a Dzogchen / Mahamudra blog

Three Asparas at Angkor Wat

Month: September 2004 Page 3 of 5

Dakinis of Coincidence

The more you practice, the more it happens.

Things in the ‘outside’ world start reflecting your inner world. Auspicious Co-Incidence. Dependent Origination.

Sitting meditating yesterday, eyes half open, facing out the window. In my meditation, Dakinis swirling like a snow storm, a whirlwind of Enlightened energy. Right then, at that point, outside the window, a sudden whirl of wind, whipping the autumn leaves and rubbish round in circles, picking them up in swirls of energy.

Dakini with Blessings for the Ocean by Lasha Mutual
Dakini with Blessings for the Ocean by Lasha Mutual

Blessings flood my mind

Blessings flood my mind, of connections, support, refuge, pure beings who watch and guide, who lend their delicate helpfulness wherever beings are open and receptive to their compassion and insight.

How often the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ mirror each other. Things pop up outside, right after remembering them. The weather suddenly matches the mind. People, things, places, all seemingly arranged to match your inner thoughts, your inner occurances.

The how and why, I’ve no idea. It just keeps on happening, in happy symmetry.

Synchronicity.

Buddha Heart.

Machig Labdron – That is Buddhahood

Ah, fortunate sons and disciples gathered here,

This body of ours is impermanent like a feather on a high mountain pass,

This mind of ours is empty and clear like the depth of space.

Relax in that natural state, free of fabrication.

When mind is without any support, that is Mahamudra.

Becoming familiar with this, blend your mind with it —

That is Buddhahood.

Machig Labdron
Machig Labdron and the Foundations of Chod
by Jerome Edou
Machig Labdron Thangka
Machig Labdron Thangka

Butterfly’s Dreaming

I was reflecting that the sense of inseparability in my deity practice has recently taken on a new dimension. The quality of not being sure whether I was generating the deity and identifying with her (Machig Labdron), or she was generating me and identifying with me has been so strong.

It seems so much more expansive and powerful to have this sense of the deity meditating with me, or even through me, rather than poor little me, with all my adventitious defilements, aspiring to be this vast flowering of wisdom and compassion incarnate.

Of course, I exaggerate for effect … I don’t really sit there feeling so ‘spiritually impoverished’, but just wished to convey the sense of how transformative the sense of identification can be. Once you take it on, it seems to melt away at rigid ideas of who is what and what is who. The deity, and yourself … well, they are not separate, they are not at all distinct, and even at a basic level, at times it feels like something much larger than you is flowing through you … as I say, I am being meditated, rather than me meditating.

Chuang Tzu dreams of the butterfly

So meditating on/with/by Machig Labdron, I’m reminded of one of the Taoist Chuang Tzu’s (Zhuangzi) famous poems, about the man who dreams he is a Butterfly …. though talking directly of dreaming, this teaching so beautifully reflects the dissolution of any sense of separation in deity practice, resonates with the dreamlike nature of all experience, and speaks of the centre-less, groundless nature of things :

One day about sunset, Zhuangzi dozed off and dreamed that he turned into a butterfly.

He flapped his wings and sure enough he was a butterfly…

What a joyful feeling as he fluttered about, he completely forgot that he was Zhuangzi.

Soon though, he realized that that proud butterfly was really Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly, or was it a butterfly who dreamed he was Zhuangzi!

Maybe Zhuangzi was the butterfly, and maybe the butterfly was Zhuangzi?

Zhuangzi / Chuang Tzu
Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi dreams of the butterfly
Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi dreams of the butterfly

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