Reliance upon the Spiritual Guide is the root of the path.  Gen-la Losang said that there is only one activity on the spiritual path, and that is mixing our mind with that of the Spiritual Guide.  Since his mind is already enlightened, by mixing our mind with his, we too become enlightened.  Geshe-la said at the Summer Festival several years ago that he will take us by the hand internally and guide us every step of the way to enlightenment.  Kadam Bjorn explains that we can literally ask the Spiritual Guide to do our practice for us in our mind, so he will do all the work, all we need to do is know how to ask him.  A very pure senior teacher once said we need to allow ourselves to become completely under the influence of the Spiritual Guide, both externally and internally.  In this series of posts, I will explain my understanding of how to do all of these things.

This series of posts will principally discuss three things:  First, how do we get our relationship right with the outer Spiritual Guide; second, how to leave behind our ordinary mind, and why we should want to; and finally, how do we align ourself with and ultimately surrender ourselves completely to the Spiritual Guide.  We can do this with respect to our wishes, our thoughts, our actions and ultimately ourselves.

Getting our relationship right with the outer Spiritual Guide

There is no relationship more important to get right than the one with your spiritual guide.  There is no relationship more important that you can have because it is eternal and promises limitless fruit.  There are several reasons why we need to get our relationship right with the Spiritual Guide.  Your relationship with the outer spiritual guide is like your lifeline in your spiritual practice.  Many people think they can have bad relationships with everybody externally but a good one with Geshe-la inside, but generally everything falls apart when our external relationship with our spiritual guide is bad.  We lose everything.

If we can’t get our relationship right with our spiritual guide, then our future students of Dharma won’t get it right with us when we are their teacher, and then we won’t be able to really help them.  The faith we have in our spiritual guide determines the faith our students will have in us.  We don’t want our students to have faith in us because we like that sort of thing, rather we want our students to have faith in us so that we can help them.  This is a very important point.  We need to make it a priority to cultivate good, honest, working relationships with our teachers.  If our relationships are bad, even if we have perfect Dharma, we will be unable to help anybody.  By getting it right with the outer spiritual guide, you will be able to get it right with the inner spiritual guide.  The outer spiritual guide will help you identify your delusions that specifically get in the way of you having a good relationship with the inner spiritual guide.  By clearing these, you clear away the internal interference until eventually you realize he is with you all of the time.

So who is the outer spiritual guide?  There are three different levels.  The first, and most obvious, is he is the little Tibetan guy.  This is the individual who assumes the aspect of a Spiritual Guide and appears to accomplish the function of a Spiritual Guide, namely to lead us along the path of Sutra and Tantra.  We first learn how to get our relationship right with him – this is the easiest.  Second, we come to understand the spiritual guide as the synthesis of all three jewels, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha – in other words, we come to view the totality of the tradition, externally and internally, as one giant Spiritual Guide with many aspects, like many facets of a diamond.  We view all the teachers, our Sangha friends, the books, the centers, all the different Buddhas, everything as emanations of the Spiritual Guide.  These are like his mind.  We view all the instructions and teachings that are given as emanations of the Spiritual Guide.  This is his speech.  We view all the practitioners and Sangha as emanations of the Spiritual Guide.  These are his body.  If our relationship with even one part of this is not good, then our relationship with one aspect/part of our spiritual guide is not good.  The third and final level is we come to understand him as everybody and everything.  The ultimate nature of all things is bliss and emptiness, so it is correct to say that everybody and everything ultimately arises from and is an emanation of the Spiritual Guide. A senior teacher once explained how we can view ourselves as we are on solitary retreat right now, and everything we see is an emanation of your Spiritual Guide, like one big Truman Show.

Within our daily life, and indeed throughout all aspects of our spiritual life, we need to hand over control to the Spiritual Guide, where we essentially become a puppet that he controls.  He then uses us as a tool or an instrument for helping all living beings.  We invite him into us, request him to take over and work through us for the benefit of all living beings.  Essentially, we try transform ourselves into an emanation of him.  We provide the body, he is the one at the helm, in control.

DJ told me recently that the Sanskrit translation of Avatar is “emanation body of God”.  In short, we want to transform ourselves into an Avatar of the Spiritual Guide.  Once we have some deep experience of the Spiritual Guide working through us, essentially living and working through us, then on that basis we can develop some qualified divine pride, where we identify with him working through us.  Once our divine pride becomes more and more qualified, we come to identify more and more with the guru-deity until eventually we become or we are the guru deity, and our ordinary body and mind are like ‘our’ costume or vehicle or Avatar or emanation body.

The question is how do we do this, how do we first become an Avatar of the SG?

1. We have to want to do this.  We need the humility to realize that when it is our ordinary mind in charge, it is really our self-cherishing which is in charge and it just makes a mess of things and binds us deeper into samsara.  But when it is the spiritual guide who is in charge, our every action functions to lead ourselves and others to enlightenment as swiftly as possible.  He is omniscient, has perfect compassion and perfect skilfull means.  By allowing him to take over, we put him at the helm or in the controls and these qualities come to animate our life.  It will be as if we possess these qualities in our own life, and he will engage in his enlightened actions through us.  The really cool thing about that is then we get the karma as if it was us who is engaging in these enlightened actions.  This then will swiftly take us to enlightenment.  We can also increase our desire to do this by understanding how it is an essential step along the way to a qualified divine pride.
2. Dissolve the guru into our heart.  We can do this either through a formal practice or just instantly throughout the day.  The point is you remember that wherever you imagine a Buddha, a Buddha actually goes.  So with our believing and wishing faith, we dissolve the guru into our heart, strongly believing the living SG has entered into us and strongly wishing for him to take over.
3. We need to ‘cease’ or ‘make silent’ our ordinary mind.  Our ordinary mind and its ramblings are like static noise operating in the background that interfere with the spiritual guide taking over.  Either our ordinary mind is in control of the Spiritual Guide’s mind is in control.  The one directly competes with the other.  They are mutually exclusive.  The former has only one intention – to send us into the deepest hell; and the latter only has one intention – to lead ourselves and all beings to the highest enlightenment.  They go in completely opposite directions.  So on the basis of wanting our SG to take over, we intentionally make silent our ordinary mind to create the space for him to take over.
4. We then align our motivation with his, wishing to help all those around us or wishing that he live through us and use us to accomplish his enlightened intention, and we request him to do so.  We then hold our ordinary self in silence and allow him to come forth.

We have to gain living expeirence of how this works.  Then, it makes sense.

The main point is this:  by generating one virtue, the wish for him to take over, we are able to accomplish all virtues.  By neglecting this one virtue, our SC mind remains in control and sabotages all of our spiritual activities and our spiritual path and all virtues become nearly impossible.  I would go so far as to say that the extent to which we can do this is the extent to which we can lead a virtuous life.  The extent to which we neglect to do this is the extent to which we plunge headlong into the lower realms (even if we don’t realize it).

Your turn:  Would you like to become an Avatar for your Spiritual Guide?  Why or why not?

From an external point of view, I have very bad karma when it comes to being able to be with my spiritual guide.  It is hard for me to go to festivals, everytime I have tried to physically meet with him in the past, something has happened where it hasn’t been possible.  It is even very difficult for me to have much interaction with those teachers he has formed.  It is very easy to become discouraged thinking we must be doing something wrong or feel like we have insurmountable obstacles and we will never be able to attain enlightenment because we can’t receive this direct interaction. 

Other times we can have the doubt, how is it possible for him to help directly each and every being all of the time.  Yes, he can help those around him and they in turn can help others like ripples on a pond, but that is him helping all beings indirectly – not directly. 

When I did my Heruka close retreat, my main conclusion was the answer to these doubts – and I need to remind myself of this conclusion again and again so that I never lose it.  The way in which it is possible for the spiritual guide to be able to “be there” for each and every living being all of the time is he resides at the center of the sphere of all living beings.  Technically speaking, and perhaps more poetically, he resides simultaneously in the heart of each and every living being.  How? 

All hearts of each and every being have a common intersection point, like the hub of a wheel or the center of a sphere (of emptiness).  Each being is like a spoke on this wheel.  If you are inside an individual spoke, you can only see what is inside that spoke.  But if you can move yourself to the hub, then you can simultaneously reflect yourself inside every spoke.  This is where the Spiritual Guide resides.  By being present there, he is present everywhere for everyone all of the time.  Beings can even die and be reborn, and he remains equally “right there the whole time.”  For him, it is like a parent watching their child fall asleep and then waking up again.   He is able to stay with us in life after life.

If we can understand this, then we will never feel alone, we will feel we can always access him, and that he has never and will never abandon us in life after life.  Even when the reflection that is Venerable Geshe-la’s present body dies, it is really our karma to have that appearance which has exhausted itself, but he is still there.  He will never abandon the NKT and he will always be there because he is not the body of VGL, rather he is the eternal Je Tsongkhapa, like the Living Christ for Christians.  The body of VGL is an echo or a reflection of a much deeper, eternally abiding being.  We do not need to fear, he will always be with us.  In fact, he will always be within us eager to fill us with his wisdom and respond to our prayers.

While it is beyond the scope of this blog, this understanding also has tremendous benefits for our self-generation practice.  We are able to feel as if we are doing our practice inside the hearts of each and every living being, directly and profoundly blessing and healing them.

As a father, I have tended to give my kids a lot of freedom to make their own choices.  The primary reason for this is I feel it is important that they learn to make their own correct decisions, and they only way they can do this is with lots of experience of having to make their own decisions.  But when our kids are making the wrong decisions, it is our job as their parents to help them make the right ones.  This involves discipline.  I have avoided this because I feel getting angry at my kids does more harm than whatever mistake they have been making.  I have also avoided this because I myself really dislike it when other people tell me what to do and it invites rebellion.  But I have gone too far to the extreme of granting excessive freedom to my kids, and this is doing them a disservice.  Because our kids lack sufficient experience or understanding of what is important, it is our job to provide them with limits for those areas where they are not yet capable of making the right decisions.

I think the key is creating very clear rules, that are fair and reasonable, and these rules need to be applied consistently with clear and proportionate natural consequences when they are violated.  The rules do not need to be enforced with anger – ever.  Anger destroys the constructive value of the rules.  In life, people need the skill of respect for authority, but this is different than obedience.  Obedience is you obey out of fear, respect for authority is acknowledging that the other person is an authority (be it through superior knowledge, experience or legitimate power of decision-making), and this authority needs to be respected.  There is nothing wrong with teaching our kids respect for authority, but there is something wrong with “breaking them” like some horse that needs to be trained so that they “obey”. 

Rules should be clear, reasonable and process based.  It should be crystal clear what is expected and what is not allowed.  The rules should be reasonable, fair and not arbitrary.  Most importantly, they should be focused on the question of “how” things are done.  When we do things, we do them right.  We focus on hard-work, diligence, thoroughness, doing things properly, not specific outcomes.  For example, a rule we are needing to teach our 4 year old is “if you cry/get angry for it, you don’t get it.”  Yes, we should have taught that at 2, but like I said, we have been too far to the extreme of excessive freedom.

When applying rules (I like the word applying better than enforcing), I have found it is vital to eliminate any trace of doubt.  This is how it is going to be.  Kids, even small babies, can sense your doubt a mile away and they will exploit it and test it.  But if they know it is unamigiously as you say, then they don’t test it.  This is why it is very important for the rules to be fair and reasonable, because what is more obnoxious and counter-productive than the strict application of unreasonablness!

It is likewise important to teach our kids how to interact with others.  We are thinking of introducing a rule that our kids have to play together at least 1 hour a day on the weekends.  We are establishing a rule of limiting the number of hours per day our kids can be in front of a screen of some kind (TV, xbox, computer, etc.).  We are establishing a rule that nobody leaves the dinner table until everyone is done (or at least the other kids).  We have a rule that after snack homework is done before we play (“do what you have to do before what you want to do”).  And even on Christmas, today, we try apply certain rules:  we don’t start until after 8:30, each person opens their presents one at a time in order, you always say thank you, etc. 

Finally, it goes without saying that “those who make the rules must follow the rules.”  Nothing is more self-defeating than breaking your own rules.  In the end, our kids need to learn moral discipline, which depends on self-discipline, which depends on having good habits.  Those habits are formed by following good examples and having been raised in a family that “does things right.”  Success in life depends upon discipline, and as parents this is a skill we need to cultivate within our kids.  Discipline does not mean punishment, it means self-control to do the right things.