recitations in silent retreat, he became sick and suffered acutely from his illness.
Jigme Lingpa visited him and gave him the oral instruction called “Making
Sickness Itself the Path with Automatic Release into the Trikaya”:
Don’t reify the sickness; look into the one who suffers.
Don’t fix your neurotic mind on the symptoms;
Focus instead on the naked pure presence of the illness:
That is oral instruction on illness as dharmakaya.When we are diseased or wounded, we should not conceive of the illness as a real
substantial entity. Rather, look at the one who thinks “I am sick,” or take on the
pain itself directly and gaze into that. The illness is just an envisionment that
actually has no substantial existence. So do not fixate upon the misconception of
the grasping mind that thinks “I am tortured by this disease.” Loosely fix the
naked, unmodified, here-and-now pure presence on the baseless envisionment of
the sickness. Thereby that very illness will appear as the intrinsic creativity of the
dharmakaya. This is the supreme oral instruction of Dzogchen. Pemo Dharma
relied upon this Dzogchen instruction and, recovering from the illness, heightened
his accomplishment.
1.21 MIND IS THE ROOT OF ALL EXPERIENCE
We may comprehend the absence of any substantial nature in both outer and
inner forms, in sound, taste, or touch, and so forth, through intellectual
investigation. We may then abandon objects of desire, such as a man’s or woman’s
body, by seeing that body as unclean and ugly. But if the inner mental attachment
is not released, the grasping that is at the root of attachment will not be eliminated.
Consider, for example, a dog hit by a stone. Instead of locating and chasing the
stone-thrower, the dog will bite the stone. In the same way, no benefit will accrue
by attacking the immediate form to which we are attached. When a stone is
thrown at a lion, the lion will attack the person who threw it, not the stone. The
root of all desire, aversion, and stupidity is the mind alone. If we keep the mind
itself in a state of nongrasping, the emotions such as desire, aversion, and so on,
will automatically be pacified. In The Words of My Perfect Teacher, Patrul
Rinpoche quotes Tilopa saying to Naropa,
Not the appearance—it is attachment that binds.
Cut through the attachment, Naropa!1.22 KNOWING THE WHOLE WORLD AS FIGMENTS OF MIND, UNDISTURBED AT THE TIME OF
DEATH, WE ARE RELEASED IN THE BARDO
We may not have full realization of the magical, illusory nature of the world as
figments of mind, but with just a modicum of understanding of it, we will be free