A very senior teacher once told me the highest practice is offering ourself to the Spiritual Guide so that he can do with us whatever he wishes.  We surrender ourselves completely to him, give him the keys, let him take over, we become an extension of him.  We should view ourselves as a reflection of the guru’s mind.  Normally we say that everything is a reflection of our own mind, but when we say this we still have enormous self-grasping.  But when we see ourselves as reflections of the guru’s mind, then we lose any sense of independent self-existence.  We are part of him and there is no longer any us.  Then all of our actions will be his because only he is present.  We get our ordinary selves completely out of the way and let him act through us.  We surrender to him in all our actions where everything we do is actually him acting through us.

What are the benefits of this practice?  If we can do this, all our actions function to create non-contaminated karma.  Because the spiritual guide’s final goal is the enlightenment of all living beings, by working towards the fulfillment of his goals everything we do accumulates non-contaminated karma.  By doing this, we purify massive amounts of negativity, specifically with respect to the Spiritual Guide.

When we offer ourselves as a servant to the Spiritual Guide, our delusions will fight back with a vengeance.  As we work through these delusions we plow through all the obstructions that prevent us from uniting inseparably with him.  We naturally become just like him.  We become like him, his wishes become our wishes, his choices become our choices, his behavior becomes our behavior.  We put ourselves in total alignment with him, so all of his power naturally flows through us.  We receive perfect inner guidance and always know what to do, and all our actions have infinite power behind them.  It is like we connect into a spiritual nuclear reactor and can do anything.  We generate infinite self-confidence, because our Spiritual Guide can do anything and we are now an extension of him, so we too can do anything.  We come under the protection of the Spiritual Guide now and in all our future lives, so we can guarantee the continuum of our Dharma practice between now and our eventual enlightenment.

This practice completely destroys our self-cherishing and our self-grasping.  It destroys our self-cherishing because we no longer can use ourselves for ourselves, but need to use ourselves in the accomplishment of the goals of the Spiritual Guide.  It destroys our self-grasping because we see ourselves to be a reflection of the mind of the Spiritual Guide and have no independent self-existence.  We become and feel ourselves to be part of a larger whole.  We feel ourselves to be an extension of his body.  It feels as if we are like a limb of his body – our body, speech and mind are his.  All our actions naturally become his actions working through us.  So it is as if he does all the work and we get all the merit, and we feel ourselves to be directly engaging in the actions of an enlightened being. This experience is an essential basis for a qualified divine pride in Highest Yoga Tantra.

How do we overcome the objections that come up?  For example, we might object what if he wants to do something with me that I don’t want?  But we need not fear.  What he wants to do is forge us into a Buddha, which is what we want for ourself.  It will mean us having to go against the grain and advice of our delusions, but this is a good thing because our delusions will take us only lower.  It doesn’t matter whether we succeed at doing this, we train in this direction.  Another objection is it sounds sect-like to surrender ourselves completely to the Spiritual Guide.  In general we would say that a tradition is a sect if it tries to take control of you, and a pure lineage will try to give you control of yourself.  Now I am saying that we need to surrender control completely to the Spiritual Guide.  This sure sounds sect-like.  But it is not.  In order to surrender control, we first need to gain control.  Once we gain control, we then need to decide what we do with our freedom and we need to choose to use it in the best way.  So we examine all the different things we can do with ourselves, and we realize that offering ourself to the Spiritual Guide is the best possible use of our freedom for all of the reasons explained before.  With our hard won freedom and control we offer ourselves.  Paradoxically, offering ourselves to the Spiritual Guide is the easiest way to gain control over ourselves, because the reason why we don’t have control over ourselves is our delusions, and offering ourself to our Spiritual Guide enables us to easily overcome all of our delusions because that is his function.  When we offer ourselves to our Spiritual Guide we are actually offering ourself to our true selves because the Spiritual Guide is our own future enlightenment.  He is our pure potential fully realized.  So in reality we are offering ourself to our true self.

Through this series of posts, I have attempted to explain how to activate our inner Spiritual Guide.  For me, there is no higher practice.  If we can master this, everything else becomes easy.  By focusing most of our efforts on this one practice, we open the door for our Spiritual Guide to do the work of all of the other practices for us.  We will soon enter the time when Venerable Geshe-la is no longer around with us physically.  What will we do then?  If we are to carry the lineage forward, we need to learn how to maintain a daily relationship with him even after his passing.  We need to do more than this.  We need to keep him alive in this world forever.  We do this by handing ourselves over and becoming an extension of him.  We take our place in the mandala.  We become part of the Great Wave of Je Tsongkhapa’s deeds.  We become the body, speech and mind of the enlightened guru forever working in this world.  May we all attain this.

In this post, we will explore how to become an extension of the Spiritual Guide, how to make our every action of body, speech and mind be him working through us to benefit others, where we literally feel like we are an extension of him.

In the end, we can learn how to engage in the actions of a Buddha right now.  Our true self is our pure potential – our Buddha seed.  It is completely beyond defilement, no matter what delusions we might have.  Its nature is the same as the Spiritual Guide.  In other words, our true self fully developed is the Spiritual Guide and the Spiritual Guide is our own future enlightenment.  A Buddha is simply an aspect or a reflection of our own pure potential.  Our pure potential is like a diamond, and each Buddha is like a facet of it.  The conventional aspects of Buddhas are tools which help us understand the good qualities of the Dharmakaya.

We might think, well that is nice, but I have no access to all this power, no access to myself, so what good does it do me?  It is possible to gain access to all of this power and all the abilities of a Buddha right now.  All it takes is faith, imagination and a pure motivation.  An easy way to think about is to think we have two selves:  our external self and our internal self.  Your external self is your ordinary body and mind.  Of course they are very limited in the sense that you have only one body and so can only do so much, and the ordinary mind is quite weak and so can’t do that much.  But nonetheless, things can and should be done with them.  Venerable Tharchin once advised me to get to know all the different powers and abilities of the spiritual guide.  This increases our faith, helps us better understand how he can help us, strengthens our bodhichitta and shows us what we too can accomplish if we become a Buddha ourselves.  Studying this enables us to know all the different ways we can invoke him.  The Dharmakaya has all the powers and abilities of all the Buddhas, so we can consider any Buddha and attribute that power to the Dharmakaya.  There are three principal aspects of the Spiritual Guide upon whom we rely, Guru, Yidam and Protector.  Guru functions to lead us along the path of Lamrim, Lojong and Vajrayana Mahamudra.  Yidam functions to bestow the realizations of Lamrim, Lojong and Vajrayana Mahamudra.  Protector arranges all the perfect outer and inner conditions for our being able to practice Lamrim, Lojong and Vajrayana Mahamudra.  We can invoke these three deities for ourselves or for others.

So the question is how can we develop this power right now?  We know how to get our right hand to do something – we simply request it to go do something and it does so.   It is exactly the same with our internal self.  If we want to bestow wisdom on somebody, we just request Manjushri to do it, and so forth.  Our ability to do this primarily depends upon our faith and imagination:  our faith that the guru is within us and can accomplish these functions and our imagination that he goes and does so when we invoke him.  If we check carefully, there is really no difference between requesting our right hand to do something and requesting one of the Buddhas abiding within us (which arise from our own pure potential) to do something.  When we see this, we realize we can use the enlightened beings’ bodies, speech and minds as our own by simply requesting them to do things.  When we can do this, we can engage in the actions of an enlightened being right now – long before we ourselves are an enlightened being.  We can right now do and accomplish anything simply by asking with faith, a pure motivation and our powers of imagination.  Once we are trained in the feeling of having a Buddha inside of us that we can invoke, we then hand over increasing levels of control until it is only him acting through us.  We accomplish this by surrendering ourselves completely to him.

But is it possible to go beyond even this and actually becoming an extension of the Spiritual Guide, where our every action of body, speech and mind are his actions?  The answer is yes, and I will explain how in the next and final post of this series.

Here we align our actions with those of the Spiritual Guide.  As we explored in the earlier posts, the quality of the karmic seeds we create determines the quality of the messages we can receive from the Spiritual Guide.  In this post, we will learn how to create the best possible karmic seeds for the Spiritual Guide to be able to bless.

So the question is how do we create these pure imprints?  By aligning our actions with those of the Spiritual Guide, all our actions become non-contamianted because his goal is non-contaminated.  The reason why this works is the objective of the actions is itself beyond samsara, and since the location of the mind is at the object of mind, by mixing our mind with a pure object we take part of our mind out and thus create pure seeds.  The next several posts will explain methods we can use to plant pure karmic seeds on our mind.

Receiving teachings and our study and practice of Dharma.

Every time we study or practice Dharma, we plant pure seeds which can later be blessed.  Every time we mix our mind with any instruction, we plant pure seeds.  Why?  Because all instructions are the same nature as the omniscient mind of the Spiritual Guide, and so therefore are pure.  Every instruction leads us in the direction of enlightenment and has as its ultimate intention to lead us to enlightenment.  When we receive teachings, we realize that we are sick and that we are listening to the cure.  It is like we are reading our horoscope.  When we study, we plant seeds that can later be blessed so that we understand the material we studied.  This is why it is so important to study.  When we meditate, we plant seeds that can later be blessed so that we gain realizations of the truth of the instructions.  This is why it is so important to meditate.

Become a channel for the Spiritual Guide.

Kadam Bjorn explained to me a special method for dealing with any need we feel, such as an attachment of wanting to feel loved or approved of.  Whatever need we feel, we should try to go and fill this need in others by opening ourselves up to becoming a channel for the Spiritual Guide to fulfill this need in others through us.  What he said was every time we feel the need for approval or love from others, we should take this as a sign from the spiritual guide that we need to offer approval to and love those around us (our students, our friends, family, etc.) (in other words, we need to change the object of needing approval and  love from self to others).  He said what we need to clearly realize is that needing to feel loved is a delusion.  We need to recognize this clearly for what it is:  a deceptive mind which results in only suffering that should not be believed.  We don’t need to feel love, we need to love.  We need to align ourselves with the directional gradient of the spiritual guide – from self to others.  He said by aligning ourselves with his intention to love others – in other words instead of seeking approval and love from others we seek to give approval and love to others – then we get the winds (pure winds at that) of our spiritual guide in our sails and he loves others through us.  When he loves others through us, he satisfies their need for approval and love and likewise fills us with his approval and love.  In other words, the way in which we can feel the unconditional love of our spiritual guide is not to seek it from him for ourselves, but rather is for us to unconditionally love others.  Then he fills them and fills us with his unconditional love.

We can likewise do the same with any feeling or need.  Whatever we feel we need, become a channel for your spiritual guide to give that to others.  When we do, he fulfills our need and that of others through us.  We can do this with anything.

In the last post we discussed making a vajra commitment to others.  In this post, I will explain how we actually fulfil our vajra commitment to others.  We can fulfil our vajra commitment to others by practicing for them as if we were them.  We are prepared to take on all their delusions and negative karma and work through it for them.  With total faith in Dorje Shugden and like Shantideva explains in Chapter 8, we offer ourself to others and are willing to become whatever they need us to become to be able to provide them temporary and ultimate benefit.  We are ready to endure whatever we need to endure.  We are ready to go through whatever we need to go through.  Soldiers are ready to give their lives to protect others and go through difficult training and situations to be able to do this.  We are the same, except we are seeking to protect them from samsara.  We are ready to work through their obstacles for them so that they do not have to.

How do we do this?  We view our delusions and negative karma as those we have taken on (from our vajra family).  When a delusion arises in our mind, we imagine that it is one that we have taken on – that of our vajra family/future students.  We then imagine that as we overcome it in our mind, we are eliminating it in their mind.  Quite simply, we completely exchange ourself for others, where we impute “self” onto others and “others” onto what we previously considered to be ourself.  Shantideva explains this practice in Chapter 8 of his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life.  For example, when we are sick we can imagine that as we are overcoming our delusions related to being sick, we are actually overcoming all of the delusions of others related to them being sick.  Literally, like Christ, we feel like we go through others suffering for them so that they don’t have to.  We have taken their suffering upon ourselves and are working through it for them.  We take on the delusions of our vajra family because we realize we are in a better position to work through them than they are.  Our mind becomes like a TV screen which reflects the aggregate nexus of the delusions arising in the minds of our vajra family.  We become like a contaminated mind treatment facility.  We bring in delusions and negative karma, we treat it within our mind and then return it back purified.

Technically speaking, how can we do this?  We essentially take on the contaminated karma of our vajra family.  This includes all negative karma, deluded tendencies similar to the cause and their obstructions to omniscience.  We can also accomplish this through requests to Dorje Shugden.  We have on our mind the contaminated karma for virtually any experience.  So we are essentially requesting Dorje Shugden to activate the karma in our mind that corresponds with the delusions and negative karma of our vajra family.  We make requests to Dorje Shugden and dedicate:  may the delusions that arise in my mind be those of my vajra family; and when I overcome them in my mind may they be eliminated from their minds.  Since ultimately, the world is a creation of our mind, if we eliminate these delusions from our mind, their effects will also gradually vanish from our world as the karma giving rise to these appearances exhausts itself.

How does it feel to practice in this way?  We can imagine that we are the ‘resultant’ Vajra Family, and we engage in the practice.  We view ourself as the ‘resultant person’ of our vajra family, and seeing ourself in this way, we try gain the realizations of the stages of the path of Sutra and Tantra.  This is really the highest form of King-like bodhichitta, and can easily be understood as Christ-like bodhichitta.  Even though the delusions are arising in our mind, we don’t feel them as “our delusions.”  Rather we experience them as the delusions of our vajra family that we have taken on.  When we work through them, we feel like a spiritual surgeon directly healing the minds of others.  We feel ourself as the Dharmakaya performing spiritual surgery on the minds of our vajra family.  As the Dharmakaya, we imagine that we are accomplishing the function of the various practices on the minds of your vajra family (purifying their subtle body, etc.)

The benefits of this practice are limitless.  By doing this for others, we create the causes for the Spiritual Guide to do it for us.  Doing this gives us enormous power in our practice, because we feel like we are directly practicing for all living being.  We feel, “if I succeed, they succeed; if I fail, they fail.”  If our superior intention is genuine, this will really motivate us.  This practice gives our suffering meaning, so we gladly accept it.  It helps cut our identification with the delusions arising within our mind.  They are not our delusions, they are the delusions of others that we have taken on.  With this practice, bodhichitta comes naturally.  We see the direct connection between overcoming our delusions and negative karma and benefiting others.  This practice creates a special karmic connection with these beings which will ripen in the form of them being our disciple in the future.  It will karmically draws us closer to them in the form of a special relationship with them as our disciple.  If we think deeply, it is nearly a miracle anytime somebody turns to us for spiritual advice.  Dorje Shugden does not activate the karma for others to come into contact with us before we have the realizations necessary to actually help them.  When we overcome their delusions in our mind, then we know exactly how to help them.  On this basis, then Dorje Shugden can safely activate the karma for them to appear.  It is in this way that Dharma centers grow.  Venerable Tharchin said that all we need to do to make a center grow is for ourselves to gain realizations.  Ultimately, by eliminating others delusions in our mind, we are actually eliminating them from their minds.  This is so because their faults and delusions come from our mind anyway, they are the reflection of our own faults.  If we eliminate the fault in our own mind, we will no longer project it into others.  In this way, we can directly engage in the actions of a Buddha liberating all beings right now simply by working on our own mind.  Venerable Tharchin said every step we take towards enlightenment, we take all beings one step closer as well in proportion to their karmic connection with you.  With this practice, we can understand how this is so.

The next several posts we will talk about how to align ourselves completely with and ultimately totally surrender to the spiritual guide.  First we will talk about how to align our wishes, then our thoughts, then our actions and finally ourselves.

We align our wishes with our Spiritual Guide by asking ourselves when we look at or think of somebody, “what is your [the Spiritual Guide] plan for this person?”  His ultimate plan for everybody is to deliver them to the Dharmakaya, where they will be completely free.  His temporary plan is to gradually lead them along the path to enlightenment.  Our job is to align our wishes with his – where his wishes are our wishes and our wishes are his wishes.  We want to get to the point where our wishes are in total alignment, we work for what we want (which is what he wants).  When our wishes are not in total alignment, we work on changing our wishes so that they are in alignment with his by considering the benefits of his wishes versus our own.  We need to examine whose wishes are better, and when we see his are, we change our wishes to be his, we adopt his wishes as our own.

We ask what does he wish for us?  What does he wish for others.  He wants to get us and everyone else out because he understands the danger we are in.  We want to stay.  The principal method for aligning our wishes with those of our Spiritual Guide is our regular practice of Lamrim.  Lamrim functions to make our aspirations pure – it changes our desires and makes them spiritual.  At this point we might object, “but I don’t naturally desire spiritual things, I want worldly things.  So adopting his wishes is artificial.  Gen-la Losang explains what is natural is simply what is familiar.  Worldly wishes are natural for us because we are more familiar with them.  Through training our mind in new wishes, they will become more familiar and eventually even more natural.

The best way we can align our intention with the Spiritual Guide’s is by making a vajra commitment to others.  A vajra commitment is a commitment to take personal responsibility for the eventual enlightenment of somebody else.  We promise somebody that we will do everything we can to help them attain enlightenment as quickly as possible.  We promise that we will continue working for their behalf for as long as it takes, even if that means countless lifetimes.  We will never abandon them.  We don’t have to directly do this with them, but internally we make such a commitment.  One powerful shortcut for being able to do this with everyone is try view others as your future disciples and organize all of your relationships around this idea.  Right now, they are just our colleagues, friends or family.  But one day they will be our spiritual students and it will be our responsibility to be their Spiritual Guide.  Knowing this is where our relationship is going with the person, we then naturally know what direction to take things.  We will naturally feel we are responsible for them right now.

Why do we make a vajra commitment to others?  Because doing so puts ourselves in perfect alignment with the Buddhas.  Their power then flows through us, and we naturally and easily have self-confidence.  We can accomplish anything.  Doing this is the best possible thing for our practice.  It changes everything in our life, like somebody having a child.  But it is much more than being a parent, because this is their spiritual welfare and it is for all their future lives.  Vajra commitments make our bodhichitta real, not abstract.  Bodhichitta is the wish to become a Buddha for the sake of others.  When we have others who we are personally responsible for, we easily feel the need to get serious about gaining realizations to be able to help them.

Our Guru is a much better Dharma practitioner than we are.  He knows how to enagage in all of the meditations perfectly and he knows how to resolve all of the doubts or problems that can arise.  He has perfect concentration, perfect wisdom and just the right motivation.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could just use his mind to meditate instead of our own?  Well, we can.

To understand how we can consider how there are three different types of mantra recitation, verbal, mental and vajra.  Verbal recitation is when we do mantra recitation with our mouth, mental is when we do the recitation with our mind, and vajra is when we do by listening to the Spiritual Guide do it in our mind for us.  Mental is more qualified than verbal, and vajra is more qualified than mental.  In exactly the same way, we can engage in all of our other Dharma practices in these three ways.  For example, we can recite a Sadhana with our mouth, in our mind, or we can have our guru do it in our mind for us.  We can do this with our meditations as well.  When we engage in vajra recitation, sadhana practice of meditation our ordinary mind is completely still and silent.  In this space, we allow our guru to take control of our mind and guide is through our recitation or meditation, filling our mind with each of the realizations implied by the words or lines of thought.  He enters into us, does our practices for us but with our mind – his mind doing them with our mind, so we get all the benefit as if it was him doing our meditations for us.  Once we have a taste for how to practice in this way, we will have no desire to practice in any other way.

So how do we actually engage in vajra recitation or meditation?  What do we need to do to start the process?  First, we need to make our ordinary mind completely still understanding it is just static, contaminated noise.  We then try align our motivation with our guru’s motivation.  We ask ourselves, ‘why does my guru want me to engage in this practice?’  We then try feel that same motivation itself – this is why we want to engage in this practice.  Then, we dissolve our guru into our root mind, strongly believing he is there and understanding that all of our subtle and gross minds arise from our root mind.  Then, make the request that he engage in the practice for you inside your mind.  The feeling is not that his mind is somehow separate from your mind and he is doing it with his mind and you are just watching.  No, the feeling is he picks up your mind and begins his enlightened dance with it, and you go along for the blissful ride.  Each time you recite a word of the sadhana or consider a line of reasoning from the contemplation, transform that recitation or thinking into a faithful, well motivated request that your guru generate within you the appropriate spiritual understanding.  You still say each word of the sadhana, but here you understand the recitation to be a faithful, well-motivated request.  As you do this, keep your ordinary mind completely still and inactive to create the space for the guru’s dance with your mind to take place.

Once we gain some experience of this, we can learn how to accomplish all our daily activities through making requests to our guru to do it through us, for us, for others.  We can do this for every activity, right down to brushing our teeth.  Because we are directing all of our requests to the guru, we naturally have a spiritual motivation in everything we do.

Of particular importance is learning how to fight our delusions with our guru’s mind.  This has several different aspects.  First, we make request that he reveal to us our delusions in a way we can overcome them.  Then we request him to reveal to us what we need to do to overcome them.  Finally, re request him to help us to actually overcome them.  We can learn to overcome all difficulties with our guru’s mind.  One of the easiest ways is to make requests to Dorje Shugden that he pacify all obstacles.  Gen Togden once told me the story of how he dealt with almost all of his obstacles.  An obstacle would arise, he would request Dorje Shugden, “if it is best, please pacify this obstacle; if it is not best to pacify it, please help me transform it.”  After making the request, sometimes the delusions would just go away.  Other times, they wouldn’t.  He would then train his mind in response.  Either way, it was all perfect for him.

We can also make requests to Medicine Buddha that he heal our mind of the difficulty.  We need to break our identification with the delusion by identifying it as the fruit of our ordinary mind.  We generate a strong desire to be free from the delusion or distraction by considering how much misery it causes us.  We then make requests to Medicine Buddha that he heal our mind of this delusion by reciting his mantra.  We imagine that infinite healing light rays radiate out and permeate every aspect of our mind but in particular healing this delusion/distraction and we strongly believe that our mind is becoming completely healed of this particular delusion.  If we have faith as we do this, we will literally feel our mind being healed.

Once we see how this works with a few of our practices, it is not difficult to extend it to all of our Dharma activities:  teaching, working for the center, writing on Facebook, emails or a blog, caring for our family, doing our normal jobs, etc.  We can literally set aside our ordinary self and from this day forward have our guru live our life through us, for us, for others.  It makes travelling the path literally effortless.