Printed in the Spring 2023 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "The Indestructible Vehicle: An Interview on Tibetan Buddhism with Andrew Holecek" Quest 111:2, pg 12-20
by Richard Smoley
Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher who is a longtime student of Buddhism, presenting this tradition from a contemporary perspective. Drawing on years of intensive study and practice, he is known as an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream. He is an experienced guide for students drawn to these powerful nocturnal practices.
Dr. Holecek is the author of many books and offers seminars internationally on meditation, lucid dreaming, and dream yoga. He is the author of Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep; the audio learning course Dream Yoga: The Tibetan Path of Awakening through Lucid Dreaming; Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming; and The Lucid Dreaming Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Your Dream Life. Dr. Holecek is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the author of scientific papers on lucid dreaming.
The article below is edited from a transcript of a video interview with Dr. Holecek. It can be viewed in full on the TS YouTube channel.
Richard Smoley: It’s very good to talk to you, Andrew. I’m very pleased to be discussing Tibetan Buddhism with you, a subject about which you are so knowledgeable. Maybe we could start at the ground level. How would you explain what Tibetan Buddhism is? How does it differ from other main lines of Buddhism?
Andrew Holecek: One major classification schema of the entire corpus of Buddhist teaching is that of the three yanas, the three vehicles. These classifications are not hard and fast, but they do have heuristic value.
The Hinayana, which is mostly known these days as Theravada, is gaining a wonderful exposure through the mindfulness movements and a host of skillful teachers in that arena. Hinayana is like the narrow vehicle, the individual vehicle, where you’re cleaning up at home: you’re working with your own stuff, your own mind.
Then there’s the wider vehicle, which is called Mahayana, or the great vehicle. It’s a little bit wider and bigger. You get up off the cushion, so to speak, and you’re engaging more in the world at large.
Tibetan Buddhism is virtually synonymous with the third yana: Tantra or Vajrayana, which literally means the indestructible way. It’s basically a subset of the Mahayana, where you take the fundamental teachings presented in the greater vehicle. But what distinguishes Vajrayana is its vast array of skillful means. It’s sometimes called the upayayana in Sanskrit: literally, vehicle of skillful means.
That’s one reason why I’m so attracted to it, because it has dream yoga, sleep yoga, the yoga to prepare for death—you name it, there is a meditation designed for it. That, perhaps, is one of its greatest distinguishing factors: it has an incredible armamentarium that allows you to work with virtually any state of mind under any particular condition.
Smoley: Let’s pick up on one thread, which is Tantra.
Tantra is a term that’s widely used and possibly misused and misapplied. Could you explain what it is?
Holecek: The word really comes from a root that means something like thread or continuity. It relates to the marvelous notion of the thread: the continuum of the awakened mind. It means that under any circumstances—sleeping, living, dreaming, dying—the awakened condition, the awakened state, is always indestructibly available to you. That’s one reason to talk about Tantra in a kind of etymological sense.
Another characteristic that I really appreciate is that in Tantra, body is as important as mind, so it engages in a bidirectional process. When we’re engaged in traditional meditations, it’s more of a top-down effect: You’re principally working with your mind. You’re working with mindfulness, with awareness of a passion and the like. There isn’t a particularly overt application for working with either gross or subtle or very subtle bodies.
A distinguishing characteristic of Tantra is that it engages not just gross body to work with gross mind; it engages subtle body to work with subtle mind, and this is where things like dream yoga come in. Even more compellingly, it engages extremely subtle body to work with extremely subtle mind. This is what you do in the complete, formless meditations and sleep or luminosity yoga, where you work to cultivate awareness of dream or sleep. An interesting approach to mind and body would apply here: on one level, very subtle body can be looked at as very gross mind. Fundamentally, it’s bidirectionality: you can use bottom-up or top-down processes to engage.
When people talk about Tantra, they’re almost always thinking of Tantric sex. That’s a particular dimension of our experience. One can in fact engage in the energies of passion and desire, because in the Buddhist cosmological schema, we live in this realm of desire.
Tantra does something really skillful here, and this is where it can get a little bit tricky. It’s a kind of prescription strength spirituality, if you will, because the practices can go directly into some of the principal problematic areas in conditioned life, like passion. Tantra goes directly into this passion, using some of these practices that are so misunderstood.
In Tantric teachings and practices, it’s often said that the preliminaries are more important than the main practice. In order to really engage in Tantra properly, you have to have a very solid grounding in the Theravada approach and all the restraints and structures that are associated with it. In addition, you have also the vast skill set of teachings that are engaged in Mahayana. Vajrayana Tantra includes both Hinayana and Mahayana, but it also transcends them; it goes a little bit beyond.
To go to the deep end of the pool right away, deity yoga is a massive aspect of Tantric practice. I’ve heard some scholars say there are three main bodies of Tantric meditation. Deity yoga is arguably one of those. Then you have the inner yoga, where you work with subtle body processes. The third one would be the supersubtle formless meditations.
When we’re working with deity yoga, we’re also working with what’s called generation stage meditation, also sometimes called evolutionary yoga. With this meditation, you visualize yourself as a deity, and there are many of these.
The deity principle refers to archetypal dimensions of the awakened mind. Let’s say I’m engaging in deity yoga by meditating on Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion. I visualize myself as this archetypal form. I also engage in mantra recitation, which is central to such an extent that in the Buddhist world, another synonym for Tantra is Mantrayana: the vehicle of sacred sound.
You’re fundamentally creating a kind of harmonic resonance. Say you have two pianos side by side. If I play middle C on a piano, of course you know what’s going to happen: the strings on the other one will vibrate to the same note. Yoga creates a similar harmonic of body, speech, and mind, using mudra [gesture], mantra, and visualization. These are designed to evoke these harmonics from the universe at large, so that you can elevate yourself.
Hence the notion of evolutionary yoga: you can use it as a way to evolve the matrix of your being from Joe Schmo—or in this case, Andrew Holecek—a confused sentient being, into the archetypal manifestation of awakened compassion. It’s a marvelously sophisticated practice. I’ve done it for decades.
Initially, I said, “What am I doing here? What is it all about?” The more I did it, the more I realized its tremendous profundity and applicability. What makes it so skillful is the fact that it takes processes that we’re already engaged in but may not be aware of.
Yoga is visualizing. You’re visualizing yourself as a deity, but whether we know it or not, we’re always visualizing ourselves as certain bandwidths of our identity. I think it was the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore who once said, “The greater the imagination, the less imaginary the result.”
Even colloquially, we know that if we want to attain particular results, often we will be guided by a visualization: “I want to be like this person. I want to be like this role model.” We’re engaged in visualization practice all the time.
We’re also engaged in mantra recitation all the time, whether we know it or not. In the untrained nonmeditative mind, the mantras take the form “Me, me, me. My mind, my mind”: it’s all highly self-referential. We also recite poverty mantras: “I’m a loser. I can’t do this.”
The skillful means of Vajrayana says, let’s take this fundamental principle. Let’s bring that unconscious process into the light of consciousness, which is part of the psychospiritual vector of development and liberation.
A wonderful Western analogue of Tantra is alchemy, where you work to transform lead into gold. In this case, the lead would be me—a confused sentient being. I want to transform it into the gold—in this case, Chenrezig.
There are many of these riches in Vajrayana. I’ve done dozens of these, for cultivating intellect, for cultivating spiritual power. There are dozens and dozens of these archetypes. By engaging in these practices, you’re stepping up your spiritual potentiality.
Smoley: Thank you. That was very comprehensive. Perhaps we could go back and talk about meditation in a basic form. What is it supposed to do? Furthermore, what would someone in the Tantric tradition engage in as a daily meditative practice?
Holecek: Many people may not be aware that meditation is a multivalent term. It has many different meanings, depending on different contexts. It’s a little bit like sport. When somebody says sport, which one are you talking about? There are dozens, if not hundreds of sports. Vajrayana Tantra is a tremendous array of different meditations.
My favorite definition of meditation is habituation to openness. I really like that, because it invites us to expand our sense of identity. It invites us to open the aperture of our awareness. One reason we suffer so much is that the lens of our mind, the aperture of our awareness and consciousness, is so myopic and constricted. It’s a little bit like looking into bright light: your eyes are so constricted and the aperture is so tiny that we get lost in this limited self-sense. All there is, is me. So, by immediate implication, is the external world out there. To use this definition, meditation is an invitation to open in heart and mind.
By the way, in both Sanskrit and Pali, the word for a mind and heart is the same: chit. So when we talk about meditation working with the mind, we always have to remember it’s really working with the heart.
In Tibet, when people talk about mind, they never point here (to the head). They always point to the heart. This means that meditation not only opens your mind; it opens your heart, and this is where the compassion practices come in.
The Tibetan word for meditation is gom. The word provocatively means to become familiar with. In almost fifty years of meditation, I have discovered that meditation allows you to become familiar with who you are not by a process of progressive disidentification.
We suffer partly because we have a constricted dimension of consciousness. We think that this body is who we are. Freud said that the ego is first and foremost the body ego. So everything is constricted.
When we work with these opening practices, we’re starting to open, to expand. We’re starting to open the aperture of our awareness so that we can encompass an increasingly greater spectrum of identity.
Again, the first part of meditation is to become familiar with who we are not. I am not this body. Even colloquial language expresses that truth: if I speak of my body, it can’t be me. All right, what’s left? My mind, my thoughts, my emotions. Again, the colloquialisms reveal that if they’re my thoughts, my emotions; they can’t be me. They’re something I possess.
As Nietzsche said, we are possessed by that which we feel we possess. Our body possesses us. Our thoughts and mental states possess us. Meditation is a process of becoming familiar with who we are not. We retreat, realizing by the process of elimination who we really are: this deeper, formless dimension of being.
So I see meditation as a twofold arc. There is the via negativa, the apophatic process of differentiation, letting go of who we think we are and becoming familiar with who we are not.
Then at a certain point, reality is pointed out: the nondual state—enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it—is pointed out, and we become familiar with that.
This is yet another distinguishing factor of the Vajrayana: it is the fruitional vehicle, because it starts at the end. When we do deity yoga, we’re starting with the end product: I am Chenrezig, or, I am the Buddha: I am this transpersonal, transdimensional state. That’s who I really am. Tantra starts at the end. It starts sometimes with what’s called a pointing out transmission of who you really are, and then you work to become more and more familiar with that.
Smoley: You’ve used the term I am a number of times. My impression of Buddhism is that it denies the existence of this I. You know the doctrine of anatta: no self. Could you relate what you’ve been saying to that doctrine?
Holecek: Oh, yes, absolutely. Not only in Buddhism, but also in the Hindu traditions, there is the necessity of centrifuging out the difference between relative and absolute truth. This is quite important, because on a relative level, we exist. I’m sitting here talking to you over there. We have this relative validity. If we didn’t honor this basis of relative truth, we’d get caught in all kinds of spiritual pathologies, like spiritual bypassing, nihilism—all kinds of dismissive, untoward reactions to the material, phenomenal world.
But the great contemplative traditions interject that there isn’t just this one bandwidth of relative truth. Fundamentally it’s fake news, but it has a relative validity. The great wisdom traditions are more interested in absolute truth: the difference between appearance and reality.
Again, we can’t deny appearance. I appear; you appear; the world appears; we can’t deny that. The wisdom traditions challenge the status of that appearance. When you’re talking about anatta, you’re starting to talk about absolute truth. You’re talking about what the Buddha and realized masters in many other traditions discovered when they looked closely at the nature of their own minds and hearts.
Many Western vectors point to the same insight. There is tremendous backing here from the scientific community: cognitive neuroscience, psychology, philosophy. The fundamental teaching here is, look for yourself. If you think you exist, where specifically do you exist? Do the investigations: if you think you exist, where exactly and precisely?
This process of progressive disidentification is exactly what I described earlier as the via negativa: I’m not this. I’m not that. Eventually you can back yourself into the truth.
On a relative level, we say, “OK, I seem to exist.” But like a good scientist, I say, “Am I my body?” With some investigation, I conclude, no. Am I my thoughts? With some investigation, no. You keep chipping away, cutting away, and eventually you realize that this thing called self is a narrative, a construct. It’s something that we make up, called vikalpa in Sanskrit.
Moment to moment, we confabulate, and you can see this in meditation. Meditation in many ways is a process of demolition and deconstruction. If you do in fact rest one-pointedly in the present moment, the self-sense, the structure, the narrative, the story line of the self is deconstructed.
Meditation allows you to see that yes, you appear provisionally; we couldn’t function in the world without this relative presentation and relative bandwidth. On another level, ego is just a particular form of arrested development. Meditation allows us to transcend the ego structure, even the self-sense. You still have it when you need to relate to other people in ordinary life. But with a slightly more adult perspective, you realize the view is so much better from up here.
Smoley: Sometimes Buddhists use the term mindstream. What is mindstream?
Holecek: I think it was William James, who was arguably the father of American psychology, who coined the term stream of consciousness. Two thousand years before him, the Buddhists were using the term santana, or mindstream, to talk about it. If you take a close look, this is something you can see for yourself. There does seem to be this kind of continuity. If you take a look at photographs going back from your infancy to now, you will see a couple of very interesting things: No, I am not the same entity that I was when my baby picture was taken, but at the same time there’s something oddly constant and familiar. There’s some level of continuity, right?
Even so, the stream of consciousness itself is somewhat illusory in nature. Scientists use talk about it using a compelling term called flicker fusion. It is defined as the frequency at which an intermittent light stimulus appears to be completely steady to the average human observer.
As quantum physics tells us, what seems to be continuous is really a packet of quanta. Everything is pixelated in nature. Things arise with lightning rapidity out of the zero point. This happens with such rapidity and constancy that the untamed, untrained mind feels that there is an unbroken stream of reality, and even of consciousness itself.
But if you take a very close look, this is where the illusion of self itself comes from—from this seemingly unbroken narrative structure. You start to take a look at things by slowing things down.
Let’s take an interesting if somewhat outdated analogy here. The old movie reels ran at a rate of sixteen to twenty-four frames per second, which creates the illusion of continuity. What happens when you slow things down? You start to realize the film’s discontinuous nature. You take it below sixteen frames per second, which is kind of a frequency threshold, and you start to see the pixelated nature of the phenomenal world, including the self-sense. So this stream of consciousness is really more a staccato of consciousness, even though there seems to be this one unbroken stream.
Scientists will tell you this. Your individual deep experience in meditation will also tell you this. In Sanskrit, there is a term: dharmas, which are atoms of experience. Take a very close look at your mind, and you will realize that from moment to moment, with lightning rapidity, phenomena arise, thoughts arise, images arise, perceptions arise. What is it that glues the whole thing together? This speed of the mind brings everything together to create the illusion of a continuous stream of consciousness.
This has tremendous applicability and validity for how we live our lives and how we relate to self. It may seem somewhat abstract and theoretical, but that’s perhaps only because we haven’t experienced it directly. When you do experience it this way, you start to realize profound insights into the nature of mind, the self-sense, and reality.
Smoley: Let’s move on now to something else that you mentioned earlier, which is dream yoga. I believe you practice something called nocturnal meditation. Would you like to go into this subject?
Holecek: Again, this is a wonderful contribution of the Tantric traditions, because as I mentioned earlier, everything becomes the path. Sometimes the Vajrayana Tantra is called the quick path. Why? Because everything becomes the path. There’s nothing that you’re doing that isn’t the path or the meditation.
Nocturnal meditations are my neologism for five types of practices that we can engage in as we fall asleep every night. I will briefly mention what these five are, and then maybe we can talk just a little bit more about dream yoga.
The first of the five nocturnal meditations is called liminal dreaming. Liminal is a word that comes from a root meaning threshold. We all know this experience. When we first lie down, we’re not awake; we’re not asleep. What do you start to notice when you’re lying down? You notice the pixelated nature of your mind. The narrative that creates the self-sense starts to fall apart when you’re falling asleep.
I’m a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, so I work with insomnia in all its manifestations. If that self-sense didn’t fall apart, you wouldn’t fall asleep. That’s what characterizes insomnia. So liminal dreaming has this marvelous dimension, where you work with the mind as it expresses itself as you’re going to sleep, and right after you wake up. You’re working with your mind as it’s going offline and as it’s coming back online from dreaming to waking. Here you can sit back and develop a kind of witnessing awareness, a distance perspective, where you watch your mind just as you do in meditation. You can see pages being ripped out of the narrative of the self-sense, and you start to realize, “My gosh! This thing called Andrew really is a construct.”
With some meditative sensitivity in the liminal state, you start to see this in brilliant color. With a little bit of familiarity, people can work with this and then progress into the famous lucid dreaming. That’s the second category.
In a lucid dream, something will clue you into the fact that you’re dreaming, and you wake up, but you’re still in the dream. It’s like the movie Inception.
Guess what? Meditators have more lucid dreams. There’s a reason for that: the more you meditate, the more you have lucidity. Why? Because lucidity is nothing more than a code word for awareness. A lucid dream is an aware dream. What are you doing when you’re working with meditation? You’re working with awareness, insight. Meditation heightens awareness of the contents of the mind during the day, which naturally reveals itself as a proficiency in lucid dreaming at night.
With a little bit of proficiency in lucid dreaming, the next step is dream yoga. Now you are working with lucidity for spiritual transformation. It’s no longer psychological, as it is in lucid dreaming. It’s now more spiritual: not so interested in self-fulfillment, but self-transcendence. It’s a marvelously profound arena to explore using the laboratory of the nocturnal mind.
Then one can progress into the next stage; now you’re entering graduate school, which is called sleep yoga; in Tibetan, the term is luminosity yoga. Here you maintain a lucid awareness even in deep, dreamless sleep.
You can get these four practices in other traditions, but the fifth and last one is a specifically Tibetan contribution: this is what’s called bardo yoga. Bardo is a word that means gap, in between, transitional process. Bardos are those tiny little gaps that arise between every moment of perception, between every moment of thought. And—if you believe in this sort of thing—between every life. Bardo relates to the gap between two different states of consciousness, so bardo yoga is a way to work with the nocturnal mind in order to prepare for death.
In Greek mythology, Thanatos is the god of death; Hypnos is the god of sleep. What’s their relationship? They’re not just brothers, they’re twins. So there’s a very intimate connection between sleeping, dreaming, and dying.
The Tibetans engage the nocturnal mind. They talk about death as the dream at the end of time. The Tibetans use the nighttime dream—what they sometimes call the dream of the double delusion—as a way to extrapolate insights into the primary dream; that’s this waking state. Then they bring it forward into the death: the dream at the end of time.
Smoley: This is fascinating. We could talk about this for hours, but why don’t we go on to the subject of the pitfalls, dangers, and traps Westerners can fall into with these practices?
Holecek: I mentioned that Vajrayana Tantra is called a quick path. It’s like the difference between driving across the country in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle and taking a supersonic Concorde. You can get there in two weeks or two hours.
In my experience, Westerners tend to be a little bit impatient. There is sometimes a subliminal sense of superiority: “I don’t have to do all the preparatory work, as Asians do. I’m a modern, hip, Westerner raised in a scientific culture. I can skip over all this stuff and go right to the Tantric goodies.”
What I say to that is, “Get back to me and let me know how that goes.” You have to handle this stuff with tremendous care. If you don’t harness the power of these Tantric meditations properly, instead of having them light you up, they burn you up. I’ve seen this: I can mention tons of personal relationships with people who go in, with maybe not the best attitude, maybe not the best intentionality, and simply haven’t done the preparatory work. It’s a little bit like math: if you want to understand differential equations and the calculus, you’d better do your arithmetic and your algebra first.
If these practices are done properly and carefully, they are, in my estimation, the most powerful and transformative spiritual technologies ever devised by the human spirit, but they’re like really powerful medicine: if you don’t have a good physician who prescribes it appropriately and you don’t follow the directions, you know what happens. (In this case, the physician would be a good teacher.)
I see this all the time. People rush; they jump over the preliminaries. They forget that in order to do Tantra, you have to have tremendous grounding in basic practices. You have to have tremendous compassion.
A famous teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, once very beautifully said that practicing the Vajrayana without compassion, bodhicitta, and the Mahayana principles is like having a supermodern house with every conceivable electrical gadget but no hookup. Nothing works right, because you’re missing the common ingredients of tremendous stability from the Theravada and the compassionate love and devotion that come from the Mahayana. When you enter Tantra, you use the rocket fuel. Then you can take that Concorde from here to the awakened state.
Furthermore, there’s quite a difference between states of consciousness and structures of consciousness. By this I mean that you can have a very high-level experience. You can have an experience of being Chenrezig. You can have an experience of being the Buddha, being the universe. You dissolve into complete nonduality. You have a completely authentic experience, but it’s not stable.
Here’s where the trouble starts. When you open your mouth, you have no choice but to express your experience through your structural level of development. You can have very high-level experiences, but they’re not stable. They’re not realization.
Structures of consciousness are archetypal blind spots. You look through them. This is the only thing I’ve ever come across that can explain these endless, relentless scandals that happen all the time; it’s happened in my community. Their leaders have just been burned because they’ve taken abuse of their students, and there is tremendous hardship and pain. That happens because people have these high-level experiences, but they don’t realize the limitations of their structural level of development, so they translate those experiences through a somewhat developmentally arrested state.
Many people say, “I’m a Westerner. I’m just going to jump all the way and do these inner-heat yogas; I’m going to do these sexual practices.”
These are really powerful methods, and you absolutely, positively have to abide by the safeguards of the Eastern approaches. But in my estimation, you have to be extremely aware of the limitations of psychospiritual development using the contributions from Western development anthropologists such as Jean Gebser.
Smoley: Tibetan Buddhism is very much embedded in a culture that is as unlike our own as is imaginable. It’s been transposed into a society that is almost diametrically opposite. How much of this that you bring over is merely cultural trappings, and how much of it is essential? And how do you bridge that gap?
Holecek: This is a fantastically important question. This is the difference between deep structures and surface structures. I look at myself these days as a cultural translator. Perhaps because of my facility in Western academic and scientific languages, I have noticed that I can bridge a little bit between these two streams of wisdom and knowledge.
How can we centrifuge out the surface structure and what is relegated to the cultural container of the East and then bring this tradition into the West, jettisoning some of these cultural aspects? They really don’t apply to the West.
In Asia, it’s beautiful to see how Buddhism flows from one country to the next. Think of it like water! In Burma, you get nourishing wisdom water that is different than the water you get in Sri Lanka or Nepal or Thailand. The wisdom tradition flows into these cultures. One of its most brilliant aspects is that, properly adapted and translated, Buddhism will flow into the container into which it is embedded.
This is an open question for us in the West, is it not? Buddhism is very young here, maybe a little bit more than 100 years old. Have we, in fact, been able to culturally translate? Have we been able to bring this massive wisdom tradition into the West, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
This is the great nontheistic gift of the Buddhist tradition: Do some of the work yourself; find out what aspect of these teachings resonates with you; find out what presses your buttons; find out what stretches you. Work with others of like mind; work perhaps with a guide or a skillful teacher. Buddhism is empirical. It’s based on experience. The last thing that the Buddha allegedly said was, “I’ve given you everything. Don’t take my teachings on face value. Work out your own salvation with diligence.”
Smoley: It seems to me that the greatest problem of this cultural embeddedness has to do with guru yoga and all that it entails. On one level the student is told, the guru is really you. Sometimes the guru is envisaged as Padmasambhava or whoever, but a lot of times the actual human lama is venerated. Prostrations are made to the lama as an embodiment of the teaching. In America this is a problem, because the idea that all men are created equal is so radically ingrained in us that some inner conflict is almost bound to arise. Could you comment on that issue?
Holecek: There is the whole issue of the guru principle and the role of love and devotion. Both Buddhist and Hindu Tantra use the most powerful force in the universe, which is love: harnessing the power of love for the purposes of awakening.
When you do it right—and there’s only so far I can take this metaphor—there’s a kind of dating period. In fact, the classic texts say the students should study the teacher for twelve years. The teacher should study the student for twelve years. You date them, you romance them a little bit, and at a certain point, when you’ve kicked the tires and you’ve asked the hard questions, you can get married. That power of commitment and devotion is incredibly powerful if it’s done right.
In the Tibetan world, there are four types of guru. One is the provisional external agent. Because we believe in externality, it’s helpful to use that training wheel. Then there’s the guru as the sacred text, the Dharma. You revere the text as a teacher.
The next two forms of guru yoga are the most interesting to me. The third type is where, with a really sensitive relationship to reality, the phenomenal world becomes your teacher. The great meditation master Milarepa said it beautifully: phenomena are all the books one needs. You can cultivate an openness to your world. You know the world is not made of matter; the world is made of mind. You realize that you have a capacity to read and relate with your environment as your teacher. We know this through synchronicities and auspicious coincidences.
But all three of these gurus are provisional. They all point to the ultimate guru, which is within you. That’s fundamentally where you really take refuge. We use these three forms of training wheels until we finally get the conviction: “Oh, my gosh! I really am the awakened one. I have wisdom and compassion and power. I just don’t believe it.”
In any case, the guru principle goes back for thousands of years to a number of Western traditions too. It’s there for a reason. It has a lot of power if it’s used as directed.
Smoley: This issue is generally approached from the perspective of the students. But the lamas themselves often become distorted and fall into dysfunctional situations. Does the cultural embeddedness of the United States really fit the guru concept as you know it from Tibet?
Holecek: I’m an agnostic on that. This remains to be seen. That type of cultural transposition hopefully shouldn’t be an imposition. Can Westerners relate in this way? On a mass market level, I don’t think so. Originally Tantra, guru yoga, and the like were forest traditions. They weren’t meant for mass consumption; they were for practitioners who weren’t part of mass culture.
If these teachings are held within a proper framework within a limited environment, they’re unbelievably powerful. I don’t think this is a prescription that fits a mass setting in the West.
Smoley: I wasn’t talking about the mass market. I was talking about actual institutes where these problems have arisen with lamas and very dedicated students. It’s not like they’re just a bunch of Taylor Swift fans.
Holecek: That’s where you have to have tremendous rigor. Don’t be afraid to continually kick the tires. Don’t be afraid to continually ask the hard questions. Don’t be afraid to challenge. If there is a teacher who isn’t open to that, who isn’t amenable to direct challenges, that’s a good time to walk in the other direction.
If you have a legitimate teacher, they’re going to be there for you. I speak with direct experience. I’ve had experiences where I’ve said, “Whoa! I’m not going to touch this person with a ten-foot pole.” Conversely, I’ve been with other teachers that I would consider 100 percent legitimate, with whom I feel nothing but love and compassion.
There are ways to test the veracity of a teacher. Look at the senior students. How much love and compassion do they have? How much are they doing to help others? How much are they walking the talk? How much do they circle the wagon around the guru? If you pay attention to these metrics, you can be careful, and you’ll be OK.
But here’s the other thing that happens: A lot of people in the West heap the poor teacher with all their projections, all their transferences, all their psychological stuff. They put all their eggs in one basket, and then, of course, the basket is going to break. This is one of the most difficult issues in Western spirituality, and also one of the most important.
In short, ask the tough questions. Challenge your teacher, and if there isn’t a proper receptivity to that, it’s time to walk. Trust your intuition. Trust your inner guru. Work with your dreams. One of the great gifts of dream yoga is that you work with your own unconscious mind. You can incubate dreams. You can get this guidance; trust the ultimate guru within; pay attention to that intuitive feeling. If it feels fishy, it probably is fishy, and then it’s time to walk. In my opinion, when in doubt, leave it out, especially in the West these days.
Longtime readers with strong memories may recall that I’ve written here before about my on-again, off-again, love affair with Islam, specifically with its mystical branch of Sufism. As I related previously (see “Losing My Religion” in Quest, summer 2009), in the years after the 9/11 terror attack and the hard-to-ignore rise of violent jihadism, I had real trouble continuing to resonate with a set of religious metaphors and practices that could also birth obscenities such as suicide bombers yelling “!Allahu akbar!” (“Allah is great!”) as they blew themselves up while targeting wedding parties and the like.
After I became an adult and left behind my staunch Southern Baptist roots, I was unsure who or what God is. Inside myself, I have somehow always known that there must be a higher power, and I have always felt a connection with Jesus. But in what form God exists, I had no clue.
Is it sacrilege to say that one’s personal god is a practical device? Religious and spiritual traditions prefer a more numinous vocabulary for God, and words like practical and sensible are rarely used. Yet human perceptions, cognition, and emotions can embrace a personal god with grace while balking at mystical notions of the Absolute.