Experiences Mahamudra

8/6/2019 Experiences Mahamudra

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The Dharma in Nature



The Lama of Appearances

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Experiences with Mahamudra

Notes from a Personal Journeyphotos and text

byMichael Erlewine




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Heart Center Publications

315 Marion AvenueBig Rapids, Michigan 49307

[email protected]

First Published 2009

© Michael Erlewine 2009/2010

ISBN 9781450526258All rights reserved. No part o this publiation may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any orm or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other-wise, without the prior written permsission o the publisher.

All photos taken by Michael Erlewine, © 2007-2010 Michael Erlewine

Cover, ormat, and graphic design by Michael Erlewine

Tis book is respectully dedicatedto

Venerable Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, Who introduced me to the true nature o the mind,

And to my good riend,Lama Karma Drodul,

Who pointed out to me the “Lama o Appearances “




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Acknowledgements

First I want to thank my wie Margaret or joining me on many o my tripsout into the world o nature and or helping me to carry equipment!

And thanks to my ather Ralph Erlewine or starting me out on photogra-phy back in 1954 with the loan o his Kodak Retina 2a camera.

Tanks to my photography mentors Stanley Livingston, John Shaw, TomHogan, and Björn Rörslett, and om Erlewine.

And nally, thanks to my our kids and riends or enjoying the photos andencouraging me to take more o them.


Experiences with Mahamudra

The Dharma of Meditation

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The Dharma in Naturerealization.

Te word “dharma” is slowly working its way into the Englishlanguage, but at this point mostpeople would have a tough timedening it. Originally “dharma”reerred to the teachings le by t hehistorical Buddha (and subsequentteachers), teachings meant topoint out the method or path or

us to achieve realization. Tatis the point o all the Buddhistteachings. Tereore the worddharma generally reers to the pathor means through which we candiscover the true nature o the mind- enlightenment.

Our personal dharma is the specicway or method that will work orus to gain realization, the particularsigns in the world around us thatwe can pick up on and throughwhich (by ollowing this path) wecan eventually reach realization.It has been said that there are84,000 dharmas or pathways to

enlightenment, and it is up to eacho us to discover our personal way to realization, our particular dharmapath. We have no choice. We can’treach realization except by someparticular path, and no one can doit or us. eachers don’t somehowenlighten us. We enlighten ourselvesand the guide or teacher is there to

Te Lama o Appearances

Tis book might have been calledsomething like “Zen and the Arto Nature Photography,” but I don’thappen to be a Zen practitioner.However, aer many years o working with a brilliant ibetanBuddhist teacher and Rinpoche,I did manage (with the aid o photography and nature) to get

a glimpse o recognition (notrealization, mind you) as to thetrue nature o the mind, and it wasnothing like I had led mysel toexpect all those years. Tat is why Iam writing this.

Tere may be some o you, likeme, whose expectations andimaginations are more o an obstacleto spiritual realization than a help.In act, our expectations can makeit almost impossible to have any realization. We think we know whatwe are supposed to be nding whenit comes to spiritual experience and(by denition) that is exactly w hat

we don’t know, and are tr ying tond out. For those olks, hearing my story might be useul.

Beore I relate that story, it isimportant to say at least somethingabout how appearances themselves,in particular natural phenomena or“Nature,” can assist us in our own




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The Dharma in Natureproess to teach the dharma. Someteachers know what they are talkingabout and some are only oolingthemselves and others. And even i we nd a good lama, the particulardharma or path that they teach may not be the right one or us. It may not work or us. It is written thatthe root lama or each o us (called‘sawi Lama’ in ibetan) is thatlama or guide that is actually able to

nally stop our endless wanderingby pointing out to us the true natureo the mind.

Tis, then, is the precious lama weeach are looking or. Yet the personalroot lama we need may not be easy to nd or may not be available inthe particular part o the world wehappen to live in. And teachers thatcannot actually guide us only wasteour time and urther distract usrom nding a workable path, whichbrings me to my main point, that o the “Lama o Appearances.”

Te word ‘lama’ has many meanings,

but here I am using it to reer tothose dharma practitioners withenough realization and experienceto serve as guides or the rest o us. In the Karma Kagyu lineageo ibetan Buddhism, someoneis called a ‘lama’ i they havecompleted the traditional 3-yearclosed retreat, which is a very

point out just how this can be done.

And our particular dharma, themeans through which we cannd realization, is everywherearound us and always has beenright here beore our eyes. Ourpersonal dharma path is present inthe busiest city as it is in the mostremote mountain cave, but due toour various obscurations we are notyet able to pick up on it. Accordingto Buddhists, each o us has beenwandering or innumerable lietimestrying to nd the path or dharmathat will work or us, the particularmethod that will lead to ullrealization. Yet up to this point wehave somehow managed not to seeit. We have been distracted in all t heother things we are doing instead.

Tere are thousands o booksand texts available in which thebasic nature o the dharma pathhas been careully laid out or usto understand and yet, even i wehave read them, we still have not

gotten it. And that is why greatdharma teachers are so precious.Tey are able to point out to us thetrue nature o the mind. In act,in ibetan Buddhism the namegiven to the very highest lamas is“Rinpoche,” which literally means:“Precious One.”

O course today there are many who




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The Dharma in Nature(3) Te Lama o Dharmadhatu

Tis reers to the nal goal or stateo realization, where the teacher orguide is the Dharmadhatu itsel andtrue nature o the mind itsel. I don’tknow very much about this orm o lama or guide. Te Dharmadhatureers to the realm o dharmas, thetrue nature o our mind.

(4) Te Lama o Appearances

And there is also what is called “TeLama o Appearances,” the lamao the natural world surroundingus. In other words, the world o appearances we nd ourselvesembedded in is also a perectreection o the dharma and canserve as a lama and guide to us inpointing out the dharma path, i we will just take notice and observecareully. Although all appearancesreect the reality o the dharma, Iam mainly talking here about theworld o nature that is as close asthe nearest parks, elds, woods, andstreams.

Nature is also a perect reectiono the mind itsel. All the truth astaught by the living lama or writtendown in the ancient dharma textsis also perectly readable in naturehersel. It is all the same text withthe same message, and pointingto the identical path or dharma.

rigorous practice.

It came as somewhat o a surpriseor me to nd out that there areother kinds o lamas aside rom theparticular root lama or personalguide, our main lineage lama. Inact, it is written and taught thatthere are actually our kinds o ‘lamas’ or guides to realization:

(1) Te Lama o Lineage

Te Lama o the our Lineage, theparticular school or approach toBuddhism to which we naturally belong, including our root lama.oday in ibetan Buddhism, thereare our popular lineages, theGelugpa, the Nyingma, the Sakya,and the Kagyu. Although all ourlineages share much in common,each o the our lineages has itsparticular approach or path. Forexample, I nd that I naturally ammost in tune with the Karma Kagyulineage.

(2) Te Lama o the Scriptures o

the SugatasTe extant teachings and textsthemselves are considered a lama.Tis “Lama o the Scriptures” reersto the dharma teachings themselvesas guides, the actual texts andinstructions le by the Buddha andhis enlightened ollowers.




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The Dharma in NatureFour Toughts Tat urn the Mind,”or simply the “Four Toughts.”And they are not some abstractphilosophical conundrums, but arethe very essence o practicality andcommon sense.

Te Four Toughts

(1) Tis human lie we have isprecious.

(2) Lie is impermanent and ragile.

(3) We are subject to karma. Every action or cause has an eect.

(4) Undependable. Our daily worldo business-as-usual is inherently unstable and can’t be gamed.

When I rst encountered the FourToughts I was amazed at how realand practical they are, just what Ihad always been thinking aboutanyway. For example, the rstthought about the preciousness o having a lie: I always elt t hat my liewas precious and I sure did not wantto waste it. I want to be put to good

use and or it to have a purpose.And impermanence, a thought thathas always been in the back o my mind whenever I can stand to think about it. Everything that is bornwill also die, and that includes me!How could I avoid coming to ter mswith that thought, at least once in awhile?

In other words, there are dierentlamas or guides, but only oneteaching that they all point out ortoward.

In act, while we are searching ora living lama that works or us, theworld o nature is always presentand is as clear and uninching asany teacher could be. Te message o the natural world and the message o the root lama are in truth the same.Let me give one example:

In all the lineages o ibetanBuddhism, there exist what arecalled the “Common Preliminaries“or “Four Toughts that urn theMind toward Dharma.” Tese ourthoughts have real power, or only they can turn our minds away romthe endless distractions o everyday lie and toward real dharma practice.

Tat is why these our preliminariesare the entrance gate or startingpoint to the dharma or many ormso Buddhist practice. And althoughthey are called ‘preliminaries’, they

are hardly only that, or awarenesso these our thoughts are alsoconsidered essential or the mostadvanced orms o meditation, suchas Mahamudra practice.

Te “Common Preliminaries” arealso called the “Four Toughts Taturn the Mind to the Dharma,” “Te




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The Dharma in Naturemy own. So my introduction tothe dharma was a welcome relie to the ear and trembling that my upbringing had instilled in meconcerning matters o aith andcertainty – this lie and what comesaer lie.

Since the our thoughts seemedmore or less obvious and naturalto me, I set about learning moreabout the dharma and its path. Andmy beginning meditation attemptsled to more advanced practicesand so on it went. wenty or thirty years o practice went by and Igradually moved along to moreand more advanced practices. Butit was not until I was introducedto Mahamudra meditation (saidby many to be the most advancedand sublime orm o meditationas practiced in the Karma KagyuLineage) that I really encounteredthe Four Toughts again, and headon at that.

O course, I never orgot about

the Four Toughts, anymore thanI could orget about my eventualdeath or my wish to have my lieused or a good purpose. Yet they were mostly on the back burner,so to speak, while I was concernedwith these more “advanced” (or so Ithought) practices. When teachingson Mahamudra meditation

And, although perhaps less obviousthan the rst two thoughts or mewas the third thought relating tokarma. Now here is something I amstill learning about, that every actionI take will have a correspondingeect depending on my intentionand eort. I tend to be a slowlearner, and it takes me a long timeto examine the bad result again andagain, beore I nally am willing to

stop doing the action that causedit, especially when it comes to badeating or pleasure habits - whatever.

Te last o the our thoughts is thatthis world around us (the Buddhistcall it Samsara) is (by denition)inherently undependable. In otherwords, no matter how hard I try, Iwill never get all my ducks in a row,so to speak. I keep thinking that Iam clever enough to somehow gamethe system and have only the upsideand keep what I don’t like at arm’slength, but lie proves me wrongconsistently.

Aer having been raised Catholic,with Catholic school, Sunday school,and all o that (rules, warnings,threats, and admonitions),something as practical and naturalas the “Four Toughts” made perectsense to me, a breath o resh air.I was already well on the road tounderstanding these concepts on




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The Dharma in Naturethe good ortune to have ound amost qualied lama to work with.But I am not alone in that. KhenpoKarthar Rinpoche, the lama I haveworked with or the last 27 years,has many, many students aside romme, and that involves sharing histime, and no one o us has as muchace-to-ace time with Rinpoche aswe might like.

I am not complaining, only explaining. And the point o thiswhole story is that there is another

very qualied lama available to usall o the time, one that is expertat helping us to recognize the FourToughts and keep them everin mind, and that is the Lama o Appearances, particularly apparentin the world o nature. And nature isas near as your own backyard whereyou live; and the elds, st reams,meadows, and woods nearby.

And she is a ully qualied andmost-enlightened teacher!

Nowhere are the Four Toughts

more obviously and consistently pointed out than in Mother Nature.As the photos in this book hopeully point out, nature is beautiul. Andthat beauty is real beyond ourimagination. But the reality o impermanence, the results o causeand eect, and the preciousness o all lie are equally real in nature.

eventually came my way, the FourToughts were clearly presentednot just as preliminaries, but asessential to keep constantly in mindwhen approaching Mahamudrameditation.

In other words, the Four Toughtswere not something to simply touch upon and then move beyond.Te texts clearly point out that itis essential to keep t hese thoughtsully in mind (constantly) whenundertaking to practice Mahamudrameditation because they keep thingsreal and help to prevent our beingdistracted by everything going onaround us in lie.

So I discovered that in advancedmeditation (like in beginningmeditation), it is important to beaware that lie is precious (and so

very impermanent), that our every act will have results in proportionto our intent, and that try as wemay (like the able o t he princessand the pea), we will never quite get

comortable in lie, no matter howwe eather our nest. Not only arethe our thoughts important, butwithout them there is no advancedmeditation possible. But how tokeep these our thoughts always inmind? Tat is the question.

O course, nding a qualieddharma teacher is key, and I have




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The Dharma in Natureconcepts. How can somethingso sublime and beautiul be soterriying?

When we observe nature, we areobserving the Four Toughts clearly spelled out or us in stark black and white. Nature shows no mercy,and the law o cause and eect isinexorably exact down to the lastdetail when it comes to questionso lie and death. Lie is so precious

or many beings that it is hardly there or them but or an instant. Innature, impermanence is a stark act,not an abstract concept.

For me (and many people), it takessomething like a death in the amily or the death o a loved one toremind me o impermanence. Whensomething tragic happens in my lie,I come out o my orgetulness o how impermanent lie is, and eventhen usually only or a short time.I tend to wake up when somethingterric or striking happens to me.Otherwise, I kind o agree to orget

about impermanence, which I nd just too painul to remember all thetime.

Well, Nature is the cure or that, i we will but observe. Everywherein nature, the our thoughts areclearly demonstrated or all to see;impermanence, the preciousness o lie, action and result, and no real

Nature plays no avorites and shenever blinks. All you have to do isobserve. It is all careully laid out,written in reality, and as clear as any dharma text. Tere is no conusionabout the laws o nature. We don’tbreak them; they break us. Nature isa harsh mistress indeed.

Even a casual acquaintance withthe natural world takes one beyondsentimentality and into how thingsactually are, the reality. I you areemotional about all o this, thenobserving nature is an instant andprolonged heartbreak - all o t ime.Just look around you!

Te rst sentence rom almost every Buddhist teacher I have met is t hisone:

“All beings want to be happy and nobeing wants to suer.”

How simple and true! Every s entientbeing is struggling to be happy orat least content, just as we are, andno being enjoys suering. Tat is

how it is or all sentient beings. Mostanimals spend their entire liveslooking over their shoulder, terriedo being eaten, while at the sametime trying to nd enough ood toeat, oen another being. And yetNature is so peaceul and beautiulin appearance. Please connect thedots or me between these two




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The Dharma in Natureday tragedies that are played outall around us in the natural world.Te same rules apply to the humanworld, but we won’t go there justnow.

I am not going to drag out all o thepossible sentimental thoughts wecould share about how cruel natureis. Nature is a harsh mistress, to besure, but she is simply a reection o a reality that, while beautiul indeed,

is equally harsh, however much wemay like to dress it up and perumeit. Tat is not my point here.

Tis writing is not about gettingsentimental. It is about takingadvantage o these natural acts tohelp wake us up to the reality soclearly spelled out in nature. TeBook o Nature is a tough-loveread, or sure, but it is a real teacheravailable to each o us all the time.Impermanence is the smelling saltso the dharma, and we all couldstand a whi o it now and again. Acareul observation o nature can

provide that. Where and How

I don’t have to describe to you wherenature is or how to go about ndingit. Tere are thousands o booksand DVDs on nature, everythingrom eld guides on down topictorial coee table books. I will

resolution or permanent solution tolie. We just have to spend the timeand look around.

And Nature is a brilliant teacher.alk about equanimity! Nature isalways the same, always on the job,and she never pulls her punches.Nature tells it like it is, 24x7. But wedo have to actually take a look andnot turn away or inch at the hardspots. For example:

It is painul or me to walk on thetarmac o a road aer a rain andnd it covered with earthworms andslugs trying to get rom one side tothe other just as the Sun comes up.Te Sun will ry most o them toa crisp beore they ever reach theother side, and I can’t physically pick all o them up and move them tothe other side o t he road and saety.And some are even crawling in thedirection the road travels! Here arethese sentient beings struggling tolive like we all do, wiped out by adecision they made to cross that

road at sunup.Or the broken blue Robin’s egg onthe sidewalk, with the tiny birdalmost ready to hatch or still alive,and the cat or crow raiding thebird nests and eating the hatchlingswhile the parents scream and cando nothing to prevent it. Tere arecountless examples o the day-to-




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The Dharma in Natureit is sobering. Tere is nothing likea whi o impermanence to wakeme up to the benets o the dharmapractice.

It is so easy to get distracted in theday-to-day hustle and bustle o modern lie. I am swept away daily in a sea o distractions and it canbe difcult to remember to remindmysel o the Four Toughts, muchless manage to keep them in mind.

However, an hour spent alone innature can not only be rereshingin itsel but, more important, it canbring home to me clearly how thingsreally are. Tere is nothing quite likeseeing a beautiul buttery suddenly caught and eaten by a prayingmantis or other predator rightbeore my eyes. It is all right there,the surprise, the struggle, the dying– the whole thing. And the analogiesto my own lie does not escape me.

What happens on the small scale,in these mini worlds, also happensin our own world, and a quick trip

to nature can help to remind us o how the world actually works andpuncture some o the imaginary balloons we have oated. I don’tknow who it was who said thatmost o us walk around as i wewere immortal, with no t houghtto impermanence, but it is so true.Many o us have our lives set up so

say something about how I approachnature, which may be helpul.

Obviously, rst we have to go out innature. We don’t get the ull pictureby looking rom a mountain topor even by standing up. For bestresults, I have to get right down inthe middle o it, like: sit down. Finda sunny eld or meadow or a shady brook or woods and sit.

When I rst sit down, it usually takes some time beore I pick upon what is going on, and this romboth sides. On my side, I need toquiet down and just rest my mindenough to begin to see what is goingon around me. From nature’s side,my appearance probably stoppedeverything but the boldest crittersrom moving around, and it may take a while or everyone to resumetheir activities, but they do.

A good magniying glass can bea help, as much to urther slowyou down as to enlarge things.You will soon nd that there are

a wide variety o insects, spiders,amphibians, and sentient lie allaround you, not to mention owersand plants. And they all are eatingand being eaten, being born anddying, earlessly attacking othercreatures, and at the same timestruggling to escape being eatenthemselves. It is all right there, and

Th L f A Th Dh i N t




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The Dharma in Naturehere may make it easier or ot hersto have this recognition. And, any teeny-tiny part o what I write herethat is useul, I dedicate to all theBuddhas and Bodhisattvas, that they may urther assist all sentient beingsto become enlightened sooner thanlater.

Buddhism as a Philosophy

Growing up in Ann Arbor, home

to the University o Michiganmeant that I was exposed to acosmopolitan atmosphere rom anearly age. As early as the late 1950sI had read a smattering o Buddhistliterature, although my take on thedharma was that it was intellectual,something that, like Existentialism,we would stay up late at nighttalking about while drinking coeeand smoking cigarettes. In the 1960sI toyed with some more advanceddharma concepts and certainly played at bit at meditation, but it wasnot until the 1970s that I actually did any real practice, February o

1974 to be exact.Tis was the date that Chogyamrungpa Rinpoche came to AnnArbor to speak. I had read some o his books with great interest andwas eager to see him in person. Asit turned out, since ew people knewo him back then, I ended up as hischaueur or the weekend and the

as to careully avoid being remindedo our own morta lity.

It can be hard to nd a perectteacher to work with, and yet that iswhat we each have to nd to practiceVajrayana Buddhism. Finding ateacher that does not t you justwon’t work out. However, Nature isalways a perect teacher and a goodsubstitute until the human versioncomes along. You can’t get it all rom

books and you need the interactionthat comes with a living teacher, andNature is that. You can interact withNature, and she is unerring in herlessons, and more than good enoughuntil the real thing comes a long.With that said, here is my story.

My Experience withMahamudra

Tis is the story o how I managedto get a glimpse o the recognitiono the true nature o the mind. Iwrite it not to boast or show o,but because having had this initialrecognition, I immediately see howsimple it is and how all those yearsI had managed to look every whichway but loose in trying to see it. My wish is that something that I write

Th L f A Th Dh i N t




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The Dharma in NatureAnd o all the Buddhist teachings Ihave attended over the years sincethen, the yearly ten-day summerMahamudra intensive with KhenpoKarthar Rinpoche at KD has beenthe most striking and inuential.Te rst ten-day Mahamudrateaching was in 1989 and this yearly event (I have not missed a one) isnow going into its 22nd year in 2010.In addition, sandwiched somewhere

during that time were two years o intensive Mahamudra teachings andpractice with His Eminence ai SituRinpoche, one o the regents o theKarma Kagyu lineage.

Tis article is not an introductionto Mahamudra meditation,which I am not qualied to oer,but simply a recounting o my encounter with this prooundtechnique and its eects on mepersonally. Mahamudra meditationis considered the main orm o meditation and practice among theKarma Kagyu lineage o ibetanBuddhism.

As mentioned, I am not qualiedto teach or even introduce readersto the more advanced techniques o Mahamudra meditation. Here it willhave to be enough to simply say thatto learn Mahamudra meditation,one has to rst study it academically and then work with a qualied

designer o the poster or his publictalk.

Aer meeting rungpa at theairport, one o the rst things thatrungpa did aer getting into AnnArbor was to beckon me into a smallofce room and spend an hour or sopersonally teaching me to meditate,although he never mentioned theword and I had no idea what he wasshowing me. I was just very glad just

to be with him.

It was rungpa who rst pointedout to me (and to everyone I knew)that the Buddha always intendedthe dharma as a method or lie path,and not as something just to think about. In 1974, that was real news tome. From that year onward I triedto intensiy my study o the dharmaand learn to practice it. I was notall that successul at practice, butI continued to be attracted to thegreat tradition o ibetan Buddhism.

But it was not until 1983 that Iound my personal or root teacher,

the year that I met the Ven. KhenpoKarthar Rinpoche o Karma riyanaDharmachakra Monastery (KD)near Woodstock, New York. Tat’swhen I really became serious aboutdharma practice. Khenpo Rinpochewas the teacher I had alwaysdreamed about meeting and I havebeen working with him ever since.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Nature




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The Dharma in NatureI you have it, you know it.

Recognition

Because it IS a threshold event,recognizing the nature o themind has become a huge topic o speculation among those who readabout and are learning to practiceMahamudra, replete with wildexpectations and preconceptionsbased on the imaginations o those

who have never had the experience.Recognition o the mind is one o those experiences, as they say, thati you have any doubt whatsoeverabout your recognition, thenyou have not had it. Tis is a realarrogance stopper or most o us.I we are being honest, we knowwe have not had that experience,no matter how much we wish wehad. In the Zen tradition, thisrecognition is called “Kensho,”and they make just as much ussabout it as the ibetans. And mostimportant, our expectations andhopes about what that experience islike are perhaps the greatest barrierto having the experience itsel.

You can’t recognize the truenature o the mind many times,but only once. I you have to do itrepeatedly, then you are just having‘experiences’ o the mind, but havenot yet recognized anything. Tis isbecause ‘Recognition” is not some

teacher who can actually pointout to you (help you recognize)the true nature o the mind, aerwhich (i you grasp the p ointing outinstructions), you must diligently practice the Mahamudra techniques.Tis much inormation is readily available all over the Internet. Formysel, I have had a great deal o teachings on Mahamudra and havebeen well exposed to it academically,

which simply means I understandconceptually the basic concepts.

Academic or conceptualunderstanding o Mahamudraby itsel can never qualiy asrecognition, much less realization,which by denition is beyondthe reasoning mind. In a similar

vein, the many experiences that Ihave had that might be related toMahamudra, bits o illuminationor a day or part o a day, also arenot what Mahamudra is abouteither. While many or most ibetanBuddhist practices are designedor gradual progress toward

illumination (a smooth incline),Mahamudra practice has at least one

very clear speed bump right at thebeginning, and that is: recognizingthe true nature o the mind. Youeither have or you have not hadthat recognition; there is no “Well,maybe I have and maybe I haven’t.”





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The Dharma in Natureyour ante in, only the doorway toMahamudra practice. You literally cannot do Mahamudra practicewithout that initial recognition, so itis like the ring-pass-not or guardianon the threshold that the westernoccultists oen write about.

Practitioners like me can study and undertake most dharmapractices and work up a pretty goodsemblance o a successul practice.

We can certainly talk ourselves intobelieving we are going somewhereand perhaps others are impressedtoo. But this is why they call it“practice” and term the practices wedo “Preliminaries,” because they are

just that: prelims, qualiying exams,and a getting ready or the actualwork which has yet to begin.

Te en-Day Mahamudra Intensives

My teacher Khenpo KartharRinpoche had given what are calledthe “pointing out instructions”once beore at the yearly ten-day

Mahamudra teachings, but try as I might, I had ailed to graspwhat it was that actually was beingpointed out, and so my experienceremained largely conceptual. Iwas not able to actually practiceMahamudra because I had not yethad a glimpse o the true nature o my own mind, which, as mentioned,

kind o temporary experience,spiritual high, or loy state o mind,like many imagine. Recognition isnot enlightenment!

Instead, it is simply nally recognizing or seeing how the mindactually works or the rst time,

just as we might recognize an oldriend in a crowd or it is like one o those gure-ground paintings wheresuddenly you see the embedded

image. It is “recognition,” not atransport to some blissul state o enlightenment.

Enlightenment and the path towardit is what we begin to work toward AFTER recognition o the mind’strue nature. O course, there is noway or me to communicate thisproperly with words. However,I wish I had understood thisdistinction early on. It would havebeen a huge help.

As mentioned, ‘recognition’ islike gazing at those gure-groundpaintings; you can’t ake it. You can

give up looking, but either you seethe embedded image or you do not.You can memorize what you are toldyou should see, but nally you eitherrecognize the mind’s true nature oryou do not. And recognition is justthe beginning o real practice, notthe end or any kind o nal resultor stage. Tis is key. Recognition is





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The Dharma in Natureto such simple questions.

So I had heard this kind o presentation or years and in many ormats, and I always told mysel privately that ‘this’ particular kindo teaching was probably not orme. Either I didn’t get it at all or itwas too easy. I couldn’t tell, but Iknew the mind was not the colorblue. Perhaps some academicpundit delighted in answering

such questions, but it was the bestI could do to politely ignore thetemptation to be condescending o this approach. Is the mind red? O course it is not red. Te mind is notred! I not-so-patiently waited untilthis section was over and we couldhopeully get to some o the goodstu, something that would actually grab me.

But in Rinpoche’s presentation IWAS intrigued to learn that in ibet,when this approach was presented,monks would be given a questionsuch as “Is the mind red?” and thenasked to go o and think about it orthree entire days and nights, thencome back and give their answers,aer which they would be given asimilar question, but perhaps withthe color ‘green’, and this would goon or something like three months.Hmmm.

Hearing this troubled me, or monks

is a prerequisite (by denition) orMahamudra practice.

Ten at the ten-day Mahamudrateachings at KD monastery in2005, while studying a text by Karma Chagme Rinpoche called“Te Union o Mahamudra andDzogchen,” Khenpo KartharRinpoche again gave the pithinstructions, what are called the“pointing-out” instructions, the

instructions by and through whicha receptive student may be able torecognize the true nature o themind. Tese instructions were parto the actual text by Karma ChagmeRinpoche, which my teacher waspresenting and commenting on.

Analytical Meditation

O course, I had heard all thewords beore. I had been repeatedly exposed to what is called theAnalytical radition, the “MiddleWay” school, which is oenintroduced by asking the student toactually look at his or her own mind

and answer simple questions like “Isthe mind the color red?” or “Is themind the color blue?” Tis kind o talk had always been a super yawnor me, or it was obvious to methat the mind was not red or blue.What was this all I about? I couldnever understand why something asproound as Buddhism could resort





36 37

The Dharma in Naturesomething just a little dierent.Perhaps my habitual amiliarity withmy mind had not included actually looking at the mind itsel, although Iautomatically assumed I had already done that long ago, back when Ilearned to meditate.

And so, very slowly at rst (and notwithout some struggle), I actually began to make eorts to stoplooking outward at what was going

on around me, and turned and triedto look inward at the mind itsel.Tis was not easy.

O course I was already amiliarwith the little chatter-box inside my head, whoever it is that plans outmy day or me, saying things to melike, “It is almost time or lunch” or“You have a dentist appointmenttomorrow,” and so on. Whoeverthat inner person is, it is not really me, and I didn’t like him or ‘it’ very much. It is annoying and way toomuch o a nag. And it yammerson ceaselessly. So I began to atleast dierentiate mysel rom thatuptight narrator in my head. Tattalking voice was no riend o mine,

just not my kind o people.

And Rinpoche was asking that welook at whoever it is inside o us thatis looking at all the stu happeningoutside in the world. I guess thatwould be “me.” Now, this was a

(not to mention rinpoches) arenot oolish people. What on earthwas this all about I wondered, thisasking: what color is the mind? Andthis is no secret teaching; this sameMiddle Way approach has beentaught all over India or centuries.Anyway, I stopped trying to waitthis section out, and began to pay more attention to what Rinpochewas presenting. It took a while,but my take-away rom all o thisquestioning stu was that rinpochewas asking us to actually stopthinking academically about thisand simply go and look at our mindand see or ourselves i it was red orgreen or whatever the question was.And that very slowly began to sink in.

Look At the Mind

I meant no disrespect, but I hadnever beore ollowed Rinpoche’srequest to look at the mind to see i it was red or blue because I elt thequestion made no sense to me. YetI was also starting to pick up on theact that Rinpoche was asking us toget o our mental dus and actually make an eort to look at our ownmind, right there on the spot. I hado course always assumed I already knew my own mind. Aer all, I wasa dharma practitioner and it was‘my’ mind, but now I was hearing




pp

38 39

perhaps never been exercised beore.

And as silly as it seemed to me, Ieven began looking to see i my mind was red or some other color,whether my mind was located inmy head, my heart, or my belly, andso on. O course, the answers wereall negatives, just as I had alwaysthought, but in the process I wasup and walking around in there,getting to know the place a bit. And

so it went. Was that what Rinpochewanted us to do?

Where beore I had kind o mentally slept through this kindo questioning, now I was at leastgoing through the motions – gettingsome exercise. I was also ollowingthe instructions rom my teacher,which I had so conveniently ignoredup to that point because I thoughtthese questions went without asking.Instead, I was asking them again,doing what Rinpoche was requestingus to do. And that little bit o exercise began to open up doors orme.

It went on like this or days, asrinpoche very careully led us intoactually looking at our minds. I wasnally ollowing along. Tese simpleexercises, along with the act thatapparently by this time I had doneenough practice over the years orsomehow managed to accumulate

whole lot more difcult than justputting some distance between meand my internal narrator. When Itried to look at “who” in there wasdoing the looking at the outside, itor “I” just would not hold still. Itwas like those magnets that repelone another. Every time I wouldtry to look at the ‘looker’, the wholething would ip around. It was very tiring to even tr y. You can try it nowor yourselves: just look at who isreading this page. ry and nd the‘who’.

What was happening through all o this was that I was very gradually beginning to exercise ‘mind muscles’that (to my knowledge) had neverbeen exercised beore in my lie.And they were soon the equivalento very sore or very sti muscles -hard to move around. I had neverdone this kind o thing beore and itamounted to giving mysel a mentalCharlie Horse. It cramped up my mind, and was very awkward, but it‘was’ a new experience.

Te whole thing was a little liketrying to erect a large circus tent inthe middle o my mind, strugglingto push up massive tent poles tostretch and raise the canvas until Ihad some mental room to just look around in there. And it was hardwork, or these mental muscles had




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as enlightenment (whatever thatis), so let’s start there, and this isimportant:

What is meant by the phrase“recognizing the nature o the mind”as I understand it is more like beingable to nally see the actual problemI was having with meditation allalong, like: I had no idea what itwas, and that is embarrassing.

And, having some recognition, Ithen saw that the nature o the mindis not something beyond my currentreach (as I had always implicitly assumed), but rather more like very simply seeing how the mind actually worked, seeing that the mind (my mind) was in act quite ‘workable,”as in: “Hey, I can do it!” I nally could see a little into how I mightwork it. And being a clever guy, thiswas a very practical revelation. Tisis what seeing the true nature o the mind is all about, a new take onpractice, not some euphoric rush o bliss.

Perhaps the most important result o recognition is that the responsibility or getting enlightened immediately switched rom books, texts, andmy teacher to me. What I saw orrecognized made “me” responsible,and only me. Tat had neverhappened beore. I was alwayslooking or someone or something

enough merit or whatever it was thatI had needed, so that I actually wasable to recognize or glimpse the truenature o my mind - not what I hadexpected. Tere was no lightningbolt, more like an exclamation point!Needless to say, it was nothing likeI had led mysel to believe all theseyears.

O course my expectations werewhatever I had managed to distill

rom books and the teachings,mixed with the tales o otherpractitioners and then sealed withmy personal take on things, in otherwords: a jumble. Like most o uslearning this, my preconceptionshad managed to thoroughly cloudand obscure an otherwise cloudlesssky. Here it is worthwhile tobacktrack and take a closer look atwhat I had expected.

Te Pointing Out Instructions

It is said in t he Mahamudrateachings that the main and perhapsonly unction o the guru is to

point out to the student the truenature o the mind. Aer that it isup to the student. “ Te Nature o the Mind,” this phrase immediately raises expectations reminiscento the realm o Zen koan dramas.One thing I never had managed tounderstand is that recognizing thenature o the mind is not the same




42 43

mind’ seems so mysterious, andthe actuality is anything but that.In my case, the less that is le tothe imagination, the better. My imagination has lled me withpreconceptions and impossibleexpectations all my lie.

In other words, at least in my recognition, the ‘Aha!” experiencewas not “Aha!, this is nally someenlightenment,” but rather a simple:

“Aha! I get it now. So this is howthe mind works; even a beginnerlike me can do that! Tis is actually workable, something I could actually do.”

It is remarkable how in an instantmy years o expectations vanishedand were replaced by somethingsimply practical that nally madereal sense to me. How absolutely encouraging!

Te “pointing out” instructionsdidn’t in any way mark the end o my practice and my graduationto some higher “bodhisattva-like”

level (like I had always wonderedor imagined), but rather the end o my imitating what it is I thoughtpractice was supposed to be, andthe very beginning o actual useulpractice. Finally I got the generalidea o how to work with my mind,and understood in a ash that I had

on the outside strong enough toaect me and somehow enlightenme. It doesn’t come rom outside!

As obvious as it sounds now, I couldnow see that was not about to everhappen, and I could now s ee why.Only I could enlighten mysel. Itwas my job, not someone else’s.In pointing out the nature o t hemind to me, and my getting the gisto it, Rinpoche had completed his

responsibility to me and succeededin making me ully responsible orthe rst time. I responded! But withthat responsibility also came theinsight on how this mind trainingbusiness could be done.

When I originally read in theclassic texts about “seeing thenature o the mind,” I assumed andexpected some grand reworks-like display and that I would beimmediately transported into sometranscendental state o illumination.You know: “enlightenment” orsomething like it, whatever I hadimagined all these years.

Expectations are seldom ever yourriend and almost always obscurethe actual path and the reality. Itmight be better to say the teacherpoints out the nature o ‘how’ themind works rather than simply say the teacher points out “the natureo the mind.” Te ‘nature o the

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturel h h h



44 45

sincerely went through the motions,but with little result that I couldsee. I had been rubbing the sticksand getting some heat but no re.Suddenly, there was some heatand also re. While not what I hadexpected, this was what I had alwaysdreamed about having happen:

visible progress.

Te Workable Mind

Te mind was suddenly workableand all I had to do was to work it,and I could now see that even Icould do it! Aer perhaps thirty years, I actually understoodsomething about meditation. Notthe enlightenment-revelation Ihad in my expectations, not thethunderbolt rom above, notsomething beyond this world o Samsara, but something much moredown to earth and already very closeto me – the nature o ‘my’ mind,that is: how to work with it. Aerall my years o theoretical practice,

things nally got practical andthereore real practice could begin.Nevertheless, as minimal as my realization was, it brought about aproound change in my approach tomeditation.

I le that year’s ten-day teachingwith a very dierent idea as to what

been mistaken about this all o my dharma lie, like perhaps 30 years!!!

For the rst time I saw simply howthe mind works and that therewas no reason that I (just as I am,warts and all) could not just do it.And that WAS a new experience,to somehow be at the same levelwith reality – to see it clearly. It wasup to me to gure out just how towork with this new inormation and

to put the time in. Perhaps mostimportant o all, I suddenly had theenthusiasm and energy to make itwork that I had b een missing. Nomore boredom and laziness when itcame to practice.

And while the act was less exoticthan what I had mistakenly expected, it was perhaps (i my opinion counts) the rst tangibleresult o many years o practice, andit was not just a passing experience,but a simple realization as to whathad to happen next, like: when yourealize how something works, you

just get it. You don’t orget, because

it is not a simple experience, buta recognition. Tat quite ordinary insight was a orm o recognition,and it was permanent.

In reality, or me this was a hugeresult aer about 31 years o meditation o the “sounds-like-this” variety, years during which I

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturet id th m practice as oin to be abo t



46 47

not consider the consequences o just stopping practice altogether,although I was very tired o it.Quitting was just too scary to evenconsider. Te dharma was too mucha part o my ego, my identity to

just stop my practice. I I wasn’t adharma practitioner, what the heck was I doing with my lie?

But what I now realized was that,like it or not, my daily practice

even in the best o times had beensimply way too small an eort toever get very ar along my personaldharma path. At the best o times,the most practice I had ever donewas around two hours a day, andeven that much practice wouldprobably not be enough to clear the

various obscurations I had managedto collect. I needed some ull timedharma practice and I was a part-time player.

One thing I did realize rom thepointing out instructions wasthat all o my years chained tothe computer as a programmer

had given me a real ability toconcentrate and or long hours at atime. Tat was not all bad. I oenwould work 12 or even 14 hours aday glued to the tube, as they say.And, although the computer work might not be particularly dharmicin nature, the concentration I had

my practice was going to be about.For one, it was now crystal clear tome that the amount o daily practiceI was able to squeeze out up to thattime would never be enough to getme to any kind o enlightened state.It was like going to church only onSunday. Being the devious, lazy, badboy that I am, I would never get toheaven at that rate. I had never beenthat much o an angel anyway, morelike the black sheep o my amily,

and that too was a problem.

I could now see that mind practicerequired way more eort than thesmall amount o practice I had beendoing each day, which practice itsel I had nickel and dimed to death as itwas. It seemed that everything elsein my lie managed to come rst anddistract rom my dharma practiceand, on top o that, my wholeapproach to practice was cloaked inexpectations, disappointment, andrugality o eort. At that point inmy lie, I was doing as little actualpractice as I could get away with and

still look at mysel in the mirror. Iwas worn out.

Worst o all, practice was not a joyul aair or me. It was somethingI just did and continued to do,sometimes only because to not do itat all would be more horrible thanthe pain o actually doing it. I could

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturebark a phone call the doorbell anacquired was quite real lacking



48 49

bark, a phone call, the doorbell, anunwelcome thought, etc., whateverit took to startle me out o what Iwas concentrating on. Te result wasthat I was suddenly orced out o whatever I had been ocused on and

just instantly there - awake. Tosegaps in my concentration werethe only moments I had to insertdharma into my work, but t herewere a lot o them.

It was in those gaps or moments thatI would remember to look at thenature o my mind or t he nature o the thought that I was having. In thebeginning it was only momentary glimpses, brie glances at the natureo a thought, at the nature o themind, but I persevered. Aer all, Ihad virtually nothing better to dowith my time anyway, so wheneverI ound mysel startled or poppingout o whatever I was engrossed in, Itook that opportunity to at least try and look at the nature o my mind,and to then rest in the true nature o my mind as much as I could. I was

gradually exercising the mind.I had seen the nature o my ownmind, how it works, which as Imentioned does not mean I wasenlightened in any way, only that Ihad seen something about how themind actually worked or was, andeven that tiny hook was enough

acquired was quite real, lackingperhaps only a more pure motivethan making money, although thatis not air to me. In my lie, I havealways turned my hobbies intoways o making money, so mostly I loved what I did or a living anddid it with a pure heart. I only Icould tackle dharma with the sameconcentration and enthusiasm thatI put into my various computer andentrepreneurial projects. I had been

thinking and dreaming about thisor years.

Te pointing out instructionsI had received rom KhenpoKarthar Rinpoche and the resultingtechnique it inspired and madepossible was something that actually stood up very well o the cushion,that is: in everyday lie, what iscalled post-meditation.

Putting the echnique to Work

I slowly began to apply thetechniques o mind training I waslearning to what I was doing on the

computer all day long. During my computer work, whenever I wouldcatch mysel in a distraction, when Ipopped out o whatever I was deeply involved in and ound mysel onceagain outside my concentration andlooking around, I would attempt topractice Mahamudra meditation.It could be as simple as a dog

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureall those years, it was that I couldto begin unraveling some o the



50 51

y ,not nd much joy in practicing. Iknew that this was not the way itshould be, but I was powerless tobring joy to something I could notnd the joy in. And it took the shock o an outside event to really push meinto yet totally new territory. Here ismy story:

On My Own Again

I had been working or the

preceding our years or so as asenior consultant to a subsidiary o NBC, one specializing in astrology,something I know quite a lot about– 45 years o experience. I wasputting in long hours or them (andor mysel), because I was buildingcontent, something I am well-knownor in my career as an archivist o popular culture, creator o the All-Music Guides (allmusic.com), theAll-Movie Guide (allmovie.com)and other entertainment sites. Itis not unusual or me to put in 12or 14 hours, seven days a week.I was getting up at 3 or 4 in the

morning most days, concentratingon programming, on creatingthousands o tarot-like cards orastrology in Adobe Illustrator,writing courses, and other text-related projects. And I took plenty o

joy in that.

All o these tasks were perect to

g gobscurations I had labored under allmy lie. And I liked what I saw andwas beginning to learn to rest in thenature o the mind, however brie that might be.

Tose moments o restingwere short, perhaps more likenanoseconds than something moreenduring, but the total amount o actual practice time I was doing

o the cushion added up to morethan I had been able to practiceat any other times in my day,including time spent on the cushion,which at that time was a kind o a

joke. Every time I headed or thecushion it seemed like I put on therobes o expectation, arrogance,embarrassment, past ailures, andirritation. Te cushion was getting amuch-needed rest.

Tis new process o post-mediationpractice was not something I couldmeasure in days or even months. Ittook about two years o this kindo exploration beore I really had

it down to any useul degree, but itWAS useul and it actually worked,which translates to: perhaps orthe rst time in my many years o mind practice, I really liked practice,something I had devoutly wishedor all those years. I there was onething I was ashamed o and eared

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureastrology conerence a ew daystest out my Mahamudra practice,



52 53

early when I ound out that HisHoliness the 17th Karmapa wassuddenly making his rst visit tothe United States and to his mainseat in this country, Karma riyanaDharmachakra Monastery (KD)in the mountains above Woodstock,New York. I could not miss thatevent and, as it turned out, I couldbe useul as part o a three-man

video team to lm the event, and

personally was able to lm someevents where they didn’t really wantmuch o anyone present. I had beenaround KD so long that I waspretty much some kind o xturethere anyway.

I would love to tell readers about the visit o His Holiness, but that wouldbe a whole other story, but the gisto it was that seeing his holiness wasa big shot in the arm or me. I alsotook hundreds o still photos o theevent and aer I got home, within aew weeks, I had made a 200-pagecoee-table sized book o the visit o

His Holiness which I made availableor the close sangha. Te book wasinspired, not so much by me as aphotographer, as by the act that allo the people I was photographinghad just been with His Holiness andwere shining with happiness and alight that was clearly obvious in the

which was coming along really well.All it lacked was the motivationthat comes with a worthy object.In other words, I was practicingMahamudra while working onessentially mundane tasks, insteado the ‘dharma’ itsel, although my intent and motivation or astrology were very pure and heartelt.

Free

In late May o 2008, while attendingan astrology conerence in Denver,Colorado (along with 1,500 otherastrologers), the head o the NBCoutt I was working or, who wasalso at the conerence, told me thatI no longer would have a job withthem aer June. In an attempt topare down expenses, NBC laido a lot o olks, and I happenedto be one o them. O course, thiswas a real shock to me, since I hadbeen working so hard at it, and thenancial ramications simply meantthat I would soon have no incomewhatsoever. At almost 67 years o

age at the time, nding a job wasprobably not too easy, even t houghI had a lot o skills and experience,plus a good reputation. But it wentbeyond that or me. It was one o those corners lie oers us that wesomehow just have to get around.

It turned out that I had to leave the

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureby my ather (a really good

h t h hi l) i hphotographs.



54 55

photographer himsel) ever since hehad given me a little Kodak Retina2a camera back in 1954, when I wassomething like 13 and sent me onabout a 3,000 mile trip across theU.S. and Canada (with a dip intoMexico) on a bus with a bunch o kids my age. He had explained tome beore I le how to take goodpictures, and I listened. Apparently I had taken some great pictures

because he couldn’t say enoughabout them when I returned,perhaps the only time he ever eltthat way about anything I have done.Te long and the short o it is thatI came away rom that time withthe sense that (perhaps only in my mind) that I had a really good eyeor photography.

And I had been toying withphotography or a number o years.Like many o us, I had o coursetaken the requisite shots o my amily, our dogs, and what not. And,as part o a large archival database

that I created or documenting rock and roll posters, I had purchaseda Nikon D1x system and careully photographed some 23,000+posters. For this, I had built my own

vacuum table, had an exact lightsetup, and so on. So, I knew at leastsomething about photography.

Te time with His Holiness certainly helped to put the act that I nolonger had a job into perspective,but to suddenly be without apaycheck is a shock, and it sure wentthrough my system like a lightning.Where beore I was working longhours at my job, suddenly I had allkinds o time on my hands – a really big gap o time in my lie. alking

about popping out o what you wereocused in (the so-called gap inMahamudra practice), well, this wasa really shocking gap, and I p oppedout big time and here is how I wasable to actually look at that gap:

Te Photographer

I had been working as anentrepreneur without a break (or agap) or over thirty years straight.When you work or yoursel, youdon’t have weekends and holidays,or at least you don’t live or them.When you love your work, timeo and vacations are meaninglessor, worse, boring. Tat is how Ialways experience them. And nowwith all this time on my hands, my past interest in photography (andrecent photo work at KD) began tocome out, and this hobby plays animportant role in this stor y.

I had been deemed a photographer

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureemale vocalist o all time is BillieHolliday No other voice has moved

But in the late spring o 2008, aeralling out o a job I ound mysel



56 57

Holliday. No other voice has movedme so utterly than she has. Tatbeing said, the act is that I don’tlisten to Billie Holliday very oen,hardly ever. Why? Because I haveto really prepare mysel or work up to hearing her sing, becauseshe puts me through so very muchemotionally that I am not alwaysready to let that happen. I tell youthis because it is the same with

nature and her lessons.

Te Naturalist

I studied natural history or somany years and with such diligencethat there was not much I missedas to what goes on out there in thewoods and meadows. I know every rog, salamander, and snake, not tomention insects, and you-name-it.I not only know them, I know allabout their lives and deaths.

Nature is so absolutely candid anddirect that she leaves almost nothingto the imagination. Nature doesnot know mercy. It is all laid out oranyone to see, and it is not a story without emotional aects. I did notneed to become a Buddhist to lovethe lie in every living creature. Ialways elt that way. When I wasconrmed in my early teens aspart o Catholic ritual, my chosenconrmation name was Francis,

alling out o a job, I ound mysel embracing photography moredeeply, perhaps just as a way to ndstability rom my somewhat chaoticlie at the time. And then there wasmy interest in nature. Even thoughthis happened only a year or soago, I have trouble pinpointing justhow I happened to start going outinto nature again. I was a trainednaturalist and had intensely studied

nature rom the time I was about 6years old until in my late teens, andI mean intensely. In my early teensI even was given a tiny ofce at theUniversity o Michigan Museumsbuilding, just because I wassomewhat precocious. I was into it.

My wie loves nature and or t he lastmany years had done all she couldto get me out in the woods, streams,and elds again, but I pretty muchdeclined the invitation. I don’t knowwhy exactly. Perhaps it was becauseI elt that nature had been early-onmy real teacher and I had learnedmy lessons. Certainly school hadtaught me almost nothing. Whateverlie lessons I carried came romobserving how nature behaved, andonce learned, I was unwilling toopen up that avenue again. Why?

Now that I think about it, here isprobably the reason: My avorite

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureso heavy it can hardly y, utters inthe still morning light, trying to nd

aer St. Francis o Assisi, the saintwho loved and protected animals.



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the still morning light, trying to nda tree to hide in or the day, and issnapped up by the bird just as it triesto land, etc. You get the idea. It isendless and merciless.

And this is not an isolated story, notthe exception that proves the rule,but just the opposite: this is the rule,with almost no exceptions, ever!Lie is brie, ear-lled, and accident

prone or almost all sentient lie.And humankind is not an exception,although we choose to ignorehow Samsara (our conused state)actually is. We are one o the ver y ew beings that have any real controlover destiny, and we never have asmuch control as we imagine. Terest o the animal world are simply bewildered, too stunned by theirlack o real intelligence to protectthemselves.

I trust you get the idea here Iam painting; it is one o a naturethat has no mercy, and death thatis inexorable in its presence and

swiness. Is it any wonder that Ihave to cross over some kind o threshold to really want to take acloser look at nature again? I already knew what nature is about. You getthe point.

who loved and protected animals.Tat was me. I have oen joked thatI like animals better than people,and I wasn’t being all that unny.It is kind o true. Te Buddhiststell us that animals are bewildered.I eel great compassion or theirbewildered state. I am working oneeling that same way toward humanbeings.

So nature, like listening to BillieHoliday, was probably somethingthat I really had to work up to asar as re-immersion is concerned. Itis just way too sensitive or words.Nature is beautiul, but nature israw. Every last animal out t herelives in constant ear. Tey arealways looking over their shoulderor something bigger than they arethat wants to eat them. And they are always looking or some smalleranimal to eat. Tey have almost norest their entire lives.

Te whole concept o impermanence and the ragility

o lie are everywhere present innature. Te countless tiny tadpolesthat don’t mature beore the springpond dries out, the mass o wormsand slugs that get caught on t hetarmac as the erce sun comes overthe horizon and dries them to acrisp, the huge Luna Moth that is

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturewalked out into the elds. It wasdramatic.

Back to Nature

But that year o 2008 I was not in



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Each morning would nd me out inthe meadows and woods at sunrise,lugging my camera equipmentaround. Tere in the mist anddew-covered elds I would bephotographing all that was beautiulor, many times, just sitting there inthe grass as the rst sun rays peekedover the trees, and simply doingnothing. Here is a poem I wroteabout that.

ime or Nothing

Excuse me for the moment,No matter the reasons why,I just need more time to do nothing,But gaze into clear empty sky.

And I am not talking aboutweekends. I watched almost every sunrise rom around late May through October, until it became

just too cold to take my camera ormysel outside or extended periodso time. Tink about that or amoment: I watched EVERY sunriseor hal a year and this aer seldomever leaving my ofce or 30 or soyears. My amily must have beenpuzzled.

As I look back on it now, it was o course a very remarkable time. HereI am remarking on it! But what was

But that year o 2008 I was not inan ordinary rame o mind. I had

just been shaken out o every senseo sae I knew, at least nancially. Ihad been put out, turned loose, andset ree rom any path or trajectory I thought I was on. So it is nosurprise that I easily crossed overthat threshold that I had avoided orso many years and immersed mysel

in the way things were - nature. Ialready was completely vulnerable,reminded personally how thingscan be when we have no control. Iwas in the mood. And the camerawas probably my ticket to ride, my excuse to get lost in nature onceagain. It was like nding my roots,like going home. It was consoling.

I became absolutely ascinatedwith close-up camera work, what iscalled macro or micro photography.And or me, this meant close-upphotography o nature and all theliving things surrounding us. Andin what was perhaps also a symbolic

gesture, I got out o my ofce. Foryears, I had been araid to leave my ofce lest I miss an important phonecall or whatever next thing I waswaiting or. As mentioned, my wiehad tried just about everything toget me out o my stick-in-the-mudofce, but to no avail. But now I just

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureAnd I don’t know or sure why I gotinto macro (close-up) photography,

d l d

most remarkable about this time wasnot at rst apparent to me, and thisi h I h



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as opposed to landscapephotography or just walking in thewoods and meadows, but I havea guess. It could have been thatlooking through an open lens withreal magnication at a tiny diorama,at a world that was ever so muchobviously more perect than the oneI was used to, somehow was reeingto me. Every tiny y and insect

appeared so incredibly complete, soperect in every respect at the microlevel.

Te outer world I knew hadbeautiul patches and rotten onestoo, areas that were stained beyondappreciation. But here, in the microworld, you could always nd somelittle bit o perection, perhaps anewly hatched dragony that wasabsolutely resh in every way. And Iparticularly like dioramas, miniaturescenes - the tiniest o landscapes. Iwas transported by what I saw.

I can tell you that nothing I have

ever done requires as much patienceand concentration as doing macrophotography. It can take hal anhour o excruciating pain to holda physical position with a tripodand camera until the wind managesto die down, just to take a singlephotograph o a ower or insect.

is what I want to present here.

Macro Photography andMahamudra

Te experience I had accumulatedover the preceding three years or sodoing Mahamudra practice on my computer had kind o extended itsel to anytime I did close concentratedwork. I am at home with drudgery,

at home in very concentratedand tedious work. I need only point to that act that I single-handedly (and later with a sta o hundreds) recorded, reviewed, anddocumented every piece o recordedmusic rom 10-inch records onup to the present. Similarly, wedocumented every single lm andmovie, complete with its entirecast, and video games, and rock posters, etc. You get the idea. I amobsessive. My personal collection o CDs (which I no longer own) nowsits in a warehouse in Ann Arbor,numbering well over 500,000 CDs

and counting.My point is that I have a hightolerance or tedium. And nothingis more time consuming anddemanding o concentration thancomputer programming and

video editing, that was: beore Iencountered macro photography.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturethrough lenses to see.

I was nding true rest in those

And I am NO known or my patience, but in photographingnature I had ound a worthy teacher



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gminiature scenes I could see. AndI so much needed the rest that Iwas not at rst aware that I was (Ibelieve) also resting my mind ina dharmic way, and in a prooundsense. When I point out that Iwas not ully aware o what washappening, this is an importantpoint.

Please keep in mind that I amholding a precise position, cameraand tripod in hand, rozen to astance, so that a tiny insect doesnot y away, and waiting orthe incessant Michigan wind todie down long enough to take aphotograph. And all the while I ampeering through this very speciallight-gathering lens into a microworld at a tiny critter. And clarity!Te world I could see in there wasawesome, beautiul, and so ver y,

very clear. I was resting in thatclarity, resting my mind. And I lovedwhat it did or me. It was beyond

thought.For some reason, through thelooking glass (so to speak), I wasable to rest my mind like I had notbeen able to do it on the cushionor even in my work, and or along time! It would take a book toexplain what resting the mind really

nature I had ound a worthy teacher.

Lenses

Beore long I was spending up toseveral o the best hours o theday (dawn) immersed in peeringthrough various special lenses atthe lives o tiny critters and plants.I soon ound mysel searching orner and ner lenses, so I could see

ever more clearly into these very perect micro worlds. Yet, I justcouldn’t see clearly enough, so I justneeded better and better lenses. Teoutside day-to-day world I lived inmight seem dingy and worn mucho the time, but these micro worldswere as resh as a new ower or

just-hatched buttery. And: I wassoaking it up.

Without really thinking about it,I was using all o my Mahamudraexperience and techniques here inthese micro worlds. And I literally mean: without thinking! As Iconcentrated on this photographing,

looking deep into and throughthe lens, I began having extendedperiods o resting my mind, but Iwas not at rst ully aware o this.I mean: it was true rest. As I look back now, I can see that I was (me,Michael) resting my mind and liein the tiny scenes I was peering

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturekarma, etc. All o these are literally magnied and obvious in nature,where kill or be killed, eat or be

is all about. No, a book could notcommunicate what I am reerring tohere It would take being personally



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where kill or be killed, eat or beeaten, and things like a owerthat blooms or one night, a hugemoth that lives but 24-hours, etc.continually reminded me o thoseprecious our thoughts. I didn’t haveto remind mysel. Lie in naturereminded me instant by instant,day by day. It can be heartbreaking.I had not looked at impermanence

this closely or many years, but I waslooking at it now. Raw Nature is thebest reminder o the “Four ToughtsTat urn the Mind” that I know o.

For that spring, summer, and all, Iwas really away rom the maddeningcrowd, o by mysel, observing my own mind in the midst o purely natural phenomena. But what I didnot at rst see was how much I waschanging, perhaps ‘stabilizing’ is abetter word. It was my mind and my practice that were stabilizing. WhenI was out in the eld and owers, Icould rest my mind, I could see thenature o thoughts as they arose,look at their nature, watch themdissolve, and not drag around somesad thought all day long. I wasthrilled at the crystal clarity o themind. But most o all I was ndingrest, resting my mind in all thatclarity, deeply resting.

here. It would take being personally shown how to rest the mind, butI can’t do that here and I am not ateacher.

Beore I knew it, I was lookingorward to these orays into thedawn as i my lie dependedon it. I could not wait to get upevery morning, get outside in theelds, and launch mysel into thisparticular state o mind. I knew thiswas connected to my practice, butthat knowledge was not important atthe time, which tells you somethingby itsel. It was the arthest thingrom my mind. I just liked gettingmy ‘mind right’ out there in nature.I was ascinated by what I sawthrough those lenses. In the end, o course, what I was seeing was relatedto my own mind.

urning the Mind

As I look back today, what wasreally taking place is all too clear,and nature held just the reminders I

needed to keep my attitude adjusted.Te our Common Preliminaries o Buddhist practice, what are oencalled the “Four Toughts Taturn the Mind toward t he Dharma”are ever present in the naturalworld, things like the preciousnesso lie, impermanence, the laws o

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturelenses. I scavenged up and sold my older equipment or this or thatmore accurate lens, tele-converter,

Where beore I was probably engrossed in guring out why so-and-so did this or that or how I



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close-up diopter, or whatever wouldbring more light and acuity to what Iwas doing. And the lenses helped.

I studied lenses. I went tooptometrists and discussed withthem the sharpness o lenses andwhat was needed or t he humaneye to see at its very best. I got newglasses and special magniers orthe eyepiece in my camera. I tra ckeddown lenses that are almost neveround, lenses that are legendary or their ability to gather light andto ocus with extreme accuracy. Iburned through the nest lensesthat Nikon has to oer (and that ismany) and on into lenses that areeven better than anything Nikon canproduce.

I worked with special architecturallenses, lenses that tilt and shi,allowing you to bring a wholeat eld o owers into ocus, thenearest and the arthest ower, all

perectly clear. I stacked lenses oneon another to get even closer in. Iused tele-converters, diopters, andextension tubes to reach beyondwhat I otherwise could. I began tostack photos, which means to take aseries o photos, each at a particularocal point, rom near to ar, and

managed to embarrass mysel inthis or that situation, now thoughtslike that could be seen not or theircontent, but in their actual natureand just dissolve like dew on thegrass. In an instant they were gone,back where they came rom, away,and I was not etching yet anotherkarma track deep in my mind.

Each morning I was up way beoredawn, gathering my equipment andheading out the door. It seemedI could not get enough o what Iwas nding out there in naturepeering through my camera lenses,but in reality I was learning to restin the true nature o my mind. Iwas practicing Mahamudra, butin a more direct manner than everbeore.

I knew I was using Mahamudratechniques, but I was not initially aware o how deeply I was changinginternally. Tat awareness only

came much later. And I studiedcamera equipment like there was notomorrow, in particular ne lenses.I just somehow could not get lensesthat would gather enough light andopen up my vision as ar as I needed.Every spare dollar I could scroungewent into sharper and sharper

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureis hard to describe. Everything waslucid. I was lucid - clear as a bell!

And although I continued to

then merge the stack to make asingle image where all parts, romront to back are in perect ocus.



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And although I continued topractice Mahamudra during my ordinary workday, as I ound this orthat project to do, it was mostly inthose raried mornings out in thedawn that my mind could ully restand appear lucid. I was addicted to itright o and could not wait each day to get out there among the bugs andowers to get my mind right.

And, as mentioned above, thiswent on rom late May until lateNovember o 2008, almost every day when it did not r ain. I don’t knowwhat my amily thought, other thanI had become a camera nut and thatI didn’t have a job. I don’t know whatI thought about it mysel. I neverthought about it. I was spending aninordinate amount o time doingit. My extended amily and riendswould drive by me where I wassetting up one shot or another alongthe roadside and give me st rangelooks, like “Oops, there he is again.

Doesn’t he work anymore?”I didn’t have a job (I was lookingor one), so I had the time and,aer a lietime o working jobs,this was the rst real break I hadever given mysel and I put it togood use. It was wonderul. It wastransormative.

I am just giving you a taste o whatwas a real obsession on my part, anda learning curve. I took more than50,000 photos during that periodand gradually became a better andbetter photographer. Tat is notsuch a lot o photos, until you takeinto consideration how long it cantake or one macro photo to be

taken.

And through all o this, it wasnot the resulting thousands o photographs that concerned me.I hardly looked at them. Instead,it was the process that had mespellbound, the clear looking atthe subjects and the seeing. It wasthe seeing! And it was the resting.Ostensibly I was looking throughner and ner lenses at nature. Inreality, I was learning to look at my own mind through the process o photography, and I had managedto conuse the two. Yeah, “Zen and

the Art o Photography” is a book Icould probably write now.

I was learning to rest my mind inthe moment and allow whatevernatural beauty there was to presentitsel to me, to show itsel, to appear.Everything was clear, luminous.And the sheer exhilaration involved

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureIt was clear to my amily that I wasno longer spending much time onthe cushion and their looks and

l t ld th t th b bl

Stabilization

All o this time what was really happening (as I look back now) is



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glances told me that they probably didn’t approve and certainly didn’t’understand. Aer all, I didn’treally understand mysel whatwas happening. Michael, who hadbeen more or less diligent as apractitioner or so many years, wasout-and-out playing hooky.

Tere was no excusing it.

And I did not care. I just knew I hadound my way and was progressingsomewhere aer all the years o anticipation. I was my own counselin this regard. Outside approvalor disapproval (my own or ot hers)could not change my mind or my behavior. And so it went.

When summer ended and wintercame on, I had to curtail my early morning explorations and gradually move back inside. I looked orwardto the ollowing spring with unusuallonging, but I also ound that Iwas able to carry on my mental

training at my desk and around thehouse with no problem. Somethinghad changed within me andpermanently, but I was not really able to get a handle on it until theollowing spring when I was onceagain headed back out into t he eldsand woods.

pp g ( )that my Mahamudra meditation wasstabilizing. Aer all, I was doing itnot only on those early morningshoots, but all the rest o the day aswell as much as I could happen toremember or wake up into momentsto do it, which was more and moreoen.

My initial ear and guilt that Iwas no longer interested in sittingpractice, in doing sadhanas andother practices, began to al l away.I just did not care anymore what itlooked like to those around me oreven to my old sel. Whatever it wasthat I was doing with Mahamudrawas enough or me. I was ull up andI was in love with and happy withmy practice or the rst time in my lie.

It was just natural to move o thecushion or a while aer so many years sitting there. I had done t wongondros (traditional extended

practices), not to mention othermore complex practices, and Iimagine I had accumulated what Iwas able to accumulate. I was tiredor the moment o on-the-cushionpractice and inhaled Mahamudrapractice like a breath o resh air.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NaturePerhaps it was that bogs are so very,

very ragile, tiny microenvironmentsthat hardly anyone has ever seen,much less spent time in Out there

Spring Surprise

And out I did go, as early as January and February, a bunch in March,



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much less spent time in. Out there,isolated rom nutrients, sincethe plant lie on them can’t getnutrients rom below (the peat isanaerobic and won’t let anythingthrough), many bog plants havebecome carnivorous, depending oninsects and what-not or ood. Bogplants include the Pitcher Plant,

the Sundew, and the Venus Flytrap,among others. Whatever the reason,I was ascinated by bogs and oundmysel traveling many hours to visitthem and careully document what Isaw there.

Te point here is that I had takenmy photography yet another step,not only shooting whatever wasavailable each morning near my home, but now traveling longdistances to sample this or thatspecial environment, this particularplant or that one. Without realizingit, my enthusiasm had caused meto overstep the boundary between

Mahamudra practice and that o becoming more o a naturalist than Ialready was.

From the time I was about six yearsold until I was in my late teens I hadstudied nature with a erce passion,so I already knew all about nature. I

and constantly by April. And I hadbeen gathering my equipment andupgrading what I could aord. Butthings had changed or me and in aquite unexpected way, but it wouldtake me some months to gure thisout. At the time, I was hell bent toimmerse mysel ever more deeply in nature, and my outings were now

ranging ever arther rom home.

Instead o spending my early mornings at the back o the localcemetery, at the ringe where thewild vegetation meets the well-groomed lawn, as I had done theyear beore, I was now actively planning trips to nature spots allover. I was studying maps. I becameascinated with Michigan bogs andthe lie possible in those very specialenvironments.

It turns out that bogs only really thrive at latitudes higher than 45degrees. Big Rapids, Michigan

(where I live) is almost 44 degrees o latitude, so we have bogs in this areaand just an hour or so north o hereare really vast bogs.

Why bogs? I have no idea. I aman enthusiast, and there is alwayssomething that ascinates me.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureamphibians since I was a child,and so knew all about them. I wasgeeked.

I ld t it t t t Mi hi ’

already knew all the little woodlandcritters, and I knew them well, theirhabitat, behavior, and lie and deathstruggles. And here I was urther



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I could not wait to get to Michiganswild Upper Peninsula and out onthose bogs with my camera. My tripwas to last a number o days, and Iwas up beore dawn o that rst day and in my car heading north. It musthave been around 4:30 AM when Ihit the road. Te only hiccup was theact that I had just had some airly

protracted oral surgery (severaldays o root canal work), and thetooth in question had developeda really nasty abscess beneath it. Iwas already on my second dose o antibiotics, this time really heavy antibiotics, the rst round havingnot touched the problem. I was notabout to be stopped by a waywardtooth.

So I was in some pain and my lower jaw was swollen. I assumed that astime passed the swelling would justgo down. Anyway, hell or high waterwould not have kept me o those

bogs, and on I went.Te urning Point

My rst stop was at a small bog atthe top o the Lower Peninsula, justbeneath the Mackinac Bridge. I wasout on the bog in the morning sunby 8 A.M., already hours rom my

ggupping the ante as ar as being anaturalist was concerned.

In my enthusiasm I could vaguely sense something was slightly o,but or the lie o me I could notplace the problem. It took timeor this to gradually surace in my consciousness, but eventually it did

become clear to me that I did notreally want to become a ull-scalenaturalist once more. I was (as I doso oen) conusing the baby withthe bathwater again, a bad habit Ihave. It was like a ‘Mara’, an illusionthat conused me. And this all cameto a head during a trip up to the topo Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. It isa good story.

I had been invited to join a very select group o naturalists who weregiven permission to enter a rarebog preserve at the very top o theUpper Peninsula o Michigan to take

a survey o wildlie there. Bogs are very ragile environments and evenwalking on them is destructive. Butthis conservation society allowedspecial teams to enter these closedreserves once or twice a year and Iwas to be the team’s herpetologist.I had been trained in reptiles and

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturethrough the bushes, circling me,working together, and they movedast. Much o the time all I couldsee through gaps in the bushes was

home. It was a magnicent morning.Yet already I was having trouble withthat dumb tooth, a certain amounto throbbing and little sharp shoots



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a sideways prole o one o theirheads as it circled me. I could seeone bird as it ran through the busheson my right, and then suddenly onmy le was the other bird circling inthe other direction. I was constantly o balance, and I had to watch my every step lest I step into muck so

deep that I would begin to sink down in it. And I was carrying over$12,000 worth o camera equipment,not to mention my lie.

Or one o the birds would rise in theair and cut directly across my path(only a ew eet in ront o me) only to disappear into the bushes andtake up running around me again.And the cries were now gettingreally scary. At some point I beganto eel like I was being stalked, and

visions o the movie Jurassic Park and velociraptors came to mind.Tese were large birds and they didn’t like ME. It is easy to see

how birds were once reptile-likecreatures.

Well, that is as ar as it went. I nally managed to plot a course throughthe bog that apparently took meaway rom their nest area, all thetime I was moving one gooey step

o pain. I did my best to ignore itand told mysel it would die down.

Tere I was in my hip boots way out on the surace o the bog,surrounded by moss and smallbushes, and careully stepping my way along in the ooze. I was maybehalway around the small lake when

I rst saw them, two large SandhillCranes picking their way throughthe bog on the opposite side. I wasthrilled to see them and they wereincredible.

As I threaded my way along I musthave somehow began to encroachon the area where they p erhapshad their nest, or they becameincreasingly animated. Now theseare large birds. Tey can stand veeet high and have wingspans o sixto seven eet across. And their eyewas on me, and they were not justlooking at me. Tey were moving incircles around me.

Many o the bushes on the bogwere several eet high, so I couldnot always see the cranes, but Icould hear their rightening calls.I didn’t say ‘rightened’ calls; I saidrightening calls, which they were –eerie. And the cranes began running

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureUpper Peninsula, hours rom whereI was now, and miles rom any town(much less a hospital) on a remotebog, and the temperatures there

di t d t b ld

at a time very slowly through themuck. I nally got out o there,ound my way back to the car, anddrove to the nearest town.



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were predicted to be very cold,even or a spring day. Aer all, way up there it was still hardly spring.Hmmmm.

In the end, the throbbing o my tooth and those little sharp spasmso shooting pain told me thatmarching through a bog miles rom

anywhere might not be the timeto try and push this 67-year oldphysical envelope. As it turned out,this was the right decision, becausethe second round o antibiotics withits very large dose also ailed to dothe trick. My abscess overcame allattempts to control it and spreadmuch arther into the bone o my lower jaw. In the end, the tooth hadto be extracted and the jaw treated.And I only tell this longish story because this became a real turningpoint or me. Let me explain.

Te Outside is Inside

Like so many times in my past, onceagain I had managed to conusethe inside with the outside, theimportant with the unessential.What was going on over the lastyear was that I was using the outside(nature) to look at the inside (my mind) AND I had allen into the

By this time it was beginning to beclear that my tooth was not goingto just calm down, but instead wasonly going to get worse. I had superstrength Ibuproen and even someVicodin that they had given me, so Ihad to dip into those a bit. And thiswas just the rst morning o the rst

day o a ve day journey. I had todecide what I would do.

I went to visit some riends at theirhome near where I was at. Here Iwas sae in a nice home in a townonly a ew hours rom my home.But I had the st range experienceo eeling that I was somehowembedded in a scene at which I wasno longer ully present. It was likea dream or the set or a movie inwhich I was an actor. I was kind o leaning out o it, like you might leanout the back door to get a breatho resh air. Something had stirredor moved inside o me that day and I was damned i I could gureout what it was. Somewhere back there I had lost my incentive or my direction. Something had changedat the core.

Yet, by tomorrow I was supposedto be at the tip o the top o the

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturethrough the lens o nature. It is theold baby and the bathwater thing.I had once again conused the two,but I am getting a little ahead o mysel Let me summarize

mistake o conusing the two. Sinceit was through the nature that Iwas realizing my mind, I began toelevate natural history as the goal orobject o my passion when it was



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mysel. Let me summarize.

Quite early on in the spring o 2009 I began to notice that the very special lucidity that came when Ipatiently peered through the cameralens waiting or the wind to diedown was now present without any camera at all. What beore was made

possible by my concentration anda really tack-sharp lens had nowoverowed into the rest o my lie.Ten one day I realized that I didnot even have to bring a cameraalong with me at all. Tis clarity thatI had very careully nourished theentire preceding year through my photography had become the rulerather than the exception. It wasnot about cameras; it was not aboutlenses, but about clarity o mind.Tat was it. I began to get it.

Now I ound that just walking alonga road, looking at the vegetationor whatever, produced the sameresult as hours o painstakingly peering through the lens. My mindwas already somewhat lucid and Icould more and more just rest inthe beauty o the nature aroundme, which would just present andreveal itsel to me… and without the

object o my passion, when it wasonly the means through which Iwas experiencing my mind’s nature,which is my real passion. I hope thatmakes sense.

Here I was upscale-ing my naturetrips when all they were to me in theend were the lens or means through

which I was viewing the mind. Andhere I was buying more equipment,planning longer and more extensivetrips, and ordering every kindo eld guide I did not already have, and I had a lot. Well, this allchanged, and that early morningaceo with the Sandhill Craneswas perhaps the turning point. Tatexperience was thrilling and notreally that scary, so I was not scaredo by what happened there. Butsomething else did snap there oraround that time.

Aer that I began to realize I wasunnecessarily urther complicatingmy lie with all these lenses andnature trips, when what I wanted todo was simpliy it. I was extrudingthe naturalist in me at the expenseo the simple clarity o resting my mind, and it was the clarity o themind that I was in love with, as seen

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturedierent.

Being with Rinpoche or ten dayseach summer means so much to me.For one, I ound that I was alwaysth b t ki d h I ith

need o a camera. It became clearthat I really didn’t need a camera atall anymore, and this at rst really puzzled me. Whoa, I thought. NowI have these great cameras and all



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the best kind o me when I was withhim, when I was present and withinthe embrace o his mandala. Andgoing back home aer the ten dayswas always something o a mixedbag, driving the 800 miles back toour town lled with Rinpoche’sblessings, much o that grace which

I would soon manage to ritter away as I settled into my more ordinary lie.

But this year was to be dierent.Part o the Mahamudra practice Ihad been doing during those early morning camera practices includeda very special orm o guru yoga,which I can’t detail here, but theidea is simple. Guru yoga is nothingmore than connecting with yourteacher, taking that connection toheart, and mixing your mind withthe mind o your teacher. Tat’s it.Tere are many orms o guru yoga,so it is not a secret.

I had been practicing that alongwith my Mahamudra training. AndI had done guru yoga beore, duringthe two ngondros I had completed,so I was amiliar with this kind o practice. However, where beore Ihad painstakingly marched through

I have these great cameras and allthese ne lenses, and whatevertechnique I had managed… and Idon’t need them?

Tat’s right. Tat’s what happened. Ittook time, but I increasingly becameaware that what I had loved allthis time through the photography

was what was happening withinmy own mind. All that gear was

just a scaold to build a stablepractice and, once built, the cameraequipment (as wonderul as itis) was just an empty cocoon asar as I was concerned, or I wasnow already gone. Tis was at rstdisorienting, to say the least.

Mixing the Mind

It is easy or me to write all thisnow, but it took a while or all o these thoughts to really sink in, andit was not until I made my yearly trip to see my dharma teacher in

late June that it all came together.2009 was the 21st year that KhenpoKarthar Rinpoche has oered a ten-day Mahamudra intensive at KDMonastery and I had never missed aone. I act, seeing and studying withRinpoche or those ten days was thehighlight o any year. 2009 was no

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturemonastery were exactly the samethis time. I didn’t get it at rst, butover time, while I was with him,I understood that somehow my practice had brought Rinpoche rom

the practice, keeping count o how many this or that I had doneand how many more I needed tocomplete the practice, my recentguru yoga practice experience had



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p g pout there in the world, out in thatmonastery in New York, into herein my heart. Now they were in mostrespects (at least as ar as I know)one and the same. Rinpoche hadbeen mixed to some degree w ith my own mind.

Tis is not to say that I was likeRinpoche, but rather to say thatwhatever I was back home on my own (with my relation to Rinpocheat a distance), that now when I waswith him again in person, they werethe same. He was with me as muchat home as when I was with him atthe teachings. Wow!

A ear I had always had was: whatwould happen to me when Rinpochesomeday passed on and I was lealone in the world without him tobe with – a terriying thought! Sure,there are many ne rinpoches outthere that I could work with, butthere is no replacement or your rootlama, the one who cared enough toaccept you just as you were and putup with you until you could learn alittle dharma.

Somehow, in this last year, I had (atleast to some degree) internalized

g y g p pbeen dierent.

In the last year, as I was doing themicrophotography, I was ver y much taking to heart this guru yogapractice, doing it as oen as I couldremember to do it, and actually somehow mixing my mind with

that o my teacher. I really enjoyeddoing it and I did it joyully, but Ihad little awareness o the eect o this practice on me until I travelledto our monastery or our yearly visitwith Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche.

As mentioned, it is always a joy tosee Rinpoche again and to be inhis presence. I am instantly at my best and I like that. Tis year wasdierent. When I arrived, o course Iwas thrilled to see him, as always. Itis great just to be in the same roomwith Khenpo Rinpoche. But thisyear there was a change.

I soon realized that I did not eelany better in his presence than Idid beore I le home to see him.Keep in mind that I had been eelingpretty good at home. In act, therinpoche that I had been mixing my mind with through guru yoga andthe rinpoche I experienced at the

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureand while in those places beginto actually practice and trainin Mahamudra. And I had justdone a modern equivalent. I hadnot le town, but I had spent my

i i

Rinpoche and made him a part o me orever. It was clear to me t hatit was the heartelt guru yoga thatI had been doing as part o my Mahamudra practice that had madehi ibl H i dibl !



88 89

most important time away rompeople, out in the elds and woods,watching the sun rise again andagain – by mysel.

It was this solitary time duringwhich my practice was able to settlein and stabilize. And my riend

pointed out that once stabilized,my need or some solitary time hadevaporated. Tat was perhaps why the camera and photography thing

just naturally dissolved. In act,once Mahamudra has stabilized, itis customary or practitioners to re-enter society and test their mentalstability in the midst o crowds,day-to-day business, and all otherchallenges. And along with thatneed to be a lone that went away,so did my need or cameras andinterest in photography. Just gone!

And this is exactly what washappening to me. I didn’t need tobe alone any longer and I was inthe process o separating the baby rom the bathwater. Te baby wasmy Mahamudra practice and thebathwater was all my camera gearand my need to practice throughit. I didn’t need the support o t he

this possible. How incredible!

I had brought my camera andseveral important lenses along withme to KD and had planned touse them in the early morning, youknow, shots o mountains, clouds,rising mists and og – all o that. But

once there, I seemed to have lost allinterest in photographing anything.And I wondered what that was allabout.

Te Return o the Hermit

One o the 3-year year retreat lamasat KD (whom I consider a closeriend) was kind enough to listen tomy recent practice experiences, whatI have been relaying here to you andhis comment hit me like a reighttrain.

What he said is that my experiencewith the photography and allthat it entailed was right out o a

dharma handbook – pure tradition.Mahamudra practitioners areencouraged at a certain point intheir practice to go out in the wild,to caves and araway places tomeditate when they have receivedthe pointing out instructions,

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturecamera any longer. I also did notneed to be out in nature all thetime, either. It is not that I didnot appreciate natural beauty any longer; it just made no dierence tome where I was anymore

Experiences with

Mahamudra

Part II



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me where I was anymore.

And or the rst time in many years,I want to reopen our meditationcenter here in Big Rapids and dowhat I can to help others get startedin the dharma. I am doing that now.

So there you have at least a brie account o my experience so arwith Mahamudra. O course, nowI am just on the rst step o a long

journey to learn and someday master Mahamudra. And, althoughI am not yet enlightened in any way,I at least understand somethingabout what I have to accomplish andsomething about how to go aboutdoing that.

END o Part 1

Part II

Year 2010

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureTe Epilogue

Although I thought I was movingaway rom mixing photography and Mahamudra practice in Part1, actually that took longer thanI thought Te winter and spring

with all but the nest lenses, colorcan aect the ultimate degree o sharpness, the very nest details. Aneect called “chromatic aberration”tends to soen photographic imagesand produces what is called color



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I thought. Te winter and springo 2010 brought my interest andocus on better and better lensesto a peak. I had exhausted almosteverything that Nikon has producedwhen it comes to their macro andclose-up lenses. I had pushed theseNikon lenses beyond their limit andmoved on to more esoteric ultra-ne lenses, lenses by companieslike Voigtlander, Leica, and CoastalOptics. Tese extraordinary lensespushed the idea o sharpness beyondsimple resolution and into aspects o highly dened color.

By this time I was working with themost advanced DSLR camera bodieson the market like the Nikon D3xand D3s, both ull-rame camerasthat employed sensors the size o traditional 35mm lm. I had by thattime some orty dierent lenses,most o them designed or macro orclose-up work. And I ound when

I pushed these lenses to their limitslooking or sharper resolution thatsharpness itsel began to relate moreto color.

In other words, the quality o color itsel began to be a actorin sharpness due to the act that

pringing in photos at high-contrastedges where two colors meet.For the sharpest possible images,apochromatic lenses can be used,lenses that bring two wavelengths(oen red and blue) into ocus in thesame plane, resulting in a p erceived

greater sharpness. Soon I oundmysel using only apochromaticlenses, like the Voigtlander 125mm/2.5 APO-Lanthar, the Leica100mm /2.8 Elmarit R APO, andespecially the Coastal Optics 60mmUV-VIS-IR /4 APO. Tese APOlenses extended my vision beyondwhat ordinary glass oered. But intime, even these sophisticated lensesell short o the clarity I sought, andceased to satisy. Remember that theclarity was in my mind and not justin the lenses.

Furthermore, I had or the mostpart stopped shooting a single rame

when I took a close-up or macroshot. Instead, I was now shootingmultiple rames to make a photo,each one o which ocused on onelayer o the object I was shooting.Te result is that or each photo, Inow had to process ten or een

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureshots, each o those shots a micro-step dierent in ocus rom theone beore it, so that I had a serieso many clearly ocused shots orany macro subject (a bug or a lea),running rom the ront to the back

h b

were considered by the bestphotographers and scientists as thestandard by which all other macrolenses should be compared. I hadreached the limits o the physicalin my attempt to achieve the clarity



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o the subject.

I would then take this series o shotsand process them on the computerso that the result was a single photothat was in clear ocus rom rontto back. Tis technique is called“ocus stacking. Tis was, needless

to say, very time consuming, but t heresults helped to extend the clarity o what I was seeing with my mind,which a single rame shot with acamera could not reproduce. I wasonce again pushing the limit o thepossible.

Beore long, I had established a website (MacroStop.com) devoted toocus stacking and had written amanual on how to go about ocusstacking, outlining my growingexperiences with this technique.And I did a lot o this, perhapssomething close to 100,000 photosin a nine month period. But ocus

stacking had its own problems,introducing artiacts in the stackedimage that interered with thenished clarity o the photo. Withthis discovery, I had run out o options.

I was now using lenses that

o my mind through a camera lens.Tese limiting events marked thebeginning o the end o my extremeinterest in lenses and probably photography in general, although Iwas not ully aware o it at the time.I will always know photography.

Without ully realizing it, I wasalready in the process o extractingmy meditation technique rom thetechnique o close-up and macrophotography. At this point, they were still combined, but the die wascast. I knew I had to move on, butthis would take many months.

Using the analogy o a train thatruns on tracks, I had simply runout o tracks. Te proessionalphotographers with whom Idialogued on various lens-orientedsites kept asking me why I neededmore sharpness. Tey seemedirritated at my quest or ultimate

clarity o vision and most were notopen to any spiritual discussionwhatsoever. I had even reached thepoint where I was about to have aninternal part o my camera, the AA(anti-aliasing) lter, removed so thatI could get just a little bit more

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturesharpness. Well, things naturally came to a head beore that took place.

Like agging down a distant train,my internal meditation regimewas trying to get my attention but



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was trying to get my attention, butas usual it took a long time. I hadexhausted the best photography equipment I could nd, but notmy meditation practice. It was onre. All o this was a sign or me toonce again begin to separate mysel

rom the techniques o photography,which I had tried to do once beore,only to all deeper into lookingthrough lenses. Tis time I nally got the message. I had indeedexhausted the existing technology.Tis realization itsel was liberating.

With the lenses out o the picture, allthat was le was my mind.

What I was trying to get through orat with all o the photography wasnot simply an excellent photo, butthe clarity o mind t hat emergedthrough the whole photographicprocess, the ultimate in clarity. It

was that clarity o mind, the ‘seeing’with the mind that I was intenton, not the subject o the photo orthe resulting photo itsel. I couldcare less about that, although Iwas becoming a better and betterphotographer so I am told.



The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureto discuss this wonderul orm o meditation.

Clarity

I probably don’t need to mentionmental clarity here. I have beenwriting almost exclusively about

the more I try to hold still, the morethey hurt until they really, really ache. A lot o this is mental.

I used to time my pain, ollowingthe schedule or the teaching orevent. I the event was scheduled ort h I ld ll



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g ythat all this time, And ‘rest’. Lettingthe mind rest in mental clarity iswhat this is all about. O course, by denition, words will not sufce.Tey are but pointers, ‘reerences’ toan experience that each o us has to

have or ourselves. Words dependon their meaning, and ‘meaning’has to do with the sense wordsmake. ‘Sense’ means the ve sensesand experience. So words cannotbe a substitute or the actual senseexperience they reer or point to, asin: living and being it. With that inmind, here goes.

Sitting

I have been sitting more or lessseriously or some 36 years now.When I am at one o the many intensives I have attended, I end upsitting cross-legged or anywhere

rom one to three hours at a time,typically one and a hal to two hoursat a sitting. Aer a while my legscan hurt rom just sitting in thatposition. Sure, I wriggle and squirm,change my position, and so on, butthe bottom line is my legs hurt. And

two hours, I could usually manageto just make it to the end beore my legs really began to complain.

But these kinds o events are exible.Quite oen the teacher would runover the set time in order to nish

a section o the text, sometimes asmuch as a hal hour and sometimeseven an hour. When that happened,my legs really began to scream. Iwould nd mysel unable to listento the teaching in avor o hopingsomeone up there would look attheir watch and notice that we haverun over. My thoughts were notalways anything I am o. You get theidea. And I would try not to get alittle angry about it. My legs wereangry.

I am one o these people who like tosit still or at least appear to sit still

when I am in the shrine room or ateaching. I don’t move to a kneelingposition with my legs under andbehind me, or bend them o to thisor that side, etc. Tat is or whooses.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureI maintain my original position andtry very hard not to move… much.Micro-movements I allow, and I amexpert at moving just enough to getsome temporary relie, even thoughve minutes later, when that parto my leg again begins to cry out, I

Te body is completely relaxed. Andbecause it is completely relaxed,it can just sit there or a very longtime without the cramping andstiness, rigidity, and strain wemight normally have. Tis is a oneo the attributes o Mahamudra-style



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will have to move again. I you couldsee a stop-motion lm o my micro-movements when sitting, it wouldbe like a smooth subtle perpetual-motion ick.

With Mahamudra meditation andconcentration, there is no leg painand sitting or two hours is easy.Now why is that? As ar as I cansee, it is not because I am lookingat the true nature o the leg pain asit arises. It is certainly not becauseI am nally getting more and moreused to sitting or long periods o time, although that is a act. Regularsitting or long periods does makesit somewhat easier to do just that: sitmore painlessly. But that is not whatI am pointing to here.

What it is about Mahamudrameditation that makes sitting

relatively painless is simply the ‘rest’.In this type o meditation the body and mind are at rest. When we letthe mind rest, the body ollows.It rests too, and when resting it is,well, ‘resting’. Tere is no tension,no tightness to get tired o or rom.

meditation.

Calm and Peaceulness

As a personality type, I am active,somewhat shy, and certainly sel-conscious. In other words, I am

usually quite aware o where I am atall times, like sitting in the middleo a group o people. And while I‘subjectiy’ easily, I don’t ‘objectiy’easily. Being an object, being seenand observed, is oreign to me. ‘I’am the observer, and don’t like to belooked at. As I said, I tend to be sel-conscious.

For many years I have helped to video the teachings at the monastery where my teacher lives. o do thisI have to sit at the very ront, withothers behind me and on both sideso me. Tis position makes me a

very easy visual target or everyoneand it is all I can do to keep mysel calm and allow mysel to objectiy a bit.

When the question and answertimes come (when students get upand walk to the microphone to ask

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturea question, I eel like I am wearingthe scarlet letter or something. Itend to quickly ask my question andsit back down, while most olks justremain by the microphone. I don’tlike to be in the public ocus, so tospeak. Some o you will understand.

we determine the content o thatthought, that is: what the thought isabout. We never know and we don’tcare what the thought is about. Wecare only about determining the truenature o the thought and resting inthat.



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With Mahamudra meditation,all o this changes. I have no sel-consciousness whatsoever. In act,it is very much like I am completely alone in the middle o all thosepeople, like I am the only one inthe shrine room or anywhere. Evengetting up and asking a question hasno ripples. I am totally quiet andat peace. People to the right o me,people to the le o me, Rinpoche inront, and many people behind memake no dierence. Tere I sit, witheyes looking orward. My mind is atpeace. I am not socially consciousor sel-conscious. Tis is a one o the attributes o Mahamudra-stylemeditation.

Catching Karma

In Mahamudra meditation wegradually learn to look at the truenature o each thought as it arises,the sooner the better, preerably beore the content o the thoughtis even apparent to us. In otherwords, we meet an arising t houghtwith Mahamudra meditation beore

I a thought arises, and we see thatit is a ‘bad’ thought, we meet thatthought with meditation by lookingnot at its content, but at its truenature. I have been taught that i we

identiy the content o the thought,even i we immediately look at itsnature right aerward, it has already marked our mindstream with itsimprint or karma. Tis is all part o the meditation technique, which Iwon’t even try to explain here.

Conversely, i we meet the thoughthead-on as it arises, beore we knowwhat the content o that thoughtis, it vanishes and leaves no karmicimprint. Do this all or much o the time and you stop creating themost common cause o karma,which is the reinorcing o karmictracks by successive imprints o the

same thought, like worrying aboutsomething. Te same goes or anger,hatred, ear, hoping, expectations,and all other manner o uselessthoughts. Tis is the kind o thoughtthat lls our mind most o the time.With Mahamudra meditation, we

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturetend not to leave an imprint.

I am learning to do that, but I stilltend to see the content and thenlook at the nature o the thought,almost like you might apply aremedy. Tis too stops karmicimprints, other than the initial one.

aware o them, they seem to havemovement and duration. In otherwords, when I look at their nature,they don’t just vanish, but ratherpersist or some time. You couldalmost say that I grapple with them.I nd mysel, at these times, doingguru yoga with this kind o thought



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It is best not to have any, good orbad, imprints. I am working on that.Tis is a one o the attributes o Mahamudra-style meditation.

Meeting Toughts Head-on

And I notice this same kind o eectwhen in a public place. For somereason, I can sense when someoneis looking at me and perhapseven thinking o me, and withoutidentiying that thought, I tend tomeet that ‘look’ by seeing it’s nature.I I am not particularly aware atthat moment, it seems I spring toawareness to meet that thought withmeditation. Mahamudra meditationnaturally arises.

Te same goes or thoughts ingeneral. Some thoughts appearquite mental or intellectual, but

others seem to be more viscous orhave emotive content to them. I amnot talking about ull-blown heavy kleshas like anger and jealousy here, but rather ordinary heavy oractive thoughts. By active thoughts Imean that as I apprehend or become

guru yoga with this kind o thought.

Oen they will subside, loose their viscosity, and vanish. Sometimesthey persist and I can’t really resolvethem to their nature. Tis is an area

where I am learning as I go.Tis is particularly true when Ihave ‘bad’ thoughts. Let’s discusswhat I mean by bad thoughts. Forme, ‘bad’ thoughts are thoughtsthat are not doing me or anyoneelse any possible good, like hopesand ears. And these thoughts are,by denition, thoughts that I havealready identied by their content.In other words, they are t houghtsabout something and not thoughtsthat I meet head on in meditation.

It could be a thought like “theperson is not nice,” or it could be athought that a person thinks thatI don’t like them and I sense thatthought. Tese kinds o thoughts arelegion. Tey are endless. Tese typeo thoughts, although they obviously have le their karmic imprint, areprime candidates or Mahamudra

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturemeditation. As time goes by, I amgetting better at meeting thosethoughts at their earliest momento recognition, and am gradually beginning (I believe) to catch many o them beore their content is evenrevealed. It does not matter whattheir content is, good or bad.

What is the point o them, w henwe could just learn Mahamudrarom the beginning? Tese are goodquestions.

Te act is that Mahamudra isnot that easy to learn. o be moreexact, Mahamudra cannot belearned through books and written



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Te process o Mahamudrameditation is becoming more andmore o a meeting o any thoughtthat is carrying some kind o loadhead on. I should separate the

eort required to learn Mahamudrameditation, rom the meditationitsel. In other words, I am stillon a learning curve here, whichsometimes requires eort onmy part to perorm this kind o meditation. However, I begin to seethat given practice, Mahamudrameditation becomes more-or-lessautomatic. In the end and aer awhile, it just happens by itsel.

Something arises and I meet it withMahamudra meditation withouta thought, eortlessly. Tis is howI see the uture o this orm o meditation or me. Tis is a one o

the attributes o Mahamudra-stylemeditation.

Learning Mahamudra

Why don’t we all just go out andlearn Mahamudra? Why do we haveall o these other kind o practices?

learned through books and writtenteachings. You can’t just pick it up; atleast that is what I have been taught.It has to be pointed out to you by an authentic teacher, and even t henit can take many years. Te reason

why this is so may challenge many o you. I know it challenged me.And I will try to explain.

Intellectual understanding alone isnot enough. Mahamudra techniqueis beyond verbal description andwords can but describe it, but notpoint it out. It takes a living teacherto do that and that is not the only obstacle we ace. Our own lack o preparedness is an even greaterobstacle and there are aspects topreparation that we probably don’teven know about or understand. Letme list a couple:

Merit and Devotion

Mental preparation alone is notenough to empower us or theMahamudra experience. No matterhow smart we are, we will never,ever gure it out or, i we do, I amtold that it will take endless kalpas

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Nature(millions o years) to do so. I haveasked various authorities repeatedly why they don’t just start right outteaching Mahamudra meditation,and their every answer is “lack o merit and devotion” on the part o most students. What is that?

First o all, I am not an expert. I am

And i we have an authentic teacher,someone who can point out theMahamudra technique to us, it isnot their ault that we don’t get it.I had what are called the ‘pointingout’ instructions at least two timesbeore I had any hint o recognitiono the mind’s true nature. I was

illi b j h



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, pa beginning Mahamudra studentand can only give you my takeon all o this. Merit is somethingwe accumulate through our gooddeeds and actions, and I might

add through pure good deeds andactions, and a pure mind – ourattitude. And it is not just obviousactions I am speaking o here, butthe entire state o our mind. Tattoo has to be puried, and that takestime, lots o time.

Over and over again it has beenexplained to me that the mainreason why students don’t graspMahamudra meditation is their lack o merit, not their lack o interest,smarts, or other qualications. Meritis something we accumulate until itreaches a point where it somehowblesses us or opens our mind

enough to receive some o thesemore subtle teachings. And meritis not something we can just go outand buy or dr um up. We can’t tradein our good deeds or merit, but ourgood deeds and a more enlightenedattitude can generate merit.

willing, but just somehow not yetready or able to receive.

Te other obstacle to Mahamudrameditation is the lack o devotionto our teacher on our part. Without

the blessings o the teacher, noexperience will arise. Tis I havebeen taught. A lack o merit andlack o devotion are what is missingin most would-be Mahamudrastudents. Lack o devotion justpoints to the act that the channelbetween our dharma teacher andus is not wide enough, not properly established in some way. It needs tobe developed and opened more. Tetrust and devotion to the teacher hasto be out there beore it can be inhere, so to speak.

How Do We Develop Merit andDevotion?

Well, the short answer is: gradually.Te longer answer is why we haveall o the preliminary practices likesthe Common Preliminaries (TeFour Toughts Tat urn the Mindtoward the Dharma), and the

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureUncommon Preliminaries orNgondro. And o course meditationpractice itsel. Tis puts us rightback toward the beginning, as in:where so we begin in practice? I you really believe you are seriousabout training your mind andlearning the Buddhist methods, thenh th t t d j t th t

quite as clear as we always assumedit was. It is like looking and ndingdirt everywhere we look, only todiscover the dirt is on the lens weare looking through.

In act, there are all kinds o mentalbaggage that we have been carryingaround literally orever that has to



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here are the steps to do just that.First, we need to assess the state o our own mind.

How Crazy Are We?

Te simple answer is that we haveno idea. Up until now we haveknown everything through themonocle o the untrained mind. Wedon’t know whether our mental lteris clear or cloudy, clean or dirt y,and so on, because we have hadnothing to compare it to. Comparedto what? Aer all, we have neverknown any other way o seeing sincewe were born. Here in the west, it iseven worse because we assume ourmind is crystal clear and good-to-go at birth. What’s not to like? Why shouldn’t we be ready or the mostadvanced teachings like Mahamudra

meditation rom the very start?So it should not come as any greatsurprise to us that the rst thing wemay learn that the rst thing we may learn in beginning meditation isthat our vision is obscured and not

around literally orever that has tobe cleared up or us in order to seeand use the mind properly. We cancheck this or ourselves very simply.Here is how:

Just go and sit by yoursel or eventen minutes. As an exercise, justocus on and ollow your own breathas it moves in and out. Don’t bedistracted, but just let the mind reston the breath, undistracted. Let itremain there. Just do it right now, sowe have something to discuss.

My guess is that or most o youthese could be ten very longminutes, minutes that include a loto distraction, and that you nd itdifcult to rest the mind withoutdistractions. Most o you probably won’t even try, because you think you already know the answer. Tis

inability to simply rest in t he minditsel is considered an obscuration.Examples o obscurations mightinclude a lack o mindulness, a lack o awareness, mental agitation andirritation, interruptions like

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturea wandering mind, daydreaming,laziness, sleepiness, and so on. Teseare just some minor obscurations wemight run into on the cushion as weattempt to meditate.

Major obscurations would includeanger, jealousy, greed, hostility,ear, hope, expectations, pride,

something like ngondro, how do youplan to remove obscurations?

Te Sequence o Learning theDharma

Buddhists are very efcient. Tey like to make lists and tend toorganize everything in the properorder or sequence and that includes



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worrying, violence, ignorance,attachment, and so on. Tese minorand major obscurations generally cloud the mind rom being able toapprehend and register more subtle

and advanced teachings such asMahamudra meditation. We havebeen carrying these obscurationswith us as long as we can rememberand may not even realize it.

Obscurations have to somehow beclaried and removed beore we canprogress and see clearly enough toundertake any o the more advancedpractices like Mahamudra. How todo this is the question and that iswhere the Common Preliminaries(Four Toughts) and ngondro(Extraordinary Preliminaries)come in. Ngondro (pronounced

nŭn-dro) is tailor made to removeobscurations and work the mindinto a condition o awareness andmindulness. Ngondro may seemarduous and endless, but it is the

very best way I know to efciently remove obscurations. I not through

order or sequence, and that includespractice. I you one day aspire topractice Mahamudra meditation,there is a very denite order o practice that is suggested. It is not

that there are no other p ossibilities,but all things considered, here isthe order o dharma practice thathas been taught or at least onethousand years. Tis order worksnot because Buddhists say it works,but Buddhists says it works becausein act it does work.

Happiness & Sufering

In the great many teachings,both written and oral, that I haveattended or studied, perhaps the rstand oremost statement that mostlamas present is:

“All beings want happiness;

No beings want to suer.”

However obvious this statement may be, unless we take it to heart, we willbe missing the point. Every beingrom the giant whale and elephant tothe teeny tiniest microbe that moves

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Natureis trying to live and have theirparticular orm o happiness. Andno being known to science (exceptperhaps humankind) voluntarily seeks suering or its own sake. Inact, it is just the reverse. All beingstry to avoid suering.

Beings o all kinds and sizes sharethis approach to lie and all beings

simply a practical method to achievegreater awareness, a step-by-stepgradual path to enlightenment.Buddhism doesn’t even have a ‘god’.Buddha is not going to reach downand enlighten us. It is up to us toenlighten ourselves. Te Buddha justpointed out to us how to do it. Wehave to do it.



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this approach to lie and all beings,large and small, have the sameessential Buddha Nature. I we donot have respect or ALL lie, mosto the Buddhist approach will be

lost on us. Aer all, there is nothingintellectual or abstract about theabove statement that beings searchor happiness and try to avoidsuering. It is not subtle.

Te Four Common Preliminaries

And there is nothing abstract aboutthe Four Common Preliminarieseither. In act, these our thoughts(as they are called) are probably responsible or my being a Buddhistbecause, aer looking into a numbero dierent religions, when I cameacross these our ideas, they did notseem to me religious at all. Tey made simple plain old common

sense and were ideas I had beencontemplating on my own as arback as I can remember. It wasthen that I realized that (at least orme) Buddhism was not religious inany way I could identiy rom my Christian upbringing. Buddhism is

Te Four Toughts Tat urn theMind

Te “Four Common Preliminaries”are also called “Te Four ToughtsTat urn the Mind oward theDharma,” because only by havingthese our thoughts constantly inmind can we manage to turn ourmind away rom the external andinternal distractions that haunt useach day and toward the nature o the mind itsel.

Tese our thoughts that turn themind are essential to the Buddhistteachings and they are easy tounderstand. Here are the ourthoughts that, i we can hold themin mind, are capable o turningour minds away rom the many distractions and toward inner

realization:

First Tought: Te PreciousHuman Lie

Lie is precious! Even the least o living beings treasures lie as best it

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturecan. Growing up I always thoughtand hoped that I would be good orsomething in this lie, that I wouldbe used up in some good way, andnot just wasted.

Te point here is not only that all lieis precious, although o course it isto each being. Te main point is thatthis particular human lie we happen

practice dharma (like the realm o animals) or we are too high on onething or another (and not down-to-earth enough) to actually practicedharma. Te human birth is the onehappy me¬dium. And we have itnow.

Second Tought: Impermanence

T d h h h



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p ppto have right now is most precious,and it is precious not just becauseit is our own lie. Te human lieis precious because it is said to be

our only opportunity to nd andpractice the dharma and t hereby somehow awaken and move towardenlightenment. Te opportunity o having a human lie to learn dharmais what is most precious o all. My teacher would say that the act thatyou are reading this paragraphmeans that you have accumulatedenormous merit to even come incontact with the dharma, to evenhear about it. You are already inthe 99th percentile o all beings. Inother words, you have already comea long way.

It is written that o the six realms,rom low to high, only the humanrealm oers the exact combinationwe need to meet and actually learnthe dharma, and so it is oencalled the “precious human birth.”In every other realm we are eithersuering or bewildered too much to

Te second thought that canturn the mind is the thought o impermanence. “Impermanence”simply means that we have a limitedop¬portunity here, one that beorewe know it will be gone. Tereis a wonderul story o the greatteacher the Ven. Chogyam rungpaRinpoche, who opened one o histalks with these words: “Some o uswill die soon…,” he said very slowly,and then took a sip o whatever hewas drinking, and continued “Andthe rest a little later.”

O the ‘Four Toughts’,“impermanence” is the most obviousto us all, i only because lie jogsour memory every once in a whileand reminds us that we ARE in actimpermanent.

We all get a whi o impermanencerom time to time, perhaps asthose closest to us die or when wemomentarily realize that we too areimpermanent, that death can only come closer as time passes. I like tocall ‘impermanence’ the smelling

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturesalts o the dharma. It wakes us up.And there seem to be several aspectsto impermanence.

Witnessing the heartbreaking senseo impermanence nature displaysis one way we are aected, oenbringing out compassion within usor the suering that most animalsand beings expe¬rience. Tis

the taste is pretty obvious: actionand result. You do something in lieand it provokes a reaction or result.

Te aertaste (with understandingkarma in my experience) is thatas you get more into looking atkarma, you begin to realize thatnot just the big decisions or actionsbring results but that ALL actions



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and beings expe rience. Tishelps to keep us sob er. Ten thereis the recollec¬tion o our ownimpermanence, the act that we willor sure die one day. Tis is harder

or us to look at, so we tend to pushit out o our consciousness most o the time.

A sense o our impermanence canalso urge us to not waste time,because our own lie will expire oneday soon, and or all we know, itcould be today. As the Ven. BokarRinpoche said to me years agowhen I le his monastery in WestBengal, India, “Michael, I will seeyou tomorrow or in the next lie,whichever comes rst.”

Tird Tought: Karma and ItsResults

Understanding karma and its resultsis not as easy as it might seem.Karma is like tasting some necheese or ood where there is anaertaste, a taste and then a littlelater, an aer-taste. In this analogy,

bring results, but that ALL actions(everything we do) bring somereaction, lay down their own track or cast some ne shadow. And i werepeat that action, good or bad or

us, the track only deep¬ens. Tosetracks are also our karma.

It took me a while or this to really sink in. In other words, we wouldbe best served i we were very,

very careul in ev-erything we do,careul in every action, no matterhow trivial it might appear on thesurace. It reminds me o one o the most common images used toillustrate chaos theory in mod-ernphysics, the image o the apping o a buttery’s wing in South Americaserving to modiy the weatherin Iceland – something like that.

Little things can mean a lot. Tis isparticularly true with karma.

Karma is not only about committingbad deeds and paying or it, butalso about shaping our lives almostinvisibly by every small action wedo.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureTis is perhaps best celebrated inthe methodical care and gentlenessshown by some o the great Zenmasters in every move they make,like the traditional tea ceremony.Te more we work our way into thepractice o dharma, the more careulwe become in our every deed,word, and thought – body, speech,and mind With karma we are all

down by impermanence do weactually sicken and become nauseaswith lie as we know it; only thendoes it turn empty o meaning orus and reveal itsel as a construct.Otherwise, we keep it hopping at alltimes.

Four Toughts Summary

Tese our thoughts: the precious



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and mind. With karma we are allwalking on tiptoe.

Fourth Tought: Samsara – Tis World

Te ourth o the “Four Toughts”is the consistent unde-pendability o this world, also sometimes called“the revulsion o Samsara,” Samsarabeing this world that you and I livein. We live in a state o change thatitsel is changing, or as I like to say it: I will never be able to quite getall o my ducks in a row. I alwaysbelieve I will, but I never have yet,and the teach¬ings suggest it islogically impossible.

Like the gambling casinos, it is only our own gullibility that keeps usbetting on permanency, thinkingwe can actually game the system.

Others can’t, but given enough time,we think we are dierent; we cando it. Tis is the same attitude orcarrot that has led us rom lie to liethrough beginning-less time.

Only when we are severely struck

Tese our thoughts: the precioushuman lie, impermanence, karma,and the sheer undependability o liehave been said to be the our riendsthat help to keep us awake, thatkeep us rom totally abandoningourselves to the deep sleep o distractions, bewilderment, andconusion.

“Te Four Toughts that urnthe Mind” really are the gateway to practicing ibetan Buddhismor many. I know they were orme. When I rst heard o them, Icounted through them one by oneand totally agreed. I had a littletrouble with the ourth t hought,the one about detaching rom thisworld, because I thought or a whilethat it meant I could not have any un or joy in this lie, which o

course is not what it saying. I had tobe sure that those Buddhists werenot taking away whatever little joy in lie I could manage. Tey weren’t.And it may be worthwhile to relate alittle story rom my experience that



The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturethis at several levels.

I can remember one particularinstruction he gave, as I wasbreathing out. rungpa Rinpochetold me to let the breath go out, andI tried hard to do just that, just tolet it go. He saw this and told me toreally let it go all the way out andnot to worry. “It will come back,” hesaid It returns As I took this in and

“Te dragon has our pearls, one ineach hand, and as long as he holdsall our, he can y, but i he dropseven one o them, he will all to theearth.” Te idea was that the ourpearls were the our thoughts thatturn the mind to the dharma. Aslong as we can manage to keep anawareness o these our thoughtsin our mind, our dharma practice



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said. It returns. As I took this in andtried to relax still deeper, on a moreinner level my innate ear o deathashed beore my eyes and then

relaxed also. I never eared deathas much again aer that moment.And so it went. It was cosmic. Tereis more to it, but perhaps anothertime. You get the idea. It was deepand transorming.

When the instruction was over andas I was leaving, we walked downthe hall together toward the rontdoor. On the wall on our rightwas the poster I had created orRinpoche’s talk. It was o an orientaldragon ying in the clouds carryingour pearls, a pearl securely graspedin each paw. rungpa Rinpochestopped at the poster, gesturedtoward it and said, “Do you knowwhat this image is all about?” I toldhim that I did not, and that I justthought it was a wonderul image.He then went on:

, pcontinues, but i we orget abouteven one o them, things just can’ty right. We must remember all our

o them. Later, I wrote this po em.Tese our thoughts are not only important or beginners. WhenI nished many years o practice(including working through twongondros and a number o themore advanced deity practices), andbegan actually to learn Mahamudrameditation, the very rst step inthat practice was to once againconcentrate on the our thoughtsthat turn the mind. So these ourthoughts are not just or beginners.Tey are essential. I am sharing animportant point with you here.

Going or ReugeI you can get behind t he ‘FourToughts Tat urn the Mind’ andsee that they make sense, then thenext step on the Buddhist path, atleast or me, was ‘Going or Reuge.”

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureTe title sounds kind o dramatic,but it is really very simple and doesnot contradict any other religiouspractice you are involved in. Forexample, I was raised Christian andhave never turned my back on theteachings o Jesus. Tey made sense.I just needed a method or path togreater awareness, which Buddhismoers. Reuge simply opens up achannel between yoursel and the

what Buddha did, the way he wentabout it, and those who ollow in hisootsteps.

Te reuge vow always involves adirect linkage or transmission romBuddha’s lineage through 2500years down to the present moment.Usually, a lama or rinpoche gives thereuge ceremony or you can requestit. I have never heard o anyoneb i d i d t d d h



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yBuddha, his path, and ollowers.‘Going or Reuge” is a simpletransmission that connects you toa lineage going back at least 1,000years. Here is what ‘reuge’ is allabout:

Te vow o reuge is a simplerecognition on our part that thehistorical Buddha was a humanbeing just like us, and not a godor deity. He enlightened himsel.Likewise, it is a recognition that theBuddha’s teachings (the Dharma)was the method or path that he took to greater awareness, and those whocorrectly practice the dharma (theSangha) are t to assist us who arebeginners on that same dharmapath. Tat is essentially the meaningo reuge.

In other words, we go to reuge inthe Buddha, the dharma, and theSangha, not to the exclusion o anything else we may hold precious,but in addition to what we already have and believe in. aking reuge isour way o recognizing the truth o

being denied or turned down whenrequesting reuge.

At this short ceremony, the lama

cuts a tiny piece o your hair andgives you a dharma name, a namewhich you will have until youbecome ully enlightened. Tisceremony takes only about one hal hour and never involves any money or obligation, other than to respectthe three objects o reuge, theBuddha, his path (dharma), and histrue ollowers (Sangha). Tat’s it.

Te ceremony and reuge name aretangible, but there are intangiblesas well. Te actual connection witha living lineage and with the longline o teachers who have held it isa blessing o great value. Tis is aspiritual connection that can be elt

by most who take reuge. I knowI was so happy to have an actuallink to such a humble and powerultradition. aking ‘Reuge’ or me wasthe rst step in what has been anongoing lie-changing experience.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureAnd Ten Comes the Ngondro

When I rst heard about ‘Ngondro’,the Uncommon or Extraordinary Preliminaries, I was shocked. It wasone thing to ask me to meditate on acushion, but entirely another thingto suggest that I might do 111,111ull prostrations on the oor. Andwhat about the 111,111 recitations,or the 111,111 100-sylable mantras,

trouble with taking a yoga class.Some o us even work out onthe weight bench to develop ourmuscles and stay in shape. But w henit comes to matters o the mind,we westerners seem to believe t hatthe mind, just as it comes out o the box, is good to go – perect. Inact, I could make a good case thatmost o western philosophy is about

i th i d t id thi



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ythe 111,111 mandala oerings, andthe 111,111 guru yoga prayers? Giveme a break! I ran screaming rom

the thought o it.Needless to say that I peeredthrough the doorway o ngondropractice or a very long time beoredoing any, and even when I didsome, it was just to test the waters. Ithought: what kind o throwback tothe Middle Ages are these practices?What kind o devoted crazy personwould submit to this? As you cansee, I had my own opinion.

Te Reality Te reality is that I was a hard case.We are all hard cases when it comesto doing ngondo. Or, as my teachers

says: through all the time in history up to now, we are the ones that stillnever got it, literally the hard cases,those who have managed to ignoreenlightenment almost entirely up tothis point. All o us. We have no

using the mind to consider this orthat, but never to look at itsel. Inthe west, we don’t tend to use t he

mind to look at the mind. Tat issomething Asians do.

Asians have pointed out seemingly orever that the mind itsel is aproper object o study. Westernpsychology is little more than a poorand relatively juvenile reection o the ancient mind sciences o theAsian people. In ibet and Chinathey study the mind, which is whatmeditation and all we have beendiscussing here is about.Massage the Mind

Earlier I mentioned thatMahamudra meditation is difcultto learn mostly due to our lack or merit and devotion, andunamiliarity with meditation. Lack o merit? Lack o devotion? Lack o amiliarity with the mind itsel?Tese all add up to a simple lack o

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturetraining the mind whatsoever. Wemay have trained the mind herein the west to look at everythingoutside o us, but we have notproperly trained the mind to look inside at itsel, at its own nature.Why have we not done this here inthe west aer all these years? Howmight we go about it? Tese kindso questions lead us to topic o ngondro practice.

only person you can shortchange isyoursel, and i you do that, sooneror later you have to do it over and doit right BECAUSE it does not work any other way. Tink about that.

How could you cut corners orbetter yet, why would you cutcorners when it comes to your ownenlightenment. It can’t be done.Te astest way starts at the very b i i k d i l



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g p

I we want to grow a garden, we haveto prepare the soil. It is the same

with the mind. We can’t just leapinto Mahamudra practice. We haveto prepare or it. Ngondro practice,as medieval as it might at rst glanceappear, just happens to be the easiestand most kind way to prepare themind or more advanced practices,like that o Mahamudra meditation.rust me. I am the slipperiest o the slippery. I I could have ound away around doing ngondro, I wouldhave. In act I had to do ngondrotwice because I was too much in ahurry to get to advanced practices todo it right the rst time. I took toomany shortcuts.

I you want to save time and moveahead quickly with dharma practice,submit to starting at the beginningand moving orward rom t here,because you will end up doing itanyway. In other words, there areno shortcuts in dharma, because the

beginning. ake my advice or learnthe hard way as I did.

Believe me, I should know, because

I tried everything to get ahead andplace out o dhrma-101 or whateverwe could agree to call it, and to noavail. When all was said and done,I had to start at the beginning, andall the time I wasted looking orloopholes was just that: a big wasteo time that set me back years. Doyoursel a avor. Do it r ight once.

Te Mind

In reality, ngondro is a brilliantly designed system or awakening andexercising the mind, a system orbreaking down resistance built upwho knows how many lietimes agoand working our mind into shape sothat we can actually use it. You can’texpect to bypass eons o ignoranceexcept by actually changing andlearning to use the mind. It takeswork and that work is anything but

just intellectual.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureNgondro shapes your body, youremotions, and your mind. Ngondropractice is the easiest way to do justthat. And it incorporates both thedevelopment o merit and devotion,the qualities that you will need toenter Mahamudra practice.

Enhance the Mind?

You can’t enhance the mind, butyou can train it. Te mind is not

d b l h l

would soon be going in circlestrying to know what is real and whatis your imagination. It would be alltrial and error and you would notknow what you can trust and whatis leading you away rom w hereyou want to be. In other words,you would be right where you arenow, unable to do this on yourown. Tis is what the Vajrayanapath is all about: working with an



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improved by caeine, alcohol, ordrugs o any kind. Tese substancesalter the mind, making it even still

harder to use. But the mind can betrained, which is what meditation isall about.

Te Blessings o the Guru

Here is a point that is relatively easy to explain, but very difcultor beginners to understand. Youcan’t train the mind in Mahamudrameditation without having anauthentic teacher. Period. End o story. You might be able to pick upon basic meditation techniques rombooks or on your own, but thesemore advanced techniques are not

just “advanced” physical techniques”that can be learned step-by-step by

ollowing a diagram. Tey involveadvances in ‘attitude’, which includealtering your approach, motivation,and intention in ways that wordsalone cannot describe.

Without an authentic teacher you

authentic teacher. Tis is why it isconsidered a ast path, because thereis transmission and lineage involved.

Tese are the blessings o the guru.

In Vajrayana Buddhism you have tobe able to trust your teacher in orderto trust yoursel. Your condence,aith, and trust have to extendbeyond your own skin. You must beable to but your complete trust inanother person outside yoursel, inthe guru. I you can’t do that, t henyou have to learn to do it, and thisbecomes part o the practice itsel.

We may not be able to trust ourguru right o. Perhaps we havenever really trusted anyone otherthan our sel. And it is morecomplicated yet. First you have toactually nd an authentic guru towork with, and this is not easy. It issaid that there are 84,000 dharmateachings because it takes that many methods to accommodate all o the

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturedierent types o dharma studentsout there.

You may nd an authentic teacher,but not one suited to your particularpersonality and/or current stateo mind. In other words, you cannd a good teacher, but you can’tlearn rom them. Tey don’t suityou. Or you may nd a teacher whois not authentic and you can’t tellthe dierence. In this case, both

transmission or ‘lung’, whichsomeone empowered to give thattransmission must recite in yourpresence. Only then can you beginngondo.

Te good thing is t hat the teacherwho gives you permission and thereading transmission does not haveto be your main teacher. Tey can

just help start you out. Te processo actually doing ngondro is the



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teacher and student can waste a loto time or worse, create even moreobstacles or both. Disentanglinga non-working teacher-studentrelationship also has its complexitiesand dangers. It can discourage thestudent.

My point here is that it can be very difcult to nd an authentic teacheron the one hand, and beyond thatit may be difcult or you to learnto work with a teacher, even i they are authentic. Tis is another reasonwhy the ngondro practice is souseul. Trough ngondro, many o the possible kinks and disconnectsin the teacher/student relationshipare worked out early on.

Permission to PracticeAnd you can’t just start doingngondro on your own either. Youhave to have permission to startngondro and you have to rsthave what is called the reading

y g gbest preparation or working withan authentic teacher you may meetdown the road.

As you will nd out by practicingngondro, it is not just about doingthe 111,111 prostrations or whateverpart o that practice you arecounting out. Te most importantresults are the changes in attitude,intention, and approach that thesepractices bring about. Troughngondro you gradually remove allkinds obscurations you may havehad all your lie, and the processpuries your mind in ways thatyou are not now aware o or couldimagine.

Tis purication can open the door

to your recognizing an authenticteacher that ts your personality when you meet him or her, whichmay be something you cannot doat this point. I you wore a pair o unclear glasses all your lie, how

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Naturewould you ever know any dierentunless you cleared up whateverclouded them? In other words, wedon’t even see our obscurationsbecause they have always been there.

We could search everywhere orclarity, but i our mind is unclear wewill never just chance upon clarity,because we carry our obscured viewwith us. Looking will never ndanything dierent But the moment

provide. You can nd a list o centersin North American and aroundthe world at Kagyu.org. Check them out. Even with these centers,you will have to nd a teacher thatyou can work with that suits yourpersonality.

So there you have my account o encountering the dharma. I am notan authorized teacher, and don’toer reuge or anything else I am



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anything dierent. But the momentwe begin to polish and train ourmind, we start to see more clearly.

Removing our mental obscurationsmay not be un or easy, but until wedo, we will continue more or less

just as we are.

Where to Go

ibetan Buddhism and Buddhismin general are quickly gainingpopularity in this country. oday there are all kinds o centers, events,teachers, magazines, and so on. Iam sure that many o these groupsand teachers are authentic, but Idon’t know them rst hand andcan’t recommend them or notrecommend them.

Pretty much the only centers I knowby experience are the Karma Kagyucenters o ibetan Buddhism. Sincethese centers all teach the samething, I can reer them to you withcondence as I know what they can

oer reuge or anything else. I am just like you, but have been studyingthe dharma or a little while now.

What I can perhaps do is pointyou in the right direction i youhave questions. You can reach meat the email address below. Andlastly I dedicate this writing to allthe Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, thatthey may continue to benet allsentient beings and to help all o the beings in the six realms to reachenlightenment.

Michael ErlewineSempa ChÖnyi [email protected]

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureTe Four Toughts Tat urn the Mind

Tis precious lie,Impermanent and brie,I know.My actions keep on piling up,

And I can’t quite get my ducks into a row.

rungpa said to me,So many years ago,By grasping just one thought or two,

We’ll never turn aside.

Post Meditation

I I am practicing all the time, When will I have time to practice?

Rinpoche

Just as in that dream o sleep you came,Urging me awake,So too, in this dream o lie,



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We must, he said, maintain all our, And leave not one behind.

Four precious thoughts that touch the heart,Only they can turn the mind.

Mind Practice

Not an option,But a reuge,Less painul than:

Anywhere else.

Feb. 14, 2010

ibetan new Year o the Iron iger

So too, in this dream o lie, You awaken me rom the nightmares o ignorance.

On rst meeting, At rst glance, You showed me compassion,Introducing me to mysel.

I wandered or days wrapped in your blessing. Yet, due to my weak practice,I could not hold that state or long.

Still,Having known such kindness,I no longer chase ater imitations.

You are the bright star in the night o my obscuration, Always showing me the way to the precious Dharma,Guiding me back to mysel.

You are indeed a precious one.

Rinpoche.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in Nature Water and the Well

Te rare times, When nothing moves me, And I don’t eel,Like doing anything.

Perhaps this is some kind o,Natural meditation,

An eortless detachment,From my day-to-day world.

All that is missing,

Toughts Make Sense

Toughts come.

I the thought is nonsense,I can’t keep it in mind.Forget it.

However,I a thought makes,

Any kind o sense,Has any kind o meaning,I usually ollow it.

Te Dharma says:

Realize the nature,O the thought,Not the content.

Seeing the true nature,O any thought,Ends the thought right there,Breaks its link to the senses,Causes no karma to arise,

And brings about awareness.



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From just being lazy,Is this awareness,

O my own condition.

I don’t waste time,Pretending to be busy,But just sit there,

And or a long time.

Nothing is missing.

Watch a movie,Read a book,Sit, or not,It makes no dierence.

I am right here.

Te mind is at rest,Te water back in the well.

- Michael Erlewine,

February 15, 2010,New Moon,New Year of the Iron Tiger

It’s my train o thought.

Yet ‘meaning’ in itsel is,Nothing,

A reerence,Pointing toward or at,Te sense a thought makes.

Toughts can only make sense.

And sense,Is an experience,Tat every thought will take me to,

A journey I am always on,Mini-incarnations,Te sum o which,

Add up to a lie,O endless just not-knowing.

Tis is why I meditate.

April 21, 2010

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureMeaning to Know

Feb. 7, 2010

Your words (or mine),Depend on what they mean.

Meaning is only a reerence, A simple reerral,Like pointing toward:Somewhere else.

In other words,Meaning is only as good,

Solitude

‘Alone’ is a simple mistake.Like the disappearance o a sound,Hearing cannot be heard,

And the nder never ound.

September 15, 2010

Meditation is Nothing

Te books say:Seek a place o solitude



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g g As the sense it makes, As in:

Does it make sense?

Meaning itsel,Is not meaningul.It makes no sense.It is not like ‘being’.

Only we can make sense.

Meaning points to:Experience,But only i ‘we’ go.

It is the only way to know.

Seek a place o solitude, And meditate,

But it’s just the other way round. When meditation,Naturally occurs,Tere is no place in the world,Tat you eel comortable,ry as you might.

Not here or there,Not doing this or doing that.

Only nothing eels right.

You just want to hold real still,Let the mind rest,

And then park yoursel,Somewhere out o the way,Like on a cushion,OrIn a place o solitude,Because:

Nothing is going on.

Sept. 13, 2010

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NatureMandala

A good oering,Gathers together,Naturally,o a point,O blooming,Like a perect fower,

And,Dissolving,Is gone.

Petals in the wind.

Samsara

Not exhausted,Uncontrollable,Recurring activities,

Animate my lie, And keep me ever moving,Trough a waste o time …

All the things I like to do.

But every so oten,I lose my appetite,And remain unmoved,

Given time,Even this world,Goes void,

And eortlessly,Rejects itsel.

Wait or that.

May 30, 2010



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Petals in the wind.

And then:

Again.

Te object,O mandalas,Is oering,Endlessly.

It is all oering.

Sept. 11, 2010

And remain unmoved,Not interested,

Already at the end,O where I would be,I I did all that.

My time is taken up.

Empty o eort, And motion, With no direction,I lose my meaning,

And just stop wandering.

I am so still.

I don’t have to keep my edge,Te edge keeps me.

At these times,I know,

Tat rejecting this world, Will never work.

The Lama of Appearances The Dharma in NaturePHOOGRAPHY

All photographs were takenwith Nikon systems, speci-cally the Nikon D300, D700,D3x, and D3s cameras. I useGitzo carbon-ber tripodsand Markins ball heads withSwiss-Arca style quick-re-lease clamps.



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As or lenses, this collection(in order o use) involvedthe Voigtlander 125mm /2.5APO Lanthar, Nikkor 85mmPC-E /2.8, Nikkor 105mm/2.8, and Nikkor 17-35mm/2.8.

Post shooting work was donein Adobe Lightroom 2.6 andPhotoshop CS3. I tend to useISO values as close to 200 asI can get them, slow shutterspeeds, and apertures usually

ranging rom 8 to 11.




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Experiences Mahamudra

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