In basic mediation then, you sit for a period of time. If you're a beginner, 15 minutes; after a while, a half hour then 45 minutes, maybe after a year or two. Then eventually, bring it up to an hour, hopefully twice a day, once [a day] in the beginning. Oh, you might sit longer sometimes. You'll just find yourself doing it. But normally it's not how long you do it -- it's better to just sit for an hour and then improve the quality of that meditation. In other words, once you're sitting for an hour -- and there's no rush to get to that point, it will happen naturally, you'll just find that it is happening, it's what you're doing -- then what you want to do is work on overcoming thought, not increasing the time. As I said, you begin by focusing on something external, a candle flame, a yantra, something like that, with your eyes open. You should spend at least half your time in a meditation session doing that and then closing the eyes for the second half and focusing on either the third eye, the heart chakra or the navel center. It's a good idea to alternate them. You can alternate one, two or three in an individual meditation session, or I think it's probably better, each time you meditate, to focus on a different one to gain power, balance and knowledge. That's basic and intermediate meditation. Naturally, meditation is more than just sitting and focusing. It's also letting go. When you meditate, you focus to clear the mind and to bring the willpower together. But then, after you've been meditating for a while, as you're sitting in an individual session, perhaps for the first third or half, you focus on something with the eyes open. Then you close the eyes and focus on a chakra, and then toward the end of this session let go. Don't focus at all; just melt into eternity. You've raised enough energy and quieted your mind sufficiently so that you can just become eternity. Try to approach that still point. You don't really try, you just let go and see what happens. But our life interferes, doesn't it? Our mind. Our thoughts. In other words, meditating is not just a practice of asserting will and learning to develop control of the mind, it's also developing control of one's life and gaining wisdom. Now we move into advanced practice. Your mind is turbulent because you're filled with desires, frustrations. You want too many things. You're afraid of too many things. It's necessary to overcome both attraction and repulsion to still the mind. There is lots of mental conditioning, programming that's been put in there during this life by your parents, teachers, the society. You've been told what is and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. This has to all be pushed aside. Then, there are the samskaras, the tendencies from your other lifetimes, ways of seeing, habits that are so strong that they affect you now. These have to be washed away also. They're the operative situations in your life that are created by karma. What you've done causes things to happen. Your situation in life now has been caused by -- is predicated upon -- your previous actions. If you made a lot of money last year and you didn't spend it, you have it this year. If you didn't work, you may not have much money. So the way you set your life up and the way you conduct it, the kinds of thoughts you think, feelings that you allow yourself to have, where you focus on life, brings about a mental state. That's karma. You can gain power and lose power. That's karma, depending upon, of course, how you handle yourself. Then there are unforeseen incidents. You're walking down the street and someone comes up with a gun and demands your wallet. That's not necessarily your karma. Someone else is creating karma -- bad karma for themselves. You can have good karma, you can be a relative innocent, and bad things can happen to you. And if it disturbs your mental equilibrium, of course, you won't meditate well. Meditation is the ability to clear ourselves of all conditioning, be it present life or past; to be able to deal with unexpected situations, both pleasant and unpleasant, and maintain our inner equilibrium; to be able to downplay our desires and our ego which wants attention and wants always to be right and to be noticed. We must control the tendencies within our being that are destructive -- when we want to slam somebody else, hurt them, injure them, push them out of the way. A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred. At the same time, we have to create the balance of being happy. In other words, you can't become so spiritual that you're not having a good time. You don't want to create a plastic image of what it is to be spiritual and try to become it because you won't be capable of it, and that will frustrate you. Or even if you could do it, if it's not really what you're like, then you'll be miserable. You need to be yourself, but constantly upgrade that self. So a lot of self-acceptance is involved in this process. You've got to be able to look at both your dark and your light side, if you will, and not get enamored of or depressed by either. This is the process of mental analysis -- sifting through the selves, sifting through your thoughts, practicing mindfulness, learning to control thought. During the day when you are thinking and you find yourself dwelling on something negative, actually consciously using your willpower to remove your mind from that which is negative -- a jealous thought, an angry thought, a fearful thought -- and moving your mind into the flow of something positive. Learning not to be attached to others, to other people, to certain types of experiences. Allowing the flow of life to guide you wherever it is supposed to and accepting with equanimity, with balance, with poise whatever happens. Not trying to force our will on things. Allowing our will to work from deep within ourselves, almost unconsciously, to bring about necessary changes.

Advanced meditation, in other words, is not just sitting meditating. It's addressing all these aspects of life -- to be aware of the designs of others, the dark side of others that seek to interfere with our evolution and keeping ourselves distant and closed to such beings, recognizing that they're part of the universal process too, but not a part that we need to be open to at this time; spending time alone, particularly in areas of low population density, away from people, where we can feel the stillness, where we don't just pick up psychically everybody's thoughts and desires because if you are just picking up everybody's thoughts and desires, after a while you'll think they're just your own; going walking in the woods or on the beach; taking weekends and going out into the desert or up into the mountains or to the ocean where there aren't too many people; going to the beach, not so much in the summer but in the winter; taking short walks in the park down a happy trail; spending time with people who are also on the pathway to enlightenment and avoiding people who aren't in your free time; being happy to deal with anyone in the world of business or whatever is necessary; not judging others, always being open to them; avoiding the cult mentality, you know, the super-slick, “I'm superior because I meditate, because I'm on the pathway to enlightenment,” the subtle ego nonsense, terrible trap; just being real even, happy, being you, but finding out that “you” is far different than you have ever imagined; going through this process, reaching for it, yearning for it, aching for enlightenment, aching; but at the same time being responsible; working at your job and bringing it to perfection; keeping your house perfectly clean; keeping your bills in order; finding a teacher and studying with them and devoting yourself completely to the study, but in a balanced way, not in a fanatical way; having a wonderful sense of humor, particularly about yourself and your own situation, yet not simply laughing but working to change and improve things, even though, at times, it seems impossible. This is advanced meditation. In other words, advanced meditation is not performed simply when we're sitting down once or twice a day meditating. That's beginning and intermediate meditation. Advanced meditation means, all day long, all night long, keeping our mind in a specific state or series of states of awareness that engender or lead to enlightenment; not being angry when we could be angry; not being hateful when we could be hateful; not being depressed or remorseful; lifting ourselves out of these states with our willpower, willing something else, having dreams and believing in them. They don't have to come true. They are true just as a dream [is true]. Life itself is a dream. In the actual practice of advanced meditation, while you're sitting doing zazen, formally meditating, you won't be doing that much that is outwardly different. You'll be sitting for your hour -- certainly it will be an hour at that point, twice a day. You'll probably start meditating with your eyes open, focusing as a warm-up. Then focus on a chakra, but then you won't spend as much time focusing -- you will just let go and merge. Not just let go to your thoughts and sit there and think or move into sleepy states of awareness, but to move into high-powered states of attention that bring you to that still point. Studying with a teacher. Studying with a teacher doesn't simply mean going to an occasional seminar or lecture or Zen retreat. It means fully applying yourself to what the teacher says, most of which, of course, is not verbal. When you go to see the teacher, you need to be meditating, sitting there in a very precise state of attention. If you're studying with a real Zen master, a real enlightened person, then the teacher will be moving through thousands of states of mind and sometimes beyond mind. While you're with the teacher, whether the teacher is talking, doing zazen or taking you out for a bite to eat afterwards, the teacher is always in a state of higher awareness -- being sensitive to that, not being flaky and devotional, but just being sensitive and developing the respect that is necessary for the teacher, as the teacher respects you. We see in a lot of practice this flaky devotionalism where a person feels the necessity of bowing and scraping all the time and sucking up to the teacher and all that sort of nonsense. It's very phony. It's counterproductive to enlightenment and spiritual development. What's necessary is mutual respect. The teacher respects the student. The student respects the teacher and [develops] a sensitive awareness to what is being taught. Now as a Zen master, of course, I teach all the time. Most of the teaching I do is not verbal. It's in every movement of my body. It's in my dance. It's in the way I lift a glass of water. It's in my voice tone. It's in every aspect of my life. Because it isn't my life any more. It's eternity expressing itself in manifold ways. [Studying with a teacher means] being able to keenly perceive not those outer expressions of enlightenment but the enlightenment itself. Feeling that. Learning from it in a balanced happy way. Again, without over-focus. A lot of people over-focus on Zen masters and teachers as an excuse to avoid their own life, and that way they fail to take responsibility for themselves. They have this feeling that the teacher will take care of them. Or some teachers, of course, have said that. They say, "Just devote yourself to me, and I'll take care of it." This is nonsense. You never devote yourself to a teacher. You devote yourself to the practice. The teacher is there to teach. The way Zen masters teach is not just through talking -- they teach in a variety of ways. They interact with you in powerful and often surprising ways, sometimes shocking ways that cause you to shift awareness. The Zen master can see precisely what it will take to cause your awareness to become free. But the Zen master can't do it. If you've done your homework and you've been meditating and putting your life in order and following the teacher's recommendations, then when you interact with the teacher, you're keyed, you're prepared, and then the slightest motion from the teacher can cause you to spin into hundreds of different states of mind, to radically shift in moments. But that only happens for the prepared individual. So advanced meditation has more to do with the interaction of student and teacher. It's not that necessary in the beginning. A person just comes, meditates, takes a seminar, comes on a regular basis, applies the general teaching to their lives, works on their lives, feels wonderful improvement, practices zazen once or twice a day, sees tremendous improvement in how they feel, and in their energy level, their ability to concentrate, to accomplish things and so on. They just start to become more still. That's the measure of your success -- how still are you, how satisfied are you? How happy are you with nothing? In the advanced practice, in advanced meditation, the relationship between the Zen master and the student becomes very terse. The Zen master will expect things of the student because the student is now in graduate school, and in graduate school you do the amount of work you did in a year of graduate school that you might have done in three or four years as

You should love everyone because God dwells in all beings.

If you spent one-tenth of the time you devoted to distractions like chasing women or making money to spiritual practice, you would be enlightened in a few years.

God is in all men, but all men are not in God; that is why we suffer

The truth is that you cannot attain God if you have even a trace of desire. Subtle is the way of dharma. If you are trying to thread a needle, you will not succeed if the thread has even a slight fiber sticking out.

OUT ON A PEAK!
It was late afternoon in the Himalayas. I was standing on top of a remote mountain peak in northern Nepal. As I watched from my sixteen-thousand-foot vantage point, the sun momentarily ducked behind a gray-and-white cloud mass that hovered directly over the crest of some jagged mountains to the west. As if triggered by the sun’s sudden disappearance, a freezing, icy mountain breeze from the north assaulted the front of my body. Hurriedly, I zipped up my Gore-Tex down ski parka, rapidly pulled its hood up and over the top of my head, tugged on its straps, and secured it, firm and snug, around my freezing face. The cold, stinging wind continued to rise as the sun moved swiftly on its everwestward course. As I watched in awe, the color of the sky began to change from a light Nepalese blue into a soft, pastel rose and lavender tinged with deep purple and white streaks. Standing alone, on an unnamed snow- and ice-covered peak, watching the everlasting montage of colors that filled the skies above me, I wished silently that I could remain in the breathtaking beauty of that time and place forever. But the rapidly rising icy wind, combined with the plummeting temperature, gave me no choice but to snowboard immediately down the mountainside or freeze to death, alone, in the oncoming Himalayan night. My jet-black snowboard lay on the ground several yards ahead of me. I was about to mount my board and begin to snowsurf down the mountain—when suddenly I had a strong feeling that someone was standing directly behind me. I quickly gave a nervous glance over my shoulder, but to my surprise no one was there! I was completely alone, out on a peak, in the late-afternoon snow. Laughing out loud at the absurdity of the idea that someone else might be out on that same remote Himalayan peak, I turned back and looked at my snowboard...and yet, the strange feeling that I was being watched persisted. Just as I was about to mount my snowboard, I heard a strong male voice call out my name from behind me. My stomach knotted. Reflexively, I swiveled around on the heels of my snowboarding boots to see who was there. Much to my dismay, there was no one behind me at all! I was still completely alone at sixteen thousand feet. I immediately assumed that I must be seriously losing it. “Probably the altitude,” I muttered to myself. I quickly mounted my snowboard, hoping to get off the peak before my altitude-generated hallucinations worsened. As I snapped my snowboarding boots into their bindings, I heard the voice for a second time. “The dimensions! The dimensions! What has happened to the dimensions? They are all disappearing!” I heard the voice say, in what I can only describe as an emotionally charged lament. Without bothering to look behind me for a third time, I quickly pushed off on my snowboard and began my run down the snow- and ice-covered mountainside. I felt better when I started to carve in and out of the deep Himalayan powder. I kept my turns tight and completely focused my mind on snowboarding, consciously pushing the sound of that plaintive voice out of my memory until I finished the end of my run on the granular snow at the bottom of the mountain.

After an exhilarating ride down the mountain on my snowboard, I reached the bottom of the slope where—much to my surprise—I found Master Fwap waiting for me. He had a huge grin on his face! I carefully brought my snowboard to a halt a safe distance in front of him and shouted out in amazement, “Master Fwap, what are you doing here?” “Why, I’m waiting for you, of course,” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. I hopped off my snowboard, removed my goggles, and stared at him. I was speechless. “You look well,” he remarked with a soft chuckle. “How have you been getting on with your snowboarding project?” Master Fwap was referring to an assignment he had given me when I had last seen him several weeks ago. At that time, he recommended that I evolve my snowboarding from a consumer sport into a Buddhist practice that he referred to as “mindfulness.” Master Fwap had told me that the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is perfectly suited to snowboarding, because it is a type of meditation that is accomplished while a person is physically active. The most critical part of mindfulness, he had carefully explained to me, is to be consciously aware—while snowboarding—that my snowboard and I were “one.” At the time I wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to meditate at all, let alone while snowboarding down some of the most difficult and treacherous slopes in the world, but Master Fwap had convinced me to try his mindfulness technique by promising that it would radically improve my snowboarding. “Okay, I guess,” I sheepishly replied to his question. “To tell you the truth, Master Fwap, I haven’t really practiced your technique very often. Most of the time when I’m snowboarding, I get so involved in what I am doing that I forget to visualize that I am the board.” “Do not be discouraged. It takes both time and practice to turn an activity like snowboarding into meditation. Be patient. No matter how difficult it may seem at first, keep visualizing that you and your snowboard are one and that you are both made of the same energy.” “But it’s so hard!” I complained. “It’s only as hard as you think it is,” Master Fwap quickly replied. “Master Fwap, that’s easy for you to say. You grew up here in the East. All of your cultural traditions support Buddhist yoga. Where I come from we have cultural traditions like television, Bud Lite, and football.” “You are feeling sorry for yourself and making excuses when none are necessary,” he curtly replied. “Life is hard, harsh, and cruel; it is also incredibly beautiful and worthy of our deepest respect.” “Master Fwap, I don’t understand what you mean by that. I know that life is simultaneously difficult and beautiful, but what does that have to do with what we were just talking about? You always say things like that just to change the subject.” “I am not changing the subject. I am just putting the subject into its proper perspective. We can’t really talk about the practice of meditation, in either a physically active or passive form, unless we see it as an interactive mental and spiritual process that intimately connects us with the rest of the universe.” “But what does that have to do with the beauty and harshness of life? I simply get distracted by the difficulty of snowboarding down some of the slopes, that’s all. I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.” “I’m not driving at anything,” he quickly replied. “You are. I am simply standing at the foot of this beautiful mountain waiting for you to ask me the ‘just right’ question for the precise moment and location that we are in.” He spoke in a melodious tone of voice. It was apparent from both the relaxed expression on his face and the tone of his voice that Master Fwap was not the least bit perplexed by my sudden emotional outburst. “And what question might that be?” I asked. I had learned from my previous experiences with Master Fwap that he had a way of leading me into long and complex metaphysical conversations through which he attempted to teach me Buddhist yoga. To be honest with you, at that exact moment in time and space, I was a young man who was not the least bit interested in learning anything more about Buddhist metaphysics. I was tired, hungry, and cold. I had definitely been weirded-out by my experiences with the strange voice back up on the peak. The only conscious thought in my mind then was to get into the local village a short distance away as soon as possible. I had made arrangements earlier in the day with a Nepalese family who lived in the village to spend the night in their home. I wanted to get there, eat some hot food, and crash. That’s it. But it was clear from Master Fwap’s voice and from the playful gleam in his eyes that I wasn’t going to get off that lightly. My previous experiences with Master Fwap had taught me that he was highly telepathic and had an uncanny ability to read minds. I knew that he was aware of my discomfort. However, as I contemplated Master Fwap’s question, I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to end up in the village with hot food and a soft sleeping bag in the very near future, if at all. “You know all too well which question I am referring to,” he continued, his broad smile gently accentuating the small wrinkles that lined his aged Tibetan face. “Close your eyes, clear your mind, silence your thoughts, and the question will come to you.” Following Master Fwap’s instructions, I closed my eyes and attempted to quiet my thoughts. At first, thoughts buzzed through my mind like a swarm of angry bees, but after a few minutes of focusing on emptiness, my thoughts began to slow. Several more minutes passed, and instead of listening to my thoughts, I began to hear the wind rushing through the snowy mountain passes above us. Then, quite suddenly, without knowing how I was so certain, I knew exactly what the “just right” question was. I opened my eyes and asked, “Whose voice was it that I heard up on top of the peak, Master Fwap?” “I can’t tell you that yet,” Master Fwap replied, as a serious expression suddenly fell over his face. “Before I can determine that, please tell me what the voice said to you.” “It said something about the dimensions being missing. That’s really all that I remember. The voice sounded very sad to me.” Master Fwap looked at me with a vacant expression. I had the strange feeling that he wasn’t totally in his body right then. Waiting for Master Fwap’s answer, I studied his appearance. He was approximately five foot two, very thin, and couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds. From my six-foot-three-inch vantage point, I had a clear view of his neatly shaved, round head. His face, like that of so many Tibetan people, was gently wrinkled from a lifetime of exposure to bright sunlight and the thin air at extremely high altitudes. Even though his skin was marked with many small, fine lines of age, it didn’t seem old and worn. In fact, his skin had a healthy and youthful glow. Master Fwap had told me once that he was seventy-three years old. His eyes were hazel colored, and they seemed to change hue according to his mood. When he smiled— which was frequently— he revealed a perfect set of pearly white teeth. His saffron-colored monk’s robe was ancient. In places, its color was uneven and faded from extended exposure to the sun. He wore small boots and high stockings. His English, while perfect, was slightly accented. While I stood shivering in the oncoming Himalayan night, dressed in America’s warmest and best technology, Master Fwap, dressed in his light cotton robe, seemed oblivious to the freezing wind that was buffeting our bodies. After several more minutes of silence, Master Fwap’s expression sharpened. He then began to speak to me in a quiet, barely audible tone against the din of the rising mountain winds of sunset. “There are many mysteries in the Himalayas,” he slowly began. “There are many astral doorways and parallel dimensions hidden deep within the mountains here. These astral doorways and dimensions lead to thousands of different parallel universes. The spirits of great masters who left their bodies long ago occasionally return to this world to convey an important piece of information to someone here. They step in and out of these astral doorways to do so. Today, when you were up on the mountain, one of these disembodied masters came and spoke to you and gave you an important message—” “You mean I wasn’t simply hallucinating back up there on the peak?” I interrupted. “No, you weren’t.”

DEBORAH One night Rama lectured on the path of jnana yoga, a very difficult and advanced path. In it the seeker attains to liberation by constantly discriminating between the real and the unreal, between the transitory and the eternal. For some reason, and without knowing anything about jnana, I was intrigued by it. It is analagous to the way I feel when I listen to a Spanish language radio station; though I don't speak or understand Spanish, when I listen I have the impression that I understand. After the lecture and meditation on jnana yoga, I felt singularly strange. Often, while meditating with Rama I see colors — gold or purple light. I often see Rama change form or the room move. This time I saw none of that. I only saw things more clearly and with a great, great precision. I was awed but emotionless. It seemed difficult to function, not because I felt overtaxed by functioning but simply because I didn't care. To carry on in this world was like being asked to carry on one's life in a black and white line drawing. It was as though I was looking at everything through a telescopic sight. The angle of vision was the same as usual and objects were the same distance from my 'eyes.' And yet I was looking from very far away. The 'thingness' of things in the phenomenal world was revealed to me. The richness of that world became shallow, and, in a way, dry. I could not apprehend the world from which I was looking. I don't even think that it was a world. I felt alien. More alien than I had ever felt. Actually, it was less that I was alien than that everything and everyone else was alien. I found it a bit amusing.

(Zazen music plays in the background, and Rama speaks to the beat of the music.) Zen Master Rama here. Our topic today is how to be a successful student. So for the next 45 minutes, let's all become students -- students of life, students of death, students of eternity, students of our minds, students of all the beauty and horror that passes before our eyes, students of the eyes, students of that which is real, students of that which is unreal, students in college, in graduate school, professional school, computer school, students of Zen Buddhism, music students, architectural students, law students, medical students, elementary school students, students of life. Yes. (Zazen music ends.) I've been a student really all my life. We all start as students. We come into a world naked, knowing nothing save that we came, and we look around at th

So long as one does not become simple like a child, one does not get divine illumination. Forget all the worldly knowledge that thou hast acquired and become as a child, and then will thou get the divine wisdom.

Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.

God is everywhere but He is most manifest in man. So serve man as God. That is as good as worshipping God.

When an unbaked pot is broken, the potter can use the mud to make a new one; but when a baked one is broken, he cannot do the same any longer. So when a person dies in a state of ignorance, he is born again; but when he becomes well baked in the fire of true knowledge and dies a perfect man, he is not born again.

Unalloyed love of God is the essential thing. All else is unreal

Ratna Sambhava.

One cannot completely get rid of the six passions: lust, anger, greed, and the like. Therefore one should direct them to God. If you must have desire and greed, then you should desire love of God and be greedy to attain Him

Vairochana.

Vajra sattva Mamaki Kshitigarbha Maitreya Lasema Pushpema

Sangyay chanma Akasha garbha Samanta badra Mahlaima Dhupema

Amitabha Gokarmo Chenrazee Jampal Ghirdhima Aloke

Aum

Thank you Lord

Amoga siddhi Dolma Chag na dorje Dibpanamsel Gandhema Nidhema

People who use their mental powers to block the enlightenment of others, who see somebody doing well and they attack them and knock them down -- the teacher has nothing to do with people like this. These people lack control. What can you teach someone who lacks control? They can't control their anger and hostility. The teacher is only interested in persons who have control, who can control these feelings. Everybody feels some jealousy, some anger, some hostility -- at least until you're enlightened. Then there's no one to feel any more. Not that there's nothing to feel. There's everything to feel. There's just no one to feel. So to feel these things is not bad or wrong, don't feel guilty. But to allow them to become dominant expressions of your way of life is definitely off the wall. You can't let it happen. If you do, you're a beginner.

So advanced practice is not simply meditating a couple times a day, but it's living your meditation 24 hours a day, doing more for others, contributing with your love, with your effort, supporting the spread of the dharma. Believing in it, getting excited about it, being excited about the fact that new people are discovering meditation and that it's awakening them, not being selfish and feeling those people will take more of the teacher's attention and you won't get it. That's nonsense. With that attitude, you won't get it, that's for sure. Because the teacher sees that attitude and will have very little to do with you because you're selfish and stuck on yourself and you're not seeing things properly. You're in a very illusory state of mind.

Bleep pride.

Egg

fork yansh.

Nude meditation.

In mysticism we begin to learn about the different types of power and how we can access them. The primary way to develop power is through making your mind quiet, shutting off your internal dialogue. Thoughts drain you. They block your power. As your mind chatters away incessantly during the day and night, you block the source of power. Within you there’s an infinite ocean of power. The sun is always burning within you, but it’s in a state of perpetual eclipse because you are blocking it with your thoughts. In mysticism, you have to learn how to stop thought completely. Once you stop thought, the power and light and energy of eternity will pulse through you. That’s step one