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Relatively, Chö cuts through obstacles, severs hope and fear, incises habitual tendency, and chops at the root of chronic narcissism.

Ultimately, it cuts fixation on mistaken, false identity, catapulting one into the luminous open space of original unborn Being—so-called Dharmakaya.

MEET the DEMONS

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Making Sense

If a group of 20 of us looked at a yellow chair, we can be fairly confident that close to 100% will agree that, yes, it is indeed a chair and it really is yellow. So far so good for consensual, shared reality. But already when it comes to the more refined senses of taste or sound, some (like a wine-taster) might be far more sensitive than others. Here we are not talking about likes or dislikes, or opinions, but just the raw sensing of things. Go beyond the myth of those five senses, and ask someone how the room “feels,” or what the “vibe” of a person walking into the room is, and we start to have a problem.

Getting Real

Just like a yellow chair, there are facts about a room, or the person who just walked in. Yes, you could focus on one or another aspect of something, but there really, really is a very specific energy to a room, or a person (albeit a complex one). This is no more a “matter of opinion” than the yellow chair. Here, sensitivity starts to vary enormously, from 0% on up. And for those who can’t directly feel these things, it is hard to accept that others actually can. What happened? While there are a dozen solid reasons why we are “desensitized” to the most obvious things about the world, three main soul-killers seem to stand out.

Over-stimulation

Every year the ads gets louder, more frenetic, more outrageous and more irritating, because advertising humanoids know full well that subtle doesn’t work. A solid blow across the head with a large stick seems to be required. The ongoing trends in music, movies, fashion, marketing, eating habits—all blatantly show how the volume keeps ramping up to break through our progressively hardened senses and shut-down energy bodies.

Over-intellectualiztion

Since the dawn of the “Age of Reason” several centuries ago, we have been pummeled with the dogma of the greatest religion the world has ever known, Scientific Materialism. If you cant sense it, or measure it (with an extension of the senses), it ain’t there. And you are crazy or a superstitious primitive to think it is. Apart from a rationalization for the global colonization of the “heathens” of the non-Western world, this had a tremendous chilling effect in believing our own eyes and ears.

In this way, I would estimate that fully 70% of our human capacity is amputated. The human soul is castrated from its ability to actually feel the sizzling, percolating reality around us, and confined to a stale compendium of things and names.

Over-intoxification

Why humanity likes to poison itself is food for another long discussion. But a world of pervasive neurotoxins, including heavy metals, medical drugs, vaccines, fluorides, several hundred thousand chemical additives, industrial pollutants and self-imbibed poisons such as alcohol, tobacco and artificial sweeteners, take their toll. The cumulative effect is staggering in terms of stupefying and anesthetizing our neurological “wetware.”

Enter the Mystic

This would all be academic, except for one thing. The Vajrayanist, and especially the Chöpa, is a mystic, a practitioner who deals directly with the vital forces of the universe. It is not for the dry intellectual, the emotionally dead, or the sensually challenged. Like Vajrayana as a whole, Chöd is about engaging the world in its most raw, naked form. Chöd starts in reality, not in the stale, shadow world of those who live in the prison of their heads, populated by the sterile thought-forms of others, themselves long departed.

First, Meet the World

Are demons real? For those that encounter them, they are. For those that do not, they can start by walking in nature and feeling the powerful life force that is present there. Refine it down to the stories in a blade of grass or a flower petal. Listen to the wind. Hear the messages spoken to you within the sunbeams, the clouds and the call of the black crow in the morning mist. When life is that real, the spirit beings of the land, the non-human entities and the demonic forces can also be sensed and felt. And if we keep up our Dharma practice, we have the Vajra confidence to meet them on their own ground.
And then let the healing begin!

Stay tuned for Are Demons Real-Part 3

The Uprising

The Chöd practitioner is a Demon Whisperer. Someone who invites the dark side, in order to resolve, heal, and cut through fixation on hope and fear. With this kind of approach, it is no surprise that even even talking about “Internet Demons” is likely to unleash a hornet’s nest of one’s personal and karmic obstacles. But these are, ultimately, harbingers of great blessing. That is the very nature of Chöd.

Thus, after my last blog, an acquaintance admonished me about my mistaken views and emailed a lengthy article explaining the nature of Shunyata, Emptiness, and the state of Mahamudra, in relation to Chöd. The implication was that, well, after all, demons are not real, are they? They are just manifestations of the mind. We need to cut through belief in these phantasmagoria and see the empty, luminous, unimpeded nature of the natural state. Whether this was the intended meaning of the enclosed article, that was its interpretation by my friend. But in fact, this same explanation of demons has been offered by a number of Western authors and scholars, and is even found in in the introduction to the translation of MaChik’s own tome, the Namshay Chenmo or The Complete Explanation.

Selective Reality

Mahamudra is an intrinsic part of Chöd, and writings such as Karma Chagmé’s 17th century Prayer to MaChik (translated by the author in 2006) express this relationship with infinite poetry, depth and subtlety. But the point is this: We cannot use Mahamudra or Dzokchen as a “selective” tool, like a hammer to nail this or that preferred object. Indeed Mahamudra (Chakgya Chenpo) means The Great Seal, because it stamps everything with its pervasive truth. Everything. That means that demons are not real, in exactly the same way that we are not real. Demons are no more real than any other phenomena, and no less real. To negate the existence of demons, or any concept we fear or dislike, is dharma in service of ego, rather than dharma that eradicates self-clinging.

Self-Illusion, Self-Illumination

Actually, the Chöd practitioner overcomes demons by dematerializing the illusion of his/her own solid self. It is well known that many Chöpa’s of old were utterly immune to contagion. Was it because they decided that “Bacteria do not exist and can’t hurt me.” Unlikely. But if “I” don’t exist, then the phenomena of contagion has nowhere to land. We could take this to its logical conclusion and state “Karma doesn’t exist. It is just an outer phenomena, a projection of my mind. Therefore I am freed of all my karma.” But as long as “I” am there, karma indeed sticks, whether we “Mahamudra-ize” it our not.

Two Different Truths

In the Ultimate state, the underlying reality from which all phenomena arises, indeed there is no becoming, no ending, no coming nor going, no being, no non-being. No karma, no demons and no “I and thou.” In the Relative world, which is co-emergent, co-arising with the Ultimate, there is a whole heck of a lot of arising and disappearing, busy-ness, impermanence, over-arching karma, disease and, yes, demons.

Being Real

Whether demons are just projections of our psychological fears is a different argument altogether, and the subject of the next part of this article. But for now, we can rest assured that demons are no more real than we are. And not an iota less. And throwing concepts of emptiness at them, and not at the perceiver and the rest of the “good stuff” is itself… demonic.

Coming Events

Remote Healing Chöd

Our first group of DNA identity packets will be heading to Eastern Bhutan in mid-August. We are fortunate in having someone to handy carry these directly from San Francisco to Tsewong Rinpoche’s monastery. There, participants will receive over 60 or more remote Chöd and other tantric healing rituals over a 12 month period. http://www.tibetanchod.com/remote-healing/

Tibetan Land Healing

Our first 2-day Tibetan Land Healing training will take place in early October in Toronto, Canada. Participants will learn the Tibetan shamanic practices of Blessing, Energizing, Enriching and Clearing the environment; This in turn has profound ramifications on all aspects of our life, health, relationships and spiritual development.
www.tibetanlandhealing.com

Tibetan Energy Healing

Balancing the 5 Elements is the key to rapid and deep healing of body and mind. In Level 1 of Tibetan Energy Healing, we will disclose the ancient Tibetan esoteric methods for using light and sound to regenerate the structure of Earth, flow of Water, energy of Fire, motility of Air and integration of the Space element.
www.tibetanenergyhealing.com

Tibetan Healing Chö

Module 1 of the world’s only comprehensive training in the practice of Chöd will take place in Canada this fall. Apart from the empowerment of the Sky Door, students will learn basic meanings and principles behind Chöd and five important beginning practices. Much of the teaching is from original Tibetan sources, never translated before. Audiovisual presentation includes over 120 slides and a CD of all ritual melodies, teachings and PDFs of all practices.
www.tibetancho.com
www.instituteoftraditionalmedicine.com

What’s A Nyensa Anyway?

I was chatting with a dharma practitioner the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends regularly met on the internet to do Chöd together, via Skype. I immediately said “What does that do to the Nyensa?” She replied: “What’s a Nyensa?”  I wanted to say, “A Nyensa is the thing you really need to know about before you do Chöd on the internet!” But I decided to blog about it instead.

A Nyensa by Any Other Name

Because Nyensa is, in all cases, an essential understanding of Chöd. Chöd is the most “location-oriented” of any dharma practice. Actually, it is meant to be done in the wild, outside one’s know territory, one’ comfort zone, one’s normal parameters. In the traditional Tibetan literature of Chöd, whole texts are devoted to the characteristics of the Nyensa. Those kinds of details are fully discussed in the context of the School of Tibetan Healing Chö (www.tibetancho.com), and in my forthcoming book (Tibetan Chö: Cutting Through to Freedom). But here, the core point is that a progressive training is needed.

Stranger in a Strange Land

One goes to a peaceful, non-threatening, safe place—like one’s home, dharma center, or in a group setting. Here one practices only the White Feast, offering to the Higher Guests. Once the student becomes more mature in their practice, with various meditative experiences and small realizations under their belt, they progress towards less comfortable sites. Even then, it is suggested that one go “semi-wrathful,” before taking it to the ultimate level of the wrathful Nyensa.

Enter the Nyensa

This is a haunted area, whose vibe is threatening, spooky, and downright scary. It is unpleasant and malevolent; We have a natural revulsion to even sitting there. Traditionally, this might be an abandoned house, under a solitary tree, near the water’s edge, or anywhere that seems anomalous and distorted. Many urban landscapes come to mind, as well as parks, areas of human excavation and disruption. In fact, it is hard to go a block anywhere, without seeing somewhere that is not a little sketchy. Here real demons, disembodied spirits, and our own deepest fears and rigidity lives. The practitioner engages in the Red Feast, with its vivid and violent meditations. Uprising come about, that must be processed—processed in the crucible of the yogi’s grasp of the fundamental nature of self and other.

Electric Lady Land

So what about the internet? What lives there? Are we safe from “cosmic spam?” Or is this the greatest repository of demonic forces, malicious entities, human madness, emotional toxins, pain and excess, confused ideas, psychospiritual impurities, karmic stains and evil spirits this world has ever seen? It may well be. And so Chöpas everywhere, rejoice! No more going to haunted cemeteries and places of sickness and death. No more trudging through the cold night with the thin sliver of the moon the only light to keep the demons at bay. We can just stay home on the wifi, open up Facebook, Google, Skype and Hotmail, and off we go, kangling in hand.

To Everything a Season

But friends, maybe before one embarks on such a journey, caution is necessary. Before we say “come and eat me, release all karma, you vicious demons, rolling like a red fog up the side of my desktop,” we might want to be prepared for what we call up. As Shenpen Dawa Rinpoche said, “Chöd is not for the faint-hearted.” Well, on further reflection, maybe I will just stick to chatting and making friends over the invisible airwaves, instead of leaving the doors wide open all night, waiting to see who shows up next morning. Until I am ready.
www.machikcholing.com

The word wisdom is a bit intimidating. It sounds like some far-off, lofty goal. Or something that only belongs to sages, the “fool on the hill.” It’s the oldster, sitting on the rocking chair, looking out across the distant horizon, and uttering (after a long silence) some profound truth, that the real hero of the story must heed. This is the image that is in our head, that is repeated endlessly in literature, song and movies. But fortunately it is also usually there at the end of the story, where the hero or heroine actually learns something about their own humanity, some truth about us all that gains them a small piece of wisdom. Then we can leave the theatre, happily crunching our popcorn, glad that the day is saved and all is well with the world.

Developmental Issues

And why this persistent image of the old sage or the elder wise woman as the holder of true wisdom? Simply because we don’t expect wisdom from a child—or a young man or woman for that matter. In fact if a younger person does show some insight, we often say that they are “wise beyond their years.” And so we understand that wisdom happens over time and with experience. Not just any experience, but deep and often difficult passages of life. We become “seasoned,” or possibly a better phrase would be “cooked” by life’s challenges and opportunities. We are forged in the crucible of confronting our pain, hardship, our own limitations and faults. Note that it is the confronting of these obstacles that builds our Wisdom, not just suffering through them. So wisdom, if present, is a function of age, of time and of courageous encounters. And therein lies a key to understanding its lack. If we don’t grow up, we certainly cannot have wisdom. If we remain immature, wisdom is beyond any possibility. So what does it mean to not grow up, to remain immature? Or conversely, to accept adulthood, manhood, or womanhood as a mantle we are ready to wear.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child…”

You don’t have to look far for the answers to this human dilemma—what could be considered the human dilemma. We find it right in front of us, as “pearls out of the mouth of babes.” You see, my little four year old grandson is an amazing being. Smart, resourceful, inquisitive, basically good-hearted, with a great sense of humor. But what is the defining difference between him and me or you? He acts in a “childish” way. He will behave completely selfishly at times, following all his wild whims and crazy notions. At those times, knows no limits, and can fight boundaries as if it were a life and death situation. He has to be monitored like a crazed criminal. For any child from age 0-2, that supervision is literally 24 hours a day. Walking with him at 18 months, it was clear that he could kill himself about once a minute, climbing on a ledge here, waltzing out in traffic there, eating some bizarre object off the ground, etc and etc! By age four, zealous and self-referential, the observing is not only for their own safety, but the safety of everyone around them! Yet, he learns. And as his wise mother guides him, he begins to understand the needs and hurts of others, apart from how it relates to himself. He starts to look through the eyes of another.

Developmental Arrest

Now think about the corruption, greed, and self-interest that fills this world. Think how stupidly humans act, without any care about consequences, seeking only self-interest. This is none other than a failure to negotiate away from childish self-regard and the entry into adulthood. It is a failure of maturity. We are a nation, a world, of immature people. An extraordinary percentage of humans have simply decided to forgo the growing up process. It is too challenging, too painful, too filled with demands and responsibilities. And besides (and this is paramount), you don’t always get what you want! So in the end, the one key monitor of human development or maturity is simply this: How well are you able to respond to the needs, the sufferings, the desires and hopes of others? To the extent that others are just to be manipulated, their weaknesses and failings exploited, is the extent of the immaturity of the person carrying such value systems. And it is the extent to which Wisdom evades such an individual, be they 40 or 80, poor or fabulously wealthy, famous or unheard of. It is an equation that is irrefutable.

Rule by Majority

Maybe wisdom is not easily won, but once it is gained, it is a permanent feature of our character; indeed it is a core feature in the landscape of that indefinable something called character. Yet the words wisdom and character have both fallen totally out of use: Where do we hear of a “person of character” anymore, when it used to be the most important measure of man or woman? What went wrong?

Maybe it is just a matter of playing the numbers. As the percentage of people who no longer valued character and wisdom became greater, the balance of power went to the immature, the childish and the fulfilment of the grandiose and megalomaniacal.  The world of commerce, advertising, politics, entertainment, became largely trivialized, but moreover infantalized, and our culture became directed towards superficial and selfish goals. In the grand scheme of things, it is impossible to trace all the threads—social, psychological, karmic, spiritual—that have lead to the eclipse of wisdom as a valued goal and guiding light in our culture, and our world.

The Return

But if it is true that wisdom is “missing in action,” it is also true that it is not dead. The world is changing in fundamental ways, more profoundly and radically than most realize. As tough as it sounds, in the coming months and years, as the world turns totally on its ears, those who have opted to remain invested in developmental arrest will suffer the consequences. Immaturity has its price, and it is a steep and painful price in a world of grown-ups. And that world of grown-ups is coming. Call it a New Utopia, call it the Dying of Dinosaurs, but whatever you call it, you can take heart. The wisdom that you have so carefully cultivated and nurtured in the silence and struggles of your innermost core will soon have its day.  And slowly, gradually or suddenly, it will be back where it belongs—at the very center of the complex mandala of our lives. And that will be a maturing of humanity that is long overdue.

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We practice the ancient and profound path of Vajrayana. To do so, we follow the traditions, knowledge and realization transmitted from Wisdom mind, through an unbroken lineage of living masters, down to the present moment. That these methods even exist in our time and space is already miraculous, as we are told that the rapid and demanding path of Tantra only appears rarely in the cycle of world creation and destruction—and whole eons can pass without its appearance.  Vast, profound, sometimes complex, the intricate detail of the sadhanas, visualizations, mantra and mudras, are the container that keeps dharma intact, free of contamination or distortion.

An essential part of this matrix of practice is the remarkable spectrum of sacred implements and instruments that are used daily in Vajrayana practice. Their nature is both practical and symbolic and they perform energetic functions that directly impact the fabric of experience and phenomena. Thus, just like the practice itself, their fabrication, form, proportions, materials and details are all a matter of exacting specifications and standards.

However, since the diaspora from Tibet, and the fracturing of the population and culture, there has been a dramatic degradation of the level of the available sacred objects. Yet these ritual arts have not been lost. The texts describing the proper qualities and characteristics of these items still exist, and far more importantly, skilled craftsmen can be discovered who have kept these traditions intact. However, few Westerns have been exposed to these quality materials so that the difference can be discerned.

We are entering a new era of challenges. With economic, social and personal difficulties on all sides, now more than ever we need an impeccable approach to our dharma practice. Guarding our tradition and its sacred intentions, this can be, not a time of loss and shadow, but a time of transformation.

The mission and vision of DamaruWorks is 5-fold:

1. To perpetuate and preserve the traditions of Vajrayana though the accurate creation and dispersal of ancient Tibetan ritual crafts with absolute integrity.

2. To provide the highest quality traditional practice materials to serious Vajrayana practitioners, especially Chöpas, Ngakpas and Yogis and Yoginis—lay practitioners of the West. Such materials are increasingly rare as commercial, low quality goods have become the norm in India, Nepal and the outlets that sell these products in America and Europe.

3. To support the best traditional craftsmen, who are few in number, so that they may flourish and continue their work, passing on their art to future generations of skilled workers.

4. To provide financial support for our Tibetan, Bhutanese and Nepalese lamas who coordinate acquiring these sacred and precious items.

5. To use funds from sales to further unique projects, related to the preservation and perpetuation of various texts, translations, audio and video archives and so on. In fact, 100% of all profits are to be used to benefit the Dharma, and most specifically the various lineages of Chöd.

Signs 3
I have never done well with heights: My nose bleeds in Taos, New Mexico a mere 9,000 feet. When Dr. Rotelli and I visited Kunzang Dechen Lingpa’s monastery in Arunachel Pradesh—after a day of winding through heights of green pine—my breathing came in involuntary pants and sighs all night. AMS, also known as altitude sickness, is often mild and usually comes on gradually. But it can occur unpredictably, suddenly and intensely. It is the reason why I have never gone to the dizzying heights of Tibet, at 12,000 feet above sea level. The problem is not just the lack of oxygen, but the pressure changes, as fluids leak out of compartments and fills lung and brain cavities. Confusion, lethargy and death can follow as water perfuses into that tight compartment. One of the side effects, or balancing acts of the body in order to equalize pressures, is ridding itself of water with frequent urination.

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