Jumping off the Cliff in the Footsteps of Naropa

Paula Chichester and Roger Munro finished a four-year Great Retreat at Milarepa Center in Vermont, USA, in September last year (see Mandala, March-April 1995). Ven. Robina Courtin talked to them in December in Big Sur during their visit to California.

PAULA

Paula: The most important part of retreat I think is learning to have great faith in the guru; trusting that the guru is guiding you in whatever comes. If you think about things too much, you get in the way of that process; you’ve got to get the talking mind out of the way so you can feel what the real work is.

It’s a completely different way of leading our life than what we’re used to. In a nutshell, it’s abandoning the eight worldly concerns. When you abandon the eight worldly concerns all that’s left is guidance from the guru; that’s all that’s left to hold on to, for lack of better words.

If you’re not worried about where your food’s coming from, and you’re not worried about where the money’s coming from, and you don’t care about what happens to you from day to day, then all you do is wake up in the morning and do your sadhana practice and do your guru yoga practice and feel your guru in your heart, and then you think, “Okay, today I’m dedicating my life to benefit sentient beings.” You have faith that whatever happens that day is just what it is. And then, at the end of the day, you dedicate your merits.

You don’t put too much concept on whatever happens in the day. It mightn’t turn out to be what you intended to happen, but if you have faith, then you know that that was the perfect day, so then there’s no more labeling, there’s no more guilt, there’s no more, “Oh, I should have done this, or I should have done that.” You’re completely free of all that kind of garbage thinking and you just live the day. It’s a pretty radical way of living, I think. That’s pretty much what Lama Zopa Rinpoche has taught me is the path.

I could never have done it before the retreat. I didn’t have the faith, I didn’t believe that food would come on the table. It took the retreat to do that. In the middle of the retreat sometimes, when we would run out of money, and it was freezing cold, I’d get upset. And then I’d have a dream in which Rinpoche would look at me and laugh and say, “Oh, are you still worried about money?” And then someone would send us a check for $200.

I think I learned to have faith that the guru would take care if I dedicated my life purely to the practice, which for me is not only wishing to benefit sentient beings but putting your mind in that space where whatever comes is fine; you’re just in the moment, and whatever. It’s lo-jong, thought transformation, that’s what I learned. Whatever happens, you can transform. Whatever happens, you have your three principal aspects of the path; you have renunciation, bodhichitta and right view in every little circumstance. And that’s what the training is.

In retreat you develop the subjective blissful consciousness, and arising from that is the objective appearance, right? And you just take that throughout your whole day: I’m the deity and this is what’s arising, and big deal. Something arises – okay, what are we going to label it? If I want to I can label it a problem, but if I just leave it there I can see it as a blessing of the guru.

This is the way I’m living my life at the moment. I might be starving in a couple of months, but I’ve decided to trust that process out of retreat for a while and see what happens; just wander around a bit and see what happens. And hopefully the guru will guide me into the most perfect thing that’s next to be done, because all there is to do anymore is to benefit sentient beings. And hopefully it will happen. Something else will come along – I don’t know what’s going to happen, the next gig. I don’t know.

I might go back to Milarepa Center. It seems once you get started on this meditating, you just don’t want to do anything else. You look around and nothing else has much meaning anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to help others in a more concrete way; if that presents itself, good. If Rinpoche said go do something, I would definitely do that. But he hasn’t said that. All he’s encouraged us to do is continue to retreat.

This was a wish that I made a long time ago. I think Zong Rinpoche blessed me, at the Enlightened Experience Celebration in India in 1982. The thought just came, “Well, if we’re going to have Buddhism in the West, we need to have meditators.” There is no tradition without the meditators.

When I went into retreat I didn’t really know what was going to happen. I had all these hopes of getting shiné, single-pointed concentration, and getting great tantric realizations. But you know, it’s just like Lama Zopa said, you go into retreat and you get the lam-rim – and tantra gives you the foundation. In fact, for me tantra made the lam-rim – it’s almost the opposite of what you hear, that the lam-rim is the foundation for tantra. I understand now how the two work together so beautifully.

On the one hand, tantra enables you to get the blissful subjective consciousness that understands emptiness, which you maintain throughout the day, and then the lam-rim works for your intellectual mind, so that you know how to think. The experience of the deity is a non-conceptual experience of the expansiveness of “I am great blissful space,” like Lama Yeshe taught us. But you still have the thinking mind, and for this you have lo-jong to deal with it. When something comes, you have your little slogan–we memorized the Seven Point Mind Training by Geshe Chekawa, you see. You say, “Okay, this is what I do with this.”

It’s so liberating. You realize that you don’t ever have to get upset anymore. I mean, I got upset a few times; my back got really out and I had sciatica and I was in so much pain. Basically you go into cruise control and you just deal with things. But you have to meditate every day to do that.

I don’t want to sound like I’m advanced. I’m just saying this is what I’m trying to do. The retreat gave me something really special that I just don’t want to abandon. I think it’s something that’s very, very hard to gain and very, very easy to lose. It’s like being a salmon swimming upstream, you know? So to put myself in conditions where I would lose that would be really stupid. I think it would be pretty easy to do. It’s like I have this little jewel in here that I need to protect, and I just pray that I can, that the causes will come. And you never know, I might lose it in another year. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. Like I said, I just pray every day that this day will be beneficial, and then when things come along I just make Dharma out of them.

Robina:  Perhaps it would be interesting to talk about this “subjective blissful consciousness”? When did you begin to taste it?

Paula:  Well, the first time was when I met Lama Yeshe in 1980. I went to a Chenrezig course that Vajrapani Institute had organized at Grizzly Lodge in California. A good friend of mine, Anne Park, invited me to go. I’d already been meditating and doing yoga for a few years, and I was looking around.

When I met Lama I remember thinking I was like a rotten peach, I was just so ripe. I began to experience something from doing the Chenrezig meditation. Usually people’s minds are in their brain, right? Well my mind just dropped down to my heart, and then there was no more me, there was just space. Lama had given the visualization of a pond and a rock falling into the pond and the waves rippling out on it. And I became that pond. I had this overwhelming experience of just no thoughts and lots of space and bliss. And I didn’t know anything about Madhyamika philosophy then or how to check the I. But I just had this very expansive experience of, for lack of better words, nothingness. I don’t want to be nihilistic, but that was all I knew at the time.

Robina:  Zero.

Paula:  Exactly, zero. I was in zero space, that’s what Lama used to call it. And then if a thought did come, it would be like this little thing rippling out. And it was all because of Lama Yeshe – his incredible teaching about the white radiating crystal light body too. I could just be that white crystal light body, with the crystal radiating light. And then I wanted more!

So I just kept doing that practice. I had a job that summer in the mountains; I used to be a forester. Lama was in Berkeley the whole summer, and he was giving initiations, but I didn’t go to any more because I thought, “I have what I need.”

I would just feel Lama above the crown of my head. It was one of those first-student blessings. I was having to teach, and I remember seeing Lama later, and I said, “Lama, whatever I teach my students, it feels like you talking” – I didn’t know anything about guru yoga yet. He cracked up.

I think that what really clinched it for me was a trip to Pyramid Lake that I took with a dear friend Carol Fields, to a puja that Lama did there. It’s this beautiful lake in the desert outside of Reno. The water that comes from Lake Tahoe goes through Carson Valley, through Reno and then ends up in this lake. And it’s in the middle of a desert. Carol is an environmentalist as well as a Buddhist, and the lake is drying up because they’re taking too much water out. The puja was to protect the lake, to stop it from drying up.

Lama completely blew my mind. The best way to describe being with Lama is it was like taking LSD. My mind was in an expansive, totally delightful space. We’d just laugh and giggle, and carry on; it was like that all day. But when he did the puja, Lama got really serious. I don’t know what the puja was, but as soon as he started doing it the clouds parted right over Lama – it was totally overcast. I remember, it got so hot, we were sweating. As soon as the puja ended – it didn’t last very long – the clouds came back, and a swarm of white pelicans, maybe ten of them, came swooping out of the north, paid tribute to Lama and then flew off.

That was it for me! There was nothing else to do in my life anymore after that. It was just a matter of getting rid of a job, a husband and a life. I don’t mean to sound crass, but it was how it was. “This is it!” And it’s been like that for me ever since.

At the end of the Chenrezig course, Lama said, “I want to come to teach you the Six Yogas of Naropa.” Even though I didn’t know what it was, I said, “Okay, I’m doing it.” And he said, “But I want you to have mahamudra teachings first, and Lama Zopa’s coming next year to give a course.” “Okay, I’m going!” So for the whole year I was just waiting to do that course.

And in the meantime, my life was turning into a total disaster! – you know how it is when you started getting involved with a lama. There’s suffering and emotions, and all the negative karma starts ripening. (In fact, this is the first time I have come out of retreat and it hasn’t totally been a disaster!) It was one negative experience after the next, all these emotions, all the deepest, darkest, most horrible things that you keep a lid on just poured out.

And when I got to the mahamudra course it was even worse. When I went to see Lama Zopa – it was the first time I had met him – all I could do was cry. I just cried, cried and cried, and I couldn’t even say anything, because I was going through so much purification. It was total suffering!

Actually, I think part of the reason is because it was a brand new plywood room. I really think one of the biggest obstacles is the toxic building materials used these days; I have found that the building materials make all the difference in the world to the quality of your meditation. That retreat with Lama Yeshe, for example, was in a very old building made completely out of wood, and that was fine. But when I went to Vajrapani for Lama Zopa’s course, we were in this plywood building with brand new rugs, and it seemed that nobody could meditate well, their backs hurt, their knees hurt.

I get very wrathful about this. I try to tell people, but they just can’t see it, they don’t have the experience. These days there’s so much information about how to build non-toxic houses. This is something I could really get on the bandwagon about!

Robina:  Tell us the evolution of how you finally got into retreat.

Paula:  In 1982 I went to the first Enlightened Experience Celebration in India; I knew it was the end of life as I knew it. There’s your intuition that knows exactly what’s going on and exactly what you have to do, and that’s connected to bodhichitta and the lamas. But then you have your other mind, your intellectual mind. One book I read called it the protector controller. You have to get the protector controller out of the way so you can feel what’s really coming up. My true self knew I was never coming back. But the other wasn’t quite sure.

First we had mahamudra teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And then we got Guhyasamaja and Chakrasamvara teachings from Zong Rinpoche. I’d never had a Highest Tantra Yoga teaching before, and the whole thing was blowing my mind. I didn’t know about death and intermediate state and rebirth, and I thought, “Wow, this is amazing! This is the science of rebirth, this isn’t religion!” My background is in science, I was a botanist, a biologist, and I thought, “The world of science needs to know about this. This is actually the science of what happens when you die.” It was so clear, like reading a textbook on the Kreb’s Cycle, or how a tree grows. I mean, they’re not talking hocus pocus; they’re just telling you what is. And so that completely got me. “I have to study this,” I thought. There’s nothing more important, because I could see that this could be some kind of foundation for morality in the world.

I’m an environmentalist-type person, so worried about the planet. I grew up in that period, and that was my bent before I met Buddhism. And I was always thinking, “How are we going to help the world, how are we going to save the world? And now I thought, “This is what’s going to save the world!”

I have the firm conviction that if the world could last long enough and the mainstream world, even just a few scientists, could see that rebirth is real, that karma isn’t just something made up, that your rebirth is based on your actions, then people like the Rockefellers, instead of sort of hoarding all the money and making the taxpayers pay for everything, would actually pay for the police force and so on. I know it’s a really far-fetched idea, but it is a logical conclusion.

Those are the people I’d really like to tell Dharma to, I thought. But how am I going to tell them about Dharma? I’m totally ignorant, more ignorant than a pig, as Lama Zopa would say. So how am I going to tell people about Dharma? The only way is if we become like our lamas. We need Western lamas. And it’s not out of pride, it’s just logical. And if you’re going to tell people about the science of rebirth, well you’d better know about it. I thought I could learn it really quickly, “Oh, I can do this!”

Anyway, it’s many years later and I still haven’t. I am not a completion stage practitioner, no way, but I have definitely made some progress, and I have generation stage experience now, and I can see that with some more practice you could actually enter the winds into the central channel and absorb them there. I mean, I think the thing that would inspire people is seeing that it is possible. But it’s not possible living in the world. I really don’t think it is. I think it’s really hard for people to understand what the training is, that it could take a whole lifetime, that it could take two lifetimes, many lifetimes.

Look at our lamas. What if we had more people like that in the world? As Murray Wright told me one time when he came to our retreat place with Rinpoche: “Look,” he said, “if we don’t do it, who’s going to?” If it’s not Robina, if it’s not Murray, if it’s not us, who’s going to do it? We have to do it. This is not pride, it’s just practical. If you really believe in it and you really want it to happen, then you just do it.

So that’s what happened in Dharamsala, I just got that wish.

Robina:  That strong aspiration.

Paula:  Yeah, that strong aspiration.

Robina:  What did you do between ‘82 and ‘91, when you finally started your retreat?

Paula:  Someone gave me a copy of Nick Ribush’s transcript of Lama Yeshe’s teaching on Heruka Vajrasattva. I was reading it during that series of initiations we were receiving in Dharamsala – remember, we were allowed to read during them. And so I decided that after the Dharma celebration I would do Vajrasattva retreat.

Our dear late friend Stefano Piovella really helped me a lot. He gave me a room in the house where he and Claudio Cipullo and Dieter Kratzer were doing retreat. Every day he would go to teachings on calm abiding by Lati Rinpoche, and every day he’d bring me the tape, and I would transcribe it. So I had all the teachings on shiné during my Vajrasattva retreat; it was perfect.

Anyway, Stefano was my brother, he was almost like a guru for me. I had been accepted in a Ph.D. program, and I had a fellowship waiting for me, I had the opportunity to become a scholar-type Tibetan Buddhist, doing something connected to environmentalism. Stefano helped me stop that. He did tarot readings, and he’d say, “Look, this way you become the King of Swords, but what’s the King of Swords? That’s the intellect. And this one leads to the Queen of Hearts.” “Oh,” I thought, “we want to be the Queen of Hearts, don’t we?” So I wrote my professor and said I wasn’t coming back.

During that retreat I didn’t have any money. A woman said she would bring us food, but after two weeks she got scared of the spiders and left! Then I didn’t know how I was going to eat, but I decided I wasn’t going to quit. I had some spirulina, and there were nettles, and I’d go to the chai shop and get potatoes, and on my birthday I treated myself to an omelet.

One of the things I had to really learn in the Great Retreat was about renunciation: I used to think that renunciation means you don’t take care of yourself. It’s taken me 10 years to learn that it doesn’t. Roger would have to teach me that. There we were in Vermont, and I was nearly dying, freezing to death, and I wouldn’t buy a coat, you know?

And this attitude was starting to manifest then, doing this Vajrasattva retreat. Most people in the West have this; it’s our excuse for toxic shame, for self-hatred. As soon as we hear about renunciation we think, as Lama used to say, “I’m bad.” I think a lot of people think that’s renunciation, and because of that they have no compassion. Compassion is based on real renunciation. If you love yourself, you turn that outside to everybody: I not only love myself but I love everybody else so much that I have to attain enlightenment for all of them. But if you think, “I’m bad,” then your compassion is just like a control trip. Anyway, I was learning about that.

Robina:  Had you met Roger yet?

Paula:  Actually, Roger started to bring me food, and that’s kind of how we got together. I love hiking, so on my breaks I’d go to the Shiva temple and to where Trijang Rinpoche’s stupa is now. So there Roger would be, this monk sitting under a rock. We started talking. We’d talk about emptiness a lot, and that really excited me. And he was also into yoga.

Eventually we realized that we were interested in exactly the same thing, which is mahaanuttarayoga tantra, actually doing it, not just talking about it. I hadn’t met anybody else at the Dharma celebration like that. Roger was really into meditation, and I was really into meditation, so in the end he said, “Well, I have a little money. Come with me and we’ll practice together. I’ll help you.” I think he probably had some karmic debt to me, you know, I was probably his mom or something, and he probably made some vow that if he ever met me, he’d help me! Actually, I think he really is a monk, you know. But this karma ripened that he couldn’t control, and he ended up disrobing. So we went off, and we’ve been meditating together ever since. That’s all we’ve been doing: going to teachings and practicing.

After Dharamsala we went to Australia. Roger wanted to help start a center, Padmasambhava Institute in Western Australia, but it didn’t work out. We weren’t really working out either, we were having a terrible time. We had hepatitis and were really sick, and I think we were both a bit nuts at the time!

During Vajrasattva retreat I was in what I thought was a state of grace, but I think it was probably a state of insanity! From the time I took the Heruka teachings until the time I got hepatitis, for about six months, I was in some other realm almost. And we were fighting, having a terrible time, and I thought, “What am I doing? What have I done to my life?” I decided I would leave. But then I looked and looked at Roger and I thought, “I can’t leave this person.” So we decided to do a Tara retreat. And that Tara retreat got us the money to go to Lama’s teaching on Six Yogas of Naropa at Vajrapani in California.

But Roger couldn’t get a visa because he didn’t have a job. I had to marry him so he could go to the Six Yogas of Naropa. That’s how I ended up getting married – it wasn’t for the usual reasons. After that Lama got us to do a year-long Vajrasattva retreat, combining it with the Six Yogas, doing inner fire, tummo. Lama said that we could do the mantra at the navel instead of at the heart, and work on the tummo like that. Anyway, Lama was really kind to us. That was when he pretty much put us in this direction, putting us in this long retreat together.

We lived in a really small place doing Vajrasattva retreat for one year, and it was hell! And one of the reasons it was hell, let me just mention, was that it was a plywood house, full of gas, with terrible rugs and mold. Plus we still had bad livers. But after Lama passed (in February 1984), and spring came, everything got better. When we could open up the windows and have fresh air, we didn’t fight anymore. Nevertheless, it was a really amazing retreat. Lama’s right, the more purification the better. It’s just really hard to go through it.

We attended Lama’s funeral at Vajrapani and then went back and finished our retreat. And this is how our life’s been. We do retreat, then we come out, and then put out feelers for whatever’s next.

After that, we went to Osel Ling in Spain to do the Vajrasattva retreat there. And the great thing about that was that we got in-depth teachings on the Guru Puja from Geshe Tempa Dargye. That really turned everything for me – Rinpoche talks about one door opening the door of Dharma. Then right after Lama Osel was born, in February 1985, we got a letter from Lama Zopa Rinpoche saying, “I want you both to stop doing Vajrasattva and do a Great Retreat, so start doing the nine preliminary practices.” We didn’t know anything about it.

So from ‘85 to ‘91 we did our preliminary practices, ngondros, we went to two more Dharma Celebrations in India, and we worked a little bit. And it was always the same way: we’d never know where we were going or what was happening, then suddenly someone would offer us a place here, we’d do a ngondro there.

Robina:  Please describe to us this object that has to be refuted, this I.

Paula:  It’s just like the teachings say: it’s the I that comes whenever somebody says something that you don’t like, for example. Actually it’s always there but it gets more strong when someone yells at you or you have a strong desire. Jeffrey Hopkins’ books are really good by the way; I really appreciated Emptiness Yoga and Meditation on Emptiness during retreat.

It’s difficult to talk about it: I have to meditate to find it. It’s like I have two minds now: the talking mind and the more subtle mind, and that’s the mind that does all my practice now. Anyway, after you’ve done the guru yoga in your sadhana and you’ve gone through the death absorptions, you get to this really calm space – it’s that same one that Lama showed me about the pond. So then you can just think “I.” It’s just like Lama Zopa says, just make the “I” come: you imagine somebody said something mean to you, or maybe you can even think about what you want to eat; it comes up, it’s like a trick.

This took me a while, actually. I didn’t get this until the Great Retreat, I didn’t get this in all my ngondros, I have to admit, because I didn’t have enough time. It took me that long to be able to hold that calm space for the amount time needed to do the refutation meditation. It’s difficult to be able to have that much clarity, to be able to spend that much time looking for the object to be refuted without losing it. Because mostly what happens is that as soon as you start to think, you lose it. So the trick is to stay calm enough to find a really subtle … remember Lama used to call it a “mindfulness fish.” You have your mind, and you’re in this big pond, and here comes the rock, poomp, and that’s your object to be refuted. Then you have to use a little part of your mind to check it out. And then you can go through Chandrakirti’s points, you know? And then suddenly, boom! you can’t find it, there’s no I. I think this is the skill that comes with the retreat, the skill of being able to analyze that object to be refuted, that I, without losing it.

This is when you can see what differentiates emptiness from just spaciousness, you know, because they are different – and I think that’s the greatest blessing of doing Great Retreat. You do that over and over and over again in the retreat, and even now, out of retreat, you just sit down and meditate and you can find it. But I still have to study, I still have to go back and read, because my mind gets lazy.

Robina:  They talk in the texts about the mind merging with emptiness as water mixing with water: are you talking that subtle?

Paula:  I never got that far. I don’t think I’ve ever had that mahamudra … Actually, I don’t really know what I’ve had. I mean, all I do is go through the points that are taught by Lama Tsongkhapa. I just go through that meditation. And what happens is what happens. I can’t tell you if I’ve had this, that or the other because I don’t really know.

Robina:  You mean, you haven’t studied enough to know the right words?

Paula:  No, I just can’t say, I don’t know. I think sometimes the winds do enter the central channel, and I do have some subtle experience. Because sometimes when you meditate on your heart, definitely, you can feel the winds have gone in, even a little bit. I think that’s what actually allows that great calmness to come. In Lama Tsongkhapa’s Uncommon Mahamudra practice you don’t enter at the navel, you do it at the heart. And I can see that the more you just sit there and meditate like that, the more airs would just go in and in and in of their own accord. But I use the contemplation of the meaning of Shri Heruka, that’s the other way to go. You have the object to be refuted, you find that empty; then the mind that’s looking at that, you find that empty; then you try to put them together, and then you find that empty. And then you’re just left with this non-conceptual blissful space, and you just stay in there as long as you can.

Robina:  How long can you stay?

Paula:  Not that long, it depends. Maybe at the most ten minutes. But it doesn’t matter. Why these practices are so beautiful is that even though you might start having conceptual thought, you don’t completely lose that space. Okay, you’re in non-conceptual space, but what comes out of that? Well, the sambhogakaya. That’s a little bit of a concept, but it’s not a great concept. Then you lose that concentration, and what comes out of that? Then you start making the nirmanakaya. And even though they’re concepts you still have this foundation of non-conceptuality and emptiness. The entire sadhana goes from that. The river is emptiness, and the boat’s going down the river, you know?

The beauty of sadhana is that throughout it you keep going back to the non-conceptual emptiness. The emphasis is on bliss and void: you start out from bliss and void, you bless all the offerings from bliss and void, doing Vajrasattva you go into bliss and void. You’re always going in and out, in and out, in and out, so you never really leave the emptiness. You continue your sadhana within that space, and go back to it repeatedly; your sadhana gives you the opportunity repeatedly to go back to it. It’s like dipping into the well: you go down into the well and you don’t come completely out. You go down, and then your mind just has to think, it can’t help it, but what you give it to think is the sadhana.

What you do with your mind is incredibly meritorious: what you’re thinking is, “I’m this deity emanating enlightenment to all sentient beings.” What better alternative to emptiness meditation is there? So you just go back and forth and back and forth, as much as you can, til you get exhausted, and then you go eat!

And that’s when the sadhana’s really working. Roger said something like that to Lama Zopa once, and he said, “Yeah, that’s how you do it.” Like, “Very good dear, I’m glad you finally figured it out!”

In fact, this is the beauty of tantra as opposed to sutra: you’re totally in emptiness. And the longer the retreat goes on, the deeper and deeper and deeper the sadhana comes from until you hardly even think the sadhana anymore. You just turn on the video, and there it is.

Then when you’re not meditating, you have lo-jong that keeps you on focus. And you keep the guru there all the time, never separate. With time you see that it does grow: I mean I’m much better at meditating that I was 12 years ago, for sure. You just have to keep going, keep going.

I pray to Tara all the time, I have total faith now. And I make sure that I have time to do my practice. That’s the only requirement that I have in my life, that I have time to practice. Okay, today it’s full moon, I must do the Four Mandala Offerings to Chittamani Tara, because if I don’t do this, it’s all going to fall apart; to do the self-initiation on the appropriate days, the sadhana every day … That’s the key, you have to do that, or else you’re on the outside of the mandala.

I understand what the word mandala means now. When you are in the mandala, you’re totally protected: guru-yidam-protector. You don’t have to worry about anything. You don’t have to worry about food, you don’t have to worry about car insurance, you don’t have to worry about health insurance. Geshe Yeshe Tobden said, “Whenever I need a doctor, the most perfect one comes.” But it’s like Tilopa asking Naropa to jump off a cliff. And that’s the really hard part: you have to jump off that cliff.

 

ROGER

Robina: Roger, tell us what you learned about your mind in retreat.

Roger: That with habituation, anything can change. That most of the time it can’t be trusted, and that the only thing it can be trusted to do is to follow the advice of the lama.

As far as how the mind functions, there seems to be some difference having done the Great Retreat. The mind doesn’t get as angry as often. There’s not as much involvement in the delusions. I had this visualization one day that before the retreat delusion was shouting right in my ear, there was no way to ignore it, it was so loud, and virtue was a little voice way off on the horizon, saying “Be good.” And now it’s the opposite. Now it feels like virtue is a big voice shouting, and delusion is off somewhere without much influence. It’s still there, but it’s just not front and center anymore.

Robina:  Is that only when you’re feeling comfortable? What about when people give you a hard time – that’s the real test, isn’t it?

Roger: Yeah, it’s the same. I can find little reason for involvement in delusion.

Robina:  How does the voice of virtue become stronger?

Roger:  I think it’s just a matter of habituation. We grow up in a culture that is quite belligerent in its way of relating, and unfortunately what’s fostered is the deluded response; we learn that kind of response just to live in families, in schools and with people. And so we have to develop the habit of not responding to those kinds of minds, and practice the internal virtues. Then the bad habit, just like any other habit, loses its power.

Robina:  The teachings say that in order to soften the mind like this and have it change in retreat, you need to prepare yourself by doing the various preliminary practices, the ngondros – mandalas and prostrations and the rest. Often it is difficult for people to understand the benefits, so could you tell us your experience?

Roger:  I found that in the period straight after finishing one of the ngondro retreats, you could actually feel changes taking place in relation to whatever purification it was you worked on.

Also, after each of them you felt like some kind of disaster was happening, although in the long run you could see that it was actually good. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche told me on a couple of different occasions when I was having a very difficult time, “When you wash cloth, the dirt has to come out.” It’s pretty clear what he meant by that. I don’t think that a lot of us understand that that’s the purpose of Dharma practice.

Generally, disasters are disasters. When our motivation is only for this life, then if it’s bad it’s bad, that’s all there is to it. But as soon as we take into account higher rebirth, liberation and enlightenment, doing whatever we do to make those future results happen, then just like Rinpoche said, the dirt has to come out. It doesn’t disappear in its place, it has to come out of the nerves, the mind. And that’s usually in the form of mental or physical disease. That’s why in the lam-rim it’s called wrong compassion to feel compassion for someone who’s experiencing the hardships of practice, because it’s not a hardship, it’s actually what they’re working to do.

Robina:  When did you start your ngondros?

Roger:  Basically in 1985.

Robina:  That was when you decided to do your Great Retreat?

Roger:  Well, I decided to do the retreat when I first met Rinpoche in ’79 – the first lam-rim course I ever took. He taught a great deal about the need to attain enlightenment to benefit all the sentient beings, and when I first heard that from him I just developed a very strong wish to do that as quickly as possible.

I think what actually convinced me was trying to do the Six Yogas of Naropa course with Lama Yeshe in 1983. At the end of the course, Lama had us all write down our experiences. When I sat down and really asked deep inside, “What is my experience of this retreat?” it was that I couldn’t do this practice, and that I wouldn’t be able to do this practice until I’d purified the obscurations and then accumulated the merit to be able to do it. So I wrote down for Lama that I had the wish to do a year-long Vajrasattva retreat, and when everyone’s experiences were read out, Lama gave very serious acknowledgement to that.

I did it in Northern California, and then again in Spain. Lama Osel was born in Spain while Paula and I were doing the Vajrasattva practice there. And it was at the end of that time in Spain, just after Lama Osel was born, that we received a letter from Lama Zopa Rinpoche, saying, “Okay, now you’ve finished Vajrasattva, do the other eight ngondros, according to Lama Tsongkhapa’s ear-whispered instruction, to get ready for the Great Retreat.” So we started then.

Robina: Tell us about each one, what their purpose is.

Roger:  Lama put so much emphasis on the Vajrasattva practice, I think, because it is extremely powerful in getting rid of self-pity mind. It helps you stop feeling bad about all the bad things you’ve done in your life. You can still remember them but you don’t feel bad about them anymore. And I think for us in the West this is important because our self-esteem and self-image are so damaged.

Then I went to Milarepa Center in Vermont and did the refuge ngondro. After this I really began to feel refuge. I had this vision of a fox being chased by the hounds and finally making it down into a burrow. The feeling of relief that the fox has at that point is what I began to feel throughout the refuge retreat: the intense relief that finally I’d found this place where I’m safe; it’s run by someone I can depend upon, and they’re telling me things that I can believe. And even though I may die tomorrow, I feel safer now than I’ve ever felt before. I noticed throughout that period also that I began to have a lot more faith in my ability to survive on practice.

Then after refuge I ended up in Colorado. The next retreat I did there was the Milarepa Guru Yoga retreat, according to the practice Rinpoche teaches. And that brought great blessings to my mind. And then not long after that I did the Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga practice.

The main kind of big-picture change that I saw come about after doing that practice was that I now experienced my relationship with my lama so deeply that it didn’t matter that I was not actually spending time with him, or getting strokes, or getting precedence, or eating with him, or any of those things. This was the great blessing of guru yoga practice.

We also did the water bowl offering retreat in Colorado. I have a feeling that that is connected to pride. Prostrations are too of course and I did a lot of my prostrations at the time. So when I finished that ngondro I had this huge explosion of pride. People who knew me thought I’d gone quite insane, and the only person who was still compassionate and encouraging was Rinpoche, who simply told me on several occasions, “The dirt has to come out, the dirt has to come out.”

I was having the worst time of my life: completely puffed up with pride, putting myself above other people. Part of me was really shocked, because it was going completely against everything I’d ever learned about Dharma, but another part of me was happy because I knew the process. I’d already had enough experience with the ngondros to know that this is to be expected, and I was able to kind of step back a little bit and allow the process to go on without ever identifying with it and without ever losing faith in my guru, that I’m still under his guidance, that this is a process he’s putting me through and he’s not leading me astray. That was the most rewarding aspect. Everything else was horrible!

I think from Colorado we went back to Australia and stayed at a place called Vajradhara Gompa. And there we did mandala offerings, and we each did a small wealth practice retreat and we did the tsa-tsa practice.

Robina:  Tell us about mandalas.

Roger:  In the long term of course it is training for higher rebirth and liberation and enlightenment. But for getting ready to do a Great Retreat, I have a feeling that the main thing mandalas do is accumulate the causes to receive benefaction throughout that time. And not only that, it also purifies the kind of self-pity miserly mind that we have that doesn’t allow us to receive from others, that makes us think we are alone and have to constantly provide our own food, clothing and shelter and can’t depend on anyone else because one, we aren’t worthy, and two, our culture won’t allow it. That’s gone, you lose that, and you gain the ability to accept as graciously as you can give. I have a feeling that’s what comes from mandalas.

And the wealth deity practice I think has basically the same function. It leaves you able to expect Shakyamuni’s promise to be true – as Pabongka Rinpoche said, Buddha promised that “his followers would not starve to death, even in times of such famine that pearls have to be bartered for flour.” You actually begin to feel that like an expectation: “Yes, that’s real, that will happen.”

Robina:  At this point, how were you surviving?

Roger:  I’d been living off a small inheritance I received from my father. Basically, I used it for my Dharma education; I spent the last of it in the Great Retreat.

Robina:  Your next ngondro?

Roger:  Then we did the tsa-tsas, which of course are creating the cause to receive the holy form, Buddha’s enlightened body, but in relation to the ngondro for the Great Retreat, I think that it has the purpose of purifying the physical hindrances, purifying the physical body to be able to persevere in the practice. Right at the end of that retreat I was able to get a handle on health problems that had been plaguing me for my entire life, without effort. When I finished that ngondro I was taken to a doctor that I had karma with, I was given the right diagnosis and all the right treatments and medicines, everything came together auspiciously. For many years before I had tried everything; I’d been searching out that situation and never found it. But having done that ngondro practice and purified the inner causes, the situation almost took care of itself.

And then the last one, the Dorje Khadro fire puja, I did right at the beginning of the Great Retreat. I saved that until the very last to purify my mind of all the non-virtue that I created when I was actually setting up the retreat place, cutting down all the trees and killing all the creatures and destroying all the spirit homes.

Robina:  Talk about how you got into the retreat.

Roger:  We’d gone to Australia anticipating to go to the third Dharma Celebration, and on the way there we checked out the alternatives, all the different centers and places where it seemed possible to do the Great Retreat. But there was nothing in Australia; everything was too undeveloped still for our needs.

After the third Dharma Celebration we came back to the States. We spent a winter in Colorado thinking to do the Great Retreat in an old commune there. The people were very nice and had very good intentions, but when it came down to the spiritual feeling of the place, there was no mind protection there at all. I think that’s when I began to realize the power of the refuge vow of not associating with people who want you to do things other than Dharma practice, and the power of blessed land.

Then we contacted Martha Tack at Milarepa Center, and she was very enthusiastic about us doing it there. It had the purification blessings of great siddhas who had done the groundwork of clearing away all the spiritual hindrances of the place, and it had a fairly well-developed infrastructure that was able to support us. Because of her kindness and the kindness of everyone at Milarepa, we were able to do it there: all the conditions were right. And Lama Zopa Rinpoche had given us his blessings to do it there. Everything came together – and that’s a very rare bunch of conditions in our culture; even within most of the Dharma centers it’s a rare gathering.

As well as the ngondros, Paula and I had to do the nearing retreats of the deities that we would practice in the Great Retreat. In this retreat, in which you recite 100,000 of your deity’s mantra, you are trying to get close to the deity, and gaining permission to do self-initiation and other practices. It’s kind of an unspoken ngondro for the Great Retreat, because during the Great Retreat you have to do all those rituals on a regular basis.

And during the six years of our ngondros we memorized all the texts we used throughout the retreat: the sadhanas and protector practices and so forth. We did them in English.

Robina:  Tell us about meditation. How is it beneficial?

Roger:  Well, meditation itself is nothing special, right? Because if you’re doing it just to get rid of a headache for this life, then you’re creating the cause for a lower rebirth. Meditation becomes helpful only if the motivation is extremely pure. If one has specific goals, and the motivation for those goals is pure, centered around higher rebirth, liberation and enlightenment, then meditation becomes a very powerful way to achieve those goals. But there’s nothing particularly holy about meditation itself – nor is there about living in celibacy, or living in solitude, or being mindful, or eating frugally, whatever.

Robina:  As Lama Zopa said once, even thieves need mindfulness.

Roger:  Yeah, even thieves need mindfulness. So all these things are only props or tools for achieving certain goals. We are very fortunate to have met Lama Tsongkhapa’s transmission, because he explains very clearly how to meditate, and why- – and it’s not just for gaining health benefits or pacifying the mind momentarily. They’re just associated effects.

Robina:  So, what’s the point of meditating, how’s it beneficial?

Roger:  What I learned throughout this retreat is that the outer actions are not the determining factor for something being Dharma practice. If someone is to be considered a good Dharma practitioner, then that person would have the skill to motivate whatever action they’re doing for higher rebirth, liberation or the highest goal, enlightenment. And then of course they would actually do the action with awareness, and then at the end dedicate the merit, the vast amount of merit created because of that motivation to the great enlightenment of all sentient beings. That is real Dharma practice.

It doesn’t matter what the appearance of the action on the outside is – meditating or washing the body or going to the bathroom or talking to a friend or eating some food – if the mind inside is purified with those motivations, then any action, even the act of killing, can become a meditation on the path to enlightenment.

During the Great Retreat, I felt a little bit of that understanding happening in my mind. I was able to accept the fact that I was having to stack firewood instead of doing my session, because I was able to relate it to my lama and his works and then develop the motivation that I’m doing this to attain enlightenment for all sentient beings. So even stacking wood became the highest cause for enlightenment.

Robina:  You learned that from meditating?

Roger:  I learned that throughout the retreat. Actually I learned that from my precious holy kind Lama Zopa Rinpoche the very first time he gave me teachings. The very first time he taught me about bodhichitta I learned that that’s what makes actions Dharma. And based upon that, then you can make water bowl offerings or mandala offerings with great enthusiasm, even though they’re extremely boring and are quite hard work. You find the energy to do all those things, because there’s a certainty in the mind that this really is Dharma, this is meditation.

It was the same during the eight months we spent actually building the retreat place. I was able to do that with a very happy mind by understanding that the entire activity became the purest Dharma practice because of the motivation. I didn’t have the mind thinking, “Oh, I’m a meditator, I’m not a builder, why am I doing this?”

Throughout the retreat I received some confirmation in dreams from Lama Yeshe that I really could hit the point, that the purpose of Great Retreat isn’t whether or not you come out with a certain amount of meditative stability, or how many hours you can stay in meditation. The real point of the retreat was how well you could train your mind to see hardships as the cause of happiness.

So, doing whatever action you do – having a cup of tea or going to the bathroom or waking around the circumambulation path around the houses – you are constantly able to feel that you are practicing. And creating merit. Even though, over such a period of time with the effort that’s required to accomplish almost four years of continual practice, you are bound to have long periods of disturbed mind, of self-pity mind.

Without understanding what Rinpoche calls the secret of the mind – the power of motivation – you could get very disgruntled and upset in retreat, thinking, “Here I am giving up a normal lifestyle for this. What’s the point if I’m just here unhappy? Unless that can be transformed into Dharma practice, then a lot of the retreat would be wasted. Whereas with the understanding of what Dharma practice really is, what really is the dividing line between non-Dharma practice and Dharma practice, then you can be sick with a happy mind, whatever, because you know that you’re still doing what you were there intending to do.

Also, it is good to have compassion for yourself, “Oh, this is okay, I don’t have to be front and center twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year.” You get sick, you go crazy, different things happen, the weather changes, sometimes it’s the food; many things constantly blow you around. But having been trained correctly in being able to distinguish what is Dharma practice and what isn’t, then all that becomes meaningful. What looks like disaster, what looks like not profitable time, what looks like lost time, all becomes meaningful because of the motivation for the day’s activity, meditation.

Robina:  If motivation is the main thing, then why choose meditation over cooking, for example? What’s the specific benefit of that action? Why were you meditating?

Roger:  To gain realizations of the path, of the entire lam-rim within the mental continuum, in order to bring great benefit to sentient beings. Because I am a being of lower capacity when it comes to practice, I’m unable to gain realizations by just relying on an intense daily practice; several hours of sadhana throughout each day is basically what it would take for a highly qualified ordinary person to gain realizations in their lifetime. But for someone like me who’s not so capable, the retreat offers the opportunity to isolate yourself from all the disturbing factors.

So it’s just practical. A student doesn’t go to medical school because there’s anything fancy about medical school or because it’s nice hanging out with all the babes. He does it because his goal is to become a doctor, and he puts himself through the hardship of medical school in order to achieve his goal.

And it’s the same with Dharma practice. The goal isn’t to live in retreat doing meditation, the goal is enlightenment. So for someone of middling to lesser capacities, the most direct way to do that is, under the guidance of a qualified guru, to do the most direct practice, which is meditation, which is sadhana practice, which is deity yoga, which is guru yoga, the ngondros. That is the most direct way to get enlightened. And the very heart of all that is meditation, and the very heart of that is concentration on emptiness. And, for beings of lesser capacity, the easiest way to gain concentration is in retreat environment with the best possible conditions of solitude, being able to meditate by oneself, many hours a day. Then based upon that, over a long period of time, there is the possibility of success.

Of course, washing dishes can be transformed into a Dharma practice, or cooking. In fact, my Dharma profession used to be cooking. I’ve cooked for many Dharma courses, and created immense merit doing that, under the guidance of Lama Zopa Rinpoche, knowing why I was doing the cooking. I wasn’t doing the cooking just to feed people, I wasn’t doing the cooking for reputation or because the job needed to be done. I was doing the cooking because I wanted to attain enlightenment on behalf of all sentient beings, therefore I did those jobs at the centers. Based upon that, great merit was generated, because of that motivation.

And like in the Zen tradition, you hear stories about people who gain realizations doing these kinds of mundane tasks.

Robina:  There was Dromtonpa, wasn’t there, who got realizations while carrying his guru Atisha’s kaka.

Roger:  Yeah, there were great blessings in those situations because of the proximity of the guru. I think for ordinary people who are living ordinary lives, who don’t have the great fortune to be with their guru, mundane tasks definitely can become Dharma practice – but are they the most efficient, powerful ways to gain realizations of the path? No. They are a way to accumulate merit to one day be able to gain realizations on the path. My limited understanding of shamatha, calm abiding, especially on the tantric path, is that it does require certain outer conditions, for an ordinary person.

Robina:  How subtle does your mind get?

Roger:  It disappeared! Well, when all the conditions were right, I had the ability to do the sadhana at quite a subtle level with a great deal of concentration for long periods of time. And that got more and more constant over the four years. And of course when you’re in a situation like that, auspicious things happen, auspicious dreams, auspicious outer occasions.

Robina:  Dakinis flying into your room?

Roger:  No dakinis flying.

Robina:  What then?

Roger:  Oh, it’s difficult to describe now; situations that would have left me in a very confused, upset state, I hardly noticed … Anyway, definitely experiences happen, but they can’t be counted on. What can be counted on is how the mind is over the long term – whether you’re going up and down every day with the change in the weather, or whether there is some equanimity of experience, no matter what external garbage is going on.

Since we finished retreat, I think one of the most important encounters I have had has been with Geshe Yeshe Tobden, a Dharamsala meditator. Recently we drove him from Santa Cruz up to San Francisco in Paula’s mother’s car.

At first, when he was told what we had done for the past four years, he was a little bit stand-offish. But when he asked us how we got money for food, and we told him that we raised the money through the kindness of benefactors, that we basically begged for the sustenance, he became extremely happy, and loving towards us, and started showering us with praise and telling us what an important thing we had to share with Western people. Because, in his own words, “The power of the Buddhist tradition comes from practitioners in solitary retreat.”

And why is that? That’s where all our lamas came from. All our lamas who are benefiting us in this life, doing apparently very little retreat but are just naturally holy beings, had spent many lifetimes in the past developing the capacity to be in that role in this life. And that was all based upon the kindness of others. They could only do those practices in retreat based on the kindness of others.

So now in the West we need to do the same thing, even though we have so much rugged individualism pushed into our minds by our culture, and it’s considered very bad to live off the kindness of others. Geshe-la was encouraging us to show people as much as possible that this is how we’ve done it, and that it is possible to live this way; to inspire other people to spend their life in retreat.

It seems to me, eventually, if you get enough people doing that, you’re going to end up with some holy beings. I don’t expect myself to become a holy being, following this path, in this lifetime, but I do expect to help other people to see the possibility of that lifestyle and to follow it. And then one day, based on that, we’ll end up with indigenous holy beings in the West, who will have the authority to do what needs to be done for Dharma to really flourish here, for ordinary people to really start getting a taste of what it means to create causes for higher rebirth, liberation and enlightenment.

That’s all based on what Geshe Yeshe Tobden pointed out: first, to value the life of the meditator, and then to want to support that in others, to want to help other people attain that.

When Lama Zopa Rinpoche visited us halfway through the retreat, the thing that appeared to make him the happiest was that we were creating an example that other people could look at and say, “Oh, if they can do it, why can’t I? He makes mistakes, he’s full of garbage, his mind’s not worth a piece of used toilet paper most of the time. But he has faith in the word of Shakyamuni Buddha, that it works, then so can I.”

That was very encouraging, because that was one of my motivations for doing it that way. As a young man I spent time with Australian aboriginals, working as a stockman. Seeing their lack of attachment to the material world had a very profound effect on my mind and left me with great respect for them. And it also left me with a feeing that we could rely on the environment to give us whatever we needed to some extent. And then of course that feeling became even stronger upon hearing about Shakyamuni’s promise that we’d never go without what we need for practice. I realized that here’s a very holy being, who’s putting the weight of his realizations behind this promise, so actually there’s some foundation to believing in it.

And of course now, after having dedicated basically my entire adult life to the study and practice of Dharma, and having been supported throughout most of that time in one way or another, I have great confidence in that promise, and wish to encourage anyone else who has the slightest seed of that within their mind: don’t hesitate to put it to the experience, to find a qualified master to devote yourself to, give up on your fears of this life, so that these precious lineages can be made to flourish in these degenerate times.

In December, shortly after this interview, Paula and Roger returned to their retreat houses at Milarepa Center in Vermont to continue meditating.

 

They wish to thank the scores of devoted generous friends who make their meditating possible. May you never be parted from perfect gurus and, quickly fulfilling the stages and paths, may you achieve unsurpassed glorious enlightenment.

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