From Sutra to Tantra - Illusory Advice

Apprentice: One of the things I’ve not quite taken on board fully yet is that Tantra ‘allows’ and works with personality. I am still influenced by a sutric view of things, even when I’m trying not to be. 

Teachers: Tantra can seem rather decadent or dangerous from the perspective of Sutra. Sutra moves towards emptiness and so personality is irrelevant. Everything is calmed down. Tantra however begins with the experience of emptiness and conjures with form. Personality and the richness of life is embraced as the material with which the nonduality of emptiness and form can be discovered.

Illusory Advice, Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin, Aro Books Worldwide, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-898185-37-6, page 6

Romance is an Important Part of the Aro Lineage Teachings - Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

In this video from February 2010 Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin discuss the value of romantic relationship as an aspect of the path of practice.

Transcript

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: Romance and relationships are an important part of the teachings within the Aro Tradition, and how romance can be part of a path of practice. To have people who teach as couples is also a reflection of this. I came originally from a background where all my teachers were monastic, and to move into a Sangha where you have a teaching couple was quite a revelation: the idea that your teachers actually have a romantic relationship and reflect to you how a romantic relationship can exist without neurotic functioning (which is often thought to be part of it), and this in itself an important teaching. So a teaching couple teach not only through what they say, but with how they are with one another as well.

Ngakma Nor’dzin: So our students often will come and stay with us—not just come on retreats—and they see that we we’re a happy couple and our practice is informed through the fact that that we practice as a couple and are in romantic relationship – that we actually like being together and enjoy each other's company and love one another. So this is all very helpful for our students.

When life is stormy, first learn to relax

I have found that people expect meditation to be a solution to their problems. This was another common factor that arose amongst many of those attending my classes: a need for relief from exceptional personal circumstances such as illness or bereavement. People attended the class in the hope of finding help with a particular personal problem.

A period of life with an unusual degree of stress or difficulty however, may not be the best time to try to begin meditation practice and in such circumstances it will certainly be better to begin with relaxation techniques. It is in fact preferable to have established a degree of stability in one’s life and relief from immediate pain—mental, emotional or physical—before beginning meditation.

Relaxing into Meditation, Ngakma Nor’dzin, Aro Books worldwide, 2010, ISBN:  978-1-898185-17-8, page 5

Impermanence

As we become familiar with viewing impermanence [in this way] and embracing the present moment, our mind-moment experiences can become less clumpy.  We can start to develop awareness in every actual mind-moment. 

At first we experience presence in a clumsy, artificial way like the flickering frames of an old black and white movie.  We continually attempt to apply awareness to our experience and arise with presence, so that we can act from the liberated energy of spontaneity rather than the stilted constriction of expectation and anticipation. 

Spacious Passion, Ngakma Nor´dzin, Aro books worldwide,2006, ISBN 978-0-9653948-4-0, Chapter 5 Infinite Impermanence, page 126

Teaching as a Couple - Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin

In this video from February 2010 Ngakma Nor’dzin & Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin talk about the benefits of teaching as a couple – both for themselves, and for students.

Transcript

Ngakma Nor’dzin: The Aro gTer Lineage is unusual—possibly unique—in that we have teaching couples rather than just individual teachers. I think this offers a wonderful opportunity for people who become students to have a teaching couple. You have the same sex teacher as your role model, and you have the opposite gender teacher – who is your teacher in that they can reflect to you in a different way to the same gender teacher.

So this offers a great scope of inspiration and capacity for what teachers can offer you as a teaching couple. For us as a teaching couple, it’s just really nice to teach as a couple – to have that support for each other. We have different qualities in the way we teach, different capabilities in what we remember, what we understand, the way we present things. I think it enriches the experience for our students—and for us—being a teaching couple.

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: We have different qualities and different ways of approaching a question, so if questions arise within the group of students I’ll often listen with fascination to the answers that Ngakma Nor’dzin gives because she comes at a question from a different angle to me.

Ngakma Nor’dzin: I have the same experience.

Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: So as much as anything, I’ll be sitting here learning, being able to understand things in a different way. We are able to play—in a sense—with our relationship in terms of how we approach teaching. So we enjoy each other’s company, and the teachings that we can give are complementary. Also it can give one person the chance to rest and consider a situation in more depth, while the other person is answering perhaps the immediate question. So it enables us to work together in that way as well.

Ngakma Nor’dzin: It’s also very useful to me being a little bit deaf! So when i mis-hear a question that somebody asks me, and answer the wrong question, then Ngakpa-la can very gently say at the end ‘well that was a lovely answer, my dear, but that was not quite what was asked’, and then we can start again.

Consider all phenomena as dreamlike. 

A dog is a potential predator for a horse. Dog as predator is a perception. Dog innocently sharing the path is an alternative perception. Each is dreamlike as it appears, because interaction with the dog has not been engaged.  The skilful rider notices the dog and is prepared for a fearful reaction from the horse, or for the need to protect the horse if the dog is aggressive, or for nothing at all to happen. The rider makes no assumptions. To anticipate any reaction of dog or horse would be to give substance to the dreamlike potential of the moment. The rider neither joins the horse in its fearfulness, nor rejects the possibility that the dog could be an animal to be feared, nor ignores the dog assuming that it will just walk past. 

All are dreamlike appearances until something actually happens, and then what actually happens is ridden.

Battlecry of Freedom by Ngakma Nor’dzin, Aro Books worldwide, 2019, ISBN 978-1-898185-46-8, Part II - the slogans, p. 38

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