Macclesfield 2003 teaching edited by Wendy Bates and called Finding Freedom at the Bus Stop.

There is no rulebook that tells you how to live; we are all flying by the seat of our pants. In this situation it’s best to keep your eyes open, your ears open, and your heart open. Of course, sometimes you will get it wrong but there is no point in being

I’d like to introduce to you some of the basic ideas of Dzogchen and to place them within the context of the various systems in Tibetan Buddhism. I’ll do this in terms of the view – the way in which the world, and our place in it, is understood. I’ll also introduce the kinds of meditation we do, and the way of being in the world which arises as one practices living in harmony with that view. 

... 

There is no rulebook that tells you how to live; we are all flying by the seat of our pants. In this situation it’s best to keep your eyes open, your ears open, and your heart open.

Of course, sometimes you will get it wrong but there is no point in being too upset by that fact. A mistake is simply a miss-taking of a situation. If you have taken it wrongly, you can take something else but you can’t go back and re-take it, just as you can’t retake an exam. What you can do is take another exam. It will be a different exam paper, but this time you can take it with more preparation, more openness, and more attention.

At this point you have to believe that what happened was not so bad otherwise you might think, ‘I failed it last time so I’m not going to do any better this time. What’s the point of studying? I’m going to leave school.’ Lots of kids say things like that. They get a fixed definition of their capacity and then they are conditioned by an event that occurs, coming to see it as a definition of the limits of their being.

One of the functions of tantra is to show the illusory nature of all these sites of closure. There is never, ever, a final moment, just the next and the next and the next…

back to latest news