Good morning everybody. We have come here to do a longevity and healing practice through Tara, or rather with the help of Tara, or maybe we should even say ‘within the sphere of Tara’s great energy’? The way in which the great masters of early generations have given this practice is not just to have longevity for the sake of living long, but in order to have a meaningful life, meaningful in the sense of helping ourselves and, if possible, helping others. I believe that is our purpose.
As you know, in the West a lot of people say, ‘What is my mission in life? What is my purpose? What am I supposed to do?’ Your mission is to help yourself and, if you can, to help others. If you cannot help others, at least help yourself. For this you need longevity; for this you need a healthy life. That is why the earlier masters have given us this practice and that is how we should use it, too.
Basically, when I was a kid, I was taught two things: What do you do at the beginning, and why? In other words, what are your ideas and motivations? And, what do you do at the end?
These are the two most important things. They told us to have at the beginning a proper motivation, a good way of thinking. What that really means is to think, ‘Why am I doing this? What for?’ Whether your thoughts are good or bad, it is always good to correct your motivation. Whether you have a practice in general or this one in particular, it is always nice to think, ‘Hey, I am not doing this just for the sake of doing it, I am doing this for the benefit of myself and others.’ Even if you have come for other purposes, you can think at this moment, ‘I am here for very important purposes.’ That is what it means to have a great motivation. You do not necessarily have to sit cross-legged and meditate and say, ‘I am correcting my motivation,’ I do not think you need to do that. So step number one is: the purpose of what we are doing here is to help ourselves and to help other beings.
Step two. We do not have the power. Maybe we have it, but the power is not at our disposal. In one way we are very great, in another way we are helpless. So what do we do? We rely on another power.
Basically a lot of people do that, rely on another power. You see a lot of healers in the world today rely on some spirits. A lot of people channel them, and do all sorts of things. Whatever things are happening, they will go with that. Whatever will give you a shake and vibration—mentally, physically, psychologically or emotionally—people follow that in the world today.
If you look around and see what is happening in the world today you see a group of people who are—let me put it nicely—ultra-scientific: nothing is acceptable to those people unless it is very scientific. And there is another group of people who believe there is an alternative power, too. I think all of us here are in that category. That does not mean we are against science.
Spiritual power is not really scientific, because, if I understand correctly, scientific means: no matter who does it, where he does it, whenever you repeat it the correct way it should have the exact same result. Spiritual power does not work that way. It is totally different to different persons. Though you may do it the same way, and you approach it the same way, somehow the results are slightly different for each and every individual. It is like hand-made clothes in comparison to factory-made ones. You know what I mean? Individuality is there. Likewise spiritual results, I think, depend on the level of the motivation of the individual, the intensity of the individual, the luck or fortune of the individual and many different circumstances.
~ Gelek Rimpoche, The Triumphant Ma, 2016, p. 1
