September 19, 2017 Tuesday Evening, Path of Clear Light Class
Opening class with discussion on clear light, what is love, tonglen
Aaron: My blessings and love to you all. I am Aaron. Welcome. Very good to have you here.
So much wonderful dharma to share. I know you have each come with your own areas that you hope we can give focus to this semester. And also, I have an agenda: love. One word: love. Peace. Ease. Joy. Spaciousness. Summed up as LOVE.
As Barbara mentioned, we spent most of the summer with me dictating a new book. Not all day every day; I encouraged her to go swimming. But we worked hard putting it together, and then Dan did a masterful job of content-editing. Roann did a masterful job of text-editing it. Lalita held it in her heart and shared many thoughts about, also. And now Nicholas is working on the layout. So, this book is not just my book.
The title is Out of the Shadows: The Path of Clear Light. The focus of the book is no different than what we have always practiced here. Have you had any shadows in your life this week? Are you ready to punch, fight and wrestle with the shadows; have you tried that? Did they go away? Did they diminish at all?
Barbara mentioned, in writing something about this class, that she had needed to go into her storage shed to find something. It’s a dark shed so she took a flashlight She knew if she was going into a place of darkness she would need light. The light would illuminate what she needed to see in there.
Fortunately, you do not need to carry such a piece of equipment. Your heart’s light is always there. It’s radiant. What good would the flashlight have done Barbara if she forgot to turn it on? When there is anger, pain, and confusion, you get so wrapped up in the idea, “I need to fix it,” that you forget to return to the heart’s light.
These practices, then, are based on the simultaneity of the relative— body pain, emotions, mental agitation; and the ultimate, the radiance of being, the love. The beginning of the book introduces the ideas of relative and ultimate, simultaneity, the ever-presence of your innate perfection, of your love, and also that you cannot deny the painful experiences, which is not love, but to hold them lovingly.
For many of you this has been your practice for many years, and yet also for many of you, you’ve hit a place, let’s call it a plateau, where you’ve become stuck. You think, “If I were doing this right, these painful emotions wouldn’t come anymore.” Really? If you were practicing correctly, would you cease to have body sensations? If we have a thumbtack on the floor and you step on it, it’s going to hurt, no matter how enlightened you are. But the more enlightened human will relate to it with kindness, lifting the foot and pulling out the tack, without saying, “I need to chop off my foot,” or kill the person who dropped the tack. Openhearted. Present.
The first half of the book is more introduction of this background that many of you already have, although I hope you will absorb it at greater depth. In the second half of the book I spell out a number of very specific practices. My idea for this class, and feel free to disagree with me, this is just my idea and you have equal say, is that Barbara will email you what is still a draft copy of the book, asking you not to share it with anyone. It is not yet finalized but it’s close enough. Please read it through. It’s only 130 pages, and much like my book Human, some pages only have a sentence or two, not a lot of text. A few more words than Human, but not verbose.
Then I want to go through the practices themselves with you, perhaps one a week, looking at the practices that I’ve suggested in the book as part of your expanding vipassana and lovingkindness repertoire; how to come back into this place of innate radiance, and more fully invite it.
So my idea is that we can devote part of the class to this, and that it will naturally lead into the various questions and topics, like working with shame or anger, body pain. How do we work with these, each of you offering suggestions and talking about it in one class or another. How can these specific clear light practices expand your repertoire working with difficult objects.
I love these practices. They are basically taken from Tibetan Dzogchen togyal practices, which often are written in an esoteric and challenging way for those not grounded in that tradition, with a lot of visualizations and so forth. What I wanted to do was drop off all that is not essential and give a clear, brief practice that you can follow without engaging the brain, trying to figure it out.
Let’s try one simple practice here for just a few minutes. I’d like each of you to think of something challenging that happened this week. It may have been around body pain, around emotional pain, around mental agitation. Somebody figuratively or even literally pushing at you in anger. Deep sadness. So many possibilities. Just think of something that causes you to close up a bit and is hard to be with.
Does that mind or body state feel dark in any way? Heavy, dark, claustrophobic? Can you feel that? Now close your eyes. Feel both that emotion or sensation and the aversion to it. It’s as if you are in a dark room, even a dark cave. Hold your hands up and feel loving friends take those hands, smile at you, and lead you out the door into a sunny, radiant day. (pause) Feel the breeze on your face and the sunshine warming you. (pause) Sit on the fresh grass. Smell the sweet smell of the grass and flowers. (pause) Put one hand over the heart, the other hand still extended, and feel the heart’s tension around the unpleasant feeling—shame, body pain, agitation, helplessness, whatever it may be. (pause)
Holding one hand out, feel the light coming in as if you were doing tonglen with yourself. (pause) Draw that light into your heart and let it merge with your own inner heart light. Remember that you do not need external light, but you are inviting this light to reflect your heart’s own light. (pause) Radiant, ahh… Feel that light, that radiance…. (pause) Breathing in, I am aware of the radiance and light. Breathing out, I let it fill me, opening my whole being with that light. (pause) And again, breathing in, feeling the external light of the sun and my own inner radiance, the warmth, the light, the joy. Opening to uncover the power of that inner radiance. You’ re not trying to get rid of whatever physical or emotional discomfort was there but simply to let it release, because you don’t need it anymore.
That light is always with you, always within you. You have forgotten it. My hope is to reintroduce you to it so it becomes increasingly accessible. Can you feel a bit more spaciousness? I’m going to be quiet now for a minute and let you practice with this.
(pause)
If you feel some opening, some ability to access that radiance right there with the discomfort, bring your hands together and say thank you. Can you feel the energy from the two hands? Thank you, thank you. It’s very hard to hold onto negativity and darkness when the hands are held together this way with thank you. This is another simple practice.
(bell, bell, bell)
I thank you. I don’t want to talk too long. I want you to have a chance to go around and share what’s been coming up for you this summer and what specific areas you would like to see us focus on. Is my suggestion okay with you, that we spend part of the class with this clear light practice and some going around? I think it’s going to blend together very well. How we use this clear light practice to rest in that light and spaciousness, and how we use our vipassana practice, and the heart-centered practices— metta, karuna, and so forth. How it all goes together.
That’s all. Are there any questions for me? If not, I’ll give the body to Barbara.
(tape paused)
Thank you, thank you. A wonderful question.
I’m going to return the body to Barbara and turn this to all of you: how do you know what love is?
(Barbara reincorporates; discussion and sharing not transcribed)
Aaron: I am Aaron. You are made of love. You are born into love. And yet, you have forgotten love. Truly you are here to remember love. It’s all around you and within you, but you have grown such thick armor that that love cannot be felt or experienced.
The question is not, where is love, but what holds the armor in place, and how can you begin— let me say this carefully— without any force, with no judgment, simply and gradually to release the little pieces of armor and allow yourself to be touched by love. I think the issue for so many of you is more about fear of letting yourself love that deeply, and the pain of loving that much. This is the question Barbara expressed in her sharing, “what blocks me from giving and receiving love?” Seeing that obstacle, you cannot use force. What is your highest intention? We go into that clear comprehension practice. The deep intention to protect yourself; that’s fine, that’s natural. You are human. But also the deep intention to open the heart and give and receive love. You can begin to watch yourself with just the small note, armoring, armoring. Breathing in, I am aware of armoring. Breathing out, I hold space for armoring. That practice we’ve done so many times. Here’s the armor. Look at the fingers, then look through the fingers. The armor is still there, and the space, the lack of armor. It takes commitment and practice. Dare I say it takes love? But you are capable of that love, because you ARE that love. That is your essence. So you are really uncovering your essence and allowing it to shine through.
The second part of this is to cease to berate yourself when you armor yourself. When somebody throws a stone at you, the natural tendency is to put up a shield. We have to be careful. We are not asking you to be a martyr, standing there, open, rocks and knives being thrown at you. There’s a difference between armoring and an appropriate shielding. So, when something is very painful and you begin to shield in a very natural, loving and appropriate way, as you develop the ability to do that, you find that the shielding can then fall away when it’s no longer called for. Once you develop confidence in your ability to shield yourself appropriately, to set appropriate boundaries and so forth, then you are more able to drop off the habit of armoring that separates you from love.
Other questions?
Q: When I experience a very painful sensation, fear comes up immediately. Strong armoring. Very hard to shield when I”m already armored.
Aaron: And here is the heart of your vipassana practice: to note the object that gave rise to the armoring, and then the arising of armoring; all arising out of conditions. Noting the object that was painful. Noting the arising of armoring. First the painful object, then the armoring. That which is aware of armoring is not armored. Right there is love. And it only takes a moment.
Q: (talking about taking others’ pain) I think I have been really shielding when my energy field feels open. When I’m contracted, there’s awareness, but I’m still armored.
Aaron: It’s important when you have a very open and sensitive energy field not to hold onto other people’s pain. We learn how to take it in and release it. The tonglen practice. Breathing in light and sending it out. Breathing in pain. Letting it touch your heart, and then release it. Otherwise you really do more harm than good. And you hold the intention to do no harm. But if you’re going to be the martyr and take other people’s energy and pain into yourself and store it there, you’re doing harm, if only to yourself. This is not love.
Dan: Can we make a distinction in tonglen practice between taking in the suffering of others, instead of taking in the pain and the energy and the karma of others?
Aaron: One is a doing and the other is being. If we DO tonglen, we take in the pain and the suffering, whatever, of others, and there’s me taking that into me, and then I will do something with it that makes everything better. Doing. The other is just being. Being willing to enter into that field of pain, no self or other, just present with that field of pain and letting it touch my heart and letting it flow away, because there is such clear understanding that it has arisen from conditions and not of a nature of a separate self. When the conditions resolve, it will go. I let myself be touched by it. This is the state of true compassion. Can you feel the difference?
It’s a process, Dan. We have somebody who is a musician, just learning the notes. A skilled musician but unfamiliar with the piece and learning the notes. There’s a doer looking at the notes, trying to understand which notes to play. Then, eventually, the piece becomes a part of you. You’re not thinking about it anymore. The doer and the music all become one. There’s just music happening, or dance, or painting. In the beginning, there will be a doer. Don’t worry so much about the doer, except to be aware that becoming the doer is going to create pain. The musician tearing his hair out, saying, “I can’t get it right!” But when he stops trying to get it right and just lets the music express through him, or the dance and the movement express through him, then the pain resolves.
Dan: When I do tonglen, I don’t feel the need to release. I can take in the suffering of others and give back love and light. My heart is open and sensitive, but I don’t feel the need to release that negativity because I don’t see it as negativity.
Aaron: You may get into trouble that way! Maybe not.
Dan: I can see it as illusion.
Aaron: I understand what you’re saying, Dan. With my “You’re going to get into trouble!”, when your heart is truly open, you’re not holding anything so there’s nothing to release; it’s just going through you. The place where people experience some challenge with tonglen, or any taking others’ energy into themselves is when you’re working specifically with pained energy, confused energy. Energy that you take into you from another must be released. When you’re looking not at the energy but are just with the whole experience, as with the friend Barbara spoke of, the enormous suffering of this family and not trying to separate herself from it. The enormity of suffering. Allowing herself to feel how much pain there is without needing to armor. Then there’s nothing that she has to release because there are no stories. There’s nothing energetically caught, there’s just love.
Dan: That was the distinction I was trying to describe.
Aaron: In its essence, we talk about tonglen as giving and receiving, but at a certain point tonglen drops off the giver and receiver and then it’s pure tonglen. So we start with giving and receiving but that’s not where we end up. Then there’s nothing to release.
Q: So, meditatively I get it. But practically, when working with clients, working with people’s painful, confused energy, I’m not sure that I’m not in that moment taking it in. I’m not in a totally meditative state when I’m talking to somebody.
Aaron: There’s no certainty. But if one finds oneself closing in more and more, then one checks it out, what’s happened. Feel the belly, here. Is the belly open or is it closed? That’s where, especially in the solar plexus, so much contraction and armoring is held. Begin to observe the state of the belly. Soft belly. Stephen Levine has a beautiful meditation called “Soft Belly” in one of his books… Soft belly.
(discussion continues on working with these practices with clients)