Transcending Madness

I always liked the quote, by Peter O'Toole from "The Ruling Class",
where someone asks him why he thinks
he's Jesus: "Because I find that when I pray I'm talking to myself."

The watcher

Noel

The Aspriration of Samantabhadra (which was mentioned by Khyentse Rinpoche at the seminar) talks about the realms (and klesha associated with them), i.e. "...may desirous beings not reject the longing of desire, nor accept the clinging of attachment. By relaxing cognition as it is, may their awareness take its seat. May they attain the wisdom of discrimination." --quote from Penetrating Wisdom

I guess the question is how does the watcher correspond to the 7th consciousness. I imagine that prajna, which is one of the 51 mental factors, has something to do with awareness taking its seat when the "watcher" relaxes for a moment. I think prajna sees the vastness.

Thrangu Rinpoche's book titled "Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom" has a section on the 7th consciousness that gives a different view of how the 7th works, you might find it interesting. One aspect of the 7th seems to be the energy or movement of mind and not just klesha activity.

June


 

The watcher

Noel

I also don't have the quote from Khyentse Rinpoche's talk, but my understanding (from CTR's teachings and from the Pramana teachings) is that there are two possibilities for a "watcher":

One is the self-awareness that experiences itself, experiences all that appears to the mind whether it is an outer experience or an inner experience (conceptual and non-conceptual). This self-awareness is non-dual. I think CTR called it the "abstract watcher". That self-awareness is part of the 6th consciousness as far as I can determine.

Then there is the "watcher" that is associated with the ego that is associated with the 7th (and 8th consciousness), that brings in the problems of duality and all the protective emotional reference points. CTR seemed to equate this "watcher" to the mind that is constantly judging and dealing with the duality of "good or bad", "right or wrong", "going for pleasure and avoiding pain".

This is one way the concept of a "watcher" can be looked at. The idea of a "watcher" being "recruited by the ego into its retinue" is an interesting thought that needs contemplation.

June

Where is the watcher?

I was intrigued by Dzongsar Rinpoche's pithy comments regarding "the watcher" and how ego can recruit it into its retinue.  Can someone give the exact quote?
Also, I am curious about where "the watcher" fits into mind.  It seems to correlate with the seventh consciousness, but I don't think I've seen this connection made explicitly.  Any thoughts or knowledge about this would be interesting...

Noel McLellan

Lean into our suffering

To Sally

Here is something I ran across on Ponlop Rinpoche's website which speaks to "leaning into our suffering":

Ponlop Rinpoche has suggested that we focus on one paramita each month (in addition to our other practices). According to Rinpoche, the Mahayana path and all the paramitas can be summarized into four main points: mindfulness (a stable mind), renunciation, bodhicitta, and the view of emptiness. Renunciation in the Mahayana means that we examine and lean into our suffering and fear (and the suffering and fear of others), rather than trying to avoid such unpleasantries.

June


 

Relative and Absolute Truths

I think that as long as one experiences duality, there is the idea of prayer and blessings that calls to something outside oneself. On the relative truth level, I think prayer or devotion is a skillful means to open to our true nature, our buddha nature.
On the ultimate level there is no duality and the experience of blessings and prayer could have a completely different meaning that involves compassion and wisdom.

June

prayer P.S.

Hi again,

I remembered the following quote from Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche, which
you may find of interest. It is from 1997 talks on Creation and
Completion, posted on the Shenpen Osel website www.shenpen-osel.org

"Supplication produces blessing, and although the blessing is understood
as something that is given to you, something that somehow engulfs you
from outside, in fact blessing really is not given to you at all. When
you supplicate, you generate faith and devotion. That faith and
devotion cause the appearance of what we call blessing", p. 31

Sally Walker

prayer

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments. The comments from June and Michael made the
most sense to me- of prayer being a kind of intermediate step in terms
of working with madness. Of course we all "pray" quite a bit, and
probably it is often odes get theistic for many of us. I just wanted to
see what people had to say on this. I agree we should recognize our
western tendencies but these days I find for myself it is also important
to always be on the lookout for spiritual materialism.

Cheers,

Sally

Transcending Madness Blog, re Prayer and Madness

Pray Tell?   We in the West, at least the United States and perhaps Europe, shy away from the mention of prayer, and rush at such propositions as "leaning into it".  We need that translation, but are the two in any way really any different?  In the same way that Tibetans do not hesitate for a moment to pray, we are enjoined not to hesitate, to "just do it!"  Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche once observed that he was curious about how Westerners shy away from the notion of prayer.  He said he and Tibetans never fail to pray fervently to Guru Rinpoche every single day of their lives. It was, consequently, refreshing to hear Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche use the word prayer.  At first one could think he was kidding, but he followed up immediately with his comment about the power of mantra.   Whether we acknowledge it or not, if we are practicing Vajrayana, and in particular Kye-ri, sadhana practice and mantra, we are devoting ourselves to prayer.  If we have devotion, the expression and experience of that is itself prayer. And if we long for devotion, that in itself is prayer, the invocation of devotion, guru yoga. Perhaps feeling overwhelmed by speed and madness is then the call to prayer, the crest of the wave which will carry the prayer to genuine connection, or recognition.  Such madness short circuits our hesitation. Chaos is extremely good prayer!   Of course we shy away from the mention of "prayer", given our flight from the Western Judeo-Christian notion of prayer, which reinforces the duality of prayer and the prayed to, and all the theistic implications that carries forth.  Yet prayer in the Dharma context, I would suggest, is the opposite (if there can be such thing as "opposite" in the discourse of nonduality)…it is the unhesitating leap into the fervent present moment, it is the inseparability of devotion and the guru's mind, "nowness". "Just do it!" Or, as the Vidyadhara suggested, we don't so much leap, but we find ourselves having leapt. Leap or lean, wherever you find yourself is the razor's edge, the cutting edge of prayer. So why hold back?   -Clarke Warren

Sally praying and leaning

Here's another angle. In order to lean, you need to be standing or sitting on something. That ground, which is (your own) strength or sanity, is what you have lost when you feel overwhelmed. Remembering the guru and opening to that (praying) is accessing that ground. Then you can lean rather then spin. If you can lean directly, the intermediate step is already taken care of.

Maybe I insist too much on ordering things. I'm sure others have some provocative takes on this.

Michael Chender

reply to Sally

Hi Sally

I think that Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche was giving advice to that specific person to "just pray". Sometimes "just praying" or saying the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra is a way to allow some "space" to the speed and madness that is going on in one's world (and in one's body, speech and mind).
Vidyadhara's approach to "leaning into the madness" is, in a way, the same kind of advice. When one leans into the madness, one can only meet with the spacious quality of the speed and madness rather then solidity of it. I think that the resistance to the speed and madness is what makes one feel overwhelmed.
What do you think?

June

question

Hi,

At Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche's recent teaching on transcending madness,
someone asked him how to deal with all the speed and madness around one
when you feel overwhelmed. He said something like, "To tell you the
truth, what I do is just pray". He talked a bit about the physical
impacts of saying the Om Mane Padme Hum mantra. I wanted to ask about
this approach in light of how the Vidyadhara taught us to lean right
into the madness. Does anyone out there have any comments on this?

Thanks,

Sally Walker

Allen's Park Seminar, Bardo, from Clarke Warren

The Bardo Teachings Created Their Own Environment   I haven't yet listened to the "Transcending Madness" seminar with Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche , but am looking forward to it with great relish, after having reread the book and listened to the "Let Loose" interview with Khyentse Rinpoche.  I too was present at the 1971 Allen's Park seminar on the Bardos.  After rereading Transcending Madness and being utterly amazed, I commented to some friends, "I wish I had been there, even though I was!"   To this day, whenever I drive by the camp in Allen's Park where the seminar was held, it stirs deep reverberations in me, as though I were cruising by Rajagriha, Vulture Peak Mountain. I was the assistant head cook and baker at the seminar, under Chuck Nowick.  There was great anticipation about this impending teaching with Trungpa Rinpoche, the first in-residence intensive seminar in Colorado. In retrospect, the environment of the seminar was in line with the subject matter of bardo.  There were little bardo-like experiences popping up often.    One night, David Bolduc convinced me to climb the mountain behind the camp with him and sleep out under the stars.  I had just recently saved enough to buy a good Eddie Bauer goose down mummy sleeping bag, which was my pride and joy.  When we reached the top of the mountain and bedded down for the night, it was too hot to stay zipped into my minus 20 degree bag.  But when I unzipped it for air, legions of mosquitoes moved in to feed on me.  It was a miserable night!  In addition, I had to wake up at 3:30 AM, as I was on kitchen duty to prepare breakfast for the entire seminar.  After hardly a wink, at 3:30 AM I packed my bag into its stuff sack, put it in my day pack, left David snoozing in his cooler bag, and made my way in the dark down a pathless forest maze of tangled stumps and fallen branches.  I had failed to bring a flashlight with me. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my sleeping bag had fallen out of my pack while bush whacking.  I panicked, and went running, weaving back up the hill.  I thought, "If I wait until daylight, maybe I can find the sleeping bag, but if I don't continue down the hill now, there will be no breakfast for everyone. What to do?" As I was utterly freaking out in this way, I tripped and fell. Everything seemed hopeless. I got back up and continued to wander furtively and aimlessly in the dark.  A few moments later, I realized that what I had tripped on was soft!  I turned back and groped around on hands and knees in the area I thought I had fallen in.  Then I found it, the sleeping bag I had tripped on!  I paused for a moment of utter exultation, and then continued straight down the hill to make breakfast for everyone.  It wasn't exactly finding the nature of my mind in the bardo, but maybe it was good practice! That afternoon, the teachings were particularly poignant.   Clarke Warren

THANK YOU

I just finished listening to Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche talks and had a fantastic experience filled with contemplation and laughter and many memories.  Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche is so entertaining with his generosity and clarity.  He goes so far out into space there is no other choice but to let go!  Sound familiar?

Many of the questions and familiar voices sounded thirsty, a yearning for Trungpa, or maybe that was just me.

Thank you for all your effort to put this together virtually as well as actually.
Sharing in the madness is fantastic!!!

-Hildy Maze

Rich offerings to explore

I was at the seminar in 1971 that constitutes the first part of Transcending Madness, but remember little of the specifics. It was a subject that the Vidyadhara emphasized in the first few years he taught in North America, but as far as I know, did not much come back to later. There is now a lot of material in English on the six bardos from different teachers, and I thought I had a reasonable understanding of the subject when I picked up Transcending Madness to prepare for Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche's seminar.

Wrong. I read it with Post-its in hand, and found I was averaging three to four a page; one that usually said something like "Wow!!!," and the other two or three that had some equivalent of "Huh?" A journey through the vivid moment-to-moment details of lived experience in the bone, with abrupt mind-twisting turns into a vast perspective. I read it several times and felt I was no closer to any graspable understanding, but I was having a great time.

It was a momentous occasion to see a teacher as accomplished and widely respected as Dzongsar Khyentse Rinoche take the Vidyadhara's material as a root text to comment on. To my hearing, Rinpoche commented on the text in two ways. One was by repeatedly expressing his appreciation for how "amazing" it was, how every sentence was full of profundity, how it should be read five times, and how the Vidyadhara's use of English gave Khyentse Rinpoche a greater understanding of what he himself had been taught in Tibetan.

And then, in his talks and long question periods, Rinpoche didn't so much comment directly on the details of the Vidyadhara's presentation, as present and demonstrate the principles of non-duality, innate wisdom, resting in the nature of mind and not taking yourself so seriously that are the background to understanding the Vidyadhara's material further.

So we have incredibly rich offerings to explore here. May it be of great benefit for ourselves and others!

Michael Chender

Allen's Park summer 1971

I hitch-hiked up to Rinpoche's house in Four Mile Canyon in early July 1971 to catch a ride up to the first summer seminar in Allens Park along the Continental Divide. I got a ride in the back of a truck delivering supplies with, among others, a tall colorful talkative fellow named Alan Marlowe who said he had just returned from Thailand where he had been practicing in a monastery as a Buddhist monk.


I have many vivid memories of those 10 days which were extremely formative in my 21-year-old life and emerging Buddhist path. Rinpoche's teachings were utterly unfathomable and equally captivating. Marv Ross was taping the talks, and immediately after each teaching I would listen to them with his headphones to try and comprehend what Rinpoche had just taught us. We also had discussion groups in the afternoons. But I was still utterly bewildered by the material (even though I had studied Kant and Hegel as a philosophy major at UCLA two years earlier).


Karma Dzong -- with Jonathan Eric's inheritance -- was about to purchase the land near Red Feather Lakes which Rinpoche soon christened Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (and Sakyong Mipham renamed Shambhala Mountain Center many years later). The Pygmies were planning to move up there later in the summer, and I planned to move there, too. There was some discussion about me camping with them in the mountains above Boulder until it was time to move up to "the land." But one of the Pygmy guys said it wouldn't work out because I was not deferential enough to men.


The camp at Allens Park had some horse stables, and one afternoon I decided to go riding. The horse bolted away up the mountain carrying me along with him. As we raced past Rinpoche's cabin Lady Diana came running out and yelled at me "Kick him! Control your horse!" I managed to stay upright, but it was a wild ride. A foreshadowing of things to come...


Chris Keyser

Berkeley, Calif.

From DJKR

I have chosen to say a few things about one of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's books, Transcending Madness. Besides the subject matter being very important, more importantly, I offer this in gratitude and appreciation towards Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's legacy of courage and wisdom. -Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche