Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Email | RSS
Call and Response Ep. 54 Guru Puja Meditation
“Every inhalation you’re drawing away the pain and suffering of all the Beings around you, all over the universe, actually, because you have, the center of your heart is the open clear light of freedom. It’s not any kind of a trap. It’s not any kind of a prison. It’s a prism through which all this is completely swallowed up into the vast infinite energy of love in the universe, of all the Krishnas and all the Ramas and all the Everybodys, Buddhas and the Kalkis from the future who conquer all darkness and sadness and injustice and suffering. And you triumph. Your inhalation draws that in and you triumph over it and your bliss triumphs over all that mass of sadness. It does not burn you out.” – Robert Thurman
Bob: Let’s meditate something. Can we meditate something?
KD: Yeah, please.
Bob: Ok. So, please go into meditative mode. In this light I’m moved to ask you to meditate something. And, this comes from the Guru Puja but I won’t read it. I’ll just, from the Guru Puja. The Guru Worship. Mentor Worship. Ok. So, please go into meditative mode. And in meditative mode, take a look at yourself to find your true self. And when you do that, when you use your mind to look back into your own face, what will happen to you is you won’t be sure who you are, if you look properly for yourself. You will find a certain uncertainty about, are the tip of your nose? Are you your face as it looks this morning? Are you your face as it was 20 years ago or 10 years ago or 2 years ago? Or are you something else? Do you have an angelic face inside? Are you, etcetera… You’ll feel a kind of vein like that if you really look intently into yourself to find your self. You’ll feel an uncertainty and if you do it strongly you’ll feel even a little nervous, anxious, maybe insecure, like “who am I?” A sort of Ramana Maharshi sort of routine. And just let yourself melt. Use that uncertainty to kind of melt your self-image about yourself. And as you’re self-image about yourself melts, your picture of the world around you will melt, can melt. You know? Your imagination that you’re in this room in Massachusetts and this and that and Kripalu and this and the other and whatever and just let go of it all. And then, imagine yourself in the best way you might want to be. On a mountain in Tibet. Sitting with Shabkar. Looking at another mountain with the billowing clouds on top of it. Beautiful. With shining sun, blue sky, rainbows in some parts of the vast view that you’re seeing and you’re feeling really alert, you don’t bother, like who you are, you’re in your best feeling and you’ve seen this vision in your mind’s eye. And then you see sort of like He did, His guru on top of that cloud. You see your Guru and if you don’t have a particular Guru, you think of, you could think of a Buddha, you could think of Krishna, you could think of Rama, you could think of Neem Karoli Baba, you can think of anybody you want, whoever you feel moved by, whoever, if they were there on that cloud, you would feel really excited. You know? Like, when you meet some celebrity or some really super person that you love and you’re just in their space and you get all like, keyed-up, you know, and you just feel like that, some amazing person even you don’t know that. A lama or some imagined lama. It doesn’t matter. And that person is sitting there smiling radiantly at you like Shabkar’s guru is smiling at him. And you just imagine that being is there. Like Obi Wan Kenobi’s like a light being. Like a pure light phenomenon. And you can have many beings there if you like. If it’s Jesus that you like, if it’s Moses, if it’s, if it’s Muhammad, if it’s, whatever it is you just… they’re all there together. Krishna. And really there, you know? Or Sita. Or Shakti. You know? Mother Teresa. It doesn’t matter. Because they’re all there and you can have a host up there on top of that cloud formation, sitting there smiling and they’re all looking personally at you. They’re like, you know, they found you. They love you. You feel, you visualize them there and then imagine if there’s someone who passed away, let’s say, could be your parents, your grandmother, grandfather or anybody you can imagine. And they’re there in their light body and you imagine that their real light body comes from wherever they may be, in whatever heaven plane or anywhere and inhabits what you’re visualizing. In the duplicate soul body comes in and inhabits what you visualize. Don’t worry if you can’t hold the visualization steady, you just flash it in your mind and sky above you, smiling at you and from the smile, gleaming light rays flow down to you and a rainbow, whatever color you need, blue or red or gold or rainbow and just flow this energy comes like a liquid coherent gentle laser-light flowing to you, comes in through the crown of your head, goes into all your chakras and your central nervous system fills with you up with this light and energy. You just feel you’re receiving grace and energy and light and your normal nagging doubting mind is like little shadowy things being washed out of you by this light and energy and it goes, flows out of you, flows down into the underworld where even your nagging doubts are like nectar the Beings under there and they like it, so it’s not just trash, you know. It comes to them in a blessing way. And you feel totally blessed. And then don’t neglect all the Beings that you know, all everyone else in this group here and also all your loved ones at home or everywhere you can remember. Even those who are passed away. They’re all around you in a huge host and all beings, actually are around you, and all your loved ones along the front rows on the left side and your acquaintances that you have no strong feelings for, one way or the other, are in front in the front row and the ones you have disliked and you have negative feelings about are on the front rows on the right side, but they’re all getting a reflection from you of this energy that’s going down to you, this grace energy and in reflecting off of you and they think it’s coming from you, which is ok. But you’re just reflecting it from those Beings above you and they send you encouraging thoughts and even your enemies and rivals, they send encouraging thoughts because they are getting light from you so they don’t mind, even though they’re a little jealous, they don’t care, they want you to send more light. Loved ones love seeing your light and the neutral ones are amazed that this neutral person is sending light to them. And then you sending your gratitude and your devotion and your dedication to your Krishna and your Guru and your Buddha and your Lama and whatever it is for you, your grandmother, grandfather, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, whoever it is, all of them together. And you’re in this like, infinity figure-eight of Blessing, of Grace and then reflecting blessing of Grace to all the Beings around you and then their gratitude coming toward you, gratitude, or any way agitation, incitation coming towards, inspiration coming towards you and then your gratitude and love and devotion going toward your source of your grace, your mentor, your Guru, your Gurus, your Gurinis, and you just enjoy this, and this Bliss setting, this meditational setting field, in Tibetan tradition for that Shabkar and then and every spiritual traditional has something like this and in fact, they build temples and churches and synagogues and mosques and everything to create in a building a feeling of being in a space like this with the grace flowing down through the roof or whatever it may be, through space. This is a universal thing and you just enjoy being there and in the Tibetan tradition, when you meditate on any theme, even if you’re meditating on death, if you’re meditating on the preciousness of life, you’re meditating on, on the inadequacies of the self-centered world view, you’re meditating on the beauty of the loving world view, you know, whenever you’re meditating a different thing you just know that you’re in a field like that, because actually all of us are in a field like that all the time, actually, whether we know it or not. As Rinpoche, Rinpoche said, KD Rinpoche said, “It’s all grace but we act like it isn’t.” So, we visualize it and then you meditate whatever it is you really most need to meditate. You know? Mindfulness. You can practice mindfulness. You can count your breaths within a field like that. And even you can then, even counting your breath, you know, you can use in every way… someone did ask me and I want to add to it just while we’re doing it, and don’t worry if you don’t remember, you know, who’s up there and who’s blessing and which color light’s coming and who’s around. Doesn’t matter because you’re in that field. You create it with your imagination and you’re in it. And then you just think about all the Beings around you and all their suffering and you feel how blessed you feel and how blissful you feel, feeling the grace of being beloved by deities and by Lamas and by Goddesses and by angels and by those in your life who have touched you in a positive way and then you, when you draw in your breath, you draw away the shadows of the doubts and worries and sufferings and anxieties and sorrows and sadnesses and distresses and pains of the beings around you, and you draw them into your heart and then in your heart is the vast absolute luminous nature of what they call “the clear light of voidness” “clear light of freedom” is in the center of your heart and therefore any amount of this darkness goes in there and completely transforms in the sun and moon and luminosity of that space. Infinite abundant energy, loving energy in that space. And then when you exhale, the light from that space of your loving bliss, the light of the bliss of your feeling and that from the center core energy of your heart comes flowing out, out of your nostrils and it goes out to all the beings around you and it feeds them bliss and nurtures them like nurses them with bliss and you, so you, this is called the “meditation of give and take”. So, every inhalation you’re drawing away the pain and suffering of all the Beings around you, all over the universe, actually, because you have, the center of your heart is the open clear light of freedom. It’s not any kind of a trap. It’s not any kind of a prison. It’s a prism through which all this is completely swallowed up into the vast infinite energy of love in the universe, of all the Krishnas and all the Ramas and all the Everybodys, Buddhas and the Kalkis from the future who conquer all darkness and sadness and injustice and suffering. And you triumph. Your inhalation draws that in and you triumph over it and your bliss triumphs over all that mass of sadness. It does not burn you out. And then when you exhale, this triumphant loving bliss energy flows out to all the Beings around you.
Your normal being becomes a purifier of other’s suffering ad infinitum and eternally, past, even the past suffering you draw away. You go back and fix the past. You don’t leave the past in a mess. You fix it. Enlightened beings go and change the past. There’s no set thing, it’s just this way or that way. They fix it. You undo all unhappy endings, all tragedies, all sufferings, all beings, not just all human beings, either. All beings. And you exhale the energy of infinite bliss flows out as love, as the will to the happiness of beings in the form of light. Indomitable light energy traveling instantaneously. You know, light is a concept, you know. Light, light travels at the speed where mass becomes infinite, so it doesn’t take any time to become infinite. And you do as long as you can do normally, though I’m not going to take that much time. So then, when the way you close the meditation, this meditation, like what Shabkar did, you imagine that your Guru is so pleased with you that you are channeling His or Her, you could be having a female Guru for sure, infinite loving blissful energy. The bliss void, bliss freedom indivisible, it’s called. Sukha shunya advaita. The nonduality of bliss and emptiness or openness or freedom. Don’t be scared of emptiness, openness or freedom. Bliss freedom indivisible. They’re so delighted of you, that your work and your life and you’re spreading the grace and the love. It is so much Them that they melt into pure light, you no longer can see them there, they dissolve into pure light and then they flow down with their light as their light rays that they were sending down, they then become their light rays and they flow down into you and they come onto the crown of your head and then they melt into the central nervous system and they go down your central channel and they come to your heart center and there in the infinity of your, of the central core place in your heart center, the infinity of bliss freedom indivisible, they take up their happy residence. And they become indivisible from you. And you don’t have to worry about ever losing them. Or ever being apart from them. Because they are there, as He said, they are your mind, they are your heart, they are your super subtle, spirit bliss freedom indivisible heart-mind.
So, keep meditating then. Keep doing give and take. And let’s take away the suffering from Sharon. And let’s take away the suffering, with your inhalation take away the suffering from Ram Das and send them to them the bliss of your good health, bliss of our happiness and our blessedness, being here with KD Rinpoche and Nina Rinpoche and all the musician Rinpoches. And just keep doing that. Give and take. Giving your bliss and happiness and grace and taking everyone else’s feeling of being lost and forlorn and sorrow and so sad and sorrowful. Must keep at it.
