Lama Tsultrim Allione Quotes

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 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

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 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

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.