Table of Contents and Introduction
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. GROUND: The experience and principles of nonduality and Dzogchen
1. An Auspicious Meeting
2. The Two Truths
3. Cutting Through
4. Rationalizing The Ineffable
5. Longchenpa
6. Spontaneous Presence
7. Emergence
8. Getting There-Being There
9. The Edifice of Practice
10. Karma: A Thing of the Past?
11. Beginningless Time
12. Being Here Now
II. PATH: Encounters in practice
13. Compassion
14. Listening
15. Surrender
16. Trying
17. Fearlessness
18. A Quiet Heart
19. The Root of Happiness
20. A Confession from Solitude
21. Everything is Everything
III. EMBODIMENT: The body as a medium of awakening
22. Resonance
23. Eros and Evolution
24. Notes on This Body
25. Awakening
26. Being and Becoming
27. Belonging
28. The Pinnacle
29. Dissolution
30. Becoming No Body
IV. PASSING THROUGH: Mortality: Returning to the One
31. The Sanctuary of Not Knowing
32. The Penetrating wind
33. Growth
Poem: For My uncle
34. Personal Justice
35. Immanence
36. Grief and Love
37. No time to lose
38. Islands in the Stream
39. Unfinished Business
40. My Eulogy
41. From Zero to One
Poem: My Lineage
Poem: This Creaking Wagon
Poem: Just Passing Through
Poem: You Can’t Take It with You
Poem: gratitude
Epilogue: The End of Seeking
Introduction
This book is inspired and fueled by a sudden and unexpected life-altering episode that took place in the middle of a Buddhist retreat at the Mount Madonna Center near Watsonville, California in March 2013. That experience, a direct view into the nature of non-duality, has been an omnipresent feature of my awareness and central to the direction and flow of my inquiry ever since. It is the core message at the heart of this work—to reiterate the wholeness that is always present, always accessible, and to highlight a clarifying view that brings our deepest aspirations closer to hand. To bring that wholeness into the most intimate spaces of our purpose, our relationships, and our inevitable dance with death becomes an expansive and fulfilling pathway to the fruition we all seek.
These short commentaries, accumulated over a period of seven years, including four years of nomadic life in Southeast Asia, are most deeply influenced by my primary relationship with Dzogchen Buddhism. The essence transmission of Dzogchen is accessible to anyone. It may be found either in discursive offerings or rendered in such great poetic detail that simply reading some of the treasured texts may transport us into new realms of awareness not previously imagined. Perhaps many have glimpsed the nature of that reality, but any projections of the Dzogchen View in meditative practice and any rational references to features of the View, are just that—projections.
Here, I will be revisiting and interpreting personal and collective entanglement with the granular reality of our self-destructive habits of thought, self-generated suffering and key illusions defining our entrapment in the material relations of everyday existence. I’ll explore the way out of suffering and the natural arising of compassion. We are not nearly as in charge of our lives as we imagine ourselves to be and acknowledging the immediate presence of death is a profound stimulus to awakening. With limited references to modern physics, philosophy, and noting the depth of our intimacy with all life, we are reminded that life is more a product of probabilities than certainties. The initial group of essays address philosophical foundations. The second group includes issues arising in practice; the third focuses on the body as a vehicle of awakening and the final section includes more of my personal story and end of life issues. I am focusing on a few key principles: that fully comprehending the unity of appearance and emptiness is a reservoir of creative compassion; that our intense pre-occupation with individuality and personal agency is not only illusory but is an obstacle to the relief of suffering; and that the consciousness of death is not something to be ignored or denied but is a gift we offer from our own future.
Everything is biographical in the sense that nothing can be separated from one life or from the context of this time. It’s been a continuous process of awakening, healing, comprehending the nature of wholeness, arriving at a refreshing clarity about core Buddhist principles. Ultimately, what we imagine awakening to be is both more accessible than we realize and more dramatic than we imagine. With the right intention, a sharper, more real, more engaged presence does not require a sudden or explosive event. But if such an event occurs, however briefly, there is no mistaking its import. Whether cultivated by gradual practices or by more direct means, a view beyond the random discursive nature of the human predicament requires only a gentle settling beneath the busy mind constantly looking for an explanation for itself.
This effort might have been very different, or not even possible, without the contributions of seminal events of my life. With the benefit of time their impact only seems to grow, as I’m sure is the case with all of us. We are shaped by our past, constantly impacted by a penetrating wind bearing us into the future, revealing the nature of our becoming. As a teenager, I lived in Asia with my family for two years. There, my worldview was permanently altered. I was forever shaken out of the parochial and insulated view Americans have of the rest of the world. After college, there was a period of intense activism in a small Southern town, culminating in having my house torched in the middle of the night. I deliberately subjected myself to the possibility of prison as a Vietnam draft resister, contemplating a personal sacrifice for the sake of a moral clarity from which I have never wavered.
My legal status drove me to Berkeley, California, where I became immersed in the creative froth of counterculture. Over the next twenty-five years, I had profoundly influential mentors whose impact continues to simmer on a back burner. I dove deeply into emerging somatic therapies in which the body-mind dichotomy was obliterated. I returned to graduate school and became a Physical Therapist, devoted to enhancing strength, integrity, and freedom in the body. In retrospect, all these experiences influenced my vision, my capacity for presence, guiding me through stages of growth, decades of spiritual practice, career, the inevitable challenges of relationships, parenting, aging, and disease. They ripened into inexhaustible curiosity, commitment, and the courage to explore.
Most of the time, we imagine ourselves the playwright, actor, and director of our personal story. Yet, the more we cling to the comforting signposts of certainty, the more distressed we are likely to become because such a view simply isn’t real. Examining our Western assumptions of certainty reveals that much of what we believe, even the binaries we most deeply trust, are entirely fabricated and tenuous in the extreme. In fact, if anything, I now regard the nature of being as even more uncertain, more tenuous than I ever previously thought. In the meantime, any one of us may glimpse what we believe is bedrock truth, even if it’s only a relative flash—a slim postcard, leaving us to imagine the rest. Articulating the finer details and full implications of what is revealed and carrying them into one’s daily existence is another matter. Time inevitably reveals the truth. Reality occasionally hits us in the face in a multitude of ways. To be so deeply attached to a self-image chiseled over a lifetime and reactive to the unceasing flow of change gets in the way of cultivating gratitude, generosity, openness, patience, resilience, belonging and the regenerative balm of fruitful relationships.
We name our default cognitive framework, our cultivated self-image, as ego, which for our entire lives stands as a vigilant sentry against the very experiences which might interrupt or relieve our entrapment. I could describe ego as a medieval king or a mythic god asserting sovereignty, relentlessly suspicious, overseeing his subjects, collecting tribute, claiming divine status, and enforcing compliance. We may realize the full dimension of his nature from time to time, being subject to his whims, resigned to our subservient place in his world without even realizing it, blind to the possibility of freedom implicit in every moment. As he ages, his personal comfort zone may inexorably shrink, drawing us into a narrowing redoubt reflected in reified habits and reflexive behaviors.
That mythic king, will reach for the safety of concepts at every opportunity, perpetually grasping for anchors or frames to differentiate himself. We cannot fully visualize the nature of any realization from within such a strictly defined framework. We can describe the View to the nth degree, burrowing into centuries of teachings and practice. The details may inform a conceptual understanding, a map, but they are not the territory. Beyond a certain point, voluntarily dissolving the boundaries of cognition and activating our own dissolution is impossible. Memorizing teachings or writing about them or holding them as an object having any materiality whatsoever will not get us there. Nevertheless, we are not helpless. Breakthroughs do occur and continuously returning to the simplicity of presence is a constant reinforcement.
To fully realize the nature of mind is a radical loosening—or even a temporary obliteration--of the grip of ego. Stripped of habit, self-defeating loops, and the commonplace confusion of being in a body, one may have the great fortune of arriving in the non-dual state, approaching the truth of Buddha’s accomplishment. In that state, objects of consciousness fall away. Everything becomes subject, revealing an all-encompassing source-less unity of all phenomena. Intellect collapses entirely. What does capturing the full breadth of relationality and inter-dependence feel like? It wasn’t as if I suddenly realized I wasn’t in control and was determined to put myself back in command. Just the opposite. It was a tremendous relief, as if a subtle but tenacious veil—or a suit of armor I’d been polishing and wearing my entire life—had been removed, revealing an unfamiliar quality of presence combined with a profound surrender into vulnerability and a softening heart. It was enlivening, but it also carried an unrealistic expectation, even a self-reinforcing prison depending on one’s interpretation and comprehension of bias. Stepping out from the imperative—or the fantasy—of individual agency permits an openness to a wider range of messages (and messengers) subtly influencing our lives.
Buddhist teachings articulated over two millennia can be distilled to the Four Noble Truths. We may see ourselves loosely tracking them, particularly the truth of suffering, and the path leading out of suffering. The nature and depth of my own suffering was confirmed to me. In the most radical fashion, I even witnessed the end of suffering—which can only come with the dissolution of self. But that arrival is not an accomplishment except in the self-aggrandizing interpretation of a puny ego, because what comes with that arrival is the realization that there is no self to have accomplished anything. But the experience does remain as a standard against which all my habits are rendered into stark relief. I’m no longer fumbling in darkness. I’ve described experiences of non-duality recounted here as dissolutions, such as what occurred at Gangri-Tökar in Tibet, the retreat-home of Longchenpa. What dissolved was any presumption of determinate boundaries to anything. When everything in one’s visual field appears as a single seamless image from which all phenomena including oneself emanate and are sustained in unitary relationship, when time disappears altogether, one’s attention is sharply galvanized and one’s perspective is irreversibly transformed. I cannot fully return to those conditions at any time, but I can recall them. Their benefit is instantly available.
Yet above all, whether unexpected or cultivated, the arrival of indelible insight warrants no special privilege. Constructing mental conditions as if they will become a bridge to the absolute is a misguided venture. If it were that easy to talk our way out of prison, we would have done so by now. We cannot see what cannot be seen. We cannot determine the nature of something which has no determinate characteristics. We cannot predict if practice will ever lead us to glimpse the truth. Striving to do so becomes an obstacle. We can incubate and prepare and precisely focus on aspects of the View, but nothing is guaranteed. We can speculate and sometimes it is just such speculation that briefly softens our conceptual incarceration, allowing us to see beyond the bars of our cognitive cells to an unobstructed view of reality. Even so, there is nothing to prepare for. Every act of conceptual creation is artifice. This is the reason Dzogchen is referred to as the pathless path. Yet we must still constantly perform deliberate acts for the sake of being in this world, enacting coherent moral principles. The voices of Dzogchen strike deeply into the most remote recesses of awareness, delivering messages that take time to unfold, discipline to decipher, and which may remain eternally paradoxical. But either way, once glimpsed, they cannot be ignored.
I’ve been addressing such a leap as if it’s strictly a personal event, a moment of reality waking up to itself, one being waking up to the nature of Being. But believing in separate events is another deception because within the non-dual view time is indeterminate. Any event is already every event. There is no such thing as chronology.
As quantum reality implies, there are not only many possible futures, there are many possible pasts. A sudden leap into the View is a confirmation of what the sutras, the modern teachers and indeed, Buddha himself tells us is true -- nirvana is no other than exactly where we are. As such, it’s a confirmation of what we already know from other sources, none of them spiritual. Ecology tells us we are One. Physics confirms the view of emptiness. Nothing stands objectively alone and independent of everything else. Most of all, we must begin to grapple not only with being part of everything we see or know, but that we are creating all of it in the very instant of seeing or knowing. The distinction between Newtonian and quantum physics is about as stark as the truths of appearance and emptiness. Neuroscience and psychology confirm the deeper states of consciousness, the plasticity of the brain and that we are communicating with each other through transpersonal networks, generating and being generated by field phenomena linking us together. These are unconventional sources of knowing with evolutionary implications.
Looking beyond divided consciousness, yearning for an authentic dissolution of all pseudo-boundaries is the earnest longing of all mystical traditions. We are deeply conditioned by our own developmental process to distinguish between our internal world and the world ‘out there,’ between self and other, between mind and body, between life and death. These dualities are the primordial nourishment of infancy all the way to adulthood. They become the primary architecture of identity, refuge and safety and the framework of our dispassionate view of the world. Their parameters are transmitted and curried by the school systems, employers, media, and entertainment joined in a seamless narrative defining everything, just as they do to this day: knowledge, success, pleasure, pain, even sanity. Witnessing reality is thus a connecting event. The View may go by many names, derive from varied sources, and be described in nuanced terms, but it is a territory common to all traditions and as old as spiritual practice itself. I am not a source of these energies. I am not even the sole arbiter of what is offered here. It is not entirely for me or by me that this process unfolds.
The identity we assume and the agency we imagine in life are entirely illusory. Our narrow focus on individuality, personal efficacy, and human supremacy severely complicate and obstruct our clarity and our actions. As such, we are immersed in a mass delusion so deeply rooted as to be virtually beyond interruption—except possibly only by a near-death experience, or even by death itself. The flow of new information into this material has never slowed, which makes it difficult to put an end to it. The totality has arisen from a wide array of sources, memory, chance encounters, ecstatic poetry, the wisdom of ancients and contemporaries, the deep green perfect geometry of ripening paddy fields, red-orange sunsets, forbidding peaks, the artifacts of geological decay, exquisite artistry, the silence and light of remote sanctuaries, the wizened faces and gnarled hands of rural existence, signs of devotion everywhere, not to mention the course of my own physiology, quietly proceeding along its inexorable and bumpy course of aging.
The aggregate also effects my perspective about death. Through these contemplations, the threshold between life and death becomes just another gauzy and suspiciously vague boundary. In the world of Tibetan teachings, everything we do in life is a preparation for the end of life. We are engaged in a continuous negotiation of dream states, whether in daily living, sleep, meditation or even in the moments immediately following clinical death. Ego, mental habits, and the true nature of mind, pristine, indestructible, free of all qualities and conditions, timeless, open, and spacious beyond measure is revealed. Even so, regardless of how much we prepare, how deeply we investigate, however much we may adjust our lives to reflect what we ‘know,’ just as in the case of any real breakthrough, nothing fully prepares us for a full-on entirely unfiltered glimpse of reality.