Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is a lama of the Bön Tibetan religious tradition. He is founder and director of the Ligmincha Institute, an organization dedicated to the study and practice of the teachings of the Bön tradition. He was born in Amritsar, India. After his parents fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet, he received training from both Buddhist and Bön teachers, attaining the degree of Geshe, the highest academic degree of traditional Tibetan culture. He has been in the United States since 1991 and has taught widely in Europe and America.
Rinpoche has an intense interest in the interpretation, control and application of dreams and has written fairly extensively on lucid dreaming and the yoga of the dream state.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche Quotes
- Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death. Look to your experience of sleep to discover whether or not you are truly awake.
- Dream, rather than let yourself be dreamt.
- Methods can become an obstacle to abiding in non-dual awareness if the practitioner believes that one must use the practice to renounce something or transform something. Practices are only used to connect to the natural state and stabilize in it.
- When in the body of a donkey, enjoy the taste of grass.
- For example, when practitioners transform into Shenlha Ökar (Shen Deity of White Light), they visualize their bodies as being adorned with the thirteen ornaments of peacefulness that in themselves evoke the enlightened quality of peacefulness.2 Shenlha Ökar himself embodies all six of the antidote qualities of love, generosity, wisdom, openness, peacefulness, and compassion; so as soon as you transform into Shenlha Ökar, you instantly embody these same qualities.
- If we cannot remain present during sleep, if we lose ourselves every night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes? If we enter our dreams and interact with the mind’s images as if they are real, we should not expect to be free in the state after death. Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death. Look to your experience of sleep to discover whether or not you are truly awake.
See also: Dzogchen
Bibliography
- Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York. (1998)
- Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal. Wonders of the Natural Mind. Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York. (2000)
- Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal. Healing with Form, Energy, and Light. Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York. (2002)
