Ben Black's Writings 1 | 2 | 3

It is stupid to imagine that evil has the sweetest music. Have you not seen our paintings and sculptures in Ladakh? Have you not felt their spiritual grave and dignity? Do you imagine that they were created out of vanity? They were created, many of them, by humble and poor men, who left no names behind them, and who worked on them out of love and in worship. The most beautiful paintings and sculptures, the greatest poetry, have not always been born form torment or bitterness. Often they have sprung from contemplation, from joy, from instinct or wonder towards all things, To create from joy, to create from wonder demands a continual discipline a great compassion, It demands a severity of mind towards all vanity and posturing of the Ego that loves its suffering, and clings to its despairs and depressions and fears; it demands a continual objectivity of spirit, a continual looking out at and beyond, the world created by the senses, towards a spiritual reality, whose lineaments only emerge slowly, after years of experience and meditation. You do not need to stop working, but you need to strive for a new relationship with your work, you do not need to stop writing you need to begin to explore another way to write, to build another awareness to write from. You will not be able to find this quickly. You will need patience. Many people will tell you that you are foolish, misguided, ridiculous, You must listen to what they have to say, learn form their criticisms, but not be swayed by them. With time and sincerity you will discover a way to work and write that does not harm you spiritually, that does not tempt you to vanity, that is the deepest expression of your spirituality, you will find a voice that is not your voice only, but the voice of reality itself, and free from all delusion and stain of personality. If you can be empty enough, that voice can speak through you. If you can be humble enough, that voice can inhabit you and use you. Andrew Harvey



‘ Once I tried to leave Dharmsala altogether. I had had enough. I was making no progress. I thought I had been a fool I thought I would stop the whole thing, stop learning Tibetan, stop trying to meditate, stop the whole thing and go back to Europe and do something simple. Be a clerk or a journalist. Forget about the whole thing. I even began to suspect that the lama whom I had been studying under was a fraud, not at all evolved, not at all wise, just a parrot of the Old Tradition, and a kind of decent fool at best. I grew sullen. I sent for some money to get back to Switzerland. I went to my lama and told him everything that I was feeling. Everything. I spared him nothing. I was angry. Insulting, eloquent. He listened carefully. Sometimes he would ask me to make myself clearer, to be more precise. Why did I despise him exactly? What precisely had failed me in his teaching? And so on. At the end of my tirade he said nothing. Then he looked up and said, “Is that all?” he smiled and said, “ Charles, being angry is the one honest thing you have done all year. Why are you now wasting it? Don’t you see it is a gift you must not throw away? Think of your anger as a piece of dark marble; you must work it. If you just carry it with you back to Europe, it will make you a hunchback.” I stayed.’ A. Harvey

The Rinpoche said, ‘be sad, but not too sad; grieve, but do not become absorbed by your grief. You cannot change what you have done; but you can change what you will become. Remember that somewhere you are free already. Remember that you are already Buddha. Draw hope form that; live in that hope.’
‘It is hard.’ ‘It is the hardest thing. That is why you must practice. The soul wants sometimes to give up, to abandon itself to despair. Despair is one of the last houses of the ego. And that house too has to be burnt down. We must abide in nothing and nowhere. The heart sutra says, “Let the mind abide nowhere and alight upon nothing, let it dwell without thought coverings.”’
A Journey in Ladakh, Andrew Harvey.
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We looked down at the stream, I said, suddenly, ‘ Sometimes in these months I have wanted to leave the West and come and live here.’ I had never formulated that thought to myself so directly, and it startled me.
‘Don’t,’ Drukchen Rinpoche said. ‘Why not?’ ‘ I do not think you are ready to become a monk, and there is no reason why you should be. There are many other ways of life and many other ways of attaining enlightenment. You have your work to do in the West. As a teacher, as a writer ‘But I find it so hard to teach or write in the West about the experiences I have had in the East. ‘That is why you must. You must find a way of making what you have lived through believable to others. You must not refuse that challenge. Those who reject the materialism of the West, who despise it and separate them from it, are in danger of refusing to look at it, they are in danger of not being responsible to the facts of life as it is lived, and must be lived, now. We must find a way to work within the world, within science, within industry, even within politics; we cannot simply pretend superiority to those things, for they are the forces that largely shape mankind. To work in the world we will have to be strong, and in the world our inner strengths will be greatly tested. But that is good. That will dissolve any pride we may have, any sense that we are “special”, that we deserve “special treatment”, that we are “unique”. So many Westerners who find solace in the East are coming to have their Egos healed, their shattered personalities reassembled in some way. But the east is not a large convalescent home for the West, s sort of enormous recreation room where Westerners can play at being spiritual, at “exploring themselves”; it is a place of power, of new power, a new kind of strength which must be used in the world.’
But to survive in the world,’ I said,’ you need spiritual strength. And to build spiritual strength you need solitude.’ ‘ Make retreats often. Make pilgrimages to holy places. But re-enter the world. Re-enter the world and test again and again what you have learned. If what you have learnt is true, it will hold. Some of the humblest people I have met, the most spiritual, have been drivers or farmers or businessmen, even politicians, some of the most arrogant and useless, monks, so-called “religious” men. Be quietly detached from what you do and dedicate it to the good of all created beings, and you will be safe from disillusion or vanity.’ ‘But how to do that ?’ ‘By discipline, by prayer, by cultivating the wisdom of Emptiness, by building daily your resources of compassion, by humor! The old way … Begin, and you will find out! It is not so very elaborate, you know, not so hard.’ A Journey in Ladakh, Andrew Harvey.

“The great enemy to spiritual progress is the belief you know already. Knowledge is unfolded. Pray to be willing, at every stage to be ignorant, so you can be really taught.” - Thuksey Rinpoche

There are many Ways that lead to enlightenment, and no one is better than another, and all are hard to travel; the Way for you, I understood when I saw you, is the Way of compassion. I saw when I met you that your heart has been baffled and embittered and that your mind is proud; the Way I will teach you will crumble the pride of your mind, and call out the sun that is your true heart from behind its clouds of fear and anger. What I am going to teach you is not special and not especially elaborate; it is simple. You will need a simplicity and humility to follow it. You have both within you, but you will have to work hard to find them, and then live them. the true journey of your life is towards the enlightened self, and you are that already. You came, across your life, across Ladakh, to this room, to this morning, to me, and now another journey is beginning, the journey which you traveled here to begin.‘ Now I shall teach you the meditation. First, as I said at first, you must dedicate the merit of it to the joy and happiness of all created beings. The practice of meditation is not a selfish one, and is not undertaken for the personal satisfaction of the self. It is important always to remember this otherwise you will become vain and the meditation will be of no use to you or anyone else "The Rinpoche gave me the vows in detail and made me repeat them after him in Tibetan.‘The next stage of the meditation is to visualize the Bodhisattva (your higher power). You must visualize it so intensely and with such fidelity that it is more real even than I am, sitting here in front of you, more real in fact, than anything else that exists. And you must remember as you visualize that it is the divine part of yourself projected out of yourself, your most sublime energy of love given external and living expression…At first you will find the process of visualization hard. You have not been trained to. You have been trained in a materialist way of imagining and seeing, which has its beauties and precisions, but has not accustomed you to the kind of inner projection that I am asking you to do. But the harder you work at it, the more the power will come to you. And with it will come an extraordinary joy and confidence in the power of your own mind. You will understand, slowly and in slow stages, that Reality is a creation of the mind. You will understand it not with your intellect or even with your intuition, but practically, because you will be growing within you the power to alter Reality. You must work every day. You must not be discouraged if for many months you can visualize very little. What your are beginning is a journey into a different world, into an awareness of different reality; you cannot expect to make that journey quickly. Nor, in a sense, should you want to. The journey itself has its joys; the hardness of the journey has its lessons also, of perseverance and trust and humility, which you will need to learn…When you have visualized all this so powerfully that you feel you could reach out your hand and touch the bodhisattva who is looking into your eyes with a look of immense love, then you are ready to begin the most exalted stage of all. In this you offer your heart to the Bodhisattva- you offer your senses, your body, your, heart, your spirit. You make a sacrifice of everything that you are and then you merge with your (higher power) and melt into it. you become your highest self, which is your (higher power). And in this state you will see everything with your (higher powers) eyes, hear all sounds with its ears. You will see the world as its body and you will hear all sounds singing its sacred mantra. Even the noise of a car will be singing its mantra; even the whirr of an aero plane; even the singing of a farmer in the fields; even the barking of a dog.’The Rinpoche seemed to enter as he was talking into a kind of ecstasy. For a long time he could not speak. He sat with his eyes closed, the sun lighting up his body and the wall behind him.You must understand that this merging with the God that you have projected out of yourself, that you have visualized from your own deepest energies, is not an ecstasy that the ego can claim for itself. It is an experience of power, of immense power, but of a power transformed and purified by love and dedicated to all beings, to the salivation of all life. And to save yourself from any possibility of vanity, there is a final stage in the meditation, which you must also perform. You just dissolve the meditation; you must dissolve your own projection; you must unmake your own ecstasy; you must rest your mind in all emptiness that has no form, neither your own, nor that of your (higher power) that your mind has visualized. You must enter in this last stage into the Sunyata that is the mother of all projections, the Emptiness from which all forms are born, yours, mine, and all the imaginations of our minds and hearts. There must be nothing left of yourself or of the experience of the higher power of your delight or splendor… and the clear radiance of the void.
I told him that I loved him and would keep him in my heart all my life. I told him I hoped I would live to have been worthy of his kindness.
He shook his head, smilingly. ‘ You are worthy already. I do not want your gratitude; I want you not to allow the bond between us to break.’
‘It will never break’ I said.
The Rinpoche was silent for a moment and them said, ‘We will do the first part of the meditation I taught you together.’
We sat together quietly. After some time, he said, ‘was your visualization good?
‘Of course not,’ I smiled. ‘ I could hardly visualize anything. I feel like a fool. In my mind is a dark stone.’
‘Well then,’ the Rinpoche said,’ practice and wear it down.’ A Journey in Ladakh, Andrew Harvey.


Excerpts from Hidden Journey, A Spiritual Awakening, written after a journey in Ladakh.



“ Do that which consists in taking no action; pursue that which is not meddlesome; savor that which has no flavor.”
from the Tao

Forever at His door
I gave my heart and soul
My fortune, too
I’ve no flock anymore
No other work in view
My occupation “Love”
It’s all I do
from John of the Cross’s Spiritual Canticle

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Ben Black's Writings 1 | 2 | 3