welcome, well come to day 26 of a season of peace on this twenty-fourth day of free at last february and the first of four days of the great prayer festival in tibetan buddhism where we celebrate the miracles of this new year; today with the support of Ram Dass, let’s meditate on pure mind…

“I have the intention to become free and I’m using everything in my life to do it. At first you just have practices like meditation or prayer. And then you go to work, or you do your stuff, or whatever. And after a while all of it becomes your practice, every bit of it. You tell me something that can’t be practiced. Tell me something that you can’t convert into becoming one with spirit.

So you keep working on yourself to cultivate the Witness, which becomes, in your way, a gift to everybody around you. Because they come in thinking they’re somebody, just like you do most of the time. And you’re creating an environment where they can if they want to, but they don’t have to.

So intention to awaken, finding the part of your mind that is not caught. Even though immediately after you’ve noticed it gets caught and then you come back again. The predicament is the clinging of mind. The predicament is that awareness clings to thought. I’ll just read you the first paragraph of “Extracting the Quintessence of Accomplishment.” And it comes from Dudjom Rinpoche who was an extraordinarily beautiful Tibetan Lama who passed on a few years ago I guess.

‘The nature of our mind. The nature of our mind is the nature of absolute reality.” Try to think of it now as the sky as opposed to the clouds. “Divested of all conditional and artificial characteristics fabricated by the intellect. This nature, this mind, is established with certainty in awareness. Awareness arises, naked, as the self-originated primordial wisdom. It just is. This awareness cannot be expressed in words, nor shown by examples. It is neither corrupted in samsara nor improved in nirvana. It is neither born nor ceases to be. It is neither liberated nor confused. It is neither existent nor nonexistent. It is neither delimited nor falling to either side. In brief, from the beginning, awareness has never existed as a substantial entity with elaborated characteristics. Its nature is primarily pure, void, vast, and all pervasive.’

“Now take the stages. You’re caught in experience. Then you cultivate the Witness, which is that little part of your mind that sees the rest of it. After a while the witness gets stronger and stronger and stronger until most of the time you are “Ah, so.” And even though the dramas of desires, fears, aging, life, crisis, are all coming and going, coming and going, they’re all undulating within you, there’s a part of you that is strong, that is clear, that is saying, “Ah, so.” And then, in this particular technique, you become aware of that in you which is saying, “Ah, so.”

And you go through, into pure mind. Which is neither the witness, nor not the witness. It is neither the experience, nor not the experience. It’s not looking, but it knows everything because it is everything. I am describing to you a very disciplined technique of using the mind to beat the mind. Stand back from experience into the witness, not denying the experience, this isn’t dissociation, this isn’t a defense mechanism. Stand back so that you’re feeling the pain of it all and at the same moment, seeing it. And when you’re resting in the awareness, the seeing of it broadly, then you start to note the seer. The witness.

And there’s a flick that occurs. And no longer are you experiencing the universe, the universe just is. It includes you but it’s nothing special. It’s really the process of dying as a separate entity into pure mind. And the moment you do that, a moment later you’re fully there as a separate entity but you’re also not there as a separate entity. It’s all there all at once. You’re a star and you’re also the heavens.”

~