’The only problem with bliss is that because it arouses such enormous pleasure, beyond anything on a worldly level, including sexual bliss, people cling to it and really want it and then it becomes another obstacle,’ she added, before launching on a story to illustrate her point.
‘Once when I was with the Togdens in Dalhousie there were two monks who were training to be yogis.’ One day they were standing outside shaking a blanket and they were so blissed out they could hardly stand up. You could actually feel these waves of bliss hitting you. The Togdens turned to me and said, “You know, when you start, this is what happens. You get completely overwhelmed by bliss and you don’t know what to do. After a while you learn how to control it and bring it down to manageable levels.” And it’s true. When you meet more mature practitioners they’re not completely speechless with all this great bliss, because they’ve learnt how to deal with it. And of course they see into its empty nature.
‘You see, bliss in itself is useless,’ she continued. ‘It’s only useful when it is used as a state of mind for understanding Emptiness – when that blissful mind is able to look into its own nature. Otherwise it is just another subject of Samsara. You can understand emptiness on one level but to understand it on a very subtle level requires this complement of bliss. The blissful mind is a very subtle mind and that kind of mind looking at Emptiness is a very different thing from the gross mind looking at emptiness. And that is why one cultivates bliss.
‘You go through bliss. It marks just a stage on the journey. The ultimate goal is to realize the nature of the mind,’ she insisted.
The nature of the mind, she said, was unconditioned, non-dual consciousness. It was Emptiness and bliss. It was the state of Knowing without the Knower. And when it was realized it wasn’t very dramatic at all. There was no cosmic explosion, no fanfare of celestial trumpets. ‘It’s like waking up for first time – surfacing out of a dream and then realizing that you have been dreaming. That is why the sages talk about all things being an illusion. Our normal way of being is muffled – it’s not vivid. It’s like breathing in stale air. Waking up is not sensational. It’s ordinary. But it’s extremely real.’
Nor apparently does the real thing happen in a Big Bang. ‘At first you get just a glimpse of it. That is actually only the beginning of the path. People often think when they get that glimpse that it is the whole thing, that they’ve reached the goal. Once you begin to see the nature of the mind then you can begin to meditate. Then after that you have to stabilize it until the nature of the mind becomes more and more familiar. And when that is done you integrate it into everyday life.’
At other times Tenzin Palmo’s revelations were decidedly more ordinary, although in her eyes equally valuable. There was the occasion one spring when the thaw of the winter snows had begun and her cave was being systematically flooded. ‘The walls and the floor were getting wetter and wetter and for some reason I was also not very well,’ she related. ‘I was beginning to think, “Oh dear, what they say about caves is really true,” and started to feel very down.’
Suddenly the Buddha’s First Noble Truth which she had learnt when she first encountered Buddhism struck her with renewed force. ’I thought, “Why are you still looking for happiness in Samsara? and my mind just changed around. It was like: That’s right- Samsara is Dukka [the fundamental unsatisfactory nature of life]. It’s OK that it’s snowing. It’s OK that I’m sick because that is the nature of Samsara. There’s nothing to worry about. If it goes well that’s nice. If it doesn’t go well that’s also nice. It doesn’t make any difference. Although it sounds very elementary, at the time it was quite a breakthrough. Since then I have never really cared about external circumstances. In that way the cave was a great teaching because it was not too perfect,’ she said.
If the results of meditation could be sensational, the path toEnlightenment was plodding and exceedingly hard work. There was a lot to do and an inconceivably long way to go. The lamas said if you reached there in three lifetimes you were moving incredibly quickly, for the task at hand was the transformation of the body, speech and mind into that of a Buddha. No less. Understanding this, the Tibetans had developed the Way into a science. Anyone could do it, given the texts which held the instructions, the initiations which conferred the empowerment and the right motivation which ensured the seeker did not fall into the abyss of self-interest. There were clear-cut paths to take, detailed directions to follow, delineated levels to reach each marked with their own characteristics so that you knew precisely where you were. There were specific landmarks to watch out for, special yogic exercises to do, and a myriad aids harnessing all the senses to propel the seeker forward. This was the mind working on the mind, consciousness working on consciousness, the task at hand unlocking the secrets of that three-pound universe contained within our own heads. In short, what Tenzin Palmo was engaging in was arguably the most important and significant adventure of all time – the exploration of inner space.
Dr Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University, New York, one of the world’s most lucid and entertaining exponents of Buddhism, put it this way: ‘What the meditator is doing in those long retreats is a very technical thing. He’s not just sitting there communing with the Great Oneness. He’s technically going down, pulling apart his own nervous system to become self-aware from out of his own cells. It’s like you are using Word Perfect and you are in the chip. And you are self-aware of being in the chip. The way you have done that is by stabilizing your mind where you can go down to the dots and dashes, and you’ve gone down and down even into that.
‘In other words the Mahayana Buddhist, filled with the technical understanding of tantra, has become a quantum physicist of inner reality,’ he continued. ‘What he has done is disidentified from the coarse conceptual and perceptual process. He’s gone down to the neuronal level, and from inside the neuronal level he’s gone down to the most subtle neuronal level, or supra-neuronal level and he’s become where it is like the computer is self-consciously aware of itself. The yogi goes right down to below machine language – below the sub atomic level.
‘When you have done this what you have achieved is not some kind of mystical thing but some very concrete, evolutionary thing. It’s the highest level of evolution. That’s what the Buddha is defined as. The highest level of evolution.’
Personally Tenzin Palmo had never doubted the efficacy of the methods she was following. ‘Tibet had been producing Enlightened beings like an assembly line for centuries. For such a small population it was extraordinary,’ she said.
Being a methodical and highly conscientious person, she had started at the beginning with the preliminary practices, which she had begun in Dalhousie and Lahoul long before she went into the cave. These consisted of certain rites such as mandala offerings, where the practitioner builds up a symbolic universe on small silver trays decorated with ‘precious’ items and offers it to all the Buddhas, or doing full-length prostrations, or mantra recitation. These are then performed literally hundreds of thousands of times in order to prepare and soften the mind for the esoteric tantric meditations that were to follow. In the cave Tenzin Palmo did them all again. At one point she fasted completely (although she would not reveal for how long). At another she conducted a partial fast while simultaneously doing prostrations and singing praises to Chenrezig, the thousand-armed Buddha of compassion. Always an extremely arduous exercise both physically and mentally, this time it was made even more difficult by the extreme conditions in which she was living.