compassionate spontaneous becoming

We do not all find ourselves to be in the same place all the time. Buddhism, as a religion of method, addresses this flux in our experience of being by providing different approaches to practice, known as ‘yanas’. The word yana means ‘vehicle’ a coherent system of theory and practice that transports one from a base via a path to a particular result. Compassion is the central theme in each of the nine yanas which can be viewed as a developmental psychology that makes sense of every stage of spiritual growth. Each of the Sutric vehicles and the six classes of Tantra expresses compassion - or appreciative interactive empathy - according to progressively more subtle and vivid criteria. We find that the compassion we begin by cultivating in Sutra is none other than the innate energy of the natural state we discover in the innermost Tantras.

The word bardo is most often used to refer to the state between death and rebirth. However, every moment of experience is the bardo between what has gone before and what will come next. Such in-between moments are classified in various ways according to the nature of one’s awareness of them. The Aro gTér teaching of the 9 bardos explores discontinuous experiences such as birth and death, waking and sleep, meditation and action, remembering and experiencing; and introduces ‘thamal-gyi shépa’ —instantaneous recognition—as the means by which we abandon the illusions of our own continuity and discontinuity through time. Thamal-gyi shépa explodes us into the dimension of who we are. Then we discover – that this is precisely where we have always been.