Learning to Practice — The Real Meaning of Dharma Practice

Twelve Links of Dependent Origination — Shifting Thought, Awakening, Writing a New Script The turning of the twelve links of dependent origination runs the same as the twelve stages of life in a birth chart, and the same as the twelve links of dependent origination the Buddha taught.The role you are playing in this life comes from your previous life's script; the role you will play in the next life is made by this life's script.You often see homeless people on the street, filthy all over, half-eaten bread and other people's leftover drinks beside them.You can tell at once: in his next life he will be a stray dog, and in his previous life he was already a stray dog — he never broke out.He looks like a person, but his behavior and his life are a stray dog's.Being born human this time has been wasted, squandered.When he dies and reports back, Yama will ask him: I made you human so you could evolve, and you went on behaving like a stray dog — fine, go on being a stray dog.That is why you see so many people whose behavior is identical to animals'.So why do we practice?Practice is editing this life's script.We use the meaning and wisdom of the Dharma, and the energy of the Dharma, to alter what has been set into this life's script, hoping to change the role we take in the next."Saṃsāra is role-playing." Playing one role after another — that is saṃsāra."Shifting thought is the method of rewriting the script." Shifting thought — how do you shift it?I tell you how to shift it and you can't.So you use practice to force the shift.Shift until I am Śrī Lakṣmī — that is shifting thought.I want the merit of Śrī Lakṣmī benefiting all beings — that is shifting thought.Shift until I am no commoner, I am Śrī Lakṣmī: I can give beings money, I can satisfy beings, I can give beings joy — that is shifting thought.In Mahāvairocana's Sūtra on the Buddha-Blessing of Divine Transformation this is called divine transformation — forced into another role, the role of a successful one, the role of a bodhisattva — that is shifting thought.Otherwise, how do you shift?Shift to where?You want money?Shift thought — shift to being a wealth deity.If you truly cannot take money and hand it out, then I use the dharma of giving wealth to give to beings.That is shifting thought.The guru's role is to call forth the awakening of the disciple's twelve kinds of perception (sensory system).The ear only hears the sounds you can hear; when the guru wakes up your spirit, you can hear the voices of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, you can hear the voices of beings — this is making your twelve senses wake up anew, not just hearing ordinary sound.You hear an animal cry — why it is crying, what the cry means — and you understand.That means your perception, your hearing, has evolved and awakened.Your eyes no longer see only within fifty or a hundred meters; you can see things a hundred kilometers out, you can see things in the realm of empty space — the guru has activated the awakening of your sight.So the guru's task is to activate the disciple's twelve awakenings and wake them up.This is enlightenment.This is the awakening of the soul."Aware" equals "realized" equals "awake" — once awake, you find the human realm is an illusion, not real.So from sensation you climb to enlightenment, from enlightenment you become awakened — awake, and it turns out this was all a dream.Excerpted from a teaching by Master Urgyen Topden Rinpoche on 2018-11-24