Ven. Lobsang Tsering via clearemptymind.com

David Gonsalez (now, Ven. Losang Tsering) is a dedicated student of Dharma and founder of Dechen Ling Press. He has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and is sharing the spiritual insight he’s gained from the experience in an inspiring blog. In his most recent post he writes: 

“Many years ago I was stuck by the poignancy of a statement Geshe Ngawang Dhargye made in one of his teachings I was reading where he stated that every moment is another opportunity to change the course of our lives, that how we decide to react right now, in this very moment, will have a long-lasting impact far into the future. It had a deep and lasting impact on me and made me acutely aware that we should never become complacent by thinking that just because we have reached a certain age or have been practicing Dharma for all these years and still keep making the same mistakes over and over that we shall never succeed. We never know just how many times we need to ‘fail’ at making wise and healthy decisions before we actually ‘succeed.’ …”

More than a decade ago, David Gonsalez spoke with Ven. Roger Kunsang about his spiritual development starting as a child with a penchant for philosophy to an adult connecting with a deep-seated love for Buddhist practice in the December 2002-February 2003 issue of Mandala:

Ven. Roger Kunsang: How did you first connect with the Dharma?

David Gonsalez: I read a book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Kindness Clarity and Insight, when I was twenty-three. At that point, I had already decided to find some purpose to my life, other than working, and had quit my job to find a spiritual path. I read the book, and that was it – that was the beginning.

VRK: Did you have any feeling or connection with the Dharma before that?

DG: Ever since I was a little boy I was always wondering about the deeper meaning of life and the world. When my mother said that [the] things that happened were because of God, I would think, “But I watched the situation. First someone did something, and then something else, and then something happened, so why do you think that God did it?” When I was very young, about five or six, and I did something wrong, I would kneel by my bed and pray that I could experience the results of my negative actions as suffering in this life, so that I wouldn’t have to take them with me when I die.

VRK: Where do you think those thoughts come from?

DG: A lot of lamas have told me that I practiced Dharma in my previous life. When I started practicing Dharma, especially when I was meditating on tranquil abiding, I remembered dreams I had as a little boy, things about Tibet. One time I explained a dream to Geshe Khenrab, who said, “You just described the area around Ganden Monastery.” I dreamt a lot about sitting in this little room. [I saw] everything in it, the little bed, and door, where the window was, how it was made, and looking out at the valley, the way the river ran through it, and the way the mountain was. There was this feeling of being sad because I wanted to do retreat but I had some responsibility at the monastery.

VRK: Did you understand that these dreams were connected to a previous life?

DG: No. When I was young I was always trying to figure out how the concept of God and Christianity fitted into my philosophy. I created my own little religion in my head, my own sort of spiritual tradition. As a teenager I told my friends about this theory I had that a table wasn’t a table, because if you were a fly, with all these eyes, and you landed on the table, it didn’t look like a table, and it was so big that it didn’t function as a table. So the fly can’t put cups of tea on it! I had this idea that a table only appears that way because it’s a certain size in proportion to us and we use it for certain things. My friends would laugh and ask what the point was. “I don’t know,” I told them, “but there’s something going on.” In His Holiness’s book, he mentions a table in reference to emptiness. I got extremely excited because the table idea was there, but also a little deflated on realizing that all these ideas I had figured out were already in Tibetan Buddhism! [I became] extremely interested in [Tibetan Buddhism] and in one year read close to 100 books on the subject – everything I could find – one book after another for six or seven hours a day. In my first week of discovering Dharma, after reading a few books, I decided that bodhichitta and tranquil abiding were the two most important things to practice. So I would meditate one session everyday on tranquil abiding using the breath, and another on the methods to cultivate bodhichitta [the ‘seven-fold cause and effect’ and ‘equalizing and exchanging self with others’].

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From Mandala December 2002-February 2003

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