Zen Master Rama:
"Tibetan teachers were non-traditional. You go see the enlightened teacher, he's smoking Havana's finest and Havana hasn't even been discovered yet. That's when you knew you had a powerful teacher.
It is the Tibetan Buddhist belief that all heavens and hells are created within our own minds.
Everything is inside you. Gosh, didn't your mom or dad tell you that?
There is no external anything. There is only the mind and the mind is endless reality, endless perfection.
The Tibetan doctrines are far reaching. They are really very similar in essence, to the doctrines of yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and the very early American Indian religions. A common thread unites them all, the perception of that which is truth.
Each aspect of the teaching must be individually validated for it to be meaningful.
Words are pointing in a direction towards something. It is good not to take them too literally.
The esoteric or inner teachings are experiences in infinite awareness. The esoteric teachings aren't something you can express. They are experiences in the planes of light, the causal realities.
The secret teachings of the oral traditions suggest that it's possible to take the thousand lifetimes it would have taken to become conscious of consciousness and to compress it into one lifetime.
The Tibetan Rebirth Process is based on the idea is that we are an aggregate; a human being is not one individual self. We're composed of many, many selves, and that these selves are growing and progressing within us. As Walt Whitman said, "I contain multitudes.
The Tibetan Rebirth Process is the awareness that it is possible for a human being, a sentient being, to go through hundreds or thousands of lifetimes within one incarnation.
The idea behind the sophistications of the rebirth process is that this is the bardo. The bardo is not a place that you go to at the time of death. The bardo, or the bardos, are the levels of awareness, fields of attention that we pass through, and we're in them right now.
Reality is not any particular way. If you're in a hopeful level of attention, then you could be in the pit of hell and see possibilities in it. If you're in a dead state of mind, then heaven would not entrance you.
Pilgrimages are journeys to places of power. People sometimes make pilgrimages to the caves where Milerapa or other great yogis meditated.
Limitations exist within the mind. Freedom exists within the mind. Heaven exists within the mind. Hell exists within the mind.
In Buddhist practice a great deal of time is spent practicing mandala meditation. You learn to visualize and hold simultaneous concepts in the mind during meditation.
When you use the tumo, you just produce a tremendous amount of heat.
Tibetan yogis could generate tremendous heat, which saved terrifically on heating bills, and it's still quite useful in the Sierras. All my friends freeze and I walk around in a t-shirt.
Because someone is a lama or is part of a monastic order or claims to be part of a succession, doesn't really mean they know anything. Always examine the individual's consciousness, their ability to transmit light.
A Tulku is a Buddhist master who has left his body and reincarnated in the body of a child. Usually, his former students will find him and bring him back to the monastery, because they want to be with their master again
Once you go through all those traditional forms you reach a point where you have to then get creative with God-realization. That's the essence of the secret teachings.
Rather than being overly concerned with whether someone is a Tulku or not, how about you becoming a Tulku?! Why not focus on the clear light of reality inside of your own mind, as Buddha suggested, and become enlightened?
There are all kinds of wonderful stories about practitioners of tantra who seemingly break all the rules and yet are enlightened. They don't try to break the rules. Let us just say that life draws us in different directions, sometimes simultaneously.
As you are able to eliminate attractions and aversions, the idea of yourself washes away and with it, so do your limitations. You have an endless infinite mind.
All heavens and all hells are within the mind. Your mind is endless; you just haven't discovered it yet. You're just living in small sections of it. You can discover, of course, the rest of it.
In the Buddhist thangkas they're all having a very, very serious party up in the high astral...but above that is the unmanifest. You can't put that on a thangka. There's no way to paint it.
Look at the world, happy one day, sad the next; laughing one day, crying the next. Put your mind into the Diamond Vajra Sutra, into the ultimate spiritual vehicle, the ten thousand radiances of enlightenment.
It is only by learning to direct the mind toward that which is infinite and pure, and to control the part of our nature that is destructive to ourselves or others, that we can truly progress along the pathway to enlightenment which leads to the realms of light.
What causes us to change is not simply the detonation of the self. What causes the change is that in-between restructuring of the self, one is directing oneself towards light.
In the Tibetan Rebirth Process, we use and develop what we call the Caretaker Personality. The idea is that we really aren't a person, we just think we are. We think we're people because we've been told we're people.
So, you can modify and change the personality structure in advanced meditation to suit the occasion. We're not simply modifying it for social occasions, but we're continually moving to an upgraded structure of being.
Our knowledge, experience, and wisdom can also assist us during the intermediate stage of the bardo plane when we are between death and rebirth - in between all things.
Life is infinite ecstasy in the planes of infinite ecstasy. It’s infinite suffering in the planes of infinite suffering. It's infinite boredom in the planes of infinite boredom.
They had a terrible class structure in Tibet...a terrible, terrible system there, particularly regarding women, awful suppression.
In 1950 the Communist Chinese invaded Tibet, massacred hundreds of thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and destroyed or desecrated the Tibetan monasteries."
- Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
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