Awake in Illusion

Awake in Illusion
James Low
Hamburg, Germany
18‐20 February 2011
Transcribed by Anne Conn
Edited by Barbara Terris
Excerpts
…The most important thing in the practice is to be very tender, because outside in the big
world there is enough violence and we are often a little bit violent towards ourselves. And
particularly from the point of dzogchen, mistakes or errors or confusions, they should not be
taken too seriously
…
…Everything is illusion. Wisdom is to see everything is illusion; compassion is to act carefully
and helpfully with beings who are trapped in the illusion of believing that phenomena are
real. y.
…
…When buddhism says ‘Everything is an illusion,’ for example this cup, what this means is
that the experience we have of there being a self‐existing cup with all its qualities and
possibilities inside it— that is an illusion. ‘Illusion’ here means that we forget that subject
and object are always born together. The cup‐ness of the cup doesn’t live in the cup. It
exists in your own mind.
…
…Whatever comes, comes. Here is the crossroads where either I try to improve the object
and work hard, or focus on the one who is the one having the experience. The path of
dzogchen is not to lose contact with the one who is having the experience.
www.simplybeing.co.uk © James Low

…You can’t grasp the moment, but you can inhabit it. You can inhabit it directly or
indirectly. Directly inhabiting the moment is called nirvana and indirectly inhabiting the
moment is called samsara.
…
…The key point is to be present with whatever is occurring. That’s all. Nothing else.
…
… Each moment that we are here together is vanishing as soon as it arises. “As soon as we’re
here, we disappear, like dragonflies”, sang Eddi Reader. We can make a story, which seems to
have some continuity but this also is vanishing as soon as you say, ‘everything is always
vanishing’. This is the natural self‐liberation of all phenomena. Nothing remains
…
…The time for observing is in meditation. But when we bring the meditation into the world,
it is the time for participation, which is to say, being a part of the world. We are already in
the world. This is our world, so if we attend to the world, we will flow into activity. There is a
space, there is something that needs to be done, and we just do it. Then life can be easier
because you don’t have to think and work out what to do.
…
…Being a buddhist is an illusion because you can't really ‘be’ a buddhist. You can ‘do’ a
buddhist. You can do what buddhists do. You can do filling butter lamps, you can do
prostrations, you can do wearing robes, you can do many things—buddhism is a great
factory of activity. But from the point of view of dzogchen, no matter how good a buddhist
you are, that won't make you enlightened. Just as, no matter how wonderful the reflection
in the mirror is, the reflection doesn't become the mirror.
…
…In the springtime when you go out in the country you see the small lambs jumping about.
This is the mind of a meditator, because the field is open. There is nothing to do except jump
about and run around. The mind can go anywhere. If you have an angry thought you can
just have the angry thought, because in the field sometimes the lambs bump into each other
and knock each other over.

Contents
By ‘illusion’, is meant that we experience things as if they were selfexisting ... 2

The content of our mind determines what we experience........................................ 3
The mind is always moving.................................................................................................. 4
Dzogchen and awareness...................................................................................................... 5
The mirror and its reflections: the mind and its contents ........................................................ 6
Wisdom and compassion.......................................................................................................... 6
We arise in nonduality, we can neither make nor develop ourselves ................. 7
Knowing about something is not the same as knowing directly.............................. 8
The practices of each of the nine yanas ‘rebrand’ our experience ......................... 9
Hinayana rebrands samsara as dangerous so that we take care............................................ 10
Mahayana rebrands all beings as our loving mother so that we feel love ............................. 10
Dharma is a method..............................................................................................................11
Example of making leather soft with butter........................................................................... 12
How the dzogchen method differs from other methods ..........................................13
Meditations which have, and do not have an intention............................................18
Like lambs in a field in spring.................................................................................................. 19
Question about being tired..................................................................................................... 20
What is meant by ‘to awaken’?..........................................................................................24
What is meant by ‘ignorance’? ..........................................................................................25
Being present with whatever is occurring....................................................................27
Meditation question: is there anything that endures through time?...................28
‘I am’ is like an empty glass: you can put anything in it ......................................................... 28
How the sense of ‘I am’ then becomes my security ............................................................... 30
C R Lama’s story of two brothers............................................................................................ 32
C R Lama on ‘people with broken hands’ ............................................................................... 32
Meditation question: who is the one having this experience? ..............................32
Meditation question: does the mind move? .................................................................35
Integrating both observing and participating, in our meditation ........................36
Question about awareness ..................................................................................................... 38
Dedication of Merit ...............................................................................................................39

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We can begin by sitting quietly for a little. You can do that in any way you know; basically you
can just focus on the movement of the breath, in and out, focusing on the nostrils. If you find
your mind wandering off you just very gently bring it back.
The most important thing in the practice is to be very tender, because outside in the big world
there is enough violence and we are often a little bit violent towards ourselves. And particularly
from the point of dzogchen, mistakes or errors or confusions, they should not be taken too
seriously.
Okay, so if we just sit for a little while—
[Practice]
By ‘illusion’, is meant that we experience things as if they were selfexisting
Illusion is a very important concept in Tibetan Buddhism. We see many things and the things
that we see appear to be existing in themselves. That quality of existence creates the basis for us
entering into a relation with an object. Some of the objects we like, some of the objects we don’t
like. But it appears as if the objectivity, the given‐ness of what appears in front of us is
unquestionable, is just there. This is our ordinary way of experiencing the world.
The various buddhist teachings are ways of exploring whether this is true or not true. This
exploration or understanding is important since it can influence how much ease and peace we
can have in our daily life, no matter how complicated our lives may be. Most generally on a
good day when life seems light and easy, there is a certain simplicity, or ease of movement, or
clarity to whatever we encounter. On a bad day, when we feel more depressed or anxious, it’s as
if the surfaces around us thicken, become more impenetrable. We ourselves take on a kind of
heaviness, and so it’s as if we are banging into the world and the world is banging into us. That’s
why is may seem a good idea to be happy—life is better when we’re happy—but the happiness
is often based on a solid appreciation of the world. ‘I like you and because I like you, when I’m
with you, I feel happy. So you are the basis of my happiness.’ The experience that some thing is
doing something to me, condemns us to endlessly manipulating our environment, trying to
‘improve’ it, trying to get better patterns of objects or things to relate to. Because there are
many factors in the world which affect how we are we don’t always get to be with good things,
and so endless work is required to try to maintain some kind of balance.
The buddhism critique of this is that it offers a very limited solution to the question of what is
the nature of our existence. Buddha says in many teachings that the world appears to us and yet
it has no inherent substantial reality—it’s like the reflection of the moon on water. When you
see the reflection of the moon, you see something which appears to be there but you can’t catch
it. As with a rainbow in the sky there is an appearance—which appears to be the appearance of
something—but when you get closer to it, you find that it is nothing in itself. That is to say that
there is no strong internal essence in the appearance of the rainbow.
We ourselves, when we see the rainbow say ‘rainbow.’ So two things are happening at the same
time: there is the immediacy of the perception of the colour and the addition of interpretation.
We call the rainbow a ‘rainbow’. That is to say, the rainbow comes into existence through our
naming of it. In the same way, I have a teacup and the teacup comes into existence because of
the concept of teacup. Of course you could say what we have here is just shape and colour. We
see that it appears in front of us, and we might even recognize, ‘I am applying to this shape and
colour the concept of ‘tea cup’ or ‘mug’.’ These are all mental activities—if your mind was not
producing that mental activity, what would occur for you? Something, but what it is you
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wouldn’t know. That is to say the identity of every object that we see, the basis of that identity,
is our own mental activity. It’s an amazing way of understanding the world!
So is it that when we go out into the street and you see some nice bright shiny new car, we have
made that car ourselves? This could have terrible consequences for the economy! Nobody
would need to go to factories to make things, we would just sit at home and meditate and cars
and everything would appear magically. If course, it’s not quite like that because something
does appear and the thingness of the appearance is coming from your own mind. It’s not that
there’s nothing there at all, but your only way to access what is here is through participating in
the co‐construction of it.
So, when buddhism says ‘Everything is an illusion,’ for example this cup, what this means is that
the experience we have of there being a self‐existing cup with all its qualities and possibilities
inside it— that is an illusion. ‘Illusion’ here means that we forget that subject and object are
always born together. The cup‐ness of the cup doesn’t live in the cup. It exists in your own
mind.
The content of our mind determines what we experience
That is why the content of our own mind determines the kind of world that we live in. Different
living things are interested in different appearances. The dimension of a dog is different from
the dimension of a human being. Dogs are very interested in smell, human beings not so much.
The dog has a huge range of associations with different kinds of smell. So the dimension or the
structure of the dog, the arising of the smell and the interpretation of the response of the smell,
leads to the dog growling or wagging its tail or running.
We have a much more complicated range of contents in our minds and one of the ways in which
we validate our own individual existence is through making choices. When I make a choice I
take a selection from what is available in the field of potential experience in front of me and by
acting into that selection, I arrive at something which confirms my sense of who I am.
Not everything which appears to us in the world has equal value for us. If you go into the
supermarket to buy apples, you look quite quickly and suddenly find yourself choosing one kind
of apple. If all the apples had the same value to you, you could spend a whole hour picking them
up, putting them down and thinking, ‘It’s so hard to choose.’ But we already have a prejudice.
We have a tendency towards particular kinds of apples or potatoes or whatever it would be.
These are called samskaras, the fourth of the five skandhas. And these associations or prejudices
lead us towards the repetition of selection, which confirms to us the predictability, the
regularity, of our sense of self. That is to say, our movement towards the world is based on
selection and that selection is again based on thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a good apple.’ We take the
apple as existing in itself—as having an apple‐ness—and we take the goodness of that kind of
apple as being inherent in that apple. Of course, because the supermarket has many kinds of
apples, there must be unfortunate people who don’t know very much about apples, who buy the
wrong kind of apple! ‘If only they knew what I knew about apples, Ha, then they would make the
right choice...’
This is why blaming other people is very helpful. The faults of other people prevent us having to
look at the relative nature of our own choices. If I buy this kind of apple and you buy that kind of
apple and you seem to be quite happy eating your apple and yet I wouldn’t want to eat the apple
you’re eating, that means that the goodness of the apple that I like, is just my opinion. My mind
is making my apple good for me. But because of the limitation of my mind, I can’t make your
apple good for me. This is very important to see. The formations of our own likes, dislikes,
habits, avoidances, create a selective attention, which is operating moment by moment.
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That’s why it’s an illusion to say. ‘This apple that I like is really good’. The goodness lies in the
relationship that I have with it. There is no defining essence in anything which can show us that
it can be definitely good under all conditions for all people. As the Buddha said, ‘Friends become
enemies, enemies become friends.’ You meet someone, you get to know them, you feel you really
like them and then, after some time, it’s not so easy between you. Then you experience that you
don’t like that person at all and ask yourself, ‘Oh, how could I have been so stupid?’ Well, the
answer is very easy—we are quite good at being stupid! And this stupidity is not that we
thought that a bad person was good; the stupidity lies in imagining that a particular kind of
relationship with a person or with an object will continue in exactly the same vein for a very
long time. The very nature of impermanence means that our connection with the world is
dynamic and moving and changing so that, even if you create for yourself a structure of
discipline, the actual experience will be changing.
We already know this. Say we decide that we will do some meditation every day and it will be
the same kind of meditation, what we experience is that each time we sit we have a different
kind of experience. We might be able to glue our bum on to the cushion for an hour, but it’s
much more difficult to find the glue to fix your mind on to the breath. Even if you can maintain
focused attention for a long period of time, the mood that suffuses that experience is going to
change. From this we can start to see that the mind is not a machine and we are not engineers
able to improve its performance.
Rather, our experience is revealed to us moment by moment as the interaction of forces, some
of which appear to be internal and some of which appear to be external. We may try to limit this
contact by deciding that the world outside is dangerous and so have minimal contact with it.
We might even support that decision with the strength of certain vows or commitments.
However the mind itself is always moving.
The mind is always moving
Over the next two days we will look at the nature of the movement of the mind, taking that into
meditation and trying to see directly how to work with this unfolding movement. Because the
world is not what we think it is and yet the world is exactly what we think it is.
Our thoughts generate the kind of world we inhabit but thoughts can’t grasp their own ground.
The thought goes out to the world and tries to grasp transient experiences and make them
substantial and reliable. This effort is very exhausting, because no matter how hard we try, it’s
very difficult to stabilize anything. The impermanence of our mind, the impermanence of our
perception, our conceptions, our sensations—once we really start to attend to them—they
reveal ourselves as on the very edge of a wave of unfolding experience. If you really attend to
the immediacy of perception, conception, sensations and so on, then you start to see just this,
just this... The past is gone, the future hasn't come.
You can’t grasp the moment, but you can inhabit it. You can inhabit it directly or indirectly.
Directly inhabiting the moment is called nirvana and indirectly inhabiting the moment is called
samsara. Samsara means the mediation of experience though habitual concepts, associations,
and interpretations. And these interpretations appear—in the moment when we apply them—
to be adding value to the situation. And indeed, they do add value—but only to the ego. I'm
using ‘ego’ in the sense of an individual, seemingly personal, self‐referential point of
consciousness. All the interpretations and associations, which bring richness to our life, which
allow us to know things, to enjoy a joke, to understand a novel or to play with children, all of
these associations are of no value to awareness.
To explain briefly, awareness, or rigpa, or the mind's own nature, is pure from the very
beginning. That is to say it’s not a thing. Things are always at the mercy of other things and so
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how things are located in relation to other things is very important. Here, for example, in front
of the altar we have some little offering lamps. If we move the offering lamp a little closer to the
Buddha statue, it will set fire to the cloth that the Buddha is sitting on and then this building
may burn down. So, where the lamp is put is very important, because objects in samsara—or
the objects of consciousness, for that is what they really are—have to be dealt with some care
since they influence each other.
On the level of being a person, we exist as a personality and to be a personality is to have your
own particular shape. Part of the unique specificity of me being me, is the fact that I'm not you.
So when I look at you, one thing I definitely notice is that I'm not you. You are you. And
therefore what you do impacts me. If you smile at me, I'll smile back. If you look very bored, I'll
think ‘What am I doing here, saying things that are not reaching you?’ In that way, how we are
with each other influences the movement of our unfolding.
Your personality is not sealed in itself the way a yolk is sealed inside an egg. To be alive is to be
connected and influenced by what’s going on, just as, due to the wonder of the development of
the euro, the German economy is linked to that of Greece and Portugal and Spain. All
manifestation is interactive. This is the meaning of dependent co‐origination. Interaction is
continuous and so the moving and pulsation of thought, feeling and sensation is continuous—to
imagine that you can control this is ridiculous. You can control it for a short period of time, but
it has a life of its own.
However, we are not just a personality, because we are also aware of ourselves. I can be aware
of what I’m thinking, of what I’m doing. And in that moment, there is the particular form of my
consciousness arising with the clarity of the fact that I am aware: ‘This is how I feel, this is how I
think.’ In the course of a day, I think and feel many, many different things. These contents of
experience cannot be nailed down and made stable and yet we spend a huge amount of time
trying to direct and shape these very contents. However, all day and all night, there is an
awareness, the one who reveals, or the one who shows what is going on. This awareness
doesn't change. I'm aware that I’m happy, I’m aware that I'm angry. But of course, as soon as I
become aware, say, that I'm angry, I might suddenly have the next thought which is ‘Oh, I
shouldn't be angry, I'm a buddhist.’ Because one thought is never enough. It’s like sometimes
when I watch a film and I happen to have Maltesers, one Malteser is never enough. You know
these sweets? They're very good. One is never enough.
So a single thought is never enough, because one thought always brings another thought and
another thought and another thought. This very creativity of the mind, this radiance, this shiny
capacity to have these thoughts, feelings, sensations, is so intoxicating that we don't see the
ground out of which they arise. It’s because of that, that we experience ourselves as this endless
flow of experience.
Buddhism has many kinds of practices for trying to direct or control the nature and intensity of
this flow of experience. Yoga practices, shamatha, vipassana, tantra, all kinds of practices.
These are all ways of working with the energy of experience. Some of them focus on simplifying
and slowing down the content of experience and others, like tantra, are more concerned to
provide pathways of choreographed experience, which can be repeated again and again in order
to give the confidence of being able to stay present with whatever kind of experience is arising.
Dzogchen and awareness
In dzogchen, which is not so different from some aspects of tantra, the point of view is to focus
directly into the nature of awareness, because awareness, which doesn't change, is inseparable
from the content of the mind, which is always changing. These are not two different things but
it’s exactly because they are always together—and we have the tendency to be fixated on the
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content of the mind because that appears to be what our world is—that it’s quite difficult to
recognize the presence of awareness in the moment of its non‐duality with the content of the
mind.
We have been sitting here for an hour and stuff has been happening for each of us; there have
been thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on. The flow of that experience is pretty much
continuous. We are aware of the experience. Sometimes we get completely immersed in it;
other times we seem to be observing ourselves across a gap, but actually the awareness itself is
the same quality at all times. We may seem to be more aware when we're bright and we're
sharp and this is very important for meditators because actually this is a false kind of
experience. For example, we have electric lights on in the room just now and if we turn the
lights off, the room will be dark. If we turned the lights on again, the room would become bright.
The light is part of our experience of the room—the more light there is, the brighter the room
seems. When we feel relaxed and spacious and at ease, we might feel ‘I am relaxed, spacious and
at ease,’ and then, after a while, we don’t feel like that any more.. We had hoped that was us, but
it's gone away. Next, we might think, ‘Oh, I had this breakthrough experience, I saw who I really
was, it was wonderful, relaxed, spacious and at ease. I hope I get back to that wonderful state
again.’ But it was just an experience.
Good experiences and bad experiences are experiences; they are not the mind itself. Chasing
good experiences is a pathway to having bad meditation. The function of the meditation is to be
able to sit with whatever arises, whether it’s good or bad.
The mirror and its reflections: the mind and its contents
In the traditional example the mind is like a mirror. The mirror has no content of its own and
yet is always filled with content. The content of the mirror is important—on the level of
content. If you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror and see you have a big
pimple on the end of your nose, that means something and you will say that the reflection is not
a very good one. The quality of reflection matters on the level of reflection; but on the level of
the mirror, the quality of the reflection doesn't matter at all since the mirror itself is not
conditioned or changed by the reflection. So what we ordinarily take to be ‘I, me, myself,’ all
that we know ourselves to be as ordinary people, this is a reflection. It’s there, it’s important in
the realm of reflections, but it has no true reality to it.
For example, if you have children and you pick them up from school everyday, if you happen to
be late, that makes a difference. The child comes out of the classroom into the playground,
expecting to see the parent; they look around and start to get a little upset. After ten minutes all
the other kids have left. If they are small, the teacher will come and ask, ‘What’s happening? You
are still here. Something's happened.’ That’s real. It’s not real—but it’s real. It’s real on the level
of the inhabitants of the realm of illusion, on the realm of reflection. On the level of pure
awareness, there is no reality at all in what is occurring.
Wisdom and compassion

To express this in other language, the quality of the mirror itself is the realm of wisdom. The
realm of reflections is the realm of compassion. The path is to bring wisdom and compassion
together. From the point of view of dzogchen, there isn't any path, because from the very
beginning, wisdom and compassion have always been joined. That is to say, on an ordinary
level, day by day, we do what we do, we talk to people; we fit into the rhythm of manifestation.
Where is all this manifestation occurring? It arises in the mirror of the mind.
That's why we don't have to wear red robes, or shave our head, or do particular things in order
to practice dharma. Being a buddhist is an illusion because you can't really ‘be’ a buddhist. You
can ‘do’ a buddhist. You can do what buddhists do. You can do filling butter lamps, you can do
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prostrations, you can do wearing robes, you can do many things—buddhism is a great factory of
activity. But from the point of view of dzogchen, no matter how good a buddhist you are, that
won't make you enlightened. Just as, no matter how wonderful the reflection in the mirror is,
the reflection doesn't become the mirror. Also, no matter how bad you are, no matter how
corrupt, evil, selfish, cruel, you don't come out of the mirror; the reflection is always in the
mirror. So the integration of the practice—and we'll start to do some meditation with this
tomorrow —is to relax into this natural open state and to experience the integration of all
manifestation as inseparable from the ground of awareness.
In that way, whatever the structure of our life, whether we have a little or a lot of time to
meditate, whether we have many problems and worries, whether we have health problems and
so on, none of these forms of these manifestations need be the form of our existence.
We arise in nonduality, we can neither make nor develop ourselves
You can spend your whole life trying to develop yourself—you can develop the six paramitas
and do any of the many, many different kinds of practices to develop aspects of compassion and
so on. But from the point of view of dzogchen, if you don't attend directly to the immediacy of
your presence as unborn awareness, all this activity is not going to do you much good. And the
reason for this is that good activity doesn't make the buddha nature.
If you take a piece of coal and you wash it and even if you wash it a hundred thousand times, it
won't become white, because the nature of coal is to be black. This is not a complicated idea. If
you had a buddha nature which had to be made into a buddha, then it would become artificial in
the making of it. Of course, in the literature of tantra, they often refer to the refining of gold,
since when you find extract gold, it is mixed with others things. You have to heat it and refine it
to separate the bad elements from the pure gold. This is a very attractive metaphor: ‘I have
something to do, something very important to do. I am going to locate this potential inside me and
improve it until it shines like pure gold.’ Who is going to do this? ‘Me, I am going to do this. I am
going to become a Buddha by working hard.’
There is a bit of a problem: everything that has a beginning has an end. All compounded things
are impermanent—basic buddhist teaching. Of course you might say, ‘Well, I'm not a very nice
person. I'm a bit lazy, I'm selfish, I don't do all the things I could do.’ But that is a description of
the problematics of energy; which is to say that how you manifest is in one particular way and
how you want to be is in another way.
Is it easier to get enlightened if we drink coffee than if we drink tea? Tibetan lamas tend to
drink tea, so if we drink more tea than coffee, then maybe that will me more helpful. It is
important to follow the logic of this way of thinking. When I have a bad thought, what does that
mean about me? If I have bad thoughts, is it a sign that I'm a bad person because it is bad people
who have bad thoughts. This makes a nice little circle.
‘The reason I have bad thoughts is because I'm a bad person and because I keep
having bad thoughts, I'll never become a good person, unless I try really hard.’
But it's hard to try hard when you're a bad person.
‘I became a buddhist some time ago, but I haven't done as much practice as I should.
On my bookshelf I've got so many buddhist books, but I don't read them very much.
Buddhism's helping me to develop a new kind of hopelessness. There is so much to do.
And I’ve taken the bodhisattva vow...’
This is very, very problematic. Where do bad thoughts come from? This is what we use meditation to
discover. What is the root of all thinking? What is the root of all sensation? If you see directly the
root of your own mental experience, then you become freed from the necessity of ceaselessly
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manipulating yourself to try to make yourself a better person—because there are no ‘good people’
since everything is an illusion. There are people who appear to be good, but are they really good?
No, because there is no reality to anything. Reality is linked to the Latin root res, which is a thing; it’s
linked to the notion of self‐existing entities.
Saying that there is no reality to anything doesn't mean you just do what you like; it doesn't mean
there is no difference at all between good and bad. On the level of manifestation it matters a
great deal—but manifestation is inseparable from its own ground and that relation is like the
reflection to the mirror. So wisdom is to see directly and to exist as emptiness. Compassion is
to be present as the manifestation, with that state of open awareness that has no solid substance
in it and which is ceaselessly appearing in interaction with other manifestations.
How we manifest is linked with the field around us and that means that how I’m going to be
arises alongside what is there. In other words, ethics is not something inside me. It's not that I
am going to be a good person and that I will follow the ‘steps’ to make myself a good person.
Ethics means ‘How are you?’ because how you are, will determine how I will be.
So in the buddhist system, we have the six main realms of existence and in each of these realms
there is a Buddha. When the Buddha goes to the cold hells, he gives fire and clothing. When he
goes to the hot hells, he gives water. That makes sense—the Buddha doesn't think,
—In my buddha factory I happen to have made a lot of blankets, so regardless of what
kind of hell it is, I'll be giving out blankets. I’ve been studying this compassion for a
long time. Blankets are good. There is no evidence that anyone anywhere is suffering
from blankets. So it’ll be fine if I give blankets to all the beings!
— But the people are very hot.
—But the blankets are good.
—But the people are hot!
Which one do you go with? Do you go with the map in your head? ‘I know how to be a good
person,’ or do you go with the phenomenology, the actuality of what is occurring? Again, this is a
very simple yet central point . You don't need to spend a lot of time studying and getting a huge
amount of technical knowledge about ethics. If you want to live ethically you have to be in your
senses and work with respect for the field and respect for yourself; the middle way, neither
dominating the other nor being dominated by them.
So, to recap, the most important thing is to free ourselves from the intoxication of being the one
in charge of the nature of our own existence. Due to ignorance, subject and object separate. As a
consequence of that, we experience ourselves as separate individual consciousness trying to
survive in a complex world. However the ground of our individual self is not different from the
ground of everything, so the key point is to explore directly, through the practice, what is our
own ground, what is our own basis. From that we find that being in the world with others arises
as the non‐dual manifestation. In recognizing this ground, you find that your own manifestation
is arising in non‐duality within the field of all arisings.
Develop this kind of experience for yourself in the meditation. From the point of view of
dzogchen, enlightenment or buddhahood is not something far away. It is the very basis of our
existence but we don't recognize it because we are so caught up in the flow of the content of
experience, that we forget who is having the experience, who is present as the experiencer.
[Day 2]
Knowing about something is not the same as knowing directly
The Buddha’s first teachings were very straightforward and simple. But over time, buddhist
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understanding has become very elaborated. This has two functions: one is that people have
different individual characteristics and therefore, in order to provide methods that are suitable
for the many different kinds of people, new formulations needed to arise. According to the
tradition, all of these formulations have essentially been taught by the Buddha according to
what are called ‘The Three Turnings of the Wheel’. After enlightenment at Bodhgaya the Buddha
went to Sarnath and did the first turning of the wheel. Then he went to Rajagriha and did the
second turning of the wheel. Next he went to Mount Malaya and did the third turning of the
wheel. That is to say, he did a lot of teaching in a lot of places.
You can study the history of buddhism and learn lots and lots of details about these things. Then
you can become knowledgeable in the culture of buddhism. Does knowledge of the culture of
buddhism help you get enlightened? That's a very big question. Knowing about something and
knowing directly are not the same.
The traditional example of this is the notion of sweetness. You might know the history of the
slave plantations and the manufacture of sugar over the last three hundred years. You might
understand all the patterns of distribution of sugar throughout the world and you might have
read many different accounts of sugar. But if you've never tasted sugar yourself, you don't
know what that sweetness is like. There are many, many things you can learn, but you have to
think what is the function of the learning? Our world has many features to it. We have to learn
so many things in order to survive as adults. We have to find ways to make money, to keep the
rhythm of our life going, to keep relations with our friends and families and so on. And its not
uncommon for people to feel a bit overwhelmed or overcome by all that is occurring. This can
lead to states of anxiety, depression, obsessionality, addiction and so on.
All the many methods taught in buddhism are concerned with simplifying existence; they are
ways to help us make sense of what is happening. For example, if you look at a mandala, it's a
circle and inside the circle, is a square. The square is cut into four sections, with another one in
the middle. Each section has its own colour. It's very peaceful, you look at that and everything
is in its proper place. Life, however, is not like that. You can tidy your flat again and again, but
somehow its not going to have that very simple order. That is to say, the mandala offers a vision
of a certain kind of clarity and simplicity, which doesn't manifest in the dimension we inhabit.
A traditional Tibetan monastery is like a ballet school; people practice the same moves again
and again, whether it's mudras, or playing instruments, or in some cases, how you elegantly
drink your cup of tea. One of the senior monks is appointed as Dorje Lopon, or Vajracarya and
his job is to make sure that everything that happens in the pujas and public rituals is performed
and choreographed exactly right. In English, we say ‘The show must go on.’ And it's important to
realise that what happens in a Tibetan monastery is unique and special, but it's also just one
way that human beings organize many people being together, without bumping into each other.
That is to say, it is an artificial activity.
So we have to think, ‘Why learn new artificial activities? What is the function of learning to do a
ritual?’ The answer is, we do it in order to see something in particular. If you sit inside the
ritual, if it has become a way of life, it may hide its own deeper purpose from you because it has
become ‘just what I do.’ I may do it out of habit or out of vows, but it's still just what I do and I
do it because it's ‘good’. But for us, who live in the western countries and who often don't have
very much free time, it’s very important to know precisely why we are doing something and to
be doing it in order to gain a result from it.
The practices of each of the nine yanas ‘rebrand’ our experience
In the nyingmapa tradition there are nine vehicles. Each of theses vehicles has a view,
meditation, activity and result.
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Hinayana rebrands samsara as dangerous so that we take care

In the first yana, there is a sense that samsara, this place we find ourselves in, is a very
dangerous place and therefore, we should, as much as possible, renounce any involvement with
that ordinary daily activity. On the basis of that, we should practice meditations that are about
separation and simple clarification. So we do the basic shamata practice of focusing on a simple
object such as the breath. Through that, we try to create a sense of protection against the many
different thoughts, feelings and sensations which arise. Just because the thought is in my mind,
doesn't mean I have to be involved with it. Just because there is chocolate in the house, doesn't
mean I have to eat it. The chocolate is there, not causing trouble to anyone, but we hear these
voices coming out of the chocolate: ‘Eat me! Eat me!’ It is the same when you are meditating;
these thoughts seem to have a huge amount of power. They seem to be covered in glue, they are
very sticky and they just lock onto us.
From this point of view, the key thing is renunciation, and what aids renunciation is to insult the
object you are attached to. One of the things you need to know about chocolate is that it is just a
fat. So would you like a piece of fat? ‘No thank you.’ Now I have cured my addiction to chocolate.
Likewise a monk would develop a negative reading of women and use the development of
aversion as an antidote to desire. This is similar to rebranding. The effect is that, no matter
what the object is, we don't see just what it is when we say it is either very good, or very bad.
Earlier, we had started to look at the nature of illusion. If you have a piece of chocolate, you've
already named this as chocolate. If you take the name off it, you have this brown substance.
Then you take the brown off it and you also take the sense that it is a square off it. You taste it a
little and you take the word ‘sweet’ off it. When you try to taste the thing itself, without telling
yourself what it is that you are tasting, then you have a very different kind of experience. Its not
that it's nothing at all, but you can't say what it is since as soon as you say what it is, you import
an idea from somewhere else and layer it on top of that experience. This is quite a simple,
straightforward principle. Once that process has become clear, you can start to see how other
different methods of practice function.
Mahayana rebrands all beings as our loving mother so that we feel love
Most dharma practices are concerned with rebranding. Mahayana buddhism says that all beings
have been your mother. It also says that all mothers are good therefore, regardless of your
experience, you rebrand your own mother as ‘good’. Since your enemy, or someone you don't
like, has been rebranded also as your mother from a previous life, so this person is now to be
interpreted as somebody who, in a previous life, did many good things for you and therefore you
should have an attitude of gratitude and obligation towards them. That is to say, an artificially
derived attitude is created and intensified, so that it becomes an antidote to the seeming
immediacy of an habitual interpretation such as, ‘I don’t like this person and I wish them ill’. This
view has many advantages but it requires a lot of effort, sustained over time.
The function of that mahayana approach is to shift something in your heart. It's a reorientation,
but you have to apply it inside the logic of ordinary interaction. The idea that ‘all people have
been a mother in a previous life’ is an abstract formulation. It's designed to undermine the
biases that we have in favour of our friends and against our enemies. Nonetheless, on an
energetic level, we find it easier to get along with some people than with others. Not everyone
gets along well together. That is a fact of existence. It's like when you are a child and you go
with your parents on holiday someplace. At first you don't know anyone and your mother says,
‘Look there are some children. Over you go and play with them’. The fact that they are children
doesn't mean that you can play with them. When my mother was very old, she went to live in a
home for old people. She was always saying, ‘Just because I'm old doesn't mean I have anything
to say to these other old people’. What happens is that a door opens, or doesn't open. You can be
kind to everyone. You can be thoughtful about everyone, but you don't necessarily like
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everyone.
When I was younger, I lived in a commune. People would sit around smiling at each other, being
very friendly, but the toilets didn't get cleaned so often and the kitchen was always a mess. Love
is not enough. So it is important for us to appreciate that this world is complicated and that,
although there are methods of simplification to help us see how we function, they don't remove
how we feel about interacting with each other.
Tibetan culture is a shame‐based culture; people are very attentive to hierarchical structures which
can lead to a lot of choreography, to a lot of working out who should stand when someone else
comes into the room and so on. You can all see that I have been given a seat on a higher level than
the German translator’s seat. Without the translator, many of you wouldn't understand what I am
saying and so on a practical level, the work of the translator is as important as my work. However
teaching the dharma is considered to be very special so I am given things like this. This is a cultural
construct. This is the attribution of value to certain functions. From the very beginning, all
phenomena, whether subject or object, are empty. ‘Empty’ means there is no true essence inside.
So it's a play, like a play in a theatre, or children playing. In this particular play, I get to sit on this
kind of seat. It doesn't signify any essence. No person is better than any other person. Some
people are better at sewing than others. Some people know how to make a cheese soufflé and
some people don't. So if you want to have a cheese soufflé, it is very important to know
someone who knows how to make it. And if you really want to have a cheese soufflé, you
become very, very grateful that this person can make the cheese soufflé for you. Their
importance stands in relation to your desire and interest.
Dharma is a method
For the people who come to this kagyu buddhist centre, the Karmapa is very important. Since
the Indian tax inspectors are currently investigating all the finances of the Karmapa, the
importance that he has for the financial police is very different from the importance that he has
for his students. If you really believe in the Karmapa, you might think that everybody should
have faith in the Karmapa. Catholics believe that everyone should have faith in the Pope. I'm
not suggesting that you shouldn't have faith. But we have to recognize that these are methods
and that the method is applied for a purpose.
For example, in your kitchen you have different knives, or you might have a toolbox with
different kinds of screwdrivers. These are all tools. We use different tools for different things.
In order to use a tool, you have to understand the nature of the tool and its possible range of
functions. And then you have to look at the situation: what tool is required? Because, if you
have a screw that has a star cut on and the head and you have a straight screwdriver, it won’t
function. So, what kind of screw is the Karmapa good for? He's very good for faithful screws
that believe in the Karmapa. Once you have faith in the Karmapa, then the Karmapa can meet
you and then the Karmapa can mean something. The Karmapa is not good or bad in himself. In
himself, the Karmapa is empty. All phenomena are empty, yet some people believe there is a
good Karmapa and a bad Karmapa. It's important to see this.
Every dharma method can be a way of becoming confused and to believe that the Karmapa
really exists is to insult the Karmapa. This is what is meant by nirmanakaya. Nirmanakaya is the
radiance, or the illusory form, which shows itself in the manner of a rainbow. It’s very difficult to
stay with the freshness of the meaning of this. I remember when I was in India, during the time
of the sixteenth Karmapa, the people would tell many stories about him and about what he did.
And of course, in describing something we rely on language, but we are used to using language
to describing things in a fixed way as if they really exist: ‘The watch tells the time’ or ‘The
Karmapa gave an initiation’ or ‘My mother used to make potatoes in a very nice way’. Because
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we have the habit, the mental habit, as seeing the agent as strongly real, it's very easy then to
create a mental construct, in which the nirmanakaya, the illusory manifesting form, is seen as a
solid, substantial, real agent. In that way, we completely lose the function of what is going on.
The central thing is to recognize that language is very dangerous. As Wittgenstein points out
again and again, language is a game. It is itself a realm of illusion. Words don't mean things in
themselves. Wittgenstein says that if we want to know a word, don't look in the dictionary but
observe how it is used. This is exactly pointing to dependent co‐origination. When we use the
personal pronoun ‘he,’ it usually carries for us the imputation that there is a truly existing
person doing something. So, when we say, ‘The Karmapa might come to Europe’, or ‘We hope that
the Karmapa will come to Europe’, grammatically that is not very different from saying ’We hope
that the bus will come soon’. The bus, the Karmapa—something is there. But from buddhist point
of view, there is no Karmapa and there is no bus.
This is why tantric practice says that all sound is like a mantra, and that the essence of mantra is
that it is a sound which is related to the open, empty ground. That is to say, when we speak, we
speak out of emptiness. The sound is arising, like sparks from a fire, like light passing in the sky.
The sound is then caught by us and organized into these patterns, according to our own
structures. In the analysis in the mahayana tradition, they say there are eight kinds of
consciousness. Each of the senses has its own consciousness and then there is a mental
consciousness, which organizes the material from these five sense consciousnesses. You need to
have the mental consciousness doing the interpretation. Consciousness is a dynamic activity, an
activity moving through space and time, and without the movement of the mind, there wouldn't
be that quality, or that style of experience. So, when we say ‘the Karmapa’, we have to watch
what is the interpretation that we are taking towards that. That is to say, we can make a story
about what a wonderful person he is, that he has had many incarnations in Tibet, and so on. All
of these things may be true, but they are not necessarily helpful, because again, the more you
know about him, it creates a sense there is a ‘him’ as a real entity with many details, which can
be known about.
Example of making leather soft with butter

Regarding this, Tibetan lamas use an example of preparing leather. After it has been scraped it
and oiled and so on, people often rub butter into it to make the leather more pliable. But they
also use leather bags as containers for storing their butter. Gradually, the leather starts to dry
out and becomes hard and brittle. The meaning of this example is that you can get a lot of
knowledge about the dharma and you can store it inside you, but it won't make you soft. In fact
it may even make you brittle, because you become somewhat confident that you know
something. So we have to take the dharma idea and keep massaging it into ourselves, in order to
keep soft and pliable. Again, this is just another way of saying that the dharma is a method.
So, the Karmapa, or any other lama—since this centre belongs to the Karmapa, I use him as an
example—is one such method. I am not saying you should not make use of the Karmapa, but
getting a photo of the Karmapa and putting it on your shrine and thinking about the Karmapa is
not necessarily making use of the Karmapa. You may just be taking the Karmapa and putting
him into your world, into your fixed set of assumptions, whereas, the function is to use the
Karmapa to come out of your set of assumptions into some new, fresh experience.
It is important to observe how you think and how you make sense of the world because the
ego—that is to say our personal sense of self—is desperate for control. When we understand
how something functions, we tend to relax a little bit, because we like to know what is going on
and thereby feel safe. But the dharma is designed to disrupt the pattern whereby the ego makes
its safety.
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There is a conflict between these two forms of understanding. From the point of view of the ego,
I want to learn about the dharma and that will give me a stronger, clearer sense of self. I can use
dharma methods to become stronger and clearer. But, you can see the danger with that: the
methods that are designed to deconstruct, or to loosen up the ego, are being subverted to
strengthen the ego instead.
The essential point is that we have to observe ourselves. Just following orders, just going to
dharma teachings and memorizing or learning fixed structures is not necessarily going to be
helpful because no matter how good the dharma is, the real issue is how do I make use of the
dharma. It's not about the quality of the dharma as on object that I can get more of, but rather,
how do I come into relation with the dharma, with being at work, with shopping and so on. It is
about the phenomenology of my existence, which takes us more in the direction of dzogchen.
[Break]
How the dzogchen method differs from other methods
Whether you prefer to use the hinayana or theravadan method, the mahayana method, the
tantric method—if you know the method, you can apply the method to any situation. With these
methods, you can know what you are going to do before you do it. You may have a puja ritual
text to follow, you may have a meditation instruction, you may have decided how many mantras
you will recite, or you may intend to practice walking slowly and mindfully. So in that way, you
have an object of meditation that is created inside a space of meditation, a space of meditation
which excludes the ordinary factors of experience.
The practice of dzogchen is not like that; so now I will explain the view, the meditation and so
on of dzogchen. The basic principle is that we are here. When we start to describe our
experience of being here, we use concepts. We might say, ‘I am comfortable’, or ‘My back is sore’,
or ‘I'm tired’ or ‘I'm interested’. We describe it. Who is the one who is making the description?
There is no end to description—there is always something to talk about. Who is the one who is
talking? Who is the one who is listening? This is our presence, our awareness. This presence is
open and hospitable. That is to say, it allows whatever arises to come. And it allows whatever
arises to go. This is the natural clarity of the spaciousness of our mind.
But again, we have to be attentive to how we understand this. When I say, ‘This is my watch’, ‘my
watch’ is clearly referring to a relation between a subject and an object. If I say, ‘My thoughts go
quite slowly today’, again, the thought is the object of the subject who is experiencing the
thought, because the subject is able to comment on the quality of the thought. But if we say, ‘My
mind is clear,’ what is this? Is there a ‘me’ who has a mind? This is a central thing we have to
investigate for ourselves because, unless you are clear about your own situation, you just have a
lot of words. The mind itself is the luminous space within which experience occurs. Thus, within
the space of our awareness, the thought arises, ‘I live in Hamburg.’ In this case, the dog wags its
tail. But when we, as an individual, say ‘my mind’, or ‘I have a mind’, then the tail is wagging the
dog. This is not so good, because the tail is moving very quickly! To confuse a thought with a
direct experience is one of the biggest problems in mahamudra or dzogchen meditation. We are
very used to identifying with thoughts but as soon as we identify with a thought, the thought is
already vanishing. So, that's the tail—the thought is like the tail. It's behind and it’s going. As for
the dog, for the one who is the ground or the basis of the thought, to imagine that the thought is
telling the truth about itself, about its own ground, is a misconception. This doesn't mean that
thoughts are wrong or bad. Thoughts tell you about thoughts; words tell you about words. They
each have a field of operation.
So, for example, Padmasambhava we now believe is living in Zangdo Ngayab Ling. And where
we humans live is called Sazhi Ngayab Ling. Sazhi means the domain or the sphere of the earth.
P a g e | 14
Whereas, when we describe the dakinis, we believe that they have a pure land called Khache,
which means using the sky, or the dimension of the sky, or in more ordinary language, the
sphere of operation of birds is the sky. For fish, it's the sea and for humans it's on the earth. If
we saw a fish flying in the sky, we would be very surprised. Fish belong in the sea—fish know
what to do in the sea. If you see a fisherman taking a fish out of a river and putting it on the
bank, it is shaking its body around, thinking, ‘How come I'm not moving anymore?’ The fish is
trying its best to swim, but it's not in the water. The fish is doing what it knows how to do, but it
doesn't work because it has lost its sphere of operation.
So it's better to leave the fish in the river. Same with your thoughts, let your thoughts swim
around. Don't ask them to do something they can't do. It's very unkind.
Nowadays, we think it's wrong for a circus to have performing tigers or elephants. Likewise our
thoughts should not be performers in the circus of our mind. That is to say, a thought is a form
of energy; feeling is a form of energy; sensation and sensory perception is a form of energy.
They are dynamic, moving and ungraspable, so don't try to catch these things and put them in
some kind of cage or box. Rather, allow them to go free, because they are not dangerous if they
have plenty of space. In India many tigers get killed every year. The farmers keep cutting into
the forest where the tigers are and then the tiger has no place to hunt. So it comes into the
village and grabs a small child. Then the villagers say that the tiger is very bad but when there is
plenty of forest, the tigers stay in the forest and they don't bother the human beings at all.
In the same way, when we relax and we are open and spacious, all kinds of thoughts can come,
good thoughts and bad thoughts—if we don't try to organise them and say bad thoughts go out,
good thoughts come in, if we stop being a traffic policeman—then there is space for all the
thoughts to come in.
So, the most important point is to recognize the difference between the mind itself and what
arises in the mind. Returning to the example of the mirror, the reflection in the mirror doesn't
harm the mirror. The mirror is not improved by having beautiful images and it is neither defiled
nor harmed by having ugly images. This is the meaning of ‘vajra’. Vajra means indestructible and
is the nature of our own mind. Whatever arises comes and goes, it doesn't touch or harm
awareness itself, but it does touch and influence other thoughts.
So there is a very particular point here, which is very important for meditation and that is: ‐ the
first person singular. I am. That is to say, there is an undeniable facticity to each person’s
existence. Whatever you think about yourself, or feel about yourself, there is an undeniable
given‐ness that you are here. But this ‘I'm here’, is not ‘I'm here as anything’. It has a presence as
an openness, which has a hospitality. Think of some of the experiences you've had since you got
up this morning: putting on clothes, cleaning teeth, travelling here, sitting down, listening,
getting up and so on. All of these experiences are gone. Sometimes they seem to leave a trace,
the way airplanes leave that little cloudy trace in the sky. Yet, even if we get preoccupied with a
particular thought, the process of thinking is always dynamic. The thought arises and then
passing through the space of the mind, vanishes.
From the point of view of the emptiness of the mind, I am nothing. Yet when we are just relaxed
and open like here just now, I am everything, because as we sit here, what we take to be ourself
and what we take to be the room, arise together. That is to say, there is no fundamental
difference between what is, as it were, inside and what is outside. So, as we are sitting here, we
each can experience our body in some way. Some sensation is occurring, maybe in the back or in
the legs. At the same time we are seeing some shapes and colours. Maybe you see a white wall,
or a painting, or a window.
What you see is an experience, which is to say that it is something that registers for you –
P a g e | 15
something that is there for you. On that level, the sensation and the vision‐impression have the
same status. They are both temporary experiences although their quality is different. What we
call an internal sensation, the sensation of my body and the seemingly external perception of the
white wall, are the same in as much as they are experiences, but their quality, the feeling tone is
different, because one feels personal and the other doesn’t.
Say we each have two bowls of water in front of us, one hot, and the other cold. We put a hand
into each bowl; one hand is feeling hot, the other hand is feeling cold. Hot and cold are
experiences. But the hot one is very hot, 'Oh I don't like this, this is burning me.' And there is ice
in the cold one, ‘This is very cold I don't like that!’ So now, you put your hand that is very hot into
the cold water and say ‘Oh, that feels very nice.’ And you put the hand that was in the cold water
in the hot water and ‘Oh, that feels very nice.’ Each of these is an experience—just something
arising and passing, arising and passing—but the feeling tone of I like, I don't like makes it
qualitatively seem very different.
In the mahamudra teachings, there is a lot of attention to what’s called rochik, or one taste; and
this means simply staying with the sense of what is arising as an experience, without being
pulled into the differentiation of quality as being something truly meaningful.
In dzogchen, the focus is more on who is the one who is having the experience. Experience
arises and this is a really central point. Experience arises in two aspects. One aspect we call the
object, one aspect we call the subject. So when I say I am tired, tiredness arises as the object, ‘I
am’ arises as a subject. Both of these are experience. This is the basic difference between
samsara and nirvana. Samsara we identify with the position ‘I am; this is me; I continue through
time, as this selfsubstance.’ And at the moment, the main thing about myself is that I am tired.
So, ‘I am’ seems to exists as a continuing noun, onto which adverbs and adjectives illuminate
changes of quality. It appears as if there is a continuous, reliable point of self‐reference: I, me,
myself. But we have to put this really into question and directly in the meditation – and we'll
come on to do that later.
For example, we are in Hamburg. When we go out of building and walk 200 hundred meters,
we’re still in Hamburg. There is quite a lot of Hamburg; there’s Hamburg to the north, Hamburg
to the south, to the east, to the west. In fact, we’re surrounded by Hamburg. You can also go out
of Hamburg. But what the council, what the civic authority, says is the limit of Hamburg is not
necessarily what the people living at the edge of Hamburg will agree to, because they might
believe that their village is really Hamburg. The postal department might say it’s not. What is
Hamburg? It's a town, a city. That explains a lot, or maybe not. That is to say, it is a word chasing
a word. It is an intoxication, it’s a game and you can have a lot of games around Hamburg. You
can't find Hamburg, because Hamburg is an idea.
When I was young and I was hitchhiking on the road, I hitchhiked down to London and the lorry
driver dropped me at the north of London, because we were coming south. It was on the edge of
the city, so I started walking and I walked all day because there's a lot of London. I was trying to
get to London; I was already in London; but somehow I never got to the bit of London I needed
to be in. Because, before you get to a city, you don't know what it is. And if you live in Hamburg,
you live in your Hamburg. You live in your local bit, with local shops and if you go to the other
side of the city, you think, oh, nothing to do with me. The important point of this example is that
there is a difference between a direct experience and an explanation, or a description.
When we take a break for lunch a bit later and we go out of the building, we will be walking in
Hamburg, but not the Hamburg that exists in any description, because we don't know what kind
of car is going to be coming towards us; a blue car or a white car. That is part of our experience.
But it doesn't exist on any map or in any book as a formal description. That is to say, whenever
you try to describe something, including yourself, the description abstracts you from the in‐
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graspability of the direct experience. The nature of samsara is to be caught up in, or attached to,
or identify with, the stream of narrative interpretation. But this stream of interpretation is
revealed to an awareness, or revealed by an awareness, in an awareness. The awareness and the
description are not the same.
In terms of the mind itself, of our awareness, when I have a description ‘I am tired,’ this is false,
because the mind itself is not tired. ‘I am tired’ refers to a pattern of energy arising, like a
reflection in the mirror. That is to say, I am not a thing. I am two aspects, an openness and a
ceaseless flow of expression; and on the level of expression, how I am is not internally created
by some kind of bubble that I inhabit. It's not internally created by some kind of bubble, like a
kind of egg, or something sealed. It's not ‘I am James Low and inside me there is the factory
creating this experience.’
Now, say some tragedy happens in your life. You lose your job, your parent suddenly dies, your
child dies. Why would you not be sad? That would be ridiculous not to be upset. That is the
quality of energy: subject and object go together. But awareness itself is not sad. Awareness
reveals that I am sad. I am sad for a while, due to causes and conditions. And I am sad because
the I am, which is manifestation, is always going to be influenced by events. This is an absolutely
central point, because otherwise, you can spend a lot of time trying to stabilize the contents of
your mind and it's impossible.
We can develop a particular kind of adaption in which you perform repeated activity again and
again, but what is repeated is an abstraction. So, if you are a musician and you are practicing
everyday some piece from Bach, you practice it until you know it very well and then you can
bring up the quality of interpretation. You practice it so that you are technically fine and then
you can bring out the quality of interpretation, your own sense of the music. But if you go to see,
or you listen to the recordings of a famous pianist, who is playing the same piece in many
occasions, it is different each time, because the way of expressing it depends on the audience,
the hall, whether the person is happy, or sad, or so on.
The central point in the dzogchen view is not to try to stabilize the content of your mind, but
rather rest in the unchanging natural state. The natural state never changes and is without
effort. Within this open spaciousness of the mind, thoughts, feelings and sensations are
ceaselessly flowing. So, don't enter into the duality of separating the spaciousness of the mind
from the flow of what is arising and don’t enter into the duality of separating subject and object
as if they were separate and truly self‐existing. You cannot catch the nature of your own mind. It
is already there; it is who we are. But it is not a thing. So if you go looking for your mind, as if
you were looking for something, you will never find it.
This is why, in dzogchen, we spend a lot of time trying to describe this very precisely, in order to
help you not to waste your life. It's a quality of being; we are here. Being is not something that
you know; it is something that you are. You might feel a bit dull and stupid, you might feel a bit
bored, but these transient states do not define who you are. One state will be replaced by
another.
If we trust the contents of our mind as being the limit of our experience, we hide from ourselves
the ground of our experience. The purpose of the meditation practice is to not make that
confusion. The nature of dzogchen meditation is always to do nothing. We are not trying to stop
anything; we are not trying to encourage anything. By allowing the process of the mind to
unfold, we are relaxing the quality of identification with what we take to be our unique personal
subjectivity. The ego is not something bad that we have to get rid of but we do have to stop
using it for something, which it cannot do.
So, we have now identified that we have three aspects: I am—just the open bare, naked
P a g e | 17
awareness; I am everything—the immediate revelation of the non‐duality of what we take to be

the subject and the object; and thirdly, I am this thing. The third aspect is always changing: I am
tired, I am hungry, I need to pee, I am happy… The unique specificity of how we manifest,
moment by moment, arises from the unified field of experience. So, for example, I start to be
aware that it would be a good idea to go and have a pee. Why is this? Because I have been
drinking water. Why am I drinking water? Because I have been talking. Why am I talking?
Because I am in here teaching in a buddhist centre. That is to say, my talking is created by being
here. Perhaps we could take a pair of scissors and cut a line of separation between me and what
is here? Then I might say, ‘I am talking, I am the one who is talking’. The talking is telling me
about me, but the only reason I am talking, is because of you. So I am talking with you; in some
ways you could say I am talking to you, but essentially, I am talking with you, because how you
are influences how I am. This is the meaning of ‘the absence of inherent self‐existence’, a term
that you will often read or hear referred to.
Although this term may sound heavy when you read it, you can experience it very easily. If you
are walking along the road, chatting with someone, what you say is determined by how you are
with that person. If you are talking with someone you don't know very well, it is a bit more
hesitant, because you're not quite sure how to align your rhythms. That is to say, all the
potential of the many things you could say is in the background. In the foreground is your
connection with this particular person and it is that which allows you to be who you are with
them. In other words, there is no internal essence to us. However, when we forget, or lose sight
of, or lose contact with the immediacy of the non‐duality of subject and object, then it is as if we
are inside ourselves, connecting with a world outside us, and then we feel it is our responsibility
to create ourselves in the right way. At that point, we follow our own karmic tendencies, or we
can develop more buddhist, ‘good’ ideas. We might decide, ‘Oh, I should develop patience.’ Maybe
someone is causing us difficulties and we decide to be patient with them but because we are
patient with them, we don't contradict what they do and so they continue doing what they do.
So you have then entered into collusion with their bad behaviour, which is not a particularly
useful thing to do. But you have been practicing patience, which is a ‘good’ thing to do. It's a
good thing which has a bad outcome. What we need is to be with the actual presentation of the
world.
The world is energy; it's not abstract ideas. That's why tantra describes four activities: pacifying
—pacifying sickness, difficulties, dangers etc; increasing — increasing crops, happiness and so
on; over‐awing— impacting on a situation in such a way that people are subtly controlled by the
presence of a charismatic person; and fourthly destroying, or crushing – completely controlling.
Translator: Is the third one also called magnetising?
James: Yes, it can be.
In Tibetan it's ‘wang‐du du‐pa’ meaning to put under your power. So, it means, for example, if a
policeman is walking down a street, then a thief is not so likely to break into a house, because
they see the policeman; the policeman represents the stage. They think, ‘Oh, better be careful’. So
the other shrinks back without the powerful person having to do anything.
This is in the tantric system, which is a very orderly system. However the basic principle is very
simple: do different things in different situations. It is not saying that you always have to try to
be a nice person; it’s not even always appropriate.
In dzogchen practice you don't have to think about this very much. If you simply stay close to
the immediacy of the situation and don't interrupt your reaction, and if your reaction is coming
from this real openness, then it will be ethical. It's not very complicated, but it does mean that
you have to trust yourself.
P a g e | 18
[Break]
Meditations which have, and do not have an intention
We are now going to look at meditation. There are two main aspects of meditation. One is
working to recognize your own nature and the other is working with the energy of
manifestation.
What we looked at this morning was in the area known as kadag or primordial purity: that the
mind has been pure from the very beginning. It is not a thing that can be harmed or improved
and therefore, it is not something you have to worry about; you can trust your mind. However,
this mind is the ground of all the thoughts of samsara and nirvana and so the contents of the
mind are not so trustworthy, in particular, when you have a specific intention. If you don't have
an intention, it doesn't matter.
Recently I was travelling through the English countryside and I said to the person who was
driving, ‘You know, in England there are so many towns I have never visited and I never want to
visit’. Like this place which we were driving past on the motorway. Felixstowe is the name of a
place. Then of course we took the wrong turn and ended up in Felixstowe, because we were so
distracted by talking about not going to Felixstowe! So in that way, the movement of the mind is
dangerous. If you have an intention—to avoid Felixstowe and go straight to our destination—
the going somewhere else‐ness of our intention, made the going to Felixstowe wrong. That is to
say, as soon as you have a specific intention, you are immediately into the territory of right,
wrong, good, bad. That is why I was explaining how all the general methods of Buddhist
meditation, right up to tantra, are essentially about energy, because it is about the intentionality
of trying to go somewhere.
Energy travels; your mind itself goes nowhere. So, the practice is simply to sit and be present
with whatever is occurring. What is happening sometimes looks outside, sometimes looks
inside. Something arises, could be the sound of car or someone walking in the street. It could be
a sensation in the body. You don't have to block it in any way, or try to correct it, because the
object of the mind is whatever arises. You don't have any prefigured, pre‐established notion of
what you are trying to do. You are not trying to do anything, except not be busy.
So when you are sitting, if the body wants to move, you can let it move. Again, some forms of
meditation control what is happening but here, we want to maintain an open awareness, which
is both the ground and the operational field and the end point of whatever is occurring. If you
find that your mood is a little heavy after having eaten some food, you simply stay present with
the heaviness, keeping this balance between falling into what is occurring—merging with it—
and holding oneself back—trying to stay separate from what is occurring. This is the central
point where you can see if your meditation is going in a useful direction or not.
Awareness is like the screen of the computer. Attention is like the cursor, the little arrow‐point
that moves about on that screen. With our attention, we are always somewhere, but this
somewhere is always within space, it’s always within the dharmadhatu. The mind itself,
awareness, is inseparable form the dharmadhatu. The basic point is: I am not a thing. Everything
has to be someplace or other. My watch is going to be on my arm, or on a table, or on my bed. If I
take the watch off, even if I throw it away, it goes somewhere. In the world of duality, things are
always standing in relation to other things.
Awareness, however, has no top or bottom, front or back. It can’t be established as being
something somewhere and therefore it never stands in relation to something else. So when we
find ourselves being located, that is a sign that the energy is spiralling around manifestation on
the subject side. And if you attend to that, the very quality of attention will intensify the seeming
P a g e | 19
reality of what you attend to.
This is why, if you have a small baby and it is crying a bit, you sing to them and you rock them.
When they pay attention to the sound of your voice, they are not paying attention to the
building‐up habit of crying. When the child starts to have a temper tantrum, they put energy
into a particular position and then they put more energy in and more energy and more energy
and more energy. And, the big world they are living in is getting smaller and smaller and they
say ‘I’m not going to do it, I’m not gonna do it,’ and their voice is getting louder and their whole
body is getting rigid. When a small child is really refusing, they are so angry and so resistant.
It’s exactly the same principle in meditation. An idea comes, you invest energy in the thought,
you invest attention on the thought and it seals itself into a seemly small, separate world. When
you find that happening, don't do anything. The temptation we have is to try to solve the
problem, but the problem has been created by investing energy. Don't invest more energy. Just
allow whatever—allow what needs to be there, and it will go by itself. This often doesn't feel
possible since we don't like what is happening but at that moment stay present with the
experience of not liking. And then something else will happen.
But you can see that there are only two possibilities here. Either I stay with this seeming
continuity of progression of thoughts where one thought goes to another, goes to another. This
is the progression of samsara. Or I stay present with each thing as it arises, and experience the
continuity of awareness, which is not something that can be grasped. In that way, you have what
is called the continuity of nirvana. In fact they are not essentially different, since there is no
inherent reality in either formation.
So we do a little practice just now. Just sit in a comfortable way, you don't need to sit in a rigid
way, sit in a comfortable way. Relax into slow outbreath, just to ease out. And then whatever
comes, comes. You can explore doing it with your eyes open or closed. Traditionally we do it
with the eyes open, but sometimes you find that at first anyway, you do it with your eyes closed.
If your eyes are open, you are not looking at anything in particular; you are just letting the gaze
rest in the space in front of you. And, just remember one thing; one thing to remember is: ‘I am
not meditating’. This is not something I am doing. You are already present with what is
occurring, so just stay more aware of that already‐present openness and rest in it. Okay…
[Practice]
Like lambs in a field in spring

We'll do this kind of practice many times. It's good to do it for short periods of time, because it is
not being done by effort. We are all adults and being an adult is sometimes not so easy. Life can
be better if you are a small child. In the springtime when you go out in the country you see the
small lambs jumping about. This is the mind of a meditator, because the field is open. There is
nothing to do except jump about and run around. The mind can go anywhere. If you have an
angry thought you can just have the angry thought, because in the field sometimes the lambs
bump into each other and knock each other over. In a lot of meditation practices, you have to be
an adult—there are many things to remember, when to ring the bell, when to do the mudra,
when to change the chant and so on. But in this meditation, the awareness is inseparable from
the field. It is not the lamb, it’s the field.
Translator: It’s not a lamb?
James: No, it’s the field. The lambs are subject and object. The energy of the mind
sometimes appears as subject, sometimes appears as object.
So you are sitting here and there is a noise ‘zhzhzh’ outside. This noise comes up and then there
P a g e | 20
is an object. Then you have a response to it ‘Oh, it’s a car.’ Where does the car come from? There
are many streets, many places; but all the streets and all the towns are like the blades of grass in
the field. The car comes from the mind.
So when we say awareness is inseparable from the dharmadhatu, it means there is no limit. In
this context, dharma means phenomena. Dhatu means a space, or a dimension, or an openness.
It means the place where everything occurs—you could also call it infinity. Within this infinity,
there are many dots—like looking in the night sky, this open huge, huge space and in it there are
many stars. If you know something about astronomy you can name these various stars and
planets, but anyway, they are moving within space. Space doesn't have an edge to it and so we
refer to the stars and planets in relation to each other, how far they are from one another. The
most basic thing is the space within which they appear.
In the same way awareness itself has no limit. So, the sound arises into the mind— ‘zhzhzh’—
and the mind says ‘That’s a car’. ‘Zhzhzh’ comes from the mind and ‘that’s a car’ comes from the
mind. But that can’t be right, because the car comes from Hamburg? Maybe, that may be true,
but where did that thought come from? The thought chases the thought, chases the thought
chases the thought, chases the thought. And the quicker the thoughts come, they seem to create
a whole world of objective material reality. But then they are gone.
This is the self‐liberation of all phenomena. Arising and passing in the space of awareness. So
when we sit in the practice, not interfering with whatever is coming, not entering into
judgement—good, bad, right, wrong, me, not me — just give space and allow it to go. It’s
difficult to describe this because, if we say ‘give space,’ it’s as if somehow each of us is going to,
very generously, give some space. It’s not that we give space. We are space. Spaciousness is the
very nature of our basis. This is why our nature is indestructible. So, just being present with
whatever occurs, without, as it were, becoming what occurs. Are there any thoughts or
questions about that?
Question about being tired
Question: I feel sleepy but I don't want to sleep just now…
James: Generally if you are feeling very sleepy and it feels impossible to stay awake, you
can get up and wash your face with cold water and then come back to the practice. However, we
may become tired not just because maybe we have just had a big lunch or something like that,
but we are tired because we have stored a huge amount of exhaustion inside ourselves. The
nature of duality is very exhausting, subject and object rubbing each other all the time. Dualistic
consciousness, mental consciousness, links itself with the particular forms of energy which can
be caught, which we might name libido, or prana, or chi. A lot of the time there are things we
must do. It will soon be Monday morning and many of us will have to go to work. We may not
feel like going to work, but that is irrelevant, because we do have to go to work. So as an
energetic system, I am often driving myself to do things I don't want to do, because they just
have to be done. This often leads to a kind of exhaustion. Many, many people in the west are
exhausted, because our lives are so driven.
So, what I am suggesting here is that maybe we have to investigate what is the nature of the
tiredness. Subtle states like depression, tiredness, boredom, because they don't have a sharp
edge, are often more difficult to stay present with. If you suddenly remember something you
have to do, it has a particular shape. Or, if you start to become angry about something, that also
has quite an edge to it. But this kind of experience like the tiredness—in Tibetan they call it jing
wa—means sinking and is described as like being a tired swimmer. You still have to get across
the river, you can't go back, but you start going under the water.
P a g e | 21
On a practical level, intensify the length of the outbreath, relax more into that, really relaxing the
muscle. Extend the outbreath, so it is longer and then relax into it. And try to find the point of
presence with the tiredness. Now this is very tricky because, as we looked before, the energy
which is manifesting as the tiredness and the aspect of awareness stand in relation, like the
reflection in the mirror. So, the tiredness is the movement of energy and it’s like the reflection
and the awareness, that you want to bring to attend to the tiredness, is like the mirror itself.
Now the thing is of course, you can’t take the reflection out of the mirror. I can take this cup and
I can pour the water out of the cup so that we can see the difference between the cup and the
contents of the cup. Because if I poured the water from the cup into the bowl, we would still
have the same water, it would just be contained in something different. But you can't do that
with the thought and the awareness, because the reflection, that is to say our existence, as
noetic beings as beings who register events, this quality of clarity is present in the moment of
the arising of the object. So the object, you can’t take out of your mind, you can’t say, oh this is
my tiredness ‐ I am going to stand back here and look at my tiredness.
Now of course you can do it in the system of vipassana, in Tibetan is called lhagthong, which
means superior or very good seeing, seeing clearly. So for example in that practice you might
start by bringing your attention to the nostril. You focus your breath and then oh, this is the
point of my attention, my focused attention. And then, you take that focused attention up to the
top of your head and gradually, you move it down through your body as a sort of scan and you
register whatever sensation is arising. And, as you go down through your body you note, in the
simplest language possible, what is happening. So if you feel tired, you might say heavy, sinking.
The important point is who is the one who is scanning my body? That is to say, I am bringing my
attention to different aspects of my embodied manifestation. I, as subject, am scanning what is
happening in the body as object.
It is a dualistic mediation since, essentially, it is one reflection looking at another reflection. The
aspect of reflection called subject is looking at the aspect of reflection called object. But here
with the dzogchen practice, the mirror is not an ordinary subject at all. The mirror shows the
movement of the subject and object. For example, now I am talking and I am moving my hands
around and I am looking at you. So on the level of the individual, I, me, am talking and moving,
looking at you, the object. So, this feels like me, this is subject here and object over there. I am
doing this, looking at you. I am in the conscious self, looking at you. But I am also aware of being
the conscious self looking at you and I am aware that I am conscious of you, as the object over
there.
If you imagine, just as a metaphor, you have a theatre. The space of the theatre, the stage is like
the dharmadhatu. The various lights which illuminate the space are like awareness, so that the
light is everywhere on the stage. On the stage there are two actors, subject and object. You can
see the subject and you can see the object, because they have a definite shape. But because of
the skill of the lighting engineer the light is just filling the space, you can't find it as a thing. If the
light went off, we wouldn't have any experience of the subject and object. But when the play
begins and the subject and object start moving together, because the object is also a subject—
subject to object, subject to object—in both directions, all the attention is caught up by the
actors. So, in this drama, awareness is both the illumination and the audience.
On the stage, one actor is saying ‘I am so tired.’ The other actor says ‘Wake up, stay with us, don't
vanish.’ The awareness which reveals this, is not tired. The tiredness is an energetic formula, it’s
an energetic formation; it’s not the state of awareness itself. The awareness is not tired;
consciousness is tired. So when we are tired, it’s very difficult to be aware, although the
awareness is never tired. Part of the problem is that we are on the samsara side and the rule of
your life in samsara is that if you want something done, you better do it yourself. So, this is the
orientation, isn't it? ‘I onto the world, make things happen.’ Tiredness is the collapsing of the
P a g e | 22
power of the focused energy of the subject to make something happen.
If you are practicing on your own, you can just stay present and fall asleep. And then, when you
wake up after a bit, you practice again and gradually, you can explore the relationship between
awareness and sleep. You can do it every night, when you are in your bed. You can wrap the
duvet round you and sit at the wall behind you and just relax into the outbreath, staying present
and gradually you fall asleep. Gradually you become able to integrate the awareness into
sleep—because, you have to remember, awareness is not a self‐referential commentary. Like I
know that I am talking, that is the work of consciousness. But … presence is the quality of basic
aliveness, which illuminates what is going on; and it’s a soft illumination.
So, for example, this founding buddha of the lineage, Kuntuzangpo, is dark blue in colour. Dark
blue is very close to black. Black is good night, all gone. So this dark blue is like just before the
dawn, the sky lightens very little. Awareness is not like a bright spotlight; it’s like the free
movement in space. So, you don't have to be very bright and alive to be doing the practice; you
can be old and tired, too. One of the great, early dzogchen masters came to the teaching when he
was very old. And when you see pictures of him, he is leaning on the stick that holds his chin up
because he kept falling over. The mind often has these very subtle hazy states and we have to be
present with that haziness. Often the difficulty is we think ‘I should be fresh, I should be alert.’
Now if you are doing zen sitting practice, whether soto or rinzai, both want you to be very fresh;
you should be working, working on the koan, keeping your attention on the wall, whatever it is.
But here, we are talking of something different, the shift of relation between active and passive.
So, if I say we all have to look at the ceiling, we look up. This is something we can consciously do;
we can decide it and that shifts the muscles in our neck, our chin goes up and then we are
looking at the ceiling. That is to say, I can make myself look at the ceiling; I can make my self
look at the carpet. That’s an act of will. I can force my mind again and again to go back to a koan,
or to just look at the bare wall in front of me, or to focus on my breath. These are all things I can
do, but I cannot be aware. I cannot make myself enlightened. Awareness and enlightened are the
natural state. They’re there from the very beginning. They haven't declined, they haven't been
covered over by anything. They are not obscured, or defiled, or covered over. But they are not
the same as conscious intention. So, in that sense, we have to abandon the hope of self‐efficacy
in order to gain success. Self‐efficacy, it means the efficiency of myself, the capacity to do. And
do nothing. So it’s a lot about surrender.
For example, in the practice of chod, we offer our body up, so there is no fixed basis and we give
up a place to stand. I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my sensations, my
emotions; I am not something which is arising ‐ Nothing to do with me.
If you are practicing on your own and you are feeling tired, some tiredness is coming. My mind
is not mine. It is not a private property or private territory. Now this tiredness is coming like a
squatter. It is not paying any rent. So it’s not paying any rent and it is making a mess, but it is not
my house. It’s not my house. This is the basis of freedom, according to dzogchen. As long as you
say, my mind is mine and I am going to decide what comes in and what goes out, then you are
tumbling in the world of samsara forever. So, whatever comes, comes; whatever goes, goes. This
is not the instruction for outer behaviour, though you can do it as part of the practice. But
generally, this is the instruction for when you are sitting. So part of it is I am tired.
I have come to a buddhist setting, I want to be alert and I am tired. So we take out our set of
scales. In one pan we put my intention ‐ to stay awake and in the other pan, we put the actuality
of my condition‐I am falling asleep. Which is going to be most important? We have been trained
to say ‘I must stay awake. I must do it.’ Maybe because I don't want people to see that I am
sleepy, or I want to do things the right way, or I want to learn. But you can see the motivation of
intentionality is very, very strong. But, this is very, very unhelpful, because if we are tired, it is
P a g e | 23
much better to take a blanket and lie down. Because what is the function which is to be
privileged?
When I was studying with the previous Kalu Rinpoche, a long time ago, his assistant, his
nephew, Gyaltsen would tell us not to sit with our feet straight out towards the lama because
this was a very big insult. So we all became very concerned to keep our legs bent. This is called
culture dressed as dharma. There is nothing insulting about your feet. But in that cultural
system, the top of the head is very precious. And if you touch a lama on the top of the head, they
get very angry. Oh, there are so many gods sitting there on the head, but the feet are on the
earth and can be very dirty! So the body is high and low.
When I was young, for years and years and years I had people telling me what to do ‐ my
parents, my big brother, all my schoolteachers. Finally, I left school, I left home, I went to India
for freedom. And so I met the Tibetan dharma and found many, many new people to tell me
what to do!
Actually, your question is very, very important. It is a way of asking if I can trust my own state?
What do I do with the fact that I may be bored, or I don't want to meditate; what significance do
I give to my own experience, or do I always have to interpret it through some model or lens?
My teacher explained to me that there are four activities for the yogi: walking sitting, eating and
sleeping. When you are tired, sleep, when you are hungry, eat. It is not so difficult. But we don't
have permission to do what is straightforward.
This is a long, long answer to the question. But the general principle is that we have to start to
live close to ourselves. And observe the cost of artificiality. So, for Tibetans, one of the most
important bases for the ability of meditation is the ability to close the door. Because in
monasteries and in families, people are always coming in and out and going around and if you
can’t close your own door and say go away, leave me alone, then you can’t practice. But in order
to do that you have to be willing for other people to feel insulted.
We will take a break in a minute, but the most basic principles are like this. First of all, we have
to recognize, what is my state? Because if we are cheating ourselves on how we actually are,
then it is very difficult to do anything. You cannot force yourself to do this kind of practice. You
can force yourself to do prostrations, you can force yourself to clean butterlamps, but you can’t
force yourself to rest in the nature of the mind.
Secondly, we need to work with these circumstances; so if we are tired we can lie down, maybe
sleep for fifteen minutes. If we are very tired, sleep longer. We could put on some music and
dance, just to shift the energy in your body. You could do some deep diaphragm breathing to
bring a lot more oxygen into your system. If you are too tired to practice, you could lie back on
the couch or the bed and recite some mantras or say some prayers. So again, this indicates that
traditionally, they say that you should have six sessions of practice a day, but you also have to
get to know yourself.
Some people have a lot of energy in the morning, they are very fresh in the morning and they
are very tired in the evening. Other people are very slow to wake up, but are quite fresh in the
evening. So, given that for this kind of practice, being physically relaxed and open, but with
some alertness or clarity—not driven‐ness, not hyper‐manic—but just alertness, that is useful.
You can track for yourself, when it is a good time of day to enter that practice. And, if you are
working, it may be that from Monday to Friday you have a different rhythm than Saturday and
Sunday, so you can work with that. There is also the changes of the menstrual cycle. And some
people are strongly influenced by the lunar cycle, that around full moon you get variations in
bodily energy and so on.
P a g e | 24
With this kind of practice you start with yourself. You don't start with the instruction, or the
rules, or the puja, or the thing which is out there. You are not trying to align yourself with some
system. But rather to gradually get to know yourself‐how you function. And then collaborate
with yourself, work with yourself, be an ally to yourself. And then, the more we can do practice
at the best times and get the confidence of that, then gradually you can take that out into times
which are more challenging.
Okay, so we take a break now.
What is meant by ‘to awaken’?
The Buddha, so we believe, led a good life and helped many people and we believe that because
we have some faith in the Buddha. Not everyone believes in the Buddha. When I was in a
monastery in Zangskar in northwest India I was shown some statues of the Buddha that had
bullet holes in them from when they were attacked by Pakistanis. So for some Pakistanis, the
Buddha is not a good guy.
In this world of being with other people, it is not such a good idea to hold strong ideological
positions. That is to say, compassion is not about converting other people to ‘the truth’, rather it
is about helping people to loosen up and to relax and to find some freedom how they are. In our
multicultural culture, holding any dogmatic view can clearly be rather problematic.
However even someone as relaxed as Patrul Rinpoche said, in his little commentary on refuge,
that when you take refuge in the Buddha you shouldn't make friends with people who are not
Buddhist. Why would he say that? Because how other people talk is going to undermine your
faith. So let’s think about that. What kind of faith is it that can be endangered by someone else
having different ideas? When you study the ten basic sins or faults or wrong practices, you
learn that wrong views is one of the mistakes of the mind. And wrong views means not
accepting the basic buddhist propositions—absence of inherent self‐nature, impermanence and
so on. Now, clearly to understand the absence of inherent self‐nature is helpful. It is helpful as a
practice, and a practice is a method. However to say that only one kind of practice, one kind of
method, will get you anywhere, that places you in the realm of formal religion.
Compassion is to help people awaken—so what does it mean, ‘to awaken’? Does it mean to
become a buddhist? ‘Buddhist’ is a conceptual category. ‘Awakening’ is not a conceptual
category. It is an ontological freedom. That is to say, it is a direct unmediated experience in
which you are aware that you are not tied in knots, as you were before. From the point of view
of dzogchen we have never been tied in knots. We are asleep and dreaming that we are in
samsara. To awaken from the dream is to recognize the nature of dreaming. It is not that the
dreaming has to stop, because if you don't dream at all, you end up like a pratyekabuddha—you
have your own enlightenment, but you can’t relate to anyone else. If you are going to relate to
other people, essentially you have to be able to enter their dream. But the problem is that they
have the wrong kind of dreams; they have these communist dreams, Christian dreams, Muslim
dreams…
“Your dreams are no good. But I so happen to have here, in this box, some very special
buddhist dreams. You just rub this magic lamp and open sesame! Now we are all
buddhists. So no problem.”
A dream is a dream. We can put it this way; awareness is necessary in order for the registering
of a dream. So, what is it like when we are dreaming? When you sit in the meditation practice
and you find yourself going off into a thought and you come out of it, you went into a mini‐
dream. To recognize that you were off in a dream is like a small waking‐up. Shakespeare often
created a play, within a play, within a play; so too we have a dream within a dream, within a
dream… Merely changing the structure and quality of a dream is not the same as awakening.
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From the point of view of dzogchen, you don't have to change your lifestyle, or even say you are
a buddhist. If being a buddhist is good for you and it supports you and it helps you to do
practice, then it can be a good thing. If being a buddhist causes trouble and doesn't really help
you to do practice, it is not very useful. When Prince Siddhartha left home and then practiced for
six years on the banks of the Niranjana River and then went and sat under the pipal tree—which
later became called the bodhi tree—he had an experience. The Buddha became awake. He didn't
become a buddhist. So again, the point is not that one shouldn't be buddhist, it is to think about
what is the function of being a buddhist? What is the function of trying to be a kind person?
What am I up to in the service of what is this activity?
So we have four factors: we have the view, the meditation, the activity and the result. The view
as we've looked, is this natural purity, the natural openness of the mind; that the mind is naked,
clear, shinning. Within this domain, effortlessly arising come all the possible forms of samsara
and nirvana. To meditate is to stay close to what is expressed in the view. The activity is to be
present in the world, with the world as the unfolding of the state of the meditation. Imagine you
are meditating, sitting, and then you stop sitting and you stand up. What does it mean then to
stop meditating? If your meditation includes visualising or prostrating, then it’s pretty clear
what it means when you stop meditating. But if the meditation is to remain open and present
with equally available energy in all directions, then when you arise from meditation and make a
cup of tea or telephone someone or whatever, this is the movement of energy. Where is this
energy moving? It’s moving in the space of the mind. If you think my mind is inside my skin‐bag,
maybe in my brain or in my heart, then there is stuff outside and stuff inside. But the mind itself
has no shape.
There is a famous dzogchen text called Dorje Sempa Namkhache —The Big Sky of Vajrasattva. It
has been translated into English. The title means that Vajrasattva represents the natural purity,
the indestructible nature of the mind, so it is saying that rigpa or awareness is like a big sky. You
can’t cut up the sky. It doesn't belong to anyone. It doesn't stop at a certain point. So in that way,
the idea that one can come out of the meditation is impossible. That is to say, what happens is
we are forgetful of being in the state of meditation. In the same way we are sitting in this room,
we are doing some buddhist‐y stuff and we can be quite forgetful that we are in Hamburg. This
room could be anywhere. But when you go out the door you remember that this is Hamburg. So,
forgetfulness is not a line or a slice that separates you.
That is to say, when the text says that the root of samsara is ignorance and on the basis of
ignorance there is attachment, ignorance is not like the Berlin Wall. It’s not cutting something in
half. It doesn't separate in a real sense. When there was the separation of East Germany and
West Germany, this was a convention. There were people on both sides of the wall who spoke
German, but due to causes and conditions, it was as if they were two completely different
countries. On the level of energy, it was difficult to go from one side to the other. So it seemed to
function as a real gap, but actually, the two parts were not so different. When you are only in
one part, then that becomes what is real for you and the other part is a kind of abstract fantasy.
And of course, people on both sides start to have lots of interpretations and stories and fantasies
about the people on the other side.
What is meant by ‘ignorance’?
So, ignorance is very important to understand. In Sanskrit we say avidya, or in Tibetan, ma

rigpa. In both of these, you have the negation of rigpa, or awareness. So, it means ‘not knowing’.
Of course, the fact that we don't know something doesn't mean its not happening. This is
important in terms of how you understand awakening; because if you think that awakening is
some kind of cognitive event, that you will get some special knowledge, then ‘not knowing’
becomes something to be removed. For example, say I go out walking in Hamburg this evening. I
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don't know Hamburg and I don't know Germany. I wouldn’t know where I was. Even if
somebody told me the name of the street it wouldn’t mean anything to me. It would mean
something to the person who was saying it but even if they repeated it three or four times it still
wouldn’t mean anything to me. The fact that I don't know where I am doesn't mean that I don't
exist. I am still having an experience.
Do you see the difference? Not knowing doesn't bring about a fundamental ontological shift
because the key thing is that I can still be myself, even though I don't know where I am. I might
know a lot about the streets of Hamburg and yet be very alienated from myself. So, ‘not
knowing’ is the absence of a conscious integrating overview of what is going on. In the absence
of that we create a non‐integrating overview of what is going on, which is the story of samsara.
We start to tell lots of stories out of all the ingredients we find around us in order to create a
kind of nest that we can sit in. But the meaning and value of this nest is not profound, because
we have lost, so to speak, the existential ground of our being.
So we have this kind of nest made out of all these kinds of things you can find around you—
some belief system in this or that. Some people might say the most important thing in life is
football—in that way you make a nest. These nests, whether they are made out of football, hard
work, drinking alcohol, home‐making, whatever they are made of, these nests have a relative
function, but they don't connect you with the ground, with your own nature.
So, ignoring is not like what happens when schoolchildren quarrel and one child ignores the
other. Ignoring doesn’t mean that you’re not attending to your own nature. Your own nature is
there. It’s not that you are trying very hard not to see your own nature; Ignoring is that you are
attending to other things.
That is what is meant when buddhism refers to attachment. It doesn't mean that you are
greedily holding onto things. It means that you are preoccupied with a particular level of
interaction. So if you look at one thing and it holds your interest, it means a lot for you. For
example, children like to have computer games and inside the computer game, everything is
very important. When the parent tells the child to stop playing and come to the dinner‐table, it’s
a no‐no. In terms of this computer game, they are very happy to follow all the rules so that they
get a very high score. But in terms of their house, they are not interested to follow any rules at
all!
This is selective attention and it is how samsara operates. That is to say, we say some things are
important and we put a lot of attention towards them; other things are not so important and we
don't put attention towards them. This is quite terrifying because every moment that we attend
to the activity of the world, we are not attending to ourselves. Since we were born and indeed
since we came in contact with the buddhadharma, how much time have we spent actually
observing our own mind? We don't see our own nature because we are so occupied looking at
what we do. This is what ignorance means—our ignoring. It’s not a lost stupid state; it’s an
active state of doing something else.
So activity, in terms of dzogchen, means whatever is occurring. Don't forget yourself. Don't fall
into objects in the world. Don't fall into fusion with thoughts, feelings and sensations. Maintain
the relaxed awareness, which reveals the non‐duality of subject and object as they integrate, as
illusory forms with the integration of emptiness and form. So what is important in this is not
that you change your behaviour nor that you do anything different, but that you don't blinker
yourself into activity, as if it was going to provide the answer. In the old days people put the
blinkers on a horse so that it just looked at the road. Don’t you be blinkered, don't over‐focus
into the activity and make it too important. No activity creates enlightenment therefore no
activity is so very important.
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Being present with whatever is occurring
The key point is to be present with whatever is occurring. That’s all. Nothing else. If you have an
unhappy marriage, you don't need a divorce to get enlightened. You can observe the nature of
disappointment: ‘I want this person to give me something that they can’t give me →If they were to
give me what I want, then I would be happy→It’s because they don't give me what I want that I am
unhappy.‘ You might then start to think ‘Oh that’s all a bit silly. Does it really matter?’ That’s an
important question, because in life there are many frustrations and disappointments.
Whenever you start out with a sense of entitlement—‘I should have a happy relationship, I should
make a lot of money, I should always be healthy, I should always have good friends’ and so on and
so on—you will always become disappointed.
Whatever comes, comes. This is very important. Here is the crossroads where either I try to improve
the object and work hard, or focus on the one who is the one having the experience. The path of
dzogchen is not to lose contact with the one who is having the experience. Remember the
mirror is not made happy by having beautiful things placed in front of it, nor spoiled by having
ugly things placed in front of it. Integrating everything into this natural state is the path, rather
than trying to change the nature of the content of experience. Every kind of experience can be
integrated because it is already integrated. Nothing is outside the mirror.
But if you imagine that you should be a big shiny buddha, always smiling, then this is a dharma
madness. I would imagine that the Karmapa and the Dalai Lama are unhappy sometimes. What’s
wrong with unhappiness? The Dalai Lama often looks rather sad and why wouldn't he be sad?
Does he stop being the Dalai Lama when he is sad? If he looks sad, is that a sign that he didn't do
any meditation that day? No, when sadness arises in the mind of the Dalai Lama, it is the same
mind in which happiness arises.
So buddhism is not about being masochistic, nor is it about trying to create good situations for
yourself, but rather, both difficult situations and good situations will come and go. This is the
movement of energy and nobody can stabilize it. In the history of Tibetan buddhism, there were
many wars and attacks and intrigues and so on. Also poison was very popular in Tibet. Many
lamas eat out of a special bowl, which will crack if someone puts poison in it.
Translator: No way!
James: Yes, poisoning used to be very common. Even nowadays poisoning still happens.
The purpose of saying this is just to remind ourselves that many things happen in the world.
There are no ‘always‐happy’ people. It just doesn't exist; that would be ridiculous. I never met
anyone who’s happy all the time. Happiness arises due to causes and conditions. It’s part of the
energy of the mind. The nature of the mind is open and clear like a mirror. Its not happy, it’s not
sad. It’s just open, clear, contented. That is to say it is not vibrating, not ruffled.
Translator: Due to causes and conditions …
James: Yes, happiness arises due to causes and conditions. It’s part of the energy of the
mind and therefore, it’s not going to be something stable; you cannot stabilize it. From the point
of view of meditation, it is very important to understand how the mind operates. From the point
of view of religion, it’s very nice to pray to go to Dewachen, where everybody’s happy all the
time.
So, now we come towards the end for today. And when you go out into the evening, think ‘Who
is walking down the street?’ Your consciousness is in your body. You can experience that since
your body is walking down the street and the street is in your mind. Just see if you can explore
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that. If you are talking with friends and start to feel a bit tense, relax into the out‐breath—the
environment and what you call ‘yourself’ have the same nature—and then the conversation
continues. Good.
[Break]
Meditation question: is there anything that endures through time?
Impermanence is probably the most basic and general teaching in buddhism. We have outer
impermanence, the changes of the seasons, the changes of economics, politics and so on. We
have the changes of our body through time. We have the changes of our body through the day.
We have the changes of our body moment to moment. Our seemingly internal and seemingly
external experiences are all impermanent. So when we meditate in this open way, stuff is
coming and going. Different kinds of thoughts, different kinds of feelings arise and then pass. Is
there anything fixed?
Is there anything that endures through time? This is what we have to explore. Often we have a
feeling that ‘I am still here’ or ‘this is me’. That focus of recognition of continuity of my personal
self is habitual. We’re used to it. The question is, is it actual? Perhaps it's just an illusion. An
illusion which, through its repetition, creates the sense that there is an enduring personal
identity.
After all, we have many different kinds of experience. We go from feeling hungry, to eating, and
then to feeling full. Each of these stages, when we give an account of it, that account is true for
the situation. So if I say ‘I am hungry,’ if that’s the case, it rings true. In a sense, it’s undeniable. I
may prepare some food and then ‘I am eating.’ Then, ‘I feel I’m full, I’m satisfied, I’m not hungry.’
The lived sense ‘I am hungry’ is now gone and is replaced in the continuity of my experience, by
the sense ‘I am full, I am satisfied.’ They are clearly different states. And these states have
implications for activity. If you are hungry, it takes you towards food; if you are full, it takes you
away from food. Yet, there is a link between them, which is the sense ‘I am.’ The ‘I am’ links each
moment of our experience.
‘I am’ is like an empty glass: you can put anything in it

The ‘I am’ is like an empty glass. Because the glass is empty, you can put anything you want in it.
If the glass already has something in it, then there is a limitation of what you can put in it. So we
fill the glass with ‘I am hungry,’ and then when we eat the food, the glass empties of the ‘I am
hungry,’ and fills up with the ‘I am eating.’ And then it fills up with the ‘I am full,’ because the ‘I
am eating’ has gone out of the glass. When each of these experiences was there, we were filled
with them, like a glass being filled up with water, or milk, or wine, or whatever. It is the
emptiness of ‘I am’ which makes it so useful. I am nothing: ‘nothing’ in the buddhist sense of
nothing. It is the emptiness of our self which allows us to be filled with the many, many things,
just as it is the emptiness of the mirror—the fact that the mirror has no fixed content—that
allows the mirror to be filled with reflection after reflection.
So, when we sit and meditate, thoughts feelings, sensations are always coming. In this kind of
practice we are not trying to interfere or block that in any way. But what we want to explore is
what is the nature of this ‘I am?’ Can we see directly the impermanence of the phenomena, the
way in which the ‘I am’ is receiving what is occurring, without being mixed in it?
Because this glass is made of glass it is very useful. Glass is easy to clean and it has a very fine,
smooth surface so it doesn't absorb very much. If this container were made out of paper it
would be very different, because, if you put some milk into the glass, then poured the milk out of
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the glass, then put in some red wine, it wouldn’t taste quite right, because there would be a
remnant or a trace of the previous experience left inside.
So the central function of meditation is to have a clean glass, so that each moment of experience
is fully what it is, without being contaminated by aspects of the past, or even aspects of the
future. So you might think ‘Oh no, I put petrol in the wine glass. I'll never get that out, I'm stuck.’ In
this way we move across the three times, linking the past and the future, into a kind of complex
filling of the glass. But if you stay present with the moment that is arising and you offer it full
hospitality, it will go through, because the hospitality is like the glass, like the sky. Many things
pass through the space which is above us, airplanes, clouds, birds, explosions; all kind of things
happen in the sky and then after a while, they don’t leave a trace. The trace comes from one
arising mixing with another arising. Say you have a thought, and then another thought arises as
a judgment on the first thought. The first thought was just about to go, when the policeman says,
‘One moment, what are you doing? Show me your identity card’, and in that way, the second
thought was holding onto the first thought. Both of these are inside the glass but you now have
something complex.
So the continuity of experience through time is both the ceaseless display of completed
moments, like the reflection in the mirror, and simultaneously, the linked 1 to 2 to 3 to 4
sequencing of thoughts, which don’t quite separate from each other. So particularly in
meditation we can feel directly or see that we have a sense of a fixed point of reference: that this
is happening ‘to me’. This sense of ‘to me’, or ‘I am having this,’ feels like the unchanging
container, like the glass, but it is actually a content, it is something in the glass.
Here you can see the difference between ego and awareness. The ego is an ongoing movement
of self‐referencing thought, feeling and sensation which claims for itself a status of the
permanent site of identity. In that sense it is an illusion—something which is built up of a whole
sequence of moments is claiming that each of these moments refers to some permanent
substance. But if you think back to this earlier example of ‘I am hungry’ and ‘I am full’, these are
very different in terms of the body. In terms of the internal proprioception they are also very
different. In terms of feeling they are different and in terms of associated thought they are very
different.
The only thing that seemingly keeps them in the same family is this ‘I am.’ It is the emptiness of
the ‘I am’ that allows them to be linked but the illusion is that in saying ‘I am’, we seem to be
referring to some substantial thing which is fixed inside us. From one point of view, you may
say, ‘Everything is just an illusion, a sequence of empty reflections, moving across this infinite
mirror of awareness’, and indeed, this is the key point to awaken to in the meditation. However
it’s not just illusion, because it’s a shared illusion, in which we take our place as energetic
formations with other people.
So—I am speaking and you are listening. These are energetic movements. Who is the one who is
speaking? I reveal to myself the fact that I am the one who is speaking. That’s to say, it’s by being
aware that I am speaking, that I know that I am speaking. I am not inside myself, pushing words
out of my mouth. I don’t have an essence, like a little homunculus in my heart, pushing all the
words out. That is to say, ‘I am speaking’ comes into existence in the act of speaking. If I think I
am going to speak, and wonder what will I say, that creates a kind of artificiality. That’s why
many people experience conferences as very boring—people have already prepared what they
are going to say and then they read out what they are going to say. Whereas now, I don’t know
what I am going to say, I am just speaking and I am speaking to you. So when I am speaking, I
look around; I look at the people and I speak to the people. There is no fixed self, inside, with an
agenda to say something.
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My speaking and your listening is a co‐emergent gesture, it’s a joint gesture. If we stay with that,
then the centre of our existence moves, in an energetic sense, out of ourselves. Imagine a kind of
infinity loop that is moving, like a number 8. Something arises in me and goes out
and meets your awareness and goes into you and comes back; there is this pulsation of
experience between us. It’s the non‐fixation of ourselves that allows life to happen.
It is very tragic when a person develops a condition like an obsessive compulsive disorder
because the demand say, ‘that I wash my hands again’, can’t be interrupted by anyone. The
person is so preoccupied with an idea that it comes to dominate their experience. Sometimes
children around the ages of six or seven become very, very full of words and they want to tell
stories again and again. We often find it difficult to listen while the child is exploring the fullness
of their imagination inventing so many things. It can take us quite a while to realize that we
have to empty ourselves in order to listen, which means letting go of our narcissistic
preoccupation.
Remember the story of Narcissus? One day he is out with his friends; he is out hunting and he
gets thirsty so he goes to this little pond and as he bends down to drink some water he sees this
beautiful person. He’s completely captured; he is mesmerized, enchanted. ‘I only have eyes for
you.’ His friends say ‘Come on, let’s go!’ Narcissus replies ‘No, no, this here is the best thing.’
Eventually his friends leave him and the only person remaining is Echo. Echo has been punished
by the gods, so that the only thing she can do is repeat the last few words of what someone said.
So narcissism is the state where we are captured by a fixated image of our own place. We lose
our flexibility, the possibility of being many different things, with, and for, many different
people.
How the sense of ‘I am’ then becomes my security

Small children often develop a relationship with an inanimate object, piece of cloth, or a doll, a
toy, which is their place of comfort or support. This object can be a very positive object but it
can also be a very negative object. It can be chewed, hit, thrown down, picked up again; it
becomes a place in which many emotions are expressed. The psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott
named this a ‘transitional object’, an object which helps a transition. It’s an object that the child
uses to help it separate from its fixation on the mother, to enable it to move out. Perhaps the
child has a sleepover at a friend’s house and they must take their little teddy bear with them. If
they don’t have that, it’s gonna be bad… And then after some time, the child is not using such an
object anymore. This is a similar idea to what the Buddha meant when he said that you when get
to the riverbank, make use of your boat to cross the river, but once you have reached the other
side, then leave the boat there. You don’t have to carry it with you.
What actually happens is much more difficult because when I put it away this external object—
which I carry with me all the time and which is very important with me—I transfer its function
to something else. I transfer it into the internal object, ‘I am.’ So the sense of ‘I am’ becomes my
security: I know who I am because I can say things about myself. And so, we have a reassuring
self‐reference to an object that becomes invested with great emotional, symbolic significance.
Around this sense of ‘I am’, we accrete shame and guilt. This can operate so that we don’t want
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to know something about ourselves, or we might be able to know something about ourselves
and even say something about ourselves, but if someone else says exactly the same thing about
us, we don’t like it at all. Let’s say I am fat, but if you tell me I am fat, then how dare you!
Why is this? Because when I say it, I can feel like a subject, I can manage that aspect of myself
and I can have some story about how maybe I can lose weight, or this or that. But if you say it,
it’s as if I have become an object. I have become defined by you. Most of us, in childhood, had
quite a few experiences of being shamed. When we are shamed, we move from being a living
subject, at ease, part of the world, to diminishing and shrinking and being turned into an object,
perhaps even an object which can no longer survive. Hence we dissociate and vanish
somewhere else.
In meditation, these habits become more visible. I exist as a subject and I exist as an object. I can
attack myself. I can say ‘Oh, you’re so stupid.’ Most of us have that kind of harsh, critical voice
inside us. And, when we are criticizing our self, it is as if our self is a thing, which can be
described and defined and completely known. Some thought or memory arises, and then
following it, the critic pounces and attacks it. This generates a feeling of shrinking, or remorse
and one is in a particular position for a while and then something else happens... Each of these
was a moment arising and passing, like a cloud forming and vanishing in the sky. But, when we
attack ourselves—‘Oh God, I’m so stupid’—the intensity of the expression generates an excess of
value, a reaffirmation, a reinforcement of the felt sense that ‘I am a thing’. It is this thing‐ness
which inhabits the floor of our experience, that is the basis of attachment, because, the notion
that I am a thing immediately gives me a territory to be protected.
For example, if I go out in the break and look for my shoes and find that they have vanished, I
might say, ‘Oh. My shoes are not there’. That may lead to some difficulty since today is Sunday
and I would need to find a shoe shop that is open on a Sunday. That’s a practical problem.
However probably somebody could lend me a pair of shoes to wear back to London. But if we
imagine the emotional feeling of ‘My shoes are missing’ it’s feels as if some violence has been
done to me ‘Why would anyone take my shoes? This is crazy, I don’t understand it.’ So there is an
arising of energy. The feeling might be, ‘I just want my life to carry on as before but things are
going wrong all the time. Stop it! I’ve had it up to here! I don’t need anything more.’
We often have that sense, the sense that we are like a balloon and that the world is blowing and
blowing and that we feel we’re going to burst, to pop. So, the glass can fill and empty, fill and
empty, but the balloon is very different. This thin membrane of the self starts to vibrate when
too much is going on, too much is happening to me. The outer practical problems of the world,
difficult as many of them are, can be addressed: either some method will be found or we will die.
But it’s this territory of vibration, like pulling an elastic band and then twanging it with your
finger… the tighter you pull it, the louder the vibration can become. This is a quality of self‐
reference. In saying ‘I am thirsty,’—instead of it being a simple communicative gesture into the
world, a description, something which can be solved quite simply—it becomes an affirmation
that there is somebody inside who is experiencing this, somebody who feels vulnerable. ‘I don’t
want to be thirsty, I shouldn’t be thirsty!’ and so there is a sense of contraction, of being under
attack, of the need to defend.
In the meditation we can observe directly how the impermanent, transient movement of a
thought acts as the maintainer of the illusion of a fixed sense of a specific personal self. Because
this is really the point where you can see the beginning of samsara—of how something which is
not the case is taken to be the case.
An example used by both hindus and buddhists is of a rope being mistaken for a snake. On a
dark night, remember this is in India before they had electricity, you are walking home and you
see a snake lying on the road. But actually it’s a rope. You mistake the rope for a snake. But
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because you see a snake, you become afraid. Will the snake bite me? The snake will not bite you,
because it’s a rope.
In the same way, in our mental functioning, we misidentify what is a transient experience, what
is the movement of a reflection. We mistake it for something solid and substantially real. So
what do you we have to do to take the snake‐ness out of the rope? Nothing. Nothing at all. This
is why purification practices can be a bit problematic. The rope has never been a snake; the rope
is just a rope. The fantasy that it is a snake has not made it a snake. And so there is no snake.
C R Lama’s story of two brothers

My teacher, Chimed Rigdzin Rinpoche, said to me that it’s like two brothers: one is asleep in bed
having a nightmare and the other is awake. The one who is sleeping is imagining all kind of
terrible things are happening, but the other brother can see that he is asleep, safe in his own
bed. When we wake up where we are, we find we haven’t been anywhere, except in illusion.
Similarly awareness itself has never been contaminated, or mixed up with, or confused with any
of the events of our life. And all the events of our life so far, have gone. When we remember
them, they come back to us and we can tell some stories about them, but we can’t go back into
the past.
Today is Sunday morning; we met first on Friday evening. That has vanished, then Saturday
morning, Saturday afternoon. Each moment that we are here together is vanishing as soon as it
arises. “As soon as we’re here, we disappear, like dragonflies”, sang Eddi Reader. We can make a
story, which seems to have some continuity but this also is vanishing as soon as you say,
‘everything is always vanishing’. This is the natural self‐liberation of all phenomena. Nothing
remains. But nothing came into existence. That doesn’t mean there is nothing at all, for we are
here. Each of us is appearance and emptiness. Knowing this, we could be a little bit happier. It’s
not solid, it’s not real, and it’s not so serious. And also, because it’s illusion, we can be more
flexible. All our fixed positions are only habits. Whether we are shy, or a bit frightened, or very
eager, or bossy, or whatever our particular character traits are, these are just habits built up in
time, they have no solidity to them.
C R Lama on ‘people with broken hands’

So, the activity in dzogchen is to allow ourselves to be whatever is required by the situation. My
teacher, C R Lama, often said to me that he liked people but there was one kind of person he
didn’t like and that was people with broken hands, meaning people who don’t do anything.
People who never see what has to be done and just do it. It’s that being connected world and
just doing what needs to be done that is the energetic basis of non duality. And was not talking
about a kind of needy driven‐ness or a guilty driven‐ness, not like that. He meant not sitting
back in yourself and just kind of observing.
The time for observing is in meditation. But when we bring the meditation into the world, it is
the time for participation, which is to say, being a part of the world. We are already in the world.
This is our world. so if we attend to the world, we will flow into activity. There is a space, there
is something that needs to be done, and we just do it. Then life can be easier because you don’t
have to think and work out what to do.
[Break]
Meditation question: who is the one having this experience?

P a g e | 33
Another aspect of the meditation is to take up an inquiry into ‘who is the one who is having this
experience?’ or in other words, ‘where does the mind rest?’ We have just been looking into our
=tendency to create a sense of a continuous personal self. Thus, when we’re sitting in practice,
thoughts and feelings are arising and they are arising for us. We’re not dead, so there is
experience. Who is the experiencer?
One aspect of the experiencer seems to be the thought that responds to the previous experience,
a thought which has a subject‐side quality to it. Maybe a thought arises of something you have to
do tomorrow. There’s a sense of intentionality or necessity about the activity. The thought has
something to do with me. ‘It’s my life.’ If you fall into that thought, it seems to be self‐proving
that it’s referring to ‘me’.
We want to look very precisely at who is the one who is having this experience? The slick
answer, of course, is ‘I am’, which is the intelligent form of stupidity, since it seems to tell the
truth while actually telling a big lie. It’s the bouncer or doorman in Club Nirvana and you’ll
never get in, because this claim that ‘I am this substantial something’, looks clear but really is
dumb. It’s very tricky. So, stay with the observing despite the habit to go into the fusion with the
familiar answer. That is to say, stay with the questions and do not fall into the answer.
Staying with the question means we don’t know and there’s an uncertainty that can go with that.
We’re putting into question the assumptions that we have been living in and with for a long
time. Sometimes this can become very disturbing and then we might soothe ourselves with
comforting ideas such as, ‘I know how it is, I know who I am’ thereby letting a familiar stream of
thoughts continue. Often when people have spent a lot of time in prison they become so used to
being in prison that when they come out, they commit another small offense just to get back
inside. It’s like that. There is a comfort in familiarity, even if it’s not very helpful.
For example, if we’ve had the experience of being overwhelmed by life, it’s not uncommon to
seek a powerful antidote to the feeling that we can’t cope. Teenagers who’ve had a difficult time
at home, might start intense behaviours which might provide a moment of relief, a
transformative experience, a sense of control. Of course they then have to deal with the
consequences but in the moment of the intense action it appeared to be an absolute necessity.
So again, it’s like blinkers coming on. There’s a closure of the world and it appears that just this
thing is required. That might be elaborated in to a ritual, such as having a drink when you come
home from a hard day at work, ‘God, I needed that drink!’
You can identify such habits that you have built up to shift your mood. They operate like the
gear clutch in a car. You are going in one gear and you need to get into another gear and this
activity or substance allows that shift to occur. These are understandable human behaviours,
but again, they’re a kind of intelligent stupidity. They’re intelligent because they work in the
short term and are effective. But the consequences are not good since they narrow the range of
possibilities you have for dealing with a situation, so in that sense they’re stupid. Some people
say, ‘Don’t speak to me until I’ve had a cup of coffee and a cigarette.’ In a sense the person knows
how to manage their state, but it’s very narrow, very fixed.
The reason for giving theses examples about human interactive behaviour is to see that
something very similar happens in our thought processes when we meditate. The desire to
follow habitual patterns of mental activity is very strong. Some solution appeared to work in the
past so we think if we keep doing it, we’ll be okay. This sort of activity is going on all the time.
So, when we meditate, sitting, just very gently take up the inquiry ‘Where is my awareness? What
does it rest on? Does it have a fixed location?’ Whenever you seem to find a solution, whenever
you seem to find yourself being located in one precise place, look again and see if the same
solution is available to you. Some arisings may seem intensely real and intensely true, yet they
P a g e | 34
are not, since they don’t endure in time. If you think back in your life, when you were a child
there were many things you were attached you that you’ve lost touch with now, maybe your
first bicycle, some toys. You don’t even know where they are now but when you were a child,
they were so important and such a part of your life.
That is to say, we’re good at identification; we’re good at investing objects with particular
significance. We’re good at believing in things. But in this meditation, we’re trying to examine
what is the truth of what we believe in. So we look and if we come to a conclusion, we look
again. And we look again. We do this again and again until we get, for ourselves, a direct, clear
understanding of the relation of thoughts to awareness—that thoughts and awareness are very
close but that they’re not the same.
Thoughts stand to awareness the way a reflection stands to a mirror. Thoughts:awareness =

reflection:mirror. The thing about ego‐focused thoughts, or self‐referential thoughts, is that they
claim to be the mirror. They claim to be awareness when in fact they are reflections. There’s
nothing wrong with being a reflection. If a reflection is a reflection, that’s exactly what it should
be. But if it claims to be the mirror, that’s where the problem is.
So, now let’s do some practice, reciting Aa three times.
Aa is the sound of emptiness itself. Imagine in the space in front of you, about two arms
distance, a white letter Aa. You can imagine the Tibetan letter if you know it, or just a capital ‘A’.
Then recite Aa three times and, to release all your preoccupations all attachments and tensions
in the body, just let them flow out into the sound, while your gaze rests on this Aa. The letter Aa
represents the essence of all the teachers. When you’ve finished the sound, the letter Aa just
dissolves in space and you sit in this open state and then gently pick up the question.
If you look too strongly, then it's ‘I am looking for something,’ which creates its own problem
since it is a very dualistic way of looking. It's more like if you walk into the forest, and you come
to a little clearing, you stop and you just listen. Gradually you start to hear various things
moving in the forest. You're not listening for something in particular; you’re not straining your
ear. It’s an open, passive, receptive listening. In the same way, you are aware that some
something is occurring, some thoughts or feelings or sensations.
Who is this happening to? Who is the one having this experience?
[Three Aa and Practice]
If you are interested and can make the time, this is an important thing to do regularly. At first
it’s better to do for ten minutes, fifteen minutes because you want to bring the optimal, fresh
clarity; then you can extend it until you sit for as long as you can. Again and again ‘What is this
ground that I’m standing on?’ ‘Where does the mind come from’ ‘My presence or my awareness is
here. Has something produced it, has something brought it into being?’
P a g e | 35
Meditation question: does the mind move?
You can also enquire ‘Does the mind go anywhere?’ When we merge in with a thought and go off
on a sequence of mental events, it often seems as if it's taking us on a journey across time, and
maybe space. If we find ourselves in a thought about going somewhere tomorrow, it’s almost as
if we are moving toward something. Or we may have the sense of a thought moving across our
mind. The thought seems to carry us, in the sense that if you suddenly remember something
problematic and stay in that, it will take you into a state of some doubt or anxiety or depression.
But does the mind itself move? That’s the thing to observe. Am I going somewhere? Everyone
now think about where you had your meal last night. That place may be your own kitchen, may
be a café or something. Anyway, your mind has a very clear recollection, some sense of ‘Oh yes,
it's there.’ It's as if your mind goes into the kitchen and the kitchen goes into your mind. Does
that seem to fit with your experience? That’s interesting, isn’t it, that you can, as it were, visit
places in your mind. Some forms of psychotherapy use guided fantasy whereby you go to a place
of safety and so on.
In tantric practice you can visualize a Tara or Padmasambhava or Chenrezig and you go into
their mandala, go to their buddha realm. You may have read this famous Dechen Monlam prayer
by Raga Asye for being born in Dewachen. In that prayer gives a great description of what life is
like in Dewachen. When you imagine all the things he describes, it is as if you have gone
somewhere else. But who has gone? Or if you’re watching a movie or you’re reading a novel, you
get caught up in it. The characters in the novel can come to have some emotional importance for
you. If the writer has managed to create a good character it's as if you get inside their life. Their
life becomes meaningful for you.
Who’s the one who’s doing this? Is your mind going into there?
When you read a novel, and you think ‘Oh that’s terrible’, that feeling that it's terrible is like the
traditional example of mistaking the rope for the snake. Books are made of pieces of paper with
little black marks on them. Your mind is creating the novel. Whoever wrote the book has
created something, but without your active participation as a reader, the novel will not be clear.
And your experience of reading that novel will be different than anyone else’s. The one who
reads the novel is the activity of the mind. This is a patterning of mental energy.
Likewise when you are doing a visualization practice, and in an instant you become
Padmasambhava, this is your imagination, that is to say, it is a quality of mental energy. We start
to have a sense of the hat, of the robes, of the vajra, the bell and so on. So clearly thoughts are
moving, mental activity is going on, but does the mind move?
Now I imagine I'm born in Dewachen, I’m born inside a lotus, but because I haven’t been very
good, my lotus hasn’t opened yet. I can hear all the sounds of happiness outside, but it’s like
being a child whose parents are having a party and you have to stay in your bed and not come
downstairs. Does the mind go to Dewachen? The mind doesn’t move. The thought creates the
sense of Dewachen. This is something that we need to experience, not just read the words about.
We have to look again and again for ourselves. ‘Does the mind move?’
Of course this is difficult because these are technical descriptions and different writers use
different words for these aspects of experience. In this context, ‘mind’ means ‘awareness’. It
doesn’t mean the movement of ordinary consciousness. We can sit again and observe both,
‘Does the mind seem to come from something, is it generated, created, delivered by anything?’ and
‘Does it seem to go anywhere?’
P a g e | 36
We can just start, relaxing into the out‐breath. Be present. In the dzogchen tradition we take
refuge in our own mind. Of course we generally take refuge in the buddha, the dharma and the
sangha; in the guru, the deva and the dakinis; and in the three kayas: dharmakaya,
sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. But of course, when we recite these things we are reciting
words and thereby developing a relation with some concepts in order to antidote other
concepts.
However to take refuge in our own mind—that is something direct. We have access to our own
mind; if we didn’t have a mind, we wouldn’t be here. But you can see what happens in the
meditation; we don’t take refuge in our own mind, we take refuge in our thoughts, our feelings
and our sensations. And they are very unreliable. The mind itself, the state of awareness, is
always present. So exploring how to take refuge in, or how to settle into, or how to rest in the
state of awareness, this is the central function of the practice.
[Break]
Integrating both observing and participating, in our meditation
Anthropology has developed the notion of participant observation, which means that the
anthropologist goes to the ‘tribe’ and by engaging in their cultural practices, gets a closer insight into
what the people are doing. If the anthropologist is only participating, they don’t see what all is going
on. If the anthropologist is only observing from a ‘held back’ position, they don’t quite understand
what all is going on. It is only revealed through actual engagement. The same idea is taken up by
psychotherapists. Similarly in meditation, we observe and we participate at the same time.
If I’m looking at you, the separation between us may bring a kind of clarity. And if I’m performing a
disciplined activity like playing the piano, or knitting, or walking in a mindful way, I can also observe
what I’m doing. But if are doing the practice and relax and allow the mind to move as it does, then
this is our existence, and so we don’t have a place apart from it to observe it, because this is me. So
we have to bring these two faculties, observation and participation, together.
Some of you may know the Tibetan notion of ‘rang‐bab’, or falling by itself, running free. The
example is a waterfall where the water is just tumbling down and going in different directions. We’re
not trying to correct what’s happening in the mind, in the energy of the mind, but just to stay
present with it, wherever it goes. We don’t have to move about to stay present with it because the
clarity of awareness is not like the light of a torch. If you have a torch, you have the source of the
light and then the light is going from the source out to a particular place. Rather, this light is diffuse.
Everywhere something occurs, and already we are there. Awareness is always present when
something is happening. It doesn’t have to move from A to B. So, in letting the mind run free, we
observe, but, as I say, it is our mind that is running free. So reactions will arise. Keep the reaction as
part of the flow.
This can be quite difficult, because it means that when I have a thought which I don’t like, maybe a
selfish thought, it can be followed by a judging thought. The selfish thought and the judging thought
are both valid, otherwise you would be saying it’s okay to be selfish but it’s not okay to be judging.
Whatever thought comes is okay. This may take you into territory that seems very wild and strange.
These thoughts are not going to do anything if you leave them in the space of the mind because
what gives thoughts energy is either ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’ And either of these responses will put
some energy into the earlier thought. But just accept it, it is what it is.
When we talk of a mandala it has five sections, representing the purification of the five poisons. You
don’t get the five wisdoms unless you have the five poisons. This is old‐fashioned Indian recycling:
‘collect your psychic crap and transform it into something useful’. What it means is that you have to
P a g e | 37
have the five poisons. Stupidity, in this context, means not that you’re not intelligent, but that
you’re caught up in assumptions. Aversion means trying to push away what you don’t like.
Attachment means hanging on to and trying to get more of what you do like. Pride means thinking
that you’re special. Jealousy means being anxious that you’re going to lose something that is
precious.
Out of these five root or basic poisons, all the different kinds of off‐balance behaviours arise. We
call them poisons, which might indicate that they’re not good and that we should get rid of them.
Say you spill some red wine on your new white tablecloth and get another cloth and try to rub it off.
Is that helpful? No. It’s the worst thing to do with that kind of stain. You can put some salt or white
wine on it and deal with it later. Sometimes when you’re trying to remove stains, the very effort of
trying to remove them rubs the difficult substance in further and makes the stain worse.
From the point of view of dzogchen, the best thing to do with the five poisons is to leave them
alone. Why? They have no energy of their own; they only have the energy that is invested in them.
Say you have a child who comes home from school and says a really rude word, like ‘Fuck’. As a
parent you have to think what to do with this. When the child heard this word in the playground
they picked up that it was a special kind of word. If the parent says ‘This is a terrible word, you must
never use this word’ this will often encourage the child to use it. It can be much more skilful to say
play it down, because if the child does not get any real reaction, the energy will go out of the word.
It’s the same way with the mind—the ego lives on a kind of excitement. Something has to always be
happening. The strong reactions that we have to what happens in our mind, create an extra charge
of energy which keeps the whole show running so being distressed at the contents of our own mind
is a way of fuelling the continuity of distressing elements in your own mind. For that reason,
whatever comes, whether it’s very free or very tight, very generous or very selfish, whatever comes,
just let it be there.
Each thought which may arise, is useful for something. So, in the Tibetan pantheon we have peaceful
and wrathful deities. There are male deities who are visualized with an erect penis and there are
female deities who are visualized with an open vagina. There are people holding all kind of weapons,
dancing in flames, Very peaceful beautiful deities. These are all ways of showing that purity—the
peace and purity of enlightenment—can also manifest in different forms, because compassion is a
gesture toward the situation of the other.
Even though we don’t like parts of ourselves, they might be useful in some situation. For example, I
have patients who are very generous to the point that they are compliant and always do what other
people want. I teach them how to be selfish. I get them to say ‘me first.’ Often they say, ‘But, I don’t
want “me first”. It’s good to help people.’ Yes, being a doormat can help people to clean their shoes
but in a very limited way it helps other people. If someone has the problem of being dominating and
controlling and selfish and you are very adaptive and compliant, then you will not be helping them
by doing what they want. Being a bit selfish and saying, ‘No, do it yourself’ might be a very helpful
challenge to the other person. So although generally we would say being selfish is bad, selfishness is
also useful under certain conditions.
From our limited position at the moment, from our personalities, we would probably pick a very
narrow range of the potential of our mind as being suitable for us to have which is why getting to
know the full range of possibilities is very helpful. For that reason it’s often said, ‘Don’t limit
yourself.’ The one who’s saying ‘I can’t do this,’ or ‘I shouldn’t do that’ is operating inside a particular
frame of reference which may be fine in terms of your outside behaviour, but inside the meditation,
we have to open up that limitation and allow whatever is there to be there.
P a g e | 38
Going back to this example of the snake and the rope, if the snake is killed, what dies? Nothing dies.
Because there never was a snake. In the same way, we have very strong ideas about the reality of
our thoughts. Say you have a thought about killing someone, followed by the thought, ‘That’s really
bad!’—it’s an illusion that it is really bad, because it’s not real, it’s a reflection. It has no self‐
substance. This is the central point.
If you take it as real, you will jump from here to there because you don’t want the bad things and
you want the good things. But there are no ‘things’. Everything is illusion. Wisdom is to see
everything is illusion; compassion is to act carefully and helpfully with beings who are trapped in the
illusion of believing that phenomena are real.
Just because you see everything is illusion doesn’t mean you can do what you like. Our actions have
consequences both for ourselves and for others. When we move towards others, we can see the
illusory nature, but act precisely within it, in terms of the other person’s manifest capacity. It’s
important to recognise this difference. In meditation we don’t apply any limit on the basis of our
own capacity, as we open to more and more hospitality towards whatever is occurring. But after the
meditation, in relation to other people, we limit ourselves according to their situation—not just by
doing what they want, but by acting in a way that doesn’t get us caught in their assumptions, and
doesn’t confirm their assumptions either.
Are there any questions?
Question about awareness

Question: Is it the awareness that sees thoughts? How can I discern whether this is awareness,
or not? How do I know?
James: Generally speaking, consciousness always takes an object. So, if you sitting quietly
and then suddenly a car comes by, you are aware of the ear consciousness in relation to the sound
of the car. Or maybe you are sitting quite comfortably at first and then you become aware of a pain
in your knee. Before you had the pain, you didn't have the knee. That is to say you were not
conscious of your knee, so it was as if it was not there. When the pain comes, the consciousness of
the knee comes. So, consciousness always requires an object, whether it's a sense consciousness, or
a mental consciousness.
Awareness doesn't require an object. For example a mirror in a dark room doesn't show anything,
although its capacity to show is not affected by the dark; it's always there. So if you have the
experience, when you are sitting, that there are no thoughts at all—if you are awake and you
haven't gone to unconscious—then there is a presence, but it is the presence of something without
form. That's one aspect of experience.
In the practices they talk about nyams, or mental experiences. There are three main nyams—clarity,
happiness and absence of thought. If we don't have any thoughts, we can feel very peaceful and it's
as if the problems have all been sorted. But this is a temporary situation, because it's the mind's
nature is to have something happening. So, without artificially making something happen, one can
just be present with the absence of thought. Because of course, as soon as you go into a reaction
about it, thinking ‘I have no thoughts’, or ‘Where are my thoughts?’, or ‘It's good not to have
thoughts’, then you already have a thought!
Let the thoughts go free. Awareness is already complete. This is the meaning of ‘dzogpa chenpo’, the
great completion. The awareness doesn't need any additional support or help from any kind of
thought. Whatever the mental state is, it doesn't add anything and it doesn't subtract anything. This
is why the texts often speak of being free of hope and fear. You’re not hoping that any special
P a g e | 39
thought or experience will save you and you're not frightened that any bad thing will happen, or that
you will lose what you've got.
Now we are near the end of this retreat so we will do our final sitting and then dedicate the merit.
[Practice]
Dedication of Merit
GE WA DI YI NYUR DU DAG
OR GYAN LA MA DRUB GYU NAE
DRO WA CHIG KYANG MA LU PA
DE YI SA LA GO PAR SHO
By this virtue may I quickly attain the glorious Guru's stage, then may I put all beings, without even
one exception, on that same stage!

Awake in Illusion

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Awake in Illusion

18‐20 February 2011

Transcribed by Anne Conn

Edited by Barbara Terris

www.simplybeing.co.uk © James Low

www.simplybeing.co.uk © James Low

By ‘illusion’, is meant that we experience things as if they were self­existing ... 2

www.simplybeing.co.uk © James Low

Okay, so if we just sit for a little while—

By ‘illusion’, is meant that we experience things as if they were self­existing

The content of our mind determines what we experience

The mind is always moving

Dzogchen and awareness

Wisdom and compassion

We arise in non­duality, we can neither make nor develop ourselves

Knowing about something is not the same as knowing directly

The practices of each of the nine yanas ‘rebrand’ our experience

Hinayana rebrands samsara as dangerous so that we take care

Example of making leather soft with butter

How the dzogchen method differs from other methods

awareness; I am everything—the immediate revelation of the non‐duality of what we take to be

Translator: Is the third one also called magnetising?

James: Yes, it can be.

Meditations which have, and do not have an intention

reality of what you attend to.

Like lambs in a field in spring

Translator: It’s not a lamb?

Question about being tired

Question: I feel sleepy but I don't want to sleep just now…

power of the focused energy of the subject to make something happen.

Okay, so we take a break now.

What is meant by ‘to awaken’?

What is meant by ‘ignorance’?

So, ignorance is very important to understand. In Sanskrit we say avidya, or in Tibetan, ma

Being present with whatever is occurring

Translator: Due to causes and conditions …

Meditation question: is there anything that endures through time?

‘I am’ is like an empty glass: you can put anything in it

How the sense of ‘I am’ then becomes my security

C R Lama’s story of two brothers

C R Lama on ‘people with broken hands’

Meditation question: who is the one having this experience?

Thoughts stand to awareness the way a reflection stands to a mirror. Thoughts:awareness =

So, now let’s do some practice, reciting Aa three times.

[Three Aa and Practice]

Meditation question: does the mind move?

Integrating both observing and participating, in our meditation

Are there any questions?

Question about awareness

OR GYAN LA MA DRUB GYU NAE

DRO WA CHIG KYANG MA LU PA

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By ‘illusion’, is meant that we experience things as if they were selfexisting ... 2

By ‘illusion’, is meant that we experience things as if they were selfexisting

We arise in nonduality, we can neither make nor develop ourselves