Part I
Chapter 1: Who Are You?
- Self-as-context, self-as-content ideas
- Meditative (or steady) awareness: looking at things without “filters,” perception, expectations, memory → “whatever we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear has greater clarity and sharpness, and enlivens our interactions.”
- Moves us toward looking at the nature of awareness itself
- Can then drop into pure awareness, when there is no longer a duality between normal & meditative awareness
Chapter 2: Acknowledge the Wave but Stay with the Ocean
- Life is change and impermanence.
- “To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.”
Acknowledge the wave but stay with the ocean. This will pass…if I let it.
- Spacious awareness of natural mind is like the sky or ocean; this is what we are
- Once we recognize this, thoughts and emotions are like clouds or waves, inseparable from awareness → less carried away by the “weather”
- Returning to noticing physical sensations, instead of all the associations built over time
- Sensation = link between body and mind → more awareness of subtle sensations gives us distance and liberation from our reactivity
Chapter 3: Born with a Silver Spoon
Chapter 4: Impermanence and Death
- “I held to the assumption that individuated personhood was a process of solidification; like wet clay, my size and shape would change but that would not influence the essential me, the real me, even though I had no idea who that was.”
- Emptiness → things arts not as solid and real as they seem; rather characterized by change and fluidity
- Phenomenal world is not nothing, just different than we usually think
- Sustained recognition of emptiness = enlightened or awakened state
Keep the view as vast as space. Keep your actions as fine as flour.
- Recognizing impermanence leads to its own benefits: “disempowers the false claims of the fixed mind. In turn, this expands our sense of who we are and what we can do.”
Chapter 5: Letting Wisdom Arise
- Awareness = essence of our existence, always within reach, but we don’t always recognize that
- “Between the sound and the projection, between things as-they-are and things as-we-want-them-to-be. This is what the Buddha taught: To misperceive reality is to suffer.”
- Ego is not an object, but a process— tendency for grasping, for holding on to fixed ideas and identities
- Don’t want or need to be in combat with ego— just strengthens the illusion that it exists
- Parts of ego = healthy— intuitive sense of right and wrong
- Deepening understanding of emptiness → “dropping from the intellectual head to the experiential, feeling heart”
- Able to observe and have perspective of “waves”/disturbances of the ocean without being afraid, threatened— a dynamic equilibrium of sorts
Chapter 6: What Will You Do in the Bardo?
- Bardos = six stages of life and death transitions
- First three stages = this life, sleep, meditation
- Emphasis on the familiar
- Last three = dying, dharmata (dreamlike passage to…), becoming
- Then the cycle begins again
- First three stages = this life, sleep, meditation
- Question of the chapter title refers to the last bardo— what will you do in the in between stages?
Bardo can be understood to mean “this very moment.” The nowness of this moment is the continual suspension (or pause) in-between our transitory experiences, both temporal and spatial, such as the tiny halt that exists between this breath and the next; or the arising and fading of this thought and the next.
Actually, everything is in between, always in transition
- What if we entered relationships, thought about positive circumstances, etc. expecting and knowing that they will change and come to an end?
Chapter 7: Lessons from Milarepa
- The mind experiences transition between moments, thoughts, breaths, as continuous, but you can always find a gap between them
- Some moments offer better opportunity to notice this— ex. transition from exhale to inhale
Chapter 8: Varanasi Rail Station
- “…we often get caught in the illusion that arriving at a predetermined destination will end the mental agitation of feeling in-between.”
Chapter 9: Emptiness, Not Nothingness
- Gaps between thoughts allow us to glimpse the naked mind, not obscured by perceptions and or memory
- Gap = bardo
- “Emotions themselves are not the problem. It’s how we relate to them.”
- Dukkha = suffering, the mental disturbances arising when we substitute reality as-it-is for what we wish it to be
Chapter 10: If You See Something, Say Something
Chapter 11: A Visit from Panic, My Old Friend
- Contributors to distress (aspects of craving) = pushing away a problem, which just contributes to panic & fear, and pulling other things into your life that you don’t have
- Remind yourself & notice the temporary nature of all things, and your distress becomes temporary, too
- Recognizing and staying with the panic was the only way for it to dissipate
- It is possible to function as your “self,” independent and of all the individual parts making you up, of the misconceptions, emotions, perceptions
Chapter 12: A Day at the Ghats
We are restless with this scent of something better close by, but out of reach.
- All misguided, destructive choices motivated by desire for happiness— suggests fundamental moral goodness
- Can start to recognize the moments throughout the day when you’re startled, sneeze, see a wild animal, experience wonder, etc. as moments when our mind empty → can access our true nature
Chapter 13: Of Sleep and Dreams
Chapter 14: Learning to Swim
Chapter 15: Momento Mori
- Buddha did not attain enlightenment, but found it already within him
Part II: Returning Home
Chapter 16: Where the Buddha Died
Chapter 17: What Is Your Happy Dream?
- Emptiness is an experience— like a dream house, which has no substance and doesn’t really exist, but you can still experience
- Our perception of reality is akin to a dream in that way, similarly empty
Chapter 18: Coming Through Darkness
- Every day seems like the last, but rationally if that’s so then we’d be living forever…
- Can learn to be more aware of, sensitive to the daily changes and subtle transitions of every day life
- Three states within this life that parallel the bardos
- Stage one: Every new beginning is also a moment of death— “only through dying will the past not dominate this moment. Then we can fully appreciate the sweetness of the fresh atmosphere that accompanies this stage.”
- Stage two = marked by opportunity, a dreamscape, transitory (parallels dharmata)
- Stage three: translucent dreams begin to solidify, become more habitual— can become trapped again, but still possible to change (neuroplasticity!)
Acceptance of our own essential emptiness, and the emptiness of all phenomena, diminishes our impulses to hold tight to things that cannot really be held.
Chapter 19: A Chance Encounter
- Acceptance and passivity are not related!
- “Acceptance allows for genuine discernment to arise from wisdom, rather than having our decisions limited by rote, unquestioning patterns.”
- Buddhism is more about cultivating creativity than productivity: “…to accept impermanence and uncertainty means risking failure. Preoccupation with certainty indicates a fixed idea of success. Creativity means staying open to change, and risking failure.”
- Thought meditation: basically cognitive decision; those moments when you can’t identify your thoughts are actually you noticing true awareness
Chapter 20: Naked and Clothed
Chapter 21: No Picking, No Choosing
- “Guest-house mind” of awareness → welcomes all feelings, emotions, thoughts non-judgementally; layers of feelings (I feel bad about feeling bad about…)
Chapter 22: Working with Pain
- Pain, too, is just another feeling that enters the guest-house
- Often met with resistance → turned into an object outside the mind → we add suffering to the pain
- Pain meditation = a kind of reverse meditation— inviting in the unwanted
- Entire Buddhist practice is somewhat a reversal of mindless behavioral loops, “swimming against the stream”
Chapter 23: The Four Rivers of Natural Suffering
- = birth, aging, sickness, death
Chapter 24: Recalling the Bardos
- Elements of all phenomena = earth, water, fire, air/wind, space
- Mirrored by five qualities of our body: solidity, fluidity, warmth, movement, openness
- Dissolution of elements as we die (or fall asleep, in a lesser way)
Chapter 25: Giving Everything Away
- Letting go → can be free of attachments, diminishes pain of dying
- Must acknowledge feelings of sadness, remorse, etc. without getting wrapped up in them
- “In the bardo of dying, to free ourselves of our attachments, we combine letting go, letting be, giving away, and making offerings.”
- To be the most true, must not see what the effect is (remove your own pride from the action)
- Must give up those things, feelings, concepts you are most strongly attached to— either by attraction or repulsion
Chapter 26: When Death is Good News
- Death offers us singular opportunity to recognize the true mind
- Belief that you remain conscious for several minutes after biologically “dying” when you can explore this state
Chapter 27: Awareness Never Dies
- Dharmata = suchness, reality
- Prayer by Tokme Zangpo:
If it is better for me to be ill, Give me the energy to be ill. If it is better for me to recover, Give me the energy to recover. If it is better for me to die, Give me the energy to die.
Chapter 28: When the Cup Shatters
- (He dies and comes back to life)
Chapter 29: In the Bardo of Becoming
We are all of us together dreaming ourselves into being. Dying into being. Becoming and becoming. Always becoming.
Epilogue
- Can take small steps to experiment with acceptance and awareness of constant transition:
- “…acknowledge that each night when we fall asleep, we’re dying to this day, which allows us to take rebirth tomorrow.”
- Notice that each new breath follows the death of the last one
- “Don’t forget to make space in your life to recognize the richness of your basic nature, to see the purity of your being and let its innate qualities of love, compassion, and wisdom naturally emerge. Nurture this recognition as you would a small seedling. Allow it to grow and flourish…. Keep this teaching at the heart of your practice. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, pause from time to time and relax your mind. You don’t have to change anything about your experience. You can let thoughts and feelings come and go freely, and leave your senses wide open. Make friends with your experience and see if you can notice the spacious awareness that is with you all the time. Everything you ever wanted is right here in this present moment of awareness.“