Sublime

The first of the commitments, traditionally called the Pratimoksha Vow, is the foundation for personal liberation. This is a commitment to doing our best to not cause harm with our actions or words or thoughts, a commitment to being good to each other. It provides a structure within which we learn to work with our thoughts and emotions and to

Original nature is cultivated externally through virtuous acts and internally through nonattachment to forms.

“Although it can be useful to think of mindfulness as ‘being with things as they really are’, it is in fact more accurate, and more helpful for our purposes, to understand basic mindfulness practice as a way of looking that merely fabricates a little less than our habitual ways of looking.” -Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees

Naropa consolidated Tilopa’s teachings in the well-known six yogas of Naropa (see chapter 11), a particularly important and distinctive part of the Kagyü heritage.

Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitations. Know that and don’t entertain Subject-object fixations — this is the practice of a bodhisattva.

We follow the path of nonrejection not for the sake of indulgence, or even for the sake of compassion. We follow it as an exercise in enlightenment so that the Goddess will, in time, show us that indeed she is fully present in every particle of our bodies and the world. The experience of compassion is the natural result of this recognition.