PLEASE ONLY READ THESE NOTES OR LISTEN TO THESE RECORDINGS IF YOU HAVE ASKED PERMISSION FROM LAMA SARAHNI TO ATTEND THIS COURSE OR OTHERWISE LISTEN TO THIS COURSE

All right, welcome back. We are Mahamudra study group. It's January 13th, 2026.

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion, their wisdom radiating from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light.

And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way, feel how much you would like to be able to help them, recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short, and how wonderful it will be when we can also help in some deep and ultimate way, a way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down, we know this is possible. Working with emptiness and karma, we glimpse how it's possible.

So I invite you to grow that wish into a longing, and that longing into an intention. And with your strong intention, turn your mind back to your precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet, to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way.

And so we ask them, please, please, please, teach me that, show me that. Help me become like you. And they are so happy that we've asked, of course they agree.

Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the perfect world they are teaching us how to create.

We imagine we can hold it in our hands, and we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us, using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth, filled with fragrant incense and covered with a blanket of flowers. The great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon.

In my mind, I make them the paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you. By this deed, may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. So I need to stop class early today.

I have a doctor's appointment and new health insurance, so it's going to take me longer to check in there. So my timer is going to go off at 8 40, my time 8 40, and then I have to get up and run away fast. So sorry.

Then I also thought, since we've been off for a while, to read together the root text to remind us where we've come. And we really don't have so much left in Lo Tsongchak Gyaltsen's self-commentary to that root text. So we'll read, and then we'll meditate, and then I'll talk a little bit.

And then my timer will go off and I'll run away. So here's my share. Now that I know how to put two up at once, I only want one.

Do you see two texts or just one? Just one. Hot dog. Natty, help me.

She taught me a new trick. Yay. Thank you, Natty.

Okay. So the Victory Road to the Great Seal by our hero, my hero, the first Panchen Lama Lo Tsongchak Gyaltsen. I bow down to Mahamudra.

And I'm just going to go across my screen. And if you wish to read, read. As you're reading, recognize you are sharing the holy dharma with your group and with the whole world.

So on the top of my screen is Ms. Tom. Would you start with the first verse, please? My holy lama, in you is the entire store of wisdom. From a billion enlightened beings, yet you masquerade in the dance of donning the saffron robes to you.

The one who grants to me the three kindness, with deep respect, do I press my head to the lotus beneath your feet. Thank you. Well done.

Roxanna, please. Yes, thank you. Mahamudra is the essential drop within the hearts of every victor, past, present, or future.

It is the core of the meaning of the great ocean of teachings, open or secret. And so, in the footsteps of every mighty yogi who has gone to bliss, I will now set forth a light to make this practice of Mahamudra crystal clear. Thank you.

Roshna, this one goes on two pages. Mahamudra reaches everywhere. It is the nature of everything.

There are no words to describe the indivisible diamond realm of mind. I place my head with great respect at the holy feet of my matchless lama, lord among yogis, master of all, who lays the teachings bare. Janet? Following the footsteps of that highest yogi, Dharma Vajra, and his spiritual son, who distilled from that great ocean of galuk advices, both open and secret, a single drop of the essence, the perfect summary.

I grant to you this book of guidance on the practice of Mahamudra. Thank you. Vika, you can go down to here, please.

Thank you, Holy Mama. Divide the teaching into three, the prelude, the main event, and the conclusion. Here now is the first of the three.

Since refuge is the entrance to the teaching of the Buddha and the wish to the control pillar, holding up the greater way, just nothing worse is not enough. Fervently take refuge and bring the wish into your heart. Thank you.

Natty, please, if you wish. Whether or not you can see the reality of your own mind depends on how well you have gathered goodness and cleared away the dirt. This is you too.

So purify your broken vows with the hundred syllables, complete exactly hundred thousand mantras, then do the hundred frustrations as many cycles as you can. Thank you. Katya, now beg for help from your root Lama, the one inseparable in nature from every Buddha of the past, present, or future.

Go to them again and again from the bottom of your heart. Thank you. Mike, are you there? I'm here.

Although there are myriad schools of thought on the subject of Mahamudra, they can all be grouped into the open and secret ways. This is the Mahamudra of Suraha and the exalted Nagarjuna. This is the Mahamudra of Naropa and Maitreya.

Thank you. And Dinara? Thank you. It is the deepest core within the surpassed class of the secret word illuminated in the collected works, attaining and the essence.

Then there is the former one of the great medium and brief, which teaches us directly how to meditate on emptiness. Thank you. Sumati, do you care to read? Sure.

How far? Come down to here. As that highest realized being, Nagarjuna has stated, there is no other path to freedom any different than this. In keeping with his true intent, in the words of the Lamas of my lineage, now at last the time has come to give the instructions on Mahamudra, the way to meet your mind face to face.

Tom, back to you. The spontaneous capsule, the practice of the five, balancing a bitter taste, instruction in four syllables, putting our torments to rest, cutting off the object, the great completion, a book of notes on the middle way view. Thank you.

And Roxana? Thank you. It has been imburdened with so many different names, but anybody skilled in both the text and arts of reasoning, or any yogi who has had the actual experience can delve into their true meaning and see that they all come down to the same basic idea. Thank you.

And Roshna? There are two methods we can use to undertake this practice, using the view to reach meditation and using meditation to reach the view. Here we will be following the latter of the two. And Janet? Atop a seat conducted for reaching meditation, fix yourself in the seven pointed posture of the body.

Go ahead, please. Clear away with the nine fold cycle of the breath. Learn to call the mental fluff from the crystalline awareness.

Thank you. We've learned to do that pretty well, have we? Vika? Thank you. Clear away with the nine fold cycle of the breath.

I'm sorry. Yeah. Then with the heart of pure virtue, take refuge and bring up the wish as we did before.

Meditate on the profound path, the yoga of the Lama, and after you have backed down, earnestly, a hundred times, watch the Lama dissolve into you. And Nati? Don't let any conception drag you into hopes of fears within this state of wavering appearances. Go and taste the waters of deeper meditation where there is no movement whatsoever.

Just like falling into sleep or losing consciousness. Don't try to stop the thousands which come to mind, the thoughts that which come to mind. Set yourself.

Sorry. And Katja? Set yourself up at a distance of undistracted awareness. Use the center of the mind to catch it running here or there.

Continue. All right. Then hone on your focus to gaze nakedly upon its true nature, crystal unaware.

Whatever mental picture happens to arise, meet it face to face for what it is. All right. And Mike? Or be like a, or be like a blade master, chopping off the head of any conceptual thought that dares to show its face.

Then at the end of battle, when you're staying still, let go without relinquishing awareness. And Tom? Oh no, sorry. Dinara? Locking down then, let it loose.

This is where to leave your mind. So they say, and furthermore, if you release this mind of yours, all tangled up in knots, have no doubt that you will be released. Loosen up just as it stays without getting distracted.

And when you look into the face of any thoughts that come your way, they simply vanish by themselves, fading into emptiness. And Tom? Then even as you stay there, still investigate the mind. You'll see its emptiness unveiled, luminous and clear.

This is known as mixing the moving with the, with the still. So don't stop. Dinara, center please.

So don't stop an image. If it happens to arise, recognize it as a movement. Stay in its true nature.

It's similar to the metaphor of a bird held captive on a boat who tries to fly away. And Roshna? It's just like the raven who flies from a boat. Once he circles round in every direction, he'll come back to land on it again.

And Janet? If you continue in this way, you'll see the face of meditation, crystalline and bright, unobscured by anything at all. And since it has no solid form, it is like the sky, inherently empty. And anything that crosses it is likewise crystal clear.

Thank you. Vika? Thank you. If you release this mind of yours, all tangled up in knots, have no doubt that you will be released.

Should I proceed? Locking down, then let it loose. This is where to leave your mind. And Nati? These days, almost every master meditating in these snow-capped peaks is sitting with a single voice, singing with a single voice.

When you see directly this ultimate nature of your mind, it is, of course, by utilizing meditative vision, but it cannot be defined. You cannot point and say, it is this. The guidance pressed into our hands by the able buddhas is to hold the mind loose, without grasping onto anything that comes to mind.

Katya? What they say is true, of course, but Lobsang Chuky Gyaltsen will tell you how it is. This technique is an extraordinary way to tweak beginners into reaching mental stillness, and it is also the way to encounter the deceptive state of your mind face to face. And Mike? But how to meet the ultimate nature of your mind face to face? Now I will explain to you the way to go about it, by setting forth the whispered words of my holy root lama.

This is still yours. The one who holds the wisdom of the enlightened buddhas, the one who lures us through the guise of holding saffron robes, the one who washes clean away the darkness of my mind. And Thao? And I agree that one is free from all elaboration in either the cycle or beyond, free from any extreme of existence or the like, within the deep space of a perfect sessionist meditation.

And Roxana? Then once you've emerged from it, if you stop to look around, you'll find a world in name alone, simply a projection. Shall I go on? Please. The interdependent workings of things arise infallibly.

They seem to rise up on their own, just like a dream or a mirage, a moon inside a lake, or a magical display. How beautiful. We could keep that in mind, your lama.

Roxana? The play of this appearing world in no way negates emptiness, and emptiness is not a refutation of appearances. And Janet? When emptiness and interdependence become one and the same, that's the pure and perfect path called forth into being. And Jinara? It is that wise old recluse, known as Lopsanchuki Gyelsang, who has spoken this advice to you.

And by the virtue I have done, may every single wandering soul quickly rise to victory by traveling this path, this one and only door to peace. And Sumathi? May all beings be happy. Yay.

All right, so let's do our meditation. Like hopefully that had more meaning to hear it again this time. Let's sit with it.

What do I need to do? Okay, set your body as you usually do. Once you have it set, leave it still, forget it, and bring your focus to your breath. That sharp, clear alert focus on a specific point at the tip of a nostril to gather all of that mental consciousness up, up and front, adjust your focus, your clarity, your intensity.

And once you have that bright, clear state of mind, you keep it bright and clear. As you relax, open, like shift back or back and down into that watcher state, still bright, clear, fascinated, keenly alert to any sounds arising, first noticing what arises with the sound as an identity, let it go, sink into observing it at subtler and subtler levels, drawing that alert focus into inner sounds or inner sensations. Simply keep keenly observing what's arising, letting it pass without following, expand the observer to anything that arises, what we call sounds, what we call sensations, what we call emotions, what we call thought, being the keen, alert observer.

And at the same time, completely uninterested in what they are, what they seem to be, thinking more deeply into that level of the constant flow of appearances, shape-shifting, all mental images ripening, passing. Your observer is enjoying this constant shape-shift, even if there seems to be a pause between shape-shifts, that pause is also an appearance. And so now to your observer, observing, add your understanding that with every appearance, there is that appearances emptiness, it's no self nature, the fact that it is a ripening mental seed, your own ripening mental seed and nothing but the whole flow happening, the flow of ripening results of past behaviors, empty of any other reality than that.

Get it in words first, your words, and then drop the words and know that with every appearing shape-shift, you are aware of the emptiness of each shape-shift. We'll stay four more minutes. Jack, are you still just watching it flow? Clarity, intensity.

Jack, I know as we come out, let arise a mental note, all of this appearances ripening and empty of self-nature. And so bring your mind up the levels, let inner sensations be sensations and recognize appearances and nothing but inner sounds, outer sounds, there are birds singing, appearances and nothing but awareness of your body, ripening appearances and nothing but aware of your outer room, what you're going to see when you open your eyes, appearances and nothing but when you feel back up at that level, open your eyes and impose, oh, another appearance and nothing but, and then take a stretch. So how's it going with your Mahamudra meditation? Anybody care to share? Maybe it's not going at all, that's fine too.

Are you noticing an ability to have a more subtle awareness in your meditation, more subtly aware of things at more subtle levels, meaning able to not go immediately to the label of the thing that's arising. Can you get to the more subtle level yet? It's all right if you say no, because this is a practice that really does take some frequent effort, frequent regular effort. I guess because we're in a lot of classes, a lot of different meditations, so I don't do this one every day, but I have noticed that in my daily life, much more of the recognition of things are of their nature and so they could be anything.

And so, you know, that whole train of thought in my daily life more so than in meditation. Good, good. That's really where it's pertinent.

Good. Yes, Roxanna. Thank you.

The question that you just asked, does it have to do when we are more aware of all of our consciousness, for example, what is arising in our consciousness? Mm-hmm. Yes, but I would say yes. You're finding a greater separation between you, the watcher, and what's arising, recognizing it's coming out.

Right, with the feelings, with the thoughts that arise. Yeah, good. I have the seeds for when Roxanna is saying something really, really helpful, she freezes.

I don't get to hear it. Like I freeze, I don't know why. I speak and I freeze.

I know. The same happened upstairs, so I just came down. When you ask how you're doing better, but yeah, I do say that I am getting a little bit better at that, at recognizing those subtle levels.

Thank you, yay, so we're rejoicing. Yes, Mike. I think for me, and in that meditation that we just did specifically, it was like I could, because I was so focused on considering everything as a ripening and arising and nothing but, like I would hear a car go by and I would start labeling that as like, oh, it's noisy, like, oh, that car is noisy.

And then I would start feeling some level of upset or discomfort. Like it was like, label the car, label the noise, and then it generates an emotion. And then I start saying like, oh, well, now I'm having an emotion and this is a bad experience.

And then I go, oh, wait, wait, wait, ripening, arising, nothing but, and then like pull myself back to, you know, and then another car could go by and then I could be like, okay, that was just just an arising. And then we'd be sitting there for a little bit. And then the same thing would happen.

And I would notice like, you know, it was like, where can I catch myself? Like, can I catch myself? Like, when I hear the sound before I label it, car making sound, or before, or like, can I not catch it there? But I can, I can catch it after the emotion starts to arise, like, at what point exactly can I catch my like, labeling system and, and put it back on the, you know, ripening and nothing but, and then like, detach, you know, not get all wound up in this process. Right. Right.

Nice. That's perfect. No, Lobsangchuky Gelson says, on one level, this practice is a trick to get people to stillness.

So I relate to all that Mike was explaining the process, because I still do that. But when we do that, without losing the train of exploration into, oh, I need to prepare for that meeting car. That's being able to do it without distraction.

It seems like the whole thing is distraction. But we're focused on the task at hand, without distraction, then we're checking for it, am I focused on the task at hand, with clarity, with intensity. So it's like, as Mike was explaining the process he's going through, if you're doing that bright, clear, eager, exploring, having fun with it.

That's a good meditation. And it feels like no, no, I'm not even getting to the awareness part, I'm still at the label making struggle. Fine.

It will grow into doing that at more and more subtle, subtle, subtle levels, which become beyond words, into just experience, into sitting there in this flow of the shape shift of appearances and emptiness. So it's a stepwise practice. So thank you for showing us that.

Dinara. Yes, thank you, Viyalama. I wanted to share also that I have kind of deeper realizations of, for example, my body.

And I was like, is this my body that I don't like, for example, at the moment? It's also coming from me. So it's kind of have deeper understanding, if I may say so, that there is an availability and something is ripening from me, and I see this way. So that's my current thing.

And the same about my husband and other things. And if I may, can I ask a short question about this meditation? So if I want to combine them together with the Thousand Angels practice, where do I do the ninefold breath? Is it before the prayer or before I go into the meditation? That's the question I have. Yeah.

You could actually do it in either place. So I would suggest you try on for size doing the ninefold breath before you even start the Thousand Angels prayer. Try it that way for a week or so.

And then try it where you do the ninefold breath after you have the Lama in the heart. And before you do your meditation session. Okay, try it both ways and see what you feel.

Gives you a greater pull your mind in feeling. Okay, thank you. Anything else? Okay.

So thank you for sharing. Mm hmm. You know, let's take our break before.

Because we only have a few minutes before break time. Anyway, let's take our break now. Yes.

I mean, a funny place of obviously, you've designed everything optimally in your wisdom. But I'm wondering, if we ended class at 835 to give you extra time would say you would be less hectic and less running around would be planting seeds of giving you time to be less hectic. So I'm torn between even asking I'm embarrassed because you know best, but also maybe offering you time is and you being safer not running.

Water, please. Let's see where we are in class. You set your timer for 835.

And I have mine set for 840, which was designed to get me there in time. And we'll see where I am. When the 835 goes off.

How's that? I'm in the middle of a thought. That'll be the clue that I've got five more minutes. Okay, I'll just I'll indicate it by raising a hand and then taking it down.

Instead of interrupting. Good plan. Thank you.

Yikes. One more confused. Anyway, then anyway, that it's okay.

So that meditation that we did, it was only the first part of a full Mahamudra practice, because we were only focusing on the appearances like the object side of our moment by moment experience. And then Mahamudra, I Mahamudra meditation could then include the awareness of the mind in that process. And then the third step is the awareness of the me the subject side, the piece, the part of the experience that is the subject side.

And we do the same process of becoming keenly aware of the ripening, the appearing, the appearing, appearing, and then use this other part of our experience to know the empty nature of whatever it is that appears. So Mahamudra at its ultimate level, is reaching that direct experience of the emptiness of the subject side of the me because it's going to include all the rest of it. The to reach that direct experience of the no self nature of the me.

Clearly, we have to get the me really clear as an appearing thing and nothing but and to get there, we need to get really clear about the awareness of me and other as an appearing and nothing but and to get there, we need to become really clear, aware of how the object side of our experience is appearing and nothing but the emptiness side. So in this meditation, which is course 17, class two, like we are almost done with our training in Mahamudra. She brought us to just get really more adept at staying at that awareness of the ripenings, the object side that's happening.

And then where Lobsangchuki Gyaltsen's commentary takes us at this point is pointing out the the I'm, I'm failing to find the word that, sorry, I can't get it that the, the fact that with any appearance, there has to be emptiness. So that there can be an appearance and that there's no emptiness without an appearance. And where he's going to take us, we won't get to it.

I don't think in this class is, and how does that, how does that reveal to us that thing we call karma, right? Our question would be, how does karma work? So he's going to go into this infallibility of karma because of this in, in, in indivisibility of appearance and the empty nature of the appearance. So we're starting out with just of the objects, but we understand that I can't even have an object to explore without having a consciousness of the object and a me having the consciousness of the object. And of course, I'm still thinking of all of those things.

As I hear my say the words, as if they are three separate things, which they are not, are they, right? They are all the appearance happening and nothing, but, but we can't get there. We can't hold that on three things as one thing until we go through each one of them separately. So mama Christie asked the question, no, is it, is it true that there's always an, an appearance happening always seems like, yes, right.

Because that's what it is to, that's, that's what it is to be is an appearance. Can there be an emptiness without an appearance of something? No. So I think we've already come to the conclusion that there's that ultimate reality is not this big, vast emptiness that exists, that everything comes out of according to our seeds, right? Do we have that clear in our own minds? Even when it seems like the, whatever scripture we happen to be reading, they say, think about emptiness, you know, that vast emptiness, like vast as outer space does our mind.

I mean, I know my mind immediately brings up a picture of this big, vast emptiness. And then my training says, no, that's not possible. There has to be appearances for there to be an emptiness of anything.

So then the question would come up, yeah, well then what about during the direct perception of emptiness? Doesn't there still have to be an appearance happening in order for the emptiness that we are experiencing directly to be experienced directly. And yet they say very clearly your experience is unexplainable, like water poured into water, indistinguishable. It seems like what they describe as we go into the direct experience of the emptiness of self and so everything.

You know, my own mind is trying to conceptualize that and by conceptualizing it, I mistake it because by conceptualizing, then there's a thing that I'm experiencing, but there has to be a thing or else we couldn't have the experience of emptiness. Like how do we really get there if the direct perception of emptiness is finally being free of all those appearances? That we mistake for having their own nature. It has to also have an appearing side, but it can't have an appearing side because we're in the direct experience of no self-nature of anything, of everything.

Then doesn't that mean anything and everything has to be there to be no self-natured experience of? It really is a conundrum. Like how can we really experience something directly without an appearance? And you know, as we try to grapple with it, it's the experience happening of the direct experience, they say, is the appearing thing happening so that you can be in the emptiness of that experience. And that what's unique to that direct experience is the fact that the appearance, we're not aware of the appearance, but it's like, wait a minute, that doesn't, that's not acceptable either.

Because if there's something that I'm not aware of, it's not ripening for me right now. So it really is a conundrum. And it's one of those things that we can't resolve by explanation, by conceptual explanation.

We can hash it out with logic and come to a conclusion that's still conceptual, but in order to get it right, that only happens once we come out of its direct experience. And then it's like, oh, and you still can't conceptualize it verbally well enough to convey it accurately to somebody else, which is why Geshe-la always says that the new Arya is like, I don't, I don't, I don't, like water poured into water, just can't distinguish. So when we're talking about recognizing appearances as projections, right? We have all our words, our terms that we use.

We use projection, meaning an image breaking out of a seed that lays over information that makes it into the identity. And maybe first it's the identity of pot on stove, and then it's the identity of no color shape, or more subtly the identity of experience happening right now, or more subtle identity of a movement of the mind, or a more subtle identity of just some emotion shift, right? Whatever the appearance happening is. So we have the word projection.

We have the word, the thing that appears. We have the word name and term. We have the word karma ripening, right? Do you have any other words that you're using to label, to recognize what we mean by the process of a seed ripening? And do we mean the same thing by all those terms? And if we do, why do we have so many terms? So it's something to play with in your own contemplation time.

When I say projection, what is my deep reaction to that? What do I really mean when I use the word projection? And to get a sense of that, I'm finding through my career with Maha Mudra, is my Maha Mudra practice efforts has made it such that when I hear myself say a word, I can feel the way my mind takes it. And it's so frustrating because most of the time my mind takes it. And then another piece of mind, my mind recognizes that, oh, that's mistaken.

But it's this heightened awareness that develops from this particular kind of meditation that allows you to be this witness of your own thinking. And then kind of checking, do I have it right or don't I? So back to the words that we're using to remind ourselves, what I'm experiencing is the result of my own past behavior and nothing but. Like that's too long to say as you're pouring your tea or as somebody's yelling at us, what are your catchphrases? Like find a catchphrase that you can use so that it's loaded with meaning.

Projection, nothing but, karma, whatever will help. They all are indicating this deep understanding of nothing, I can't experience anything outside of my own mind's karmic seeds ripening. There's nothing that exists outside of my own karmic seeds ripening.

And we think, of course, there are things that exist outside of my own karma ripening. But how would we know about them? It's like, outer space, right? Okay, I know about outer space. Okay, so if there always has to be an appearing something in order for emptiness to be there to be experienced, how do we ever get to the direct perception of emptiness, which they say, is experiencing emptiness and nothing but.

Is there ultimate reality that we can experience? And in a translator class last night, right, there was that whole punchline. It's like there is no ultimate reality. But did you just check what your mind did? No ultimate reality, what? There has to be ultimate reality because that's what we're, that's the experiencing, the experiencing it directly is the doorway to the end of all suffering.

There has to be ultimate reality. Well, what's wrong with my reaction to there is no ultimate reality. Phrase, there's no ultimate reality in it from it without an ultimate reality.

Well, wait, then doesn't that mean if samsara is an ultimate reality, doesn't that mean there always has to be samsara in order for there to be an ultimate reality to experience? Does that mean we can never stop suffering, right? What good is all of this if it isn't true that we can bring an end to all suffering. So it must not be true that an ultimate reality has to be samsara. If ultimate reality means the emptiness of something, why does it have to be samsara, a broken world, a suffering world to be the opposite of that? Any appearance is the opposite of ultimate reality.

Any appearance is empty of its own nature, whether it's a pure appearance or an impure appearance, whether it's an appearance that is a result of a pure deed or an impure deed, its appearance is empty of self-nature and that's its ultimate reality. So there is no big ultimate reality. There's no big emptiness that everything comes out of, but every appearance has ultimate reality and deceptive reality.

Deceptive reality is only deceptive when we misunderstand the appearing nature, thinking it's something that comes from the object or the experience, not experiencing it as a result of my own past behavior. So a pure appearing reality is a reality, an experience where we are aware of the object-subject interaction between all of it arising as results of the subject side's own past behavior, which we're aware of our experiences at that level, at eighth level bodhisattva bhumi or nirvana, if our path is not Mahayana, but we are Mahayana. So when we reach the point of no more mental afflictions or seeds for those because of our individual analysis, remember that, we reach that state where we are experiencing things as our seed ripening results from seed planting behavior.

What that's like experientially, I have no idea. But once we're there, we have an appearing reality that we are no longer deceived by, but there's still appearing reality happening, there has to be one. And that eighth level bodhisattva is not experiencing the emptiness of that appearing reality moment by moment directly yet, but they've experienced it at least once, probably more than once, to get to eighth level bodhisattva.

And they understand that their task at hand is to clear out the obstacles to being able to perceive directly the emptiness of all of those seed ripenings at the same time as the seed ripenings, which is what makes us omniscient. So there's more to say about that later. So Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen, he's wanting to dig into this connection between appearances and emptiness, also known as projections and emptiness, also known as interdependence or mutual arising or profound dependence, all these different terms that we've been using.

And are all helping us reach that deeper conceptual understanding that when we experience an appearance, we have to also be experiencing emptiness on some level. Emptiness has to be present for anything to appear. And we tend to, we will of course, when we learn emptiness independent and seeds ripening, we learn it as this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing.

And we're trying to reach the place where our imprints are coming out as think of one, you know, the other, that they arise together, mutual arising, which is what, how karma, the laws of karma becomes derived. So we're getting there. So Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen, he quotes from Milarepa as his tool to help us weave our thinking in terms of this mutual dependence of emptiness and appearing reality, to help us train ourselves to think of them as one thing with two sides of a coin, to trigger in our mind, knowing one when we perceive the other, which we're always stuck on perceiving the appearing side, we're wanting to know the emptiness of it.

And the advantage of that, as Rashina mentioned, is that when we have this awareness of the thing ripening and its emptiness, it means in the next moment, that thing could be anything. Yeah, it's already ripened as the ficus tree, my puny little ficus tree. But in the next instant, it could be anything.

And that can be scary and that can be liberating. So we'll get there. So let me show you Milarepa's.

Let me see if I get this all by itself this time. Nope. Wait a minute.

I'm sorry. Wrong one. There we go.

So Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen has said, when we think of ultimate reality, we tend to think it's a thing that exists, that everything comes out of. And he's trying to help us re-imprint what we mean by ultimate reality. And then he quotes Milarepa, this extraordinary meditator.

And it really, really sounds like he's talking about an ultimate reality that exists in and of itself. But Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen is going to show us how, even though it sounds that way, it's our mistake. I hope I can carry that out in the next few minutes.

Okay, so listen, here's Holy Milarepa talking to you. In the reality of ultimate truth, free of any obstacles, there does not even exist such a thing as enlightenment. There is no meditator and nothing to meditate upon.

There are no levels to be reached, no signs to mark the path. There's no such thing as the result, no perfect angel's body. And there's no such thing as wisdom.

As such, there could never be any passing beyond grief, nirvana. All the worlds in the three realms and every being upon them are nothing but projected images and names. Since the very beginning, nothing has ever happened.

Since the very beginning, there's never been anything born. There's no place where we've started from. And there's no simultaneous state.

No such thing as karma, nor its ripening. And thus, even the term cycle of pain could not ever be. This is how it will appear immersed within the ultimate.

So if you had not had the amazing explanation of what the direct perception of emptiness is like, and the effect it has on our mind stream afterwards, and we heard these words, wouldn't it sound like when we reach the ultimate, the reality of ultimate truth, it would just be a big blank nothingness. I mean, that's what it still sounds like to me when I read this. Everything I've set as my goal and my path and my task, he says, none of it exists.

Is that what he's saying? That none of it exists? Yeah, you got to say, right? You have to do this. Because it's true that none of it exists out there coming at me. There is no such thing as my Buddhahood, which is why there can be me experiencing me as totally enlightened being in paradise emanating.

If there was an enlightenment that we had to reach, we could never reach it. It has to not exist in order to become an appearance. So does that mean appearances don't really exist? You see how slippery the words are? Appearances are reality.

Our Buddhahood will be reality, but never a reality in it from it. Always a projected reality, a ripening reality, constantly ripening. Am I the only one? Everybody else is frozen but me.

Is it true that when we're in the direct perception of emptiness, there is no my Buddhahood, my path, my meditator, my... Yes. But does that mean all of existing reality has poofed into non-existence because we're sitting in the direct perception of emptiness? If I have to experience something in order for it to exist, then we would have to say yes.

There's nothing in existence while I'm in the direct perception of emptiness. But if that's the case, then I can't be in the direct perception of emptiness because there's no emptiness that is it in it from it that I could experience. There's only the emptiness of some existing thing.

Existing thing and appearing thing now being used as synonyms. But check your own mind when I say that existing thing and appearing thing and micromic seed ripening. Do I believe those are three synonyms? No, I think the existence is beyond my seeds ripening.

So I still have work to do. So what good is experiencing emptiness directly if while you are in that experience, there's no my Buddhahood, nirvana, the path to reach those two, the suffering world that gets me motivated to want to reach those two. If it all disappears, how can seeing emptiness directly help? If my me even disappears, then what's there to experience it? Really, these aren't questions that we can't answer, but we want to be grappling with them because it seems like a conundrum.

That conundrum is an obstacle to having the experience. But here's what I'll leave you with and then I'll go to my doctor's appointment. Milo Rapis says, this is how it will appear immersed within the ultimate.

It's almost like a pun. The direct perception of emptiness, which is finally free of all appearances, is itself an appearance that our old conventional way of experiencing appearances can't experience in that way, but has to be experiencing an appearance, the appearance of the empty nature of self and all existing things. He's saying it will look like in that state, none of that exists.

You won't think, oh man, none of that exists, because that's not direct perception. It's being in the empty nature of all existence. As I was grappling with all of this, I remember at some point I did come to at least intellectual realization that non-existence is impossible.

And it helped me so much because that means the non-existence of this subject side is impossible also, which is a big shift from, no, this me is going to end when the body dies. That was deep, deep seeds to believe that. And then when I was able to prove to myself and not experience it directly, but experience the conceptualization so clearly that the thing called subject side can never not exist, and object ripening can never not exist, and the interaction between can never not exist, that just changed the whole picture about dying, right, and moving on, and etc.

So please think about just this little bit, this thing between appearances and the emptiness that we're going for, that we're trying to experience directly, and how those cannot ever be separate experiences. And see if you can grapple with explaining it more clearly, finding words for yourself, and then sitting with it more clearly in a few minutes of Maha Mudra exploration, to see if we can catch the meaning of Mila Roprapa's statement. What he said is how it will appear to us when we are immersed within this ultimate, which is itself not a self existing thing, trying to get that a little clarity on that conundrum.

Okay, so we will stop there. Thank you very much. Remember that person we wanted to be able to help.

We have learned more. And we will use what we are learning someday to help them stop their suffering forever, someday. And that's a great, great goodness.

So please be really happy with yourself. And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands. Recall your own precious holy being, see how happy they are with you.

Feel your gratitude to them, your devotion to them, and offer them this gemstone of goodness. See them accept it and bless it. And then carry it with them right back into your heart.

Feel them there. See them there. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom, their guidance.

It feels so good. We want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it by the power of goodness that we've just done.

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom. And thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom. So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere.

See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom, and may it be so. Okay, thank you, my dear, so much for the opportunity. I love sharing this course.

Alright, welcome back. We are Mahamudra group. On January 20th, 2026, we'll do our opening prayers and slide right into our Mahamudra practice.

So bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again, please. Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you just by way of your thinking of them. They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion, their wisdom radiating from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light.

And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way, feel how much you would like to be able to help them, recognize how the worldly ways we try to help all short, how wonderful it will be when we can also help in some deep and ultimate way, a way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down, we know this is possible. Studying emptiness and karma, we glimpse how it's possible.

And so I invite you to grow your wish into a longing and your longing into an intention. And with that intention, turn your mind back to your precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet, to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way.

And so we ask them, please, please, please teach me that, show me that, help me. And they're so happy that we've asked. Of course, they agree.

Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the perfect world they are teaching us how to create.

We imagine we can hold it in our hands, and we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth, filled with fragrant incense and covered with a blanket of flowers, the great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon. In my mind, I make them the paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you.

By this deed, may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community, through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May all beings totally awaken by the benefit of every single other.

Okay. Now let's settle in. Set your body for meditation and then pull your mind in.

Bring it to your breath. Pulling it in to that specific location, the tip of your nostrils, and then an even more specific location, one spot, fine tuning your focus, your clarity, your intensity, and keep that sharp, clear, fascinated focus and shift the focus, the object of focus to sounds, outer or inner as you wish, you know how. Noticing they seem to have their own identity.

Focus before the identity. Keep drawing that mind's focus of attention more and more subtle and drop in beyond objects of sound to watching objects called thought. You feel open enough to allow things to arise and controlled enough to refuse to follow their identity and story, flipping deeper, more subtly.

Maybe there's a constant stream of appearances happening. Maybe it seems like you're waiting for the next one. Either way, you're deepening the object of focus, bright, clear, mind, aware of the changing, changing, changing appearances.

Fascinating. If you find yourself following any of it into identities, getting more and more specific, catch, stop, release it, fall back a little deeper and start again. We are the experiencer experiencing this constant shape-shifting happening within this vast field called our mind.

Now keep that state and use a little part of your observer you to do a little analysis, all this shape-shifting happening. Is it my mind or is it things happening in my mind? Can my mind be a thing separate from those arisings and following appearances happening? We recognize when we're looking at our mind as our object, we are still experiencing an appearance shape-shifting happening. Our mind itself is nothing but passing mental image changes happening and nothing but that.

Allow your meditator to slide more deeply into this flow of mind. It stops being a flow and rather becomes this all-inclusive shape-shifting happening and we apply the identity my mind. Can we experience it before the identity? What is its true nature? This experience of the mind constant shape-shifting happening reveals its appearing nature and so we know that its true nature is its potentiality to be that its empty nature and so we add that layer to our experiencing the necessity of the no-self nature of the mind and the object and the experience with every happening.

Use your analyzer to find it and then let your meditator slide into it and when you lose it you go back and find it again. We'll sit three more minutes check nice now think to yourself wow I see how that could be a doorway to that ultimate reality experience and intentionally bring yourself back up through the layers recognizing how the identities getting put on is still the process happening all the way up to being aware of having this body in your room in this class and once you open your eyes and see something apply your awareness this is appearances happening and nothing but just like as I was meditating and take a stretch. So in that session we never went to looking at the me in the same way that would be the fourth step of the actual Mahamudra practice. We were using the mind as the object, just so we're clear.

Is it getting easier to slide down into that state? Good. And then is the, I don't know the word, with every appearance shape-shifting happening, is the emptiness becoming more evident? The fact that every appearance is what it is because of the blank, the otherwise blank nature? You know, we're still needing to impose it, but hopefully we're not needing so many words to do so. And there's a shift in the feeling for me once I've got that mindset.

And then it gets beyond words, I can't say. But this particular sequence is designed to help us be able to recognize that with every appearance, there must be the true nature of no identity, what we call the no self nature, the emptiness, not as a thing, but as its own quality, the negative necessity for the positive, which is the appearance. So we've been talking about this relationship between appearances and emptiness for a couple of classes now.

And there's a couple more that we're going to do because it's so difficult to take these two opposite things and be able to experience them as one thing. Because as we try to do so, the one is inadequate, to call it one thing is inadequate. So because of all our seeds of believing, no, no.

I think all those things are real with their identities in them from them, because all our seeds are colored with that belief to try to experience directly the opposite of that belief. It's just like, how do you do that if we don't have the seeds? How will we ever get there? And then we plant seeds in many different ways. We water those seeds so they grow and they grow bigger so that we can have an experience that we've never had before.

It seems impossible, but this Mahamudra practice is one way to plant those seeds to get close to that doorway. And then as we learn in other classes, to be able to sustain the level of concentration, level of stillness of the mind, to sustain that direct experience of ultimate reality, our meditation seeds need to be strong enough that we have reached that platform of withdrawal that we call shamatha, where our mind's ripening, going out to any sense power has shut off. It's not interested in any of that stuff anymore.

Our meditating me and our mind are not going there anymore. And it's not that everything gets shut off, of course, but we can now focus so intensely on the arising at that subtle level. So anyway, that's why we keep at this.

That's why we learn this step by step. It's because in our learning, we're planting seeds. And to just get downloaded the meditation here, do this Mahamudra meditation.

It just will slow us down to try to do it, to do it that way, to do it step by step. It's planting the seeds for us to get the result we're doing it for, because there's nothing in it that has the power, which is why we do it, so that it can take us there anyway, you know. So we left off last week.

Lobsang Chuky Gyaltsen was quoting from Milarepa, Master Milarepa, who in our tradition has this reputation for being a really, really master meditator, and that reputation of having really gone through a lot of hardship in his practice, and then making really, really swift progress. And Lobsang Chuky Gyaltsen is using this long quote about Milarepa's talking about the direct perception of ultimate reality, the direct perception of emptiness. When we're in the direct perception of emptiness, he says, all those things that we study and the stages that we anticipate reaching all the way up to our total enlightenment, he says, when we are in ultimate reality, we see that those things do not exist.

And I don't know, I feel my own mind go, what? You know, then what the heck am I doing all this for? If none of that exists, because I'm misunderstanding the words, right? And then I think about it, and it's like, well, wait a minute. I am misunderstanding the words, because I will say to myself, all right, I understand that when this mind is experiencing directly the no self nature of it and all existing things, in that time period, there will be no appearances happening. And so, okay, I get it.

When you're in the absence, there is the absence of everything. But my mind goes, but when I get out of that, well, then all these things will be there. And then I check my mind and I go, oh, yeah, and I'm thinking they're there in them from them again, that they were just waiting for me to get out of the direct perception of emptiness, and then they'll be there again as something that is over there that I need to go to to attain.

And it's like, it takes a certain amount of subtlety to even recognize how we're holding to these realizations and the changes we want to make in ourselves to become this Buddha me. If we're still thinking there's some nature of its own that I'm going to be when I'm a Buddha me, that one doesn't exist, not just in direct perception of emptiness, but it doesn't exist in the appearing reality either. The one I'm going to become and then stay.

Like suddenly I'm a self-existent Buddha when I was a not self-existent human. Yeah, it's like the not self-existence has to extend through all of it in order for any of those transformations to happen. And it's difficult.

We say, yeah, I know, I know I'm not self-existent. And then as soon as something uncomfortable comes, wow, you know, they did that to me. So it's like, okay, what happened to my not self-existent me, honey? Oh, nuts.

So, you know, we could read this verse and go, okay, I understand in the direct perception of emptiness, there's no any of those things and not catch ourselves saying, but I do believe that they do still exist once I'm outside the direct perception of emptiness. But then that starts a squirrely argument as well. And that's where I'm supposed to go today.

Okay, so let me, let us all, if you don't mind, just for fun. Wait a minute. I'm backwards here.

There we go. Read Milarepa's comments about in the direct perception of emptiness. And actually, no, I take it back.

I'm going to read it to you. And as you listen to it, recognize, yeah, yeah, I'm understanding what he's talking about. And see if you can catch what you're thinking is this subtle outside of that direct perception of emptiness.

What about these things he's talking about? Do they exist or do they not exist? Okay, ready? Do you get it? Is it coming across what I'm trying to say? Sorry, Nettie. Okay. I'm having trouble negotiating this.

In the reality of ultimate truth, free of any obstacles, there does not even exist such a thing as enlightenment. There's no meditator. There's nothing to meditate upon.

There are no levels to be reached. No signs to mark the path. There's no such thing as the result.

No perfect angel's body. No such thing as wisdom. As such, there could never be any passing beyond grief.

Nirvana. All the worlds in the three realms and every being upon them are nothing but projected names and images. Since the very beginning, nothing has ever happened.

Since the very beginning, there has never been anything born. There is no place where we have started from. And no simultaneous state.

No such thing as karma. Not its ripening. And thus, even the term cycle of pain could not ever be.

This is how it will appear. Immersed within the ultimate. So, I don't know where to go from there.

In the direct experience of the absence of self-nature, of me and all things, when we're conceptualizing that, isn't our conceptualization of this like nothing? Just nothing? I associate it with deep sleep. Dreamless sleep. You don't know you're in it while you're in it.

And then you wake up. And because it seems that time has passed, you go, oh, I was in deep sleep. But we don't actually have any sensations to say that was deep sleep.

I kind of think of direct perception of emptiness like that. But then I feel my mind's reaction and somehow deep sleep feels black. It really feels like an absence.

And the absence somehow gives me the connotation of a time that's just dark, nothing. And yet in the diamond way, when they talk about the direct perception of emptiness, they call it clear light. So, not meaning there's this source of light that's shining.

But they're describing that direct perception as clear. Like if you look at the space between you and your wall, it's not black, except at Mike's house. I see Mike and then I see the wall behind him and he looks black.

It looks back and it's like, wait a minute. But still there's a space in between and it's clear. Which is different than black, inexperienced.

So, when you're thinking of your direct perception of emptiness, how do you conceptualize it? Our conceptualizations are wrong, of course. But we use them to try to go, oh, maybe it's like that. No, can't be because that would be an appearance.

And in ultimate reality, it's the absence of appearances. Well, what's that going to be like? All those appearances that we think we've been and have experienced, none of it is there because it's all apparent. So, is it when we go into direct perception of emptiness, does all existence disappear? What if it did? Could we have a direct experience of emptiness if there was no existing thing to be empty? No.

But all existing things are appearances in our mind. They are things that we are experiencing. How can we experience the absence of those things without the things still there? So, they can't disappear while we are in the ultimate reality.

But they're not appearing to our mind in any way. So, how can we stay in the direct experience of the emptiness of something if the something is not appearing? My mind tries to say, see, so, things do have some kind of nature of their own because they have to be there independent of my awaring of them so that I can be aware of the emptiness of them even when I'm not experiencing them. Ha! Highest middle way.

You know, and Nagarjuna goes, come on, Sarani, think it through. So, Lama Kristi was like going painstakingly through this with us, trying to help us wrap our minds around how we go from appearing nature is one thing, emptiness is the other thing, and intellectually I understand to have one you have to have the other, but we just can't quite get to that place where to experience one is to experience the other as an experience. Not deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, but always.

So, do you remember that term Nang Tong? It was from Angel Devil. It means appearance, emptiness, made into one word. Nang Tong.

Think of it that way. They could have said Nang and Tong and Nang and Tong and that's how we learn it, but then put it into one word, Nang Tong, and we're planting seeds in our minds to get where we're wanting to go. Ah, yeah.

So, we have these terms, appearances and emptiness, projections and emptiness. We have the term interdependence that, you know, I see used a lot in the blurbs that I see people type. Things are all interdependent, let's take care of each other.

And then it's like, yeah, we are and we should, but interdependence goes deeper than that. And then we have the term dependent origination. All of these are trying different subtle ways to help us think about this conundrum of the difference between appearances and the emptiness of the three spheres of the experience of the appearance, to be actually correct.

Can you have an appearance that's not empty of self nature? No. Can you have an emptiness without an appearance? No. So what's really going on when I have the direct experience of emptiness? It seems like I'm experiencing half of the coin without the rest of the coin, and that's impossible.

But if we're thinking the other half of the coin has its own nature so that it can be empty, we're misunderstanding. All right. In Bob Santucci Gelson's commentary, he uses the analogy of a dream being a dream.

When we're in the dream, typically, we don't know we're in the dream. We're having the experience of the dream. It feels as real.

It's real. It's a real experience. And then weird things can happen.

You can be in your living room one instant and at the beach the next instant. And then in Mexico, the third instant. And it's just the you and the dream.

We're not going, how did I get here? It's just that's reality. And then we wake up and it's like, oh, that was just a dream. I didn't go to Mexico.

I wasn't at the beach. Darn it. It was just a dream.

And we don't have this disappointment or expectation. Bob Santucci Gelson is saying, Jetsun Milarepa is saying, life is the same way. We think there's dream reality and life reality, and life reality is more real than dream reality.

And then we have the direct perception of emptiness. And that's like waking up from the dream and recognizing, oh, none of that really happened. But I did have the dream.

So I can think about my experience in my dream and in my not dream life, I can explain to somebody, I had this dream where blah, blah, blah, blah, blah happened. And maybe it even gives me some insight into my not dream life. And Milarepa is saying, once we experience ultimate reality directly, we'll recognize that everything in real life has been just like a dream life.

In the sense that we are having experiences that don't have the reality that they feel like they have as we're having it. And when we wake up, we recognize, oh, all of it was the dream. When we wake up from waking reality, we recognize the same thing.

Yes, we had all those experiences. And yes, they did not have the reality we thought they did while we were having them. What reality is that? That they did that to me.

That they have their own identity, that they are happening independent of being results of my own past behaviors. We would say to experience anything and not experience it or know it as my own karma ripening. But to use that word karma, we have to really understand deeply what we mean by it.

And many people use the word karma and don't have the same understanding that we have because of our training, which is why Geshe Michael doesn't use the term karma anymore, because it's so easily misunderstood. But when we say my seeds ripening or my projections happening, that's the process happening that we use the word karma for. Those imprints made in this thing we call our mind, our awareness, by how we've interacted with others.

And those imprints finally make their contribution to my current moment experience. And that's all my current moment experience is and ever has been, is these results of previous imprints made reaching the threshold of their X prints. I know that's not an English word, but it fits.

What I've put in is now coming out. Coming out of what? They really aren't coming out. They are the power behind the shape shift.

So now it's this, and now it's that, and now it's this, and now it's that. And in every moment of this and that, I'm also reacting or acting. So I'm imprinting as the X prints are happening.

And that's the process we call projections happening. When we use the word projections happening, check your mind. Somebody's yelling at you, and you go, oh, this is just my projections.

Does it make it feel less real? No, they don't stop yelling. It doesn't stop hurting. But does the word, use the word, oh, it's just my projection.

Intellectually, does it make you think, does it give you the reaction? Man, this isn't real. Because is that the right reaction? Is that the accurate reaction? No. Because it's my projection, it's very real.

What's happening in the dream is very real to dream you. What's happening to me in this life is very real to this life, me. But is it real? Is it real in the way I think it's real? No, it's not.

Is it only partly not real like that? No, it's 100% not real like that. But is it not happening at all? No, it is happening. Because it's projection.

We're trying to get there by way of watching the ripenings. So when we're in Maha Mudra and we're experiencing that constant, we're calling it a flow, but a flow feels like it's going like this. And at some point we're going to stop going like this and it's going to be, just, anyway, sorry, distracted myself.

Lost that train of thought completely. So, okay. So as we are growing our intellectual ability to put on an awareness of this experience I'm having that feels like it's coming at me, can't be coming at me, it has to be coming from me, and so it reveals the no self nature and so it could be anything different, better or worse, and the way I influence things is by how I interact.

All of that, pack it all into some way of reminding ourselves what's happening in the moment. As I do that, more and more easily in my meditation practice, I find that I can do it a little more easily in my not meditation practice. In my, what I think is my real life, my waking life that I'm learning is really not any different than a dream life in the way things are happening to me, other than the way I think they're happening to me.

And so, as I'm walking through my this time lifetime, I can have more of that sense of it's all like moving through the process happening as I'm moving through my day. And, you know, from my own experience, I can do it pretty well when I'm by myself outdoors walking somewhere. It's funny, it's like it's this certain circumstance.

I have this time, it takes me 10 minutes to get from my house to where the center I'm going. And in that time frame, I have nothing that I need to do other than think about, whoa, this is all just coming, coming, coming, coming. I can do it when I'm driving, when I'm all by myself.

But as soon as I'm with another person or I'm in my do the dishes, read the yard mode, can't do it, it's weird. But these little glimpses of being in the constant shape shift is a powerful moment of seed planting where we are finally off the automatic pilot of blaming things for their own identities. So when we get little glimpses of that in what we call waking life, it shows that our meditation efforts are planting seeds that are starting to ripen.

Even if it still feels like, well, you know, I'm 100 years away from seeing emptiness directly. When we get these little glimpses, off-cushion real life glimpses, pat yourself on the back. I think you're all having them.

We just are maybe discounting them as not so important. And I want to encourage you to take credit for the work that you've done for those little glimpses to come up. As we can hold that space of awareness, Lama Christi points out, our ability to, she used the term, ride out good appearances or bad appearances, meaning pleasant ones or unpleasant ones, with less reactivity.

It grows that sense of equanimity. Not just the, okay, I can tolerate things, but the equanimity is to love and care for everything and everybody in the same way with equal concern. And so this awareness that seems at first glimpse would make you very detached and like unconcerned because all this stuff that's happening to me isn't really happening in the way that I think.

So who cares about anybody? It's everybody. It gives the opposite experience, the experience of, no, I want to give, I want to share, I want to be for everybody, everything. All right.

Which then leads to our seed planting behavior choices as being, wanting to be more and more kind, not because scriptures say I have to, but because I want to. I want to impact my reality in that way. So first Panchen Lama, he goes, we need a break.

I'm sorry. Let's take a break. Dear Lama, may I have a question? It's very simple.

How would a Mahamudra retreat be like? What would we be doing? Considering that we already had the meditation retreat and we can take it on a little bit deeper, how would that work out? You know, I would think that what we would do would be to use a couple of days to review the steps and then decide how many days we want to dig in deeply and then use the four sessions a day to sit together and just do the practice together. You know, sink down deeper and deeper and deeper with not much guidance by the leader. You know, maybe sinking us all down by guided and then maybe the leader would just be the one to be the check, right? To make sure that we don't go wandering off and miss the opportunity.

And then I would anticipate coming out of the session that maybe we would want to bounce experiences off each other or talk about, you know, issues that came up or questions. So it wouldn't be so much a guided investigation into mental affliction issues like we've done in other retreats. It would just be a session together.

And they say that, you know, if you have one pencil, you can break it. But if you're holding 10 pencils and you try to break 10 pencils, you can't. So they say that everybody's meditations will go deeper when you meditate in a group.

And that's not my personal experience, but it is, you know, theory. So I think it would just be repeated sessions trying to sink deeper, deeper, deeper and not much teaching. Okay, but imagine that most of us who already took the meditation retreat and were taking Mahamudra would go into a meditation.

Do you think three days of reviewing the practice would be more than enough? And then maybe take six days, seven days for the practice. So it would be worth, you know. I think, you know, 10 days would probably be minimum.

To be able to get in and explore. Two weeks might be better. Right.

I was thinking of two weeks, but I thought. You know, it's hard for people. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. It would be intense.

It would be an intense practice. And definitely would need to be people that have learned the material and have worked with it to a certain extent. Yes.

Because, for example, personally when I'm doing Bhojjimpa and I'm doing also the Mahamudra I kind of get confused between one subject and the other one. Yeah. And I'm thinking if I can take this deeper Yeah.

It will sink, as you say. Yeah. We can think about it and we can see if we can plan a retreat further on and see who's interested.

Good. That'd be nice. Well, you can do your own retreat.

Oh, but I want you here. Can you come over and stay with me? Sure. Okay.

Then we'll do it together. Thank you. Yeah.

You know, it would be lovely. It would be lovely to do a Mahamudra. Okay.

Thank you. Hard. Be hard.

Hard, but Yeah. Challenging. Yeah.

I just googled if Mahamudra is a mind Therma and it is a mind precious vase. Is that what Therma means? Hidden treasure, right? Treasure. This is a mind treasure.

Mind treasure. Yay. Mind treasure.

Jenna, you look lovely. I love how you look with your colorful hat. You look beautiful.

Okay. Are we back? So in the commentary, Master Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen, he quotes from a master whose name is Khenpo Nangyur. You see it in the vocabulary list here.

Khenpo Nangyur. He's an Indian man. The lineage holder for what's called Nigud Chudjuk.

It is Nigud Chudjuk is the six yogas of Niguma. Lady Niguma. Lady Niguma is Master Naropa's partner.

That's like really in the background. When we learn about Naropa. So in the Diamond Way, we learn the six yogas of Naropa in our completion stage work.

But there are the six yogas of Niguma, not meaning asana yoga, meaning practices to bring about this union of these making a pair, making one thing out of something that is two. There are different methods for going about that. And Lady Niguma is said to be one of the few beings who reached their total enlightenment from their human form.

And so here's this lady who did what she had to do in that lifetime to reach her total enlightenment, to become this deity, fully enlightened being. And then she passed her practice on to one disciple, Gyumpo Nelnjoy. And she told him, you can pass it on to one.

And it went a couple of generations like that, just being passed to one until finally, I don't know what happened, but it blossomed and it became an actual lineage. The Changpa Kagyu lineage and a practice within their lineage. Not that everybody does it, but in Gyumpo Nelnjoy's writings about the Nyingma practices, he uses the term, this term Rangdrol.

Rangdrol, they translated as self-liberation, self-liberation, as if there are some things that will become liberated without any kind of outer input that isn't what it actually means. Nobody can see my, oh, because I don't have my screen share. Why didn't you tell me earlier? I turned on the closed captions and see if I could get the writing and the spelling of the words.

Thank you. My computer's got this delay. I've got this delay.

Now you can see it, right? No? Yes, now we can. Thank you. And now I can see you and see it at the same time magically.

There it is. Nyingma, Lady Nyingma, technically. Thimpho Nelngor, her first student.

This is from like 1000-ish AD in India. Nigachudruk is the word for the six yogas of Nyingma, these six kinds of practices that you do. Rangdrol is what I'm talking about.

Drol means liberation. Rang means self. Self-liberation.

So in that text, it's saying that there that that self-liberation does happen. And they give us an example for something that is an example of Rangdrol. Something which liberates itself is surprisingly sansara.

And it's like, what? I have to do, I don't have to. I get to do all these practices. Oh my gosh.

18 ACI courses, 18 Diamond Way, 18 Bhog Chimpas, right? All those retreats in order to self-liberate. And samsara will do it itself? Come on, do we believe that? How is it that samsara is self-liberating? Lama Krisi said, just live in it long enough. And finally, enough stuff will happen that you go, there's something wrong with this picture.

That's what makes samsara self-liberating. Because it's nothing but pain. And when we recognize that, we go looking for why that's true.

Because we refuse to accept the fact that it has to be true. And we, you know, hopefully, search enough that we find a teaching that hits our heart, mind, with enough hook to investigate it more deeply as our seeds are ripening, finding a method, a tool, an explanation that will help us figure out how to change our behavior in order to change our experience. So, because samsara is nothing but pain, it is self-liberating.

Because samsara's reality is based on a mistake, it, it is self-liberating in the sense that it is it is limited. It's going to fail because anyone who wakes up to the mistake stops perpetuating it. And it will disappear when we are not perpetuating it by perceiving it.

We don't have a choice as to whether we perceive ourselves in samsara or not. As our seeds change, we will not perceive ourselves in samsara anymore. And samsara will cease to be.

And then that's like, wait a minute, so there's no samsara for a Buddha? How does that sit? No, there has to be still samsara because I'm in it. And Buddhas are aware of me in my samsara, so doesn't samsara exist for a Buddha? It's worth thinking about. We're limited in our cognition of what it is to be Buddha.

But it's helpful for us to be able to relate better to our own samsara when we try to figure out what would it be like to a Buddha for whom it has no existence? Difficult. That's why we're chewing on it. So that we can better relate to those constant shapeshifting when we are in our Mahamudra meditation.

So that when the doorway into the emptiness of all that shapeshifting gets thrown open, we're able to step in. Rangdrol. So there's another term in the Tibetan literature.

It's rangni. Rangni means happens all by itself. Does anything happen all by itself? No, technically, because there's no itself for anything, right? To make itself happen.

There's no such thing as rangni, rangni, which is why there is rangni, rangni, because by way of projections, things happen all by themselves. It seems like things happen all by themselves. Doesn't it? Yes, right? All of a sudden, the battery died in the car, you know, a month or so ago.

That just happened all by itself. Everything seems like they happen all by itself. Here, the term is being used for how a thing liberates itself.

It seems to do so all by itself, like samsara would free itself once, once its secret is known, once its mistake is revealed, poof, it's just gone. And it seems like it happens all by itself, but it wasn't all by itself. It was by way of the mistake being revealed.

Samsara doesn't reveal its own mistake. It just reveals itself by being nothing but suffering. And then it will, we will wear it out.

So then Lama Christi put this little twist on that. What wears out samsara is becoming aware of its illusory nature. And then because this illusory nature world gets so harsh for us that we finally start to question its reality to come to see the illusion.

That's why it, samsara is something that must end because it's illusory. I really, I think I understand the word illusory until I hear her explain, use it in this kind of explanation. And then I realized as soon as I hear illusion, I think not real.

I think imaginary. I think also, it won't hurt if it happens to me. But it does hurt.

Illusions do hurt. So when we say illusion, when we say projection, we want to be checking our own mind's reaction. Maybe call it our own heart's reaction to those explanations of where things are coming from.

Is it making me think, oh, things matter less? Or have I gotten to my level of understanding where when I say projection, it makes me, like, oh, that's the answer. We're wanting to keep working with it until we get that reaction to it's an illusion, it's a projection, to this eager, okay, let me then create nicer illusions, let me create more perfect illusions for everybody. Because they are illusions, they work.

It's a difficult phrase. So we're working on becoming more keenly aware of our experiences as appearances of this, this mind, and those appearances, every single one, is an old, past planted seed ripening into experience. And with everyone, as it ripens, it changes because the power of its seed is changing.

We were talking about that in another class. And as we are experiencing that, we are experiencing this as something that's happening from itself rather than from our process of the process of the seed ripening. And this is the hardest class.

When we are applying that to everything we experience, we are experiencing this from itself rather from our process And as are experiencing this as something that's happening from itself rather of cause and effect, the very process of karma, that that also is illusory, that also is nothing but projections, that also doesn't exist, and it's like, ah, right? That's what we fall back on. Nothing is anything but karma and emptiness, karma and emptiness. They have to have some reality of their own.

Karma has to be a thing, doesn't it? Didn't Buddha say, right? Karma is what's driving the show. I'll teach people about karma, and then they'll be able to make their own karma, merit, that'll force them to see themselves as enlightened. Karma has to be a thing.

Can karma be a thing that has its own nature? Can karma be a thing that says, you do something kind, you will get a good result. You do something unkind, you will get a bad result. Because I, Mr. Karma, said so.

Do we think that's where it came from? No, it can't be. But when we think of karma, are we thinking of it as, right, a thing, a separate thing? I have my karma implies, like, I have my red and white pen, implies there is a pen to be had. Karma cannot exist like that.

So does karma not run the show? That's why we go into the debate. You can decide karma runs the show, and you are tenacious to your arguing your point. And then in the end, you throw your punch line, but I don't mean self-existently, because every experience we have is a karmic ripening and a karmic planting, and so that process is me and my world.

It does run the show. It is the show. It is the show running.

Let's put it that way. The way we use our words is really critical. And as we're getting closer and closer in our awareness, English doesn't work anymore.

I think any language that is based on subject, object, verb doesn't work anymore, but I don't know how to communicate otherwise. So that process that we call projections, ripening, planting, and nothing but is what is meant by that term for self-existent things. I know I do still believe that things think any of us believe in self-existent things, but I know I do still believe that things happen to me from them.

And that's misunderstanding what we mean by dependent origination. Because even as I know the things that are doing that to me, dependent on their own causes, dependent on their own parts, dependent on all kinds of things, they still had an identity separate from my ripening results of my own past behavior. And so ultimately, highest school, dendrel, this dependent origination, means dependent upon how I treated others in the past.

Which is why Geshe-la always jumps to that conclusion, the world is made from kindness. Because it's a positive result to have an existing world, no matter how bad the world is. If we didn't have an existing world, there would be nothing, nothing at all, nihilism, non-existence, which is impossible.

But it would be the case. So any existence, no matter how bad, is still a positive ripening. Again, a debate would be, okay then, a hell realm is still a ripening result of some kind of kindness.

Eh, Gads. Yeah, because it exists. But it exists as the result of every other kind of unkindness you've ever done.

Why are we going into all of this? Because it sounded like Milarepa was saying, when you see emptiness directly, you will come to realize that all that other stuff does not exist. How can we argue with Master Milarepa? But that can't be what he means, can it? Because if, when we are in ultimate reality, suddenly we see that there's no existing thing at all, well then there's no ultimate reality either. And then what am I experiencing, Master Milarepa? And he goes, right.

So in, in the end of his verse he goes, this is how it will appear immersed in the ultimate. So it's so slippery, like he wiggles out of the argument. No, I didn't say that's how it is when you're in the direct perception of emptiness.

I said that's how it will appear when you are in the direct perception of emptiness. How will it appear as nothing but the emptiness of all those things that we were thinking existed in some way other than by way of our own projections. Those things really don't exist.

And we experience that directly in our direct perception of the ultimate. And we'll know coming out of it, how all those things actually do exist. Not whether or not they exist, but how they actually exist.

Which is ripening results of my own past behaviors. Part of this constant shape-shifting that I call me and my world, me and my life. Buddhas being part of that are part of my shape-shifting.

Are there any other Buddhas than that? Not for me, but what about for you? And what about for them from their side? But there can be a Buddha from them, from their side that is not a them from my side. Can't there be? Yeah, I'm suspicious that every one of you is one of those. So then those Buddhas don't exist for me, but it doesn't mean they don't exist at all.

But how do I know whether they do or don't exist at all if I don't have any seeds ripening for them? They don't exist at all for me. But does that mean they don't exist at all at all? Right? Those of us who were trying to get to Nagarjuna have been through this again and again and again. It's so helpful to do those mental gymnastics that Nagarjuna puts us through for when we are trying to understand better and better what it is we are experiencing as we Mahamudra, as we try to meet the true nature of our own mind.

It's appearing nature and, more importantly, it's no self-natured nature. That it's appearing nature reveals to us. So, when you go into the direct perception of emptiness, does every existing thing disappear? No, it can't.

But can you be aware of any existing thing? No. Because even yourself is an appearing thing, you're not even aware of yourself. Well, then, who's having the direct perception of emptiness? What's happening in that ultimate reality? Which is why those who have seen it have said like water poured into water.

There's nothing I can say that will help someone else be able to think, oh, this is what it must be like. And then they go right on to try to describe it. There's nothing I can say that will work, but let me try.

Because the story helps us. As long as we understand that as we are telling ourselves the story, we are still misunderstanding. And that still misunderstanding trigger keeps us digging at it.

Until we reach the direct perception of it, which we only know once we come out of it, apparently. And then we'll think to ourselves, wow, it sure seemed like nothing existed anymore, but now I see, oh, my gosh, everything has that true nature of its ultimate reality. Which, if we try to use words, we would say, oh, it's availability to be what my seeds made me see.

So everything has that availability, doesn't it? In order to see this as the pen, there's an availability for pen to be here. Cup, hand, ring, glasses, hair, all of it has the same ultimate reality of being not what it is from itself, but what it is by way of my seed ripening, making me see it the way it is. So everything we experience has the potential to be anything, right? And so when I they use the term nothing.

In English, it's nothing. The word's no thing. I like to actually separate it and say things is no thingness.

Because to me, I hear the word nothing and my mind goes, wipe it out. But I hear no thing, and it's like there's something possible, but it hasn't shown up yet. And it feels to me like that's more accurate to an object's emptiness.

And then it feels a little bit like, well, when I make this into a pen, it's like if the emptiness had a personality, it would go, oh, man, pen? You could have made Buddha, right? Shoot. Like, everything that I make into something ordinary is a little disappointed with me. Because everything's potentiality is for anything.

Everything. If you take a bunch of squiggles, and I've seen, I've done this before, this is like no thing. Undifferentiated all potential, if there could be such a thing in and of itself.

And then I, and then my mind, forced by karmas, let me see what it does with this. It goes, and maybe I need to turn it this way. It goes, and it delineates this, and this, and this, and my mind puts on it this, butterfly.

Like, there's another one. And then over here, it does something else, and it makes tree. And over here, it does something else, it makes angry yelling bots.

Out of the undifferentiated comes the differentiation by my mind. This would be lesser school, because lesser school says, yeah, the undifferentiated mush is out there, and my karmic seeds is what makes it shapeshift. But it's a useful tool.

Take this all away and say, oh, the emptiness of any given thing and the thing together reveal this process happening. Forced as the ripening results of the causes I make. We're talking about all of this to inform our little peace of mind that's going to analyze what's going on as we're in that flow of the constant shapeshifting.

In your reading, you'll see in commentary, he goes on to say, he's quoting Kunga as saying, look, these things that we experience, they seem to rise up on their own. They seem to rise up on their own. And when we're in our place of watching the arisings happening, we can we are experiencing that directly.

Right? There's I don't know, sensation. Then there's a color. And then there's a sound.

And then there's a something. We're just watching it happening apparently spontaneously. We're intentionally not saying, now I will think of grapefruit.

We're just waiting to see what pops up on its own. Then the question becomes, well, when outside of that meditation, I am deciding to think of grapefruit, it seems like I've had the choice of what I could think of next, and I made a decision to think of grapefruit, and then now I'm thinking of grapefruit. But as we analyze more deeply, did we really make the choice to think of grapefruit? Yes, I had the experience, and that experience to think of thinking of grapefruit is also a ripening karmic seed to have the choice to think of grapefruit.

So, yes, we can have choices to think of things, and that is not outside the laws of karma. The laws of karma are an explanation of our experience, they are not laws established by something else, some existing thing else. So, when we're first starting to explore whether or not we have choices in our behaviors, because that's where the power lies to make the change, we will meet up with this understanding that we don't, in fact, have the choice to have a choice, that to have a choice is also ripening results.

It's a good ripening result, to have choice. It's useful. We don't have to see it that way.

We have even the goodness to have, be able to make choices about our quality of our behavior towards others, our morality. That apparently is pretty unique to seeds ripening as humans. Animals don't have the karmic seeds to have choices in their morality.

They are driven by instinct. That's what it is to be animal. Hell beings, hungry ghosts, the others, they are driven by their suffering to not have the seeds to choose a different behavior.

They're on automatic pilot for survival. Not even survival. Automatic pilot reaction of the one that got them there in the first place.

So when we understand that, yes, the laws of karma also are illusory, they function. That's how they function. That's why they function.

They are also projected results. until that's like, oh, yeah, cool. Wow.

What I can do with that is extraordinary. We want to keep chewing on it and keep exploring it as part of our maha mudra. This is seeds ripening and nothing but.

If we're thinking that's imposed upon us in some way by somebody, we're misunderstanding. If it gives us the wow factor, this is amazing. What can I do with this? We're getting closer to understanding it accurately.

Man, oh, man, oh, man. So we are out of time. So remember the person that you wanted to be able to help at the beginning of class.

It may not seem like it, but the seeds we've planted by listening to this class have already started us on the way to helping them stop their suffering forever someday, and that's an extraordinary goodness. So please be happy with yourself and think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone that you can hold in your hands. Recall your own precious holy being.

See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them. Ask them to please, please stay close to continue to guide you, inspire you, bless you with these ahas so that we can live more kindly.

And then offer them this gemstone of goodness. See them accept it and bless it. And they carry it with them right back into our hearts.

See them there, feel them there, their love, their compassion, their wisdom. It feels so good we want to keep it forever, and so we know to share it. By the power of the goodness that we've just done, may all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere. Give them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom, and may it be so. Thank you so very much for the opportunity to try to explain these things.

May I ask a question, please? Thank you so much. So when we say that Buddha is omniscient and they have this quality to know everything, Buddha. Right.

To experience everything directly. Technically. Omniscience is not to know everything, but to experience everything.

Okay. Okay, so we don't even mean that they know everything. Well, they do know everything, but it's not my words, but my words here to know everything, I find that limiting.

But anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt. Go ahead with your question. Yes, Roxana.

Okay. That's also because I've heard that they cannot experience, they don't experience everything directly, but they somehow deduct from when we, because they cannot experience pain and negativity, but they deduct that somebody is in pain and... For a fully enlightened being, every experience is direct. There is no deduction.

There is no conceptualization. There is only direct experience for an omniscient mind. That's what it is to be omniscient.

But they don't have the seeds to experience negativity and pain. They don't experience suffering. They know my pain.

They know my suffering. They know my samsara. They experience those things.

They don't suffer from them, no. They are not negative things. So Buddha's mind also is experiencing my mind, but they don't experience the suffering.

That's hard. If I could conceptualize Buddha, I would do it and then I would be one. So keep to it.

It's just another metaphor. The words are not saying what they are. So let's go back to my question.

If they are omniscient and they experience everything, then I guess I cannot ask this question anymore. Sorry. Okay.

Yeah. So do we need to invent words to explain it? Because the words are short of what it is we're trying to explain. Your own explanation, right? You do what you have to do and then keep recognizing ah, no, that's not quite it either.

And then so if were you trying, did I get it that even Buddhas are still experiencing reality from their own side? They are, they are still the process of seeds planting, seeds ripening. Somehow it's all happening simultaneously. Maybe it's always happening simultaneously.

They're aware of it happening simultaneously. My words are failing me as well. But yes, they are always experiencing it from their own side.

But I think what they would mean by their own side is quite different than what another different. I take it right to mean. Okay, so what's the point then? It's it's kind of lost in the words and just repeating the words over and over and they're not what they mean.

And we cannot stop having mental afflictions until we stop having mental afflictions we cannot understand them. We will be constantly in a like illusion and not getting it and not getting it and not getting it. It feels like we're stuck, right? I think the words are making us stuck.

That's why we meditate. Yeah, that's why this course is priceless to meditate on dance. But the words are labels that are so narrow and right.

Right. And the way Buddhas help us is through speech. So there's something necessary for working with the words.

Right. We cannot we don't have this is the instrument that we have to use. Right.

That's how we communicate until we become telepathic, right? Right. Thank you. All right.

Thanks, everybody. Oh, that was hard. Yes, Tom? I kind of took from today's session that it's starting to be like going to the eye doctor and they put the those like glasses on or like it's not a glass, you know what I mean? Like the thing that they put hold the lens and then they your vision change and they play with the blurriness or the sharpness and maybe even the colors, the richness and when you're looking out, obviously, you're going to see different imprint going to like show up in your mind.

So, but in the moment, I'll take them off or remove the machine. I'm back to. So it starts to feel like, oh my God, there is iguanas falling from the sky literally just fell and hit the ground so bad in front of me.

Welcome to Florida, cold weather, they literally fall. It was really scary. So it does feel like the thing that I'm like trying to reach and want to have and it's conflicting because I don't have it right now and it caused frustration because there is those gaps.

But then it's also like Nati was saying, the words has opportunities to follow them or explore them a little differently to keep the glass on. At some point your vision will change. I'm wearing glasses at this point of my life.

I can be without it. But there is a shift in my view and reality since wearing glasses. I don't know.

What I'm recognizing that arises is mostly the gaps. I want this thing. I'm recognizing this thing.

I'm recognizing samsara. I'm done with samsara. I want this thing.

But then it's so slippery to grab or have or touch or make sure you have it. It's the same as just like seeds and they're slippery. Like understanding the whole thing.

Or like to really be really clear in that. And it's a little scary not because like the end result but it just doesn't like it's like where you're actually going to catch it. It's to be like oh this is it.

I always heard like in Mahamudra or the reflection to Mahamudra like the seers. Any time you think you're like oh this is it. That's not it.

It just faded away. So the analogy you're using of the optometrist they always is this is this one better which one is this one. Which is better this one or this one.

Which is better this one. And to me it's like ah that's such a clue into life is always this one or this one. When the answer is both or neither like yes that's you know find that and then dive into that.

Yeah that's kind of what I took from class like it's not this or that. It's not like it's there is this like little narrow path here to like slide down to it. And then to get and then slide into that and stay.

Yes. The thing is it's like every time I feel like I'm there it's like slipping away. I know.

I know. So it just feels like you're like what am I doing the right thing like yeah. All of us keep at it.

Okay thank you. Thanks thanks everybody. 

All right, welcome back. We are Mahamudra. It's January 27, 2026.

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom.

See them there with you, gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion, their wisdom, radiating from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light. And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way. Feel how much you would like to be able to help them.

Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short. How wonderful it will be when we can also help in some deep and ultimate way. A way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever.

Deep down we know this is possible. Deeper down we know this is what we are meant to become. Working with emptiness and karma, we glimpse how it's possible, even inevitable.

And so we turn our mind back to our precious fully being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way. And so we ask them, please, please teach us that.

Show me that. Help me. Help me become like you.

Made of love, made of compassion, made of wisdom. And they are so happy that we've asked. Of course they agree.

Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the pure world they are teaching us how to create.

We imagine we can hold it in our hands. And we offer it to them. Following it with our promise to practice what they teach us.

Using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth filled with fragrant incense and covered with a blanket of flowers. The great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon.

In my mind, I make them a paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you. By this deed, may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. So let's sit, get your body set and be still.

When you've got that body parked, bring your focus of attention to your breath at your nostrils. Use your same sequence to focus in on the spot. Adjust your clarity.

Turn on your NAR, your intensity. When you have your mind sharp and clear, watch your state. Keep the sharp clear, clear, fascinated and drop back and down, opening up to the awareness of things that seem to be appearing in your outer world.

Mostly it sounds. Notice the identity, the identifying. Drop it, drop in deeper to inner sensations, keeping the bright, clear, fascinated mind.

In your own time, slide into the subtlety of thoughts arising into this clear awareness of any arising at more and more subtle levels. Our bright, clear, fascinated, watcher mind knows all these shapeshifting appearances are merely mental images. This vast arena of mind, this constant layer of appearances.

Check to see if you're still watching. If you are, is there fascination? Is there dullness? Is there following? Make your correction. Now from within this keen awareness of the constant arisings, take a part of your watcher and recognize that with each arising, there must also be that arising's empty nature, that unreality of the appearing reality.

Feel what it is to know it's there with every appearance that arises and passes. We'll stay three more minutes. Check, check, nice.

Now make a note and then come back up your layers. Let those appearances get the identity, sounds inside my body, sounds outside my body, still appearances and their emptiness, and then my body in this room, what it feels like. And when you're ready, open your eyes.

The first thing you see, think appearances and emptiness and dedicate to reaching it directly. And then take a stretch. The last class, the last couple of classes, we've been working on this idea dendral or nantong, meaning this relationship between appearances and their emptiness.

And Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen quoted from Milarepa that long beautiful quote about how when we are in the direct perception of ultimate reality, there is nothing arising, or so it seems, is what his punchline at the end was. And he went through all the all the ideas, all the concepts, all the things we're struggling with, all our goals, everything. And he says, you know, when you're in the direct perception of emptiness, you know that none of those things exist.

And it's like, it's still, it rocks my boat to read the words, because it sounds like, well, then do that. How do they suddenly exist when I come out? Do they not exist at all? So is reaching Buddhahood really just some, I don't know, myth. And it's never going to really happen.

And of course, that's not what Milarepa is saying. Thank goodness, we're so well trained to understand that when we are in that direct experience of ultimate reality, it's that we are, I can't even say it, we are experiencing the absence of self nature, of our self and all existing things. But that means there still have to be existing things that are empty, they cannot non exist.

But if we're not aware of them, how can we be experiencing the emptiness of them? Right? It is a conundrum when we try to really pin down what's happening in that experience, because it's never not seeds ripening, and seeds ripening have an appearing side and their emptiness. And there's no emptiness other than something appearing. So having the direct perception of emptiness is the appearing.

And that very appearing, the very experience has its emptiness. And that's what we're experiencing directly. So it ends up that what we're experiencing directly is the emptiness of our own me, our own mind, and everything about the three spheres that is happening ever has happened.

And again, when you're trying to describe it, you're out in appearing world using appearing words that are unique to everyone who hears them. So it isn't something that can be described in the way that we think, oh, I can describe the white horse in the field. And then everybody I describe it to will see it will understand what I'm talking about.

But even that's not true, right? I can't describe a white horse in a field and have you experience it the same way I do. Because nobody experiences anything the same way I do, do they? Same for you. It's kind of a miracle that we agree or that we think that we agree on so many things.

Look at that white horse in the field. Oh, yeah, I see it. But if I were behind your eyes, maybe I would say, what white horse? No, that's a, I don't know, that's a white monkey.

Or that's it's a miracle that we all agree. In our experiences, but that's what it is to be human. And that's what would it be to be a dog if you if you point out to your dog buddies, you know, wow, there's a really fresh thing of cow poop, let's go roll in it.

And they would all agree that that would be a fun thing to do. Like that's what it is to be a dog. So we're we've been working on this conceptualization of something we really can't conceptualize.

And so we go at it in such a way that we try to get it and then recognize No, that's not it either. And try to get it and no, that's not either. And we we left off I think where we were looking at this relationship between an appearing thing, the seed ripening thing, and the emptiness of that seed ripening thing.

And the dilemma is that in order for there to be a relationship, there have to be two existing things to have a relationship. Otherwise, you can't talk about our relationship. Can you? So when we're talking about an appearing thing, our friend, the pen, and its relationship with its emptiness, right, we learn, well, the fact that I see this object in, in a way unique to me, and you see the object in a way unique to you.

That shows me that the identity of the object is depending to some extent on the person who's observing it. And that shows me it's empty nature at some level. And I see that once the pen is here, it has a relationship with its emptiness that that emptiness allows it to be what any being sees.

Right? Am I holding a red pen or a white pen? I'm holding a white pen. Because that's all I see. Until I look in the thing.

And now I see that I'm holding a red pen. And it's like, wait a minute. I'm experiencing it directly like this.

Oh, this analogy is coming together. My direct experience of this pen is a white pen. But when I look out there, I see myself experiencing it as a red pen.

So which pen am I experiencing the white one or the red one? Can we say both? Can we say depends? And that shows me that whether it's a white pen or a red pen depends on my own mind. And that shows me what's called the no self nature of the pen, right? We know this so well. But then once we've thought that through, that's when we say, Oh, so see, the identity of the pen red or white is not in the object.

It's in me. So that means the pen itself has no self nature. And that's its emptiness.

And my mind thinks, well, the pen has to be here first. And then I know it's emptiness, like there's some teeny bit of time that has to happen before the emptiness is there. Before I'm aware of the emptiness, we think the object has to be there first.

And that means then that the object and the emptiness of the object have to be two separate things that arise in my mind, and then they somehow come together. And then when we were studying Arya Nagarjuna, those of us who have, when we go to try to investigate where those two are coming together, does it happen in a place? Or does it happen in a moment of time? Like, we try to find the moment it actually happens, and we come up empty handed. And it shows us that there is in fact no relationship between the object and its emptiness, because you don't have two separately existing things that come together.

But wait, every object has its emptiness. How can that happen without them having a relationship? Do you see the conundrum? The cognition conundrum. It's no conundrum, well, experientially.

Once you've experienced it directly, there's no conundrum anymore. But we can't experience them in the way we usually experience things directly. We can't experience an appearing thing and its emptiness simultaneously, which is the way they actually exist, through the mechanism of an ordinary human.

We actually don't experience that directly, both the appearing and the emptiness directly until we're omniscient. Even when we have the direct experience of something arising, the seed ripening into the identity of the object, we're not also experiencing directly the emptiness of the object. It's the conclusion we come to once we've directly experienced the fact that the object's identity has come out of my own mind.

And then once we experience that directly, if we give ourselves the chance to go into meditation, the sequence of thinking about it will take us into, they say, that direct experience of, oh, nothing exists in any other way than that, including me, like mostly my me, because it's the me that's the most subtle thing that's there that is appearing, that therefore is emptiness, revealing its emptiness. So even as we're having those first direct perceptions, it feels like, seems like, there's this level and there's that level, and it's only at omniscience that they come together. But at omniscience, it's when we experience them directly, simultaneously, because we are finally experiencing things, anything, including self, accurately to the way that they truly exist.

Every other perception has been inaccurate to the way they truly exist. And it's important to think of it that way, so that we don't fall off one of those two cliffs, that if the thing doesn't exist the way I believe it, it doesn't exist at all. We don't think we fall off that cliff.

But as I watch my own mind, when I say, oh, this pen is nothing but my projection, there is a part of me that goes, oh, so it's like, it doesn't really exist. My mind's just making a phantom pen and it works. There's a part of me that says, when it's just projection, it's not real.

Is a projected pen a real pen? Yeah, technically, but we have to be careful. What do you mean by real? Real by way of how I've always thought it was real? No, there's no such pen as that. But does that mean there's no pen at all? No.

The real pen is the projected pen. Yeah, but projections are just like a movie on a screen. You know, you burn the building down and the movie on the screen, and then you go and the building is still there.

Because it was just projected. It was just a movie. It's like we get it backwards.

So this God, Maha Mudra, we get reach one level of Maha Mudra, where we're resting in this keen awareness, everything's just ripening, ripening, ripening, ripening, not even ripening all the way into full on identities. But then that is the full on identity at that point, just ripenings. And we add to it that with every ripening, there's the emptiness.

And then we're trying to hold both of those at the same time. And we can't, did you notice that the mind's got to toggle a little bit. But we're getting used to the idea that with every appearance, I know emptiness is there.

And just that awareness, as we sit with it in our session, we're planting seeds to grow that keener awareness when we're out of our session, to be aware that anything that appears must have its empty nature so that it can be what I see. Because that's what makes the thing real, right? Our pen is very real. It writes, it's writing is very real, because it's projected from my mind, your mind, any mind that takes that information and says, oh, pen writing, because there are many minds that could see this and not come up with pen writing, which proves that that pen writing is empty of its own nature.

Right? Thank goodness we've heard this all before. We're trying to take it into a deeper connection to how it can help us in daily life to understand this inability to experience both appearance and the emptiness simultaneously, and still know that that's the process that's happening. And in any experience, pleasant experiences, unpleasant experiences, and all those neutral, habitual experiences that we're having that, you know, I use the word neutral just because Samathi and I are having this discussion about neutral karma recently.

But it's like just when we're on automatic pilot, it's still ripening and emptiness, ripenings and emptiness. But even to say it that way, it sounds sequential, and it's not. So how do we get a word that gives us that connotation of one thing, one thing that is made up of two things, but to say it that way is incorrect.

Right? By knowing one thing, we know two things about it. That's not quite right either. Right? I mean, this is why it's taking so many classes to go through this part of Master Chukyagaltsen's Maha Mudra, because we need to rattle it all around in our minds with the words.

So that when we sink down deep, we don't have to rattle around in words anymore. We can get in there and try to experience it. And somewhere along the line of that experiencing can trigger the seed ripening, it can happen.

That seed ripening experience typically happens not in meditation, but it can happen in meditation too. And that could still help you walk through the door of emptiness directly. Maha Mudra is a beautiful practice to prepare us for that recognition, because we'll be so aware.

If nothing else, Maha Mudra makes our aware-er really keen. Have you noticed? I hope it's happened. We've been at this for a while.

So at the end of Milarepa's verse, not the complete end, but after he has said, essentially when you're in the direct perception of emptiness, all you are experiencing is the empty nature of all existing things. And none of those existing things are appearing to us at that time. And that's how it seems when you're in that experience, that all those things don't exist at all, because that's what he's just said.

Not even karma and emptiness exists when you're in the direct perception of emptiness. It is still happening. So that's how it appears to exist.

And then he goes on to say, the interdependent workings of things arise infallibly. That's what we've been trying to work on. They rise up on their own, just like a dream or a mirage, a moon inside a lake or a magical display.

The infallibility is what I'm wanting to emphasize. In that, when we've proven to ourselves, or at least have enough belief that we're still trying to prove it to ourselves, that there isn't anything that I can experience that's not a result of some imprint I've made on this mind by something similar before, when I'm trying to really prove that to myself, then I can more and more catch myself when I'm blaming something or someone for some experience I'm having and recognize, no, that they aren't to blame. The experience of them doing something to me that I'm blaming is coming out of ripening of my own seeds.

Even the fact that I'm blaming them is my ripening seed. And so that means everything that is happening to me is happening exactly as needed, exactly as it should be. The whole process of seeds planting, seeds being influenced, and seeds ripening is an infallible process.

We call it karma. We call it the law of cause and effect. But those words are just a description of this process that is existence.

And there's no old mental imprint that can get over the threshold to manifestation out of sequence or inappropriately, because it has depended on its being influenced by every other seed in every other seed out until it's empowered to bring its result. So it has to happen exactly as it has to happen, because there's nobody saying, okay, now it's time for you. And then over here, there's a little seed saying, no, no, me, no, no, me.

And it jumps out in front of everything. And then it's some surprise. That's impossible.

And yet, when we're having our experiences, believing that things have their own natures, and there are all these influences outside of this thing we call karma, something happens out of the blue. And it's like, wow, where did that come from? And something else happens. And it's like, oh, my gosh, how do I react to that? We struggle against things, naturally, because of our misunderstanding.

But we're just struggling against our own system. We're struggling in the wrong way. It's a struggle that will never get resolved, because we're struggling against the wrong thing.

The workings of karma are infallible. Kindness brings a pleasant result. Unkindness brings an unpleasant result.

It takes time for a deed to grow into its result. We can't get a result we never made the seed for. And any seed we did make will give a result if we don't do something about it.

There isn't any experience we can have that's outside of that system. We reap what we sow is really true. So why do we struggle against it? Like, what if our watcher me, that's like, well, cool, come on.

Yeah, right. Could be like that in life. Do we think, oh, my gosh, I would be so disengaged from from life.

You know, I just be using every opportunity to plant new seeds. Right. Like, is there any experience that we could have, or we could decide, no, I'm not going to plant another seed here.

No, that'd be planting a seed. To experience something is to plant a seed. An experience is a ripening.

And it's a planting. Geshe-la said it in mixed nuts last night. Just to experience a pain, plants a new seed for more pain.

And it's like, oh, no, no, no. That can't be true, because otherwise we'd never get out of pain. But we do.

We do. So but what he says is true. Right.

The very experiencing of a result. Plants new seeds for results. It has to.

Otherwise, we would be able to not plant a seed. And that's impossible. So this working of dendro, dependent origination, meaning any appearance, any ripening seed, which is to say, any appearance has its empty nature.

And with any arising appearance, there is always the arising of three aspects to that appearance, the subject side, the object side in the interaction between. So with every ripening seed, there's at least those three things. And then all this seed subtleties that have to do with those three things.

So now one direction we could take from that is when we then try to identify the subject side of every ripening seed as we are in our Mahamudra flow of the seeds ripening. We didn't do it in this session. Where you let the watcher be the flow, the flow, the flow, and then you take part of the watcher and you go looking for the me that's behind the watcher.

And then recognize if there can be a me that I can identify, well, then there's a that's the object of my ripening, ripening, ripening, and that's empty as well. And by the time we've figured it out, the me has changed a little bit. And then it's changed again.

It's the me subject side is a flowing, appearing nature, just like any other flow. And we get close to that. Will the real me please stand up? And it's like, at first it rocks your boat.

And then finally, it's like, yay, right? You just like explode. How did I go there? Because we're recognizing that there can never be a moment when seeds are not ripening. And that means there's never a moment when seeds are not being planted.

And that's all going on in what we call our mind. But technically, we would say it's not going on in our mind. That's what our mind is.

That's what we are is this process. Does this rolling ball of karma I had a student say once. So this infallibility of karmic seeds ripening, nothing can ever go wrong.

We cannot like what's ripening. And it can look like it's gone wrong, like when the keys didn't start the car and it needed a new battery. Battery, but that that arose spontaneously and infallibly.

So what if we could have that attitude towards life, everything arising spontaneously and infallibly? Would we be different? Would we respond differently? There would be a whole lot less struggle. Oh, my gosh, I've got another headache, right? They haven't figured out what those are from. I need to go back to that.

Whoa, it's me, right? It kicks in automatically. I still do it. You know, when I get a new pain or another bout of coughing, it's like that.

I fall right back into old worldview. More accurate worldview would be all right, burn this one off to burn it off, do my best to plant. Kindness seeds with wisdom.

You know, there's nobody for me to be kind to when I'm coughing so hard, I'm nearly throwing up. I just have to be kind to myself and say, what can I do to get through this? I'll burn it off for everybody. Okay, okay.

But at least it takes the struggle away. It takes the fear away. It takes the agitation away to have this beautiful attitude of spontaneous and infallible.

All right, that's my time, three minutes to break. So Lobsang Jukgyeltsen points out that in this growing, very keen awareness that everything and everybody are my projections ripening. The danger when we first learn something like that is that we have this thought that, oh, then all those other people in my world, they're just my projection.

It makes them seem less real. They're actors in a movie. The wrong conclusion is, I don't really have to care so much, right? It's the opposite of what we're trying, the conclusion we're trying to reach, which is, oh, they're all my projections.

Oh my gosh, right? I want them to be happier. I want them to be wiser. I want things to go well for them.

And if they're my projections, I can make a world in which that's true. But the wrong idea is, well, if they're all my projections, then their suffering isn't real. It's my seeds ripening.

And, you know, so, okay. And then when it's like my seeds ripening infallibly, well, then great. The more pain they have, the more I'm done with all of that pain.

Right? Right. It's like total wrong conclusion. And what's wrong with that picture? Lama Kristi points out is that we're saying they are all projections, but I'm not.

Because I'm the projector. So I'm the only real one. All the rest of them are just the movie that my mind is playing.

And movies always in the end have a happy ending. So, right? You're on your own. My projections, like wrong conclusion from a growing understanding of what is true.

All those beings are projections, but so is my me. So is me. And to come up with the conclusion, I'm a projection does not make me feel any less real.

It still hurts to twist your ankle when your projection forces you to twist an ankle. So we do need to check our own mind when we're, you know, recognizing everything's my projection. It's catch when we say the word my, we're still thinking I'm real.

They are not. Whether it's the pan or the other or the boss yelling. Let's be, let's get it right, says Lobsang Chukigatsen.

So let's take our break. Let me ask a question. Yes.

I feel like this is where Mahmudra is like, splits to be like, oh, there is must be like a small version of me like that Atman idea. And, and like, as you were talking of like, I remember specifically, I was trying to hold to the word that you said, so I can remember, but I forgot. But it's like, you're zooming in, and you're zooming in, and you're zooming in, right.

And it was like, and it's like, still projecting of me. And it is naturally I want to still be like, well, it must be like a little me that is there. Because we need to have me physically to project.

Even though that I know logically is not there. But I think because we keep saying the word me so much, I'm like, and I don't and I'm like, trying to like, break it. But then like, you repeated so much me, me, me, me, me in class that I'm like, I feel like I'm strengthening the idea of me.

If that makes sense. Right. And that's the practice is the struggle against that.

Okay, is there another way to like, like, I'm just trying to make sure that like, I understand, right? Or is there something that I'm missing in like, because it's like, you're saying those words that I want to be like, you know, me, but then I'm like, I know that she doesn't mean like, I have an Atman in me or like, I know that's not what you mean. But I'm like, I use the word for myself. I use the word this.

This. Okay. But if I use the word this, with you guys, you won't know that what I mean by this is my me.

Yeah, I understand. Yeah. So find the word that works for you.

Okay. And try someday to go through your whole day without saying the word I me mine. Really hard to say what I'm sorry, to not say I me or mine.

Oh, yeah. Well, I realized that in English, it's it's really challenging. But in Hebrew, I can speak that way.

Without the I continuously and me. So I don't know if it's again, I think it's something has to do with like the like, the level of direct in that language that you can just say the thing and it would make sense coming out of seeds. Yeah.

And then I was thinking you said that you and Lama Sumati are having a discussion of neutral karma with dreaming. The time of dreaming will be neutral karma. No, no.

You still make karma in dreams. Good karma, bad karma. Oh, even though you like you don't remember? Yeah, technically.

Okay. I don't remember a lot of the things I've done in my lifetime, and I still have the seeds for them. Fair enough.

But they are dream seeds. They are seeds in dreams, dream seeds. So, but it would do it would your intention? Like, would they be more neutral? Because you have less intention in them? No.

Because the less intention is part of the seed. Your intention would have to be neutral. Oh, I see.

Make a neutral seed, you'd have to have an intention to be neutral. Interesting. Okay.

Thank you. Yeah. There is a debate between schools whether there is such a thing as neutral karma.

We have to find out for our lives, for ourselves. Do we have verses on your screen? Okay. By the way, you know, when you have us reading, and you like have to scroll down, if you would sometimes minimize the percentage of the page, I think you wouldn't have to scroll the little sections as much.

Then you won't be able to see it, will you? I think you can zoom in on your Zoom. Like we can still see it. But now I have the Emma, and we can see all of it.

That's why. Is it big enough to see? Yeah, it's the same size still, pretty big. Oh, yeah.

Not for me. Okay. Yeah.

Or in the, you sometimes have it in the Word file, and you have the zooming on the bottom. So it's like the different percentage might be changed between like a PDF and Word. Okay.

Thank you. So in Lobsangchuk and Gelson's discussion about this mistake that we might make of thinking other beings as our projections are therefore not real, and so don't matter. He's pulling us off that cliff, back from that cliff, by again quoting from Milarepa.

Not an extension of the previous quote, but here Milarepa must have been addressing the same thing with his students, because he says, Emma, if there were no living beings in all of the three realms, where would Buddhas come from? A result without a cause is simply impossible. So if we're the only real being, and everybody else are just figments of our imagination, or paper cutouts, or not real beings, how are we going to create the causes to become a Buddha? And if we can't become a Buddha, if we don't have real beings to interact with the plant, the seeds to make the causes, how could any Buddha have ever become that? Every Buddha needs other beings in order to become a Buddha, needed other beings to become a Buddha, and needs other beings to stay a Buddha. I will throw in, he's pointing out, that's why when the able ones speak about the deceptive world, they tell us everything both in the cycle and beyond exists.

There is presence, the appearance of things. There is absence, their empty essence. They are but two sides of the same coin, indivisible in nature, indivisible in nature.

When we're aware of an appearance, emptiness is there also. The lack of self nature of the appearance, the lack of the identity or presence of the appearance coming from it is there, when the appearance is there because it's coming from our seeds ripening, not from it. That's its emptiness.

It's not that you have two things there, it's that we have one thing there. But in our non-omniscient ripening, we can only see one side of the coin at a time. We can only think of one side of the coin at a time.

How do you know I'm holding a quarter if I were holding a quarter? We would see the face of it and we would recognize the face as a quarter and our mind makes up the rest of it and says that quarter has a back and it has little grooves on the side. We know what a quarter is. We know the whole quarter.

So when we see a part of it, we know all of it. Extend that to when we perceive part of this object, which is its appearance, we know its empty nature is there also. In the same way that when you look at a coin, you see its face, you know it has a tail because it's a coin.

So there is presence, the appearance of things. There is absence, their empty essence. They are but two sides of the same coin indivisible in nature.

He goes on, does he go on here to say this is still Milarepa and that's why there could never be any knowledge of a self or knowledge of another. It is all the sky wide expanse of the union of the two. So knowledge of self and knowledge of other.

It's that term Rangrik and Shenrik, I think that we studied somewhere. Knowledge of self is a perception. Can the mind perceive itself? And you remember the argument from lower schools, no, because a knife can't cut itself.

And in that same way, the mind can't perceive itself because by the time it perceives what it calls itself, that one's gone, it's passed. So we never actually perceive anything directly because by the time we know it, the thing that we were experiencing has changed. So we use the term union of the two in lots of different ways.

Lobsangchuk Gyaltsen is using it to plant some unstoppable seeds. But here he means and Milarepa is using it. Lobsangchuk Gyaltsen is quoting Milarepa so that he can use it to plant some unstoppable seeds.

And he's using it to help us understand that in our world of subjects and objects, we think those two are two separate things that have relationships. And the whole reason we went through whether you can have a relationship with something that exists and something that doesn't exist. And we show it's like, no, that's not possible.

Two things have to exist in the same moment of time in such a way that they can contact each other in order to say there's a relationship there. And then it's like, well, then there can't be any relationship between subjects and objects. They have to be, find a word, mutually arising, interdependently originating.

It's awkward to try to come up with a cognitive term that tells us they're one thing without also getting the wrong idea of what we mean by one thing. A pair is a good analogy. We say we have a pair of socks.

It's because you have two socks. And when you have both of them together, you have a pair. But they also call pants a pair of pants.

And it's like, wait, you only need one pant and you still call it a pair of pants. So in this really crazy, stupid English language, there are some great analogies that work really well. Why do you have to have two things for a pair of socks, but only one thing for a pair of pants? What does it mean to be a pair? What does it mean for subject object to be a pair? Is it the sock thing or is it the pants thing? Right.

We might start out thinking, oh, it's the socks thing. But as we investigate, it's like, no, because even with the socks, I don't know this, my analogy falls apart a little bit. Suppose you had a sock that is specific to your left foot and a sock that's specific to your right foot.

And what if you had two left footed socks there, would you have a pair of socks? No, you'd have two socks, but not a pair of socks, because the pair of socks has to be one for the left and one for the right, not just two random socks. In the same way that we could say that the appearing nature of anything requires its appearance and its emptiness would have to be like a left sock and a right sock in order to have both of them. But then we, I think, can point out to ourselves that, no, that can't be right either, because just to have a left sided sock does not define, it does not mean that there has to be a right sided sock, right? The company could have just made left sided socks.

And it's like, well, that's ridiculous. That wouldn't function except for somebody who doesn't have a right foot. So in that same way, to say, oh, our appearing thing is there for an instant before its emptiness is there, or to say the emptiness of the appearing thing is there first for an instant so that the appearance can come out of it or land on it.

Neither one quite works, does it? It has to be this mutually appearing. Can we have a pair of pants appear without that pair of pants being completely dependent upon the ripening seeds of the one who's experiencing the pair of pants? No, but check your own mind. It's like, come on, there can be a pair of pants sitting somewhere that I don't know anything about.

You know, in trillions of stores, they've got hundreds of pairs of pants waiting to be sold. I don't know anything about them. Do those pants exist in my mind? I don't really know until I go look.

I can't go look in every store. Does that mean the only thing that exists for me is what I can see or hear or smell or taste or touch? What about all those things I think about? Do they not exist until I think about them and then they disappear? Is that what it is to walk around in a world as a, I don't know, eighth level bodhisattva? There's nothing differentiated until I take my next step and then it's Tucson Estates. And then the next step is still Tucson Estates, but one step closer to the multi-purpose hall.

And then still Tucson Estates, but there's space in between those ripenings where there's like nothing yet, not nothing at all, but nothing yet. Like, is that really what it's like? That would say that there's an emptiness out there that my seeds land onto and it turns it into this and it turns it into that. And I don't know, we might want to make a case that, well, there must be an emptiness out there because you can eventually experience it directly.

Like if I can finally experience all those pants in all those stores directly by going to look at them, then that makes them really there, right? No, good. No, it doesn't make them real, really there just because I see them and touch them, you know, and hold them up and measure them. That doesn't make them any more or less real than they were when I didn't even know about them.

What if I'd never heard the word pants, not just the word, the concept, then would it even occur to me to think there's bazillion stores with hundreds of pairs of pants waiting to be sold to somebody? No. So do those pants exist or don't they exist? Does nothing exist until you think of it? No, that's not right either, right? I mean, this is how it goes. We want to finally get to, oh, I got it right.

And then when we go looking for the thing that gets the label, we will always not find that. We will find some other explanation, some other more subtle thing that is receiving a label that then reveals that emptiness is the emptiness of the subject-object interaction between is true. And we do that enough, often enough.

It's such a goodness to consider our reality in that way, that we're growing our goodness closer and closer to the goodness ripening as the direct experience of, oh my gosh, this is my, my lay on my layover, right? My seed ripening identity, and nothing but nothing has ever been anything other than that, including my me is nothing but a overlay. But even that idea of a overlay, there has to be something there to get the overlay, right? Samadhi and I are working on that one too. What about the data? What data, right? The data that gets the overlay.

In Mahamudra, we're going deeper and deeper and deeper into recognizing what is there underneath the overlay, not meaning the emptiness of the thing, which is really what Geshe-la was talking about when he says, no, I'm going to take that back, reverse that. When we look for what gets the overlay, we're looking at the more subtle information that is itself getting an overlay. When we say the chocolate sauce goes onto the ice cream and makes a sundae, and we take away the chocolate sauce, there's an overlay of vanilla ice cream going onto information, white curve, cold, that's getting vanilla ice cream.

And then when we look at the white curve, cold, those three identities are going onto something more subtle. And they say the left side of the white curve, the white, right side of the white curve. And then you look at the left side and you realize you have to look at the bottom of the left side and the top of the left side when you're going looking for the data.

At some point we get beyond words and you recognize, oh my gosh, that's the process. That's what they're describing is all of this appearances because of the emptiness of the appearance. It can be what I perceive.

And that's the process of existence. So you don't actually need to ask where does the data come from when we recognize that everything is data getting label, happening, and nothing but, that's its emptiness. So it becomes more like things are verbs rather than things are two things that are nouns that come together to make a verb happen.

And I don't see that in scripture, but if I'm trying to describe to myself, how would I describe this to somebody else? It's like, whoa, it's just the process happening always infallibly. And it's me and my world, me and my experience. And it always has been like that.

And I never understood it before. Our Maha Mudra practice is a really easy method of showing ourselves or getting ourselves into this experience of the happening of what we call the seeds ripening, seeds planting, and nothing but. There it's going on in our experience.

So when they use the term union of the two, it can be union of subject object, recognizing without an object, there's no way to designate myself as a subject. And without a subject, there's no way to designate another as an object. It takes both happening at the same time to have either one.

Same can be said for appearances and emptiness. Same can be said for left sock, right sock, making a pair. Same can be said for any moment of any experience happening as revealed by two apparent things, influencing each other, apparently influencing each other.

So I use this word apparent because in English, it gives this connotation. Something seems to be one thing, but I can't really be sure. I come to some conclusion and I convey that I'm not absolutely sure about that conclusion by saying, apparently, is that a scarecrow out in the field? Apparently, which means I could be wrong.

So I like for my own self, again, not, I don't see it in scripture. I like to think of these things we call our karmic seeds appearing. I like to call them appearances because they look to me to be in them from them, but they're not.

So apparently it's a pen. It helps us wiggle out of saying the wrong thing. Is this thing a pen? Apparently, it tells my own mind that I know my experience is somehow mistaken and it helps me get off that automatic pilot.

Is Samadhi in the kitchen right now making coffee? Apparently, because I hear sounds, I put the picture together, but I don't know for sure. Yes, Roxana. Thank you, dear Lama.

I raised my hand before when you were talking about overlay and then you just gave the example of the chocolate, the ice cream with the chocolate sauce and then without the chocolate sauce. Because of the lack of the seeds that I have right now of the word overlay, I did understand the example that you so kindly shared. Can you please give another example so I just capture in my mind what the word overlay means? Okay.

So if I'm not taking you two apart from your class, or we can do it later as you wish, but I just want to be clear that I do get it. Thank you. Do you remember in the olden days, they had printed books? They were like anatomy books? And in the middle of the anatomy book, they had a whole bunch of plastic pages.

And at the end of the plastic pages, there was a picture of a person. And you would lay one plastic page down and you would see their lungs and heart. And then you lay another one down, you see their blood vessels, you know, like that.

Yes, I do remember. That's what we mean by overlay. So when we're using it in our context of describing dependent origination and emptiness, the seed ripens into what's on the sheet.

The plastic sheet has all the organs. And then it overlays onto the picture of the person. And you can see where the lungs are, where the heart is.

So our mind ripens. Technically, it would ripen chocolate sundae. And then that image, not the words, but what a chocolate sundae looks like and what it is, comes out and overlays something.

Because the image doesn't keep going out into the universe forever. It lands somewhere. And whatever it has landed on has no identity yet.

And onto it goes chocolate sundae, delicious ice cream and chocolate sauce, right? All of it. It's the overlay. Right? And then the question about the data is, well, what's there to receive the overlay? Because it has to land on something, they say.

And then when you take away the overlay and look for what it is going to land on, suddenly we're doing the same thing. But what about the data? Mental image has ripened. And it's landing onto something more subtle than the data for the chocolate ice cream.

And that then is showing us, oh, what makes chocolate ice cream is this thing called a bowl, this thing called vanilla ice cream, this thing called chocolate sauce. That's all the data. Well, take away that, it has other data.

So the overlay is what our mind is identifying the thing as. But what thing, right? We should ask that question. What thing's getting the identity? And every time we go looking for the what is getting the identity, we find an identity that itself was laid onto something more subtle.

We don't ever come up with, oh, there's the original thing that gets the label, that gets the label, that gets the label. We come to the conclusion, there's never not the process happening. Less differentiated to more differentiated, more differentiated to even more differentiated.

The only time you might say there is a time when there is the undifferentiated is when we are in the direct perception of emptiness, the direct perception of the all undifferentiated yet. But even that has to be an appearing experience of emptiness. That cannot all of a sudden happen outside of the process of seeds ripening, seeds being planted, even as the experience is only absence.

So they say, does emptiness function? No, emptiness has no function. It exists everywhere. There's an appearance, but it doesn't do anything.

It doesn't influence the pen to become a pen. It doesn't grow and cease. It's just 100% pens emptiness or no percent pens emptiness when there's no pen.

The direct perception of emptiness, is that a functioning thing? Absolutely. It functions to change my belief in things having their own natures. Is that a ripening result of something? Absolutely.

Does it end? Yes. Does it start? Yes. Right.

Does it change as you're in it? Ooh, slipperier. When your mind's experiencing an unchanging thing, does your mind chain? Technically it still has to, or it would never come out. Something has to sustain the experience.

Seeds ripening, seeds ripening, seeds ripening. That's changing. So the direct experience of emptiness is a changing thing, a functioning thing, a result of causes and causes for new things.

As in our own Buddhahood, if we go into it with that motivation. But the direct perception of emptiness won't be a cause of our Buddhahood if we don't go into it with that motivation, which is why we want our mind imbued with bodhicitta. Remember? Versus imbued with reaching nirvana.

Versus imbued with nothing at all. You know, it would be possible that somebody could have the merit, I guess, from past lives, but in this life not be the least bit interested in spiritual things, to have something that we would call the direct perception of emptiness. And they would come out of it with some great understanding, but not coming out as a bodhisattva on their first booming towards enlightenment.

There's nothing about direct perception of emptiness that has in it that power, does it? Right? Isn't our direct perception of emptiness as empty as anything else? Isn't the emptiness we perceive as empty of anything else? As anything else, of course. And it like rocks the boat a little bit. It's like, no, no, seeing emptiness directly.

Emptiness is a thing I have to see in order to make this change. It's like we're grasping onto something that doesn't exist. We aren't ever going to get there if we're thinking of it wrongly.

Right? Because it won't ripen accurately. I remember going into Great Retreat. I think we were all on this roll.

It's like, we're going to see emptiness directly. We're just going to get bodhicitta. I just really want to imbue my mind with bodhicitta.

Emptiness directly, great, but I want bodhicitta. And it's like, oh, great idea. I'll work on that too.

I thought she was bold to book the system. Thank you. Yeah, I hope that helped.

Yes, definitely did. Yes. But at the same time, it's like, oh my God, I need to continue studying so much.

Since the whole material world exists in name only, that means even space itself is nothing but a name. Catch your mind. Nothing but a name.

Right? Mind goes off the cliff of, oh, so it's not real. And I have to reel it back to no, no, that's what makes it real. Well, then why can't I make me Buddha? That's nothing but a name.

Do I just have to say it and it'll happen? No. You know, maybe if I say it enough, me Buddha, me Buddha, me Buddha, me Buddha, right? Buddha, me Buddha, me Buddha, me. It'll eventually come true.

But not if I just say it, I have to be it. Don't I? I have to plant the seeds for it. For that name to come out of my seeds.

I can't just decide to say it and identify myself that. But wait, even if I do, that's karma ripening infallibly, right? So even the fact that I can't just say I'm a Buddha and be a Buddha is coming out of my karmic seeds, which means theoretically you could create the seeds such that all you had to do was say you're a Buddha and you would be one. But how would you make the seeds for that? Help somebody else do it.

How would you do that? Teach them the pen, right? Teach them about dependent origination, right? The system would work the same even if we could just decide I'm Buddha. All right. I think that's the end of that reading.

We still have a little time. You know what? Let's use this time. Let's use this time to share with me if you would, how it is that you've worked with this idea of the Mahamudra practice of being able to sink back into more and more subtle awareness and still have this, like the watcher's watching and there's this part of your mind that's making sure that the watcher's still just watching and doing this little bit of analysis.

How's that going? Because then if I go into the next class, it's taken a different direction and I can't get far enough in 10 minutes. So let's just discuss. How's your practice going? Anybody care to share? All right.

Going once, going twice. No, I can share. Thank you for this opportunity.

I think for me with the watcher, when you were saying like slide back and in the beginning you gave an example of sitting at the backside of a car. For me, that one didn't work properly because it's in the backside of a car, I usually fall asleep because it's like shaking and that's, yeah. And so I created for myself that I'm in a room with a big glass and at the backside of a room that it's a bit darker.

And so I kind of slide back in my chair to the back of the room and I try to observe it from there. Yeah. And everything I noticed with my mind, I try to say to myself that this is ripening and nothing bad or like ripening and seeds together like this in this mudra.

And it's very interesting. Sometimes I even realize that this is what I say is also just a ripening. And yeah, I think this is kind of my progress and it really helps me in my life as well to notice some things.

And more often I would say that to notice that it's just ripening. Yay. Thank you for sharing.

Nice, rejoiceable for all of us. Thanks. Thank you for the opportunity and for the teaching.

Yeah, you're welcome. I think for me, there is two parts. So putting myself in a situation like physically that I'm like locked in, like sitting in a meditation or doing an asana or something that sometimes can be uncomfortable.

And then like, I'll work with that if that makes more sense. Helps in a way, which is like the all the emotion or the distraction that rises are like really big, but I'm like, all right, then relax, then like be in it. And then it's the reminder that this is just rising up.

This is just distraction. This is coming from me. And it helps me give it the space to work with like this, like duality of like, this is real life.

I still, I'm grasping to this. I really feeling it. But then to like, let go and focus and give it that like space.

So that helps me a lot to tap deep, especially when I feel resistance. So like, I noticed between ACI now that we're studying like 11 is a little like, I was like, Oh, I'm feeling kind of anxious. Like, like, it's, it's meeting me in a lot of ways.

And plus, not mudra, but like, and I, I recognize that I didn't want to come to class today, because I was like, I'm feeling fatigued. So then tap into the fatigue, be fatigued, be relaxed, breathe into it. So I'll apply it in like, uncomfortable, but safe way.

And then if I'm like, in the everyday doing something, there is almost this like, like, withdraw back of like, Oh, I'm recognizing that I'm doing the thing. But then I'm like, who is the me that doing the thing, and then I'm starting to have those like internal dialogue with myself. And sometimes it's almost like a weird vision of like, seeing yourself like I'll see myself staying standing outside of myself doing the thing that I'm doing.

So but that is more ease. So I'm kind of recognizing the two parts of myself that working with the Mahamudra and doing a little bit of different work. Nice.

Nice. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, also rejoicable, right? Allowing that greater awareness and acceptance.

Nice. Nadi, did your hand go up? Yeah, I'm hesitating because I probably am not doing things correctly. So when I'm doing those meditations, I, what happens to me, I pop out of all the me things, and I expand into something like a greater space.

And it's just, things are very clear there in very, can I say, like, there's no questions, everything is clear. And then I just stay there. So I realized that it's, things are happening on some level.

And I don't have words actually to describe it. And, but it's awareness of, of something greater than, than me. Sorry, I guess it's not what it meant to do the meditations, but that's what's happening.

But in your outside of meditation time, do you find yourself a little less reactive, a little less judgmental, a little less? A lot. Right. So the awareness, the level of awareness is getting off automatic pilot.

Yeah, it's completely different. The way I see the everyday outside of meditation, things are very different now. And it's so, so funny.

It's, it's like, I'm listening to ACI classes and to your teachings. And they're saying things like, they're saying things in so much metaphors, and they look like they're not real. But then in my life, they become real, but in a different way, like in more real way than metaphors can explain.

In like more, how do I say, more simpler way, more, I don't know. Okay. Thank you so much.

This is my favorite class. Thank you so much for teaching. Yeah, I don't know who asked for it, but thank you for asking.

So the more you learn and study cognitively, it will inform your Mahamudra meditation, all of us. And then that helps us to be able to see what all that cognitive stuff was trying to really get us to. That's deeper than the cognition that I hear.

That's what you're explaining, you're experiencing. So my own opinion is, like a dog, if we can learn this Mahamudra quality of attention and use it to learn our ACI or our Diamond Way, which is really why this is happening now, is that there are some people who are in the Diamond Way, who I want them to have this to inform their Diamond Way practice. If I had had this informing my ACI practice, I think it would have just given me a whole different level of understanding swiftly.

And then for sure, it informs my Diamond Way practice. So now you guys will have it already. And you will also have to do it when you're in your Diamond Way practice, which if you're going, you know, with Geshe Michael's Diamond Way practice, he's not going to teach this.

He's busy doing other things. Because it helped me so much, that's why I want you to have it. Thank you, Juho.

Can I take some minutes, please? Years ago, I went to a couple of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's talks, and he had this phlegm in his throat all the time. And he'd say three words and clear his throat, say another sentence and clear his throat. And I remember, like, I so regret it.

I remember, you know, thinking, right, I can't stand this. And then we met Geshe Michael, we stopped going to Lama Zopa's teachings. And it's like, now I've got it.

And I'm torturing you with this cough. I'm so sorry. The ripening of having been critical of that precious, amazing being Lama Zopa.

Just one thought. And I've been at this for years. But that means, right, I'm going to wear it off, and it'll be done.

And I'll quit torturing you. Be careful not to have the thought. If you've already had it, I'm so sorry.

I know where you're going to go with it. Unless you do your four powers really well. Geshe Michael did say that the Diamond Way would be taught in different ways.

And for the yoga people, it would be the Siddhas. So for the YSI people, it will be. But you know, you don't know where you'll land in the end.

So I guess it's good to be prepared. We know Mahamudra. Yeah, right.

Right. Everything about life is better informed when we know Mahamudra, in my personal opinion. Right.

So I hope it works that way for you as well. Anything else? I guess we can close. Rasha? Yeah, I think it's helped a lot when, you know, before I wake up, like when my eyes are, not before I wake up, when I'm awake, my eyes are still closed.

Or when I'm even here, like interacting with beings, but not an actual physical being in front of me or cooking or driving. Like I can be aware, I can have the process thinking of like, okay, you know, this could be anything, let it, you know, with the motivation of it being, you know, in certain ways. But as soon as I get in front of other people, it goes out the door.

And it's so frustrating afterwards. Because as soon as I'm not with a person anymore, I'm like, Oh, again, again, and it's just, I'm not getting better remembering when I'm with other people physically. Yeah, we're so directly engaged.

But but not but, and are you recognizing that in your engagement with other people? You are making a greater effort than before, to be a positive influence that I am more careful in how I interact with others than I used to be. And, and, and that's evidence that all of the practices that we've been doing, has influenced us to change us. And it's been maybe subtle enough, in my case, subtle enough that I think, well, I haven't really changed.

I was always kind and considerate. But the level at which my subtle awareness is, has definitely changed, even if I'm not at all aware of that when I'm actively engaged with somebody. I know that, right, that my mind has changed enough, that my engagement with them is imprinting differently than it used to.

And that maybe if I were more consciously aware of rejoicing in that, it could be more consciously felt while I'm engaged with in somebody interacting with somebody. So the place to start would be is, am I, am I being more intentionally concerned about my influence on somebody? And I'm going to guess your answer will be yes. Ray.

May I share something? Please. I just love what you said. You said a result with a cause, simply impossible.

You read it. And it's true. So when we try at least to think of those subtle, how subtle I can go during my Mahamudra meditation, I cannot stop thinking of the causes that I've made to reach certain place.

And they're the seats that, for example, for me to be able to follow instructions, to listen to instructions, means that I listen carefully to other people's, what they're wording, what they're saying, what they're expressing. So in the way that I'm seeing that my awareness is growing, it's when I'm translating your classes through Holy Lama, because I just flow along with you. It's like a flow.

It's not like I'm, I need to be doing this. It's just that it's arising happening and nothing but that. It's a beautiful, synchronized dance of words just coming out.

So it's the same ripening of those seeds. It's like seeds ripening, nothing but seeds. And that's where I can see my improvement in my meditation, in my concentration, in the ability to be able to focus, to fix my mind, to have the clarity of the words, to say them out loud, or even to go in words at the same time.

Right, right. So thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for sharing that.

Like I get a sense from that of, take that feeling, that experience that you have, that you just described, and like expand, not while you're in it, but when you're thinking about it, expand it to imagine, what if I am that for every existing being? Like that's so close to the spontaneous, effortless emanation, being of omniscient mind, born of compassion, just being the flow, the spontaneous, exactly what's needed, happening, happening, like use that and expand it to everything in some imagination. And that's the seeds you plant will add to your progress. And those of us who have heard what she said, and felt a little bit of ability to empathize or to sense it, saying, imagine what that's like.

Imagine being that all day long. Cool. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you to her, Lama Pro, for that. Yes, Tom. Now we're going overtime.

That's fine with me. That's fine with you. I just wanted to say, like riding the positive wave of Roxanna's sharing, that I realized something in retreat, that I was wasting so much time sometimes, if like the meditation wasn't good, or having like, I'm struggling.

And I'm like, I was wasting a lot of time labeling the negativity part of it, rather than just like, kind of like a piece of paper, throw it, move on next. It's like, don't like in retreat, because you're doing so many, it's like release the expectation of having like super great all the time, and just do it and come back to it. And I think that was like a really big shift, like less judgment, less negativity toward myself, like I'm not this horrible person as I internally talked to myself.

And that is such a waste of time, like, sure, tap to it and figure what's happening. But like, stop it, you know, and like ride the wave and like, move on next, next, next. So good.

Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Okay, anything else? I have a question, but maybe after after class, it's something that it's just cut my mind when we're talking about seeds.

And when people use some like the mushrooms, what kind of seeds right then when you when you take an intoxicant that will affect your mind like that? I have no idea what type of seeds are those? Yeah, you know, I don't know from personal experience at all. What's that like? And it but I've grappled with that with the idea because, you know, people say, I did the ayahuasca and I had this deep experience and no, they didn't come out and say I saw emptiness directly, but they implied that they did. And it's like, wow, you know, if you could, if you could see emptiness directly by intoxicating your mind and do it with a mind imbued with bodhichitta and come out on your bodhisattva path, why wouldn't we all be doing it? You know, and then I got to thinking through my training and it's like, well, you know, Buddha says don't intoxicate your mind because when you do, you become a lunatic.

Like in the vows, when we take our five lifetime life person's vows, the words are, you know, I will avoid the lunacy brought on by the use of intoxicants, whether they're by chemicals or by plants. I will avoid the lunacy meaning we get, we can't make proper decisions. And, but other people say, you know, when I've had a little marijuana, that's when I can be my kindest.

That's when I can be my best without that help. You know, I just, I can't deal with myself well. And it's like, well, is there anything in the substance that brings on the lunacy? No, if it does, then that state of mind can't make the proper decision means we make improper decisions.

We plant negative seeds, we perpetuate samsara. But on the other hand, if we're believing that it's only because of using that substance that I can be kind enough to make good seeds, we're giving that substance the power over us. And that means the seeds that we're planting are going to require us to continue to have some other thing outside of us that we need to use in order to make our progress.

And eventually that's going to fail us because there isn't anything in an outside thing that can help us make our progress. But then as I was also like studying stuff, when we learn about valid perceptions, that what makes, right, how do we establish existence that which is perceived by a valid perception. And Buddha is saying when our mind is intoxicated by chemicals and the like, we are not having valid perceptions.

Now valid and correct. That's where our next Mahamudra class is going actually. But valid means with a mind that's not wildly mentally afflicted, intoxicated in some way, or so sick, I can't see straight.

Anything that appears to me if I'm not in those states is valid. With the information I get, I come up with what it is. And as long as I'm not drunk or high or sick or so angry, I can't see it correctly.

Then what I see exists. Well, so then that would mean that when we perceive something under intoxication, we can't say that the thing that we experienced existed or not. We can't say it existed.

So then it's like, well, you mean when if I were drunk and I got behind the wheel of my car, my car would not be an existing thing? Come on, I'm driving it. I'm driving it drunk. But the experience my drunken mind is having of driving that car is invalidated by the mind influenced by the alcohol.

It's still driving. But as we know, it's not driving as safely. It's not driving accurately.

It's not driving with accurate perceptions because it drives through the red light, it smashes into the other car. So it's not that when we're intoxicated, we don't have any perceptions at all. It's that our perceptions are colored by the being intoxicated that makes it such that the perception is invalidated, which means the seeds planted are invalid seeds.

They're planted with the invalidness, which when those seeds ripen, they're going to ripen as some kind of invalid experience. But then that's also going to mean that if under that state of intoxication, we have an experience called the direct perception of emptiness, that doesn't qualify as an existing thing. It's like driving your car drunk.

It's a different experience than driving it not drunk. So your direct experience of emptiness is a different experience when it happens intoxicated. And so it doesn't have the same effect on our mind is the conclusion I came to.

So otherwise, Lord Buddha wouldn't give us that direct vow to avoid intoxicants. If he said, well, except in this certain circumstance, when you're really ready. Now, you know, when you get into diamond way, there's exceptions to rules, but not because we want to do it.

It's because that's what's necessary to help somebody else in some way. So it's different and slippery, and that's why diamond way is slippery. So it really is something to think about, right? It's like, I don't know if my logic is coming to the right conclusion, because I already wanted to come to that conclusion, because I don't, I don't drink, I don't drug, I'm not inclined.

So I wanted to prove to myself that I'm right, you see. So of course, I decided I came to my own right conclusion. I'm just sharing the sequence of thought that I use.

It's something that I don't feel like doing. I'm really too scared. I don't have the courage, I think, to just to do something like that, to be honest, because I've never drugged myself.

Yeah, I haven't had any of those things. But I know people that are doing it, they're calling it ancestral healing. So I don't know what seats right in order, you know, to Yeah, you know, it's like, if I don't need to, yeah, if we don't need to do it, you know, that and somebody who doesn't take vows, and chooses to use a system, you know, to get some healing, and they get healing.

It's a ripening of good seeds, to use something alternative to help somebody. So there, right, there really isn't any need for, you know, me to judge what they choose to do, and whether they get a good result. If someone were to come to me and say, what do you think, blah, blah, blah, you know, I would lay out what I know.

It's so so it really is a slippery place that to use a system like that and get a good result. It's a good ripening to then keep going back and back and back, and I have to use it again. And I have to use it again, to where it's interfering with life.

Now we've got addiction. Okay, and that's a whole different thing. Thanks for asking.

Yes, Tom. I was just gonna say, one, for explaining. It's making you as I have a lot of family and friends who've done ayahuasca, and they smoke, and they do my producing and, and to them, like, what we do is being uptight.

And, and, and like, this is like, why are you wasting your time? And then I'll say also that in the yoga world, you see a lot of people who do different practices that are kind of like really extreme pranayamas and which will rise your internal body energy and they get really high. The problem with most of all that is or with like the the smoking and all this kind of stuff is that you or become addicted or to get that you're continuously chasing this. And then the problem with even the yoga practices that a lot of people are not prepared and not having any like, the understanding or the moral behavior.

So when they snap out, they come back to life. Sorry to say, but they're still assholes. You know, they're still like, dealing with really bad behavior.

And it gets excused in a lot of ways is like, well, you don't understand or right versus like, we're really learned to be more compassionate and kind. And yeah, no one said you should like have no boundaries. But if you're so kind and nice, like things don't bother you as much to be in a fighting mode.

And a lot of people come out of it. And they're having this raise of like, I'm better than you because I reached this stage. And you see it repeated.

And then there is a lot of use and abuse behavior that starts to spiral because it lacks in moral and, and it lacks in the process of how we get there. It's just, it's almost like taking a like a fast car and you just like hitting the the the pedal and you're going from zero to 100. Your body is going to like jerk and just like, okay, so like, the fun part is like, yeah, I'm driving really fast.

But there's no consequences to your body to your car. If you haven't prepared, you're going to have a lot of physical pain if you're talking to race cars. So most people that I know that use it for a specific healing experience could be good or bad people who take it to get high and see some big light.

There is no huge life changing experience like long term in their like daily life behavior. And then also, it can get really dangerous when you're in those spaces, because they're not physically and mentally purified and clear. And then they come out, kind of on the other side of things, meaning like, instead of being happy and great, it's she left, they can be hysterical, and it's it's more darkness than positive a lot of time.

So I think it's a right, you have to really build up and prepare the body then going right away to this, because we accumulate all these negative seeds, and negative thoughts, and they will ripen in that moment. Right in this in this tradition, you don't learn asanas until you have completed at least your four layer on retreats, which you don't get assigned to do until you get your blessing to practice the angel. Which you don't get until you've had your proper four initiations, which you don't get until you have the proper training by your open teachings Lama to say, I think maybe you're ready.

So, you know, you, we wouldn't all be doing asanas if we were still deeply in the Tibetan galukpa tradition. But because the whole world seeds were ripening as yoga is wonderful. Geshe-la Lama and Christie got permission to jump on that and feed people who have the good seeds for karma for yoga, which would be people that had met it, you know, in the sequence of the Dharma, but didn't finish it, have the opportunity to perhaps have the seeds to understand karma and emptiness and the need for morality doesn't mean all of them are going to go that direction.

But that's why this tradition is offering the lady Nagyuma stuff to what seems like unprepared people, which would break vows. But they're seeing it the fact that they like yoga are attracted to yoga means they have the seeds from past lives. Yeah, I personally agree with that.

So I don't do it. But also in the West now, the whole yoga view is just physical. There is no the eight limbs, there is no the preparation and there's not enough really teachers who teach that.

And then you're left with that physical and then it's becoming Oh, is this all physical or you're looking for more? And you don't have a lot of preparation, you don't have enough really prepared teachers. And that's why again, in the holistic yogi world, ayahuasca, smoking, you know, kind of plays in in the West a lot of time and solution. Yes.

But how many people do we see giving the time to learn there? You know, not that ACI is the only one that has the wisdom, there are many, but it takes it takes time, effort, commitment, and then devotion to that path. No, it's not a casual thing that you do once a week on Sundays. It's daily, daily effort.

I mean, but come on, isn't isn't isn't our big problem is our ignorance, we're going to see ignorant people. I mean, my my name is a genius. He sees ignorant people, we have such a huge problem with wrong worldviews and ignorance, we're not going to be able to get around it.

There's no way, right? We have to work on it. Yeah. Good.

Thanks, everybody. So remember that being we wanted to be able to help. We've learned a lot that we are using to help that other in that deep and ultimate way.

And that's a great, great goodness. So please be happy with yourself. And think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hands.

Recall your own precious holy being see how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them your reliance upon them. Ask them to please please stay close to continue to guide you help inspire you and then offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accepted and blessed and they carry it with them right back into your heart. See them there feel them there. Their love their compassion, their wisdom.

It feels so good. We want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it by the power of the goodness that we've just done.

May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom may. So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person to share it with everyone you love to share it with every existing being everywhere. See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom, and may it be so.

All righty. Thanks again for the opportunity to share.

Welcome back. We are the Mahamudra group. It is February 3, 2026. Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again.

Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you. They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion. Their wisdom radiates from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light.

And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way. Feel how much you would like to be able to help them. Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short.

How wonderful it will be when we can also help them in some deep and ultimate way, a way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down, we know this is possible. Deeper down, we know this is what we are meant to become.

Working with emptiness and karma, we glimpse how it's possible, even inevitable. And so our wish grows and grows and grows into a determination. And we see that we need help.

And so we turn our minds back to our precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way. And so we ask them, please, please, please help me.

Please teach me. Please show me. And they're so happy that we've asked, of course, they agree.

Our gratitude arises, we want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the pure world they are teaching us how to create. We imagine we can hold it in our hands.

And we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us, using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth, filled with fragrant incense and covered with the blanket of flowers, the great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon. In my mind, I make them the paradise of a Buddha and offer it all to you.

By this deed, may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest, may all beings totally awaken to the benefit of every single other. So, first Panchen Lama has been talking about this concept that's so hard to give a name to. Geshe-la termed the marriage of karma and emptiness, but we haven't really been talking about karma.

We're talking about the marriage of appearances and emptiness and trying to catch the nuances of what that relationship means as we recognize that there can't actually be a relationship. But let's call it profound dependence, the profound being the emptiness part and the dependence meaning the appearance part, which if we didn't know that's what we meant, those two words wouldn't connotate that at all. So, he's been talking about this marriage of emptiness and appearances because the goal of our Mahamudra practice is to reach Mahamudra, the great seal, which is that experience of the emptiness of the mind directly in order to reach that.

Of course, we need to reach the ability to be aware of the appearing side of the mind. And when we can be aware of the appearing side of the mind as the object, we can then apply our favorite analysis to be aware of how we misperceive its appearing side. And then show ourselves that misperception and then remove the misperception to come to the conclusion of the true nature of the appearance of the mind, which is its absence of self-existence.

Not the absence of the mind, of course, but the absence of its appearance being somehow it, rather than projections happening, right? All those words. So, he's been like taking us around and around and around in these different ways of looking at what we mean by appearances. And so, what we mean by the emptiness of those appearances to keep us from both cliffs, right? To keep us from falling off the cliff as well.

If it doesn't really appear though, if it isn't really the way it appears, it isn't at all. And we say, well, I'm not going to fall off that cliff. But if we watch closely as we're down that deep, I always find this part of me that flips over to that.

Well, then it's not real. It's not there. And then to find that other side of the cliff, which is, no, no, the mind is the only reality.

It is the only real thing. And to keep us from falling into that edge, he's been doing this with our understanding, pushing us towards the middle, towards the middle. And we're almost at the completion of his own commentary of his root text.

That's what we've been studying. And we're very, very close to the chapter that says, well, I did what I said I was going to do. Hooray.

Oh, so we've been at this for what a year and a half, maybe however long. I don't remember when we started. We've been at it for a long time.

And, you know, I hope that it has served you in some way to grow this greater awareness of our greater ability to be that witness, the witness level of engagement on and off our cushion. So in today's meditation, she, she took it a little bit, she took it a little bit to a little different direction. Once we get down there to the aware of everything popping up, is this mind shape shifting, she's going to give us a little something different to do with that.

It's not the, it's not the way of using Mahamudra to reach emptiness directly. But it's a useful tool. And it gives us some insight into the power of being able to live off cushion from this concept of profound dependence.

So we'll go through it. And then I come back to it towards the end of class, as to how it's pertinent to our discussion about emptiness and what's appearing. So let's settle in.

Do what you do with your body to get it parked, and then bring your focus of attention to that spot at the tip of your nose. Really pull all of your awareness up there. Turn on the focus, turn on the clarity, turn on the intensity.

And when you have your mind locked in, you turn your object of focus from your breath to sounds, whatever sequence you have learned, going from outer grosser sounds to more subtler sounds, being the watcher, the observer, the observer, relaxed, fascinated, enjoying these appearances arising and passing, shift from sounds, decibels, to thoughts, let go even of that label thoughts, keenly aware of the risings, still may feel like there are things arising to our awareness, slide down deeper and feel these arisings as those appearances of mind in its constant shapeshift. Find that flow as we enjoy sinking deeper and deeper. Those appearances are less and less identifiable, less and less delineated.

And there are still these subtle arisings. Now, when we take a little corner of that observer of that part, be watching these arisings, aware that they are karmic results, bubbling up. And so, they could be giving you messages, like when we dream, and we come out of the dream.

We think of the dream metaphorically, and how it can give us insight in the same way, as we are watching these subtle arisings, colors, shapes, thoughts, sensations, all of it can be indicators, messages. So, watch those arisings now, with this idea, what message is coming through. If you get a glimpse, just note it, don't follow this story, let it go, watch for another.

We'll sit five minutes, check for dull or agitation, adjust, check, check, one more minute, and slowly bring yourselves back up, letting yourself be more and more aware of more and more complete things, but keep that understanding. Any appearance must be empty of its own nature to be what appears to me. All of them can be messages to me, for me, and come all the way back up to your awareness of being in this body, in this room, and once you open your eyes, intentionally look around your room, recognizing these appearances, and their emptiness.

Nice, good job. So, Lama Christi asked us to work with this version of a Mahamudra meditation, until our next class, which was four days, and I remember, to be honest, I really didn't relate to it, because when I get down in there, and I'm watching, things are just too vague, and undifferentiated, and I don't get colors and shapes, it's like I, it's just, you know, so I couldn't get the messages, but I do remember that it did help me to recognize, in my off-cushion time, to better recognize that I could be experiencing my experiences with this different flavor of mind, of more, what insight are they giving, can I get from this, rather than being on the usual human surface level of interacting with somebody, and it, you know, it's like, it's leading us to being able to receive the angel message from the grocery store clerk, you know, or even receive guidance for our daily life, when we stumble on a rock, instead of the usual, right, it does another tool that we can use, to help use, or help guide ourselves to live by karma and emptiness, to live by this understanding that everything I'm experiencing is results of my own deeds, and so my own deeds are creating what I'm going to experience in the future, we know the words, but, you know, for me, when I'm out pulling weeds, I think of it for an instant, and then I'm pulling weeds, and then, oops, right, I'm changing the world, I'm buddhichitta, whatever comes to my mind, but I can't hold it 24-7, every time I do hold it, it's better than the moment of not holding it, so of course, right, making progress, so this meditation, I am going to ask you to work with it for a week, because I think it will help, it may be like, wow, this is cool, I can get in there and get really great messages, in which case, great, use it, but it's not the Mahamudra version of the practice that will take us to that doorway of the emptiness, so at some point, it can't be your daily practice forever, but certainly feel free to use it, if it seems beneficial to you, yes, Roxana, thank you, the messages, they can come differently, like in words and sounds, right, right, all right, thank you, yeah, she said it's like, when we dream, not lucidly dreaming, but we have this dream, and we wake up from the dream, and you know how, when you try to describe a dream to somebody else, you really can't tell a story, because it's so weird, and rather than just going, wow, I had the weirdest dream, we can think, what does that dream mean, right, people say, help me interpret my dream, and then if everything in the dream was white, we say, oh, white means purity, so it must be something about my keeping my vows, or I was in the mountains, and suddenly I was at the beach, and the beach means this to me, or generally, so it's like, when we're in there, watching what's popping out of the mind, maybe we're at the flow, and it's really undifferentiated, and all of a sudden, blip, comes a picture of your grandma, and you let it go, and then when you come out, you go, wow, why did grandma come to me, like, what does grandma represent, or what is my grandma, what did she teach me, what was that trying to tell me, our subconscious is, has the opportunity to communicate with us in dreams, they say, same in a deep, deep, deep meditation, so we can interpret things. I couldn't make up the words, but they were coming, you know where I'm sitting right now, and there's a hall that takes you to the other room where my altar is, so I was only receiving the words from in this ear, in my left ear, but I really don't understand the words.

Yeah, yeah, so just the fact that you had the experience you were receiving into your left ear, you would interpret that when you come out, it's like, whoa, what is it about left ear, right, left is the wisdom side, right, is the method side, you can make all these correlations, why was I hearing it instead of feeling it, what is it about hearing, you can think of those things. And as I was coming out, is it possible that I could ask, please let me know exactly what you, what I'm supposed to understand by those words, and teach me as if I were a kindergarten kid, just so I can really understand. Yeah, yeah, that's a great relationship to have with this holy being that you have before you, but really you have in your heart, right? So hello in there.

Thank you. And then, you know, you may or may not get the words saying this is what that meant. But if we pay attention, then through the rest of our day, there's an answer.

Here's an answer. Thank you. Nice.

So we're still talking about how, what, what it is, to, to experience something, to, to explore this idea of perceptions, and how we mistake our perceptions, as having their identities, their qualities, in them, that they're appearing to us because of something in them, or from them. And we're exploring, we've been exploring for years, whether that, whether or not that can really be true, and explain our experiences in life. Like it sure seems like it experiences or explains how I reach out my hand toward and turn the door knob, pull and the door opens.

But in fact, it doesn't explain that because sometimes I do those same actions and the door doesn't open, which means there's something else going on. But it's like, as humans, the door doesn't open often, and we don't go, what's wrong with my worldview? We something else has to happen before we have the goodness to be shown that our mistake is so ubiquitous. We don't even recognize it when it doesn't work.

We give it some other mistaken reason for why it didn't work. So we're way past that part. Now we're trying to understand when we call those experiences, all projected experiences, we've learned to say what projection means is a ripening result from what my mind has perceived self thinking doing saying to another before is making me have the experience of what's happening to me now.

And we understand, oh, okay, because every imprint in my mind has been made with the belief that those others have their natures in them, then every seed ripening is going to also have the belief, those others and mind nature is in them. So even when I intellectually understand that that's not correct, how do I stop doing it if I don't have the seeds to stop doing it? But then we get to think, yeah, but to have the experience of hearing this explanation, those are my seeds ripening too, right? That's all projected. So somehow we have the seeds to crack through this pattern of all I have is ignorant seeds.

So all I can experience is things ignorantly. Where, what did we do? How did we get those seeds? I don't know. We taught our four year old how to tie their shoes.

We taught somebody some, we gave somebody some new information. We gave them some new experience, right? We taught them to question somehow we made the seeds and those seeds grew into the pen thing. However that came to you.

So Panchen Lama has been helping us explore that. Those of us that have been studying Arya Nagarjuna for longer even than we've been doing Maha Mudra, he helps us to recognize how absurd it is to believe that a tomato plant comes out of a tomato seed and how it can't happen any other way, but how totally bizarre it is that it does happen. And same for my anger that comes up when I, whatever I do that makes me angry.

Same idea to be able to train ourselves to catch the absurdity of our old belief and repeat catching that because as we do, we plant seeds in our minds that are cracking away at that belief. So they use that term. Yes, Janet, or did you just hit your button again? This is a little joke.

The example is you let your computer not work so that Natty could help you and then she got good seeds. You're right. Absolutely.

Thank you. Showing your wisdom. So we were, we've been talking about how the actual way that we experience things is through that idea Mingde Taksam, through names and terms.

All right. And then there's the question, what comes first, the name and the term and then the thing or the non-named thing that then gets the name and our seeds for believing that things have their names are there by themselves, keeps us in that conundrum. One of them has to come first, like how we are in the meditation and we're calling it a flow.

Has it, have you recognized that it's like, it's not a flow because the flow goes from here to there. It's like all of it. And then all of it different.

And then all of it different. And then all of it different. It's right.

It's like, no, that's not from scripture. They never go to the, I haven't read anywhere. They go where they say, look, it's not a flow.

It's a, how do you say that? Uh, yeah, it is one of those deep conclusions that when you, when you try to find where you are on the flow, you can't ever find it. Right. Because when a flow is infinite that way and infinite this way, there's no middle.

And yet the middle is wherever you are now. So that that's a side different thing. Can you find now? No, by the time you found it, you're not there anymore.

So, you know, those are all the things where we come to the conclusion, wait, it's not a sequential. These things are not sequential. They're not pushing, push one domino and then they all fall.

It's a happening again. That's how I came to the conclusion. Oh, I'm a verb, not a noun.

And when I got that, you know, things shifted for me big. So in this sequence of our Maha Mudra, we get to that place where we are like keenly aware of these appearances shape-shifting. And they're, they're happening at more and more subtle levels, meaning less and less delineated with names and terms.

But just to have an appearance at all, it's getting some subtle name term because you can't have an appearance without it being an identified thing. It's, it'll be beyond words that are still an experience happening. And that process they call merely through names and terms.

And what they mean by that, right? Is the identities arising that, that, that is the appearance of something, right? We could, we could identify the, there's a ficus tree right here, ficus tree. Then we can say, take away ficus. Okay.

Potted plant. Take away plant. Okay.

Color shapes. Take away color shape. I don't have a word, but there's still something.

Take away that. Still something. Take away that.

Still something. We get down to, if you need words, you know, quarks and neutrons and I don't know, but we get beyond words and yet there's still experiencing happening. Right? So as we go down those levels and we're more clearly than aware of, Hey, this is the appearing nature of my mind.

That which is clear and aware can only be established that it's there because there's something happening, right? There's, we want to say what it's clear and aware of, but we are already beyond that. It's this low or constant shape-shifting and it takes a little while. It seems to me before we are keenly aware that this is my own mind shape-shifting, not shape-shifting things appearing to my mind, but my own mind appearing.

And when we are at that level of aware of all of these things as my own mind seeds ripening, shape-shifting my mind, that's when we go looking for, well, then what's the true nature of my mind? I, we made that clear a while ago. Here's here. We finally seen the appearing nature of my mind.

But don't stop there because that's not the true nature of the mind. That's just half of it. The appearing nature.

Can we have an appearance without that appearance lacking its identity in it? No. Can we have an appearance without its lack of its own identity? I mean, intellectually, we know, no. Any appearance has to be empty of its own nature for me to be aware of it, the way I'm aware of it.

But when I say it, can you be aware of anything? Can there be anything that we are aware of that does not lack its own nature? And when I hear that my own mind goes, don't be ridiculous. Everything I experienced has a nature. Yeah.

So it's like my ignorance reasserts itself when it hears the words of the question, can you experience something that lacks its own nature? Right? It feels to me like, no, because what would it be? But can there be anything that I can experience that has its own nature? But why not? The ficus tree has the nature of being a ficus tree. It is not a tomato plant and it is not a banana. It has to have its own nature, but it can't have its own nature because if it did, you would know, you would be knowing the ficus tree I'm talking about just by my having said to you, there's a ficus tree.

But I don't think any of you have seen my poor puny little ficus tree that used to be big and beautiful, but it's been, it's mad at me. So that like this, there's, it's really is a conundrum and we can meet that conundrum face to face. That's what we're doing in this deep practice where we're getting more and more familiar with everything.

It appears to us is the bubbling up of what we call a karmic seed in this thing we call our mind. That's making this very subtle, constant shape-shifting while we're in meditation. But guess what? The same thing's happening when we come up out of meditation, same thing.

And it's right, slippery and difficult to stay there. So Panchen Lama, he gives this sequence in the reading. I'm seeing whether I want the screen share yet or not.

I can't get them at the same time anymore, Natty. You taught me and then I lost it. Do you see just the verse or do you see the verse and the vocabulary? Just the verse, right? Dumb old me.

Janet, did you hit your hand button again on purpose? No, this is the King of Concentration. This is that verse that you're reading in the airport. Exactly.

The interdependent workings of things arise infallibly. They seem to rise up on their own. Mama Christy said that Tibetan actually doesn't say seem to.

She was being kind. They seem to rise up on their own, just like a dream or a mirage, a moon inside a lake or a magical display. So we've been exploring these ideas of these illusions.

The illusion means the appearing side of things. My ficus tree does not seem to be an illusion, but it is. Not that it's not a real ficus tree.

It's that the way you know. OK. So I just wanted to remind us that we're still working on this infallibility of the interdependent workings of things, not meaning, of course, the tomato plant comes from a tomato seed together with sunshine.

Soil, no rabbit that ate it, etc., that's not what we mean by the interdependent workings of things. What we mean by that, the interdependent workings of things, is the reason I have a tomato plant with tomatoes on it, if that's a good thing, is some ripening result of some kindness I did before. That interdependence.

And we have to be well trained to recognize that, that that's what we're talking about. The other interdependence is true. We know that.

We've lived with that. It hasn't stopped our suffering. OK, so let's get rid of this and let me show you the vocabulary.

We'll move you over. Here it is. Dendro is the word for dependent origination, whatever that means.

Nangtong is that word for appearances and emptiness, like this, not like this. And then we're going to talk about these things. Zechi, Zenchi, which we know as Chicherak, which if we studied Kamalashila's Diamond Cutter Sutra commentary, we learned it as Chitsen and Rongchen.

So just note the words and then I'm going to ditch the screen share. Got it? Zechi and Zenchi, or Zenchi, are the words Panchen Lama uses in his text. And as I describe those, that's why we're not learning it to learn the Tibetan, we're learning it to learn the concept.

All right, so let me get rid of this. Have it? Here we are again. So the classical way of teaching this in his time was, let's consider a four-pillared house.

Right, so a house that's got four main beams, four pillars holding it up. Consider a four-pillared house. Is there a pillar in the four-pillared house? And we say, yes, of course.

In fact, there's four of them. And then they say, actually, no, there is no pillar in the four-pillared house, which is why there can be a house with four pillars. It sounds like Dr. Seuss, right? So when we say consider four pillars, into our mind pops some kind of idea.

Maybe it's visual, maybe it's not. But when we think pillar, we have this general idea in mind. Again, to have a general idea of what the word pillar means is a ripening result of some past goodness.

It's a good thing to know pillar. It is a ripening result. And we have this idea pillar that we then use when someone says, consider that four-pillared house, is there a pillar in it? Up pops this idea pillar, and then we check in the house to see, is there anything in there that matches my idea of pillar so that I can answer the question, yes, there are four of them, because there are things that match this idea in my mind.

That would explain our experience on a more subtle level other than just going into a house, seeing four pillars and going, yes, there are four pillars there. That's how fast it happens. But we've had to do this same thing.

No pillar, see pillar, put the two together, oh, pillar. It happens like that. So the term zechi, that's the term he's using for this idea pillar.

And then the tsenchi is the word that he's using for what we would call the real pillars. Tsen means from tseni, define, define. The pillar that defines itself as a pillar or the pillar that we use that says, yes, that's a pillar.

Tsenchi means the thing that gets, well, I don't say that, the actual thing, the defined thing. The pillar is the defined thing. Because we can take the word pillar and shine it onto that thing I call my car and we'd go, no pillar, because something doesn't match.

Okay. So he says, yes, is there a pillar in the four-pillared house? We say, yes, there's four of them. And he says, actually, no, there's none of them.

Why would he say that when we're standing there looking at a house with four pillars? Why would he say, no, you are mistaken to say that there's a pillar in the four-pillared house. He says, go and find your pillar in that four-pillared house. Can we ever find? Yeah, right.

You're right, Nettie. Can we ever find a pillar that's independent of our idea pillar? No. So what is it we are experiencing? Are we experiencing the idea pillar or are we experiencing pillar? Can we experience idea pillar without a pillar? Well, we can think of a pillar, right? Without there being a pillar there.

But what if we never, ever, ever, ever, language is getting so slippery, never, ever, ever, ever had a, I'm just going to say it, a real pillar, a living pillar. No, I can't say that. The pillar that my idea pillar fit onto, if I never had that, not in a picture, not in a tactile, not at all, but I had the word pillar in my mind, would it mean anything? You need a concept.

Well, yeah, the pillar is the concept, but you need something to confirm the concept as a thing for the concept to have meaning. So it's like, well, then if I even had the word pillar that popped into my mind, if I don't know what it applies to, as Roxanna says, I don't have the concept of pillar, even though I have the words, even though I have the letters put together. So what comes first? The pillar or the idea pillar? We have to have the idea pillar in order to get that information and go, oh, pillar.

If we have the idea pillar and there's no thing, then idea pillar is meaningless. Which pillar do we think is more real? Yeah, we think the solid pillar that's holding up the roof, we think that one's real. And we think our idea pillar just makes it the pillar that I experience.

But he says, when we think pillar, that pillar is complete. It has a front side, a back side, a top side, a bottom side, an ability to hold up a roof. Maybe it even has a color and who made it or what it's made out of.

Our idea pillar is a whole complete thing. Now, stand in front of a pillar and look at it. What are you directly experiencing? Just part.

Just part. The pillar is less complete than our idea pillar. So now which one's more real? Which one is holding up the roof? The one that's only got a front side and no backside or the one in my mind that's complete, including holding up the roof.

Which one's more real? The mantle one's more real. So which one's dzechi and which one's dzenchi? That's where it gets tricky, right? Because it's not true that the idea pillar is more real than the pillar because both of them are projected mental images. So when we say which one's more real, we would say neither and both, right? There is a not more or less.

They are both mental images ripening. The mantle image ripening the idea and the mantle image ripening the thing that the idea lays onto and the ripening and so that one's real. That's the one that's holding up the roof.

That's a mental image too. The whole four pillared house is a mental image. I was talking about it as a mental image.

Can you feel, I don't know, I feel my mind going towards that cliff of, oh, if it's all just mental images, it's all not real. Look, right? As opposed to drawing into the middle way, which is, oh, it's all mental images. Oh, that explains everything.

Like truly when we get there, like we're so close to experiencing the fact that nothing has ever been any other way than that. When it's like, whoa, all mental images, that means anything is possible at any moment at any time. Yeah, maybe that's a little scary, but that's how it's been since forever.

Anything's possible at any moment. We've like denied that and somehow we have the good seats for things to seem to be consistent, but consistently mistaken and consistently painful or hurting. And like, why did it take so long to say there's something wrong with this picture? Let's fix it for crying out loud.

We're getting these glimpses into how it is fixable that fast. If our mind will shift, right? If the seeds will shift, what mind, right? We could have the same conversation about consider your mind, which pillar is your mind, your idea of mind versus the mind you have, which one's more real, which one comes first. Same idea.

So the punch line is so important. Neither one's more real, both mental images ripening. And so everything possible.

That was the conclusion Master Kamala Sheila pointed out to us, which we hadn't studied at this point when Lama Christi was teaching Maha Mudra. Not that she didn't know that stuff, but it just didn't go in that direction. Cheats and wrongs.

They're both the same was the conclusion. And even back then it was like, what do you mean? They're both the same. They're not the same.

No, my idea, car and car in the parking lot. They're not the same. And it's like, yes, they are.

Both mental, not one and the same, both mental images ripening. Quote car versus car, right? That's Cheap Chedak. Just a different way of looking at Cheap Chedak.

Thank goodness. They have a different way. Okay, let's take our break.

I act right through our break. Hi. Hi.

Hello, baby. She just turned three months yesterday. Oh, my gosh.

Does she know your voice? Yes, she does. She recognized me because I always sing to her. Yeah.

Tell her, oh, grandma's applying everything with your grandkids. I'll take her back. I just wanted you to see her.

Precious thing. Thank you. I'll be back.

Yeah. I was reading an astrological thing about the different generations, starting from the generations of my parents and then through boomers, which is me and then on to the next and how the influence of the planet Pluto but anyway, it was saying how the kids being born like now from the last five years into the next 10 years are there in this, they have this planetary alignment with Pluto, all of them that they are, well, they are the architects of the new world system. And it's like, yeah, right.

Hooray. I won't be around to see it. But yay.

It's in the planets. It's in the stars that we're going to get through this before the earth explodes. So there's one of them that architect of a new way of being who Ray teacher emptiness fast.

Maybe so. No, we're all doing our part. A quick question.

So in this image that that Han HP has of a lotus flower, how many pedals would we say that has when we just count the outer pedals? Like the most outermost? Or would we count all of it? Like how many pedals? I'm just confused about how many pedals a flower has. After a discussion of how many pillars are in a four pillared house? I can't answer that question. Why would you not color count all of them? I was thinking it seems like maybe there's like 10 on the on the bottom layer.

And I thought maybe that's how we count. Yeah, but the others are also like the roses roses have pedals in there inside and outside. So you can't all of them.

Right? Yeah, I know where you're coming from, Roshna. And they're not layered like the one the chakra pedals aren't layered. In this way, to where? How many are there? There? I don't know, maybe they are layered.

I don't know. I don't know the answer to your question. May I choose an example? Okay.

You know, for years, for New Year's, what I've been doing is kind of giving this sort of gifts, Keith, can you see? I see that you're holding something but it's all blurry. Okay. It's like golden pebbles, gold pebbles.

Okay. So I make a little small packages of gold pebbles. And this year, I didn't have I forgot to buy in Canada and in the States, those coins, those chocolate coins, gold chocolate coins.

And I put coins in it, and I give them as an offering to people. So my intention is so they'll have plenty of abundance during the year. So this year, I didn't have any chocolate coins.

But I put jewels inside, precious jewels inside. So it's the same concept or sort of the pillar that anything can be possible. So what it's really what it's not real, but it's the intention and the motivation and the concept that you have of abundance.

And I don't know, could it relate to that? I was thinking of it. Yeah, it's right. It's that's part of the ramification, right of what we're learning.

Just be careful when you're talking to people and saying, really, it's the intention that can be easily misunderstood and misused. And it's like my intention was my intention was good. And so I, I justify doing something.

I don't know. I mean, I know what you mean. But if talking to a group that could take all I have to have is a good intention, and it doesn't matter what I do.

Oh, no, no, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

But what I meant? Yeah, it's like, it's just a small. No. Yes, very lovely.

And you're right. The intention does change. It's it changes everything for everybody.

Right? As we do it. It's still seeds ripening. Right? They're painted.

They're golden lentils. Right? Yeah, but you but they're, they can be gold pebbles. Right? Yes.

And that's exactly actually where Lama Christi went with clash. She said, who cares about pillars, and whether there's pillars in a four pillared house, unless it's your house. She said, where this where this is useful is, for example, if someone hands you an apple, like somebody does something kind for you.

And you accept their kindness, you accept the apple, it looks really delicious. And maybe you even bite into it. But then you turn it around.

And you see that the backside of the apple, which is now the front side of the apple, is rotten, and there's even worms in it. You know, and so it's like this person handed me the good side of the apple, knowing it was a rotten apple. I didn't know that first, I thought they were being kind here, offer you this apple.

And then I see, well, right, the whole story becomes, well, they did that to me intentionally, they knew it was a rotten apple, they watched me bite into it, they let me do it, right? I don't like you, I'm going to be mean to you, blah, blah, blah. Pillar. Are there four pillars in the four pillared house? Right? Same thing is happening there.

As pillar, four pillars, right? My seeds ripened, delicious apple, then my seeds ripen, rotten apple. And then my seeds ripen, blame them for the rotten apple. But it's my seeds ripening.

Does that mean it doesn't matter what anybody does to me? Oh, slippery question. Yes, it matters because of the negative seeds they'll get when they hurt somebody. But technically, you can't say it matters or doesn't matter.

Because our seeds are ripening, and they have ripened, and they're done and gone now. And maybe that's a good thing. But weren't you talking to David about neutral seeds, that everything is black and white.

So there's the apple, and then there's a rotten side. But if you have a rotten apple, it means it wasn't sprayed. So you're not getting the chemical residue on the land.

It's not the food, but it affects the land and the people, who have to work there. And it keeps going back and forth. That's what I've been noticing, that it's black and white, with the odd white seed when you give up your body.

And then you were talking with David about whether neutral seeds really exist. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I personally still maintain that there's no such thing as a neutral seed. There has to be a component of pleasant or unpleasant in everything.

But then maybe they're not talking about neutral in terms of pleasant versus unpleasant. Maybe they're talking about neutral in terms of background. That's what David is maintaining, that the scripture says neutral karma is all the background stuff that's not actively involved.

As we hand the apple to the person, we are aware of the time of day, the season of the year, the date. We're aware of my grandmother. All of that is all part of the seed that's ripening, the seeds that planting.

And maybe they're calling all of that neutral karma. I don't know. I don't really understand neutral karma.

But you're absolutely right, how the karma is toggling back and forth, whitish, blackish, whitish, blackish, blackish, whitish, right? All of this going back and forth. And so did the person hand me a rotten apple? It wasn't rotten when I experienced it. And then my seeds ripen differently.

And suddenly, the apple is a rotten apple. And my ignorance makes me mad at the person who handed me the rotten apple. That's the point of this chichedok thing.

I mean, that's not the whole point, but it's the ramification, not the point, the ramification of our mistaken mind blaming the object and the interaction for what we feel as a result. But wait a minute, would I feel offended if when I turned the apple around, it was still a beautiful apple? No, my feeling offended came because they handed me an apple that was rotten, because they're seeing the rotten side. So it's like, even as we're looking at our feeling that comes up, our mental affliction that comes up, our response to a given situation that comes up, that seed's ripening also.

That's the idea with the thing that the idea, we call it, lays onto in order to just talk about it. But it can't really be happening that there's something over here, and there's the idea in my mind, and the idea in my mind flies onto the thing, right? That's the experience Geshe-la says we will have. But it's impossible to work that way from the space of there's nothing, and then this idea, and that thing, and the two come together, and kaboom, you have an experience.

It cannot be happening sequentially in that way without it having already happened sequentially in a more subtle way. Okay, what about the colors and shapes of that thing that just got the label pot on stove? They also had to have been information getting a label. We're only thinking about it now, but it had to have happened even before you got pot on stove.

You had colored shape, right? Information getting color shape, getting pot on stove, getting, oh my gosh, this is choo-chook, oh my gosh. All of it is seeds ripening, making both the thing and the idea of the thing, and making the two seem like they come together into an experience when you can't have one and then the other that come together as an experience. They can only arise together infallibly was that verse.

The infallible means pushed by the, well, means the ramification of what we call seeds ripening, seeds planting. So then we're thinking, okay, then a karmic mental seed ripens and then color, shape, pot, pot on stove, right? And then it all happens, but it's like, wait a minute. You can't have a seed ripening happening first and then you have the experience.

The seed ripening is the explanation we give to explain what we're experiencing, but it's not like it's happening first and then bringing on the event. It can't, it gets more and more slippery. And so that's how the seeds can ripen the experience.

Oh, the seed cracking open and out comes the image. And right. That's all happening in this shape-shifting process also that shows us the truth about the imprints of the mind being our experience.

I don't even want to say being the cause of our experience, but being our experience moment by moment and nothing other than that, which gives us a glimpse of why that emptiness of that mind reveals our, or is our Buddha nature. Because this system of a thing we call consciousness aware of this process happening is all words for the experience existing. And it always has an always will your side and my side.

And so it's always empty of self-nature and that emptiness of self-nature of that very aware-ing happening is our Buddha nature. It is that promise that therefore a pure world, pure being, pure paradise can be the experiencing happening and replanting and perpetuating and right. Language just fails.

Okay. So back to the pillar in the house, which pillar is holding up the house, the idea pillar or the pillar that only has the front and not the back. It's our idea pillar in a four pillared house, the idea for pillared house, keeping the house up that functions, doesn't it? But it doesn't mean as soon as I stopped thinking of the four pillared house, it will fall apart because I still have the idea for pillared house, even if it's not ripening right now, which means I'm not thinking about it right now.

But as soon as I do, there's a four pillared house. It's a, it's a big question. Are there flowers in the grocery store when we're not there seeing the flowers in the grocery store? And of course we say, of course there are flowers at the grocery store, but which flowers are there? My idea flowers in the grocery store or real flowers in the punchline? Neither.

Only mental images flower in a grocery store everywhere in the world. Like how many grocery stores with how many flowers all over the world, all coming out of whose mind? Wow. Wow.

May everyone have flowers. So when we are able to recognize that our experience is are the, are the ideas, the archetypes, they call it, we can relate to our world, our experiences in a very different way. As we described, if we understood that, that the whole delicious apple didn't end up being a whole delicious apple after all.

And I recognized it as just this ideal in my mind, shape shifting. I wouldn't blame the other person. I would laugh about it instead.

And so to be able to relate to the world in terms of the shape shifting idealizations happening reduces our blaming factor and reactivity factor is the idea. I don't, I don't relate so much to the idea of archetype. I understand what it's trying to say.

And when I say, well, can I relate to my ficus tree is just an idea of a ficus tree. It's like, that's weird too. Cause do you, does it, do I have to water my idea of a ficus tree? Apparently I do, but the one I watered turns yellow.

Every time I do it's droopy. And then it's yellow and then it's droopy. And then it's yellow.

It's like, come on, help me get it right. It. And then when I say, Oh, it's all just coming from me.

My mind goes, yeah. So I'm the real thing. Everything else is just ideas, but I'm the real thing.

It, it goes wrong, right? Because from, I'm the only real thing means I'm the only thing that's important and wrong, wrong cliff, right? I'm the only thing that exists the way I think everything else is not real. It's very slippery. We say, Oh, I don't do that, but I can catch my mind doing it.

When I say the words to you, like there's this little, it's very funny. Like shut up in there. So Lama Christi was pointing out that when we do understand this idea of these idealizations of things, they can have more meaning.

Actually, our idealization of a pillar can have more meaning to us than just the pillar that holds up that house. And she was, was describing that in the sense of how we can gain other meanings out of things that we see or things that happen to us in life. And her example is with the, with the Tibetan tankas so frequently, they are so busy, right? You've got a central deity and all this other stuff around them.

Sometimes you can't even see the deity. There's a picture in the cabin one, two, three up at diamond mountain. It's a, it's, it's mostly dark black and you look at it and it looks like an abstract.

And it's sort of like, find the deity in this picture. And then you, it finally pops out at you. And then you look around and it's like, there are all these other things happening, but at first you can't make it out because there's just too much in it.

And everything in one of those tankas is meaningful. And if you know the meanings of all of those different things, it's a whole teaching one tanka. And you remember the story of King Bimbisara and the other guy, I can't think of his name and they're trading gifts.

And finally the one paints the wheel of life for the other. And the other looks at it, studies it. And they say he goes into the direct perception of emptiness as a result of reading that tanka.

So like huge symbology in everything. And that's true in life as well. So if we could read our experiences in the same way that we could read a Tibetan tanka, I think we maybe wouldn't make so many mistakes in our interactions with others because everything would be a message and a tool.

It's part of this idea of the infallibility of karma and emptiness. Karma is the name for the process of ripening results of past causes made by what we thought said ended. They can only ripen when all the other factors, like when it gains the power to manifest, it manifests.

Like when there's a full moon in the sky and there's a still water below, it doesn't matter if it's a puddle or a raindrop or a teardrop or a lake, there's the reflection of the moon. Nobody has to decide it. Nobody has to make it.

Circumstances, that's not right either. The power of the imprint has reached its manifestation and kaboom, there it is. And so every moment of every experience is these imprints that have reached their power of manifestation.

So everything is exactly right. It can never go wrong because a wrong seed can't manifest. It can't get over the hump to manifest.

So all the better if we can, as these things are manifesting, recognize that, wow, this is the perfect, like everything is perfect. It's not perfect the way we want it to be perfect, but it's all happening infallibly. That's the word, infallibly.

So, you know, somebody's going to say, well, what about free will? Right. Right. That also, if we've given other beings choices, we'll have choices.

If we haven't given, when we, when we have given other people choices, we'll have choices. When we haven't given other people choices, we won't have choices. There is free will.

All right. How are we doing? So then there's this question. Is, is this process happening fluid? Like the river flowing? Or is it like a film strip where it has this one and then this one and then this one and then this one? You know, I'm diamond dealing you.

Which one is it? Or bing, bing, bing, bing. You can make a case for either, right? Yeah. You know, the card deck, you go like this and the horse is running, but you take anyone and the horse is still.

So if that's true, that it's just bunk, bunk, bunk, bunk, then that means there's no such thing as changing things because they arise complete and they're gone and they rise complete and they're gone, right? That's the definition of an unchanging thing, an impermanent, but unchanging thing. See why we studied all of this? Because there's going to be a place in which your mind is going, which one is it? Bing, bing, bing, bing, or blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't mean blah at all, but right.

No, because this one where it's just constant shape-shifting, that's like, Whoa, you know, when does it ever happen? And who comes, how can you have any kind of actual relationship between things? If there's just this nebulous, constant shape-shifting happening, it's like, Whoa, everything by any kind of feeling of management or power control, just sort of like, because you can't find the moment this touches that, and you can't find the moment that changes into that. And then it's like, how can it be? The constant shape-shifting and be so the same as it seems to be, right? You seem the same as you were when we got online an hour or so ago. We're not the same.

We are so hugely different than we were an hour ago. But if we related to that, I don't know, what would life be like? We really can't. It feels more comfortable.

And yes. Okay. If we're doing like the horse and the cards thing, then it appears to be changing things, but isn't actually changing things.

The other one is constantly changing things and all of it empty of self-nature, which is the unchanging nature of the constantly changing thing. That's kind of making more sense, but it feels less livable because it's too slippery. Neither.

And we want to, our mind wants to say, just tell me which one's right. You know, just tell me which one it is and I'll learn to live with it. But guess what? Neither one is right.

You know, don't you suppose it drives physicists crazy that light is both a wave and a particle. Doggone it. Make it one or the other.

It's the same. It's the same. Same idea.

Oh, I still have time for this. So Panchen Lama says, all right, we are, we are deciding, uh, things are nothing but names and terms, meaning things are nothing but our mental projections are mental images happening. So then someone says, well, if things are nothing but mental images happening, and every time we perceive something not aware of that as its appearing nature, then we are always perceiving self and other, those appearing things and experiences between mistakenly, which means it's not true that we establish things to be existing by way of a valid perception, right? We learned long time ago.

How do we know that there's an existing thing? It's established by being perceived validly. Remember that now granted that's from a lower school because what the lower school means, the pen is here. And then I validly see it as a pen and that's what makes it the pen, right? Until I validly see it as the pen, it isn't a pen because a dog would come up and chew it.

But the it thing for lower school is here validly. If I'm drunk or high, and then I see this pen, the pen, my drunk or high mind is seeing is not this pen because it's drunk or high. It's seeing, it's experiencing it influenced by these other factors.

It's not that because I'm drunk or high, I see a tree, but the pen that I see is not valid because my mind's not valid. So it takes my valid perception of this pen for this pen to exist. Before that it was just distinct.

Then higher school says, I mean, higher school agrees that objects are established by way of valid perception, but they mean something different clearly. Lower school, the thing is here. I perceive it, that makes it real.

Higher school says, what does higher school say? Does the thing have to be here first? Oh my gosh, we're back to that. 50-50 school says yes. Middle way 50-50 school says there's a basis there.

My mind brings something to the party and that makes this thing, this pen. Mind only school says something similar. Shen Wong nature, the other powered object, the object that has its own causes and conditions.

And then my seeds ripen it and me and we come together. And now my mind makes this pen for me, the Kuntak, right? I never in mind only school, this thing, my Kuntak pen cannot exist outside of my mind because my mind makes the Kuntak. But the Shen Wong, I can't ever experience it without my mind.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist because look, right? It's just beyond your, this is the perfect analogy, right? At least for me, because I still have it in my experience. So got myself distracted. If things are nothing but my projections, then nothing exists except by way of my projections.

And then you can't say things are established to exist by way of a valid perception. And it is a conundrum, similar to, is there a pillar in the four pillared house? Yes. And no, because the pillar and the idea pillar are both mental seeds ripening.

Same idea here. Yes. Things have to be perceived to be established as existing, but no, they don't have to be there first in order to be perceived.

See how powerful we are. Yes, Maddy. Okay.

Thank you so much. Maybe, can I ask a question? So there is this emptiness which exists, right? For emptiness of a pen. No.

No, phrase that again. Well, I believe that my understanding is that there is an emptiness of an object, of a pen. And this emptiness exists for this object, for a pen.

Because of the appearance of the object, the object's emptiness has to be there. So this is very abstract, but the question is, if there is something that has to be there because of the object, like, so isn't it a base? And you can say no, but it's still kind of... Do you see where our minds are going? I think, is that in order for there to be an emptiness of the pen, there has to be the pen there first. Yeah, the place called there.

There can't be an emptiness first, or there can't be a pen there first, and then it's emptiness. And there can't be an emptiness there first, and then the pen. No, there cannot be.

They'll rise together. But now, if our mind does not know pen, is there pen and emptiness of a pen here in my hand now? No. If we don't know pen, it doesn't matter what's here, or if anything is here, we can't make pen or the emptiness of a pen if we don't know it.

So our mind does make the existence of things, right? Things are produced by valid perception. Technically, things are produced by projections, but even that goes wrong because that would imply there's a projection, right? That's happening first, and then bingo. But in this space between it hasn't happened yet, what's going on then? It has to be but then you're like, how long does this pen last then? How long is it? On the recording, you won't be able to see my hand, and I think it's important to be able to see that.

How long does it last? As long as my karma permits it, right? Yeah, but is it the same pen as long as your karma permits it? No. No, it's a constantly changing pen. Right.

Not now and now and now and now, but bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Well, how do I ever get a hold of one of those and use it? Same thing, this constant shape-shifting. It's disorienting to try to imagine, you know, being a me in a world that's so constantly shape-shifting, and yet it's this clue to how we can, how we will transform, and maybe a clue into what it's like to be omniscient, maybe.

Don't know about that one. So when we're trying to sort this out, the way they say to work with it is to find the gaccha. When we're thinking the pen is their first, we're holding to something existing independent of my projection that's going to receive the projection that's going to make it this pen for me.

And we're taught that in order to reach the true nature of this pen, which isn't just its emptiness, it's the fact that the instant something is appearing there, it lacks its self-nature and the appearance is coming from the mind of the experiencer. All of that is what we mean by true nature, appearing nature and empty nature rolled together as one, but even that's going to fail us in a minute. So I'm getting confused.

He says we hold to a thing, we recognize that as we're holding to the thing we're believing it has its nature in it from it. We recognize that as the thing to be denied. The pen that has its own causes, conditions, its own parts, all of that logic.

And then we show ourselves that no, in fact, there's nothing about this object being called pen that's not coming from my personal experience of it. Recognizing that that personal experience of it is a result of a cause, that cause had to be planted in my mind before by who? Only me can plant causes in my mind and to take, find the gotcha and remove it. The pen that is in it from it, not my projection, pull it away.

And what we have left is the pen that is my projection and nothing but that, that's its empty nature. So we go through these three factors. So somebody has said, yeah, but if you're never perceiving the thing accurately, you're never having a valid perception.

And so even as you're doing this, pull away the gotcha, you're still not having a valid perception. How can you ever establish something as existing if you can't ever have a valid perception? They're being a tenacious debater. Tukey Gelson's answer to him is a little bit funny because he says, look, if you can't recognize the gotcha, then in order to find the true nature of something, you have to make up a gotcha and then remove it.

And that's stupid. He basically says that's unnecessary because everything we see, we see as having its identity in it. That's the gotcha.

You don't have to go and make up a different one just because the gotcha itself is invalid because it's wrong. It's not invalid. We're not high.

We're not drunk. We are looking for the pen that's in it and we can't find it. Has there ever been a pen that was in it? No.

Have we believed that there have been pens that are in it? Yes. So really, we're looking for a belief that we go proving to ourselves is an incorrect belief so that we can stop believing in it. Like you prove you believe in Santa Claus and then your brother proves to you that they can't exist.

You stop believing. And then Santa's gone until Santa shows up and you experience Santa directly. You now know Santa does to exist and you go to your brother and say, I met him.

I know it's true. Brother's not going to believe it because it didn't happen to him. So we won't stop having seeds for the belief in that nasty boss in them from them until we have that direct experience of Maha Mudra, the empty nature of our own mind.

We can chip away at our belief, which we've been doing. Like brother saying, no, Santa doesn't exist. Teacher is saying, no, we can't exist with our own natures in us from us or everybody experiences exactly the same and they don't.

It's so simple. And so then what, right? That's the long story. Chucky Gelson is saying, explore these two cliffs, right? We're well trained to stay in the middle way, but his point is find the cliff in your own reaction to the explanations, to the investigations, find the cliff, feel what it feels like so that we can say, no, that's a mistaken conclusion from what I just showed myself and pull ourselves back.

So in this reading from a, it's called the course 17 reading two, even though we're on technically class three, it's only a few pages, but Lama Christi said, please read it again and again and again, really think about it. It's got some really, really deep clues in it. It reads so simply, but with each concept, think about, watch how your mind reacts to it and really chew on the ramifications of the conclusion that you got from it and then go back and read it again and then chew on the conclusion that you got from it.

And then try this meditation version of getting to all the ripenings, slowing down. And then when one bubbles up, Oh, message for me, I'll make note, don't follow it at the time, but come back after that meditation. What were those? And maybe you get some insight into how it is that this middle way is so useful for us off the cushion.

All right. I thought I was going to finish that class, but I didn't. So, or that's all right.

So remember that person we wanted to be able to help. Thank you for the extra few minutes here. I apologize for not asking first.

Remember that person we've learned a lot. We've worked with a lot that will go on to help them in that deep and ultimate way. And that's an extraordinary goodness.

So please be happy with yourself and think of this goodness, like a beautiful glowing gemstone that we can hold in our hands, recall our own precious holy being, see how happy they are with us. We feel our gratitude to them, our reliance upon them, ask them to please stay close to continue to guide us, help us, inspire us, and then offer them this gemstone of goodness. See them accept it and bless it.

And they carry it with them right back into our hearts. See them there, feel them there, their love, their compassion, their wisdom. It feels so good.

We want to keep it forever. And so we know to share it by the power of the goodness that we've just done. May all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere. See them all filled with loving kindness, filled with wisdom. And may it be so.

All right, welcome back. We are Mahamudra Group. It's February 10th, 2026.

Let's gather our minds here as we usually do. We'll do our opening prayers. I have a little to wrap up from before and then we'll do our meditation.

So let's gather our minds here as we usually do. Please bring your attention to your breath until you hear from me again. Now bring to mind that being who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom, and see them there with you just by way of your thinking of them.

They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you, smiling at you with their holy great compassion, their wisdom radiating from them, that beautiful golden glow encompassing you in its light. And then we hear them say, bring to mind someone you know who's hurting in some way. Feel how much you would like to be able to help them.

Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short. How wonderful it will be when we can also help them in some deep and ultimate way. A way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever.

Deep down we know this is possible. Deeper down we know this is what we are meant to become. Learning about emptiness and karma we glimpse how it's possible, how it's even inevitable.

And so we grow our wish into a longing and into an intention and into a determination. And with that determination we turn our minds back to our precious holy being. We know that they know what we need to know, what we need to learn yet, what we need to do yet, to become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way.

And so we ask them please, please, please teach us that. And they're so happy that we've asked. Of course they agree.

Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite. And so we think of the pure world they are teaching us how to create.

We imagine we can hold it in our hands and we offer it to them, following it with our promise to practice what they teach us, using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth filled with fragrant incense and covered with the blanket of flowers. The great mountain, four lands, wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon.

In my mind I make them the paradise of our Buddha and offer it all to you. By this deed may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community.

To the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community.

To the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the highest community.

To the merit that I do in sharing this class and the rest. May all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. We had spent the last couple of sessions where Lobsangchuky Gyaltsen was helping us explore dendral dependent origination and emptiness.

Helping us understand how to be aware of one. You must have the other one and from either direction. He's been training us in how to experience that by way of this method called Mahamudra meditation where we become more and more aware of the stories our mind is using to make the identities of the experience we're having.

And we get subtler and subtler and subtler in our awareness of what's appearing. And we come to recognize that it's really just the process of appearancing happening and when we stop the story about each of the appearances it just gets more and more subtle. It's not really that appearance ever stops.

We reach a place where a specific appearance, if you can call it that, comes and passes and there may be some time before another one comes up again. But even in that space between appearances, that's still an appearance. There's still something to be aware of.

And then he said, okay, you are seeing directly the face of the mind, right? And we go, right. And he goes, no, actually you are seeing the appearing nature of the mind, not its true nature. And then he went into the true nature of the mind is the fact that there isn't a mind that that's happening in and there isn't a mind that's making all that happen.

There is the awaring happening with every one of those what's being aware of, right? Like words start to fail because you can't pin it down to here's the mind and here's the thing ripening in the mind and here's the me aware of the whole thing, somehow separate. We're not doing it in so many words, we're doing it in experience. And then he throws in the, now that we're aware of the appearing nature of the mind, and we are holding that understanding that in order for the mind to appear in this constantly shape-shifting way, it has to have no nature of its own.

And that's a long story, right? About what that means. And we have to toggle back and forth between thinking of one or being aware of one and then being aware of the other. And his point has been, we're wanting to get to the place where to be aware of an appearance happening, we are equally aware of the empty nature of technically all three spheres of that experience happening in that moment and the next moment and the next moment.

We're reaching that deep aha, that we can't experience anything that does not lack its own nature. So although the empty nature of something is not something we can see or hear or smell or taste or touch, it is something we can know by way of something that we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or just think of, which is what we're doing in our meditation, is we're shutting down all those sensory inputs, but we're still having things arise. So there's still movement of the mind happening.

So he helped us through that exploration of what's meant by the emptiness of a thing, by his discussion of those four pillars, and whether there's a pillar in the house that's built with four pillars, right? And it sounds so semantic, but it really is important to get this understanding that these depending, appearing things that we think are the real things that we're looking for the emptiness of, they don't have that kind of reality. They're all these ideas that come up, that bubbles up, and that proves that any experience lacks its identity or qualities in it from it. So he reminded us about doing that with pillars, meaning with any a thing in our outer world that we experience.

And then, of course, the implication is we apply the same thing to this thing we call mind, and then it gets a little slipperier because we also do the fourth part of the Mahamudra practice at some point where we apply all of that appearing nature, nothing but, to the observer themselves, to the me, the meditator. And then he quotes Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti and again Milarepa and Arya Nagarjuna, all of whom are trying to express this idea to experience anything is to experience the emptiness of anything, right? The emptiness is a necessary factor there. And we're trying to train ourselves to relate to subject, object, and interaction between by way of this pair of appearances and emptiness.

And Nagarjuna calls that cause and effect, which is really interesting, right? I have studied Nagarjuna for a long time now, and it's like there's no such thing as a worldly cause being the real worldly cause. There's only the worldly cause as a ripening result of some seed in our mind. So there are worldly results and worldly causes, but not in a cause and effect relationship, only in this dependent origination emptiness relationship.

So true cause and effect is movement of the mind and what it motivates, which is karma. So he wraps that all up with this beautiful verse, the play of this appearing world in no way negates emptiness. And emptiness is not a refutation of appearances.

This is Jetsun Kappa. When emptiness and interdependence become one in the same, that's the pure and perfect path called forth into being. And then he goes into a review of what it is to really be meditating, which is curious, right? So before this, he had said, and when you go looking for the me to find the Gakcha me, you don't have to make up a new me and then decide that new me has no nature to find your Gakcha me.

He says you use the me that's already there. Of course, you use your already present me. There isn't any other me than that.

And it was like, why does he bring that up? But when he's reviewing about meditation, he's pointing out that to be at the level of meditation where our Maha Mudra can become Maha Mudra, meaning the direct perception of emptiness, our meditative platform needs to be that level called Me Chokme, the first causal level of the form realm, which means our sensory input needs to be all shut down, which means we have reached single pointed concentration on the object, no agitation, no dullness. So object and nothing other than the object. And we've been there with such concentration, ease and fascination intensity that the two shinjongs have come on.

So the physical shinjong and the mental shinjong and the mental shinjong is this mental pleasure and ease that comes as a result of being so absorbed in the object that you're toggling between awareness of me, object, me on object, me, or even toggling between me, the meditator, making sure the me is the watcher and me, the watcher gets so effortlessly, pleasurably involved in staying on the object that the awareness of me goes away. And then as the awareness of me gets so absorbed into the object, the subtle winds of the body are pulling in and smoothing out in such a way that the physical shinjong comes on and is sustained. So when the body has, when the body's subtle winds are so gathered that they're not doing the sensation of what we called our body takes on this whole different sense.

They say it becomes like a rock, but that doesn't sound pleasant. It just suddenly it's the ease and your body will sit there unattended, no needs, no nothing for as long as you have determined it will. You can sit for hours, you won't have to get up and go to the bathroom.

It's just shinjong. And so this state of mental shinjong that we must have in order to reach the platform from which we can sustain the direct perception of emptiness is equally into the object. But then at some point, the actual object of our meditation is the me.

But it's like, it's as if it's gone, it's not gone. But it's as if it's gone. So it's like, Oh, I see why he's saying, when you turn your maha mudra onto the me, you don't have to make up a new one.

But it's as if your me is gone. How can you use your me as a method as your aspect of the meditation to now look for the emptiness of my me? Because your me is gone. But it's not gone, he's saying.

And it won't pull us out of our shamatha to then include the meditator, the me as our meditation object that we can then investigate the me that the appearing me to see come to see the empty, me the empty nature of me. Okay. So with that review of the meditation, and the practice, let's sit down into meditation and recognize the need to be more and more keenly aware of the agitation, or the dullness, and how to adjust it right there in the moment to sink deeper and deeper in to check to see if we have this method going of being able to sink deeper and deeper into our object.

Right, and then we'll see where we go from that. Tom, can you hold your question for later? Thank you. Okay, so set your body in and decide it will be still.

Make it still. Bring your attention to your breath at the nostrils. Feel that energy gather up there front and upper.

Zoom that mind into a specific spot. Adjust your focus, your clarity, and the intensity. Get that mind crystal clear, sharp, eager.

If it's bouncing around, just be amused. Bring it back. Now with the same quality of mind, let loose that object and slide back and down a bit to be aware of what we're hearing in the outer sounds.

Recognize the story. Let it go. Sink deeper and deeper into the more subtle experience.

Simply hearing. Decide to sink in deeper to hear inner sounds. Being aware of the story that identifies them.

Sinking deeper into the raw experience. Hearing, sound, then slide deeper in that keen, bright awareness to being aware of any thoughts that arise, whether they're mental words or just ideas or just pictures popping up. Be the detached observer, bright, clear, and aware of the identities they are seeming to have.

Checking for the fascination, the clarity. Letting go of the stories, the identities. Becoming more and more enjoyable, aware of this constant stream of shifting appearances.

Now keep this bright, clear, enjoyable awareness of this constant appearing, happening, and take a little corner of your meditating you mind and check the experience. Are these appearances? Am I experiencing this? Is my mind there experiencing these things or are these things my mind appearing? Check your experience. Not what we want to know about the experience, but the experience.

Try. We see that there's no my mind separate from these passing images, but it's not that there's no mind at all. Every moment of every experience is simply this constant stream of appearances, nothing but arising and passing mental images.

We know that every appearance being a shape-shifting of our own mental images, they then have no identity of their own, no story, no qualities, no identity, no name. And as we deconstruct more and more subtly, we can reach that space beyond any elaboration, which is emptiness itself. We find that as we get conceptually close to this empty nature of this flow of experience, we habitually call it or recognize it as another appearance and we've lost it.

And so we slide into it again. So keenly aware of the shape-shifting happening, we are part of it and a little corner of our mind, keenly aware that all of these shape-shiftings are mental images, seeds ripening, passing with no other identity than that. Let's stay two more minutes.

Now consciously allow the appearing side of the mind appear to you again. So you've separated a bit and as those appearances arise and pass, connect the two of appearance and emptiness. Every appearance depends for its appearance on this shape-shift of my mind.

Being aware of that potentiality within every appearance, now maintain the sense of with every appearance is its empty nature potential to be and come back up in your layers. Let those inner sounds come to mind as inner sounds. Outer sounds come to mind as outer sounds.

You and your body in your room as appearing mental image, empty of self-nature and determined to think that about the first thing you see when you open your eyes and then when you're ready, open your eyes, take a stretch. Nice job. So from everything you said earlier, I've kind of realized that it took us 41 sessions to analyze each item and the label that we're putting to and create this separation of the awareness, the parts of me.

We're working with the labels, but at the end of the day, to experience Mahamudra, we need to be in the moment. It's an experience. So it made me think of the breath, not in the sense of parallel to it, but it's applied in the same method.

At the end of the day, I have to breathe to physically exist, to be conscious movement. Yes, I can play with it, meaning I can hold it for a minute or for a short time. I can apply different methods and maybe even external things will change and shift my breath, if running or being scared or being straddle.

But at the end of the day, there is not this separate thing that's happening as we might be thinking. In Mahamudra, we have to be within the experience. And as we're experiencing it, it's the labels that show up that hopefully will start shifts from being like, oh, this is my thing or this is it thing.

But it's just this movement of the breath that naturally happens. The more natural and at ease I can be, the more there is less usually grasping or separation. But too much of relaxation can lead to dullness.

But it is just as breathing at the end of the day. That's just kind of what I've gathered. Yeah, that's nice.

Our awareness that we're growing through our meditative practice of Mahamudra will become as natural as breathing. This ability, this being in the space of knowing, experiencing everything as these seeds ripening and nothing but. And it just sounds so foreign, that we can't get it yet.

But for Buddhas, that's their identity. That's their existence, even for nirvana-sized beings, I think. So we can get to that sense.

We really can. We can catch it. Yeah, to be honest, last session and whatever you taught at the beginning of this class actually made it feel less foreign, not as so far.

But maybe for myself, it was like, oh, maybe be a little less attached to the separate practices. Because each of them can be its own thing. And I think the issue is, for me, or sometimes when we speak about it in class, is I think the applied practice is the actual practice.

Or it becomes so big, and you're like, oh, this is cool. I got really good at this, or this is nice. And now I'm spending so much time in that, and you miss the big picture.

So it actually starts to feel like more of a collective thing, rather than a separate item, separate, separate, just like, oh, it's this. And that's why I love Mahamudra. When we have this skill of being able to turn on the awareness and nothing but, any other practice we do, when we get to its peak, we can turn on our Mahamudra and cut to the quick that that other practice was all about.

Yeah, it just becomes personal. It just becomes breathing. Yeah.

Okay. So, but did you notice that in this session, we never went to the me, and this particular session, Lama Christi built, because in Lopes and Chukyagelsen's commentary, you'd think he'd be wrapping things up by now. But he actually speaks again, to a different tradition than the Gelugpa, right? He started out pointing out different traditions.

Then he finally said, here's the Gelugpa tradition. And now he goes to a Kagyu tradition of Mahamudra, curiously, and they emphasize these first three steps. They don't emphasize the fourth one about adding the me as a separate step, the way Lopes and Chukyagelsen's meditation does.

In the end, it's showing us, well, it's helping us investigate this idea, like, what's more me, my mind, or my me? Like, what's the difference between me and my mind? And which one's in charge? Which one's more powerful? Which one, like, we only have the question, I only have the question, which one is really in charge? Because I'm thinking of them as independent separate things, right? Here's a me, and I have a mind that should make me more in charge, like Wizard of Oz. But oh my gosh, if it's the mind that goes on, not the me, wait a minute, the mind's in charge. And it's like, I've gone back and forth and back and forth about who should I really be working with? But then, right, I can't even say it.

I can't even investigate the relationship with holding on to an I who's doing it. And so this whole idea of just, okay, I'm going to give up my I to mind, like, that's impossible too, right? Because the mind, this thing, this non thing that we call mind is always made up of, that's not right either, is always appearing as subject object interaction between. We can't have an experience, no matter how subtle, without the subject experiencing object, that's the three spheres.

So it's like, does our mind ripen the three spheres? Or is this thing we call mind, or a word that we use to try to understand this process that's happening, that's shape shifting three spheres constantly, and then just language fails. But without even subtle language, doesn't have to be alphabet language, we don't identify, we don't make the distinctions between things. And it's not the fact that we ever slide into all being one, one mind, Nadia and I discussed that last week.

What we hold is the concept of all, of one. That's not accurate either, to explain experience. But it is true that we, all of us, all conscious beings, experience experiences identically, the process is identical to every other one.

So in that way, right, we are all the same. Like he has said, when we see dependent origination and emptiness as one in the same, like that's when we've got it, that's when we've got Maha Mudra. But it's like they're not one in the same, one is a positive, and one is an absence, a negative, they called it.

They can't be one and the same. But they are always present together, right? Happening at the same time. But then that means there's two things happening at the same time.

And that's not true, right? Like every time we go down an explanation, we go, ah, that's wrong also. And, and our frustration, you know, I know, I've pointed it out before is we're looking for the final explanation. Just tell me what it's like.

And I'll do that. And the final explanation is that there's no final explanation that's accurate. And it's so hard to like, let go into that.

But it ought to be so easy. We ought to be able to go, get it and then reach the automatic conclusion. And so I want to be kind, I want to be loving no matter who's yelling at me, no matter who's upset, no matter who, no matter what's going on.

And it's like, that is that the automatic conclusion that we get? When we say I'm going to let go into emptiness and just let everything happen. It's like, that's not my automatic yet. Which means we still need to keep using these explanations and showing ourselves why the explanation fails.

So that we can connect this dot with my behavior and what's appearing so that I really can let go into that process happening all the time, fearlessly, because it's fear that keeps us from doing it. Okay, so Lopsangchuky Gyaltsen goes into an explanation of these four aspects of the of the Kagyu, a particular Kagyu master's Mahamudra training. And it's a great review.

And he goes into the questions that come up about that. And then in the end, he quotes another master of his time, who is a Kagyu master, who says, you know, like he teaches Mahamudra. And in the end, he says, and you know what, I don't think this Mahamudra practice is authentic.

And it's really odd that Lopsangchuky Gyaltsen ends his commentary about this extraordinary Mahamudra practice with somebody criticizing it. To the point of, you know, if his students, that's not Lopsangchuky Gyaltsen's students, but this other guy's students, hear him say, I don't think Mahamudra is a legit practice. They're going to say, well, then I'm not going to do it.

You know, any of the lineas, I'm not going to do any of them because my teacher says, no, don't do it. And he's pointing out how even at very high levels of Dharma training, our seeds can still ripen conflict between groups. My way is right.

Your way is wrong. I'll show you why. And then I'll be upset if you don't follow what I say, right? So subtle sometimes and not subtle other times, right? And it happens, it happens, it happens to any conscious beings who are interacting with other conscious beings.

Even animals struggle with each other because they have different perceptions and different beliefs, I guess. And so Lopsangchuky Gyaltsen, Lama Christy pointed out that Lopsangchuky Gyaltsen, like the incredible peacemaker that he was, is using even his Mahamudra commentary to his root text to point out that there will be conflict amongst even high-level spiritual practitioners and to recognize that it's not coming from them, right? It's our own mind seeds that are ripening as somebody not agreeing and saying it's not scriptural authority. And I know that it is because my Lama said, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And my Lama is omniscient and they can't say anything wrong, right? It's like our own mind will do that. So it's beautiful that he points this out, but it also is beautiful what he points out from the Kagyu Master's explanation. So I want to give that to you, but let's take our break.

Lama, I feel like the more we practice or like the more we talk about it, it's like the magic fades away. But then at the same time, it's like it becomes more magical. Because you're like, it's like, I feel like if you're talking to like a young person and they use the word vibe a lot and you're like, okay, what's vibe? And you're trying to add like, it's like we're doing like, how do you call it? Like when marketing executives, like they meet for a marketing thing and everybody's like throw ideas and it's like brainstorming.

So it's like, we're brainstorming and analyzing every parts of every part of our mind. And I'm like, this mind is not so great. The way things work is not great.

But then when you realize how it works, you're like, whoa, it's actually really great. It's really cool. So it's magical and un-magical at the same time.

It's empty. So the Kagyus also have a four step explanation or method for their practice they call Mahamudra. Here are the four of these, or the first level is reaching Sechik, which is a Kagra in Sanskrit.

It means the single pointed. Here though they are specific, not just meaning the ability to stay single pointed on our object like level nine. Of meditation, but reaching the single pointedness on the appearing nature of our mind.

Right? So taking our ability to be single pointed on anything and sinking down into this thing appearing here, here's the appearing nature of my mind and be single pointed on that, meaning free of agitation, free of dullness, being able to be there, watch it, know it. From that comes this second level of Mahamudra called Chidrel Nishparpansha, which means, Chidrel means lack of elaboration. Elaboration means the story that arises, which may not be a whole word story.

The little dog went to the store and stole hot dogs, but you hear the sound and then instantly it's birds outside and instantly after that it's flickers and then it's there struggling and it sounds so funny. That's the story. The story starts with the thing having an identity.

So this Chidrel, we're getting to be aware of it happening at more and more subtle levels and then reaching its lack. Like can we experience something free, totally free of elaboration? Let me rephrase that. What would it be to experience something totally free of elaboration? There's either no experience or it's the empty nature of the thing because the empty nature is the object free of elaboration.

You can't say that because to say it's an object is already elaborated, but without an object, there is no emptiness of the object. So you have to have the object first and then you have its emptiness. No, that doesn't work.

To have an object, there is its emptiness. Its emptiness is its lack of elaboration. Well, it's not elaborating.

The pen is not elaborating itself as a pen. My mind is not elaborating. It's so slippery.

I want the answer. Tell me what it is. So Chidrel is where we're sitting in the single-pointed experiencing the ripening nature, the appearing nature of our mind.

And Chidrel then is when we are experiencing its lack of elaboration. It doesn't mean the mind has stopped. It means that our experience of it is now its emptiness.

So for them, this Chidrel is the part of the practice where we are not knowing the empty nature of whatever is arising. We're at the mind. So knowing the empty nature of the mind as we are experiencing the appearing nature of the mind.

So we are realizing that the mind... Mama Christi says, as we're watching our thoughts, that the mind itself is not the thoughts. The total dissociation of the watcher from the stream of the constantly rising and falling projections starts to arise. But the Kagyus are saying, this Chidrel, it's happening at a conceptual level, which means it's not really not elaboration yet.

But it's the doorway to having the actual experience of lack of elaboration, which would be the direct experience of the emptiness of our own mind. Oh, so their second step in their Mahamudra practice is what we're calling our final conclusion of our Mahamudra practice. It's like, whoa, that's weird.

Then this third step is Rochik Eka Rasa in Sanskrit. Geshe-la uses that term a lot, Eka Rasa. It means literally one taste, but meaning to experience like all things as a single thing.

There we're back to Nadi's point. Everything is one. We all are one.

Rochik, everything is a single song. But when we say everything one taste, it implies there's more than one thing there. Otherwise we wouldn't say they're all one taste.

We would just say there is only one taste, which there has to be somebody experiencing the one taste to say, whoa, everything tastes the same. Oops. It can all taste the same, but it doesn't mean it is the same.

They all have the same nature. Everything is a single song. The constant blissful wisdom ultimately.

Rochik is reaching this one taste idea, which means that even after we are no longer sustaining our lack of elaboration experience of the mind, doing it shape-shifting, when we come out of that, we aren't still directly aware of its appearing nature and its empty nature simultaneously. We understand it takes karmic seed planting and ripening time to reach the point where we can perceive emptiness independent origination of all existing things simultaneously. That's omniscience.

So during this time of our Mahamudra practice that is in the Rochik level, what's happening is that we are working with the, here's the appearing nature. It has to have the empty nature. Thinking of those things as two different aspects of our object.

They are two different aspects of our object, but we're, when I say that my own mind is hearing it and mistaking it thinking there's one and then the other, but rather they are Rochik one taste. You can't have one without the other. Single song like that.

So working with what we know is true when we hear the boss yelling at me, seems like it's in them from me, but I know it's coming from me, my own past deeds. So I can't blame them. I can only work with my own how I respond to not have this situation in the past, right? We've been being trained in this since we've got here.

Rochik is when there's no toggle between appearances and emptiness. We actually do reach, no, I can't say that. We get closer and closer to Rochik as we move through our bodhisattva bhumis.

Then we finally reached this place called Gomai. Gomai, the N is like a prenasal, so I'm not exactly sure how they spell it when it turns into a word that we can read. But it means, it literally means no, no meditation, no more meditation, which no, it's not what it sounds like in Sanskrit.

They translate it as gone beyond meditation in the fourth step, but it means going beyond all conceptual thought. So all of these, the object under the microscope is our mind and the movement of the mind in these different stages of their Maha Mudra practice. Can we get single pointed on the mind itself? Can we reach a clear intellectual and then eventually direct experience of its no elaboration, absence of elaboration, what it is without elaboration? Then can we grow the ability to be on that as a single taste, the emptiness and it's appearing arising together with every experience.

And then can we reach that place of beyond meditation, beyond the toggling, beyond the effort, just the experience-ing of this true nature of mind, which then would not be its empty nature as its true nature. It would be its marriage of its appearing and emptiness, because you can't have one without the other. You can't say the true nature of everything is emptiness because you have to have the appearing thing.

We start out saying that because when we have an appearing thing, we're so tightly glommed on that it has its own nature, that even when we think it has emptiness as its own nature, we're going to glom on to emptiness as a thing rather than an absence. But here it's like we're in practice sessions. We're working with this misunderstanding at the subtle level of our own mind's constant shape-shifting.

So then technically, if at the chödral level of our Mahamudra practice, we're going to reach the first bodhisattva bhumi, we're going to have the direct perception of emptiness in one of these sessions of our Mahamudra. And we've gone into the session with bodhicitta in our hearts. So coming out of that direct perception of emptiness, we can then be called a bodhisattva on the first bhumi, they say.

And that starts this whole debate. Also, it's like, well, does your bodhisattva on the first bhumi start when you come out of that meditation? Or does it start while you're in the meditation? And they go on this long tangent about their discussion of when it starts. But do you see why we would even ask the question? Because we're thinking it's some state of being that has its own quality, its own nature.

It does, but it also doesn't. But once we are first level bodhisattva and the seeds that we are now planting, they are free of belief in self-existence. The ones that are ripening are still stained with self-existence.

So things still look like they're coming at us, but we know we're wrong. So when we replant our seeds, we're not replanting with ignorance. So it is kind of critical.

When do you start not planting seeds with self-existence? From the instant you start your direct perception of emptiness or not until you come out of it? Are you planting seeds while you're in the direct perception of emptiness? If there's no distinction between self and others, how can you be planting seeds? But if it's the thing that shifts our mind in such an extraordinary way that it brings about the end of all suffering, it has to be planting seeds, doesn't it? So this konme level then is reaching that space, that level where we're no longer even perceiving things as coming at us. Our experience is everything is this seed's ripening experience. It implies it's happening in and out of meditation.

So this is what Lapsang Shikigaltsen is pointing out, that it appears that the Kagyu's Mahamudra practice is something that's happening through the course of your career of becoming Buddha. And that rather than Mahamudra meaning reaching the direct perception of emptiness, Mahamudra for Kagyu's means reaching Sunjuk, reaching your Buddhahood. So Sunjuk means union of the two.

It's the term we use for reaching total Buddhahood from the tantric practices versus reaching total Buddhahood. But it's the same quality of mind. Buddha, me and Buddha, paradise emanating is still the sustained result.

And it would then suggest that these four stages of Mahamudra are not something that are done in a one session of meditation and not even done necessarily in a single lifetime. Because we understand that when the aspiring Bodhisattva sees emptiness directly, they reach first Bodhisattva levels, but there's 10 more to go. And that for most non-tantrikas, and I don't know, I might go so far as to say for most tantrikas, it still takes more than that one lifetime.

Doesn't have to, but it might. So then this practice of reaching everything a single taste doesn't actually happen until we are at eighth level Bodhisattva, which in sutra level would be the equivalent of nirvana, which we've learned is that state with no more mental afflictions or seeds for more due to our individual analysis. But interpreted as meaning we no longer have the seeds to even perceive things as having their own natures coming at us.

We are not perceiving directly the emptiness of those things, but we are perceiving directly that they are seeds ripening. So we don't have any mental afflictions anymore. Because the mental affliction is always caused by the belief in the self nature of me, it, and the other thing.

So our reaching that place probably takes time to go from Bodhisattva Bhoomi 1 to Bodhisattva Bhoomi 8. And we are working on all of these things theoretically, after having reached second level of Mahamudra for the Kagyu. And then there still is stuff to do from Bodhisattva Bhoomi 8 until transformation into Buddha, Bodhisattva Bhoomi 9 and 10, we need to clear out those remnants from having seen things as self existent, which are obstacles to our omniscience. And that's what's happening as we cultivate the practice to the level of the Gonmei, where we are perceiving directly the empty nature of those appearing things.

And it's like, wait, you can't perceive emptiness with your eyeballs, as we perceive appearing things with our eyeballs. But somehow we apparently can perceive the emptiness, as we are perceiving something with our eyeballs when we are at that level of 9 and 10 Bodhisattva level. So Lobsangjiki Gyaltsen is pointing out that for the Kagyus, the term Mahamudra means reaching Buddhahood, not just reaching direct perception of the empty nature of our own mind or our own me and are those two different.

And Lama Kristi pointed out, and that's why he points out that one of the masters of his time says that Mahamudra practice that everybody's talking about, you know, it's not, it's not legit. Because from his perspective, you can't do a Mahamudra practice in one life of sitting Mahamudra and reach your Buddhahood. From that guy's perspective, it takes multiple lifetime.

And then he's saying, and so see, it's right, the way we're way the other guys are presenting it is not legitimate, because Buddha presented it as something that happens over multiple lifetimes is the argument. And Lobsangjiki Gyaltsen isn't bringing this up to prove the guy wrong. That's the beauty of it.

In the reading, you'll see that Lobsangjiki Gyaltsen doesn't actually address that guy's comment. He's pointing out that there are different meanings of Mahamudra. There are different practices of Mahamudra.

And look what our own mind does. Oh, mine's right, they must be wrong in some way. And therefore, we struggle.

And therefore, we suffer. And therefore, we don't practice Mahamudra or even can't, because we have these negative seeds in our mind that will block us from coming to the conclusion that, oh my gosh, all that struggles coming out of my own mind. And it's neither true nor not true that Mahamudra means direct perception of emptiness of my own mind or Mahamudra means reaching total Buddhahood.

It depends on who's using the word. But then that's slippery. I'll just use words in a different way altogether.

I'll just make them up like I do that. But then theoretically, I should not be surprised when other people don't understand when I'm using a different word. And I should be wowed by the fact when I hear one of my words that for me, I made up all of a sudden being used.

And it's happened to me. So it's like so fascinating, especially in these times where we've got like the two opposites pulled so tight in our world that this rubber band is just going to rather than both sides letting go of the rubber band. Wouldn't that be nice instead of pulling it until it breaks? So Lobsang Chukwugelsen's whole book, they must have had the same thing going on in Tibet, Mongolia, et cetera, in his day and age.

So he writes this book, hoping, I think, to have some influence so that we'd let go of the rubber band. And of course, if we think, well, if we let go and they don't, right, there's, I don't know, we just think it's something bad would happen. So we can't let go until they let go.

And it's like, that's wrong too. So this person he's talking about, you'll see in your reading, his name is Shang Rinpoche. And Lama Christi said she couldn't find anything really specific about him.

He was a high Lama in the time of Lobsang Chukwugelsen. And again, Lobsang Chukwugelsen is not criticizing him. He's not putting him down.

He's including him in this comprehensive text on this thing called Mahamudra. Totally up to us to make our own decision about how to use the practice, how to pursue the practice. It's really beautiful.

I still have a little time. You're going to see in the reading, in this discussion about why these Kagyu Four Steps of Mahamudra must be talking about something that happens over multiple lifetimes rather than one single lifetime. And they're going to mention something about the 1200 qualities that you have coming out of your direct perception of emptiness.

And if you come out of your direct perception of emptiness and you don't have those 1200 qualities, then your direct perception of emptiness didn't put you on to, wait, your direct perception of emptiness isn't a direct perception of emptiness that will take you to your Buddhahood in that lifetime. So when we have the direct perception of emptiness with bodhicitta in our heart, sutra way, which could be Mahamudra way, we lose three doubts in our mind, three mental afflictions. Major ones, belief in self-existence is the main one, doubt in the path.

We lose doubt in the path, the second one. We lose belief that harming ourselves could ever be a spiritual practice. And we're on the first bodhisattva bhumi.

And then we work with that as we know. When we use the diamond way methods, creation stage to plant the seeds for completion stage to happen, and we're doing that, and that cultivates our experience that we, that sutra would call direct perception of emptiness, diamond way calls reaching the clear light because of the quality of mind going into that and the seeds planted in order for it to happen. When our mind stirs out of the direct experience of the clear light, the wind that stirs that forth is the first time we've had a wind that's pure enough to stir forth an appearance that is made of light, is the experience of being made of light versus being made of flesh and blood and bone.

And that means that we have stirred forth from the clear light into what's called our illusory body, our rainbow body. It will look the same to others. It will probably look the same to you for a while as well.

But that body and mind now has these 1200 characteristics right? Positive, pure characteristics. And we are infinitely closer to Buddhahood after our first experience of the clear light tantra way than we are from our first experience of emptiness directly sutra way. Like so close doing it tantra way, which is why tantra is so much faster to reach that clear light directly.

And it's a long story and it's not easy and there's nothing in tantra that makes it work that way, which is why it can work that way. But only when it's built on the foundation of extraordinary virtue, right? Extraordinary intellectual wisdom for why to do it and how to do it. Okay, so the Shang Rinpoche is making this distinction that if you call it, if your Maha Mudra means reaching Maha Mudra means your Buddhahood, then it's not a sutra practice that's going to work in one lifetime.

So that's what he's, that's his point. And to say that it is, Buddha never said that. If you're saying no, Maha Mudra means the direct perception of emptiness, whether it's sutra or tantra, that's going to be done in the lifetime you're doing the practice.

So it is going to happen in one lifetime, not Buddhahood, but Maha Mudra, because of what we're cultivating. So it's loves and cheeky gouts and point is, it's not an argument. Is pizza better or Chinese food better? It's not an argument.

It's which one would you prefer? That's not an argument. That's just a preference. So same idea.

Not that Maha Mudra is just a preference, but do you see, stop fighting with people, said Lama Christine, just stop fighting, says Lobsang Cheeky Goutson, right? And he marches out in front of the two armies. Just stop fighting. Let's go have tea.

I'll pay you off. And it's like it worked for him. I don't think it would work for me.

All right. So then lastly, he dedicates, and he doesn't just say gewa dee, gotta do this. I can't find the place to put my cursor to move this guy down.

Okay, you guys get out of the way. I'll get rid of that. That'll do the job.

Now it's in the way again. So this is the last verse in the root text. It is that wise old recluse known as Lobsang Cheeky Goutson who has spoken this advice to you.

And by the virtue I have done may every single wandering soul quickly rise to victory by traveling this path, this one and only door to peace. So in his root text, he does just give one verse of dedication. In his commentary, however, he gives this other, wait, are you seeing my screen share? Sorry.

We're seeing the play of the Garuda. Okay, sorry. It says that you pause the screen share.

So I just see black. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how to unpause it.

My screen sharing is paused. Well, unpause. All right, let's do this.

Hello again. Now? Okay. So this is his commentary.

I have churned the vast expanse of all the open and secret teachings, and this is their ultimate essence. Mahamudra is the crux behind the true intent of every single sage and saint in India and Tibet. It is the path that's traveled by every holy truth seeker of highest attainments.

And on this day, the sun of its revelation dawns in our minds. The intoxicant of misknowing has led our minds astray, trapping us between, within the walls of this terrifying prison, cycling in suffering. Our bodies too are tormented by the three kinds of pain.

Now here's a place of rest, a grove where we can frolic, a view that lights a perfect path for limitless numbers of beings, a system which is embraced by the greatest holy beings. This is Mahamudra, that crystal mirror which reflects every exquisite form, clear and unblemished. It breaks the chains that bind us, the chains of those eight worldly thoughts about all that appears.

This teaching is a Lama, the one who will impart the path pure and unmistaken to the many with enough goodness to play to their heart's content within the bliss of stillness in a place of solitude. Now I take whatever virtue that I may have gathered from all my efforts here, pure white, like the soft moonlight that opens the jasmine flower, and dedicate it to the goal of highest enlightenment so that I may free all my mother living beings. Through the mystic power of this deed, may every single wandering being revel in the greatest bliss of the union of the two, filled with the sweet nectar of the eloquent teachings of Mahamudra, which joins together both the ways, the open and the secret, within the stainless vessel known as mind.

May all beings be happy. And finally, Om. Here is a gift of Dharma from the eminent to the entire world.

The magic tree we gather beneath to hear the teachings of the victors, an inexhaustible supply of health and happiness granted to the entire expanse of wandering beings so that they may taste the delectable fruit of highest freedom. Here is a gift of Dharma for the entire world. May it flow on without decline, increasing evermore.

May all that's good prevail. So with that, we have completed our study of Lobsangchukhi Gyaltsen Mahamudra. Look at my teaching note.

Lama Christi pointed out the power of consciously, intentionally dedicating a goodness that we set out to do and then did. She reminds us of the Shri Sampa Jorwa Tartuk. There was a basis of something we wanted to accomplish.

We decided how to do it. We went and did it, and we finished it. We completed it, and we're happy about completing it.

And we'd do it again if we had the chance. Right? When we have all four of those factors present, the seeds that we planted are full, like full, complete seeds. Without all those four, seeds are still planted, but they're messy.

They're indistinct, not sure how they're going to ripen. When we have all four, kaboom, planted, strong. And that's so extraordinary because it's rare that we have sufficient goodness to take on something as extraordinary as studying a text like this and still be here at the end.

So whatever you're thinking, the quality of your effort in the class, ditch it and say, wow, I have listened to all of these classes. I have worked with this meditation. I have grown my understanding of emptiness and dependent origination, and I'm happy I did it.

And I did it with always motivated to be able to help somebody else better, deeper, higher, and done. Yay, really intentionally strong dedication. Whether what we set out to do was to take flowers to the neighbor or share a Dharma class, strong, why I'm doing it, doing it, happy I did it, dedicated, done.

I send those seeds forth that all beings suffering may cease. So think of this goodness that we've done, like this jewel that we're imagining. It's so huge.

We can hardly hold it anymore. It's so extraordinary. And think of that, your own personal holy being.

See how over the moon happy they are with you. Feel your devotion to them. Feel your gratitude to them.

Ask them to please, please, please stay close to continue to inspire you and guide you and help you and even push you if you need it. And then offer them this gemstone of goodness. Today's class, every class, every effort, further intentions.

See them accept it and bless it. And they carry it with them right back into your heart. See them there, feel them there.

Their love, their compassion, their wisdom. It feels so good. We want to keep it forever.

And so we know to share it. By the power of the goodness that we've just done, may all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom may. So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with everyone you love, to share it with every existing being everywhere.

See them all filled with love and kindness, filled with wisdom. And may it be so. So wow, congratulations.

If we were together, we would have a party. Yes, Roshna. When, I think you said that, you know, when we get our winds in the, I'm not sure if I'm getting it exactly, but when we get our winds in our central channel for the first time, just right, that's when we'll have the goodness for the first time to see our bodies are made of light.

But then we'll still look the same. I know, like the 1200 qualities are not, you know, in them. But would we know that we'd had a body of light in the same way we would know when we reached the right perception of ideas? Or can we know some of the 1200 qualities so we can be like, not in it from it, but yeah, got that.

I must've reached the clear light. Like, how will we know when we reach the clear light if everything looks the same? How can we confirm? I don't know. We'll know that we reached the clear light, so we'll know everything's different.

But whether we have some way of confirming it or not, I don't know. But there won't be any doubt that clear light experience was had. Like there isn't any doubt direct perception of emptiness is had.

So knowing that because you have reached clear light, the body that comes out of that is a illusory body, then you'll know that you have it, even though it seems the same, right? The advantage of learning about all this stuff, because what if you reach the clear light and you didn't really know what it was, but you reached it and you came out with a body of light, but you don't know you have a body of light, right? So it's just like not just reaching the clear light is quite enough to get your transformation, right? It's really interesting. I know I'm thinking, okay, I know the steps, right? I know those tantric steps. What has to happen? So by reaching those steps, it will happen because they said so.

And it's like, no, I'm thinking of that wrongly. Yeah. I don't know if anybody else has questions, but after everything, can you and I and Lama Samadhi stay on after we stop recording? Yeah.

Did you hear from him? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Natty brought up the one thing again. If we're all one, then when one person gets enlightened, everybody will be enlightened. I don't see myself as enlightened.

That means there's no such thing as a Buddha, Natty, right? Good. So truly, congratulations. I don't know who from the original classes have taught this to their students.

Some have, of course. I have taught it to a handful of others, but it's not like this is a guide to the Bodhisattva's way of life teaching, you know, where the general public has heard it from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. This is really extraordinary.

And you are now a lineage holder. So do what you want with that, including share it when you feel ready. It doesn't have to be as intense as what we did, if the people you're sharing it with are not ready for that intensity.

But you know how to bring them down in the levels of meditation, how to help them be more aware of the story that we put on. You can use parts of it to help people. Always, of course, be careful not to leave them freaked out about reaching a place where they don't exist at all, and nothing matters.

So really, we need training in the pen thing. Before you take somebody into a Mahamudra meditation, take responsibility for that as well. But yeah, so good job.

Oh, so next week, we have one thing to do together first, please. And that is, I'd like to take us through Lobsang Chukyi Gyaltsen's Mahamudra meditation, the whole thing. So we'll do like source of all my good, thousand angels of bliss, have those texts with you so you can read them.

And then we'll do a hollow body thing, the way we start, and we'll beg for the Lama's blessings. And then we'll start the sinking in, and we'll go through all parts of it. So it'll probably take an over an hour of the session itself, probably hour and a half.

And then we can chat about it afterwards. So just one practice session, and then we're done. Yay.

All right, my dears. Yes, Janet. I guess a couple of things have come up.

Like Louisa said, you have to see emptiness directly before you reach the first bhumi. And then Nadi was saying how she didn't understand things. And I said, well, this isn't really about understanding things.

This is about seeing emptiness directly. But I almost feel like these things, this path, the bhumis and understanding things, is like faking it till you make it. And I don't know if that's true or not.

But Nadi doesn't understand. She's not faking it till she makes it, but she wants to make it. And then I'm surrounded by teachers.

I have aspects of the first bhumi, but I haven't seen emptiness directly. So I don't know if that's what Shang Rinpoche was saying, that we're faking it till we make it. Can we get there? Yeah, could be.

But the main thing about faking it till we make it is that the way that manifests is we behave like Buddhas. We don't just fake that I'm a Buddha because my misunderstanding of that would be, okay, I'm better than you. You treat me like a Buddha.

We would get arrogant and our jerkness would get worse. Whereas fake it till we make it means no matter who's yelling at me, I'm going to love them. If I could, I would run up to one of those awful people and hug them.

And it's like, ooh, that's a little rough. Yeah. So it's slippery, the idea of fake it till you make it.

It's a big part of Diamond Way, the fake it till you make it. And it's dangerous because our ego or pride will take it in the wrong way. Fake being a high level Bodhisattva.

Yeah, you need my eyeball. I'll give you my eyeball. We're studying Master Shantideva.

I'm not sure I can fake that yet. So yeah, you've got a really great point though, Janet. Okay, I love you.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I have benefited more than anybody. I'm sure.

Okay, welcome back. We are the Mahamudra group. This is our final session together for this course.

And what I'd like to do is for us to go through a full Maha Mudra practice session. Not that you always have to do all these parts, but you would have it to understand how to do it. As a reminder, this is from the First Panchen Lama Lobsang Chukyi Gyeltsen teaching us how to use our own mind as the meditation object to reach a deepening experience of dependent origination and emptiness.

Technically, the three things, impermanence, dependent origination and emptiness. So, there are steps in the process. And what we've learned, we're practicing is how to move ourselves intentionally from one object of focus to another without losing that quality of focus, clarity and intensity.

So, even though we're shifting our object, we're still single pointed. So, in this sequence, first, we settle into recognizing what's arising. We recognize first, it's constantly changing nature.

And then we recognize its projected nature. And then we recognize it's necessarily empty of self existent nature and sit in that for some predetermined period of time. Then second part, we shift to the recognition of the mind, that which is clear and aware.

And first, we are checking or finding that constantly changing nature of that mind. And then recognizing its arising nature with every experience. And then digging into it's necessarily empty of self nature nature and rest in that.

Then we shift to the me, we find the me the meditator, we find it's constantly changing this experience. We recognize it's projected nature. And then it's necessarily empty of self nature nature and rest in that for a while.

So, I will lead us through these parts and the shifts, but I'm going to try and do it as minimally as possible. And then each time we get to the part where we are finding the necessarily empty of self nature part, I'll have us stay there probably five minutes unless it looks like people are falling out of their chairs. And I'll just say check randomly.

And when I say check, you know, am I on the object that I'm supposed to be on right now? If I am, great. Is the mind dull, grossly or subtle? Is it agitated, grossly or subtle? Make your corrections. If you find, no, I'm not on that object.

Get back on. Reward yourself. And hold.

And then I'll bring us out at the end. And, you know, if you have questions, we'll go from there. So I was going to have us do all the preliminary prayers that one would do if you were to decide I'm going to do a weekend Mahavudra retreat.

But as I was going through it, it's just it's too much for me this morning. So I'm going to start with our usual opening prayers and then we'll go through our usual preliminaries. And then the Lobsang Chuggi Gyaltsen's preliminaries of the hollow body and Lama's blessings.

And then we'll start. OK, got it. So once you settle your body in, stay still, please.

If you know you're not going to be able to stay still, then maybe take your video off. No, it doesn't matter because everybody else is going to have their eyes closed. Right.

Does everybody meditate with their eyes closed? OK, then then if. OK, stay still. So by preliminaries, you mean the source of all my good and thousand angels of bliss.

We were supposed to do that in the heart. We would usually, but I'm not going to do that. The preliminaries, I'll just say, you know, make your mental prostration to your holy angel and we'll sit for two minutes.

And I love those because it makes my meditation longer without working harder. I know, I know, I know. But that's what I'm trying not to do this morning is to make it longer.

But you could, you would. Right. You would use those.

All right. So let's set our posture before our opening prayers, because we're just going to go from one to the next. Now bring to mind that being.

Who for you is a manifestation of ultimate love, ultimate compassion, ultimate wisdom. And see them there with you. They are gazing at you with their unconditional love for you.

Smiling at you with their holy, great compassion. Their wisdom. Radiates from them.

That beautiful golden glow encompassing us in its light. And then we hear them say. Bring to mind someone, you know, who's hurting in some way.

Feel how much you would like to be able to help them. Recognize how the worldly ways we try fall short. How wonderful it will be when we can also help them.

In some deep and ultimate way. A way through which they will go on to stop their distress forever. Deep down, we know this is possible.

Learning more and more about emptiness and karma. We glimpse how it's possible. And so we grow our wish into a longing.

And our longing into an intention. And our intention into a determination. And we turn our minds back to our precious holy being.

We know that they know what we need to know. What we need to learn yet. What we need to do yet.

To become one who can help this other in this deep and ultimate way. And so we ask them. Please.

Please. Please. Please.

Please. Teach me. Show me.

Guide me. Help me. And they are so happy that we've asked.

Of course they agree. Our gratitude arises. We want to offer them something exquisite.

And so we think of the pure world they are teaching us how to create. We imagine we can hold it in our hands. And we offer it to them.

Following it with our promise to practice what they teach us. Using our refuge prayer to make our promise. Here is the great earth.

Filled with fragrant incense. And covered with a blanket of flowers. The great mountain.

Four lands. Wearing the jewel of the sun and the moon. In my mind I make them the paradise of a Buddha.

And offer it all to you. By this deed may every living being experience the pure world. I go for refuge until I am enlightened.

To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing this meditation and the rest. May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being.

I go for refuge until I am enlightened. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community. Through the merit that I do in sharing in this meditation and the rest.

May we reach Buddhahood for the sake of every living being. I go for refuge until I am enlightened. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest community.

Through the merit that I do in sharing in this meditation and the rest. May all beings totally awaken for the benefit of every single other. So now think of your refuge in terms of your understanding of karma and emptiness.

And what that means for our behavior. And recognize that that precious holy being that you've called to you. They're the one who's really teaching you.

They're the one who has been guiding you. And so feel both your gratitude and admiration for them. And your aspiration to become like them.

Mentally tell them. Make a mental prostration, it's called. Make them another offering.

Something from our practice. Tell them about it. See how pleased they are with you.

They are always pleased with us. And they're extra pleased when they hear ourselves telling them of some kindness we've done. And we feel so safe and loved by them that we can open our heart to some mistake we made.

Some karmic mistake. Apply your four powers. And use as your antidote this meditation session.

Then we fill that space with rejoicing. Think of some goodness you saw someone else do. Or heard about or came to know about.

Tell them about that. Brag on this other person. Tell them of another goodness you did.

Even think of someone you have a little difficulty with. Think of some goodness you know about them. Tell that holy being about that goodness.

Then ask that holy being to please stay close. To continue to guide you. Teach you.

Inspire you. Show you. Ask them to bless all those who help you be a better person.

To stay close. To stay healthy. To live long.

Then we dedicate just what we've done so far. Our meditation preliminaries. You choose your own dedication.

Then recheck your body. If you want to reset its posture, now's the time to do so. You don't need to move.

You don't have to. Once you're settled back in, do your inner body scan. Go up to the top.

Look inside. We're surprised to find clear, beautiful, hollow space inside an outline of light. Scan down.

Easily, fun, going down your arms into fingers and back up. Down our torso. Down both legs.

Feet, toes. Everything feeling so light and effortless. You bring your mind back up into the torso from the lower portion.

You see that beautiful central channel going up in front of where the spine used to be. Up to the crown, curving forward, around, and down. To its opening and there behind your forehead.

A little above where your eyebrows would meet. Then following on down. You find yourself inside the nostrils and you see those two side channels.

The brick red one on the right. The milky white one on the left. Going up towards that central channel, then paralleling it.

Up, around, and down. They extend a little beyond the lower end of the central channel. They curve around.

The right one inserts itself into the left one. And we begin our nine-fold breath. Bringing your attention to the air as it comes in your right nostril.

Up, around, down. Into the left. Up the left.

Out the left nostril. Easily, effortlessly, all on one breath. Back in the right.

At your own pace. In and out the left. Third one.

Then shift to going in the left. And by the time the breath gets down to the bottom, the right channel has removed itself. The left has gone into the right channel.

And up and out that breath goes. Then back in the left. And out the right.

One more. And then on the next inhale, the breath comes in both nostrils. Up, around, and down.

By the time it's got to the peak of the inhale, the two side channels have inserted themselves into the central channel. And up and out your breath goes up the central channel. And out that opening at your forehead.

Inhaling your breath back in both nostrils. Into and out of central channel. Third one.

At the end of that exhale, let go of that mental imagery. Turn your mind back to that precious holy being who is before you. Ask them to please help you with this meditation session.

And as a result of your request, they begin to rise up, shrink down, turn to face the same direction as you, and come to rest on the crown of your head. About the size of a marble, if you like. Or a pea.

Ask them again to bless you with this practice. And a third time to help you learn something more within it. And as a result, they very happily are pouring their blessings into you.

And then leave that imagery there. They will continue. And now we bring our attention to that very specific place at the nostrils where that breath exits and enters.

Find that spot that you wish to use today. Zoom in your focus. Adjust your clarity.

And adjust the intensity so that everything else falls away. That sensation and my instructions. Once you have your sharp alert state of mind adjusted to what you want, you shift that object of focus from the nostril point to your whole body breathing.

Same focused, bright, fascinated quality, fascinated observation of breathing happening. Now shift this fascinated observation to sounds. Start with what seem like outer sounds first.

Notice how we identify what the sound is. Let that go. Keep letting go until your focus, bright, fascinated observation is simply receiving sounds, experiencing sound, free of any further identity.

And sink that fascinated observation down deeper, aware of inner sounds or maybe aware of no inner sounds. Either way, letting go of identities, stories. Now with this in-the-backseat fascinated observation only state, allow the observation of anything that arises, thoughts, words, pictures, ideas.

Whatever pops up, we note and let go. Sink in to more and more subtle levels of change that is occurring. Fascinated, receptive, disinterested in specifics, keenly aware of the changing, changing, changing.

This is the realm of mind. Constant flow of images arising, passing. This, then that.

It loses meaning. It loses specifics. And yet there is constantly something happening.

We call these projections mental seeds ripening. So now we can impose the recognition of these arisings as mental seeds ripening. Projections happening in this constant shapeshift.

You are simply watching the projected natures of the objects, the moments of experience. Now take a small part of that keen fascinated observer mind and apply your wisdom. These ripenings, they necessarily lack their own identity because they are appearing like this to me.

Get that sense of knowing and then drop the words so that with every appearance, we are aware of its necessarily empty nature. Check. Now remind yourself, this is not yet experiencing the true nature of our mind.

This is the true nature of gross and subtle appearances. The object side. So we shift to part two from this keen, sharp alert awareness of objects arising with their appearing and empty nature.

We are more keenly interested now to become aware of your own mind's aspect within those experiences, that which is clear and aware. Some days it's very obvious. Other days it's hard to find this clear awareness through which observer you experiences those constantly flowing projected objects.

It must be there. First find it, feel it, experience it. The clear awareness of all those appearances.

Does it have a shape? Does it have a color? Does it have a location? Does it have boundaries? Does it stay the same? Is this the true nature of our mind? No, this is its subtle appearing nature, clear and aware. So then we apply our wisdom again. Can there be a clear and aware without being aware of something? Can we find an independent, self-standing moment of clear and aware that's not clear and aware of something? There is always clear and aware.

And there is always appearance of some kind. And so there must be the necessary lack of own independent nature of clear and aware. The necessary emptiness of every moment of clear, aware, happening, fascinated, bright, experiencing that.

Try to glimpse it and hold it. With every glimpse we are bringing an end to suffering. We'll sit three minutes.

Check. Check. Now we'll shift to part three.

If you need to readjust your body, you can do so. If you don't need to, don't. For part three, we remind ourselves.

The first emptiness we will experience directly is the emptiness of one's self, our me, whatever it is that we mean when we say or think. So first we need to find it. So we shift back into the fascinated observer.

At the level of the flowing projections, the object side of moment by moment experience. Next, we take a corner of that fascinated observer. And find the observer.

The meditator. We go looking for our me. It won't be in the body.

Our body projections are long gone. It's not the thoughts. Those are simply mental image objects projections.

It's not the clear and aware. Who, what is it that has that clear and aware? That part that seems independent of it and yet is experiencing it. Find the me we believe is the one witnessing, the one observing.

We have to find it to be able to check it out. The me that is there, regardless of what is being experienced. Once we find it, does it change with every experience it has? And so can it be independent of those experiences and still have them? Or must it be also ripening projections? Now add your wisdom.

There is no independently existing me that things happen to with every experience. There is my appearing me necessarily empty of its own nature so that it can be the me I experience now. And now, and now.

Every time we glimpse our appearing nature and our necessarily empty of self nature nature, we are putting an end to suffering. That's it. Five more minutes.

You work your way back and forth. You lose your me, find it again. We show ourselves its appearing nature and so its empty nature.

Check, check, check. Now when your timer goes off, you let go of the object you are me, shift back to the observer of the flow, imposing the awareness of the emptiness of each image of the flow. It has to be empty to be what is appearing.

Then rise up to awareness of being inside a body with sounds and sensations and add the awareness of the emptiness of each sound, each sensation. Then rise up to the awareness of being inside your room and add the awareness of the emptiness of those things in your room. And then think of the goodness that we've just done.

Recall the person of your bodhicitta and recognize how it is that you will help them in that ultimate way someday. Think of this goodness like a beautiful glowing gemstone you can hold in your hands and be happy with yourself. Recall your own precious holy being.

See how happy they are with you. Feel your gratitude to them, your reliance upon them. Ask them to stay, to continue to teach and share and guide and offer them this gemstone of goodness.

See them accept it and bless it and then carry it with them down into your heart. See them there, feel them there. Their love, their compassion, their wisdom.

It feels so good we want to share it. We want to keep it forever and so we know to share it. By the power of the goodness that we've just done, may all beings complete the collection of merit and wisdom and thus gain the two ultimate bodies that merit and wisdom make.

So use those three long exhales to share this goodness with that one person, to share it with every being you love and with every existing being everywhere. And then finally, when you open your eyes, again impose the knowing, the emptiness of anything you see. Because it appears, it lacks its own nature.

And then move and wiggle and take a stretch. And well done, we just changed the world. So my guess, yes, there'll be questions.

My guess is over time there'll be questions about your practice. Feel free to write me if you ever get stalled. But technically you have everything you need.

So yes, yes, I'm happy to help going forward. So Janet, yes, you had a question or did you just hit the hand button? No, I mean sometimes when I go like this, it goes in. So I guess I'm looking at my alignment and I felt my posture kind of collapsing.

And so I tried to sit forward more. And I guess the alignment has to do with the central channel. So I think I was doing the nine-point breath wrong.

Instead of breathing in, like it's easier with one nostril on the other. But when you do both, I was crossing to the sides. But no, you're supposed to breathe in through the sides and then go up through the central channel.

But that's actually related to your spine posture. Because if your head is not aligned, you can't have that central channel go up to that point in the forehead. And then Geshe Michael says it kind of goes out a little bit on the angle.

Yeah. So my question is, that's hard to hold the whole meditation. Are we supposed to hold that the whole meditation? Technically, yes.

Technically, the body will get to where it prefers that alignment. It's like a chicken or the egg, though. When we've got the winds moving, then the body aligns.

With the body aligned, the winds can move. With it not aligned, they can't move. But the closer we get to the alignment where the winds are moving more effortlessly, the more the body will stay that way on its own without effort.

And so that's where getting the cushion, the pelvis adjusted, so that the physicality of the body has to sit in a certain upright position because of the tilt of the pelvis. It's hard to keep that straightness of the spine with muscle effort. It needs to be locked in by, as you say, alignment.

I think I feel the winds align when I do Tai Chi or I do Pilates sometimes because my blood pressure lowers. And if I have congestion, my nose is running, or I have hay fever, I notice it goes away when I practice. And then it comes back when I'm done practicing, but I don't practice a lot.

So the idea is to have this experience but with the meditation, that the wind's moving. Right. That's the shinjongs in the shamatha.

It's the pleasure of those. We don't call it, oh, my winds are moving from sutra side. But when you know your winds, that is what's happening.

That brings on the pleasure of the body locked in that position. So when we aren't locked and we do start to sag, it is fine to ever so gently, anytime we need, realign. For me, I always have to raise my sternum.

And if I just think raise sternum, that fixes everything. It pops it back up again. Eventually we won't need to do that.

Technically it's a distraction. But then we get right back on to our object. Thank you for bringing that up.

Yes, Roxana. Thank you. Regarding the breathing during that period of time when we're doing the ninefold breaths, I mean, I'm going slower.

So I need to catch up with you. Sorry. No, it's okay.

But the question is, is it okay if I have my time and the inhaling I'm really doing it, visualizing the channels. But it takes me longer. Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, on your own time, any of these sections can go faster, slower, deeper. You can stop at any level and say, okay, that's my task today is just to get single pointed on the flow. We don't have to do the whole thing.

So, yes, you can take those breaths as slow or long as you need to. At this level, we don't want to intentionally making the breath really, really slow because that until we know what to do with that, that will trigger a dullness. But when you're clearly visualizing, that's fine.

You can also take more than nine breaths. If you find it just doesn't feel like I've shifted the way I want to shift, like we haven't really learned about that. But when we are breathing out the left channel, we're clearing junk out of the left channel.

And there's all kinds of stuff that's in the left channel that if we knew, we'd be going, wow, I'm clearing that out. I'm clearing that. But that's a different practice.

For right now, just breathe in and out. And if it takes you more than nine, feel free. You can adjust that.

But don't get distracted by it from your whole practice. You're locked. I'm not locked.

I'm back. I'm back. I did finish the nine cycles, but it took me a little bit.

I was going a little bit lower in lower pace in that sense. So I just wanted to ask the pace. Yeah.

Thank you. And also, when you're coming out of the meditation, does it feel like you're sinking down? Like you're coming out of your body? I don't know. An experience of.

Does it feel like you're coming back in? Yes. It feels like I'm coming back out. So whatever your experience is, that's fine.

The main thing is make sure you are in there. Okay. Before you get up off your cushion and go dry.

Yeah. Right. We need to be grounded when we're done with, especially a meditation like this, where we are.

We are deep in the me. And recognizing that. Right.

Yes. Sometimes I do that. Will the real me please stand up? Yeah.

And it's just fleeting, but it's, it's big. It is. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. It was amazing.

Thank you. Anything else? So I will encourage you. To not always use an audio to guide you in this meditation, learn how to do it yourself.

Because your timing will be different. The words that you want to use to show yourself. The appearing, the changing nature, the appearing nature, and then the empty nature.

Feel free to find your own words that shows it to you better. You've had enough training and knowledge in how to analyze, how to check. If you find a different way that serves you better, that's fine.

But it's the sequence. Recognition of the arising, arising, arising, arising. And then, oh, it's seeds ripening.

Oh, if it's seeds ripen, it can't be anything else. All right, then. Well done.

Congratulations. It's really awesome to be trained in a Mahamudra, this Mahamudra practice. Like you are lineage holders.

Please use it well. Please always stay. Please always teach.