Essays
The Magical Realism of Dzogchen as expressed in the Unceasing Experience of Spontaneity
1. Longchenpa in his great book The Nature of Natural Perfection of Awareness opens his discussion with the theme of absence…the openness of awareness as felt absence, or emptiness, or nothingness. The initial experience of such absence can be terror in the vastness of the great expanse where there is no reference. As one slowly, but surely, becomes more capable of holding, assimilating and experiencing this primordial openness, then within this openness of the great expanse the experience of spontaneity, unceasing spontaneity, magical spontaneity emerges.
2. All experience takes place within awareness as timeless spontaneity….timeless awareness manifests spontaneously. Timeless spontaneity is always present and is created by no one and is the very nature of pure awareness. Pure awareness is truly the wish fulfilling gem…the magical potential from which and out of which and within which everything arises. Timeless spontaneity is the origin of all, of samsara and nirvana. In timeless spontaneity there is freedom…the freedom of manifestation, multidimensional manifestations.
3. This pure awareness, this field of gnosis is indeterminate, completely indeterminate without fixation and without frame and without reference. Pure openness. To live within this pure openness is to live within this indeterminate space and is to dwell within this realm of freedom and magic. This vast indeterminate quality is the source of both spontaneity and potentiality …to dwell within this space of spontaneity and potential is….the bliss of freedom….muktananda. To live within this essence one must be beyond the mind and embody awareness completely. To be in the mind alone is to experience the determinateness of experience and inherent fixation of events. There is both illusionary security and hopelessness in fixation; the fixation of history, the fixation of events, the fixation of mind, and fixation of circumstance.
The inherent quality of potency, infinite potentiality may give rise to anything whatsoever and is always infinitely spontaneous, unceasing spontaneousness is dangerous. This existential ground of openness, this source as timeless spaciousness within which experience arises, everything whatsoever manifests and arises out of this spaciousness and within this spaciousness of phenomena. This process is not like a fish jumping out of water, rather this plane of immanence contains everything…everything arises within the plane of immanence and never goes beyond it. You are always with it life after life and death after death, realm after realm.
4. This gnosis is a field, this plane of immanence is total spontaneity without inside or outside, without experiential fixation. This pure awareness is boundless like the sky, this all encompassing matrix, this multidimensional matrix, all embracing, integrating everything and manifesting everything….The field of spontaneous immanence is inexhaustible with out increase or decrease. Nothing is beyond it, nothing transcends it.
5. The pure awareness field is spontaneous and complete. It is the totality of the here and now, infinite here and now, forever and ever here and now, ceaseless here and now. At the moment of death you will be in the here and now, and immediately after you die and leave this dimension of flesh you will be in the here and now. And when you incarnate and renter the flesh you will still be in the here and now.
This vast creative potency, creative potentiality is the natural function of the spacious openness, spacious unboundedness, indeterminate radiant space. The luminous openness of the all embracing essence is the essence of awareness; learning to rest in unbound indeterminate unfolding experience.
6. All environments and all worlds and all beings occur and come to be in this luminous spacious field, and yet samsara and nirvana are never completely concretized or eternally locked in or completely crystallized or completely congealed. All events are arising and dissolving within the scope of the Gnostic field, this cosmic field of spacious spontaneity….radiant spontaneity. The Gnostic field is congealing radiance and uncongealing simultaneously, appearing and disappearing simultaneously, unconcealing and concealing simultaneously, opening and closing simultaneously, luminous and darkness manifesting simultaneously, nothingness and beingness simultaneously.
7. All appearance is finite in form. The kinetic forms arise as circles of light and energy arising from Gnostic potency as the experience of samsara and nirvana (tigles). This cosmo genesis is both of the macrocosmic and microcosmic universes, the worlds within worlds.
Pure awareness itself and all of its manifestations are non-dual oneness. Pure awareness and its manifestations are all pure and luminous. You and I are pure and luminous in essence and in nature.
8. Non-duality is spontaneity .The Gnostic Ground and its field manifestations are neither identical and nor different from each other. All manifestations occur in this medium of timeless awareness. The manifestations of the unceasing potentiality may appear as both pure (non-dual) and impure (dual) in the moment of non-dual spaciousness of awareness. All manifestations are oneness and this oneness can not be contrived nor destroyed. The manifestations of the various dimensions within the field are equivocal, and ambiguous. The Gnostic ground, stated as a very weak and thin metaphor, is only one house with three different floors. Dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya are completely the same and yet a bit different.
9. All Buddha beings and all sentient beings, all actual and potential worlds, all are the nature of pure awareness, multidimensional awareness. Potential, indeterminate space as dharmakaya, luminous energy manifesting vortextually, the emanation of earth among all other worlds is the multidimensional awareness.
19. Although the spontaneous manifestations arising out of Gnostic awareness can be defined as pure or impure, good or bad, right and wrong, true and false, in actuality the manifestations can not be differentiated, from being the pure Gnostic existential ground.
20. The clear luminous non-dual knowingness of pure awareness may manifest as ordinary good and bad experience, beauty and horror, and yet what happens in the moment of the experience of non-dual awareness is the arising and the release of suffering. Suffering does arise within non-dual awareness and is released within non- dual awareness. This is the experience of the non-duality of samsara and nirvana. Within the non-dual field of awareness, duality appears and duality disappears. Duality, within non-duality. This is the essence of magical realism.
Many forms of eastern philosophy both Vedantic and Buddhist utterly deny duality by denying otherness. The Madhyamaka (Buddhist - all phenomena are empty of "substance" or "essence" meaning that they have no intrinsic, independent reality apart from the causes and conditions from which they arose.) , Advaita (Hindu – non-duality) Vedanta believe that in the non-dual absolute the subject object duality is totally negated. Subjectivity is negated; reality of the vessel of the world is negated. Incarnation is negated. This crass and gross idealism is dissociative and illusionary at best. In the denial of otherness as the non-dual experience of solipsism is resultant….a kind of attachment disorder is fabricated…The Dzogchen of Longchenpa is without the denial of otherness and is an expression of magical realism.
21. Subject and object are manifestations of the awareness field within the awareness field as the awareness field…there is duality within non-duality. There is duality within oneness of non-duality within the nature of the immanent plane of awareness. Subject and objects are spontaneous manifestations of the one luminous plane of awareness. Duality is the manifestation of non-duality and takes place within non-duality as non- duality. We might say we live in a non-dual duality or duality within non-dualness. This is bliss of magical realism.
22. Non-duality is ambiguous experience. All manifestations are equivocal. Equivocal means having more then one meaning…completely the same with difference.
23. The ambivalent spontaneity of pure awareness gnosis is manifested as three dimensions of the Gnostic ground, i.e. dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya. The metaphor of a crystal prism is used, the crystal prisms diffracting pure colorless light as the five rainbow rays of color. The radiance manifests as the 5 Buddha families to use the Buddhist functional metaphor, which manifest as the five elements, which manifest and configure the world, the luminous world of flesh.
24. These three dimensions of awareness and its manifestations are infinitely spontaneous. In the diffraction of the crystal spectrum of light, the five colored luminous rays of light are separately distinguished and are the manifestation of the one potency of the crystal spectrum of light without discrimination. The emptiness or the openness or nothingness or spaciousness or purity is the dimension of pure being of the dharmakaya. The radiance, intrinsic luminosity is the dimension of bliss, the sambhogakaya, and the indeterminate medium of emanation is the nirmanakaya. This is the magical dimension of gnosis and these are the Gnostic dimensions of spontaneity within the spacious ground as field.
25. The crystal prism and the fivefold spectrum of light within it share a common field and there can be no qualitative distinction made between them. There is absolutely no qualitative distinction between the emptiness of gnosis which is the dimension of pure being dharmakaya, which is like a crystal, its brilliance is the dimension of bliss which is like spectrum of the light and is sambhogakaya, and is unlimited potential for manifestation and emanation of light becoming worlds, including the world of flesh, nirmanakaya. The three Gnostic dimensions are of one essence. The apparitional manifestation is of the one essence and the appearance of the vessel of the world is of one essence. Throughout the entire Gnostic dimension is unimpeded manifestation of indeterminate spontaneity. Primordial spaciousness is pervasively present within the Gnostic continuum.
26. Pure being is indivisible from three dimensions of reality. The light of awareness is pure being and the lights intrinsic shining as the manifestation of apparitional existence (sambhogakaya) and shining as the manifestation of the existential appearance of the vessel of the world and its inhabitants appearing distinctly and inexorably brilliant. These intrinsic manifestations are the bliss of timeless awareness and the great compassion which is its magical emanations.
27. Any attempt to revert to the source is redundant because there is no distinction to be made between the source and its manifestations, likewise there is no qualitative distinction to be made between any varieties of manifestations. All are unified; all are in the oneness of gnosis.
28. The three Gnostic dimensions may appear to be separate but are one in reality. The three are indistinguishable due to their common nature. The experience is total reality, the brilliance is total reality…the essence is total reality. The common light of day can not be distinguished from the purity of reality.
Essays
Dzogchen and Mahamudra retreat 2011
1.Dudjom Rinpoche the great master of Dzogchen would often say :” hundreds or thousands of explanations are given, there is only one thing to be understood, know the one thing that liberates everything----Awareness itself , your true nature.”
2.Namkai Norbu another contemporary master of Dzogchen says this: Dzogchen does not belong to any religion, it is very nature of human awareness itself. No one owns Dzogchen and its naturalistic and experiential understanding is expressed in many traditions. Our own root teacher was Swami Muktanada and he was Hindu Shavite Meditation Master. He taught that meditation was becoming aware of awareness itself. Western phenomenology is also presents methodology for becoming aware of awareness.
3.The very essence of Dzogchen is to be aware of awareness itself.. Beyond words and letters ,there is a transmission that does not belong to any tradition which is very nature of human of awareness and this is the Buddha. This statement made in the 6th century by Bodhidharma indicates that although human beings easily and constantly transmit their minds from one to another, from family to children, from person to person, from group to group from culture to culture, human beings are also able to transmit the very nature of their own awareness to each other .this awareness is this field of light and of energy. This field is a field of gnosis direct lumenous knowningess and is the great compassion…love itself.
4.In the praxis of Dzoghcen if you to be able to suspend your mind even briefly, this suspension frees your awareness to become aware of own self, and in this action awareness becomes aware of its own nature. This nature this syunyata is spaceousness, or openness ,the great expanse and this nature is also light or radiance or lumenousity, and this nature is energy, or qi or shakti, and this nature is also oneness and pervasive. This nature is the great affection or great compassion, which is infinite in its horizons vaste and multidimensional.
5. In meditation and through meditation you learn through practice and happen stance to suspend your mind. The mind which is thinking, is feelings, is memory, and is sensation and is fantasy. And within the freedom of the suspension, this epoche , your awareness focuses within its own self and reveals itself and shows itself and unconceals itself to you as your own self. You begin to experience awareness itself.as .the base of your experience. The base of your experience is no longer mind alone but this field as non conceptual awareness, this field vast and infinite in its horizon. This base goes beyond the boundaries of your body.
The natural mystic drama of your lifev begins unfolding with immediacy. Your life and the mystic drama become one.
6.Dzogchen understanding and practice begins within awareness in order to dissolve suffering ,the suffering of never ending lost , the suffering of an indeterminate and unpredictable existence, the suffering of the abyss of emptiness and voidness, the suffering of non connectedness, separateness and solipsism , the anxiety of non existence ,ever present death. The phenomena of disappearance and appearance is the very essence of the field of awareness ,.ever present, timelessly present, coming and going, appearing and disappearing…within timeless awareness.
7. The praxis is simple, suspend your mind, enter into awareness of awareness, holding it, entering it, becoming it, aham ah “I am becoming what I am.” As you become aware of awareness the qualities of awareness manifest themselves in you, in your experience. The qualities are spaceousness or openeness, lumenousity or light, energy, and the oneness and compassion as pure love. As you establish your self in this field as AND THE FIELD ESTABLISHES ITSELF IN YOU, YOU integrate your mind and your body into this field of awareness. And so you begin to live within awareness itself. You think in awareness, you feel within awareness field, you have memory, sensation and dreams…all within awareness .What is most amazing and the wonder of wonders is that is you begin experience not only within your own self this field but you begin to experience this field of awareness within everyone and in time everything…animate as well as inanimate. What is in you is in the other. You begin to experience non duality, or oneness within the duality of the world..
You integrate everything within awareness field and this awareness metabolizes experience and frees you from the compulsivity of endless fixation . In time the light of awareness becomes more and more visible in your self and within in this world. all of which is the beingness of Being itself…the translucidity of Being of all the beings.
8.More over your own awareness is multidimensional and the world you live in is of the same dimensions. These dimensions in Dzogchen are called Kayas. These dimensions become slowly but surely apparent and experiential. So within the dimension of ordinary appearance (nirmanakaya) you experience the energy and light within yourself and others. This light and this spaceousness and this energy is the source of non duality or oneness within appearances, this world of fles, the world of me and you.
9.In time You begin also to experience the dimension of apparitionalness(sambhogakaya). This happens especially in dreams andin visions. In Visions, you experience the archetypical dimension of your own being which is Being itself. Primordial energies, swirling vortexts of energy and light, archetypical manifestations all of these manfifestations are cosmological qualities of primordial awareness. Primordial Beingness expressed and symbolized as personafied deities. dakinis, deva’s..You experience them not outside of you but as the qualities your own awareness , your own beingness of Being itself.
10.And in time you experience the completely ineffable non conceptual , beyond all language and expression, the silent dimension of pure potential , potential space, the great void, the great openness out of which everything arises and dissolves, including your own self, your own awareness. This dharmakaya dimension is Creativity itself …the great mother.
11.You begin to experience within your self as your self this pervasive immanence that is the source and pervades all of existence. The world becomes more inside to inside and less externalized….less objectified, less reified. In this bliss, this great bliss, thisbliss over comes all suffering.
Om ah hung, bodichitta, maha suka, jnana datu ah.
11.This unfolding of the field sometimes happens like this. More often then not a person lives in their mind. The mind is a kind of box…a jewel box. And a person can live in the functions of their mind, thinking, feelings, sensation ,memory and fantasy. Then one day you the person become aware of their mind, and the person experiences mindfulness.Soon the person discovers a space that is not their mind, and from that space the person can view their own mind. That is an amazing moment. This is the beginning of liberation. This may continue for some time.
12. Then one day that person becomes aware of that space itself . One day the person becomes aware of that intermediate space, that space in between, that transitional or liminal space . In that space of awareness , the person become aware of there innermost space and clearly realizes that awareness is not their mind. You and I are not our mind, and we are this space of awareness ,this field of awareness.
Wonderfully The base begins to shift from our mind to our awareness. Moreover, to our surprise , to our unending surprise this awareness is field vast and its horizons are infinite and unbound. Moreover you and I begin to learn to extend this awareness field to each other within this field of immanance. In and through this mutual transmission we become stronger in the field and in the light of the field. Two awareness are truly better then one.
13. We begins to live in the energy and light of the field , We begin to sense the oneness of the field in ourselves and in others. We are entering the non duality of oneness and we experience the translucidity within us and within of the world. We experience the sameness of equality consciousness.
14.Moreover the different dimension of this awareness this amazing awareness begins to manfest to us, and we slowly but surely begin to feel and to glimpse the multidimensionalness of our own existence and the existence of others. You and I begin to experience ourselves as this unfolding field . We experience ourselves as this primordial awareness, un born and undying..and in these moments death itself begins to dissolve.
15.. Dudjome Rinpoche says by simply relaxing in this uncontrived ,open, natural state, we obtain the blessing of aimless, self liberation of whatever arises. Your karma is the dharma, the map of liberation is you life just it is..
14.there is a great lama named Penam Rinpoche. He visited the states one time a number of years ago. And he gave this talk on FIXATION. Penam Rinpoche would say never separate from awareness, never separate from awareness,never separate.
15.Fixation can take you out of the awareness field., out of the spontaneity of the field, out of the sea of awareness, this magical sea…the sea of love.
16. He points out that the very indeterminateness of the unfolding field of primordial awareness can bring forth the spontaneity of the awareness field and that one can live and die within this spontaneous and syncrenistic unfolding. But the very spontaneity and syncrenistiy of the field can be overcome or undone by fixation. .Awareness can be loss because of fixation of our mind. There can be a fixation of thinking, a fixation of affective response, a fixation within fantasy, fixation within sensation, a fixation because of memory. Fixation creates mind or at least a very dense mind. Fixation creates density and disolves translucidity, disolves spaceousness.
17.Fixation destroys the field and the fullness of the field. Within fixation you go back to the beginning and become completely located within the box of your mind. You and I and everyone will always have problems but not necessarily fixatedness. Whatever is fixated bring the fixation into the field of awareness and awareness will dissolve fixation,metabolize the fixation. You can enter fixation and become fixatedness because of the fear of the indeterminanteness of this world, the vast array of unpredicableness, the vast array of lost, unending loss and to the degree you think you will solve this root problems by fixation and effort endless effort you will only become the fixation, never ending fixation. This is why the indeterminatess of reality, the impermanency, the contingency can not be dealt with by mind alone Within your own awareness is resolution to the terror of this experience of non knowningness what will happen next.
Essays
The Magical Realism of the Experience of Assimilating Everything into Spontaneity
1. As we suspend the mind, and the mapping of the mind, as we becoming aware of awareness and begin to live within rigpa, we experience the nature of field in a naked manner. Syunyata...absence…openness….the luminosity and the stunning and at times saturating indeterminateness of experience and events become clearly manifest...nakedly so. As we no longer locate ourself within the mind and its various and infinite security operations, we begin to experience within the indeterminateness the incessant spontaneity of awareness manifesting within us and around us. In our oneness within the nondual awareness field, our oneness with spontaneity becomes sadnana…the path of embodiment of consciousness.
And so our experience, all of our experience, is assimilated into the spontaneous field of spacious openness…dasein, the great expanse, surrendering to spontaneity unfolding relentless spontaneity…letting go into the wave, releasing our self into the absa….the opening and closing...the shining forth, bringing ourselves forth by letting go. Letting go is not passive, it is not giving up, it is not collapsing. Letting go is leaping through and cutting through phenomena.
The mind cannot do this. The being awareness field can and does…remaining in awareness can and does. Without being in awareness, disintegration is inevitable.
2. All of our experience is grounded in the field of pure awareness. Pure awareness is like space, luminous space. All experience, inner and outer, is spontaneously assimilated into the dimension of awareness. The field extends into and integrates everything and everyone and every action. The field metabolizes the unfolding of being within the events. If we understand what is being described in terms of mind and mind alone, a passive scenario may emerge for us as it emerges for much of eastern philosophy. If we experience awareness as the vajra kilya, vajra kumar, unborn and undying manifesting as energy manifesting as flesh, then bliss is released in action.
3. Our elemental space of awareness contains, holds, assimilates all matter and energy, so gnosis awareness includes all experience, with whatever arises. Awareness remains within itself, and everything is experienced within the awareness continuum. This continuum of kayas, mind alone, is in a tough and terrifying spot. The mind–body continuum is itself experience in and through the awareness continuum as the manifestation of awareness…which is luminous. We are in the awareness field and experiencing whatever manifests as the very same awareness. The awareness field is a felt sense and multiple senses. Of the kayas…we are the kayas.
4. In reality, every act and event reveals the freedom of letting go into the continuum of awareness through the event and the experience of phenomena…inner phenomena and outer phenomena. Letting go, releasing, allows the beingness of being to shine through whatever actions, whatever praxis are required by and in the relentless, spontaneous, and indeterminate situations…unpredictable and indeterminate in nature.
5. To assimilate all experience into spontaneity, we integrate, we bring into our awareness field vase….mandala…container...unfolding of experience and events within awareness, the space of awareness, the light of awareness, the immanence of awareness …the pervasive immanence of the plane of immanence. In nonduality we experience the dualities….Inside to inside the events unfold.
6. The effortless assimilation into spontaneity is the coemergence of experience and events as the manifestation of phenomena, the innermost awareness attuned to the manifestation of the beingness of being in all the events of beings…requiring spontaneously to be met…situations emerging, coemerging, bringing forth the beingness of our being as our own being in that moment…whether in love or in conflict, whether in victorious moment or in defeat, whether in happiness of a realm of heaven, or whether in the burdenedness of a hell realm.
7. Every event is bound to spontaneity and so every moment can be assimilated into spontaneity. The uncertainty is the unconcealing of spontaneity….Every event is bound to spontaneity, bound to indeterminancy…[every event calls for] releasing ourselves from imagined causality or fictitious explanations….staying with unfolding of spontaneity.
8. All and everything is caught in the bind of spontaneity. All inner and outer worlds are spontaneously manifested. The whole of samsara and nirvana is spontaneous manifestation. Pure primordial awareness is primordial spontaneity…the absa.
9. There is nothing other than spontaneous beingness...the play of consciousness, the incessant manifestation of consciousness both as us and as events.
10. The ground of samsara and nirvana is the pure awareness field...the immanence of the field, the pervasiveness of the field, the oneness of the field, the multidimensionality of the field. The face of spontaneity is indeterminacy…the unborn spontaneity is beyond time and yet manifesting time, manifesting temporalness, manifesting in time as time as kala. Time is the manifestation of pure spontaneity…of dharmakaya manifesting through sambogkaya. through nirmanakaya.
11. Pure awareness is unoriginated. The very nature of the unborn and undying is spontaneity. This unborn spontaneity is outside of time, beyond time while producing time.
12. As human beings we can become uniquely aware of the vast pure awareness within us and manifesting as us and as our world….There is oneness in the manifestation. The face of the unborn is in determinate….this indeterminacy permeates psyche’s manifestations. Sambogakaya is indeterminate and nirmankaya is indeterminate. To experience the indeterminacy of phenomena is to experience the beingness of being shining through and becoming. Manifestation itself has no beginning and no end. This beginninglessness and endlessness is INEFFABLE ambiguity...and is NOWNESS IN THIS LIFE, NOWNESS AT DEATH, AND NOWNESS FOREVER AND FOREVER….
14. Timeless emanation is uncrystallizing, meaning never completely concrete, never completely fixed…the indeterminateness of our timeless condition. Time takes place within timelessness. To remain in timeless awareness opens the fixatedness of situations and opens spontaneous presence…the source of synchronicity. Timeless awareness accesses healing...which is indeterminacy brought into fixed states of experiencing and events….Healing is magical realism.
15. There is the matrix of sameness, which is the quality of the pure awareness field. Everything resides in this matrix of sameness of oneness…continuity within discontinuity.
16. Duality resides in nonduality. Nonduality pervades duality. The field of immanence is nondual. There is only oneness and within oneness is twoness, and millions....Within oneness is duality. Duality is assimilated into spontaneity of awareness, nondual awareness. Nonduality gives us an inside to inside view…in and through the hiddeness of nonduality….Some think nonduality is hidden, but actually as we experience nonduality, which is inside to inside, we stunningly realize how hiddenness pervades duality. Duality in situations, in friendship, institutions, culture…duality actually effects paranoia. Duality within nonduality becomes lucidity of experience and of character.
17. Equivocal manifestation of awareness or ambiguous manifestation of awareness is the nature of awareness. Is it or is not it.
The Givenness of Compassionate Magic.
Compassion is not a secondary effect or affect. Compassion is the source of emanation, the source of extension. Compassion brings forth beings, compassion is the beingness of being emanating and manifesting….Extension is compassionate spontaneity. Passing through is a beneficent skillful means that gives us realization in and through spontaneity and its presentations…we pass into and through presentations....This is esoteric knowledge…the treasure of esoteric magic….This is togel and treacho combined.
WARNING…
THE FOLLOWING IS NOT A MIND DISCUSSION AND WILL BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR MENTAL HEALTH IF YOU TRY THIS ONLY IN YOUR MIND...IT ONLY WORKS IF YOU ARE IN RIGPA.
18. To release our self into the openness of the beingness of being is to experience completeness...wherever and how ever it happens. This letting go is a releasement into the spontaneity of manifestation…of phenomena. The play of consciousness is spontaneous and within phenomena.
19. Letting go is releasement and releasing…a leaping through…releasing into the openness of the great expanse, the openness of awareness. Releasing is letting go and letting go is releasing. It takes place within phenomena.
20. Releasing into the clearing of awareness, the light, the openness...expanded openness…extended openness lets being be and being manifest itself and accepts the arriving and departing of all beings within this field of earth and sky.
21. Releasing and letting go accepts the appearance and departing of divinities.
22. Releasing and letting go and leaping through and cutting through undoes the binding power of thoughts, fantasies, affective states, and compulsive, desperate desire. It frees up the flowingness of beingness in us and around us...frees up appearance and disappearance…frees up the capacity to dissolve negative and destructive energy. This capacity takes place only in nonduality knowing duality.
23. Releasing loosens the hold of narcissistic demandingness, insistence, and even mastery.
24. Releasing or letting go, letting go into tempers the superego, the must and the should.
25. Releasing or letting go dissipates anger and endless rage and enables the experiencing of what is.
26. Releasing and letting go, passing through, unclutters space and time and enables us to dwell.
27. Releasing into and passing through, letting go, allows us to experience the coemergence of the field in all situations and with everyone.
28. Releasing and letting go, passing through and leaping through and cutting through, allows us to experience phainesthai…the shining forth of beings that is being itself. Divinity itself, temporality itself, is the manifestation of divinity...not as ideation or belief…but as experience.
Essays
Mystical Humanism as Magical Realism
As you and I become aware of awareness, the nature of this awareness reveals and manifests itself, and shows itself in us as us. It manifests as spaciousness, as energy, as light, as knowingness, and as timelessness--as timeless awareness. Ultimately, it manifests as oneness and as non-duality. And paradoxically, awareness shows itself, reveals itself in us as us, as we experience this timelessness in time and time in timelessness. We experience this oneness within the world and the world within oneness; we experience non-duality within duality and duality within non-duality. We are beings in the world. We can experience purity within polarities, love within hate, and hate within love. This is the true purity of appearance and eventually the purity of apparitionalness.
Most amazingly, through our awareness we can experience the Beingness of our own being, which is the Beingness of Being itself. As you and I experience the Beingness of Being within ourselves, the door opens so that the Beingness of Being within other beings can be experienced. We experience the Beingness of Being within others. In that experience of otherness, the Beingness of Being becomes pervasive…infinitely pervasive. There is only one Beingness of Being…there is only one. The Beingness of Being becomes the vast support of life and death, the support of life after life and death after death. The essence of the Beingness of Being is mahasuka--innate.bliss, sahaj samadhia--natural innate bliss. This bliss dissolves suffering and this bliss takes us through the abyss of death. The Bliss of Beingness of Being is oneness of all beings.
We are beings in this world, and this world is multidimensional and infinite in its horizons. In this multidimensional awareness manifesting as worlds, there is the world of beings, the world of desire and flesh, and there is also the world of archetypal energies, the world of deities and dakinis, the gods and the goddesses. This realm of dakinis and deities is the cosmological dimension and is completely alive in its elementalness. This world of beings is manifested within and through this world of deities and dakinis. This archetypical dimension of the Beingness of Being manifesting itself as deities and dakinis precedes in a timeless manner the world of beings as flesh and desire. The Beingness of Being manifests beings in its becomingness by manifesting the dieities and dakinis, primordial energies of awareness. Although it definitely seems like two worlds, in fact there is only one awareness field which is primordial awareness itself manifesting different modes of Beingness.
The essence of us as persons is the drama that we are beings in whom Being manifests and to whom Being itself reveals itself both within us and around us and through us and definitely beyond us. There is this essential transmittalness of the Beingness of Being, and the essence of sending is the unveiling and revealing of Beingness. This unveiling or uncovering is the essence of truth, and is not the adequation of the intellect with reality, judgementalness.
What shines into human beings and through human beings can never be explained by the mere presence of human beings or the constructed-out of human beings (it is not simply constructed out of us by us.). Being constructs us. This shining through is Being itself, primordial Being, which is primordial awareness itself in its multidimensionality. Shining, manifesting from Being into beings and through beings into Being itself, Being manifests itself to itself through beings.
This manifestation from Being into beings and shining into beings is often described as the archetypical expression and manifestation-- the dieities and dakinis, the elementals. The gods and the goddess shine through phenomena. The masculine and the feminine is the oneness of Being in all beings.
Now the gods are the archetypical dimension and are essential in the unfolding of the Beingness of Being in human beings. Although they are anthropomorphized a bit too much, through them the Beingness of Being becomes present in a being.
You and I are surrounded by Being and permeated by Being shining into us and actually gazing into us just as we gaze into Being and gaze into human beings whose Beingness we can directly perceive as awareness, as fields.
The essence of the deities is the shining into this ordinary world and presenting themselves in beings as Being itself, shining, illuminating, manifesting within the sea of immanence.
Our very subjectivity is the Beingness of Being looking into itself and into otherness, the Beingness of Being gazing into itself. The Beingness of Being is always gazing into itself through its manifestation as beings. Through gaze the Beingness of Being becomes unconcealed. The essential process of being is within manifestation, becoming unconcealed from within its concealment. Luminous disclosure shows itself shining. The situations we are in are always shining into us and us into those very situations. Circumstance is definitely method; the gaze raises the look into the original face of Being which is manifested in all faces human as well as sentient faces, animals and fish, plant faces. Geographies are the face of Being manifesting as elementals. This gazing makes presence possible, both within beings and within deities.
The deities are real just as you and I are real. They also are very much like us in that in essence they are not substance or entities. They are the manifesting of awareness, manifesting within you as you and around you as circumstance. Their forms are kaliscopic, appearing and disappearing. Actually just like you and I, we appear and we disappear. The difference is that we are primordial awareness in and as physical bodies and physical minds.
Truly this is an amazing world you and I live in. This is the world of magical realities in its essence, the divinity of appearance (nirmanakaya) and the divinity of apparitional (sambogakaya). The Beingness of a being is first felt as a field. And this field is truly multidimensional and manifests everything, the vast field of awareness.
This Beingness of Being is ineffable and so cannot be thought but can be known directly-- gnosis, jnana, knowingness knowing itself. Though we cannot think Beingness, everyone actually knows this innately. This Beingness of Being is not a being and yet gives being, gives itself to all the beings as itself. Being is the Dharmakaya.
The Beingness of Being is nothingness. It is no thing. This nothingness, this openness, this clearing, this emptiness, this spaciousness, this luminosity allows all the forms of beings to appear, to manifest, to come into being. Nothingness does not mean simple negation of beings, rather, no thingness. Primordial openness is another name for Being itself. This nothingness is the infinity, the unboundedness of potential space, awareness from which everything arises. All beings arise and live within this sea of potential space, this sea of immanence… Being is that through which alone singularity exists, the singularity of light, embodied light. Being is radiance and manifests this radiance as the appearance of you and me and this room, luminous appearance. Without radiance there would be no appearance, no phenomena. The luminosity of Dharmakaya shows itself in us as us.
Just as we appear through Dharmakaya as Dharmakaya, we will disappear not into Dharmakya but we disappear as Dharmakaya. The disappearance of phenomena is completely the same as the appearance of phenomena. And that is why we love to gaze.
The gaze is unconcealment.
Being is the Dharmakaya, is the Buddha, is Shiva, is Deus.
Of course there is no one way for human beings to realize their nature and no one tradition has copyrights on understanding or expression. So each refers to their own understanding and opinion. And when a tradition expresses the opinion that its own tradition is the only method of realization for human beings, then the members of that tradition have been eating too much of their own cooking. They should visit another restaurant occasionally and experience another taste of divinity manifesting itself.
Essays
Origin of the Essays
In this volume of the Journal many of the essays are edited outlines of talks given by Rudy Bauer and Sharon Bauer at The Washington Center for Consciousness Studies. Some essays are outlines of talks given during the meditation seminars and retreats. Most essays are outlines of talks given at the Advanced Psychotherapy Seminar which is currently named Contributions of Phenomenology and Dzogchen to Psychotherapy and Healing. Colleagues have graciously helped in editing of the seminar notes. People over the years have consistently asked to have copies of the talks. You can easily access for FREE the video streaming of the seminars through the Program Archives at website of the Washington Center. The web address is www.meditatelive.com. Live online participation is also available for those who would like to participate in the online live psychotherapy seminars, the Friday online live meditation seminar as well as the daily live meditation practice seminar.
It is really true that two awareness are better then one and it is even better if you do not have to leave home and still experience the field.