Laurie Anderson "Be Happy"

Feel the sadness, don't be the sadness

I can apply the consciousness practices to this. 

And I can be the happiness. 

Top 5 insights of 2022

 1.  My Happy Losar insight. Taking refuge and becomming a Tibetan Buddhist creates the conditions of being "locked in."  Like RRSPs, like marriage, like any lifetime or longterm committment, there is an accumulation of resources and rewards. Having a Sadhana practice bears emotional fruit, and strengthens the subtle body in ways that a more variable practice probably doesn't. But the real driver is devotion. The increasing sense of inseperablity between my essence and that of all the buddahs, gurus, and deities, is what created the condition for sustained non-duality. 

2.  The paradox in the Way of the Bodhissatva of the something that doesn not exist, and yet is not nothing, creates the conditions for rest.  The result is the ground of wisdom and an understanding of the true nature of mind. 

When something and its nonexistence

Both are absent from before the mind 

No other option does the latter have.

It comes to perfect rest from concepts free  

3. The mind is not a thing, but an event.   If we can see it this way then we can see feelings as events, and "clarity as an infinitely expansive state of awareness." This helps us see the mind as a flow, not a fixed thing.  And as a result everything is simply part of this flow. 

4.  It is a very powerful practice to remember a dream and ask "who is dreaming this dream?" Stay with it and any sense of integrated self soon dissolves.

5.  If the key to sustaining wisdom seeing yourself as pure, or purifiying how you see yourself?.  Or maybe both.  During Tantra immersion I will toggle with both these insights.