Vajrayana

[Potential]

THE SIX YOGAS OF NAROPA

1. Yoga of Psychic Heat, better known as Tumo. The foundation and ongoing support of the Path of Means, Tumo is the only one of the Six Yogas which is practiced throughout its entirety. It depends on the absolute retention of generative fluids -- sexual, endocrinological, and psychic -- for the conscious redirection and transmutation of subtle energies for spiritual purposes. In its most subtle and transcendent form, Tumo is known as the primordial energy at the very core of all manifestation.

2. Yoga of the Illusory Body. This practice begins as a powerful psychological technique. Through studying his mirror reflection and then visualized images of his own body, the aspirant comes to understand the arbitrary and illusory nature of perception. Next, he projects all his subliminal self-imagery, positive and negative, onto this image and thus disentangles himself from the web of identification with these things. Then he visualizes his Yidam, his personal Patron Buddha, and identifies his consciousness with it. He must transform his mundane life into the archetypal realm or body of the Buddha: his friends become Bodhisattvas, the outer world becomes a Mandala, and all incidents resonate with the Self-Illuminating Void.

3. Yoga of the Dream State. By maintaining waking consciousness during the nocturnal dream state, the yogi comes to realize the equally illusory nature of both the waking and dreaming conditions. Not only must he remain conscious while asleep, but he must also learn to dictate the incidents of his dreams, eventually performing heroic magical feats in his dreams. Through this practice the psyche is purged of many of its habitual limited assumptions about the nature of the manifest worlds.

4. Yoga of the Clear Light. According to the Tantric tradition, everyone experiences the Clear Light of the Void shortly after death. Its brilliance, however, is so overwhelming that the departing consciousness usually recoils in fear and is drawn instead into another samsaric rebirth. By learning to recognize the transcendent Light of the Nirvanic Buddha Consciousness during his lifetime, an adept may return to it without difficulty when the shock of death threatens to disorient him.

5. Yoga of the Bardo. The Bardo is the "nowhere" realm between death and rebirth. It is also the "nowhere" of the present moment. Whichever way you look at it, this yoga confronts the adept with his own naked and unmodified karmas. If he has not been sufficiently strengthened by his previous sadhana, he may easily become entangled in this display and fall into a realm corresponding to some aspect of his own karmic destiny.

6. Yoga of Consciousness Transference. Mastery of this yoga enables the adept to direct his consciousness at death through an aperture in the crown of the head to a chosen incarnation or a realm of light. This is his means of transcending the mechanics of karma and rebirth when he dies. The most desirable realm, of course, is the Dharmata, the Buddha realm of pure luminosity, the transcendent Light of Buddha Consciousness.

[Potential]

Buddhism is a journey into the depths of one's heart and mind, the inner reality of one's essence, an exploration of who we are and what we are. This spiritual journey is nothing more and nothing less than discovering this inner reality.

Buddhist spiritual teachings present a genuine science of mind that allows one to uncover this inner reality, the nature of the mind and the phenomena that our mind experience. When we say that Buddhism is a "science," we do not mean the dry science of analyzing material things. We are talking about something much deeper. We are talking about going into the depths of the reality of our inner world, which is the most powerful world.

The teachings of Lord Buddha Shakyamuni, which we often refer to by the Sanskrit term buddhadharma, set forth a path that frees one from disturbing emotions and fundamental ignorance. This dharma frees us from existence in samsara, defined by samsaric fear, and leads us towards the fruition of independence, the fruition of the state of complete freedom, the state of fearlessness, going beyond fear.

By closely looking at buddhadharma, or Buddhism, we thus find that it is a pure path, pure teachings, a pure science, a science of mind. In this sense, Buddhist spirituality is not what is ordinarily meant by the term "religion." It is rather closer to a humanistic science, a pure and genuine philosophy of humanity and science which works with the two sides of our samsaric mind, the negative aspect and the positive aspect of our mind. Fundamentally it is the science of working with the very basic nature of our mind.

"Nangpa" - Insider

The Tibetan term for Buddhism illustrates the nature of this inner science. What we call Buddhism in Tibetan is nang pa, which means insiders. It's an interesting term, insiders; it can have two meanings. Literally, it means someone who is within a certain boundary, within a certain fence, but another meaning of this word insider is the sense that we are working with our inside, our mind, our fundamental confusion, ignorance. Therefore we can see what Buddhism is fundamentally, from this term, insider: it is a science, working with our mind, a philosophy of humanity, a human science.

Is Buddhism A Religion?

Buddhadharma is not a religion in the everyday connotation of the word. We are not talking here about the sophisticated ways of explaining religion used by university Departments of Religion. Rather, the ordinary use of the word religion, our regular mundane understanding of religion, is somewhat simple: it's a belief, a dogma that we have about some superhuman beings outside our self, some supernatural energy outside one's being which has power, control, over our universe and over sentient beings. This mundane understanding of religion is a theistic view.

In this usual meaning of religion, it is as if a particular external being or external energy is holding our computer keyboard and is doing the programming for us; we don't have any power, we don't have any energy, we don't have any choice. We ourselves have to work with it; we have to wait and see what comes up on the screen.

Holding The Keyboard To Enlightenment

In Buddhism, however, we are holding the keyboard; we ourselves are the programmer. We program our software and we press the command keys on our keyboard. So depending on our own skill, our own energy and our own knowledge, we get what we want on the screen.

The reason why Buddha taught the dharma is to teach us the command keys. The Tripitaka is the manual, teaching us how to program, how to use the right command keys, and depending on this knowledge, we can have a successful progression of programs. Therefore there is no external energy or external being holding our keyboards in Buddhism; even Buddha himself does not hold our keyboard.

Buddha is a teacher, a human being with great knowledge, great wisdom, who can teach us the right keyboard, who can teach us how to work with it, who has the great compassion to share his knowledge, the great compassion to hand over the keyboard to us. Even though he has all this knowledge, he does not guard the copyright, saying: "Nobody can use it except me." So we can see his great compassion, his great knowledge, which he shares with us, giving us the keyboard, giving us the knowledge, giving us everything.

This path of buddhadharma is totally free from any theistic view and is totally free from any shape or color. It's like pure water; it has no shape, it has no color. Depending on the container that we pour the water into, the water adopts that particular shape. If you want to freeze this pure water, you can do it by putting the water into the freezer, but as soon as you take the ice out of the freezer, it will return to its natural state of pure water having no shape and no color.
http://www.nalandabodhi.org/science_of_mind.html

[Potential]

All of the Dharma is based on Buddha's discovery that suffering is unnecessary: Like a disease, once we really face the fact that suffering exists, we can look more deeply and discover it's cause; and when we discover that the cause is dependent on certain conditions, we can explore the possibility of removing those conditions.

Buddha taught many very different methods for removing the cause of suffering, methods appropriate for the very different types and conditions and aptitudes of suffering beings. For those who had the capacity to understand it, he taught the most powerful method of all, a method based on the practice of compassion. It is known as the Mahayana, or Great Vehicle, because practicing it benefits all beings, without partiality. It is likened to a vast boat that carries all the beings in the universe across the sea of suffering.

Within the Mahayana the Buddha revealed the possibility of very quickly benefiting all beings, including oneself, by entering directly into the awakened state of mind, or Buddhahood, without delay. Again, there are different ways of accomplishing this, but the most powerful, and at the same time the most accessible, is to link ones own mind with the mind of a Buddha.

In visualization practice we imagine ourselves to be a Buddha, in this case the Buddha of Compassion, Chenrezig. By replacing the thought of yourself as you with the thought of yourself as Chenrezig, you gradually reduce and eventually remove the fixation on your personal self, which expands your loving kindness and compassion, toward yourself and toward others, and your intelligence and wisdom becomes enhanced, allowing you to see clearly what someone really needs and to communicate with them clearly and accurately.

In most religious traditions one prays to the deities of the tradition in the hopes of receiving their blessing, which will benefit one in some way. In the vajrayana Buddhist tradition, however, the blessing and the power and the superlative qualities of the enlightened beings are not considered as coming from an outside source, but are believed to be innate, to be aspects of our own true nature. Chenrezig and his love and compassion are within us.

Chenrezig: The Embodiment of Compassion

In doing the visualization practice we connect with the body and voice and mind of the Buddha by the three aspects of the practice. By our posture and certain gestures we connect with the body, by reciting the words of the liturgy and by repeating the mantra we connect with the voice, and by imagining the visual form of the Buddha we connect with the mind.