Swamiji on Class and Chod (PDF) - The Movement Center

of the creative energy and is inherently joyful. The point of growing is to bring us to that place
where we can live conscious of the completeness, the wholeness, which is ever present within
ourselves and enjoy it. Enjoy it now! Not tomorrow. Not after we die. Now, because that
dimension of ourselves is beyond time and space. In that dimension there is no past and no
future. There is an infinite present, infinitely now, which is infinitely complete.
I was honored to receive Lama Wangdu’s teachings
on Chöd and profoundly impressed by those
teachings. They resonated with my Catholic
upbringing, where I first learned that it is necessary
for us to be concerned about our fellow human
beings. Because we exist in a totally integrated,
totally interconnected environment, in which we
are not now, nor will we ever be separate, we cannot
achieve anything just for ourselves. Because we are
never going to be working only for ourselves; it is
not possible in an integrated environment. We have to be concerned about our
interconnectedness and to appreciate that the quality of our life is in some measure dependent
upon the quality of the environment around us.
The circulation of the energy is really about the quality of the whole. I was very pleased that we
could bring this Chöd teaching to reinforce that understanding and to have a practical way of
beginning to put people in touch with that boundless dimension of themselves, and the fact that
that boundless dimension of ourselves operates in our everyday life all the time. It operates
every moment of every day in every context.
How does all fit with our core practice, class? Class is about transmitting, making available to
you the experience of that dimension where the you and the me no longer exist and there is only
one pure joyous loving awareness. Class is what is described in the Dzogchen tradition as
direct transmission. It is the direct transmission of the awareness of awakened mind or pure
consciousness, which is the term in the Anupaya of esoteric Shaivism.
TMC News, December 2008 Class and Chod 6