Dzogchen again

Further reflections

Longchenpa Claus

I’m still reflecting on the Dzogchen teachings, reading and absorbing them. I thought I would seek to offer, for what it’s worth, more of my ongoing reflections. Everyone else from the retreat has, by now, left Merida. I am lingering here, seeking to remind myself continually that this reality is a dream-like illusion, and breathing into primordial awareness. 

I believe I “got” the basic realization of Dzogchen years ago, completely accidentally, during my initiatory self-discovery process using psychedelics — perhaps, also, as a result of whatever is meant by past lives. But I experienced it back then, to a certain extent, as terror and wrenching horror more than joy, spaciousness, and peace. When I directly encountered the annihilation of no ground, no meaning in any limited cultural or social construct, no story nor any individual essence, I was not prepared for it. It drove me a bit crazy. 

Since everything reverts to a state of evenness, with no object whatsoever existing, there is no orderly process, there are no phenomena, there is no identifiable frame of reference. 

The ground collapses, the path collapses, and any sense of a fruition collapses, so you cannot conceive in the slightest of good or bad, loss or injury. 

Your experience of evenness is decisive, timelessly so, and you feel certainty about the universe of appearances and possibilities.

The division between samsara and nirvana collapses – not even basic space exists innately.

There is no reference point – no "How is it?" "What is it?" "It is this!"

What can any of you do?

Where is the "I"?

What can anyone do about what was so before but now is not? 

Ha! Ha! I burst out laughing at such a great marvel as this! 

Longchenpa, The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena

I suppose the long preparatory meditation work that Dzogchen practitioners usually do through meditation, prostrations, deity veneration, etcetera, cushions the final crushing shock. I haven’t done that kind of prolonged practice, designed to convert “state” experiences into permanent “traits,” unless one counts my ongoing contemplation on my experiences and my efforts to find coherence through writing, which might be considered a form of jnana yoga.

Dzogchen presents an ultimate viewpoint on the nature of reality and, I feel, an inarguably accurate one. I still want to say there is “something else,” although that may be entirely a result of my attachment to ego or conditioning. This is not a “something else” that contradicts Dzogchen or Buddhism in any way. It is more like an addendum, or perhaps an invitation or elaboration.