Mi'sen

The six yogas are amazing, and more accessible than generally thought. Key is to put yourself in the shoes of those ancient yogis, ask yourself what they were trying to accomplish, & see through the gimmicks, obscurantist language, & proprietary symbolism to the pith instruction.

Is this something you’ve been working on for a while?

Started practicing tummo about 15 years ago. My intro to the six realms as mind map was in 1990. My teacher Bill Hamilton was obsessed with it, and spoke of it often. He learned it from Chogyam Trungpa in Boulder. I have no formal Tibetan training, though, just Burmese Theravada.

Only in the last few days, though, did I finally crack the six yogas. I have a student, gifted in jhana, who asked me to teach him tummo three months ago. He picked it right up. Then he asked me if I'd take a look at the six yogas, reverse-engineer them, and teach them to him.

I was intrigued and dove head first into the project. It was easy to see that sleep yoga was the clear light while asleep, which I also already practiced, but that left bardo yoga and consciousness projection. Shit, what a mess. Probably some dumb superstitious nonsense, right?

Last week I lay down for a nap in the afternoon, cultivating the witness as I often do with the intention of carrying alertness into sleep. As often happens, I became alert during sleep, and it lasted longer than usual, perhaps 10 to 20 minutes.

Balanced on a razor's edge of alertness, nearly falling time after time into dullness, dreams, or unconsciousness, I recognized how this fit into the metaphor. I knew this was the bardo, the in-between state where one has not yet committed to rebirth in one of the six realms.

I realized the ancient yogis would have had this same experience. In the bardo, realizing you're unlikely, based on past experience, to go into your parinibbana, so you're going to be reborn, like it or not. But which realm should you choose? Buddhism gives us the answer...