in how to work with you and if anything naughty comes up they will also talk with us so we are we're trying to have a you know a real holding practice if you really practice you know it's not always easy going and so we want to we've done all of these infrastructure a lot of discussion and with a lot of important input from Claire actually a program director - so that we want to offer those of you who are committing we are also committing to provide a holding and a structure to support you and and we really are looking to create an online and in-person practice community that in some sense this transcends the limitations of physical location so yes our spiritual friends are an ongoing training with us and as of now we'll probably be able to accommodate somewhere between 50 to 80 participants in the program and so others who can't be in the program can still participate in our two day night's can participate in our retreats but we won't be able to provide the level support to everybody that we just enumerated and so those who aren't enrolled in the program won't be able to have that level of support we will have a waiting list if we do fill up [Music]

Channel: Dawn Mountain Online

Views: 12,224

Keywords: Dzogchen, Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Longchen Nyingthig, Nyingthig, Nyingthik, Longchen, Longchen Rabjam, Jigme Lingpa, Tibet, Tibetan meditaiton

Id: CuGpqi9WeLM

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2017