22/4/25
Relationships are almost always feckless, unless there’s a spiritual vow in common seriously taken. Then, while still not assured, there’s at least some hope of weathering a progressive dissatisfaction and the certain vacillations of attraction and aversion. For the nescience yogin, ultimately a wanderer in the making, relationships can be instant liberation if the other is already fully Enlightened. This is a great long shot unless one is schooled in the secret communications with such extraordinary entities. Really, it’s an enlightened entity much more than a flesh and blood being one should look for, as in their very unsubstantiated, luminous and unworldly emptiness, the ultimate inspiration lay. Be brave yogins, when it comes to relationships and sexual gratification, follow the Yoga Tantras into their most secret suggestion of extracting supreme bliss, clarity and emptiness. Better to go off the cliff, awake and conscious, buoyed by tantric angels than caught in a weak moment, failing in transference, swooning through lack of preparedness. Or worse, a surprised or untimely demise—the way which the howling bardo lies.
24/4
The whole process of being reborn, for most beings, is perhaps a karmic algorithm matching up bodiless continuums in the bardo with their karmically suitable parents of the future. But for adepts whose awareness overreaches the ego’s inability to consciously cope with the body’s demise, it might just be a much cozier arrangement. The aged yogin adept picks out a much younger person to host their ageless consciousness, trained in the creation and dissolution of extraordinary vessels in which their mind was repeatedly poured and emptied. Such proficiency is entirely necessary in picking one’s future parents if a human rebirth is desired. Or in many cases required to fulfill the greater purposes of one’s Bodhisattva’s mission.
So, upon consciously initiating their own death, the adept waits in a Buddha heaven, receiving further Dharmic instructions, until their pre-selected mother is having coitus. While she and the father excitedly swap the necessary five elements—earth, water, fire, air and space—the yogin slips their bardo consciousness in between the mother’s red uterine fluids and the father’s white seminal congealments which get mixed together by the forceful poundings and gyrations of the two baby makers. So one acquires another human container for which the good of all sentient beings can be purposed. Sounds easy, right? I think few adepts would agree and might even show you their backside, scarred and blackened, their postured twisted and stooped after decades of sitting motionless in a profound pacification welcoming purifying transformations. The first step in a Buddhas’ eons long, unfathomably arduous efforts to save all beings from suffering.
14/5
I’ve been in Boudha for six days now, taking teachings on Vajrapani Bhutadamara and White Tara with Chakrasamvara and Vajrayogini initiations to come. The night before the day I took the White Tara initiation from HE Luding Khenchen Rinpoche, I dreamed of many people touching a swollen vulva as if were a lingam at a Jyotrilingam Shiva Temple. If one is lucky enough to get close enough to touch a Jyotrilingam within the garbhagriha, generally the outside is patted or rubbed and this was the same with the sacred vulva in my dream.
When I began thinking about how one touches a lingam, my fingers penetrated this perfect, conch-shaped vagina, moist and extraordinarily gratifying. It seemed I was the first to enter it and achieve this extraordinary experience. Then, the night of Buddha Purnima, which not only marks the day when Gautam Buddha was born but also the day he attained Nirvana under the Mahabodhi tree, I read the Twelve Deeds of His Life. Afterwards, late into the night, I experienced being perched on a very high plane, immobilized, and thought if I fell it would be a long decent with a fatal, excruciating impact when I hit the bottom.
No sooner did I think this, then I fell, accelerating straight down through a narrow channel of dim light. Conscious of my immanent demise, and of the lengthy time it was taking, I had the presence of mind not to panic. In fact, I overcame my fear of death by thinking of its unlikely nature, remembering teachings saying all things neither exist nor non-exist. While I dedicated my remembrance of this deathless state to all sentient beings, I braced for sudden impact. But it never came.
The most realistic simulation of ‘dying’ to date for me, even just to remember it recalls a very expansive and illuminated dawn-like experience to what is ordinarily thought to be an ultimately terrifying ending. It’s worth recalling the first deed of the Buddha was a steep, purposeful descent from Tushita Heaven. His father named him Siddharta, which signs a purpose fully accomplished. To consciously die and be born for the sake of beings, giving up one’s nirvanic seat in the Buddha realms is the core of a Bodhisattva’s vows. To experience dying, not once, but over and over again, comes at the end of one’s Yoga Tantra sessional sadhana. What’s suggested here is that practice makes perfect.
24/5
Just as the crustaceans living on the surface of a great whale feel this is their home—or the mole on my right calf, multiplying cells and casting them off in a similar manner, as does all living matter—so these abodes have no real existence, no foundation as a home other than the relationship with another entity functioning in a similar manner. Their arising, while observable, for example, a mole slowly increasing over the years, is at each measurement of growth just now coming into being while just now passing away. It doesn’t look quite the same, feel quite the same nor, from a wider perspective, become anything other than the mole on my right calf.
It’s an identifying mark that if documented, as it is here, will say this is part of the body of so-and-so. In that way, as a synecdoche, it’s the same as me. But is a mere mole really oneself? Hardly, from the ego’s point of view. Yet, that mole might just be the key identifying mark for one as a whole in a highly dramatic event known as one’s untimely death.
That whole, dying, will then, having been reduced to just that part—a mole on the right calf—becomes just that, and after a certain length of time, not even that. This is extinction, which happens to all of us who exist within the confinement of three times. No other entity will regard you or be thinking of you as they too will have ceased and likewise achieved total insignificance. Even now, neither one can be established without the other. Therefore, neither ever came on its own, never went on its own, and was never really there on its own.
One might say, however, there was a time before the mole appeared upon the limb of the person. But what is that time? How was the person before the mole? I don’t remember being particularly different. In fact, it’s hard to recount the event of that mole arising upon my skin. There was a period of it being small, then medium, and then large—and the way it seems now. In that way however, it seems to have found its happy place with all the other absurdities of the bodily form. They start small and growing to preordained maturity reside with the other anomalies in the collection of bodily forms. But only as a collection can they be recognized at all. As even a severed ear might be passed over many times as something else tossed aside upon an untrodden path.
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