Awakening to Our True Nature
I’d like to start off this foreword by reflecting back to you, at least in my opinion, how fortunate—indeed, blessed—you are to have come across this book. These are authentic teachings, transmitted by realized teachers, whose sole purpose is to help liberate us from our mind-created prison and awaken us to our true nature so we can remember who we actually are.
The teachings contained in this book are not abstract theories or mere speculations; they are pure, unmediated instructions on how to realize our true nature that have been passed down through an unbroken lineage of enlightened masters going back thousands of years, to Shakyamuni Buddha, and to Guru Padmasambhava, the great eighth-century siddha regarded as the Buddha of our age, who concealed these teachings as a mind treasure, or terma, to be revealed at a later time when conditions are right. That time is now.
These teachings undo one little but enormously consequential mistake that all but the most enlightened among us unconsciously make: in essence, as if falling under a spell, we have succumbed to the chronic habitual pattern of contracting against our own light and clinging to a false sense of a separate self, and this has fed a sense of lack and scarcity and a kind of existential insecurity about who we truly are. This is a form of grasping, a holding onto and becoming attached to the way our conditioned mind thinks and believes things—including ourselves—exist. It is a pattern that we continuously enact beneath our conscious awareness, which means it is rendered unconscious. Unless illumined and seen through, this dynamic develops into what in Buddhism is called “ego clinging.” As a result, we invest much of our precious life force in identifying with, defending, and protecting this fictitious identity, this separate egoic self that doesn’t even exist in the way that we’ve been imagining it does. As if weaving a cocoon around our own true nature, we unwittingly suffocate ourselves by identifying with this self-created egoic illusion, a process that endlessly generates a whole host of other illusions that become mutually self-reinforcing. No one is doing this to us—we are doing this to ourselves. This is the essence of the madness that afflicts the human species.
This is a great danger that Western psychiatrist C. G. Jung warned us about—to mistakenly identify with what he called the “fictive personality,” a process that informs and gives shape to the collective insanity that is currently being enacted all over the world. This idea is supported by the revelations of quantum physics, which has been described as “the crowning intellectual achievement of the last century.”* In essence, the wisdom that has been unlocked in discovering the quantum is comparable to the insights that the spiritual masters of the East have already realized. The teachings that Venerable Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Venerable Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche, affectionately known by their students worldwide as “the Khenpo Rinpoches,” are offering here transcend time, place, and culture and are truly universal. And even though Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche passed away in 2010—notably only weeks after his final teachings, which are found in this book—his wisdom and compassion permeate the three times. His reincarnation, Khenchen Yangsi Rinpoche, was found in 2016 (the term yangsi is used to refer to the reincarnation of a master).
The dynamic that fuels the ongoing creation and maintenance of this false identity, whose origin and cure is to be found nowhere except within our own minds, drives us into a state of delusion in which we become disoriented and deranged, thereby obscuring the awareness of our true nature. These teachings reveal us exactly as we are, which is to say they reveal our true nature, which is always with us and is already liberated. They help us open our spiritual eyes so that we can finally see, thus healing the chronic, self-induced psychospiritual blindness that afflicts our species.
I have had the honor of knowing and studying with the Khenpo Rinpoches for about forty years. Connecting with these masters has truly been one of the greatest blessings of my life. After meeting the Khenpos I remember feeling so incredibly fortunate, like I had won the lottery a trillion times over. Not quite able to believe my good fortune in finding beings like the Khenpos living in the middle of the samsara that is New York City, I took full advantage of their availability, trying my best to do the practices they taught, which literally transformed my life, leading me to find both my vocation as well as myself. I feel true joy and happiness in being able to share with you what has helped heal and transform my own life.
When I first met the Khenpo Rinpoches in 1984, I was going through a particularly difficult time in my life. They never turned down my seemingly endless requests to meet with them (typically every week), offering me support in every way they possibly could, even going out of their way if they thought it would help. At a meeting with some of my fellow students years later, I shared how the Khenpos had quite literally saved my life. I quickly realized that I wasn’t the only one in the room whose lives they—and their teachings—had saved. The teachings they offer—the nectar of Dharma—can be likened to life-giving oxygen for the soul.
I am of the opinion that one of the Khenpos’ siddhis, which can be conceived of as being superhero powers that are the result of realization, is their incredible ability to teach and transmit the Dharma. I have personally received teachings from great masters of many different traditions, but have never received such direct, embodied, psycho-activating transmissions—as if from one heart and mind to another—as when the Khenpos teach the Dharma. The Khenpos are considered to be two of the greatest scholar-practitioners in all of Tibetan history. In my mind they are the personification of the archetype of the enlightened teacher in human form. I think of them as a two-headed bodhisattva whose sole raison d’etre for being on this planet at this time is to help humanity wake up and remember who we are.
Years ago, when the Khenpos were visiting me in Portland, Oregon, I set up teachings for them that I had advertised as “teachings and transmissions.” As we were driving to one of the venues, I reminded them that they were not only to give a teaching, they were also supposed to give a transmission. As soon as I said this, the Khenpos broke into hysterical laughter. I immediately “got the transmission” and realized the absurdity of what I had just said. Because they had so consciously integrated and realized their own true nature, their very physical presence, along with their teachings, was the transmission! In other words, they so embodied the Dharma teachings about our true nature, which is all about love, compassion, and wisdom, that they effortlessly and naturally could transmit their realization in each and every moment. In essence, the Khenpo Rinpoches had become transparent to the divine light that shines through all of us—what they call “the sunlight of our inborn nature of primordial wisdom.” The light of this realization is available to each and every one of us if we but have the eyes to see.
I’ve had other lamas who knew the Khenpos tell me that in Tibet they are thought of as living buddhas. The word buddha means one who has awakened to the dreamlike nature of reality. This is to say that a buddha is someone who has awakened to the empirical reality that this universe is a shared collective dream that we—all of us—are dreaming into material form moment by moment. To the extent that we are asleep to our true nature, however, we are instead using our innate power to create our experience against ourselves instead of in service to ourselves. Awakening to the dreamlike nature of ourselves and our situation and discovering our true nature is the medicine needed for the collective insanity that ails our species.
Though Khenchen Rinpoche left his body in 2010, his living spirit comes through the teachings in this book so strongly that it is as if he is fully present with us as we read his words. These very teachings are a form of his subtle body and spiritual legacy that he has left behind for our benefit. There is a sense that linear time has collapsed between the time when he gave these teachings and this very “now” moment. In reading his words, we are—potentially, depending on how open we are—receiving a living transmission directly from his realization into our minds.
The Khenpo Rinpoches are masters of our times, two holders of the Dzogchen (“Great Perfection”) lineage, which is considered to be the supreme, ultimate, and simplest path to liberation in the Buddhadharma. I am of the opinion that the arrival of Dzogchen teachings in the West is the most profound spiritual event that has happened in our world in two thousand years—an event that has as its scientific equivalent the emergence of quantum physics in the early twentieth century. The Dzogchen teachings are not ordinary Buddhist teachings. Dzogchen is not an ordinary practice, and yet it couldn’t be more natural. Because of their psychospiritual power, these teachings were kept secret until relatively recently. Like a time-released hidden treasure, or terma, these teachings are being revealed and shared at the exact moment in time when they are most needed by the world.
In Dzogchen, there is nothing to purify, nothing to transform, nothing to liberate, nothing to exorcise, and literally nothing to do other than recognize and then rest and abide in our true nature. One morning over breakfast, as if giving me a personal transmission, Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche simply said to me, “My one practice is to not get distracted.” This is Dzogchen in a nutshell: recognize our intrinsically pure nature and don’t forget it. This is true anamnesia (the opposite of amnesia)—an “unforgetting” not of a past historical event, but a remembering of something timeless that partakes in the eternal that exists within each of us in every moment.
Dzogchen, the “Diamond Vehicle” (vajra translates as “diamond”), is the pinnacle of the Vajrayana tradition and is also known as “Tantrayana.” In laying the foundation for the realization of our true nature, practitioners of this tradition do practices such as reciting mantra and visualizing deities, thereby engaging their body, speech, and mind. Though the countless variety of tantric deities looks just like the polytheism of old, these deities are not seen as external figures that the practitioner believes in and worships, but rather are understood as representing the diverse qualities of the enlightened mind. To use the language of psychology, these various deities symbolize the multifaceted archetype of the Self, our own deepest and most true nature.
In tantra we focus our attention on the archetypal image of the deity and identify with it in order to arouse the awakened aspects of ourselves, bringing these qualities into our present reality. In these visualization practices, the practitioner is instructed to not just see the visualized deity that symbolizes our enlightened nature as being outside of and separate from ourselves, but to merge with the essential qualities of the deity, thereby identifying with the deity to the point where we creatively imagine ourselves as being the deity itself. This is why tantra is also referred to as “deity yoga.” In doing so, we are tuning in to and helping to bring forth in ourselves what the deity symbolically represents—the part of us that is already healed, whole, and awake.
Some of these deities are in sexual union—called yab-yum—which can easily mislead the uninitiated reader to mistakenly think Buddhist tantra is about sexual techniques, without realizing that these tantric deities represent the union of opposites, the coming together of the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves. This is none other than the hieros gamos of alchemy, the sacred marriage, which symbolizes the wholeness of our being. The practice of tantra is a powerful method to swiftly attain the state whereby we can serve and be of maximum benefit to all beings. Tantra helps us realize that the peaceful and wrathful deities mentioned in the title of this book—which we will invariably encounter in what is called the bardo of death—are ultimately nothing more than projections of our own mind. Once recognized as such, these deities reveal themselves to be the very means for our liberation. In essence, tantra is all about helping us wake up and become lucid in the dream of waking life.
These practices help us realize that our very sense of identity, being a function of our creative imagination and a construct of (i.e., something constructed by) our mind, is malleable. In our evocation, visualization, and identification with the deity, we are not merely creating a fabrication, imagining something that doesn’t exist or isn’t real, but rather through an act of creative imagination we are skillfully getting in touch with and becoming familiar with our always available and already existing enlightened nature. The view of Vajrayana is that within our deepest selves we are already perfect, complete, whole, and enlightened. These visualization practices are a way of dissolving our limited conception of ourselves in order to get in touch with—and embody—who we truly are, our buddha nature.
At the end of the visualization practice we are instructed to dissolve the visualization of the deity as ourself, for this can easily become a subtle form of ego-clinging and inflation, at which point we have arrived at the doorway to the state of Dzogchen, the open-ended, spacious emptiness and intrinsic freedom of our true nature. These visualization practices are thus the skillful means by which we creatively and consciously engage with the natural projective tendencies of the mind. On the one hand, projections in our day-to-day lives create separation between people. Our unconscious projections on others, for example, get in the way of our seeing them as they really are. In Tibetan Buddhism, visualization practices consciously take advantage of our natural tendency to project the unknown parts of ourselves outside of ourselves. Just as psychology teaches us to withdraw our unconscious projections and find their source within ourselves, in these visualization practices we are instructed to recognize that the visualized deity is, like a mirror, reflecting back to us the awakened part of ourselves. We are invited to own and step into what the deity is symbolically revealing to us, a process that helps us deepen our intimate connection with our awakened nature, which has always been with us.
The Khenpo Rinpoches lived through their own hellish, harrowing, life-and-death ordeal of escaping Tibet during the Chinese invasion in 1959. They were refugees in India for many years before coming to the United States in 1984, which is to say that the Khenpos have known and experienced the suffering of samsara firsthand. Talking about their status as longtime refugees, the elder Khenpo, Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche, one day said to me, “Everywhere I go is my home,” which is a perfect expression of having found the ultimate refuge of his true nature within himself.
The Dzogchen realization is said to “cure the disease of effort,” which implies that not only is there no effort involved in this realization, but that effort is itself the obscuration. Meeting the Khenpos makes this statement understandable, as they are always completely relaxed, at ease in the moment, just simply being themselves, living and being in the fullness of the natural state of what it is to be an authentic, openhearted human being. They are simply in service to the field of consciousness that we all share, modeling the very opposite of being anxious and stressed-out in a world gone mad. The congruence and coherence of their very being and the teachings they share offer us a doorway into that same state, a state that is always freely available to us. After all, it is our very nature that the Khenpos are effortlessly pointing to, reflecting at us, embodying, and transmitting.
The teachings contained in this book are pointing at the dreamlike nature of the universe while simultaneously being an expression of that very dreamlike nature at which they are pointing. As the Khenpos say again and again, “Everything is a dream.” They counsel us to deeply reflect on the dreamlike nature of our situation. Why? In their own words, “Because it’s really true.” From the perspective of the teachings, which reveal the dreamlike nature of our situation in this and every moment, you, dear reader, have dreamed up these very teachings so as to potentially awaken yourself! But as the teachings state, you have to implement, put into practice, actualize, and bring into the core of your heart these teachings in order for them to effectively reveal your true nature. And what is our true nature? To quote the Khenpo Rinpoches, “Our nature is love. Our nature is compassion. Our nature is intelligence. Our nature is wisdom. Our nature is beautiful, and we’re going to bring that up. This is known as ‘practice.’”
It is not an accident that these profound and liberating teachings you now hold in your hands have appeared within the waking dream you are currently having. From the point of view of the teachings themselves, this can only be because of previous virtuous activities on your part that have paved the way for you to connect with such wisdom. My only advice is to take full advantage of your incredibly good fortune. Receive the teachings into your heart and do the practice—bring up and share with the world your beautiful inner heart qualities of love and compassion.
I can only imagine how our world would be utterly transformed as more people take in and earnestly practice the teachings contained in this book. These teachings are quite literally the medicine that can heal our world. Change in our world, however, truly starts with the individual, with each one of us. As the teachings themselves point out, our life—just like a dream—is ephemeral and impermanent. Why not make the most of the precious opportunity that life in the form of these truly sacred teachings is offering to us? As the Khenpo Rinpoches say, “Now is the time to ignite our inner light.” What could possibly be more important than accomplishing what we are here to do—to realize who we truly are and let our light shine so that we can help others do the same.
