Khenpo Sodargye:
We must keep praying to Guru Rinpoche. As long as we pray, it is easy to remove obstacles of body, speech and mind. Also, in terms of attaining realizations, especially in Dzogchen, praying to Guru Rinpoche is a very, very swift method. Almost all the past great masters who attained realization in Vajrayana received their realizations through the practice of Guru Rinpoche.
(Note: Khenpo Sodargye is probably referring to masters in the Nyingma tradition.)
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Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche
If you pray to Guru Rinpoche, the first thing to happen is that you will experience special signs. If you practice diligently and with heartfelt devotion, not just merely mouthing the words, after one week you will have signs in your meditative experience. There’s no doubt about this. The kind of experiences we are talking about here are feelings of bliss, an increase in faith and devotion, greater clarity and wisdom, and so on. Based on those experiences, whenever you think of Guru Rinpoche your hair will stand on end and tears will well up in your eyes. After some time, Guru Rinpoche will appear in front of you. If you pray to Guru Rinpoche and experience such signs, it shows that your path is heading in the right direction and that you are receiving the lama’s blessings.
These are the kind of signs of Guru Rinpoche’s blessing that we can experience during the day. During the night, we will dream of Guru Rinpoche, of finding representations of the enlightened body, speech and mind, and so on. Beyond that, what might also happen is that we meet Guru Rinpoche face-to-face, in person, and receive instructions and prophecies from him.
These are the signs of practice that can arise. They happen simply because our obscurations are being removed: we will start to see Guru Rinpoche in front of us, even though he has been present with us all the time.
Once we meet Guru Rinpoche, we will experience the samadhis of bliss, clarity and absence of thoughts within our minds, our body will experience the blissful warmth of tummo, we will utter words of truth and be able to overpower and bring under control everything that we perceive. It has happened for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of practitioners. You only ever hear people talk about the blessings they received from Guru Rinpoche and how powerful he is; you hardly ever hear someone say that praying to him didn’t work for them.
It makes absolutely no difference where you come from, what your ethnic origin is, because the buddha nature pervades all sentient beings. All that you need to do is cultivate faith. If you have faith, you will have pure perception. If you have both faith and pure perception, devotion will arise. To put it very simply, in layperson’s language, you need to love Guru Rinpoche. We don’t like or love someone simply for no reason. The more you learn about Guru Rinpoche, just how extraordinary a master he is, the more you connect with him, and the more your feeling of closeness and love for him will grow. In dharma language, we call that having greater faith. It is a fact that throughout history, anyone who had faith in Guru Rinpoche received his blessing. There are countless practitioners who bear testimony to this.
There are some people who say we shouldn’t talk like this because we sound just like the Christians. But this is different. You can check this for yourself. Try it. In his teachings, Guru Rinpoche says that if we pray to him for seven days, he will, without fail, hold us in his compassion and take care of us. We should do that for seven days. It’s not difficult, anyone can manage that. For seven days, just pray to Guru Rinpoche and see what happens. You cannot fool yourself—you know if something is true or not. Try it and see for yourself what the result is.
That’s the point of a path—it starts at the beginning, progresses through different stages, and then arrives at the end. We have to start somewhere, to do something. If we don’t do anything, if we just sleep, listen to a few teachings, and don’t do any practice at all, then for sure nothing will happen.
