The Ballad of Birth, Sickness Old Age Death & Beyond

This is a recent addition to embodied poetry files, which appeared in a first draft probably in May last year when the pandemic madness held everyone its clutches.  There is nothing special about this piece but I am strangely satisfied with the flow of rhythm in which it composed itself.  

In the light of the Buddha's teaching one cannot but consider the present day frenzy regarding the disease and its alleged cure as a display of utmost delusion & ignorance.

Why not face the truth instead!  And the truth is that everyone dies and sometimes many people die, as in a war, or in a tsunami, or in a pandemic.  Accepting it will help overcome the crisis, managing the crisis by suppressing everything in its name, especially for the gain of greater worldly power will only lead to greater destruction.  Eventually it will destroy the crisis managers.... But as the saying goes, 'Whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad.'

Which only proves the point of what the Buddha taught and is reflected in this trifle of a self-manifested poem.

When Shakyamuni the Buddha magically 

appearing as an ordinary man

walked the Earth of the blessed land of India

beings were born they were happy & suffered

got sick sometimes

always aged & eventually died

thus the great sage taught &

never denied the obvious

but rather made no exception for himself

in his display of passing on

************

when the Roman empire stretched far & wide 

or when the lands of the great T'ang send out

sparks of genius in arts poetry & crafts

beings were born they were happy & suffered

got sick sometimes

always aged & eventually died

Cesar was stabbed & so were many of the mighty

in the Middle Kingdom or beheaded

in the times of the great plague

or much later when Britannia deluded herself & everyone

with dreaming the dream of ruling the seas

beings were born they were happy & suffered

got sick sometimes

always aged & eventually died

so it had to happen that even Victoria the almost almighty

breathed her last at last

today that money power pervades everywhere

enslaving everyone through make-believe & trickery

beings are born even now

are rarely happy & more often suffering 

get sick through depression & yes

beings still age & beings eventually die

before & after a shyster cure worse than the disease

will have been concocted to never cure anything but charging a hefty price

this is the way in which mind

under the dominion of karma 

has set things up

for impermanence 

to rule supreme

the more the minions of delusion

try to deny & suppress the fact

the tighter it keeps them in its clutches & 

will spit them out

when their time is up

likewise for the self-appointed masters of the universe

whom nobody will even remember next time around

nothing will change the fact that will forever remain

beings are born

they are happy & suffer

get sick sometimes or more often

they always age & eventually die

or so the display keeps on playing until

these beings wake up & start questioning

this entire mind made set up

thus they venture into embodying

what is pure & real magic

breathing in breathing out

space there & everywhere

space even in-between

A Week with Lama Dawa in Sarnath, in December 2016

A deep sadness veiled my heart during the week I spent with Lama Dawa & Khandro Kalsang in Sarnath and Varanasi in early December 2016.  The sadness had set in long before, actually.  It permeated throughout and to the bone, due to a sense of futility. I had lost hope that this precious jewel of a man would live in his present body much longer. To the discerning eye, the roll of the dice of karma in conjunction with the Lama's obedience to the dakinis' calling had long ago decided that much.  

 

I am sure that Lama would not at all have seen it in this way or phrased it in such a gloomy manner.  His vision was of a different quality and order, altogether.  He never just noticed one plane of existence. Yes, it is true, I hardly ever saw him denying ordinary feelings and emotions rippling through him in the moment of their simultaneous arising and vanishing.  To all appearance he was a simple man not given to flights of fancy, least of all the ostentatiousness of self-denial.  When he was happy or hurt, he often openly talked about it in private. Yet, about the perception of a true and genuine dzogchen yogi, we can only project wrongly or seek recourse in what the texts have to say regarding the view resultant from perpetually abiding in the central channel.  

 

Of course, such lofty station doesn't apply to me.  To me in Sarnath at the time, every of our get togethers every day and every hour spent in Lama’s company felt like an extended and, from my side, dreaded farewell.  The mood was amplified by the fact that the days passed under the thick north Indian plains' winter fog, made even heavier and longer lasting by industrial and/or vehicle exhaust pollution.  The fog hardly ever lifted—and when it did then only partially to reveal a hazy and never warming sun, which even when appearing to shine remained pale and powerless. 

 

And there was one more downer which was severely dampening the overall mood: the entire population of north India seemed to sleep-walk around in a state of half-stupefied disorientation if not outright despair as the government had recently opted for a brutal demonetization (eventually proven to be meaningless as black money did not disappear; it only changed hands). The old 500- and 1000-Rupee notes had been declared illegal in early November and the new notes were almost impossible to get. If you wanted cash from a machine or from the bank teller you had to wait in line for a few hours only to discover in the last minute that your wait had been in vain.  One of the purposes of my visit therefore was to bring much needed funds in the new currency to Lama & Kalsang as these new notes were more easily available in Goa than in Varanasi.  Such was the situation upon my arrival and prevailing throughout my stay.

 

Nothing extraordinary happened in the course of my visit.  Lama only gave the one formal teaching that I had requested.

that I had requested.  

I was never one to want ever more formal teachings.  Right from the start of our relationship, I had never set my mind on ‘completing a specific curriculum’, although it often occurred to me that Lama would have preferred me to be more ambitious, or rather: more dedicated in this respect.  But my mind simply is not geared in this manner. For me, teachings unfold naturally, they happen in every moment.  Life provides so much!  For me life being the ‘ultimate teacher’ is not a new-age platitude.  Of course, scriptures and formal dharma instructions give life experience the structure it needs so that we don’t get lost in the unpredictable vagaries of our mindstreams.   But life itself donates the juice; life IS the juice.  Simply being with Lama was my kind of dzogchen instruction that I could thrive on, grow on: it had always had been like this right from the start.

 

What did we do together in Sarnath, Lama Kalsang and I?  Nothing really noteworthy for sure!  And although it may not have been generally noteworthy, it seemed nevertheless deeply meaningful to us.  None of the simple events of the day seemed like negligible or a waste of time.  

 

Lama insisted that we share every meal together. He totally rejected my offer to give them privacy.  Thus we either ate at a restaurant together or shared what Kalsang had been preparing (mostly chicken thukpa or rice) on one of these old-fashioned one-burner kerosene stoves in their rented room.  The stove reminded me of my visits to the East in the 1970s.   I had then cooked quite a few meals on one of these, especially in Nepal.  One time we paid an extended lunch visit to Lopon Orgyan Tenzin (enjoying a meal of the obligatory buff momos).  Lopon is an old school mate and life-long friend of Rinpoche’s.  

 

We circumambulated Damekh stupa together more than once, and the other stupa the name of which I forgot. We went on a boat ride on the Ganga, Lama explaining the meaning and history of some of the ghats. We took a stroll around his Alma Mater, the old Sanskrit University located in the center of town and built in colonial times (but we found the building was under total renovation).  We made offerings at different sacred places, did ganachakras together, without instruments and fanfare.  Lama had declined Lopon’s invitation to join him and his students for some bigger group tsoks. Lama Dawa obviously wanted these pujas that we shared to be simple and private.

 

On the last day, Lama bought five soap stone Shakyamuni statues and asked me to keep one
and distribute the remaining four among some of his students in India whom he individually designated.  These were people who truly felt and had shown devotion for him.  They also had taken teachings and empowerments—and subsequently had progressed in their preliminary practices or even done some of the 3-Root retreats in my house in Goa. When he handed the statues over to me I could sense how much it meant to him to give these gifts precious beyond compare, albeit not for their material value.  

The next morning and final I went to the airport at 7am for a flight scheduled for 10am and had to wait until 3pm for the fog delayed departure.  I used the time to do mantras and reminisce about mirages, phantoms and dream images.

 

The dharma kaya aspect of the guru may be priceless and all pervading.  But it cannot come to life and truly radiate throughout our own being without the deep love and cherishing that keeps welling up from deep inside us for the guru’s precious human body.  Ultimately there seems to be no dharma kaya possible without a nirmana kaya calling it forth.  

 

But then, who is calling whom and what is emanating what!

 

Letter to a Dharma Friend

This is an actual letter to a dharma friend.  The name, of course, has been changed, and a few personal references were edited out. Over the years, I have written quite a few such letters, usually addressing a unique situation from its own unique point of view.  Sometimes, these words have helped people, actually most of the times.  

 

Unfortunately, we all are so forgetful these days.  Words of advice have an impact for a short while, and then the problem resurfaces in a slightly modified manner and we blend out that we have already dealt with it, and actually solved it.  Then another letter is due, and another.

 

Redundancy is not always useless. We just have to admit that we are slow learners, and try again.  We have to be kind and we have to care.

 

Sharing the teachings means to care. Communication between dharma friends shows that we care for self and others.

 

 

Dear Solani,

 

Thanks for writing. 

 

Recognizing confusion as confusions marks already the beginning of the end of it.  Most everybody is so confused that they don't even recognize that they are--confused indeed.

 

The path we follow is not a path of any god.  The gods are only as real or as unreal as we are, or as our thoughts and projections are. 

 

Padmasambhava, if anything is the embodiment of the wisdom and power inherent in mind—including your own mind—acting as a mirror for your own recognition; not some funny looking guy who lived in ancient India and Tibet many centuries ago.  His form remains still with us and its sole purpose is to help.  That’s why we supplicate that it may remain with us.  But outward and superficial worship of the form is not the aim of what you have been doing for a few months now.

 

The purpose of your practice is something else. Freedom from suffering is the purpose!

 

The end of being unconsciously (and also consciously) enmeshed in suffering is the only valid aim for the path.  In a further step, our purpose encompasses the wish that all beings may be free of suffering.  If we want to be free and want others to be free of suffering, we have to understand what suffering is.

 

What creates suffering?  

 

Not knowing, who you are is the root cause.  We can make up (and we in fact do so) all kinds of identities and create endless self-concepts, but they remain what they are: finite and highly short-lived concepts: Like the Sonali self-concept before March 2020.  Then came the lockdown and a new identity and self-concept was born.  There was the successful Sonali even during lockdown, and now there is the Sonali without income.  There will countless more Sonali concepts (for example Sonali the (finally) fully devoted wife, Sonali the mother-to-be and so forth...) and they will all end--and they all produce their own kind of discomfort or acute suffering. 

 

And of course, ten days ago we had the concept of the 'Vajra-Guru-Mantra-Practicing-Vajra-Mahashri' and now we have the 'Doubting-It-All-Helpless-Sonali'.  Self-concepts cannot define us. 

 

Furthermore, isn't it funny, how flaky these concepts are, and how easily derailed by the smallest of incidences!  

 

The only valid reason to practice dharma is the burning desire to see through the limitations of our habitual misunderstanding and wrongly reacting to whatever happens inside of us and around us (namely through our ingrained ways that create more and more unpleasantness for self and others) and instead enact freedom from suffering.  

 

Enacting freedom from suffering is our path and the path that we are trying to share through different means.

 

Unfortunately, enacting this freedom mostly starts out with challenges and sometimes a great deal of discomfort.  Such as the discomfort you are going through right now.  Nobody can relieve you of it. 

 

Okay, your husband is saying that your following this path may separate you from him. This is his concept and his fear.  Indeed, your practicing for freedom may create a rift. 

 

I am sure, in counteracting the perceived danger he is also making suggestions and promises, how great your life will become if you stop following your pat, how happy you are going to be, and so forth. And he even may mean what he is saying or promising.  He could really be a good and sincere person; many are at heart.  You may also wish to agree, thinking, 'yeah this dharma and Guru Rinpoche stuff is not for me... I should stick to what everybody sticks to.'

 

If such is the case: Great! Please, do so.  The choice is always yours.

 

The only problem is that in the end something deep inside you will revolt against 'sticking to what everybody is sticking to'.  

 

Once a certain kind of awareness has been tasted (as you have tasted it), it will always resurface, but then outer circumstances for support may have vanished when it does.  Thus: more frustration and suffering down the line.

 

As the saying goes, 'Life's a bitch and in the end you die!'

 

If you think that I can or should tell you what to do or how to chooses, you'd entertain a wrong notion about my role.  I am not responsible for your life.  You are.

 

However, one question needs to be asked: Why make someone else's insecurity your own.  If you are secure about your purpose and your commitment, how could it be compromised by someone else's insecurity?

 

For the practitioners on the path, according to the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa, “The bad news is: You’re pushed to jump and the parachute doesn't open.  The good news: there is no ground!”

 

Cheerio & much love

 

 

Retreat Master & Retreatant

Acting as retreat master ideally will make one as humble as doing retreat: the whole process of 'doing' and/or 'guiding' is only possible when sustained by the waves of support and blessings issued forth by the gurus, lineage masters as well as the collective of past and present practitioners who have practiced in and as the same mandala before.  Without the shower of their blessings, nothing works.  The retreat won't have results, or only negative results--which unfortunately sometimes happens, when people come out of their retreat more arrogant and ego-fixated than they had been before.  We have seen such incidences.  But they are not necessarily 'bad'.  They only mean to try again, rather than giving up and giving in.  

Some may think that 'they are doing retreat' or 'leading a retreat'.  There is nothing wrong with this concept as a manner of speaking but such ideas may lead to misunderstanding the whole situation. In actual fact, a good retreat is doing us (not 'we' it), impacting on our resistance to inborn Buddha Nature, bringing into play innate, ever-present and all-pervasive rigpa.  It is there always, but we need to be open to acknowledge and feel the presence.  

Once the formal retreat boundary is set up and the space has been dedicated to the mandala, a very particular energy is allowed to manifest.  Which is why it is important that a retreat has clearly defined boundaries, including established spacial boundaries.  Our own contribution to help the process along is to practice according to instructions and maintaining discipline, which sometimes can be relaxed and sometimes needs to be tight. 

Once the retreat boundaries are set, and the protectors have been called upon, the retreatant as well the retreat master have two options: they can be open to this energy field, or at least partially open, maintaining it through their efforts based on devotion--or they can close themselves, by feeding their efforts back into the illusory 'I'-thought, which lacks devotion.  In the latter case, the retreat will produce no fruit, or worse, a (hopefully only temporary) poisonous fruit.

When Vajratara arrived in Goa for her most recent retreat, we therefore first asked for proper divinations to find out about potential obstacles and for the remedies to help remove them as best we could, before we even started. Then the room and the shrine were set according to our root guru's instructions.  The opening puja revealed that there was a chance for a good retreat; no negative signs occurred.

Which doesn't mean, it was all smooth sailing.  Very few retreats are.  Although emotional roller-coasters didn't appear or if they did, didn't throw the retreatant of balance, challenges appeared in the form of physical discomfort--sometimes severe.  Remembering the much greater tormenting some practitioners in the past had to undergo, Vajratara did not give up but persevered despite the difficulties.  And yes, she sometimes was in bad pain.  Of course, it always helps to dispel doubt by talking openly and addressing everything, not necessarily on a daily basis, but at least every once in a while when the burden becomes too big.  After all we live in the age of degeneration and are not as sturdy and unperturbed as the seasoned practitioners of the past might have been.

Retreats like Vajratara's have an effect on me, too--actually on the whole house.  Nobody at home is removed or totally isolated from what is happening to the retreatant.  We are in this together--albeit illusory, but still.  When there is a retreat going on, the atmosphere in my home changes, is permeated in a way by everything that is going on in the retreat room.  Anyway, normal social life like dinner guests and so forth, comes to a halt.  

It's not that people come to my house for retreat, stay for a few weeks and then leave the same way they came--me staying throughout the goings-on as 'I' always have been.  In the light of the Buddha's teachings such thoughts are anyway ludicrous.  

Fortunately, Vajratara's retreat ended with an excellent dream omen that appeared two days before the closure and with good signs in some of the substances on the shrine when we did our final puja together, which made everyone happy.  The real test revealing the quality of a retreat anyway is in so-called everyday life.  In this case, for Vajratara and her family, in this arena the signs also appear to be alright.  

It is not easy to represent the lineage as the retreat master, but it is certainly rewarding.  There is no place for delusions of grandeur in this.  They would certainly kill everything as they always do in all respects--wherever someone falls for them as 'real' rather than 'display within the display'.

Retreats like Vajratara's this year have happened in my house since 2012, sometime two sometimes three annually.   

More from the 'Embodied Poetry Files

Poetry is the only language that I can speak when something meaningful needs to be expressed, reaching beyond the flickering truisms of the moment that tend to turn into ‘un-truisms’ in the next—and definitely into untruth when the context changes, or a different individual is addressed.  Poetry is more flexible and therefore: more durable; also more adaptable than truisms, which as a rule are always turning trite.

Poetry resembles the pointing out instructions by a genuine vajrayana guru manifesting in the form of symbols and symbolic action.  We can remember and come back to them, and whenever we do with an open heart and mind, they reveal some new aspect of what is waiting for us to discover and embody.

The short poem below was written recently.  Those who know me also know who inspired it.  In a way it is a very personal expression, so deeply personal that it reveals transpersonal shades of truth.  Which is why it is shared here.

She Is Sleeping

Sleep enters her eyes

self-luminous shine
in this moonless night

her face relaxes
into a smile

still here yet gone
gone nowhere but

to what is being given

giving itself

to continue

unbroken by birth &

forever beyond

what they construe

as series of beginnings

& endings

I can hear the rain falling

& the jungle thicken

greener than green

as she keeps breathing

& she smiles

in her sleep so deep

From the 'Embodied Poetry' Files

One more piece from the 'embodied poetry' files that have accumulated over the years in diaries and on different hard drives.  There must be over hundred of them.     

Most of them were written by hand first.  So far it has eluded me how to let poetry emerge by directly typing it into the computer.  The way I write, poems are never complete in the first setting.  Like quality cognac  they need to mature--some even over years--before they taste and feel exactly the way they need to according their inherent life-force, and thus can help embodying the view the words are there to express.

I started writing poetry many years ago.  My first collection was complete by 1971 (written in German, my first language) and the manuscript was thrown from a bridge into the river Rhine the same year, a few days before I went on the 'hippie trail' to Nepal  Can't say why I did that, just discarding five years of working on them and polishing.  As far as I can remember, they weren't even so bad.  The few friends who had read them had commented positively and were encouraging me to share with a wider audience.  Nevertheless, in the river they went.

Two more collections in German shared a similar fate.  In the late 1980s I started writing in English as well.  Much of it went into the trash bin, but not all of it.  Some pieces have survived and went through many versions.  I also keep writing on and off, till today.  

Let's wait and see what will happen with the present collection.  Enough said; right now, I feel like sharing this on.  It so appears it had some kind of effect on someone whom I cherish, when I shared it with her in private.

FREEDOM SINGING TO ITSELF

Freedom is razor-sharp

the curved blade that cuts

the head off my neck

& lets the heart blood spout

fountain like

freedom is tender

            with my arms around you

as if they were feathers

            for the wool before my eyes

I cannot see one separate thing

freedom is boring

            going to the toilet

to shit & piss

            every morning looking in the mirror

probing for pimples on the nose

freedom is fire

            I hammer the blazing steel of the thoughts

that shackle everything

            only to have the acid of fear corrode

all that I ever grabbed & held

           

freedom is delicate

the dewdrop that falls
from the leaf above

            makes the web tremble

& the spider rope down further

             

 freedom is despair

            no food on the table

with all the good people in chains

            while our leaders spit roast our livers

to assuage their own fear of lack

freedom is desire

never getting

enough of it

when everything

is always there

freedom is sentimental

            my tears soak your pillow salty

of my being so very special

            as my is head remains stuck between your breasts

I cannot explore the great blue yonder

freedom is straight & narrow

            deadlines 

timelines

fault lines –

            to bring about many a cleansing disaster

freedom is simply free

            no quality but its own

& there is stillness

            leaves burgeoning in spring

tumble to rot in November

essentially

even stupor is freedom

so is clinging

& so is hate

knowing thus definitely freedom is

naturally self-affirming

projecting more of gossamer

subtly tremulous presence

I can drink my tea

I can sip my wine

every once in a while

I can look up in the sky

the thought doesn’t even arise

that anyone will ever not partake

in this heart of freedom

forever beating

the only question remains

does appreciation really require

some self mirroring voice

to sell freedom as more special than what is

c) choyin dorje/matthias dehne 2020

A Saga Dawa Poem of Understated Praise

Just Sitting

Dusk turns blue black

night is about to fall

Siddhartha is sitting

the tree stands behind

the full moon rises

out of nowhere a storm brews

the leaves rustle

the branches shake

the earth trembles

the Buddha still sits

morning yet to come

this much the birds announce

parrots of course

they are a noisy bunch

the Buddha keeps sitting

the tree now rests

the sun turns white & hot early

near the river almost running dry

puddles doze off

dull mirrors

they reveal nothing

only continue to evaporate

what happened in the night

anything the matter