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Lawren Leo

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“We even, at the worst, reach the state for which Buddhism, in the East presents most ably the case: as in the West, does James Thomson (B.V.) in The City of Dreadful Night ; we come to wish for—or, more truly to think that we wish for "blest Nirvana's sinless stainless Peace" (or some such twaddle—thank God I can't recall Arnold's mawkish and unmanly phrase!) and B.V.'s "Dateless oblivion and divine repose." I insist on the "think that you wish," because, if the real You did really wish the real That, you could never have come to exist at all! ("But I don't exist."—"I know—let's get on!") Note, please, how sophistically unconvincing are the Buddhist theories of how we ever got into this mess. First cause: Ignorance. Way out, then, knowledge. O.K., that implies a knower, a thing known—and so on and so forth, through all the Three Waste Paper Baskets of the Law; analysed, it turns out to be nonsense all dolled up to look like thinking. And there is no genuine explanation of the origin of the Will to be. How different, how simple, how self-evident, is the doctrine of The Book of the Law !”

“I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.”

“Every time you use the Dragonflame philosophy, you refine your subtle body and stengthen your will by going through the process of separating the dross from the subtle and putting it back together again. Every time you follow this magical philosophy, you are doing what is know as the Great Work. In other words, every time you work magic using Dragonflame, you get closer to finding the Philosopher's Stone.”

“It is slow, gradual pressure that is the formula for both genius and earthquakes. Life tells us our secrets in these cracks, the way events conspire with each other in hidden grottos. This movement is at times very subtle, over a long time, like plate tectonics. If you don't have the right eyes, you might miss these patterns altogether. Although our lives do not occur in geological scales of time, it is still the gradual pressure and our minute reactions, our habits, that actually speak of our true natures. Our true will and intent is contained in potential within each of us, though in many it is buried very, very deep.”

“In terms of action, Dzogchen is not limited by any rules; therefore, no action is forbidden as such. Rather, Dzogchen practice aims at bringing immediate Awareness into every action, and the manifestation of that Intrinsic Awareness is one's true will. Awareness and intention are not at war with each other but are integrated. In the state of contemplation, the Bodhicitta compassion is natural and spontaneous; it is not contrived or created by mind. But this is true only when we are in the state of contemplation. The state of Rigpa is beyond karma and its consequences, beyond good and evil, but our ordinary dualistic consciousness is most definitely not. Being primordially pure, Rigpa is beyond selfish motivations, and all its actions are spontaneously self-perfected. All this is true of contemplation, but if we merely claim to be a Siddha, announcing proudly, 'I am in a state of Rigpa!' and do as we like, following every impulse and indulging all transient desires, we merely delude ourselves and will suffer the karmic consequences. To think we are in the state is not the same as actually being in the state. The only rule in Dzogchen is to be aware. Dzogchen teaches us to take responsibility for our actions, and this is what awareness means. We are always aware of what we do and also of the consequences that each action entails. Integration with movement is not at all the same as attachment, for the latter represents a lack of awareness.”