the Path

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Ask yourself again and again, “What’s the goal here?”  If you are more interested in expressing your fundamental, uncontrived, primordial nature which is free of discrimination, free of that which is complete and that which has just begun, in a joyful, symphonic musical way with wings?  If you are more interested in giving flight to what is precious than in following a dogma or a religion or playing church, then you are going to be an excellent practitioner.

On the other hand, if you are interested in playing church and you have a time clock for this and it’s just a thing that you want to do, part of your life, then that will be the result.  If you practice religion only to make your life different, then you will have a different life, but if you practice wisdom and Bodhicitta in order to awaken, if you recognize everything as inseparable from you, if you are able to move into the posture of moving through the sacred as that which you are, as something precious, then I think you’ve got a shot at it.

That’s going to take you working at it and you’ve really got to determine this for yourself.  You have to build the marriage inside of you.  Don’t make the mistake that we make in ordinary marriages, waiting for the romance, hoping that the path will somehow woo you so that you can feel good about the path.  That’s not going to work.  It’s a lot deeper than that.

What I’m suggesting is that you really take this into your heart, really consider this, turn the page on a new kind of life.  You can start today.  Supposing you were never to take another bite of food into your mouth without offering the nourishment of that for the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings and giving thanks and realizing the divine, precious inseparable nature of that food.  Supposing taste for you became more like chameleon than yum, yum.  Think about that.

Supposing love and friendship became for you a holy sacrament rather than a way to fill your time.  Supposing the spiritual life became for you an expression of something that exists and fills your heart, rather than something that you’re doing in order to look a certain way.  You know you want this.  You know you want to feel it to the depth of your heart.

Why won’t you be your own best friend?  Take yourself by the hand and give birth to a truly spiritual life.  I don’t care if you call it Buddhism.  I do care that you practice compassion and Bodhicitta.  I do care that you awaken to the primordial wisdom nature.  I do care that you begin to understand the sublime nature and emptiness of self and all phenomena.  This I care about very much, but what you call it is up to you.  Call it love. It’s about really going for it, really taking it in until it’s yours and bonding with it.

Practicing the path the way we’ve practiced it is kind of like having a baby and putting it up for adoption and checking in on it every once in a while and  expecting to have the same kind of bonding and connection that you do with a child that you nursed with your own body and gave your own milk to and formed that kind of unbreakable connection with.  What a difference.

Don’t make spirituality in your life the bastard child.  Let it be your life.  Let you be that.  And of course you are.  You are the ground, the basis, the primordial wisdom nature.  You are the movement and display, which is also called method, and you are the result.  And it only seems like we’re on the path now because it seems like we are traveling toward the result, but in fact nothing is going anywhere.  You are not moving.  Nothing is far away from you and there is nothing to uncover or to build or to establish.  It is simply the precious awakening, and to truly live a spiritual life you must understand that this is your nature.

Transform your life into the sacred, the sacrament, the beauty that you long for as though it were an external thing, and I’m asking you to do it by 1 o’clock.  The reason why I’m naming this time is because it’s so simple.  It’s just as simple as what you’re doing now.  In fact, it’s much more simple, because what you’re doing now is feeling separate from the source, separate from your path, neurotic and needy.  And by 1 o’clock you could have that all fixed.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I’ll tell you something about myself which may sound odd, being as I’m sitting on this throne in the middle of this Buddhist mandala here. I’m not a religious person.  I do not like spiritual dogma!  I do not like religion as I see it practiced.  I wish that I had a more comfortable seat, but I have connection with this particular method and so that’s the display or form that it takes, but the underlying reality, the thing that wrenches my heart, and makes everything about my life without choice, is that I know no other way to live other than to see my life as an expression of my Nature.

I have watched myself throughout the course of my life.  I have made choices that are so difficult, but they were never about the spiritual.  I have moved on and I have left things and I have walked into things and I have done all kinds of stuff, but when it comes to the spiritual unfolding in my life, there has never been a choice about that.  In any event in my life, if I have had to choose continuing on with the expression of my Nature, this spiritual clay that is unfolding here, or engaging in some ordinary activity, which would not facilitate that sacred life, there has never been a choice.  I will always choose the sacred.

It’s not that I’m patting myself on the back, it’s just the way it is. I never have chosen and I think it’s because I’m not religious or dogmatic.  I don’t see religion as separate from me. I don’t see dogma as something I have to pick up and carry around.  I see my life as being innately spiritual and I see that there is no other way for me to express myself.

For each one of you I make the same recommendation, that you each find a way to experience that kind of intimacy with your spiritual life, to realize that you’re not doing anything or anybody a favor.  You are simply expressing what is true.  To try to find a way to understand that the ground or basis and the movement or method and the fruit or result are simply three faces of the same reality, and that reality is you.  There is nothing that you are doing here that is strange or exotic or unusual.  You are expressing your nature.  What else would you do?  Not express your nature?

Each one of us has to find a way to really get that for ourselves.  That’s your challenge, isn’t it?  Haven’t you as you’ve matured throughout the course of your life, as an older person or middle-aged person and, however old you are, haven’t you looked back at earlier times in your life and realized that you didn’t know how to really engage, that you were kind of absent, that there is a certain kind of absenteeism that we practice with when we are less mature in our lives.  Do you remember what it was like to be 15 to 18?  You haven’t yet grown a brain. And later on with maturity you realize, “Whoa!  I’m in my life!”  Later on it happens spiritually and it’s even more profound on a spiritual level.

When you’re a young practitioner you realized that in a somewhat unconscious way that you were simply trying to do what this Lama tells you and trying to do what the Buddha says.  You were just doing stuff.  But then, later on as you mature on the path, you begin to realize that there is something here that is like the amplification of your own voice or the rays of your own sun or some movement that is a natural display of your own nature.  You realize that there is a connectedness about the way that you lived.  You begin to move into the maturity of that.

On the path that is really necessary for us.  It requires that each one of us take responsibility in an individual way, not relying on the structure of the temple for this one to come to you; not relying on the capacity of the teacher to empower, deepen and ripen our minds; not relying on the Sangha to support you and give you that shot in the arm that we need all the time.  In the same way that you do when it comes time for you to marry on an ordinary level, you find what in you connects with that.  You begin to understand the union of this, begin to find how it is that you are a spiritual being and how it is that the path has appeared.  You begin to take responsibility for this connection, for this marriedness and it is not about vows and commitments to something outside.  It’s about walking in a sacred life as a person fully endowed with the natural capacity, the method and the potency of result in order to attain Buddhahood.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo