Hillary

“...we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We shall regard it, above all, as a living thing.”
― Henri Bergson, Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

“It's good to be aware of all the (buddha) family patterns and to remember that our energy is just energy, and that every form of energy has the potential to be transformed into wisdom.

One of the most wonderful things about Vajrayana is that the stronger our afflictions are, the stronger the encumbered patterns, the stronger the wisdom will be.

So it's actually considered to be really good for a Vajrayana practitioner to be very passionate or very angry or very lazy, or whatever the dominant obstructing emotion might be, because an equal intensity of that energy will be transformed into wisdom.”
― Lama Tsultrim Allione, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine

“The key to awakening, then, is to recognize the appearances in the world as the radiance of the essence ground, and our true nature as the vast awakened universe itself.

The work with the mandala and the five Buddha families returns us to the original luminosity of the ground. We then return home to what is called the Great Mother, the ground of being. The good news is that for all of us who took the second path of confusion, liberation is achievable. All we need to do is stop investing in the dualistic struggle and recognize the true ground of being. The path to liberation is never far from us. We are actually never apart from it. We are simply not recognizing the non-duality as our true condition.

Longchenpa, the great Tibetan teacher of the 14th century, described the mandala as a luminous house, a dome of light emanating from the purely latent ground. The mandala is a means by which we return to our essential wholeness. The mandala practice is designed to help us see our patterns. It is the map for returning to the ground of being through transforming the five poisons into wisdom. It is a method of placing the psyche in a template of luminous wholeness.

There is a deep longing for wholeness in all of us. And from that longing, cultures and religions have created mandala-like forms and ceremonies, architecture, temples, churches, stained glass windows, jewelry, art, gardens, and arrangements of ceremonial food.

Although the human body is its own dynamic mandala, with the heart center, the limbs as the four directions, and so on, we often experience the world and ourselves in a fragmented way. This fragmentation is particularly true in modern times when the collective mandalic centering rituals and dances that healed individuals and communities have, for the most part, been lost.

Meditating on the mandala is a tool or template for reintegration and provides a re-centering experience that unites the fragmented psyche and transmutes the five poisons into wisdom.”
― Lama Tsultrim Allione, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine

“Now, imagine for a moment that the ground of being is the vast blue sky that has no beginning and no end, no center and no edge, and the nature of this space is pure, infinite awareness. Everything arises from this space. Its essence is empty. Its nature is radiant. It expresses itself as all-pervading compassion.

The two paths form when the ground of being expresses itself, or self-exteriorizes, into appearances by radiating its pure, luminous, rainbow-hued light. Here, the mystical brown energies move into exteriorization, manifesting as the five lights, white, blue, yellow, red, and green.

At this point, the individual awareness either recognizes that pure, rainbow-hued luminosity manifesting as appearances as inseparable from itself, or it sees the luminosity manifesting as a separate world of appearances. In that moment, the split occurs, and the two paths are created.

The path of liberation, which recognizes the inseparability, and the second path of confusion, which sees appearances as separate, creating fear and anxiety. The path of confusion forms the dualistic barrier, and our ego fixation becomes a way to resolve our separation anxiety, and the result of taking this path is called samsara, the pattern of grasping that propels us through life, death, and rebirth. This is the path that we all took.”
― Lama Tsultrim Allione, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine