Yangthang Rinpoche
Once you have begun your dharma practice you should definitely experience your
ignorance decreasing, your aggression decreasing, your pride decreasing, your
attachment and desire decreasing, your jealousy and competitiveness decreasing,
and your mind becoming more peaceful and tame.
These are signs of accomplishment. When you hear the dharma teachings, when you
meditate, when you practice, the root of all dharma is to tame the mind. The
signs of accomplishment that you think are important, like having visions of
deities or attaining some kind of power, are actually not the true signs —they
are just attributes.
The real sign is the changing of your mind, the subsiding of the five
conflicting emotions, the lessening of your attachment to samsara, the
decreasing of your self-centered attitude and less desire to be famous or gain
profit or impress others.
The true sign is that your constant attraction to the short-lived pleasures of
this world decreases. If this is your experience, then you are really
experiencing the signs of true dharma accomplishment.
Being able to fly in space or leave your footprint in stone are signs of some
siddhi, some power, but they are not signs of the ultimate result, which is
nothing other than the pacification of delusion and conflicting emotions.
You need to check and see if your path of practice is producing these results
or not. You should always remember that it is only this one time that you have
a precious human rebirth, only now, and that is certain.
This life that you have right now, this precious human rebirth with its
opportunities, is the result of lifetimes of accumulating merit and purifying
negative karmic obscurations.
All the efforts that you made in past lifetimes, working very hard to
accumulate merit and purify obscurations, have produced this precious result
that you are now experiencing.
But if you don't do anything with it now that you have it, then all that effort
will be wasted because your good merit and fortune will be exhausted very
quickly in this lifetime, and once it is exhausted there is only one place to
go back to — the lower realms of existence.
So you should never waste your precious human rebirth.
Understand that what you have accomplished in the past you should continue to
accomplish in the present. Everything that you have done in the past you need
to continue doing, even more so now, because now is the opportunity to be
liberated.
You must abandon all negativities and work hard to accumulate only that which
is good and positive so that you never have to take rebirth in the lower realms
again.
If you really aspire to have compassion and love for others, first of all you
should have it for yourself. If you can't even love yourself enough to use your
precious life in a meaningful way, then that is a very great shame and a very
great waste.
My only wish is that you will truly practice dharma. Whether you are practicing
tsa-lung-tigle, or dzogchen meditation, or OM MANI PEME HUNG Avalokiteshvara
practice, practice it well, and do your best to avoid accumulating negative
karma.
You should never harm any being for any reason and you should abandon negative
conduct. You should definitely abandon smoking cigarettes — it is a very
negative thing and is harmful to your precious human body. You should eliminate
all of these kinds of things that are of no use to you and only cause you harm.
There is no point in doing them.
In conclusion, I would just like to say that I, myself, have no experience in
meditation. I am not a meditator but I have heard many teachings from many
great lamas on the view, meditation, and conduct.
All that I have taught you is just talk, a brief explanation based on no
experience. Don't consider me a dzogchen lama or even a teacher. I am just
someone who has been talking about it. If you find it useful, then practice it,
and if you don't, then forget it.
I will always consider each and every one of you my special dharma friend. I
cannot say that I consider you my students because I don't have the qualities
of a lama but, as a dharma friend, wherever I go, if l ever meet any of you, I
will feel nothing but happiness to meet you again.
