The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Tools to Deepen in Your Practice”
When it comes to gathering wisdom and to understanding the difference between wisdom and knowledge, knowledge would be all the facts that you absorb from your text or from reading or from your teacher or from tapes that you might have heardthat allow you to accomplish that ‘letting go of the senses.’ The actual opening the senses and relaxing them is like a hand. If my hand is like this, it’s around something; the shape is defined. And here in your meditation on emptiness, it’s more like this (Jetsunma relaxes the hand grip) and the hand is open. And while the hand is open, if it were possible to truly do this in a profound way, it would be like it says in the Guru Yoga generation stage in the Shower of Blessings: ”His great bliss flashes in the fundamental space of the five lights.” That’s it.
If you could really read and understand that line, that would be so good. “His great bliss flashes in the fundamental space of the five lights.” Well, what are the five lights? They are the senses. While we are considering them solid, we can name them and describe them. But it says here, “…the fundamental space of the five lights”. So the senses become ‘fundamental space’. The trick is that when we are not grasping and reacting, the natural state of bliss arises. And so here they’re talking about Guru Rinpoche, and they’re saying, “His great bliss flashes in the fundamental space of the five lights”. Such renunciation of the grasping of phenomena is implied in that line. Such renunciation. Such accomplishment. And true understanding of what the five senses are. Because like the light coming through the crystal, they all arise from the fundamental bliss that is our uncontrived primordial nature. That’s an amazing line. And of course, by going deeply into your practice, one would want to read again and again the different words that you are reciting in Tibetan in English, so that you can really understand what it is that you are doing.
So for a Tantric practitioner, it’s all about practicing the awareness of the fundamental sphere of truth that we habitually perceive as phenomena.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved
OH, Jetsunma. Thank you so much for this teaching. How amazing! What truth and wisdom you introduce to us. Following you I will practice.