Awareness-imagery

Every aspect of the awareness-imagery of Tantra has arisen through the spacious passion of vision.  ‘Spacious passion’ means the non-dual experience of wisdom and compassion (emptiness and form).  It is the active communicative quality that is indivisible from the experience of emptiness.  The word ‘spacious’ relates to the empty or unbounded aspect of the non-dual state.  ‘Passion’ relates to the energy, that spontaneously arises from the state of emptiness, in terms of infinite variety.

p101-102, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4 

The electricity of ambivalence

Wisdom and compassion are emptiness and form; they're not separate.  That is the goal of tantra – the unification of emptiness and form.  If the practice of tantra is to unify these, then ambivalence will naturally be a powerful aspect of the path.  As long as there is the appearance of duality, there is the energy of ambivalence: she loves me, she loves me not; she loves me she loves me not …  
Will practice bring me realisation or merely painful knees and ankles?  If the dance of emptiness and form has been mere stagnation – there is no electricity of ambivalence!
Wisdom and compassion are live electric terminals for tantrikas.  You grab them and experience the surge of existence/non-existence as it lights you up like the sun!  Then … maybe you radiate compassion from the empty wisdom space of your being.

p40-41, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4

A Vicar of Vajrayana

  There is no area of life that is ever separate from practice; whether we’re in a business meeting with the board, eating paella and drinking Prosecco with friends, roaring with laughter at a bad joke, hang gliding across the Grand Canyon, walking in the wind with the hounds on the hill, singing the blues, stringing beans, or attending a dying friend. Whether we’re on the bus, on the stage, or on the run, on a roll, on the mend, or on the make, on the toilet, on the edge, or on our last legs and last breath . . . there is nothing but practice. The essential practice of recognizing the one taste of emptiness and form, of wisdom and compassion, of manifesting the non-dual play of our awareness and kindness at all times.

 

Drala-Jong.org: A Vicar of Vajrayana Ngakma Mé-tsal Wangmo
Excerpt from an article published in the magazine Buddhist Door Global 2018.

Romance lures us into spiritual practice

Desire habitually promotes self-seeking.  The desire which drives romantic pursuit is no exception to this – apart that is, from the fact that something else occurs.  When we are drawn to the person we desire for ourselves – we communicate our desire to the one we desire.  In so doing – we are unsuspectingly drawn into spiritual practice.  The practice, into which we are enticed, is that of wisdom and compassion.  We begin to display unusual open-mindedness and uncharacteristic kindness – but what is more extraordinary, is that we feel inexplicably unthreatened in so doing.

p146, Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon  Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen,  Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-3-3

Desire promotes the spiritual qualities of wisdom and compassion

Samsara presents opportunities for realisation – simply by virtue of samsara's failure to function.  Samsara is a self-defeating self-frustrated cycle, which is unsuccessful even within its own terms.  Because duality cannot function successfully within its own parameters – it cannot help but provide opportunities for realising nonduality. 
As soon as we seriously examine samsara – we begin to find it somewhat implausible; and that, is an intriguing discovery.  The Nyi-da Mélong (a Dzogchen tantra from the Aro gTér) takes this intriguing discovery as one of an array of interwoven themes.  The Nyi-da Mélong explores the texture of romance from the perspective of the manner in which desire itself promotes the spiritual qualities of wisdom and compassion.

p146, Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon  Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen,  Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-3-3