What is a Drala Priest?

The Drala priest is tasked with teaching a mind training for a life-giving interpretation of what is happening right now in front of our noses.

By Dru Peers

More and more people are looking for awareness and guidance in today’s world and the Drala priest can offer much light to help them.

Drawing from the great spiritual teachings, he or she will also be in a place to generate new Dharma.

Chogyam Trungpa, a widely influential Tibetan lama once asked, “Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other ‘undesirable’ side, the bad and the black? That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.”

The Drala part of the name Drala priest can be said to be the energy above aggression—the view from above the battleground.

These priests are warriors in the war on aggression. Trungpa wrote, “Warriorship does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Warriorship is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness.”

A Drala priest will be able to work with dralas, local energies and spirits. If Drala means “energy above aggression,” it might be good to look more closely at what energy is. Energy cannot seemingly be destroyed, only changed, on the level of form. This is because it is not really energy; it is manifested thought. The good news is not so much that energy can be changed but that the mind that made it can be changed, and teaching exactly how the mind that made it can be changed, is the proper work of the priest.

The core message is: “There is no world!” But if there is no world, then there was no world that was here before you came here, and there is no world that will be here for you to leave behind when you go. It never existed and neither did you as a separate being. What you really are, and what you will always be, is perfect spirit, in a condition of perfect oneness. Undoing the ego-thought system is a genuine contribution to the awareness of humanity, assisting not only the healing of my mind, but of the entire mind. It’s not as if the universe can’t be enjoyed and explored, but you just can’t make it real.

So let’s not make it real. Let’s not play it safe.

Let’s tell the truth—a truth too radical for pop spirituality. The Drala priest takes the Buddhist teaching that all is illusion—“a bubble of foam on a wave in the ocean,” as Buddha described it—and matches it with quantum mechanics. The priestly part comes in with the teaching of quantum forgiveness as the way out, the way home.

In a sense, the quantum type of forgiveness is not really forgiveness at all. Someone is forgiven not because they have really done something wrong, but because they haven’t really done anything because they don’t exist. The unconscious mind will never be healed until it knows the difference between reality and the dream, and is loyal to only one of those things in the mind.

Judgement of external behaviour is not however the field of expertise for the Drala priest. This priest is in no way a Check-point Charlie screening access to God, but is practiced in “right-minded” thoughts, even if his or her external behaviour is not always understandable.

The Drala priest is tasked with teaching a mind training for a life-giving interpretation of what is happening right now in front of our noses. They introduce practitioners to right view, the pure non-dualistic way of looking that I believe our ancestors enjoyed naturally. This teaching addresses the unconscious part of the mind, unlike other worthy practices such as mindfulness, or Vipassana, which can only offer temporary relief. This is generating new Dharma.

It is real spirituality, true reality, always there no matter what appears to happen.

As Trungpa stated: “Whether you care to communicate with it or not, the magical strength and wisdom of reality are always there….By relaxing the mind, you can reconnect with that primordial, original ground, which is completely pure and simple. Out of that, through the medium of your perceptions, you can discover magic, or Drala. You actually can connect your own intrinsic wisdom with a sense of greater wisdom or vision beyond you.”

The great spiritual teaching of Vajrayana is based on the Heart Sutra and the experience of the non-duality of form and emptiness. The body’s eyes see only form; they cannot see beyond what they were made to see, and they were made to look on a deception, a trick, and not see past it.

It is important to understand that we will never find the “vision beyond you” with the body’s eyes, but by the way we think. The Drala priest teaches pure non-dualism as an extension of this, incorporating the insights of modern science for a contemporary world.

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

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