From a talk given in Vancouver by Bonni Ross February 25, 1997
I take refuge in the vast intelligence of Universe.
I take refuge in the order and chaos of universal law.
I take refuge in the interconnectedness of all manifestation.
It’s in my mind over these next few weeks to revisit some primal ideas about the Teaching, partly as an exercise for myself, because I find that if I make it a discipline to re-visit certain very basic principles on a regular basis it keeps these ideas very fresh and alive. I have also found that there’s a real desire in many people to have some of these principles expressed in ways that don’t rely so strongly on the ancient language.
I was very fortunate a number of years ago when I was living at the Dharma Centre of Canada in Ontario, to come through Vancouver one summer time, just as His Holiness the Dalai Lama was coming to visit. And a friend of mine who lived in Victoria and who was one of the organizers responsible for bringing HH to BC showed up where I was staying and took me to Victoria to attend a small reception for him. It had a sense of intimacy that’s really missing in BC Place stadium! Now, the Dalai Lama is a busy guy and I think this had been a really, really bad day in the scheduling department and he’d been helicoptered over to Victoria for this very brief thing, before being helicoptered back to Vancouver and then flown somewhere else. As he came in the room it was pretty clear that even the Dalai Lama gets fried! And he was very clear about the fact that he was hassled as he sat down and made himself comfortable and apologized for the fact that he was late and then he asked what the topic was for the address that he was being asked to give to this small group. And the organizers of the group said to him: “Would you please speak about Buddha, Dharma and Sangha?”
In ten words or less, right! He smiled, as only he can smile, paused, and with all sign of hassle gone, with complete composure and clarity, he said, “It’s very simple, forget Buddha. Forget Sangha. For you, there is only Dharma. At this stage in your life you don’t have any hope of comprehending Buddha or Sangha and to pretend that you can is just foolishness, it’s just taking energy away. But: you have the Dharma, and if you practice the Dharma as it’s intended to be practiced through one of the many systems that have been articulated by Teachers over the centuries and you practice with diligence in an orderly and sustained way, then some day you will realize come to understand the interconnectedness that is Sangha. And if you continue to practice in the light of this new realization, some day you will see Buddha, you will be Buddha!”
Now I have to say that I think this sort of Teaching is brilliant, that it cuts through so much that gets in the way of how we understand this process. We have Dharma! We are Dharma! Dharma is the order and chaos of universe, and Dharma is the Teaching about realizing these laws and truths, and that we are not separate from their totality at all. And we discover that every being who’s come to some stage of direct experience of these principles has made an attempt to articulate a view of Dharma for other people.
So we benefit from all sorts of systems, lists, meditative formulas, many of them quite different from one another, but all of them arising from the particular vision or realization of one being. Some of them are very clear and useful to many people over a long period of time; others appeal to a narrow segment of human beings who seem to do particularly well with it, while others find it incomprehensible and weird! And it’s one of the great wonders of this work that it can be articulated in new, fresh ways that speak to people exactly where they are.
In the past, in the eastern cultures where Dharma was first taught, much of what was articulated (and later, written) came from beings (primarily male) who were predominately monastic and who spoke to others who were living in the same situation. They were fully supported, they were protected from a lot of the stresses that bedevil our poor selves, (while no doubt having other difficulties that we do not). So when we look at their ways of articulating an orderly process of unfoldment, we are left scratching our heads and wondering “where do I fit into this? How does this express the reality that I’m living?”
For example, the Sixteen Stages of Insight, are really useful if one happens to be in retreat practicing strict, formal meditation on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness for two or three years. It’s not such a useful tool if you’re practicing for a week or a month and it’s an almost-completely-beside-the-point tool for someone who’s getting up every morning, helping a family get out of the house on time, getting to work, taking care of business and maybe having a brief, sleepy dialogue with their meditation cushion before they go to bed!
A number of years ago Namgyal Rinpoche articulated a way of viewing the progression of the spiritual path that speaks more universally. It begins with Prisoner, the realization that you actually are not free. The next stage is Fits and Starts which encompasses all of the explorations which we enter in a dilettantish manner in an attempt to find our way out of our imprisonment.
The third is periods of blankness, or Quietude, when after all frantic searching, the being just stops, shuts up and begins to go inside in a disciplined and sustained fashion to look at what is really going on.
The fourth stage begins with the awareness of how much conditioning is expressed in Bodily Phenomena. One experiences the body going through changes as the screens and filters and blinds that block the physical level, impede clear emotional perspective and cloud mental function begin to break down and purify.
Then one comes to the fifth stage, which is noticing that one has an Effect on the World, on other beings, on animals and plants. With this seeing, compassionate aspiration arises, not only to stop polluting through one’s aversion and selfishness and confusion, but to become one who is a blessing to all manifestation.
As that aspiration develops, the consciousness moves into a state of Non-duality, and the formerly unconscious drive to awaken becomes the central unwavering focus of one’s existence.
When this ripens, there is Liberation, no longer being the blind prisoner of unceasing becoming, but a state of at-one-ment with the dance of universe.
Now that’s Dharma!