A selection of teachings from various books by Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, the Nyingma lineage master considered to be an emanation of the fourteenth-century Nyingma master Longchenpa.

Thinley Norbu Rinpoche

Visualization practice sometimes involves traditional symbolism that Westerners have trouble relating to, says Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. "As the twentieth-century Tibetan scholar-monk Gendun Chöpel pointed out, Vajrayana practitioners must get used to believing in the unbelievable. Tantric methods of visualization might involve creating a raging inferno in your mind's eye, in the midst of which sits a deity on a fragile lotus flower and a cool moon seat, embracing a very passionate consort, and surrounded by an unruly mob of angry deities wielding deadly implements. Yet the heat and the flames do no harm whatsoever and no one gets hurt. A rational analysis of such a situation can only result in disbelief, since everything about this scene is contradictory and nothing in it could possibly exist in our ordinary reality. But the point is that tantric practitioners have to get used to believing in the unbelievable. Our aim is to unite and dissolve subject and object so that they are one. We unite desire and anger, dissolving them into one, just as we do heat and cold, clean and dirty, body and mind. This is known as "the union of jnanas and kayas," and is the ultimate kind of union. // Gendun Chöpel also said that the reason we cannot grab hold of inexpressible notions like that of dharmadhatu is not because we strongly believe in what exists. On the contrary, it is because we strongly disbelieve in what does not exist. But it will take quite some time to insert this new knowledge of nonduality into our very stubborn system of duality."

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, vajrayana, Gendun Chopel