Lama Tsultrim Allione Quotes

Dr. Jung wrote of this time: “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the Self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the Self. . . . This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned. I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the Self I had attained what for me was the ultimate.”19

The mandala serves a conservative purpose—namely, to restore a previously existing order. . . . [W]hat restores the old order simultaneously involves some element of new creation. In the new order the old pattern returns at a higher level. The process is that of an ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point.

The effect of the doha is to create a mental paradox, a state of confusion where logic is defeated, and we must enter through another way of knowing. This is the gate to the mysterious home of the dakini through language. The dakini also holds a staff in the crook of her left arm. This symbolic staff is called the khatvanga. Its essential meaning is that of “hidden consort” or “inner consort.” It represents the dakini’s inner masculine, and at the top of the staff is a vajra symbolizing the phallus. The staff is an interesting metaphor because it can be a tent pole, a protective spear, or a walking staff. With it, she has the power to stand alone; she has internalized the masculine.

The Matriarchs served as conscientious guardians of the mystery, just as the stratum of matriarchal consciousness coming alive at present contains a treasure—a trove of well-guarded secrets, a welter of psychic seeds: a quiver, a bow, a cauldron, a spindle, a spoon, masks, mirrors, wreaths of string. . . . If the feminine link with the past is recovered, the old wise man, the worn Patriarch, can retire, leaving us face to face with the future. —NOR HALL

There are also some stories of enlightened women practitioners and teachers in early Buddhism. We see a blossoming of women gurus, and also the presence of female buddhas and of course the dakinis. In many stories, these women taught the intellectual monks in a very direct, juicy way by uniting spirituality with sexuality; they taught based on using, rather than renouncing, the senses. Their teachings took the learned monks out of the monastery into real life with all its rawness, which is why several of the Tantric stories begin with a monk in a monastic university who has a visitation from a woman that drives him out in search of something beyond the monastic walls.

Aggression, desire, and ignorance—these three reactions or poisons are constantly taking place within us. The plot lines may flip, and what is at first seen as desirable may become threatening or vice versa, or what at first seems irrelevant may later become something to grasp or to reject. The play of these three fundamental poisons creates two more poisons—pride or arrogance, and jealousy or envy. Those are the origins of the five poisons, which I introduced

Seeing the world as the mandala meant recognizing the symbolic perfection of the five wisdom energies—all-encompassing wisdom, mirror-like wisdom, wisdom of equanimity, wisdom of discernment, and all-accomplishing wisdom—which manifest in everything. I particularly liked the idea that the mandala doesn’t need to be constructed or organized, that our world in all its apparent chaos is actually a spontaneous,

The second is the method called the path of transformation. Now, in this path, the image used is that of a peacock. In the path of renunciation, we don’t eat the poison; we avoid it. In the path of transformation, the symbolic peacock is said to eat the poison, and the poison transforms into his beautiful feathers, all those marvelous colors, that incredible translucency. The poisons are used and transformed on the path. Therefore, in the path of transformation we weaken the hold of the five poisons that have arisen from the basic split, and—working with our body, speech, and mind—we transform the encumbered patterns into wisdom. This is where we find the mandala; we embody the five buddha families, working with the notion of sacred embodiment. The path of transformation has to do with the body, with dance and hand gestures; with speech, in terms of sounds and mantras; and with the subtle energy of sound. The

Since the destiny of women and the destiny of nature have always been parallel, and since women are major proponents of ecological awareness, by women taking their power back and manifesting it in the world, our ecological situations will be subsequently transformed, bringing balance, generating healing, and producing a culture of peace.

As long as we define ourselves by who we should be, how powerful we can be, what we should look like, through the definitions of others, we can never know our true power and what affect we can have on the world. To do this, we need the inner strength to break our conditioning, and the work with the dakini mandala can give us this. Through transforming the emotions into wisdom and our own body into the luminous presence of the dakini, stabilizing through meditative concentration, we can change inside, and then thus creates an outer transformation.

Women who are in touch with the dakini principle and the wise feminine need to work alongside men, and in leadership positions. This should not be an optional feature in our society but a requirement.

We were discussing sexual misconduct among Western Buddhist teachers. A woman Buddhist from California brought up someone who was using his students for his own sexual needs. One woman said, “We are working with him with compassion, trying to get him to understand his motives for exploiting female students and help him change his actions.” The Dalai Lama slammed his fist on the table, saying loudly, “Compassion is fine, but it has to stop! And those doing it should be exposed!” All the serving plates on the table jumped, the water glasses tipped precariously, and I almost choked on the bite of saffron rice in my mouth. Suddenly I saw him as a fierce manifestation of compassion and realized that this clarity did not mean that the Dalai Lama had moved away from compassion. Rather, he was bringing compassion and manifesting it as decisive fierceness. His magnetism was glowing like a fire. I will always remember that day because it was such a good teaching on compassion and precision. Compassion is not a “wishy-washy, anything goes” approach. Compassion can say a fierce “no!” Compassion is not being stupid and indulging someone in what they want. Trungpa Rinpoche called that “idiot compassion,” like giving a drug addict drugs. The way I am using the word “fierce” in this book is in the sense of how a mother animal defends her young. A laser beam of fierceness, of pure energy that when harnessed and directed is powerful and unstoppable. It is fierceness without hatred or aggression. Sometimes a wrathful manifestation is more effective than a peaceful approach. It is by understanding the Dakini’s fierceness as a productive and creative source of raw energy that we see the Dakini in action, wielding the power to subdue, protect, and transform. We must find the sources to access this fierce Dakini power and bring it to bear on what matters to us in our lives, be it emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Meeting our strong feminine energy, we will develop as women, and not as women trying to be like men or asexual beings. We are different, and until that difference is known, owned, and maximized, our true feminine potency and capacity to bring this world into balance will not be realized. The powerful, fierce feminine is very much a part of the psyche, but it is repressed, and when it is not acknowledged because it is threatening, it can become subversive and vengeful. But when it is acknowledged and honored, it is an incredible source of power.

The Sanskrit word DAKINI in Tibetan means Khandro, which means "Sky Dancer," literally "She Who Moves Through Space." The Dakini is the most important manifestation of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhist teaching. She can appear as a human being or as a deity, often portrayed as fierce, surrounded by flames, naked, dancing, with fangs and a lolling tongue, and wearing bone ornaments. She holds a staff in the crook of her left elbow, representing her inner consort, her internal male partner. In her raised right hand, she holds a hooked knife, representing her relentless cutting away of dualistic fixation. She is compassionate and, at the same time, relentlessly tears away the ego. She holds a skull cup in her left hand at heart level, representing impermanence and transformation of desire. She is an intense and fearsome image to behold. The Dakini is a messenger of spaciousness and a force of truth, presiding over the funeral of self-deception. Wherever we cling, she cuts. Whatever we think we can hide, even from ourselves, she reveals. The Dakini traditionally appears during transitions, moments between worlds, between life and death, in visions between sleep and waking, in cemeteries and charnel grounds.

Some models of strength have been largely lost, repressed, or hidden from view, particularly images that are not acceptable or are not safe in a patriarchal society. Those images of the Sybil, the wise woman, the wild woman, women who are embodiments of specific powers of transformation, magical, spiritual, and psychic, have become wicked witches. Estimates of the number of women executed as witches from the 15th and 18th century, primarily by being burned alive as it was considered a more painful death, range between 60,000 to 100,000. Those were times of puritanism and sexual repression, and the women burned as witches were often independent or rebellious women who lived alone and practiced herbalism, or women who disobeyed their husbands and refused to have sex with them. Images of the devoted, peaceful mother have always been safe. Such images have always been acceptable in all cultures, even patriarchal ones. But there is another level of reflection of the primal feminine experience that both men and women long for, and this is an experience that comes from the intuitive sacred feminine, a place where language may be paradoxical and prophetic, where the emphasis is on the symbolic meaning, not the words, a place where women sit in circles naked, wearing mud, bones, and feathers, women who turn into divine goddesses and old hags, who turn into fierce dakinis.

Like Tara, I firmly believe that at the absolute level, we are beyond gender and any notions of gender are limited and not our true nature. At a relative level, men and women are different, and that difference is precious. I am not in favor of women becoming more like men in order to be acceptable and successful. We don't need more men or more women to act like men. Although I certainly support women following the paths or professions they are drawn to, and certainly they should be treated equally. When I discuss the masculine and feminine in this book, it does not matter whether you identify as male, female, or non-binary, or what your sexual orientation may be. The masculine and feminine energies are alive within each of us, in our world. That said, there are rules and laws and cultural messages worldwide that specifically affect and disempower women. My wish is that we don't lose touch with the magic of primal feminine, the unique power we can bring to bear on the challenges of these times.

What can we do to restore and heal the balance? In order to find balance, we need to equalize human rights and the economic situation of women and men; and we must move away from religions that model male dominance into spiritual models of partnership and respect for our precious planet. It is by empowering the sacred feminine and by listening to the earth as she tries to communicate with us that we ultimately heal.

Until recently, being a feminist carried something of a stigma. I encountered this myself when I was criticized by my Buddhist teacher for being too feminist, when actually I was trying to bring balance to Buddhism and talk about the empowered feminine, sexual abuse, and patriarchal aspects of Buddhism. Later he changed his view and was very supportive, but it was a challenging time when feminist was a dirty word. Some women have been quick to distance themselves from that title, afraid of being labeled an angry feminist and being unattractive to men. But if you ask those same women who say they are not feminists if they believe in equal pay for equal work, reproductive freedom, and protection from male violence, most will say yes of course. So actually they are feminists, but afraid of being seen as anti-male.

The extent of violation of women and violence of the earth perpetuated by men does not mean that all men are perpetrators. It is important to acknowledge that there are many forward-thinking males around the world who recognize these same problems and are working in collaboration with women to change them. While I am focusing on the needs of the empowerment of women in this book and the devastating results of the lack of women's equality and their abuse, and ultimately we need a partnership society, in the end we need to develop the model of mutually empowered partnership with men rather than domination of either gender. Societies that promote power with, rather than power over, each other. The loss of feminine qualities is an urgent psychological and ecological issue in modern society. It is a painful loss in our emotional lives and a disastrous loss for the safety of life on earth. In women, it affects their central identity, and in men, it affects his ability to feel and value. The loss of the feminine in men causes him to feel moody and lonely. In women, it causes her to lose faith in herself. We are slowly awakening to the crisis of the earth and the effect of the loss of the sacred feminine. The few people understand that the causes of this crisis have spiritual values at their roots. Values of the sacred as eminent, immanent, imbued in all of life, and all life as interdependent.

In the second half of life, Dr. Jung viewed as a return to the self through the process of what he called individuation, a conscious discovery or a recovery of the psychic nucleus of oneself. This journey to individuation often began with a wounding of the personality, requiring a reconnection with the greater self to heal. The mandala, according to Dr. Jung, could play a key role in the process of individuation and reintegration, bringing together what had been splintered into the process of egoic differentiation and wounding. His work with himself and later with clients drawing their own mandalas heralded the entrance of the mandala into Western usage.

Now, imagine for a moment that the ground of being is the vast blue sky that has no beginning and no end, no center and no edge, and the nature of this space is pure, infinite awareness. Everything arises from this space. Its essence is empty. Its nature is radiant. It expresses itself as all-pervading compassion. The two paths form when the ground of being expresses itself, or self-exteriorizes, into appearances by radiating its pure, luminous, rainbow-hued light. Here, the mystical brown energies move into exteriorization, manifesting as the five lights, white, blue, yellow, red, and green. At this point, the individual awareness either recognizes that pure, rainbow-hued luminosity manifesting as appearances as inseparable from itself, or it sees the luminosity manifesting as a separate world of appearances. In that moment, the split occurs, and the two paths are created. The path of liberation, which recognizes the inseparability, and the second path of confusion, which sees appearances as separate, creating fear and anxiety. The path of confusion forms the dualistic barrier, and our ego fixation becomes a way to resolve our separation anxiety, and the result of taking this path is called samsara, the pattern of grasping that propels us through life, death, and rebirth. This is the path that we all took.

In his book, The Archetypes in the Collective Unconscious, where he illustrates the importance of the Centering Principle, Dr. Jung wrote of the case of Brother Klaus, a Swiss mystic and hermit, who received a vision of a wheel and painted it on his cell wall. Dr. Jung tells us that the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and the confusion of the psychic state, namely through the construction of a central point to which everything is related... All these studies have concluded that mandala drawing and interpretation in a therapeutic setting has a positive effect on a wide range of issues. The wholeness adjusted by the mandala pattern through painting or coloring seems to weave together a traumatized psyche and creates an experience of integration and order assisting and healing of trauma, anxiety, or depression. A sense of order is reflected back to the person drawing the mandala, transmuting to the brain an orderly pattern of thought that facilitates psychological recovery.

It's good to be aware of all the (buddha) family patterns and to remember that our energy is just energy, and that every form of energy has the potential to be transformed into wisdom. One of the most wonderful things about Vajrayana is that the stronger our afflictions are, the stronger the encumbered patterns, the stronger the wisdom will be. So it's actually considered to be really good for a Vajrayana practitioner to be very passionate or very angry or very lazy, or whatever the dominant obstructing emotion might be, because an equal intensity of that energy will be transformed into wisdom.

Let me use a simple analogy of how our ego fixation and self-cleaning mind works. Like a high-security base, our ego, which forms at the moment of rupture from the ground, sends out agents to explore the outside world and report back. There are three types of reports or reactions. The first is constantly surveying for potential threats, creating aversion, aggression, or hatred. The second report is concerned with making our ego feel safe. Desire, grasping, and attachment are born from this. And the third report is about neither enhancing nor threatening the ego, producing indifference and ignorance. Aggression, desire, and ignorance. These are the three reactions or poisons constantly taking place within us. The plot lines may flip, and what is at first seen as desirable may become threatening or vice versa. And what at first seems irrelevant may later become something to grasp or to reject. The play of these three fundamental poisons creates two poisons, pride or arrogance, jealousy or envy. Those are the origins of the five poisons, which I introduced in the last chapter: ignorance, anger, pride, desire, and jealousy. And the way to transform these poisons into wisdom and return to the one ground is through meditation.

The key to awakening, then, is to recognize the appearances in the world as the radiance of the essence ground, and our true nature as the vast awakened universe itself. The work with the mandala and the five Buddha families returns us to the original luminosity of the ground. We then return home to what is called the Great Mother, the ground of being. The good news is that for all of us who took the second path of confusion, liberation is achievable. All we need to do is stop investing in the dualistic struggle and recognize the true ground of being. The path to liberation is never far from us. We are actually never apart from it. We are simply not recognizing the non-duality as our true condition. Longchenpa, the great Tibetan teacher of the 14th century, described the mandala as a luminous house, a dome of light emanating from the purely latent ground. The mandala is a means by which we return to our essential wholeness. The mandala practice is designed to help us see our patterns. It is the map for returning to the ground of being through transforming the five poisons into wisdom. It is a method of placing the psyche in a template of luminous wholeness. There is a deep longing for wholeness in all of us. And from that longing, cultures and religions have created mandala-like forms and ceremonies, architecture, temples, churches, stained glass windows, jewelry, art, gardens, and arrangements of ceremonial food. Although the human body is its own dynamic mandala, with the heart center, the limbs as the four directions, and so on, we often experience the world and ourselves in a fragmented way. This fragmentation is particularly true in modern times when the collective mandalic centering rituals and dances that healed individuals and communities have, for the most part, been lost. Meditating on the mandala is a tool or template for reintegration and provides a re-centering experience that unites the fragmented psyche and transmutes the five poisons into wisdom.

In Tibetan Buddhism, we talk about three different methods for working with the basic split or the dualistic rupture from the ground of being, the fundamental state in which we find ourselves. The first is called the path of renunciation, and this is what we associate with the monastic tradition in early Buddhism. The Buddha taught laypeople, but the ideal path was one renouncing worldly life, the path of the monk or nun who becomes celibate and gives up worldly clothes, wealth, possessions, and so on. They do this in order to limit the complications that distract from those spiritual paths and to limit the tendency to fall into the five poisonous states. The second is a method called the path of transformation. Now, in this path, the image used is that of a peacock. In the path of renunciation, we don't eat the poison, we avoid it. In the path of transformation, the symbolic peacock is said to eat the poison, and the poison transforms it into his beautiful feathers. All those marvelous colors, that incredible translucency, the poisons are used and transformed on the path. Therefore, in the path of transformation, we weaken the hold of the five poisons that have arisen from the basic split, and working with our body, speech, and mind, we transform the uncomfort patterns into wisdom. This is where we find the mandala. We embody the five Buddha families, working with the notion of the sacred embodiment. The path of transformation has to do with the body, with dance and hand gestures, with speech in terms of sounds, mantras, and the subtle energy of sound. The mind comes into play with visualizations, actually seeing and holding certain images. These three essential factors, body, speech, sound, are the tools of the path of transformation. The third path presented in Tibetan Buddhism is called the path of natural liberation. Sometimes it's called self-liberation or inherent liberation. Unlike the path of transformation, there isn't the idea that you take something and turn it into something else. Rather, the path of natural liberation is a method where we experience reality as it is, as perfect, and our state as innately perfected, so there's nothing to do. We do not need to renounce. We don't need to transform. We are discovering what already is, the self-perfected state.

This journey is a construct in which you can develop your wisdom and compassion, and with the dakinis you can also develop the ineffable power of the wild and the wise, the instinctive and sexual, the fierce power of the divine feminine.

As we remember the importance of the enlightened feminine in this book, as in the story of Tara that I shared in the Introduction, we must bear in mind that ultimately in the absolute sense, gender is an illusion, just another one of those illusions that we attach to and fixate on so firmly. At the same time, as Tara also said, in the relative world, empowerment has been the domain of one gender. And therefore she vows: "Those who wish to attain Supreme enlightment in a man's body are many, but those who wish to serve the aims of beings in a woman’s body are few indeed; therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, work for the benefit of sentient beings in a woman's body." She makes a commitment not only for enlightenment, but to have all our voices heard: our human rights respected, violence and rape cease, serial harassment end, and women's issues represented at the table where decisions that affect us all are being made.