Recent PostsBy Norma on May 25, 2013 Inspiration! Today it arrives in the form of an exciting person or idea. You can see a big picture where before all you saw was a small picture. You must debate others to bring your vision into the conversation but don’t be afraid to do so. Something comes that’s outside of your usual frame of [...]
Category: Astrology By Norma on May 24, 2013 Serious matters continue to absorb your attention, and people tell secrets that must not be repeated. The act of “airing out” inner matters is important now. Another person can explain away a fear or notion that worries you. Listen to confidences if people tell them, and be sympathetic. Something hidden comes to light. Later in [...]
Category: Astrology  By Jetsunma on May 23, 2013
The following is respectfully quoted from an introduction to Kün-zang La-may Zhal-lung by translator Sonam T. Kazi:
It is a universal truth that it is extremely enjoyable to live in this phenomenal world. Nobody wants to part with worldly pleasure. It is also a universal truth that everything that conditionally exists, sooner or later, [...]
Category: Ngondro, Words of My Perfect Teacher |
Inspiration! Today it arrives in the form of an exciting person or idea. You can see a big picture where before all you saw was a small picture. You must debate others to bring your vision into the conversation but don’t be afraid to do so. Something comes that’s outside of your usual frame of reference. Accept a new solution to an old problem. Be sympathetic to people espousing novel ideas. They are opposing ”the powers that be” and they’re doing it alone! Avoid the danger of huddling up with your group and saying, “This is what WE believe.” A modern day Galileo appears. Keep your eyes open for new things. Albert Gyorgyi said, “Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” Your dream is still coming true; conversation is still fun, and you must still be deferential to authority figures.
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Art of Dispelling Anger”
And then, of course, you can do it the Buddhist way. And the Buddhist way is:Wait a minute. Where is this anger? Show me the anger. OK. It’s coming out of my mouth, but I can’t quite hold it. Where is it? Take time and play with it. Is this anger solid? Well, who is the person I’m angry at? I’m angry at her or him or somebody. Let’s see. I’m angry at her. (This is a pretend person I’m pointing at.) I’m angry at her. OK. Where exactly is her? I’m going to go through the Buddhist teaching: Where is the ‘I’ in her? Where is the part that is actually her? Is it the ear? Is it the mouth? What part of the mouth? The teeth? The tongue? Is it the brain? Slice the brain and find her.
Do yourself a favor. Take yourself off the track of hatred and work the method, because the more you let that go,… You think you feel better after you’ve had a rage thing because it’s addictive. It’s like alcohol. The more you drink, the more you want. The thing to do is to keep yourself from that by stepping back, taking a breath and examining what you are doing. Just examine the basis of it. Just take a minute and examine the basis of it. It will be very hard to do at first, very hard to stop yourself, first of all. But you must practice and you must learn. And the first time you are successful at it, yes! And the second time you are successful at it, yes again; and the third time it’s a little easier. And you begin to start noticing things. It’s a step upon step upon step sort of building process of awareness that is actually happening, because in fact, there is no enemy, there is no self, there is no anger. And we just need to wake up to that.
Our nature is the pure primordial luminosity—that spontaneous nature which is utterly empty and absolutely complete, that emptiness which is not empty within which is all phenomena, all potential . So that emptiness is our living, dynamic nature. Having forgotten it, we are asleep. Being asleep, we act like criminals, while we should be acting like the celestial deities with the vajra pride that we visualize, giving rise to those good qualities of helpfulness.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved
Serious matters continue to absorb your attention, and people tell secrets that must not be repeated. The act of “airing out” inner matters is important now. Another person can explain away a fear or notion that worries you. Listen to confidences if people tell them, and be sympathetic. Something hidden comes to light. Later in the day a lightness of spirit lifts people out of the doldrums and every word is debated gleefully. It seems you can see forever. Prophesies, hunches and intuitions offer a different and exciting picture to the circumstances of your life. Beverly Sills said, “I’m not happy, I’m cheerful. There’s a difference. A happy person has no cares at all. A cheerful person has cares but has learned how to deal with them.” Be cheerful today.
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is respectfully quoted from an introduction to Kün-zang La-may Zhal-lung by translator Sonam T. Kazi:
It is a universal truth that it is extremely enjoyable to live in this phenomenal world. Nobody wants to part with worldly pleasure. It is also a universal truth that everything that conditionally exists, sooner or later, must face ultimate destruction. This is not a pessimistic view. It is a fact. As the pleasant dream we have about health, wealth, beauty, fame, love, affection, and so on suddenly begins to fail, our sorrow knows no bounds. It is then that some of us get puzzled and begin to question the true meaning of existence. When death comes nearer, terrified by the unknown changes we will have to face, we try, as a last resort, to seek the help of the gods, goddesses, and the like. But do we have any idea who they are? For, the potentially most useful times in our life are spent fishing, watching television, smoking, drinking, gossiping and so forth. Even the small amount of spiritual practice that we pretentiously do is adulterated with worldly interest.
However, those of us who are aware of this ultimate catastrophe, in time, search for a solution to transcend death. We visit all the available religious camps in the world. Some of us come across the Buddhist teaching called Dzog-ch’en, or Atiyoga, whose superlative virtues excite us so much that we totally forget the proper approach to it. It is logical that, just as a towering building must have an equally sound foundation, success in the ultimate realization through Dzog-ch’en teaching depends entirely on a thorough understanding of the law of karma at the relative level. Kün-zang La-may Zhal-lung explains how to attain the proper balance between the relative and absolute aspects of the practice in very simple language.
The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Art of Dispelling Anger”
I study sentient beings. I must have done it in another life, because as a child I knew this. I sort of woke up from my childhood knowing that all beings are suffering. And I understood somehow that it was a spiritual thing and that they needed love. No matter what it looked like, they needed love. That was as a child; as a child I understood that. Now as a woman and a practitioner, I understand what the Buddha has taught and it’s the same. And I understand that my fervent prayer is that should I leave a footstep in this world, it will be a living display of the bodhicitta through my students, through any works that I might do. That’s what I care about. And each one of us should participate in that dream. If you are really my student, then you must care. We should all care to advance the aspirations of our teacher. That’s part of Vajrayana. We may not individually have the power to give rise to a stupa or to give rise to an ordained Sangha, but we are part of that and we should take responsibility for making that dream come true. My dream is love. It is bodhicitta. Temporary love. Feed the birds. Feed people. Feed somebody that’s hungry. I feed everything that moves. If there was sputum in a jelly dish and I could prove that it needed food, I would feed it. This is how I am. I am crazy with it.
And then, you know, beyond that recognize them because they’ll never recognize themselves without a little help. Recognize them as being Buddha. Know that they are suffering because they don’t know what to do—not because they want to suffer—and do what you can to give rise to compassion. Make it a commitment. Disallow those rage things. Disallow that anger that we have to have when we have to go and punch a wall or something like that.
The way to do that is to get a little space from that. No suppression. We don’t like suppression. Suppression is bad. It makes us all crazy, and we’re crazy enough. You work it, you work it, you work it. The rage that we have, step back from it. The way you step back from it is you question yourself. And there are two different ways you can do it. You can do it the good old American way or you can do it the Buddhist way. The good old American way works too. You can say, ‘Now what’s really making me mad here? Do I really mean what I am saying about this person?’ You can sort of take a step back and analyze it a little bit. Just look at it sort of cool, calm and collected if you can. I mean, you let yourself go back to your rage if you need to, but step back and tell yourself you can go back to the rage if you need to. But if you really do well and you think it through, you won’t. The rage will be gone because your understanding will have come up and your mind will be smoother. The mind gets inflamed like an arthritic joint, like with rheumatoid arthritis. It’s kind of like that. The mind gets inflamed. The more we are emotional, up and down, up and down, and full of hatred, and judgmental and gossipy and stuff like that, the more inflamed the mind gets, the more unhappy we get and the more we blame other people for it, and the more unhappy we get and the more inflamed we get. That is the cycle of samsaric existence.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved
Hurtful or sad news comes during the night or early morning, and serious issues must be faced. Avoid the temptation to joke now; what’s happening is no laughing matter. At the same time, kind and soothing words mean everything today. A pleasant conversation with a sympathetic person can change someone’s world. A dangerously depressing frame of mind can be altered. Watch for people who are disturbed and offer them a kind word. Speak to authority figures of private matters; they are sympathetic to your cause. Matters of death, taxes and inheritance are here and must be addressed. G.K. Chesterton said, “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” In spite of the seriousness of the day, a happy undertow is present: fortunately.
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Art of Dispelling Anger”
If you have the habit of gossip, go through the method. Fix it. Understand that if you allow that hatred in any form to continue, you will get more and more unhappy as you age. The people who are youthful and beautiful when they are elderly are the people who kept something alive, even if they aren’t Buddhist. I’ve met people like that. A duty, a responsibility, an ethical responsibility they feel to be kind. Maybe they don’t understand extraordinary kindness, but they are kind. An ethical responsibility to not put shit in the pool of earth. Some people just seem to have that karma to understand that even without the Buddhadharma. I respect that so much.
And that’s true of all of us, too. As we get older, we get the wrinkles. and this is crazy, the wrinkles, and this is crazy, the wrinkles, and this is crazy, the wrinkles. It’s a symbol, if you think about. It’s a symbol of how much deeper the lines of our habitual tendencies get over time. Do you see what I am saying? Our habitual tendency is in our posture; it’s in our face. We screw up our faces when we are doing our habits, and all of this aging stuff is phenomena—our phenomenal habitual existence becoming more solid and more real and more heavy in samsara as we get older. That’s unfortunately how most people age. They get stiffer. They get harder. They get querulous, frightened to death, frightened of death. And for many people, it’s an ugly, humiliating time.
I don’t want that for you. But it’s going to happen if you don’t take yourself in hand and say, ‘Let’s walk through this.’ Really look to benefiting yourself. Instead of being steeped in habitual hatred, conquer that monster. It’s a bubble; it’s a dream; it’s not a solid thing. There’s no elephant in this room, not really. We have to practice away from that. Start simple. If you can’t find anything good about a person, first of all, that’s your fault right there. If you can’t find anything good about the person, make it your business to find something. If it’s just you like the way they tie their shoes, work from there. If that is where you are starting from, if that is what you have to do, forgive yourself and move on from that point. But start. If you can go a little further and understand through practicing and contemplating, and through the method that we teach here, that all sentient beings wish to be happy and in their nature they are the very Lord, and that there is an end to the suffering and that is liberation. With understanding, we can then give rise to the bodhicitta and compassion.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved
Indecision! You can’t make up your mind early in the day, so don’t do anything. You may not have all the facts, or else a viable course of action may not have appeared. Wait until you know for sure what you want to do and then move ahead. Others feel the same way. If you meet someone standing at a door uncertain whether or not to go in, be sympathetic, and walk around them. Otherwise you’re in for a half-hour conversation about their alternatives. Try not to over-talk your choices and try not to involve others in your conundrum. They have their own. Once the energy changes, certainty sets in and it’s “full blast ahead.” Communication is still so interesting and fun that it’s hard to stop talking and get to work. A dream is coming true. Charles Kettering said, “The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.” Be still long enough to notice that something amazing is happening.
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Art of Dispelling Anger”
The fruit of potential and method is the awakening. But in Buddhism we see all three as the same and it is taught that all three are the same. And in truth, there is no realization without understanding the sameness of these three,. It is easy to think that we are evolving in a step by step way; and it is easy to think that we’re on the ladder. See, I am up here and somebody else is down there and some of the people are over here. And we get into that view, and that’s not what the Buddha taught. The Buddha did not teach that someone is higher and someone is lower. The Buddha taught that we should recognize the appearance of the Buddha nature in the world as our root gurus. The root guru gives us the method, and therefore we have the result. But nobody is better than anybody else. That is a different religion or a different idea, or something else. I don’t know what that is, but we don’t have that here.
Ridding ourselves of hatred is based on that kind of thinking, that kind of view. Really understanding the Buddha’s teaching that there is the foundation, the method and the fruition, and that is the path. Succinct, boom, right here. This is it. And we understand that, again, according to the Buddha’s teachings we are all suffering. We are all in the same place. Here we are. Even the people that are not in this room, we are in samsara together. They want to be happy like you do. You struggle for happiness, don’t you? Come on, don’t you? Every day. Every day. And we do it sometimes rightly or wrongly. It’s a mixed bag because we lack understanding. But the method is to recognize that all beings wish to be happy. If there are three people sitting in front of you, and two or three of them are unhappy, you come out of yourself and try to help. Efforts like that are what move us along on the path. Not just doing the fancy practices and knowing the fancy words.
Of course, we do not achieve realization by deeds alone. That is a long and difficult path. We have the Dzogchen path, which is so remarkable. It not only gives us method and the opportunity to give rise to the bodhicitta, but we also are given the wisdom to understand the empty nature of phenomena. Through that method we can understand that in samsara we are in a bit of a bubble, or an echo chamber. It’s kind of like that. Unfortunately, it’s also the nature of samsara to be somewhat blinded to that. Again, we are still asleep. It’s like a dream. It has a dream-like quality. You know how in dreams crazy things happen? And it’s OK. It makes sense somehow. Like you could be somewhere and then you are somewhere else, and it makes sense. But that dream-like quality exists right here and right now. We literally do not understand that when we gossip about a fellow vajra brother or sister, or any sentient being of any quality, or put them down, at the same time, we create that energy, that cause. Somewhere in samsara, the result is also being born. Right then. Something will change because of that hatred. Now we often don’t see it immediately, but it comes back to us; and the way it comes back to us is according to our conceptual belief. We believe in relative phenomena being solid as it is until we become practitioners, hopefully. So when somebody sends a negative energy at us, like their anger, we think, ‘Oh, it’s coming from them. Everybody hates me.’ But in fact, what has happened is that you have sent out hatred. It echoes back and it will come through somebody else’s mouth. Do you know why it’s nobody else’s fault?. Because there is nobody else. Bingo. There is nobody else. And how you can sit there and say you are practicing trekchod and togyal and you don’t know that yet, I can’t figure out.
We must take responsibility for our experiences. How will we ever awaken if we don’t understand the unhappiness that comes to us is of our own making? It may have been in the past, the past in some past life. It may have been recent. I see you guys creating the causes of suffering all of the time. And so, get back to the basics. Follow the Buddha’s teachings. To antidote hatred,… And I know, hatred is my big one today, OK? We’ll do greed and ignorance some other time and the other ones as well. To antidote hatred, the antidote has to be very strong, because hatred is such a strong energy that it brings about war in places where there is a lot of emotional, egocentric agitation that has hatred as part of it. Any time there is emotional, egocentric agitation, there will be hatred. Places like that often have a lot of earth movement and strange weather and that sort of thing. And war. Who would have guessed it?.
And so, we have to understand that we want to awaken, but we don’t want to take responsibility. We want to awaken, but we don’t want to stop dreaming. We want to awaken, but we don’t want to go through that effort of bringing ourselves into truer awareness, something that is more profound and deeper and more real than our own simple habitual tendencies.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo All rights reserved
Conversation, exchange of ideas, running around on errands and a general sense of happiness characterize today. The only way to avoid the fun is to unplug the phone and the computer and stay in the house all day. Communication brings happiness. C.J. Ducasse said, “To speak of ‘mere words’ is much like speaking of ‘mere dynamite.’” The talk is fun, but the message is important. Reach out to others; they will enjoy hearing from you… Exercise is favored. Watch the news, you’ll love it. Five planets in air signs stimulate peoples’ minds. A financial push continues, and a dream is slowly and steadily turning into a reality.
The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!
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