Excerpts from : Return to Saraha (sounds of Innate Freedom vol. 3)
“Mahāmudrā cannot be conceived and is beyond mind.
For those yogīs who seize the vajra of self-awareness, this lamp of the connate when at the verge of death is the actuality that is the unity of prajñā and means.”
24/4/23
Dreamed last night of observing a captivating ego figure who had prosthetics makeup on his face made of recycled materials. When he asked why I was looking so intently at him I said I used to be a makeup artist. I lifted up some corners of the makeup trying see the original face.
Dagmema loved me strong this morning and gave me a stern talking to about not abandoning her and the Vajrayana just because I was furthering my Saraha studies and meditations and reaping results in Mahamudra. Perhaps Gampopa is correct about its superiority, but being an afflicted practitioner, my true face is one with my Wisdom Mudra’s, married to Hevajra and his mantra. It’s love she shows me, which is the highest ‘means.’
When teachers and scholars refer to means coupled with wisdom they are of course talking about compassion. Engaged compassion, requires not only virtuous motivation, but skills, resources, even various goods and services. The highest, most in demand of these is love and all it provides.
In Saraha’s Mahamudra, I understand love to be the recognition of the inseparability of beings. And the unborn state can be taken literally. One’s meditation moving from minding to non-minding, the non-arising of the connate, and then the ‘unborn’ state experienced, a non-dual luminosity, is the focal point of one’s samadhi. Beyond thought, Mahamudra, in the context of love, is the ‘greatest gesture’ as the non-observation of beings, but an infinite appreciation of them as unborn, anonymous and void—that is, per Nagarjuna in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.
“Elsewhere, The Body Treasure also says that minding is sealed with nonminding and being unborn, while being unborn is sealed with being beyond mind.”
This is just a statement of faith with one’s experience in sync. What’s believed in is Mahamudra’s ultimacy, continuously purified, with fluctuations of non-duality between ground, path, and fruition. Mara himself could be the real Buddha in this, it’s so easy to believe. It’s also ultimate equivalency. Not that I doubt the experience. I just question its efficacy as doctrine. Perhaps these things are best left unsaid—unpreached. Perhaps the Buddha’s initial response after his series of post enlightenment experience’s, culminating in Muchinda arising as both umbrella and a yogic finale, were correct—teach at Harvard? Impossible! Of course, my very strident reaction wholly supports its efficacy as doctrine. I’m a fool and bow down, as I’m simply not there yet in my range of stable experiences in the fourth designation of ‘beyond mind.’ Which is really to say, a seeming familiarity with it appears lacking, though I and all beings experience it ceaselessly.
25/4/23
Stretched Birwapa’s yoga this morning into Saraha’s four, minding, non-minding, unborn, and beyond mind. Non-minding and some connate ecstasy comes with repetition of mantra, stabilizing these states. Dagmema joined me as added union ecstasy. Together we wished for fourth and fifth empowerments. Parlayed to Acharya Guru and Hayagriva, busted Mother and Dagmema became her and vice versa. Reflections on creation process yielding the unborn state. Total relaxation with a vision of mahamudra as nothing at all. Heyagriva puncturing the fourth empowerment ceiling. Guru Rinpoche’s and Yeshe Sogyal mantra recitation. Changing partners. More ecstasy. Slipped into sky mode almost dreaming, then like a dream hopped a trolly or van with an old work friend who’d been very sick at one time. Arrived at aerial station where an even-featured woman with a glowing face and bright eyes greeted me with great expectancy. Very blissful. We had arrived at some objective correlative, the support, for the beyond mind state—an abode of the fifth empowerment. Birwapa’s speaks of such representation in his Vajra Verses.
———
14/7/26
…Recently I get these very strong feelings something bad is happening, somewhere else—and of course it always is. Just check the news apps…
15/7/26
The Undeciphered Indus Script
archaeothunder
“The Indus Script was used by the Indus Valley...”
Reply:
[These markings] say man came from a fish and once he could walk on land he had to carry a lot of stuff. But just carrying a lot of stuff made him very unhappy. So he made up this script to explain how being a fish is better. Turns out no one then could understood his script either. So he asked the gods for help. They came up with the Vedas. Later some smart people said it’s not logical the gods wrote the Vedas. So now we have to try to decipher the indecipherable to see if it’s the guy who wanted to be a fish again wrote them.
Shall We Dance? (2004) was Peter Chelsom's ...
This scene explains marriage better than any therapist ever could.
“…unnoticed because I will notice it and your life will not go unwitnessed.”
Guide4Films
Reply:
Yes, people are always in need of the witness. That’s exactly Mara. And then Mara has children. The need for personal significance is exactly what was defeated under the Bodhi Tree. You can quote me on that.
…Everybody makes the same mistake: Instead of trying to get to the top of this world, they should really be trying to get to the bottom of it…
Yes, seen it, been there. Somanathapura (often spelled Somnathpur), which features magnificent Hoysala period architecture. Top ten temples in the world contender. But if you go further northwest to Somanath Temple on the Arabian Sea you transcend the earthly arts altogether, becoming drunk with bliss on Maha Dev soma for hours.
Cambodia, the ‘N’ word is not our's to
use
Likes
A thought piece on racism in Cambodia @sake.writes-
门IDE.E
Kendrick Lamar
End racism, call out a friend.
Reply:
I lived in NYC for decades, worked with the Fat Boys, Fiddy Cent, Method Man, et al. Now I've lived in Cambodia since 2015. Long Beach? That's for surfin' So yeah, the N word is definitely not for any Cambodians I can imagine to use. And to do what it takes to 'earn' it is unspeakable. Thanks for posting this.
“This too shall pass"
shabnamnasimi
Reply:
I think it also sounds like something Shakespeare’s Polonius would say. My father use to say it with shameless bombastic confidence. I say look for those same words arising in the language of every major culture and you’ll probably find it there as well.
18/7
Suggested for you: Zoran Mamdani
anyone who wants to win in 2026 or 2028 and beyond this…
Reply:
👏👏👏 Maybe the finest American speaker ever. Compared to what we usually hear coming out of those other political leaders mouths, he’s like the Buddha. And I’m certain the most ferocious protectors, the rakshas and yakshas, of the New York City mandala have his back—and front. 🔥🔥🔥
Who said that?
“I don’t want you to move your lips but when I say so, say ‘happiness’ in your head…”
1,209
1,183
iamjudimoon
“Seriously, who said that?”
Reply:
Internal dialogue experienced with this kind of questioning allows one to experience nondual emptiness and clarity. It’s another ‘gentle way’ to one’s Buddha nature as the very font and seeming source of arising thoughts is experienced as ineffably soft or gentle.
…Abrahamists respect God as a permanent self seeking forgiveness and atonement. Buddhist dislodge and dissolve the self to respect Vajradhara as their own true Buddha nature…
21/7
As they work on our road in from, eventually to pave, my thoughts are on Blake’s idea of Poetic Genius and how it’s not present in improvements like road straightening or paving (see Shantideva’s Bodhisattva’s Way about leathering the world) but in the crooked, unimproved one. Poetic Genius is Man and displayed in Products of Time with which Eternity is in love. It is also Prophecy which is the End Time and descent of Jerusalem redeemed.
21/7
Bessel van der Kolk spent decades studying why people who understand their patterns completely still cannot change them. The answer is not psychological. It is biological.
Reply:
The 'talking cure' was always a pejorative term. To truly transform afflicted emotions and resultant bad behaviors you need a cure that employs a 'body method' like Vajra Yoga within Vajrayana Buddhism. If you want to purify deeper than what's going on in this life it can do that too. Teachings are available around the world now. It's worth more than a try.
…Your Mission I know and appreciate so so.
But mine, if only you could know,
would appreciate you so much more…
22/7
Staying still and having time pass quickly while being in the same position, or same room, and or simply not having to come and go very much, indicates the progressive purification of compulsive, animating behavior created by the reification of self-cherishing habits with attendant cravings, pampering, and ‘me’ breaks, like smoking. Due to one’s agency or volition upon which one mistakenly builds a substantive self with five sensuous aggregates, this concrete collective then acrues self-reinforcing, self-identifying habits, behavior predispositions determining perception and discernment of accommodating a false imaging of real ‘others’ in a believable environment accompanied by an experience of a permanent or substantive I, Me, and Mine, resulting in a proliferation of ‘self and other.’ These self orientated considerations and calculations leave a plaque of negative karma cankers embedded in the five skandas as samskara bija, twisted seed letters, ready to erupt once triggered by negative vibrations from negative actions which then prompts even more bad behavior. Eventually this masses into a hardening of habits and a generalized confusion and bewilderment to the extent one or all of the following negative conditions become chronically recurrent: hatred, bigotry, sexual compulsion, hoarding, narcissistic self-aggrandizement and loathing, so forth and so on. This then generates transactionally throughout social situations and causes a lot of obvious sufferings. But the suffering of conditioned existence nuanced and pervasive as it is of three natures: the suffering of obvious physical and mental pain, the suffering of change as it seems all good things must come to end, and the ‘nausea’ suffering of the dull rounds of endless births and deaths. However, by the Buddha’s unique discovery under the Bodhi tree what appears as oneself, as a defiled self, can be purified—becoming existent and nonexistent at the same time—this brings about the third of his Four Noble Truths, called the cessation of suffering. Since ignorance is the primary cause of suffering, wisdom is what rectifies it, and so the Guru becomes like a magnifying glass through whom the Buddha’s sun-like wisdom burns away the emotional and cognitive obscurations to the Enlightened state of being, a great kindness always motivated by the supreme wish that all beings may escape suffering in those three natures.
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