The Flip Side
By Michael Erlewine
I have been practicing dharma as long as I have been studying astrology, since the late 1950s. I am 84 years old and counting.
I have spent many decades mastering astrology and am quite skilled in its exercise. With dharma, I worked just as hard or harder and can’t say I have mastered it by any means, but I have given it my all.
And I get asked, every so often, what practicing dharma is all about and what it requires. This is a brief synopsis as to what dharma practice is all about.
Many years ago, my Tibetan lama, the Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, came to our dharma center here in Big Rapids, Michigan (Heart Center Karma Thegsum Chöling) and gave a talk on astrology. The Tibetan monks and rinpoches all use astrology and carry little astrological calendars. Rinpoche knew I was an astrologer. I worked with this rinpoche, my root lama, for 36 years. And travelled and attended 10-Day Mahamudra Intensives for 31 years, driving 1600 miles each way, enough to circle the Earth’s equator more than twice.
After a fascinating teaching on astrology, Rinpoche took me aside and said to me through a translator. “Michael, astrology is one of the limbs of The Yoga, but not the root. Dharma is the root.”
He explained that astrology was one of the relative truths, designed to be useful in this world and life we are living here in what the Tibetans call Samsara. As much as I love astrology, it’s similar to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, in that while astrology can improve our lives in this world of Samsara and can be useful and very helpful, helping us to improve our situation in this world we all live in. However, it will not help to prepare us for the bardos when we pass on to our rebirth. Only attention to dharma can assist in that.
There are two main forms of meditation, Shamata (Tranquility Meditation) and Vipassana (Insight Mediation), which really are connate, meaning they can arise together, are the essential components of Mahamudra practice.
An analogy of their relationship is like the threading of a very fine needle. Shamata (Tranquility Meditation) steadies the hand, while Vipassana (Insight Meditation) threads the needle. These two, stability and insight, are required for Mahamudra to function.
For me there is no satisfying remedy other than what is called Insight Meditation as used in the Karma Kagyu Lineage for Mahamudra, which is a form of non-meditation. For me, dharma practice is a very detailed curriculum, with two major speedbumps.
The first challenge or speed bump is that we recognize (“Recognition”) for ourselves the actual nature of the mind we have been using all our lives, meaning we realize how the mind works and that we, warts and all, can work it just as we are. And then we actually start to work it. This is only difficult if we actually do not get our hands deep enough into our own mind so that we come to know it. It waits for that.
The second overcoming or speed bump is that we somehow manage to invoke Vipassana (Insight Meditation) and learn to rest in non-duality with full immersion. “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”
The first mentioned is a jump-start away from our ignorance of how we can use the mind and the second, and more difficult, is the ability to rest in the present moment to the exclusion of duality, and such full immersion brings also a reduction of karma accumulation.
Anyway, that’s what has to be done. As I look around, I see dharma practitioners at least getting involved in working with their own mind. That is called ‘Recognition’. It happens.
Much more difficult, yet of even greater importance, is dissolving our dualistic habit of separating ourselves from others and everything else by the distance of conceptuality. That is the hallmark of Samsara, and because of that endless dualistic habit, learning what is called Insight Meditation is much harder to invoke.
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Insight Meditation is not something we grasp with the mind as it is a complete immersion we have to achieve, if only for a moment. Recognition is as simple or difficult as becoming familiar with our own mind. This can be done. Yet, that gets us only halfway there.
What is and has been grasped has then to be let go of and that appears to be the reverse of everything we know to date. If we can rest in the nature of the mind authentically for at least a moment and reflect on or from that, then we can repeat that moment as often as we want until it is a seamless stream of insight.
However, an here is the point, that is like looking for a needle in a haystack. We can’t do that because it is NOT something to be done, but rather something to be undone. To achieve that, we have to let go, relax, and I mean let go completely, and that is something we don’t know how to do and don’t do easily. Apparently, from a close reading of the pith dharma teachings, that is something we have to be shown by an authentic guru.
And that’s my two cents.
[Threading the needle.]
For a limited time, I am doing a few Zoom astrology readings. If interested, please email me with the subject “READINGS.”
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
