To integrate practice into everyday life, you can let go of the sharp divisions between the times when you’re sitting and the times when you’re not sitting. You should allow the spaciousness you discover in your sitting to overflow into your ordinary life experience. You can start by allowing the postpractice period to be a time when you remain completely with whatever you’re doing.
If you sit for an hour, make sure that you have at least fifteen to thirty minutes for the postmeditation period. When you get up from your sitting session, stand up slowly and with awareness. Continue to find the presence of your awareness in whatever sensation arises—but avoid conceptualizing about the process.
You could get up and make a cup of coffee. You could do the washing up. But whatever you do, simply be with what you’re doing.
p153-154, Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Shambhala, 2002, ISBN 1-57062-944-7
Imagination relies on empty perception. Painting relies on empty planes. Sculpture relies on empty space. Music relies on empty time. Literature relies on empty concepts. If we are to realise the art of freedom, if we are to discover our creative potential, we need to rely on the experience of our instrinsic vibrant emptiness—the beginningless ground of what we are.
The gateway to the art of freedom is the practice of shi-nè—our method of approaching the white canvas of Mind.
p49, Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Shambhala, 2002, ISBN 1-57062-944-7
Attuned intent is motivation without a ‘drag factor’. It’s streamlined—aerodynamic. It gives you access to incredible power and capacity for accomplishment of whatever needs to be accomplished. In order to accelerate into the unimaginable, we have to let go of the ballast—jettison the habits of view that create drag factors.
The drag factor is the thing that slows you down. Mixed and conflicting motivations produce a drag factor and inhibit our development and growth as human beings. As long as there’s a drag factor, we experience frustration and the unsatisfactory outcome of our wishes or intentions, whatever they might be. Attuned intent is unmixed motivation, motivation without conflict—single-pointed motivation.
p145-146, Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Shambhala, 2002, ISBN 1-57062-944-7
The awakened mind warriors delight in unbounded wealth because their appreciation is unlimited. Appreciation generates generosity which knows no limits.
The Vajrayana view of wealth is grounded in the understanding that one owns everything that enters one’s sense fields. We own whatever we appreciate, to the extent that we appreciate it and for the duration that we appreciate it. We do not require personal ownership in order to own. Our ownership does not restrict the ownership of others, because our ownership is simply that of appreciative faculties.
This non-possessive, non-controlling absence of tenure is called ‘vajra greed’ or ‘non-dual greed’ – greed on behalf of others. Greed on behalf of all beings is both the maximum possible avarice, and the ultimate expansion of generosity.
Aro Encyclopaedia Index: The Ten Paramitas, Khandro Déchen
To integrate practice into everyday life, you can let go of the sharp divisions between the times when you’re sitting and the times when you’re not sitting. You should allow the spaciousness you discover in your sitting to overflow into your ordinary life experience. You can start by allowing the postpractice period to be a time when you remain completely with whatever you’re doing.