Lama Tsomo Transcript

Lama Tsomo Interview

Summary:

• Lama Tsomo’s background: Lama Tsomo is an American Lama, author and co-founder of the Namchak Foundation¹. She shares her journey from being a Jewish girl in Ohio to becoming a Tibetan Buddhist Lama. She talks about her near-death experience, her spiritual search, her meeting with her teacher Tulku Sangak Rinpoche, and her learning of Tibetan language and culture.
• Lama Tsomo’s book: Lama Tsomo discusses her book “Why Is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling?”, which is an introduction and guide to Tibetan Buddhist practice. She explains the main concepts and methods of the tradition, such as the three kayas, the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the six paramitas, the four immeasurables, and the meditation techniques of shamatha and vipassana. She also talks about the benefits of meditation for mental and physical health, happiness, and social change.
• Other topics: Lama Tsomo also covers topics such as the connection between science and spirituality, the role of lineage and transmission, the nature of reincarnation and karma, the difference between realization and enlightenment, the challenges and opportunities of being a Western Lama, and the importance of interfaith dialogue and collaboration. She also answers some questions from the audience and gives some guided meditations.

Full Transcript:

Rick:  Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you would like to watch other ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu. This whole program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and would like to support it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and there’s also a donation page that explains other things for people who don’t like PayPal. So my guest today is Lama Tsomo. Lama Tsomo is an American lama, author, and co-founder of the Namchak Foundation. She followed a path of spiritual inquiry and study that ultimately led her to ordination as one of the few American lamas in Tibetan Buddhism. Lama Tsomo learned Tibetan to study with her teacher Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche, and now shares the teachings of the Namchak lineage in the U.S. and abroad. She holds an MA in Counseling Psychology and is the author of the award-winning, “Why Is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling?” which I think I’ll hold up here. This is, graphically speaking, it’s a good book to read, but graphically speaking, it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever been sent. I mean, it’s just full of all kinds of cool, beautiful color illustrations, and it’s on heavy stock paper, and just a beautifully done book. I think it got some kind of award, it looks like here, you see that shiny silver thing? It’s an award. So it’s a great book. It’s the first of a trilogy. I’ll have to ask her about what the other books are going to be about, as well as this one. This one is “An Introduction and Guide to Tibetan Buddhist Practice.” Lama Tsomo is passionate about reaching young people and supporting those working for positive social change. I think she and I have a lot of interests in common, and we’re going to be talking about those during this interview. So welcome and thank you.

Lama Tsomo: So glad to be here.

Rick:  Yeah, good to meet you finally. I managed to read your whole book and listen to quite a few hours of various interviews and talks and whatnot with other people. I was just finishing up the Dan Harris one this morning, and he mentioned in that interview that you were from the family that built the Hyatt Hotel chain or something?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah.

Rick:  Okay, this is interesting. So I think this interview, as most are, will be kind of a mixture of biographical and then teaching and knowledge points. It always kind of goes that way. It’s usually good to start with the biographical. One question I had right off the bat that will lead us into it is, you’re one of the only Western Lamas. How many female Western Lamas are there?

Lama Tsomo: You know, I really don’t know.

Rick:  Because there’s different lineages?

Lama Tsomo: That’s right, and I don’t know who’s been ordained and what lineages and that kind of thing. I think in this country it’s more even between men and women, but among Tibetans it’s much more rare for a female Lama. I sort of got a free pass being an American, I think. It allowed me to, first of all, make a lot of mistakes because I didn’t know the culture and that kind of thing. And learning Tibetan, you can actually really stick your foot in it and get in more trouble. I think also it allowed me to be sort of outside the normal system, and that may be true for other female Western Lamas as well.

Rick:  What does the term “Lama” signify? I mean, you have priests and ministers and what not in different religions, different titles, and it doesn’t always signify any degree of spiritual attainment. It’s more like they’ve done a certain amount of study and training and gotten this title. But in your tradition, what does it signify?

Lama Tsomo: Well, being from a Jewish background, I was fairly comfortable with a lot of the responsibilities and recognitions and so on that come with the term “Lama.” So “rabbi” means “teacher” in Hebrew. My teacher did expect me to teach, and so I’m out there doing that and writing books and things like that. There’s also that community leadership, spiritual leadership within the community that is a responsibility that’s expected. There’s the lineage piece, which we Americans aren’t going to be automatically familiar with because, you know, we’re so new. But certainly within Judaism, there are long lineages. Within Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a lineage that can be traced mouth to ear, mind to mind, all the way back to the Buddha. And so the distilling of knowledge and the passing on of the gems from generation to generation is seen as extremely important. And so I was very lucky. I was Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche’s first Western guinea pig to go through all the levels of teachings. He’s kind of like, “Well, let’s see what happens when we do the channels and winds practice, you know, the energy practices, and let’s see what happens when she gets this.” I did the traditional hundred-day channels and winds practice as part of the Lama training.

Rick:  Do you want to explain what that is, or is it just a case-in-point kind of example of something you did?

Lama Tsomo: Well, I mean, I can’t explain it.

Rick:  Because nobody’s going to know what that means.

Lama Tsomo: Right, yes. So it’s working with breath and your internal energies on subtle levels, subtle energy levels, and also with physical postures and, of course, meditation of particular kinds. You sort of put all that together, and you can … true transformation, I guess is the simple way to say it, from the inside out, and getting rid of a lot of the slough that causes our windshields to be pretty smattered and warped and everything like that, so that we can see reality as it really is. It’s a step on the way to truly seeing what the Buddha saw.

Rick:  Okay, good. Well, I’m sure we’ll come back to that metaphor of cleaning the windshield. Who was that famous poet that talked about cleaning the windows of perception? I forget. I don’t know. Anyway, and of course, there’s references to that sort of thing in all the different traditions. There’s the thing in the Bible about seeing through a glass darkly, and then having it be clear.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly.

Rick:  And Hinduism talks about it, everybody does. And even modern science in a way, in terms of neuroplasticity and clearing the sludge from our mental functioning, that kind of thing.

Lama Tsomo: Well, it’s kind of building new roads and turning them into highways and letting other ones become unused and eventually break up and have grass growing up through it, that kind of thing.

Rick:  So how did a nice Jewish girl from Ohio or wherever you were from get going in this direction?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, well, that’s a bit of a story. As Westerners, we aren’t automatically born into a particular lineage or something like that. Even the Judaism of my family was … first of all, we didn’t practice much. My father didn’t practice at all. He just felt he needed to be as good a person as he could be, and that was kind of where he left it. My mother had more spiritual leanings but didn’t really express them that much. I went to Sunday school, hated it. Before I went to Sunday school, we were living in this little town in Ohio and there were only five Jewish families. We all got together on Sundays, and one parent after another would trade off going off with the kids and telling a Bible story, like just telling it and talking about it with us. I remember even as a little kid, I loved that. Then we moved to the big city, Chicago, and I could go to a Temple Sunday school, and I hated it. It was totally disengaged. There was no spirituality, no life to it, no meaning. We were friends with the rabbi and he was wonderful. His name is Rabbi Schaalman, Herman Schaalman. He actually taught me a fair amount just in passing and also when I listened to his sermons. So I went back and met with him after I’d been lama-nated. He was very curious about Buddhism and hadn’t had a chance to talk with anybody about that view. When we compared views, it was astonishingly similar, really quite amazing. Then I did a series of interfaith dialogues with Matthew Fox, and again, we kept finding so much that was the same, you know, in the essence of the meaning, that the fellow who was sort of overseeing it all was like, “Come on, can’t you guys disagree about something?”

Rick:  Yeah, I’ve often felt that if you could get Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Mohammad and all of them in a room together, you know, they’d just totally see eye to eye, you know, as just different cultures, different languages, different times in history, but they’re all talking about the same thing.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, well supposedly there was a gathering of mystics from various traditions. I don’t know if this is true, but you know, urban legend, whatever. Anyway, they all got together and when they talked about the religious points, there were debates and differences and so on, but when they talked about their transcendent experiences, they were all saying the same thing.

Rick:  Yeah. I think one thing you and I want to get into today is a discussion about the sort of science and spirituality interface and how they each have something to offer one another.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah.

Rick:  Now there was something about some profound experience you had when you were fairly young and it lasted for half an hour and you were able to sort of reference it even to this day. What was that?

Lama Tsomo: Well, I was in college and I was visiting my boyfriend and I was bored, and he was a Baha’i and he was busy doing his homework, so that’s why I was bored, and luckily he had to do his homework for more than a half an hour. So I picked up this Baha’i prayer book. So it wasn’t about the philosophy or anything, it was the prayers that are designed to put you in that place, right? The place of truth. Yeah, so dharma, by the way, means truth. So I was reading the prayers and all of a sudden my normal mind, amazingly enough, shut up for a minute and I saw what the words were referencing. Words are a vehicle for that, and somehow I was pointed there and landed there and I was sort of astonished and I saw these, it was like there was this sea of sparkles, like glitter, and there were these weavings together like threads, and I understood that that was actually reality and then it can be woven together in infinite ways. And we can choose to make sense out of it however we do using the lens of habit. I have words for this now but I didn’t then. At that point I was just kind of slack-jawed, just watching this, and I could see that everything I thought was solid wasn’t solid. I realized that if I could really get all my habits out of the way, I could pass my hand through the book or the desk or whatever.

Rick:  I remember, maybe it was in your book, I read something recently about this theoretical physicist who got so deeply into the understanding of the insubstantiality of matter that he got a little unbalanced and he was afraid to walk across the floor because he felt he would fall through it.

Lama Tsomo: Yes, he wore big boots, thinking that would help. And of course nobody told him that the boots probably weren’t any more solid.

Rick:  Than anything else, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: That’s right, yeah, that was in my book.

Rick:  That’s funny. Did you ever go through a drug phase, LSD or anything like that?

Lama Tsomo: I experimented very little with it, just a tiny bit. My sense was that it was like you’re walking through this dense forest and the LSD helps you to climb a tree so you can see further ahead, but you still have to get down and walk.

Rick:  Yeah, I like that metaphor. I mean it does, for some people, give this sort of unforgettable experience that there’s more to life than meets the eye, but you got that from reading the Baha’i book and having that opening.

Lama Tsomo: The prayer book, yeah, it was the Baha’i prayer book, yeah. And so that set me on the journey because I was like, “Well, I want to live from that reality because I know that’s the true one.” I figured that there were spiritual traditions that could help me do that, but it took me a very long time to finally come around from the spiritual smorgasbord that we have in this country, until I found my way to Buddhism and it sort of felt right, but then I tried Theravada and that wasn’t quite it. I tried Mahayana in the form of Zen, that wasn’t quite it. Finally I stumbled onto Vajrayana because a friend of mine who lived down the hill from me invited a Western Lama to her house and he gave a little talk and a Q&A. I attended that and I thought, “Oh, now this sounds like this one’s for me.” I liked that it had lots of tools, so as a psychotherapist I liked that there were different ways in. I liked that there was a very highly developed use of archetype and my emphasis in my studies was Jungian, so I felt at home with that. I liked that there were both male and female deities to be revered and to actually inhabit. I thought, “Well, this could be a really transformational path for me.” I like the balance of masculine and feminine. Then I found my way slowly to Rinpoche. I started studying the Ngondro, which is a collection of five practices. When I was about to do the next practice in the series, I was in retreat with this American Lama outside of Santa Fe. Rinpoche dropped in and he was going to teach the very thing that I was doing next. It just so happened. Well, I still didn’t get that he was my Lama, well, thick-headed. So anyway, I got some teachings from him and then the next time he came to my house to teach the American Lama. But what ended up happening was he and I connected and the American Lama ended up not studying with him anymore. He already had been studying under another Lama anyway. That was the beginning of that very deep, intimate, transformational connection with my Lama.

Rick:  Yeah, and you actually learned Tibetan, which must be very difficult to do, that’s no mean feat. How good are you at Tibetan?

Lama Tsomo: Hello?

Rick:  Yeah, we’re there. I think it just choked up for a second.

Lama Tsomo: Okay.

Rick:  A little pause there. I mean, I just said you actually learned Tibetan, which is very impressive. That’s no mean feat.

Lama Tsomo: No. And I was in my mid-40s when I met Rinpoche, so I thought …

Rick:  Yeah, they say it’s hard to learn languages when you’re older, so that’s impressive. How well do you speak it, actually?

Lama Tsomo: Fluently. I mean, yeah, I’ve translated simpler dharma talks and teachings and sometimes there wasn’t a translator for meetings or something, and so I translated for those, but I’m not actually a translator.

Rick:  Right. I know that in your interview with Dan Harris you’re talking about reincarnation and having had a relationship with your Lama in previous lives and will have in future lives, and Dan Harris had a hard time swallowing that, but I have no problem with it.

Lama Tsomo: Well, if we believe in the idea of recycling, it’s hard to believe that if consciousness stands apart from the body, inhabits the body, then when the body dies, you only have one body that you ever incarnate in, and the soul is eternal? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense to me.

Rick:  Yeah. Well, one reason some people have a problem with it is that they feel that there is ultimately no personal self, and that the sense of one is kind of a delusion, and if there isn’t, then how could there be reincarnation, because what is there to go from one life to another? But I think there’s something missing in that logic, because even if the personal self is ultimately not real, there could be some less ultimately real personal self that continues to reincarnate until it doesn’t.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, so it’s a habit and it’s sort of like whatever undercurrent it is that Causes you to see a wave come up and down and up and down and up and down. So that’s not the same water, though, in each wave, and they’re not the same shape, but there’s something that we feel is a continuum. In Tibetan, the term “juh” means “mindstream,” and I think that begins to get at, and maybe those were the streams that I was seeing in my vision, but that begins to get at, I think, this paradox that, no, it isn’t any more real than anything else, but you also can’t say it’s totally unreal, right? So the famous saying for Tibetans is, “Not is,” so it’s not something you can grab a hold of, “not isn’t,” “not both,” “not neither.” So it’s not easy to land on what this is, we can only use metaphor, I think, as our best way of pointing at it.

Rick:  The good metaphor they use in Vedanta is they have the term “mithya,” which means “dependent reality,” and they say, “Okay, you have a pot, it’s made of clay,” and ultimately there’s only clay, there’s no pot. You could have different types of pots and different clay things, and there’s really only clay, but actually there are pots because you can use them and put things in them. They use the same thing with jewelry, like it’s only gold but you have earrings and rings and all kinds of different stuff that takes particular shapes or forms.

Lama Tsomo: That gets back to the waves idea because the waves are actually part of the whole ocean, they aren’t separate, but we can point to this temporary shape and say, “Oh, there’s a wave,” but it doesn’t stop it from being the ocean.

Rick:  Okay, so we’re kind of talking here about something that you wanted to talk about, which is the three kayas, which are like different levels of manifestation or different levels of reality. So let’s talk about that more explicitly for a while.

Lama Tsomo: The dharmakaya corresponds to the depths of the ocean part. And it’s [sneeze] … happy allergy season.

Rick:  There’s a little wave on the ocean.

Lama Tsomo: A sound wave for sure. Anyway, I’ve got my dogs around so they may be making noises in the background.

Rick:  We do too. We have a couple of them here. One of them is sleeping, the other one might see a squirrel and start barking at any time.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly. So the dharmakaya is sort of like before matter or before form.

Rick:  Yeah, before manifestation.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and so it’s total potential, so it’s ultimately powerful. It’s connected to everything, right? Because it’s the depths of the ocean. So it’s not like this, even though it’s not substantial, it’s not this like dead vacuum. It’s actually totally aware. So that’s a quality of it is awareness. And because it’s connected to everything, another quality is ultimate compassion, right? So those are some … and joy is another quality that I personally have experienced in changing channels and tuning into that dharmakaya channel. And this is another thing I love about Tibetan Buddhist practice is you get some very effective methods at changing channels, which normally we can’t do. We’re stuck on one particular channel, very small particular channel. Anyway, so the dharmakaya then has this tendency of wanting to express, and so it brings forth form, and then the form comes back into the dharmakaya and so on. So there are two then levels in the form aspect. The first one that we come to is sambhogakaya, and that’s really like an archetypal level.

Rick:  Like a template.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly. I was just going to say that word. And so through that then you can then have the really vast multiplicity of differentiation with the nirmanakaya. Nirmanakaya I think could best be translated as body of manifestation. So there you have the three bodies, kayas, and they’re not separate. It would be like separating the two sides of one coin or something like that. They’re working all together, and the idea is that there is this pouring forth and going back into the emptiness and luminosity and emptiness and so on, back and forth and back and forth, many times every nanosecond. David Bohm, the scientist, would absolutely agree.

Rick:  Some people are working on a documentary about David Bohm now. I don’t know when it’s going to be finished.

Lama Tsomo: Really? This guy contacted me and asked if I could introduce him to Robert Thurman and if I knew any physicists that might be appreciative of David Bohm, so I gave him some recommendations. But there’s going to be a whole documentary about him.

Lama Tsomo: Oh, I have one, a name of somebody.

Rick:  Oh good, I’ll put you in touch with this guy too. I don’t know when it will be finished, but it sounds like it’s a pretty significant project with a bunch of people working on it.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, no, this guy knew and was friends with David Bohm.

Rick:  Oh great.

Lama Tsomo: And with his assistant.

Rick:  Well, I’m glad I mentioned that then, because I can put you in touch with that guy. So this whole thing you’re talking about, again, I like to sort of compare with other traditions because it’s like the perennial philosophy. It sort of lends, you like science and so do I, not that either of us are scientists really, but in the scientific method you take a hypothesis and then you test it and if your test confirms its validity, then maybe another scientist wants to test it and the more people who test it, the more legitimate it becomes, the more trusted it becomes.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, it graduates to theory.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah, it sort of gains credibility. With something like this, I mean, there are parallels in other traditions, the whole idea of gross and subtle. I mean, in the Vedic thing, Adi-Bhu is the world, Adi-Dhyava is more the subtle level, and Adi-Atma is the unmanifest level, and there are probably other ones too. I don’t know why I went off on this tangent, but maybe you have a response to what I just said.

Lama Tsomo: Well, I think you were bringing in the parallels from the Hindu tradition, Vedic tradition, and of course that’s what the Buddha emerged from, right? He studied that thoroughly. So we have some parallels there and that’s not surprising. Matthew Fox talks about Meister Eckhart and…

Rick:  And the Christian tradition, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Right, and so the Godhead has a lot of parallel to the dharmakaya, I believe.

Rick:  And then you mentioned David Bohm, and in physics there’s a very clear understanding that there’s sort of an unmanifest level, you know, primordial level, and then from that sequential degrees of symmetry breaking and manifestation and emerging concreteness or apparent concreteness.

Lama Tsomo: “Apparent” is the operative word there.

Rick:  That’s the operative word, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, because how it appears to one being can be quite different from another, and anybody who’s been married knows even as human beings we can see things differently. But it can be a lot more different than that because we’re all on kind of a similar channel, and that’s why we can see each other, because we’re tuned into this channel. We’re interpreting the hologram, you know, in these ways. If you look at a holographic sheet, it just looks like a bunch of pools, it looks like somebody threw a little piece of gravel into a still pond, and so there are all these circular ripples going out and overlapping each other. It doesn’t look, you can’t see any form in particular. Then if you shine a light through it, you can see a form, but it’s still …

Rick:  A laser, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, exactly. And I think you have to have two of them. Then you see a 3D form, and it’s almost like you’re seeing it through a window, and if you move to the side, you can see parts that you didn’t see before, and the other side you see into those parts, which is extraordinary, and it’s insubstantial. It’s a nice parallel, a nice metaphor.

Rick:  And another cool thing is if you cut the hologram in half, like if it’s a piece of film, and then shine a laser through, you still see the same image. So that brings out the principle of the whole is contained in the part. You can cut it in quarters, you still see the same image, you start losing resolution after a while, but the whole thing is contained in every part, which has kind of a spiritual connotation or corollary.

Lama Tsomo: Absolutely. And the Tibetans were aware of this holographic quality to the universe.

Rick:  Yeah. So this whole thing about reality being something, and then all of us having different views of it, or peepholes into it, and our perspectives on it, like the blind man and the elephant. Would you agree that whatever enlightenment is, and let’s get into discussing what it is, it’s kind of an appreciation of reality as it is in and of itself, as opposed to some kind of distorted or adulterated perspective on it through a cloudy lens.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, so shall we get into the definition of it?

Rick:  Yeah, go for it.

Lama Tsomo: So let’s see, my best definition of it, and of course I should back up and say this, when early on, when his students asked the Buddha to describe enlightenment and the state, what he saw, he fell silent.

Rick:  Right, because what could he say?

Lama Tsomo: Well, because any words would be concepts, and this is beyond concepts, and so I’m stupid enough to do what the Buddha was wise enough not to do, and I’m just going to sort of point in the direction, because that’s all we can do with words.

Rick:  But he did that, but then he spent a lifetime trying to explain it, or trying to help people understand it, and there’s books and books and books going around and around about all kinds of stuff.

Lama Tsomo: What he mainly did was give us the methods by which we could actually directly experience it ourselves, and not only clean the windshield, but finally take away the whole windshield and just be in it and see it directly, and there’s this line you cross of no return, as I understand enlightenment, where you’ve now really landed back in that full ocean, and you’re aware of all three levels, all three kayas, and how they are different parts of one thing, and you also have the channel changer. You can tune into the consciousness of any being and all the different channels and levels that are out there, and there are probably infinite numbers of them, but you can tune into any of it because you aren’t fixated on a particular one. You’ve now joined with the whole. So there’s also, if you’re really joined with the whole ocean, then you’ve got all the knowledge of the ocean, and you have the compassion of the whole ocean because you’re connected to everyone and you are living from that. All-wise, all-knowing, all-loving, and so on, and a state of complete permanent bliss Because you’ve gone home.

Rick:  Yeah, let’s beat around this bush for a while.

Lama Tsomo: I thought I went past the bush, but okay.

Rick:  No, it was great what you’re saying.

Lama Tsomo: Let’s go back to the bush.

Rick:  Yeah, when you talk to different people, one thing more and more people I find saying is that their feeling is that there’s no end to it, that even once you attain “enlightenment,” whatever, however we define that, whatever it may be, there’s still room for growth in some dimension, in different ways, maybe many dimensions. There’s questions that people bat around, like, “Could you be an enlightened asshole? Could you be a jerk and yet be enlightened, but behaving reprehensibly in some way?” There’s people who say things like, “Well, there’s absolutely no free will, and it may be that you’re enlightened and your role is just to behave strangely or inappropriately or something.” I don’t know. When I hear that kind of stuff, I feel like not even using the word “enlightenment,” because to my mind, if I were to use it, it would have a superlative connotation, which implies that there’s no further development after that. Somebody who says that you can be an alcoholic, let’s say, and enlightened, and in fact I was going to ask your opinion of that Rinpoche guy that was notorious for that, to me, such a person is half-baked and we should reserve the term “enlightenment” for something more profound than that. So I’ve talked a little too long there, but you know what I’m getting at?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, well I actually enjoy the conversation, so it’s a lot of food for thought, but I think you’re trying to point to something that’s an interesting discernment to try to make. I don’t think it’s possible to be enlightened and therefore feeling everyone in the whole ocean, so ultimate compassion, and do any sort of violence to anyone. You just wouldn’t want to. That’s not where you’re coming from. So it wouldn’t make any sense that somebody would do that. So if somebody is using violence in speech or action or being an asshole, then how could they be coming from that view of the whole ocean at all times? And once you cross that line of no return to true, full Buddhahood, enlightenment, you don’t flip back and forth. You’re just there. So I don’t think you could be an alcoholic and an enlightened being, you know, fully enlightened. You could be highly realized and addicted to alcohol, but you haven’t crossed that line that I’m speaking of.

Rick:  Yeah. Alright, well here’s one for you. Let’s say, I know Buddhism doesn’t talk too much about God, but if we think of the totality as God and it’s all unbounded awareness, infinite intelligence, that kind of thing, containing everything, orchestrating everything, then there’s tons of violence in the universe. Right here on our planet, there’s animals killing each other and so on. If you attain oneness with that, what’s to say that your particular expression as an individual might not reflect some violent tendencies, because apparently God does, if you consider the totality to be God. In the Gita, Lord Krishna said, “Arjuna, realize the self and then get out and fight this battle you have to fight.” So what do you say to that?

Lama Tsomo: Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, there’s a difference between being pissed and acting violently out of being pissed off and what they were asking Arjuna to do. They were asking him to act in what you would call a wrathful manner, where you’re bringing compassion right along with it. So for example, in a previous life of the Buddha, he was on a boat and there were 500 Bodhisattvas on the boat and a couple of pirates. The pirates, he overheard them plotting and scheming to kill all of the Bodhisattvas so that they could take over the boat and all its contents. So he thought, well, you know, first of all, the killing of all those Bodhisattvas would be a terrible thing and he should really prevent it. Second of all, he was thinking of the souls of those two pirates and what would happen to them if they killed 500 Bodhisattvas. So out of compassion for everyone, he killed the two pirates. He fully expected he would go to a hell realm or something, you know, have some terrible fate. But because of his motivation and his actually preventing the suffering of everybody involved, that’s not what happened. He didn’t go to a hell realm. I think I’ve grabbed on to just one piece of what you’re talking about. So why violence in the world? I’ve thought a lot about this because I was born right after the Holocaust and I’m Jewish, you know, for example. It wasn’t until I came upon some Buddhist understandings that I felt like, okay, that makes sense. So you know, the Buddhists, as you know, don’t personify reality and point to it and give it a name like God. You know, they talk about dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and so on. And it’s aware. But they don’t personify it, so nobody’s going to think that it’s a guy with a beard and puppet strings.

Rick:  Yeah, no, I’m not thinking that either.

Lama Tsomo: Right, I’m being extreme.

Rick:  Right.

Lama Tsomo: Just to take a really extreme example.

Rick:  As I’ll say to Sam Harris if I ever get to interview him, I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, and what’s the big deal? I mean, that’s, you know, because I’m not talking about that. And actually, when I talked with my rabbi, he said, “I don’t want to really call it that either. I want to call it the mystery. I’ve always wanted to call it the mystery, because we don’t understand it. It’s much bigger than what we mean when we talk about God.” So that was another point of overlap for Rabbi Schaalman and myself, and we were, you know, fascinated by that. And the ocean waves thing, he said, “Oh, that’s wonderful. Did you think of that?” No, it’s an old Buddhist metaphor. Very old. Anyway, so if you’ve got a whole bunch of these flecks of consciousness that are covered over with this misunderstanding that they’re separate from all of reality, then they’re going to, well, I like to, you know, pick again the example of the ocean waves. If one wave thinks, “I’m separate from everything and everyone else,” then all of a sudden I have all these needs. I’m also protecting myself as a wave, because now I’m very fragile, right? I could get broken apart. As a matter of fact, I’m going to go back down into the ocean, and that’s inevitable. So all of that, you know, makes a lot of insecurity and fear and grasping and pushing away. And so there’s talk of the five types of afflictive emotions that, if you look at their essence, are actually five aspects of pure, how can I say, the intention of the dharmakaya as it comes through the sambhogakaya into form. That’s the first template you see is those five different facets of wisdom. So it gets more and more occluded as ego grasping layers get put on top of it and habits and habits and more habits from that point of view. Then we’re all blindly sort of, now I’m going to pick another metaphor, I don’t know if it’s mixing metaphors, have I waited long enough?

Rick:  It doesn’t matter. We can roll with it.

Lama Tsomo: All right. Well, speaking of rolling, everybody’s kind of rolling in a mud pit blindly. And so people are knocking each other with elbow in the face and knee in the back and all this as we’re thrashing around in our ignorance. We’re all trying to be happy and we’re all trying to push away suffering. So we’re grasping after the happiness, pushing after the suffering. We try to do that all day, every day, and in our dreams at night. How exhausting, all the time, right? Of course, we’re in that misguided state, we’re going to do a lot of terrible things to each other thinking we’re pursuing happiness.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah, thinking, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Lama Tsomo: Right, and seeing each other through this very occluded lens, this warped, splattered windshield, so they can’t even see who the other person is, right? So there’s that as well, as we’re stuck on the different channels and so on.

Rick:  So we were talking about what enlightenment is and whether you could be an enlightened jerk or something, but I think it would be safe to say that in an enlightened world, if such a thing ever happens, where a significant percentage of the people are in a very high state of consciousness, if not enlightened, it would be quite heavenly, quite harmonious. There wouldn’t be a bunch of enlightened people going at each other’s throats.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, no, I agree. If people want to try and make a type of government that is a utopia, they can’t unless all of the citizens happen to be enlightened.

Rick:  Yep, you don’t get a green forest unless all the trees are green.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and then you don’t need any rules at all.

Rick:  Yeah, it’s true. Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching about how the more people are in tune with the Tao, the less government there needs to be. It’s just, society kind of governs itself if people are really in tune.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, exactly.

Rick:  Now, you said a few things when you were defining enlightenment that seem a little phantasmagorical. I mean, you know, there’s talk of people having rainbow bodies and leaving nothing but their hair and nails, and you said something about knowing all beings or what all beings are thinking or feeling or experiencing or something like that. I wonder if that’s actually anyone’s real experience. I mean, you probably would say that your Lama, for instance, is enlightened. Let’s presume that he is, I don’t know. If so, is he actually listening to our conversation and reading the thoughts of all seven billion people in the world, or does one necessarily have a rather limited attention beam, even if the awareness is unbounded on the dharmakaya level?

Lama Tsomo: Well, the Dalai Lama has said many times that he’s not a Buddha, that he’s not actually enlightened.

Rick:  Okay. Let’s say he were a Buddha, as some case in point. Let’s say Joe Schmo is totally enlightened. Is his experience such that he’s actually reading the thoughts or knowing the experiences of everybody in the universe, or is that really not what enlightenment is? And it would be sort of unrealistic to define it that way.

Lama Tsomo: I think if you’re speaking of total enlightenment, total Buddhahood, then yes, they’ve joined with the whole ocean, and so they can tune into any part of it. They’ve realized that holographic truth, and so the universe is contained in them and they are the universe. So that’s quite possible for them to know. I’m wondering if a lot of the shamanic experiences are people being able to tune into places and people far away, because there is a non-local reality, and it’s actually the distance is an illusion. And so David Bohm’s idea of holo-movement, where the whole universe is constantly enfolding and unfolding at a fantastically rapid rate, and so it’s like the Blake poem about eternity in an hour, even time, the universe in a grain of sand, and something in a wild flower.

Rick:  Eternity in an hour, I don’t know, yeah, I know what you mean.

Lama Tsomo: Oh my gosh, and so that really says it. And William Blake, the last day of his life, sang the whole day long, because he knew he was going back to the ocean.

Rick:  Interesting. S; Yeah.

Rick:  Steve Jobs in the last moments of his life said, “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” Kind of cool.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah.

Rick:  Well one thing a teacher of mine once said is that in the enlightened state you can know anything, but in a human nervous system you can’t know everything simultaneously. You can sort of turn the beam of attention onto anything in the universe that you really wanted to know, but it takes a different sort of nervous system than the human to have any sort of omniscience.

Lama Tsomo: Well if you believe that knowing or awareness depends on the nervous system, that would be the case.

Rick:  I mean, let’s discuss that for a moment. I mean, how does one know things without a nervous system or irrespective of a nervous system? Isn’t the nervous system on some level required as an instrument of perception for knowing or experiencing anything?

Lama Tsomo: Well, that notion gets kind of blown out of the water by when people have had out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences. I realize that actually it was his doctor who was dying, not him.

Rick:  Repeat that again because the internet froze up for a second. You said when people have out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and then it froze.

Lama Tsomo: Oh, okay.

Lama Tsomo: Then those don’t jive with the idea that it’s dependent on a nervous system. So you can be aware of things apart from the body. Normally we don’t know that because we’re stuck in our bodies, but in those glimpses that people have gotten in out-of-body experiences, and there are thousands and thousands of people who have, then they’re able to perceive things that their nervous system couldn’t possibly have perceived, including while they’re brain-dead.

Rick:  Sure, they’re hovering above the surgeons watching what’s going on.

Lama Tsomo: And then they can report accurately what happened. But not just the surgeons, other things further away and things that they begin to know because they got another glimpse. I think the mind uses the brain for a while, and then the body dies, and then the mind, the consciousness continues.

Rick:  Yeah, I agree. But when I say nervous system, I’m actually including the subtle body or the subtle nervous system. And if a yogi or a Rinpoche or something can know what’s happening in France right now, obviously his physical eyes and whatnot can’t see that, but there’s some sort of as we go deeper, we become more universal, there’s some kind of subtle mechanism, perceptual mechanism that is not constrained to the flesh and blood body.

Lama Tsomo: Well, the physicists are making it clear that photons can be tied to each other in a non-local way. So I think that we can change channels to the level of consciousness where there is no distance anymore. And so that’s beyond the nervous system. And I question about the subtle body because, I don’t know, it depends on which one you’re talking about.

Rick:  It depends on what you mean by it, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, because the subtle body that you can, for example, photograph with Kirlian photography, that dies when the physical body dies. But there is a kernel of awareness that goes forward, and that I think is what eventually experiences enlightenment and melts into the ocean of oneness, that’s what can perceive things anywhere and so on, apart from the nervous system.

Rick:  In a way, you and I are just sort of playing with hypotheses here. I don’t think either of us, at least I haven’t experientially verified all this stuff, but it’s fun to play with.

Lama Tsomo: Right. No, I’m going off other people’s experiences and then, yeah, we’re spinning out theories.

Rick:  Yeah, well we can talk a little bit about physics, but neither of us are physicists, so that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it a little bit and consider the implications of it and so on. So it’s okay to do this as long as you don’t get too obsessive about it or hang all your hopes on it or consider it to be adequate for your spiritual development to understand these concepts or something.

Lama Tsomo: Right, now I have 100% understanding kind of thing, you know, it’s way beyond that.

Rick:  Yeah, okay, good. Well, I’m going to jump around a little bit and reference my notes here, because there are a bunch of things I took notes on as I was reading your book, and as we go, anything that comes to your mind that you’d like to talk about that I’m not bringing up, please just jump in with it, okay? One is, for those who are not very familiar with Buddhism, could you just review the different schools of Buddhism a little bit and explain what’s different about Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana, from the other schools, just so we have our terminology straight?

Lama Tsomo: Sure, kind of like a map and you are here.

Rick:  Yeah, it’s like you got attracted to this particular thing, you said there are certain things about it that you liked, and mindfulness is very popular and people hear about all the rage, and so is this mindfulness? No, I think it’s different. How is it different? And so on.

Lama Tsomo: Well, mindfulness certainly is a part of it. So let me just jump back and do a little map quick, and then I’ll zero in on Vajrayana. So the jhanas, that means vehicle, jhana.

Rick:  Different branches of Buddhism, is that what those are?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, vehicle. Jhana means vehicle, so vehicles to get to enlightenment, just to understand the concept there. And then there’s Hinayana, which is usually termed Theravada, and that’s the first turning of the wheel that the Buddha did. He first taught that widely. And so Theravada is, I think, what people generally are referring to when they say mindfulness, and that’s Insight Meditation Society, shamatha and vipassana are the main practices, as well as metta, which means loving kindness. So feeling that connection to all beings. So that’s one branch of Buddhism that really landed in Burma and Thailand and that area of the world. Then there was Mahayana, and that means great vehicle. The reason it’s called great vehicle is because now you’re using not just insight meditation and metta, loving kindness practice. That’s kind of like the foundation, and that’s common to all branches of Buddhism. But then in Mahayana, you also have the opportunity with those afflictive emotions that I was talking about, the trying to push away and the trying to grab for yourself and the ignorance that’s at the root of all of that. So instead of just avoiding, they’re called poisons by the Tibetans, the three poisons. So instead of just sort of walking around and avoiding the poisons, which is what’s done in Theravada, in Mahayana, you apply an antidote. So for example, the antidote to anger is forbearance, sometimes translated as patience, but I think forbearance is a better term to get at it. So Mahayana is quite a big school, and it includes Chan Buddhism in China, and Vietnamese Zen and Japanese Zen. So those are Mahayana. That also includes the practice of compassion as being key to full enlightenment. And then a subcategory of the great vehicle, Mahayana, is Vajrayana, and that’s the one that went to Tibet. That one, there are a few important differences. So it includes the others in the practices, and you begin with those kinds of practices. But it’s kind of like building a house, where you begin with calming the mind and becoming more mindful as a foundation and loving kindness. Then you’re adding the walls, and Vajrayana is like the roof. The medicine gets stronger and more efficient, this is according to Tibetans, as you go, and you’re getting somebody who’s been studying Tibetan Buddhism. I did study the other ones actually in that same progression, so it was kind of handy. I found my way to Vajrayana and really settled there, because instead of walking around the poison or applying an antidote, now you actually take that poisonous emotion, like anger for example, and peel away the layers of drama and ego, and get to the very essence of its quality. It has this sharp, clear quality to it. So, it is actually one of the five timeless awarenesses that are qualities of the dharmakaya and really very much present in that template level of the sambhogakaya. It’s called mirror-like timeless awareness, because of its particular quality. Each of the five timeless awarenesses have different qualities, which then will play out in manifestation in infinite ways, as they weave together. Unfortunately, because we’re occluded and we’ve got a lot of ego and layers of misunderstanding, then we just feel pissed off, right? We aren’t experiencing pure mirror-like timeless awareness. We can use that feeling as a flag, “Oh, I could travel back home by just peeling the layers of the onion of that very emotion.” There are practices to help you do that. So that’s why I say it’s very efficient. For example, at one point I was doing one of these powerful practices that involve an archetypal image and so on and so forth, and a mantra which is archetypal sound, to help you tune into that channel. I was able to get down to the essence of it, to find my way to mirror-like wisdom. Then I was basically in the point of view of the ocean, and I felt complete compassion for this person who had been making war on me for years, and I’d been ignoring it. In meditation, I just realized, “Oh my gosh, they’ve been making war on me for years,” and I was furious. I did this practice with more intensity than I’ve ever done it before. They say there’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. And I was in a foxhole. It was terrible. My whole nervous system was on fire with this, and it felt awful. So I wanted to get rid of that. So I called on this principle of reality in the form of this deity, in the form of this image, used these methods to really tune into that channel, and it worked. It was amazing.

Rick:  That’s great.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah.

Rick:  You know, when you think of Christianity, for instance, you have everything from the snake handlers and the Westboro Baptist Church, all the way up to Meister Eckhart and Mother Teresa and Teresa of Avila, a huge spectrum of different things. You wonder, how much of this would Jesus actually align with, probably the stuff on the latter end of the spectrum that I just mentioned. And then in terms of Buddhism, you have all the different things you just mentioned, and I wonder how closely all these different things align with what the Buddha was actually teaching, and what he would think of them if he were alive today, and reviewing what everybody’s doing in his name. Do all these different branches and things claim to be representing the Buddha accurately and the others not so much, or are they just taking particular facets of what he offered and emphasizing those, or what?

Lama Tsomo: Well, you could say that, for example, with the three jhanas, that he was teaching those three levels, not to everybody, because especially Vajrayana, excuse me, it was a select few, and it was kept secret for a very, very long time, because with strong medicine, you know, it’s kind of like you need a prescription.

Rick:  Right.

Lama Tsomo: You’ve got to be under a doctor’s care, this kind of thing. It’s true, you know, like what I was mentioning with the working with the subtle energies in breath and so on and so forth, that’s a “don’t try this at home” unless you’re under the care of a lama.

Rick:  Yeah, people go crazy abusing or misusing various powerful techniques, pranayama techniques and things like that.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly, kundalini and so on.

Rick:  Getting in big trouble.

Lama Tsomo: That’s right. So I was very lucky that Rinpoche happened to be my teacher, he happens to be an expert at those practices, and was waiting for his green card, some stage of his green card to come through, so I was alone in retreat and he spent a ton of time just teaching me.

Rick:  That’s great.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, so pretty amazing opportunity. But let’s see, there was an earlier part of your question.

Rick:  Well, it was just about how representative of what the Buddha was actually teaching. Do we even know what the Buddha was actually teaching? You know, and maybe that’s up for wild speculation also, so it’s really impossible to answer the question.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, well let’s start with the fact that nothing was written down for 300 years.

Rick:  Yeah, same with Jesus, it’s like who knows what was actually going on.

Lama Tsomo: Or however many years it was, yeah, and people memorized and taught other people. But again, those are words, and part of the … I can’t remember where it is in the sutras, but they talk about the Buddha teaching to a crowd of people, and when people compared notes afterwards, they all heard something different. So they all got different teachings.

Rick:  Even though he was saying the same thing, that is so true.

Lama Tsomo: Well, who knows exactly what was going on there, because if he was coming from this non-local, whole ocean, channel-changing kind of thing, then they may actually have gotten different teachings. I don’t know how that works.

Rick:  No, that’s true too. The first time I ever met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on a course, he was giving a talk and he said, “You know, I’m saying one thing and you’re hearing a thousand different things,” because there were about that many people in the audience. He said, “Hopefully the day will come when you’ll just be hearing one thing.” But a good teacher can teach on many levels simultaneously and there are always going to be in any group people at different levels, and so it could be that …

Lama Tsomo: There’s that too.

Rick:  Yeah, he might have been teaching kind of multi-dimensionally.

Lama Tsomo: That’s right, and you can take it different ways, and it could also be that he was just saying one thing and different students were on their own sub-channels and hearing it slightly differently. We all know how that goes when we sit at a meeting, trying to decide on something. People have different points of view and they’re hearing different things and so on, because of their own lenses.

Rick:  I suppose it’s sort of a not that important a point. I mean, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and whatever the Buddha may have been teaching, what really counts is what works, and this is obviously working for you and a lot of other things that people do work for them, so if you find something that works for you and you do it and you stick with it, great.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly, yeah, so that’s what I decided too. I road-tested the methods and I found that I was happier. I was able to deal with challenges in life, both outer and inner, much better, and I would never want to go back kind of thing. So I just continued on, and the more I did and the more retreat I did, which is total immersion, and that’s the way to change the pathways in your brain, like if you’re going to learn Spanish or whatever.

Rick:  Go to Spain.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and just don’t speak any English and only speak Spanish, and that’s how you actually become fluent. So if you want to become fluent in these more enlightened states that you get a glimpse of in daily practice, you go into retreat and then it’s more transformative so that you leave some of that dross behind. It’s really going into an alchemical process, and the word for retreat in Tibetan is tsam, which means boundary. So you go into the crucible, you turn up the heat with the practices, and you put the elements in with the practices and so on, and then you cook. Other than meal breaks and sleeping, it’s pretty much all you’re doing all day and into the evening, and you come out quite different.

Rick:  You do, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: And you still have to do a daily practice or you’re going to lose it.

Rick:  Yeah, I’m glad you’re emphasizing that. Here’s a quote from your lama, he said, “I’m not giving you a religion, I’m giving you a set of tools with which you can reach enlightenment.” And there’s sort of a …

Lama Tsomo: I was really relieved when he said that, by the way.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah, because I mean, what’s a religion going to do for you? I mean, it does something for some people because it gives them faith and hope and solace and whatnot, but if you’re actually talking about enlightenment, then a set of beliefs isn’t going to do it for you.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, I mean, I see a religion as being sort of something to help the culture.

Rick:  Yeah, maybe give you some moral guidance and some …

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, it’s very much of a cultural element to it, that people gather at the church and there’s community and this is hopefully a better way to do community than going to a bar. The Buddha talked about the three jewels, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. So if you’re trying to get somewhere, first of all, you want a guide who’s already been there and knows the way, so that’s Buddha, right? Because they’ve already gotten there. Dharma is the map, and that’s a good thing to have.

Rick:  The whole body of teaching?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, or …

Rick:  Practices and knowledge and stuff?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and then the sangha is your fellow travelers, and you help each other stay on track. So we are herd animals, let’s face it. Our brains are built for it, and we’re very tribal. The Buddha took these natural tendencies that we have and gave us a way to point ourselves, use them to actually galvanize us and propel us on the path to enlightenment. I feel very strongly about that sangha piece that is missing a bit, I feel, in American Buddhist circles, because maybe I’m thinking … My hypothesis is that we’re into rugged individualism, so we just think, “Well, I’ll practice mindfulness for myself, and it’s a daily practice for myself,” and this kind of thing, and they don’t often get together in groups. But the experience of meditating in a group is quite powerful and very helpful. Yeah, because we all infect each other with whatever we’re thinking and feeling. So if you’ve been to a rock concert, you know this. So why not use that natural human tendency to help us go where we’re trying to go by hanging out with people and really chewing on these things with people who are trying to go in the same direction, have the same intent?

Rick:  Yeah, I think it’s a very important point, and I’m glad you were emphasizing it. The biggest group I ever meditated in was about 8,000 people, and it was palpable. Boy, it was thick as a brick.

Lama Tsomo: I bet.

Rick:  Yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Well, you know, it reminds me of the difference between ambient light and laser light.

Rick:  Yeah.

Lama Tsomo: So ambient light, the waves are going up and down whenever they do, and laser light, they’re coherent light. They’re going up and down at the same time, and they can burn through wood. They can blast a tree apart if it’s a big enough laser. So that’s exactly the point. This is a nice big laser, so why not take advantage of that? In my experience, because I’ve been with groups and starting groups and so on for years, we develop deep connection with each other. That’s the basis, once you feel that, to then step it out and out and out to include everyone, all and everyone, all beings. That’s exactly what the practices such as Metta or Tonglen in my tradition do. They start with yourself, because Westerners are crummy at compassion and love for ourselves. I emphasize that a lot, as do a lot of other Western teachers. And then my tribe, the people I easily feel love or compassion for, and then stepping out until you really feel that everyone is my tribe, and the “my” becomes kind of meaningless.

Rick:  Yeah.

Lama Tsomo: But you’re holding everyone in your heart then.

Rick:  Sure. Just to dwell on the sangha thing for another moment, I mean we don’t want to be like prissy, where I can’t go to Walmart because I’ll be polluted by the consciousness of the people there, or something like that. Obviously one has to live one’s practical life, but there’s also a thing like, if you go into a coal mine with a white suit on, you’re not going to clean up the coal, but you’re definitely going to get your suit dirty. It really does matter the company you keep, as much as you have any kind of choice in the matter. It’s extremely … oh, go ahead.

Lama Tsomo: Well, here’s the other thing. It is fun sitting together with people who are kind of trying to do the same thing, pursue mindfulness, whatever you have, and comparing notes. Well, how is this working in my life, and how is the interaction going between my life and what I’m experiencing on the cushion, and am I really able to connect the wires? What do you think? Then somebody helps with that, and then I help them, and we learn about each other in a deep way, and are talking about stuff that matters. It’s very satisfying. Then there’s usually a study portion. We have learning circles, is what we call them. In the evening, there’s a study portion, a meditation portion, a breaking bread together portion, and a chewing on things together portion, and it’s just a very satisfying evening.

Rick:  Yeah. And are you talking about what happens up there at your retreat place in Montana, or what are you talking about?

Lama Tsomo: Oh, so Nam Chak is, at this point, still in the planning stages and hasn’t built the retreat facilities.

Rick:  Okay.

Lama Tsomo: We’re going to have two, one for student workers that’ll be done sooner, and then for people who just want to go whole hog with this total immersion and do the traditional three-year retreat, we’re going to also build a facility for that. But right now, what we’re doing is starting learning circles all over the place, and they can do our e-course and read the book for those inputs to then chew on together. We support the starting of learning circles with a little toolkit, so they can go to namchak.org and download that stuff, the e-course or the toolkit, that kind of thing. We also travel. So I’m about to go teach the vipassana Tibetan style, and that’s the name of the little weekend retreat, with Rinpoche’s brother, who is a high-level scholar and a fantastic lama in his own right. I’ve taken many teachings from him. We’re going to teach together, first in Berkeley and then in New York, and that’s coming up next month.

Rick:  Great. There’s a thing on batgap.com, under “resources,” where if you put in a location, you will see any kind of activities being offered by people I’ve interviewed in the past, and it kind of radiates out geographically. So if you put in the zip code for Midtown Manhattan, then you’d see things in Manhattan, things in New Jersey, things in Pennsylvania. It sort of radiates out. So I’ll let you know about that after the interview. Irene will, and you can put your things in there.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, exactly. We’re trying to work on that so that people can find each other in different locations and have learning circles together. I’m talking like four to eight people, something like that, very small, intimate, where you can fit in somebody’s living room kind of thing.

Rick:  Yeah. Actually, that’s one thing I like about your book is, you read it and there’s all these practices in there, and there’s little cards in the back. Let me get out the little cards that you could … here’s some cards, I’ll put it on here, that you could use to sort of remind yourself how to do the practices and keep them by your meditation seat or whatever until you’ve got it down. And then you also have all kinds of things on your website that people can download for free and listen to and so on. So you can learn quite a bit. I’m sure there’s a need for having a one-to-one experience with a teacher such as yourself, but you can learn …

Lama Tsomo: Well, we actually do have monthly meditation coaching calls where I do … it’ll be a small group of people, but I do one-on-ones with each person and everybody listens to each other and they’re like, “Oh, I’m glad I heard that one,” because of course it’s all … we appreciate all of them.

Rick:  Yeah, great. So people can sign up for that on your website, I’m sure, namchak.org.

Lama Tsomo: And then there are also these retreats where we come to those two locations.

Rick:  Nice. That almost sounded like we were wrapping up the interview, but we’re not.

Lama Tsomo: We just got into how we were trying to … because I want people to have some follow-through. I didn’t want to put the book out in the world and then people read the book, that was nice, and then they go back to their lives. There’s got to be some follow-through.

Rick:  Yeah. While, I’m thinking of it. I did mention in the beginning that this is the first part of a three-part series of books. Maybe in a sentence or two, what’s in each book, this one, the next two?

Lama Tsomo: Well, I mentioned the Ngondro in the beginning, when we were talking right in the beginning, that I was doing this series of practices. And by the end of the trilogy, I hope to have taught, or at least introduced, that whole series of practices.

Rick:  And people will be able to learn them from the books? Kind of?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, it’s a good introduction, but you really are best off going to teachings because that is stronger medicine. Any kind of meditation is better learned from somebody who really knows what they’re doing. We can teach …

Rick:  Because you and I both experienced before we got on to what we ended up doing.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly. And there’s plenty of blind leading going on.

Rick:  Your voice cut out.

Lama Tsomo: Plenty of blind leading the blind. And also thinking that we can get it from a book. It turns out to be a bad idea. I did try that and had some kind of scary results. So it is good to have the real live instruction from somebody who’s been through it before and everything. And then you know, I’m taking this tool and I’m using it on my mind. I want to use it correctly and get the most benefit out of it too. So I’ll cover all of those in the three books. The one that I’ve already written the rough draft for, the second one, covers more of the first stages of the Ngondro because I wanted to start with just … imagine if somebody’s curious about meditation, has no idea, could they pick up this book and start there. So that’s what I wanted to do in “Why is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling?” my first book.

Rick:  I just want to mention to those in the live stream audience, a couple hundred people watching, if you have a question you can go to the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com and then the bottom of that page there’s a form. You can submit a question through that form and it’ll be reviewed by somebody and then sent to me. So feel free to do that if you have a question. One thing about me is that I’ve never felt that I was a very good visualizer. I have a certain type of meditation I do which really works for me and I’ve really enjoyed it, but when I start reading about all these techniques that involve various kinds of visualization and all, they seem kind of complicated to me and I have a feeling I wouldn’t be very good at them. So maybe you could address that for those who might feel as I do.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, the effort to visualize something already opens up different parts of the brain and begins to have them in coordination, in concert with each other so that you’re not just thinking in words which are only using parts of frontal lobes. Now you’re opening up and activating and involving more parts of the brain just in the very effort of visualizing. And …

Rick:  Your video froze up there for a second just after you said using different parts of the brain, visualizing, then poof, it froze. So repeat that.

Lama Tsomo: That then involves more of you in the practice and it’s more deeply transformative and Jung, of course, talked about the power of imagery. So the very effort of trying to visualize myself being this Dakini Sangwa Yeshe, for example, already … and by the way, guys are also visualizing themselves to be Green Tara or Guru Rinpoche. It doesn’t matter what sex you are, you can visualize yourself and should, both from time to time.

Rick:  So what does that do for you?

Lama Tsomo: Well it brings out all your feminine side, your masculine side, but all these different facets of it because there are all these different beings who you can be.

Rick:  And are these real beings that you think exist on some level or just sort of archetypical, traditional mythological kinds of images?

Lama Tsomo: Well, the principle of the mother, the great mother, is a principle so that’s real. Then we use images to try and tune into that channel. That’s how I see it. So the image may not be very clear. That’s okay. Right now, if you stop and think of your bedroom, for example, can you visualize that a little bit?

Rick:  Sure.

Lama Tsomo: So you know where, for example, the lighting sources are and where the bed is in relation to the window?

Rick:  Yep.

Lama Tsomo: Okay, so …

Rick:  So I just visualized something.

Lama Tsomo: You did, because you’re familiar with it. And you can visualize making coffee in the morning and how you do that, and a Tibetan would be completely flummoxed by that, right? Fresh from Tibet, totally flummoxed, and you’d have to explain about …

Rick:  They’d make a rancid yak butter tea or something.

Lama Tsomo: Well, they wouldn’t know what … you know, the Mr. Coffee, they don’t know what that is, and you have to then describe what that is. And then there’s electricity involved, and maybe they’ve never had electricity, and so when you say, “Well, then you turn it on,” they’re like, “What? What’s that?” So you have to go into this elaborate description and everything, and they think, “Oh my gosh, this is way too complicated, I can’t do this.” But for us it’s easy because we’re familiar with it. So you spend a lot of time with these, so you get familiar, and that’s another reason why just even a weekend retreat really settles you in the practice because you’re immersed in it.

Rick:  Yeah, that’s another important point. We’ve talked about the value of practice and the value of the sangha. So doing a retreat from time to time can be extremely powerful compared to just trying to meditate or do some practice on your own every day.

Lama Tsomo: It’s both/and. So just as with sangha, you want both your individual meditation, because there’s a particular benefit to that, you can kind of do what you want with it and so on and so forth, and then there’s a particular benefit of meditating in a group. Likewise, there’s the benefit of total immersion of retreat, and there’s the benefit of carrying through with those new habits so that they become really well established, and as you go then, some of the old ones again sort of fall away, and the new pathways get stronger and stronger, and those are the ones you go on. So that masters like my teachers, particularly Tulka Sangha Rinpoche, he really can practice, I’ve seen him in action practicing it on the spot in everyday life, where he can, you know, we’re supposed to let a thought arise and then let it go, and just we’re still there as thoughts come and go. Well I’ve seen him do that with stuff right in action in the day, because he’s so habituated and he’s done hours of meditation every day for most of his life.

Rick:  Yeah. Well I think we were trying to define enlightenment earlier, and I think that that’s a good criteria of it, is that it’s not something that comes and goes, it’s something that is stable regardless of what you’re doing, and that necessitates, usually for most people, it necessitates some kind of long-term culturing of the mind and nervous system. People are familiar with the term neuroplasticity, that doesn’t happen instantly, it happens over days, weeks, months, years, you can sculpt the brain, so to speak.

Lama Tsomo: Right, so doing this combination of total immersion, transformation, and follow-through. Total transformation, another step in transformation and follow-through, and then you kind of create this upward spiral if you do the occasional retreat and then follow-through with daily practice.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah. There are some people who, I won’t dwell on this too much, but there are some people who sort of poo-poo the idea of practice altogether and they say, “Oh, you’re already enlightened and doing a practice implies that you aren’t already enlightened, you’re reaching for your… you give up the search, you’re searching for something that you already have if you just see it,” and so on and so forth.

Lama Tsomo: Well, that’s the big thing, the operative word is “if” you can just see it. Well that’s the problem, and we’re talking about cleaning the windshield, and then we won’t be in the mud pit that I was mentioning. We clean all that off and then it’s a “pure land,” is the term, a heavenly realm or whatever we want to call it.

Rick:  Sure, and as Ramana said, “It takes a thorn to remove a thorn.” And speaking of mud pits, if you’re standing in the middle of a mud pit and someone says, “Come out of the mud pit,” and you say, “How?” And they say, “Well, take a step.” Wait a minute, you’re asking me to take a step in mud again. Yeah, but you’re moving in the direction of being out of the mud puddle.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. One thing that often happens along the way is as people are doing these meditation practices, they’ll have these meditative experiences and get really excited about them. Rinpoche really has strongly cautioned me, “Don’t get excited about those.” They’re called “Nyam” in Tibetan, so they’re well-known.

Rick:  Good experiences?

Lama Tsomo: Well, I mean, there can be bad ones too, but he was referring to the nice ones. But there are three categories of those. They have all these categories for everything. So the three categories here are bliss, clarity, non-thought, freedom from thought. And we can experience all three in a meditative experience, or mainly one, or one or another can be emphasized, that kind of thing. And we get really excited about it and all proud of ourselves and everything. That just took a nice little signpost and kind of sullied it, kind of ruined it. So it is just a signpost and we’re supposed to keep going.

Rick:  Yeah, it also spoils the sort of innocence and spontaneity of the practice because you’re sitting there trying for an experience and that way you’re not actually doing the practice you’re supposed to be doing that brought about the original experience.

Lama Tsomo: You’re practicing clinging and pride, which are the opposite direction. That’s ego stuff. So to me it’s kind of like driving down the road, you’re on your way to, let’s say, LA from Santa Barbara, I don’t know, and as you’re driving south you see a sign and it says, “So many miles to LA.” And you pull off the road and sit down in front of the sign and stare at the sign. Isn’t that a wonderful sign?

Rick:  Yeah, beautiful.

Lama Tsomo: You know? You get in the car and keep going. I mean, great, you saw the sign, now just keep going.

Rick:  Yeah. Also, I think one thing that’s worth noting is that some people are wired such that they naturally have flashy experiences. It’s kind of the way they operate and other people don’t. And you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. You know, you can get all hung up in envy and then trying to be somebody or not. I don’t know.

Lama Tsomo: Well, that’s just more ego stuff, you know, keeping a scorecard on whatever outward experiences that people are having. That really isn’t the point. You know, you’re still slogging, stepping through the mud to get out.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah. A question came in from Dan in London. He’s asking, “Is there anything in Buddhism like Bhakti Yoga that is a practice of loving devotion, where devotion to God” I know that you don’t use the term “God” but devotion to God might be in more personal terms to people and things in the relative world.

Lama Tsomo: Absolutely.

Rick:  I think you said you practice Guru Yoga, right?

Lama Tsomo: We do practice Guru Yoga. It’s actually fundamental to Vajrayana because of…there are several reasons, because of the intensity of the practices and the level at which they work, it’s important to join your mind as much as possible with the Lama. And that is Guru Yoga. We’re also, we are actually, of course, made of Buddha, if you will, made of enlightened mind, and we just don’t know it. We have this tendency to project anyway, and so we’re projecting onto these deities, and we see them as enlightened mind taking that form. We understand, we literally project it from our heart-mind out there and then take it back in at the end of the practice. We practice Guru Yoga the same way. We’re asked to visualize the Lama as an enlightened being, so not…you know, and my teacher said, “Don’t have a picture of me. I’ve got this stain on my tooth. I’ve got wrinkles. You know, my hair is going gray,” this kind of thing. You know, have a picture of Guru Rinpoche or something like that and imagine him, but you imagine the presence of the person you met, you know, who you actually have had a chance to meet on this level that I’m stuck on, right? And it helps me. So it’s used in that way, and you project out and then take it back in. Many times, even in one practice, you can do it multiple times, but certainly every practice session you’re doing that. So in a sense, there’s some aspect of Guru Yoga in all the practices we do.

Rick:  So when you do that, do you feel a lot of love and devotion?

Lama Tsomo: Absolutely, yeah. Because you’re joining your mind.

Rick:  So it cultures the heart as well as the mind.

Lama Tsomo: Absolutely, and you also piggyback on the Lama’s level of realization. I bumped into that by accident, actually.

Rick:  Tell that story, that’s good.

Lama Tsomo: I was practicing Guru Yoga at the end of my little Ngondro practice, you know, where you’ve got that series, and I was sinking into that and doing the mantra and visualizing not Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche with a stain on his tooth, etc., but Guru Rinpoche, who is the master who brought Buddhism to Tibet and was seen by Tibetans as the second Buddha, the reincarnation of the Buddha. So I’m busy doing that, and then right afterwards I’m sitting doing just pure shamatha vipassana meditation, and I’m like, “So Rinpoche, lately, when I’m sitting doing shamatha vipassana, it’s like on a whole different level, and it’s not even me totally. I mean, I’m there, but it’s like something more, it’s like way beyond what I can normally experience.” He said, “Well, you do that right after the shamatha vipassana, right after Guru Yoga, right?” And I said, “Well, sure, yeah.” He said, “So you joined your mind with mine, and that’s why it felt that way.” I said, “Oh, so going up the mountain of enlightenment, if you will, I’m sort of riding on his shoulders.” It really felt like that, it clicked, and I was like, “Oh, that is what it was. It wasn’t just me.”

Rick:  Yeah. In various traditions, there’s definitely a thing of attuning your mind to the mind of the master or the teacher or the guru, and actually sort of mind-melding, you know, or creating this sort of resonance such that you actually attain that enlightened state by proximity and by attunement. It can be a very powerful and fast way of evolving if you have that opportunity.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly, and so early English speakers referred to Tibetan Buddhism as “llama-ism” because it’s such a strong part of the path. Even the deities that we’re envisioning, it’s like the llama is the doorway to that because he’s somebody we’ve met who is so connected to that other level. So we can piggyback in that way by imagining that the deities are the llama, his enlightened mind in drag.

Rick:  Yeah. Okay, here’s a question that came in from Kay in Shoreview, Minnesota. He or she asks, “I always wondered what the point of all this birth and evolution is. Why are people born in ignorance and then have to take the time to gain enlightenment? Is this for entertainment?”

Rick:  Yeah, who is entertainment?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, so I gather from my studies, and it kind of makes sense, that we’re taking a very scenic route to enlightenment. The Dalai Lama says, “Sooner or later, we will all reach enlightenment. Better it be sooner.” Ha ha ha ha, then he does his little laugh. So I think he summed it up right there. We are seemingly going around in circles endlessly, since beginningless time and taking in another body and being in another situation, so on and so on, and around we go. There isn’t a whole lot of meaning to all that circuitousness. So if we can find a more direct path, we’d best pursue it. We may be a worm next time or whatever. So that would be much more difficult. So in the universe …

Rick:  Make hay while the sun shines.

Lama Tsomo: Well, and I think, if you think of the demographics of beings that we can’t see because we’re not tuned in to those levels of reality, there must be infinite numbers of beings. So to be in the right incarnation, with the right circumstances to get the teachings and so on and so forth, that’s a very small demographic. So we might want to take advantage of that. I talk about that in my second book actually.

Rick:  Oh good, that’s an important thing to do. As one teacher put it, “If you don’t take advantage of this opportunity, you’ve sold a diamond for the price of spinach.”

Lama Tsomo: Which you eat and then poop out.

Rick:  Right. One thing to Kay’s question I would say is, he’s asking what the point of all this birth and evolution is. What’s the point of the universe? And I think, why does hydrogen gas become stars and planets and giraffes and all these life forms that seem to be getting more and more complex and growing bigger and bigger brains? I could give an answer to that, you could probably give an answer to that, but that’s an interesting question to ask.

Lama Tsomo: Absolutely. It’s a big question and I’m still trying to understand really what it is. I don’t know the full answer to that. I wonder whether our little minds can encompass the true, full intention of that awareness that’s the whole ocean awareness. Because that’s really what we’re talking about. What is the intent, the enlightened intent of that ocean, the bottom of the ocean kind of thing. It’s hard to say. One thing that I understand from Buddhist thought is that unfolding of the universe into many more and more complex manifestations and then going back into emptiness, there’s a certain bio-rhythm with that that happens again and again. There’s also bio-rhythms of consciousness where we’re more murky and less murky. Right now we’re in a very murky time.

Rick:  Leading right into what I wanted to talk to you about, another one of the points here. Yeah, there’s cycles throughout history and cycles in societies and so on and so forth. And one thing you write, I believe it was in your book, “One of humanity’s great shifts is going to happen when the shit hits the fan. Your major task is to make the transition as graceful as possible. This will require inner as well as outer ways of working with life.” So a lot of people say this, they feel like something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? (Old Dylan song). There’s definitely something going on in the world. We’re on the brink of some dramatic, perhaps cataclysmic change and all the upsurge of technological advances juxtaposed with the upsurge of interest in spiritual development which isn’t carried so much by the 6 o’clock news but is nonetheless real, signifies something major is happening. So what would you like to comment about that kind of thing?

Lama Tsomo: Well it seems it’s been predicted by many different spiritual traditions and that’s true in the Tibetan Buddhist one. So Guru Rinpoche, I mentioned earlier, really landed Buddhism in Tibet and he made a lot of predictions and very specific ones about these times. He referred to them as “Dung-in” which means negative times. So that’s not very hopeful right there. And he gave specific signs like that he named particular mountains and they would look like tiger stripes and you know how mountains have these ridges and valleys on their sides, right? Normally those mountains are high Himalayas so the snow never melts near the top but now it’s melting on one side, on the south side and so they’re striped. He predicted SARS, you know the shape of the germ which correlated with what they saw in the microscopes. So a lot of really specific predictions. I could enumerate a ton of other predictions but the point is he was seeing that this was becoming a murkier time and more ego infused time and muddier, the mud pit is thicker or whatever. And he said Vajrayana would be actually on the upswing because it has such strong practices that sort of take you by the nape of the neck and plop you in a clearer state and we need something like that in these times.

Rick:  Yeah, there’s something about the Chinese symbol for crisis contains some symbol for opportunity or something like that and a number of traditions have said that well you know when things get really rough that’s when people really get fervent about their spiritual development. Even though it might be seen as a dark time, it’s also a time of great opportunity.

Lama Tsomo: Yes, and we can see that there’s a new paradigm trying to be born. We’ve had new paradigms come and supplant old ones. For example, the Renaissance just after the earlier time and then other paradigm shifts that work their way through society. William Irwin Thompson is a historian who wrote the book The Time It Takes Falling Bodies to Light. So that moment when it tips over into the new paradigm. He looked at well how did that happen when it went into the Renaissance exactly. Fascinating to look at. It starts with the mystics because they’re used to seeing the unseen and so it’s still very unseen and amorphous. Then the artists are used to working with the news and so they can work with something a little bit unseen and they can communicate it through the arts. The next people then are the businessmen who now that it’s being communicated, they can kind of get infected with this new paradigm and if they can figure, find out about a new way of doing business, sure they’re going to do it. Why not? The last people to catch on are the political leaders who then run to the front of the pack. First they’re fighting it because they were in power in the old paradigm and then they run to the front of the pack and say, “No, no, no, I’m leading you here.” So I just had to digress into that.

Rick:  That’s a good digression, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah. I’m a fan of William Irwin Thompson. But anyway, another prediction that Guru Rinpoche said was that all of the elements would rise up against us. And we’re seeing that now.

Rick:  You mean like climate? That kind of element?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah. All of the elements. We’re having bigger, stronger, more devastating wildfires. There’s mudslides and earthquakes and floods and hurricanes. So all of the elements are rising up against us. And he said it would be because of our own actions.

Rick:  Yeah. I kind of think of it as Mother Nature. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Lama Tsomo: Well, I don’t want to lead people into thinking, “Oh, the new paradigm is coming and it will be a little uncomfortable and we’ll be okay and it will be nice,” and this kind of thing. That’s not what I’m getting from his predictions. It is going to be, there is going to be some cataclysm and terrible tragedy, lots of loss of life.

Rick:  Yeah, I’m afraid you’re right. Even the war in Syria can be attributed to climate change, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what could happen if sea level rises 20 feet or something.

Lama Tsomo: Or disease.

Rick:  Yeah, disease.

Lama Tsomo: Huge plague. Yeah, we’ve had near-misses and I don’t know if we’ll always miss. What were you going to say?

Rick:  Oh, I was just going to say, I was on a boat ride one time in Switzerland with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and he used to refer to this as the “phase transition”, the change that was coming in society. And somebody said, “Maharishi, how can we survive the phase transition?” And he said, “Hold on to yourself.” And he meant capital “S” self.

Lama Tsomo: Yes, exactly. That’s it. I’m practicing as much as I can and trying to share these very efficient, effective practices with as many people as possible and as deeply as possible for whoever is interested in going deeper, because I feel that’s the best thing I can do at this time. Everybody’s got their part to play and that’s mine, you know, that feels like mine to do in this life.

Rick:  Yeah, that’s a good one. A question came in from Christoph Schmidt in Luxembourg. He asks, “Are there physical ailments, medical conditions that can block subtle energy channels and by doing so prevent, for example, successful visualization practice or deeper states of consciousness?”

Lama Tsomo: Hmm, hmm. I want to actually go a little bit backwards with that question and start with the presumption about visualization, because there was one thing I wanted to say when you were talking before about not needing to visualize so clearly. You know, the effort of visualization is the important thing and they talk about deity pride and what they mean by that is to feel oneself indistinguishable from, yerme is the term in Tibetan, indistinguishable from the deity. So it’s not as though I’m subsumed into the deity and the deity isn’t subsumed in me, right? So there’s this both/and kind of indistinguishable experience. That’s the important thing. If you can just visualize the seed syllable, which is usually just a letter, if you can do that and imagine light rays going out and in and just feeling, “I am this presence,” that’s it. That’s the essence of it.

Rick:  You can do that even if you have some physical infirmity or something like that, obviously.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and that’s your way home, you know, the quote you were giving. Just coming back to yourself in that way because your self, capital S, is like that. I just find a great channel changer for tuning into that and we want to keep doing that as much as possible. You’re supposed to imagine yourself to be the deity as you walk through your day, you know. In other words, coming from the S, capital S self.

Rick:  One thing you mention in your book and somehow that fellow’s question reminded me of it is, you know, you’re not a big advocate of using drugs of any kind. These days there’s a lot of popularity of ayahuasca and other drugs and I think you had a cautionary tone with regard to those things.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, first of all, with something like ayahuasca, some people fool around with that without doing it within the context in which it’s meant to be used. And there’s lineage and practices and the equivalent of lamas who help you in that journey and you wouldn’t want to be without a good qualified guide on that. So that’s one thing. Then I also mentioned earlier that it’s kind of like climbing a tree and seeing a glimpse of what’s ahead but then you have to go back down and you still have to walk. That was what Ram Dass found. You know, he did a whole bunch of LSD and he kept going to this whole ocean experience kind of thing. Then he would come back down and he couldn’t carry it through because he hadn’t done any practices and he got tired of having to constantly drop acid. So that’s why he went to India and just fully devoted himself to doing the practices so that he could just, you know, do the transformation follow through, transformation follow through that I was talking about, so he could actually come from that kind of place all the time.

Rick:  Yeah. One thing that, you know, I mean I did a fair amount of that myself back in the 60s, but these days, you know, if people say, “Oh, you should try ayahuasca,” I have this feeling like I don’t want to play Russian roulette with my brain. I don’t know exactly what effect that would have. And you know, so there’s kind of a safety first element, you know?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah. The thing that I feel is dependable with these practices that I’ve been studying is, first of all, you don’t depend on any chemicals.

Rick:  Externally, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah. And so then you have the channel changer. You don’t have to like go to an ayahuasca ceremony with the right person to usher you through the experience and so on and so forth. You can just, you’ve got more of a channel changer yourself.

Rick:  Yeah, and they say that your brain actually produces DMT and all these chemicals on its own. There’s ways of having that happen naturally.

Lama Tsomo: I don’t know about that. I haven’t studied that.

Rick:  They say that, yeah.

Lama Tsomo: Okay. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve certainly had enlightened experiences, lots of them, but I don’t know if I’m producing those chemicals while I’m having those experiences.

Rick:  Undoubtedly, there’s some kind of chemical thing going on in your brain if you’re having any experiences of physiological correlate.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, but which one? The brain does lots of different …

Rick:  Oh, that would have to be studied. You know, there could be a lot of research done on that kind of thing.

Lama Tsomo: Well, so one thing they’ve done is study gamma waves. The orchestration of many different parts of the brain that have to happen just right to produce a moment of gamma waves, very unusual. And those are “aha” moments. So they measured the gamma waves of masters, really experienced rinpoches, you know, masters and so on, and a French fellow, so it wasn’t just Tibetans. He had studied the practices, the Tibetan practices, but he, Matthieu Ricard, is French. So anyway, they measure it, and they had all the funny hats on with all the wires coming out. They looked at the needles and everything,

Rick:  You froze up there for a few seconds. You were saying they looked at the needles and …

Lama Tsomo: On the machines, and they found that the masters, before they were even supposed to be meditating, just in their normal state, were already off the charts with the gamma waves they were producing normally. Then when they meditated, and they were doing a form of Dzogchen, it was way off the charts, never before seen, really remarkable. They kept checking the equipment to see if there was something wrong with the equipment. They couldn’t believe it. But it was true. Then this other fellow wanted to debunk it, and he brought the same masters over there, and he put the funny hats on and so on, and then he came running in again and again and said, “I think there’s something wrong with the machinery.”

Rick:  Same results, right?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, same results.

Rick:  Well, the interesting point it brings out is that when we’re talking about enlightenment or higher states of consciousness and all, they are … just as we know, as we go from waking to dreaming to sleeping, for instance, not only does our subjective experience change, but our physiology changes. Well if enlightenment is as radically different from ordinary waking consciousness as it’s reputed to be, there should be a radically different brainwave signature and other physiological measures correlating with it. And the story you just told, and lots of research that’s being done, indicates that there is.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. It wasn’t just that study that showed it.

Rick:  So it’s not just some little mood or some attitude or some belief or anything else. It’s a radical rewiring of the way our brain functions.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, so we have the potential to just react on instinct, you know, from incoming senses to knee-jerk reaction. We also have the, how shall I say, the apparatus in our brains to react in a much more compassionate and resourced, enlightened way. It is a lot about just changing habits, walking through the forest to actually get some progress.

Rick:  Here’s a question that came in from Prakash Bastola in San Diego, “What is attention? I feel there’s a field of awareness, which is me, but my focus or attention moves from one object in the field of awareness to another. Is enlightenment being able to attend to everything in the field of awareness all at once? Can you talk about attention in relation to awareness?”

Lama Tsomo: Well, I’m going to borrow imagery from Carl Jung and say that conscious attention is like a lighthouse beam on one little part of the ocean. He says, “The conscious mind is like that and can only focus its attention on one thing at a time.” Modern brain studies on multitasking have shown that actually we are shuttling back and forth between the two things. We can only in one nanosecond focus on this or that. So we’re just shuttling. That’s attention and that’s associated with the conscious mind. Then there’s the unconscious or super conscious or whatever, you know, there’s the ocean. So there’s that ocean metaphor again because it’s the biggest thing we know, I guess. So you’ve got the lighthouse and the ocean and awareness is a quality of that ocean. Awareness is much bigger and wider and different qualitatively than the experience of attention on one thing. I imagine that an enlightened Buddha has full awareness and is coming from that all the time and then can choose to focus on one thing or another. I want to just mention that very few people who have reached enlightenment remain in their body. So that was the unusual thing about Buddha.

Rick:  You mean the moment they get enlightened they drop the body or what?

Lama Tsomo: They drop the body, they reach rainbow body, quite often they reach enlightenment at the moment of death because that is something that can foster that last bit so that they go over that line that I was talking about of no return, so that you can’t be a jerk sometimes and enlightened other times. You can’t fall back.

Rick:  Well, I don’t know, but maybe that’s so in the Tibetan tradition. But you have people like Ramana or Papaji or Nisargadatta or Neem Karoli Baba and all these guys, and I mean, what was her name? I forget. But many different saints and sages who apparently attained enlightenment and they stuck around for quite a while afterwards. I mean, sometimes you had to keep an eye on them or they’d wander off into the forest, but many of them lived for decades in an enlightened state.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, I can’t speak about them. I have no idea. You know, I can only say something about the Dalai Lama who is a very highly realized fellow, and as I said, he says he hasn’t crossed that line.

Rick:  In other words, he would not call himself enlightened? Is that what you’re saying?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, that’s what he said. But I have no idea about other people, what state they’re in.

Rick:  Yeah, who knows? How can we judge?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, I’m only going, you know, when the Dalai Lama self-reports, I feel like, okay, well, he’s the expert on that.

Rick:  Yeah, and it all comes back to how we define enlightenment too.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, that’s it.

Rick:  I like to think of it, in my definition, as a potentially functional state in which the totality can become a living reality through the instrumentality of a human body, a human nervous system, and that it can be integrated. You were talking earlier about channel changing and being able to sort of tune into all the channels simultaneously. That would be my understanding of it, and so you could be driving a car or even raising a family and doing all kinds of complicated things in the world, and yet tuned into all those other channels simultaneously, perpetually aware of the dharmakaya level and the other levels, just sort of the whole package.

Lama Tsomo: It seems to me that that would be possible. I mean, the Buddha was able to function and talk to people.

Rick:  Yeah, sure. There’s also probably a dharma thing, whether it’s your dharma to stick around or drop it.

Lama Tsomo: Yes, exactly, and he had a strong intention from before that incarnation out of compassion.

Rick:  A role to play.

Lama Tsomo: Exactly, out of compassion he really wanted to be able to stay and his form wouldn’t just melt away, but he would remain and share that knowledge, and so that momentum carried through even past his full enlightenment.

Rick:  Yeah. We’re running out of time, but I want to ask you one more question that somehow my eyes keep falling on in the paper, and I don’t even know if you can answer this, but it’s an interesting question, perhaps one to leave everyone pondering. We talked about karma and reincarnation, and that your tradition believes in both of those things, and “by belief” I mean the deeper mechanics of those things have been understood and cognized by the custodians of your tradition and other traditions as well. So an interesting question about karma, which in the Gita Lord Krishna says is unfathomable to human intellect because it’s so complicated. An interesting question about it is, “Who or what keeps track of it?”

Lama Tsomo: Well, again, if the depths of the ocean pre-form is connected to all form, and it’s all aware and all knowing because it’s connected to everything, then it’s aware of all of that.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah, you could say that.

Lama Tsomo: And it doesn’t have to contain it into a brain and nervous system.

Rick:  No, I mean, yeah. That’s too much data for the human nervous system.

Lama Tsomo: That’s right, but that’s not a problem in the sort of the enfolded universe, you know, aspect of the universe.

Rick:  Yeah, if you think about it, I’ve used this example before, but if you take a gram of hydrogen or nitrogen, some gas, and if you enlarge the atoms in it to the size of uncooked popcorn kernels, they would bury the continental United States nine miles deep. So there are that many atoms in a gram of a gas, and each one of those atoms is functioning perfectly according to whatever laws of nature it abides by, and the interactions between them are perfectly coordinated. Okay, so if that’s all happening in a single gram, and then if we extrapolate out to the whole vast universe, obviously there’s some kind of amazing intelligence permeating and orchestrating this whole thing. So keeping track of karma should be a piece of cake.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, of course. The only thing I’m not ready to go with you on is the orchestrating part.

Rick:  Okay, and why? Just why?

Lama Tsomo: Because part of enlightened intent is allowing free will.

Rick:  Whoa, there’s another topic.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and that’s unfathomable. There’s some kind of interaction between karma and free will, enlightened intent and free will, and so we’re able to act out of confusion despite the fact that the center of it all, the source of it all, is not confused.

Rick:  Yeah, well by orchestrating, I don’t think that necessarily contradicts the notion of free will. It doesn’t mean it’s predetermined or rigidly orchestrated. There’s certain laws of nature by which everything functions and free will could perhaps be operant within those laws of nature.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, there must be some sort of interaction between orchestration and free will.

Rick:  Yeah, it’s interesting to ponder. It could be a whole other discussion. And there are spiritual teachers and people interested in spirituality, like Sam Harris for instance, who say there is no such thing as free will and they cite scientific evidence for this. I don’t know. To me it seems like there is, but what do I know?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, I think there’s got to be some element of free will even though a lot of it really isn’t, and it’s more habits or neurology or a lot of other things that we aren’t aware of. But I still believe there is an element of, you know, just as the ocean makes these waves and you can point to these waves, each of them unique in their shape, yet they’re not separate from the ocean. I still think that that metaphor works in the case of free will as being some fleck of this consciousness in this wave that’s operant as well.

Rick:  Yeah, the way I like to think of it is no matter how conditioned we may be and bound by that conditioning, we still have some wiggle room, and we can sort of exercise that wiggle room and move in the direction of greater freedom or greater bondage.

Lama Tsomo: Well, and I just have to qualify what I said before, because that fleck of consciousness is not separate from the big awareness.

Rick:  Ultimately, no. L;; Yeah, ultimately it’s just not. But there’s a talk in Buddhism of the two truths, relative truth and absolute truth, and if you fall to one side or the other, you’re in trouble.

Rick:  You said that. I actually … okay, here you go, I found it. “The Buddha spoke of two truths, absolute and relative, and said that allegiance to only one will leave you in confusion. Can’t focus on absolute truth and ignore the consequences of our actions.” Yeah, I think that’s good.

Lama Tsomo: That’s where sometimes people have reached some level of realization and they realize, “Oh, I am the Buddha,” this kind of thing. You know, it happens with Christians who say, “I’m Jesus,” right? They get a little bit confused because their ego is still mixed up with that so that they think, “I am the Buddha,” or “I am Jesus.”

Rick:  Ego aggrandizement happens.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, so rather than, let’s say, Christ consciousness is all through me, just like everything and everyone, and you don’t take ownership of that, or Buddha mind is suffusing everything and everyone, so yeah, me too. So you don’t put a boundary around that and try and own it or you’re in trouble. That’s when you get a mix up with the absolute and relative in kind of a confused way.

Rick:  There are examples of people getting in trouble.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah.

Rick:  Okay, well, we could probably keep going all afternoon and talking about other things but this has been a pretty good sampling of who you are and what you’re offering and all. So maybe you could summarize what it is you’re offering. That’s somebody who’s listening to this interview and wants to find out more. You know, what more is there for them to find out, what things could they get involved in if they come to your website, and is there a cost involved, and just some practical points like that.

Lama Tsomo: Uh-huh, uh-huh. So if somebody would want to pursue any of this further, there’s of course my book, which you can get anywhere, “Why is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling?” Maybe I’ll hold it up this time so people can recognize it. And there is His Holiness right there. And then on our website we have a list of upcoming events and they’re on both coasts and we have several different offerings during the year. So one of them has more to do with sangha and another one has to do more with – we have these three threads going through everything, not surprisingly. So the Buddha strand I’m defining as practice, and so we have some that are more focused on practice. Then we will have some that are doing kind of a combination of dharma and practice. So dharma is the map or the context in which these practices happen, so you can understand kind of how to use them and what they’re really about and what they’re doing. Then on the website we’ve got the e-courses and we’ve got two at the moment. Each of them are four installments, so you might do it in four weeks. Then we can help you get started with a learning circle if you write to [email protected] and we can see if there’s somebody else in your community and we can also send you a toolkit if you want to start one. Let’s see, we’re working on a workbook. We want to have all this follow-through in lots of different ways, but at the moment that’s not finished. There are these learning circles where you can get together with other people who are also interested in pursuing this, and you can pursue it together, which as I said is just a reward in itself actually.

Rick:  You mentioned you have these online webinars where you give individual attention to people and all.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, meditation coaching calls is what we call them. We have also had webinars where we, for example, take on the topic of forgiveness or mindfulness in relation to food. We have a few of them and right now they’re sort of in a library, so I think they’re accessible.

Rick:  Some of them are on your YouTube channel actually, the thing with mindfulness and food is on there.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and if you want to be led through a particular meditation like a compassion meditation, Tonglen that I talked about, or shamatha or something like that, let’s say you’ve taken the e-course and now you just want to sit down and meditate and have somebody kind of lead you through it. I will tirelessly lead you through these meditations as many times as you click on that, because they’re me leading the meditations.

Rick:  So on the website there’s a thing of you leading the meditation and a person can just listen in on that and go through it.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, there are visual ones and you can also have it audio. I personally prefer audio when I’m led through a meditation.

Rick:  Sure, because you’re not looking at your computer screen anyway.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and anyway all you’re going to see is me sitting there occasionally talking. It won’t be very interesting. And I’m not a good dancer anyway, so I won’t be doing that. I’m trying to think there’s one more thing that we have to offer and now I’m not remembering what it was.

Rick:  But it’s on the website.

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, and if people want to go further there are deeper studies and so on with this.

Rick:  Yeah, and it sounds very much like a work in progress too, that you’re going to keep developing things and offering more and writing books.

Lama Tsomo: That’s right, yeah, this is very new. We only started the Namchak Foundation a few years ago, even though I’ve been studying with Rinpoche for, gosh, I don’t know, 20 some years. I can’t remember when we met.

Rick:  So I’m sure it’s a thing where people can sign up and get notified by email when new things come out and all that.

Lama Tsomo: Absolutely, just go to the website and you can sign up. We have a very active, lively Facebook page where we have a lot of little mini videos, also Instagram and Twitter. So it’s Namchak Community is what you look at.

Rick:  On Facebook?

Lama Tsomo: Yeah, on Facebook. So Namchak Community is another way to tune in, get a little inspirational, this’s and thats, we’ve got something new all the time.

Rick:  Great. Alright, well good, I’m glad that we were able to have this conversation and bring you to the attention of more people.

Lama Tsomo: Me too, I really enjoyed it. Thank you, I really appreciate being on your show and I love the depth to which you like to go, because I do too, and asking those questions that are really beyond even our ability to fall upon a decisive answer, but it’s great to chew on them together.

Rick:  Yeah, it is. Yeah, thanks. So, I’ve been talking with Lama Tsomo and this is an ongoing series of interviews or conversations or whatever you want to call them. If you’d like to be notified of new ones as they are offered, subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven’t done that already, it helps us in terms of our relationship with YouTube if we have a lot of subscribers, they actually give you more support. Or you could sign up to be notified by email, there’s a place for that on www.batgap.com. Oh, also the upcoming interviews page on www.batgap.com, you’ll see who we have scheduled. If you’d like to listen to these live so you can submit questions, you’ll see a live link that I usually make live about a day before the interview, and then there’s a question form at the bottom of that page, and a bunch of other things, just check out the menus and see what there is. So thanks for listening and watching, and next week I have Andrew Newberg, he’s a neurophysiologist of some sort, we’re going to be talking about enlightenment in the brain, and neurophysiology of enlightenment and so on. So thanks for listening, thank you Lama Tsomo,

Lama Tsomo: My pleasure.

Rick:  Good luck with everything you’re doing. Thanks for having me on.

Rick:  Yeah, thank you.

Lama Tsomo: Bye-bye.

Rick:  Bye.