25 Jun
2011

Bumping Along A Path Less Travelled

You must be quite surprised why suddenly I am appearing much younger. Some of you may think, “Oh, he must have had a plastic surgery, since he hasn’t appeared for such a long time.” I wish I could do something to turn back the clock, but time is something once lost, it will never come back. I was packing my study room and found a piece of disc lying there with all the old photos taken by my old students and friends. I was going through the photos from 1980’s until recently. It was such a great teaching about samsara, marvellous reminder of our precious life that can be used for greater purposes or wasted for nonsense, like chasing after our endless desires, our endless and goalless samsaric dreams.

Most of us think that impermanence is very far away, enlightenment is very far away, everything that gives us the very opportunity to realise our primordial enlightened nature is not reachable or not possible in this life. Some of us even feel that spiritual enlightenment is something to do with being a statue or a non-productive goal. Some of us feel that since it’s not possible, why not get intoxicated in samsara, engaged in the worldly dharmas and forget about enlightenment, forget about death, forget about even the moment that we were so inspired and moved when we took refuge, when we met our beloved gurus for the first time and when we had a great time sharing the joy of understanding with our spiritual friends and family. All these good and positive feelings disappeared after our spiritual honeymoon.

Instead, we always let our minds indulge in negative thoughts, our speech becomes negative and our actions become negative. It is most discouraging when spiritual friends go against each other, it doesn’t matter openly or secretly. The beauty of understanding, tolerance and forgiving is not only reduced, but also lost. Some people become more judging towards others after becoming involved in the Dharma scene, instead of encouraging the newcomers, they introduce doubts and superstitions in the name of Dharma or spirituality. This is how our time is wasted and our seeds for spiritual enlightenment are slowly killed.

We should always watch our mind and our motivation, if our mind and motivation are positive, then the energy we send out to others is also positive. Doubts are the No. 1 killer of our motivation and intention to be a good being and No. 1 killer of our relationships with others. Of course, we all come from different backgrounds and join together in one big spiritual family due to our own karmic connection. Since we have this great karma to meet, we should be supporting each other and encouraging each other. This spiritual path that we are walking together is full of bumps, rocks and potholes, we have to be carefully holding hands together and walking together with warmth, sincerity and understanding. Nothing is impossible unless we ourselves think that everything is impossible!

One has to be loyal and sincere to oneself, or one’s own conscience. I have recently heard about people saying that they are dedicating their entire life for spiritual practice, whatever they are doing, they are doing for all the beings. I want to give them big clap when I hear this sort of things, because to do that every second of your life is not an easy task. But when you check their activities, everything they do brings so much harm and pain to others, sometimes they do that in the name of Dharma, in the name of spirituality. Spiritual practice is about training your own mind, it is about training your own inner self, it is not about training others, and it is not about how much you know in terms of knowledge. It is really about how much you are able to expand your inner space, so that “I” becomes smaller until “I” becomes in unity with the space. If you have this notion of “I” and “others” and you can’t stop seeing others’ negative qualities, then you have a lot to work on. You have not travelled enough of your own inner bumpy path.

Spiritual path is about sorting out yourself. To start with, there is a need to experientially understand that making others happy will make you happy, understanding this experientially and not only by knowledge will basically sort out a part of yourself and make the bumpy road inside you a little smoother. Everyday you try to be a little nicer to others, you become a nicer person yourself, step by step, a little by little, this will be an effective practice in the long run, but you have to keep doing it. This also becomes a practice of keeping your own awareness in the present moment, this is how you begin to make the path less travelled, a more travelled path.

So a bunch of old photos has made me write this much. I am going to be in Ladakh very soon, in fact any moment. But thanks to the modern technology, I am allowed to write many messages ahead and they will be automatically released weekly or once in 2 weeks. You may be surprised that some of these messages will be not related to what’s happening at the time of their release. But I hope it will keep you entertained, since so many people have been bugging me to keep writing something and post them here. Though I know that those people who are translating my messages into different languages suffer a lot when they see long message updated here, what to do, it is difficult to please everyone. It’s their good karma to be able to translate and share some gossips and entertain the readers. Let’s thank all the translators!

I wish I had the opportunity to go to school and studied English, so that it wouldn’t have taken me that long to write a few paragraphs. However, since I didn’t have the opportunity and I am getting quite old now, it’s better that you accept whatever you are reading here. Not much of a choice, I am sorry, ha ha!

Anyway, Ladakh is one of my favourite homes, I would say. It is full of blessing and full of its own natural beauty. Historically as it says in the texts, my previous lives have been spending there in Ladakh for long time, apparently since the time of Naropa. If you ask me now whether I can remember, I can definitely say that the feeling of familiarity and warmth is so strong that it is difficult not to believe that I have spent ages in Ladakh and I have been in love with Ladakh for ages.

I want to thank everyone in Ladakh, humans and non humans, for making it such a special place. We all have to jointly keep it like this, so we have to give a lot of moral and practical support to our friends and spiritual family in Ladakh. This is one of the main reasons why we are holding the 3rd Annual Drukpa Council in Ladakh. I want to thank every individual and organisation for supporting this forthcoming 3rd ADC in Ladakh. If for some funny reasons that you don’t see any more messages on my website, that means all the next few messages that I have taken so much time to write are stuck somewhere here. So anyway, we will meet in Ladakh soon! Every connection we make in Ladakh is definitely a worthwhile connection that will encourage our future meetings again and again!

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