Rinpoche's Online Advice Book: Obsessive Negative Thoughts

Rinpoche's Online Advice Book: Obsessive Negative Thoughts

Date of Advice:
May 2018
Date Posted:
April 2024

A student with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) wrote that they had continual thoughts about going to hell and ongoing negative thoughts about the guru.

Mantra calligraphy by Lama Zopa Rinpoche

My most dear, most precious, most kind, wish-fulfilling one,
I am sorry it took so many eons for me to reply to your emails.

It is good to try to discipline your mind. Try to think only positively; you need to make some effort to think positively. Even the person who you always get angry with, look at them as a buddha. For example, once that person becomes your guru, you have to stop thinking about them in a negative way. You have to think positively—that they are a buddha, an embodiment of the Buddha. By looking at them as a buddha, you see a buddha. Through that transformation in your mind, you receive the blessings of the Buddha and from that, realizations come—from correctly following the virtuous friend, which is the root of the path to enlightenment up to omniscience.

Then think, “I don’t have the karma to see them in the pure aspect of a buddha. I don’t have a pure mind to see that; I only have an impure mind. The Buddha manifests in the ordinary aspect that I can see, so that I can receive teachings, commentaries, oral transmissions, etc. So that leads me to enlightenment; it frees me from obscurations and brings me to the state of omniscience.”

If you can, think like that. You also need to practice purification, by thinking of the guru every day and making strong requests with guru devotion.

Try to receive the initiations of your main deities, but until you receive the initiations, you can recite their mantras. Take the initiations when you can, and later you can do the retreats.

You may not have taken Highest Yoga Tantra initiations yet, but when you can, take the initiations then after that if you can do tsog offering. You can even do tsog offering now, for purification. You can do the visualization of the tsog offering, but if you don’t yet have Highest Yoga Tantra then you can’t receive the commentary.

You can visualize the tsog (the food you have offered) as oceans of nectar. You need a small amount of meat and wine; you receive just a tiny amount so you get blessings, to hook the realization of method and wisdom, the clear light and illusory body. It doesn’t mean to drink many bottles [of alcohol], it doesn’t mean that—it’s just a small blessing, like a single drop. Then you are blessed by the guru-deity, who blesses your mind. All the defilements and negative karma collected from beginningless rebirth and degenerated samaya vows are purified then revived, and your mind becomes pure. That is what you have to think.

Actually, you can’t get a commentary on the practice without having received Highest Yoga Tantra initiation. But you can do the practice and generate skies of happiness and pleasure, generated in the holy mind of the merit field, the guru. You can do that and after that, you offer to the merit field. All the merit field that you see in the pictures is a manifestation of the guru. You have to think that even though the guru is appearing in different aspects, it is still the guru. At the moment, that is enough.

Also, it is very good for you to do nyung nä, Chenrezig practice. It is a great, unbelievable purification practice. Each time we do a nyung nä and chant OM MANI PADME HUM, it purifies our negative karma. It is so powerful. It purifies our negative karma and obscurations collected from beginningless rebirths, and it is a very quick way to be free from the lower realms and to be born in the pure land. We can become enlightened in some of the pure lands.

It causes us to generate compassion for all the sentient beings, particularly by doing Chenrezig practice, the nyung nä, and reciting OM MANI PADME HUM. That causes us to generate compassion for sentient beings more quickly, and causes us to achieve enlightenment more quickly for the sentient beings. It causes us to free all the sentient beings from samsara more quickly and helps sentient beings achieve enlightenment more quickly.

With much love and prayers ...