Welcome back everybody to the Denver Zone Chen podcast.
I'm here once again with Joseph Wagner, and today we're going to
discuss a topic that's been requested by one of our viewers
and that is pure vision. What is it?
How do you cultivate it? How is it actually look as a
practice? And I think this is a really
important question because it isn't always clear, you know,
like the way that this is presented, especially to the
public, is a little bit hard to access.
And some of that's intentional because some of this isn't
really public teachings, right, That some of this is secret.
And so we won't be able to go into everything, but I think
we'll be able to generally introduce the topic and talk
about how you might get started with this.
So, Joe, welcome. And maybe you can give us a few
of your opening thoughts. Hello, Damien.
Hello everyone. Isn't this awesome where I got a
lot of podcasts out? I just saw the number.
It was pretty high. So thank you to all of you for
being part of this. And for if you weren't
interested, then we wouldn't be doing it.
And then and it gives me a chance to think about these
things and Damien and I to connect about them.
It's really good. So thank you.
I'm glad we're talking about this topic because I just got
back from a trip to India, which is a place where if you don't
have pure vision, then you're going to die immediately.
It's so intense and difficult. But I did learn a few
interesting things about pure vision, received a few teachings
and and one of them was specifically about this topic.
But before we go into the all that stuff, I thought might as
well place it within the general context of Buddhism.
In Buddhism, the home, there are three sort of aspects of
vehicles, you know, really just two.
But we break the Mahayana into Mahayana and Vajriana.
Of course, the Terravada position or the general outlook,
the hallmark is renunciation, recognizing the suffering comes
from grasping. And so we're going to cut it off
the root by turning away from grasping and turning away from
desirable objects in general. And this was the path of the
Buddha. It's the path of all
practitioners on some level, in even in the most I'm I'm
practicing a guru yoga sadhana from the long genetic cycle.
And right in there it says, may I turn my back on samsara?
May I turn away from worldly concerns?
This is the renunciation aspect. It's the foundation of all
Buddhism, but it's the hallmark of the Theravaden School in
Mayana. That hallmark changes to
compassion, to practicing the paramedis for the goodness of
all beings, for the well-being of everyone, recognizing we're
all kind of like balloons tied together at the bottom.
Individually, we look individual and the balloon aspect, but when
you follow the string down, we're connected to everyone.
Therefore, if Damien gets enlightened, I go up a little
bit, and if somebody else who I'm connected to is like
spiraling out of control down, I'm affected.
This is obvious, right? If you have a friend who say a
friend is in a deep depression or is an alcoholic or something
really tough, you're also affected by that.
It's not like you're a totally separate being, right?
So this recognition leads to the hallmark of the Mahayana being
compassion. And then if we take vajayana as
a separate vehicle in the sense that it's like quite different
from standard Mahayana, the hallmark of the vajayana is pure
perception. It is both the method by which
we transform the world and our experience in the world and also
the goal in, in that once the world is completely transformed
into purity, then we've already attained enlightenment.
So these are the this is the way that I understand the the three
vehicles and the relationship of pure perception to Buddhism in
general. Yeah.
And seeing it in that framework, what I think the most important
thing to recognize is that the scaffolding is getting lighter
and more subtle the more you go up these paths, right?
So kind of like living on a cushion and only eating a very
small amount. And this is a very coarse way of
approaching the path, right? Like it's mostly having to do
with your body and your physical experience.
And then in the Mahayana, it's a little more emotional,
relational. You're getting into that kind of
like service of others and compassion and the four
measurables being your emphasis. And then as again, the vajriana,
it's even more subtle because it's energetic and working
directly with that push and pull of I want it and I don't want it
at a really subtle level. I think the big mistake people
think is that that visualization is like imagination in the
service of belief that they're just like doing this to try to
change their mind, right? But really it's, it's about
correcting our perception. It's actually closer to how
things are, not a new additional delusion that we put in on top
of things to try and fix the you know, I think that's what people
get tripped up on. And so maybe you could talk a
little bit about that, like how how this is not an additional
layer you're pouring onto your experience.
Yeah, that's well said. You, you covered all the
important points. Stilco Urge and my llama, my
root llama used to say that same thing used to say when we're
doing visualization, we're not overlaying something we wish
were true on the world. We're actually seeing things
more like they actually are. And this is one of the sort of
secrets of pure perception. And also what makes it have so
much resonance for us is if it were just an overlay, kind of
like the belief that like the secret that if you're familiar
with that old sort of style of mental control and it can work a
little bit. You're sort of saying like,
everything's good, everything's good.
Like even if think it's, it's a little out of line with reality
to some degree. Interestingly, the Bajriana pure
perception, which at its most, I was going to say extreme, but
we'll call it supreme form, sees all beings as deities, is
actually closer to how things that really are than than
believing everything is good. I I think pure perception has to
do a little bit with the fact of the two truths, which is
something we could talk about in another podcast because it's a
big topic. But the, the relative truth of
ordinary reality, which we share.
You know, if you and I both watch a basketball game, which
would be bizarre for both of us, let's just say it happened and
we were both rooting for the same team, we would have the
similar experience of that. If we both go to a restaurant,
Vietnamese vegan restaurant, which I intend to go to with you
when I come out there next, we both could have a similar
experience. This is this is like relative
reality, right? The day is sunny or the day is
snowy. We both perceive that.
OK, great. What we overlay on that is,
geez, I was supposed to go on a bike ride today, now it's
snowing, I can't go. What am I going to do with my
day? The socks, that is.
That is our own personal experience, but it's still of
the relative reality. And then there's the experience,
to whatever degree is possible of the actual nature of reality
is supreme level of reality, which is primordially pure and
without concepts and beyond good or bad, liking and disliking and
so forth. So when we're talking about pure
perception, we are using our, which is what usually a, a kind
of psychological or mental understanding of pure perception
because it's not our, our true understanding, at least not in
my case most of the time or maybe ever.
And overlaying that on relative reality in order to relate to
relative reality in a way that's more beneficial for the path,
more beneficial and enjoyable for ourselves, and more
beneficial for those around us. Yeah, for me, the the most
accessible way to this whole thing has been through guru
yoga. You can do it through deity yoga
and and vast mandala practice and but most of us don't have
time for this. But the simple kind of
everything in your life is a blessing from the group.
If it's if it's positive, that's a blessing from the group.
If it's so-called negative, that's a purification blessing
from the group. Or like a challenge or a test
being put forward. For me, this is the simplest way
to begin to reorient myself to seeing everything in service of
the path and not having so much I want I don't want going on and
have more equanimity towards everything.
And starting to see the purity of things and beings as
offerings, teachings, tests from from the guru and the guru being
inseparable from me. So that this mind being in the
mind of the guru and everything being that perception, that's
the most accessible entry point that I've found for this kind of
experience. I like that Damien always comes
from above. He's like, he's like the highest
level and that's what I'm doing. I'm like, I'm kind of coming
from below. But then you're absolutely
right. This is the ultimate way.
I mean, in in this same practice, I'm engaging in the
screw yoga from the long term and ticket says the generation
stage. We need to talk about the two
stages of practices in the generation stage where all
appearances arise as the guru. That's exactly what you're
saying, right When we take the guru yoga to heart and we
believe what is said in the Vajriana, which is that as soon
as you enter the path of the Vajriana, your experience
changes in the sense that everything that occurs, no
matter how outlandish or intimate, is the an exact gift
from your teacher. When good things happen, we're
supposed to think, oh, thank you, Lama for this beautiful
day. Thank you so much for this
amazing meal. Whatever and when bad things
happen, we're supposed to say, oh good, I I'm purifying some
karma. Because on the path of Adriana,
the goal is liberation in one life.
Either in this body, there's a rainbow body or some sort of
super realized being at the time of death, the actual moment of
death when you don't go through the bardo, but you're liberated
or in the bardo, you recognize the yidam or your teacher or
whatever, or you know, further down the path you rise in purem,
nirmanakai, purem. All of those have to do with
liberation in this life, meaning not going to take another birth.
And in order to do that, it's important as Vajrayanis or any
Buddhist to realize we have so much negative karma.
We are always carrying around incredible amount of habitual
tendencies of wrong views, of bad habits.
This body, this body is only karma, and it's almost entirely
negative because it's going to die, right?
It's impermanent and it's our vehicle and it's unreliable, all
this stuff. So just to recognize that our
experience in the world is almost entirely karmic.
And when you embrace what Damian is saying and you see that good
things are a blessing and you feel rejoicing and bad things,
bad in quotation marks, sometimes they really are.
They really certainly do feel bad.
I'm not, you know, lowering that it can be life can be extremely
challenging. That is a purification.
What it means is we need to remove a great deal of karma in
order for any of these levels of liberation to occur in this
life. Otherwise, we wind up born again
and almost all of our reactions are karmic reactions, right?
Something happens to us and we react, and that reaction itself
creates more karma. So we just keep, you know,
cycling. So it is skillful means and also
in accordance with the truth that whatever happens to us is a
blessing from the guru. Once you've entered the path.
And entering the path can be as simple as taking refuge.
It's true at the Mayan level, it's true at the Hinayana level,
but it's made explicit in the Vadriana, which is why Vadriana
is so excellent. Yeah.
And I think it's worth just touching on, you know, in the
Mahayoga, in the the full kind of expanse of this pure vision
practice, you're training yourself, you know, to visualize
this palace and the deities. And all of these are symbols
representing the aggregates, the elements, the, the sophisticated
understanding of the world according to Abhi Dharma, which
you know, So what you're training yourself to do, you
know, you're sitting on the cushion for hours and hours a
day with this visualization, with this knowledge, and you're
trying to replace the structure of your mind that sees things
incorrectly, right? Like we, we come in with our own
visualization of there are solid beings out here separate from me
and I want to get through here and I want to get what I want
and I want to destroy my enemies and all of that point of view.
It is like really hard wired into us at this point.
We, we've done it so much so, so the Mahaya works to undo this by
relabeling with more accurate understanding and terminology
that these are yiddems, this is the five elements of the five
dakinis and so on and so on. And it can be very complicated.
And if you love it, love it, you know, get into it.
But like I was saying that to me that it's much more accessible
to just see everything is the guru.
That way you don't have to like, you know, cuz you can spend.
If you like detail and you like that, then you're in for a
treat. You know, you go study ABI
Dharma, then you study Maha yoga together and try and put that
together and then spend time in that rewiring of your brain.
Like this is not an ordinary house.
This is a mandala. These are deities.
Some of them are destroying each other or destroying things, and
some are, you know, healing things.
And these are all the activities of the deities, right?
Like that kind of complicated view.
And then even the palace, the structures, pillars, they
represent the different faculties of the mind.
This is a very sophisticated system, but most of us just
don't have time to really do this in any kind of meaningful
way. So I think that's why for me,
Guri Yoga has just been the most accessible.
It it makes the most sense. And a lot of us come from a
judeo-christian background. So there's a little bit of like
similarity to seeing everything as God's will, you know, like,
so there's a kind of entry point that I think makes sense for us
Westerners that makes this possible.
And then as you were saying, Joe, that this is not that
overlay, this is training ourselves to see things more
accurately more in the present moment and with less conceptual.
I want and I don't want based on a delusion of a self.
You're, you're absolutely right. I, I think it's important to
remember to continuously remind ourselves that we think we are
seeing the world as it is as and that we're, we're logical
beings. We're operating within this
experience and we are seeing things correctly.
This is a fault at the very base level of Buddhism, the very base
level of the term Buddha. Because what does Buddha mean
awake? And if if Shakimuni's a Buddha
and I'm not a Buddha, then that means I'm asleep, right?
And when you're asleep, you only experience dreams.
You only experience your own mind's projection as dreams.
You know, I mean, once in a while, some will have like a a
dream, but it's some sort of vision of the actual world.
This is not what we're talking about.
We're talking about ordinary. I go to sleep, I dream I'm at
the grocery store and they're totally out of oat milk and I
have a little fit or whatever. You know this get regular life
dreams we have, We're doing that even when we're awake.
It's just that because of the way our consciousness works, we
are tied to it much more sophisticatedly.
So I look at my hand in a dream, I have 5 fingers.
I look back at my hand, I only have three fingers.
That's one of the keys of practicing dream yoga here.
I look at, you know, in my wakeful state, I look at my
hand, I have 5 fingers. I look at my hand later, I still
got 5 fingers. Unless there's been a bad
accident. So it's, it's the kind of thing
where this, this level of reality is still a dream, but
it's a lot more coherent. And so it's harder to see as a
dream when we compare it to our dream life.
But it's very important to recognize we are not seeing the
world correctly. We're seeing the world through
eyes that are have been trained according to the Dharma for
hundreds of millions of lifetimes with wrong perception.
And the base of that wrong perception is just what you
said, the belief in a self as separate from reality.
I will tell a little story. I'm a big fan of the English
writer John Blofeld. And I suggest that everyone read
his his spiritual autobiography. It's called The Wheel of Life.
Beautifully written book about his path through the Dharma.
Really wonderful. He died in 1987 I think and and
got to meet all the great masters, Dodrub Chen and Dunjum
Rinpoche and many other lamas and and Chinese masters who you
know, are long gone now. So amazing book.
In one of his books he tells a little story of something that
happened to him. He was driving somewhere and he
saw on this hillside this beautiful array of flowers, like
all these red flowers. And he was like wow, that is
gorge. He stopped the car and looked
for a minute and just was like wow, spring these I don't know
what kind of flowers are so red. Amazing.
And then he got back in the car and he drove up that hill and as
he got closer, he realized it was trash.
It wasn't flowers at all. And he said this is how it
really is. He saw it as flowers.
He believed it was flowers. His reaction, his emotional,
mental, psychological reaction was one to flowers.
And it was one of happiness when he drove up the hill and he saw
it was trash. His, his emotional, mental and
psychological reaction was like then later when he was probably
when he was writing that or what inspired him to write that
passage, he was like, ha ha. Both are not true, but one
inspires goodness, upliftedness, A relation to the world that's
more of a bodhisattva relation, and one inspires the opposite.
And it that is what pure perception, the key, the reason
for pure perception, the reason to practice this, even if it
doesn't feel real, even if it feels like artificially caused
to see that all that the guru wants me to lose my job, the
guru wants me to get in a car accident.
What a jerk. Now this kind of thing like
you're saying with guru yoga, the reason to train in this is
because it is it is more beneficial.
It is still a construct in a sense, but the construct is both
closer to reality because we're all Yadams in our inmost
essence. And also it's more beneficial.
It gets keeps you motivated on the path, keeps you living in a
more pure environment. And that is very, very good,
especially in a time like we are right now when things really
feel like they're coming apart. I know I say that every week,
but it just keeps going downhill.
I went to India and things were OK.
I can't. I went to come back.
My flights are cancelled through the Middle East.
I have to reroute. I flew all the way around the
world. I like leaving a major carbon
footprint, I guess. But it was, it's that kind of
thing, right? The world is very challenging,
so it makes it more difficult for us to practice pure
perception. I refer the listener to previous
maybe 2 times ago or three times ago, we talked about the news
and our relationship to it. Very important to manage your
situation in order to be able to practice.
Pure perception. If you're on a battlefield, your
friends are getting blown up, is much more difficult to practice
than if you're in your house and you're vacuuming.
And then it really can, you know, surrounded by a look at
Damien's room, It's filled with tonkas.
It's filled with pictures of llamas.
This is very inspiring. And when that's why we set up a
shrine in our house, That's why we meditate in the same place
every day, all these things in order to increase the likelihood
that we will see things through a more pure lens.
It's still a lens, but it's more conducive to accomplishment on
the path. Yeah, I think it's so important
what you were saying about how we are, how this whole thing,
this whole construct is wired incorrectly, right?
That from the the subtlest level to this body, we are actually
some Saric formations and that everything we are perceiving is
not exactly how it is. And that, you know, our
bifurcated brain and dualistic thought, all of this systems are
all based on ignorance, built on ignorance.
And so we're practicing the yiddem and the seed syllable and
the appearance. We're trying to correct this
error as we come into experience.
Like you say, every day we come out of nowhere and we come into
this life and then we go back into nowhere when we go back to
sleep. That process is bound up with
ignorance, right? So because of that, we've come
into birth, into samsara, into a body, into, you know, a trap
basically. And that through this process of
guru yoga or deity yoga, we're untraining ourselves.
We're, we're, we're practicing this process of birth over and
over and over and over again without the delusion added to
it, You know, because the more correct view is that we are
inseparable from the guru, that we are inseparable from the
deity. And what that means is that
everything is pure. Everything is already made of
light. I mean, this is even coming true
in scientific understanding, right?
That there's no, there's no hear hear that things aren't the
solid thing we thought that they were.
That's already becoming true on on so many levels.
And so we can tap into that through this kind of
understanding and seeing things. Oh, everything is pure.
The, the, the, the kind of, yes, of course, there's a relative
dealing with your life and you can kind of keep doing that
while holding it all lightly. This, this is a dream.
This is like a dream that kind of, you know, lucid dream
training, I think is also the other easy access point like
guru yoga, just just continually, this is a dream.
Don't take it so seriously. Notice how where, where is this
morning when I was eating pancakes for breakfast?
It's gone. Like where it, it, it just
passes and everything keeps passing and this body will pass
and, and, and everything in our life will pass.
And that impermanence is, is more accurate vision, right?
Because we, we feel like it's going to last forever in good
and bad ways, right? We want the good things to last
forever and we don't want the bad things to last forever.
We get very stuck in all of that.
And so this is a way of liberating that, getting us
closer to, of course, the highest view, which is just
direct perception with no filter, with no grasping, with
no dualism. But that's extremely hard to do
because we're always in our mind, we're always labeling and,
you know, working with the kind of discursive relationship with
things. So the beauty of the Dharma
always is that it uses a skillful means, it brings it in,
you know, that to help us, to support us with something we're
already doing and help that thing we're already doing get
closer to what we want. This just naked bear awareness.
Damien's got it going on. What can I say?
I we're about out of time, so I'll leave the reader with or
listener with one way you can train in this.
And it came to me because of what you just said, Damien, it
is true that in our personal experience, when we wake up in
the morning, we wake up out of nowhere.
We are kind of blank canvas for a little bit.
It depends on how much you've got going on.
Sometimes you wake up right into thinking, but if you're a
practitioner, you know, there's a little gap there some of the
time. And in that gap, we get the road
is splitting and we get a choice.
I'm going to do what we always do.
It's Monday and what am I going to do?
Or this is a pure experience. And because this happens every
day, we get hundreds of opportunities every year.
So when you go to sleep at night, you can, you know, do
whatever your, your dream yoga practices is.
But before you engage in that, you just think, when I wake up
tomorrow, I'm going to arise in a pure ohm.
I'm going to arise in a pure ohm and I'm going to stay in that as
long as I can. And as long as you don't talk,
it's usually talking that drags you out, whether it's talking in
your mind to yourself or talking to your partner or somebody
else. You can keep this going usually.
And sometimes you can make it all the way to when you start
your session, which for me is like 15 minutes, you know, I got
to go out to the Hut and stuff. It's you wake up and you have a
choice there, and that choice you can you can lean toward.
I'm not going to judge this. Everything is the guru.
In this same practice I'm doing, you're supposed to wake up as an
accomplished being. Arise as Vimala Mitra, arise as
long Champa, arise as the guru, as Gurmache.
Whatever you get on, you're practicing and try to make it as
Gurmache all the way until you do your next thing and it maybe
let's get in the shower, maybe it's eat something, drink
coffee, whatever it is, start your meditation, whatever it is.
Once you can do that a little, you can return to it during the
day. And then tomorrow you get
another choice, another chance to practice this.
And that's like how we can really put into practice.
Maybe you only go 3 minutes, but we got 3 minutes of pure
experience in the middle of our, you know, 16 hour day or
whatever it is. And then once you can do it a
little bit, you might remember that it's 4:00 in the afternoon.
You're taking a break. You're like, I'm going to just
drink this sparkling water and relax here for a second.
And all of your sudden like it's still pure.
And maybe you can drink that sparkling water for three
minutes in the middle of your pure experience.
And that's how you start to really poke holes in your
samsaric world. So I leave it with that, but
this has been excellent. Yeah, that's great.
I just wanted to say one thing. You can go back to the previous
episode we did on aspirations. But when Joe talks about how an
aspiration you, you have a thought that you hold for a
second and then you let it go and and you abide in the direct
experience, right. Well, I think this pure vision,
like you're saying is the same way you can be.
I am the llama. It's not I am the llama.
I am the llama. I am the llama.
Like there's it can be a tendency to like turn this into
another stressful conceptual thing.
It's just fire that, pull back and then let go, and then stay
in the purity like you're saying, for as long as you can.
And then when you notice you're out of it, you can pull back
another arrow and fire again and then get through just like that
and kind of string it through your day.
Beautiful. Yeah, so, Well, thank you so
much for watching. As always, please like share,
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But in no matter what, no matter what you do or don't do, thank
you for watching. We appreciate you.
We're a nice little community. I feel connected to all of you.
I know Joe does, so we will see you again in a couple weeks.