Dzogchen Today ~
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~ Dzogchen Today ~ Tim Olmsted Greetings everybody. This is Tim, and we are now in module 1, section 2 of our Dzogchen course. In this section, we are going to be looking at the Dzogchen path itself. In looking over the readings and the material, I have absolutely nothing to add. It is just excellent! What I thought I would do is just make a couple of comments on the Dzogchen tradition today in the West. As you have probably noticed, you can get on the internet and find any number of courses and people teaching Dzogchen. Maybe people have gotten a little instruction somewhere and they have put together a program. And they are teaching Dzogchen as if it was this kind of method, or some kind of technique through which someone could arrive at complete buddhahood with very little effort and very little engagement in the path itself. Here is my concern: if we take this attitude, we could easily set ourselves up for being disappointed and, worse than that, disillusioned. Somehow, the Dzogchen path is not just a quick trick or technique we can take on, just in and of itself. So this was beautifully illustrated by the life story of Milarepa, of which many of you know. Milarepa, after having made a complete mess of his life when he was young, really felt tremendous remorse and wanted to enter the path. And so he heard about this Dzogchen teacher — I think his name was Rangtong Laga — and Milarepa went looking for him. So he found Rangtong Laga and got some teachings on Dzogchen, and the lama sent him off to a cave to meditate. And so one day, after a little while, the lama went to visit Milarepa, and Milarepa was just hanging out, doing nothing. And the lama said, 1 | DZOGCHEN | AN OVERVIEW OF THE GREAT PERFECTION "What are you doing?" Milarepa responded by saying, "You said," quoting the lama, "to meditate on it by day is to be Buddha in one day. To meditate on it by night is to be Buddha in one night." And so the lama realized that Milarepa had completely missed the point — he thought it was just some sort of trick. And then he sent him off to go find Marpa, and the rest, of course, is history. As you know, in the Mahamudra tradition, we work slowly, sort of from the outside in. We work to clarify confusion and to accumulate merit through all the practices that you know and that you have done, working with the principles of non-harm, lojong — of training the mind, of developing loving-kindness and compassion, and taming the mind through successive levels of shamatha and vipashyana practice, all the way up to Mahamudra itself. But in contrast to that, it often seems to us like Dzogchen has none of that. As Mingyur Rinpoche said, in Dzogchen we come to the meditation through the view. So it seems like all we have to do is get the view or the right teachings, and then it all comes from that. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. I can remember those days in Kathmandu — we were all getting Dzogchen teachings, but we were all completely crazy. We were just as confused and nuts as any young men and women anywhere. It is said that the nature of mind itself is without cause and conditions, but recognizing the nature of mind is based on causes and conditions. Sometimes people think of Dzogchen as a kind of sudden path. But actually, if you look at it, nothing is ever sudden. For instance, a bolt of lightning appears to us to be sudden, but there are a tremendous amount of causes and conditions that make that happen. Similarly, we need to engage fully in the causes and conditions for us to actually appreciate the essence of the Dzogchen teachings, which is pointing out itself. Tulku Urgyen himself said about this question: 2 | DZOGCHEN | AN OVERVIEW OF THE GREAT PERFECTION "But if you pretend that your nature is already enlightened and do not progress along the path of removing the obscurations, then your enlightened nature does not become realized. Therefore, we must truly consider what is actual, what the facts are. Do we have obscurations or not? If you see that there are still obscurations, there is no way to avoid having to remove them by gathering the two accumulations." Tulku Urgyen right there was saying that we have to do the whole thing, just like in any other tradition. Tilopa pointed this out to Naropa when he said: "Son, perception arises interdependently. Naropa, until you realize the unborn essence, never leave the vehicles of the two accumulations." These were just a couple of comments that I wanted to make about the Dzogchen path as we enter it and to suggest that, even though the Dzogchen path is often talked about as being sudden and a path with no effort and no meditation actually, we need to understand the inner meaning of that and understand that everything accumulates to this experience of the nature of mind. Nothing is lost along the path so we have to go, as in any other tradition, through all the accumulations of merit and working with mind. Those were a couple of thoughts that I had as we enter this Dzogchen path, and again, we look forward to hearing from you on the webinars and on the forum. Again, please let us know if there is anything we can do to make this course more helpful and more enriching. That’s it for now, and I look forward to sharing more a little later on. 3 | DZOGCHEN | AN OVERVIEW OF THE GREAT PERFECTION .