Source Text
So, from a great Great Completion, Dzogchen point of view, the real nature of the mind’s radiance, awakened awareness, is always here. You are never apart from that. So, everybody experiences awakened awareness all the time. But you don’t recognize it. And the analogy that’s used in Dzogchen is it’s like the sun. The sun shines all the time. And if it’s cloudy and the cloud’s clear we say, “The sun just came out.” But that’s not true. The sun shines day and night. But from your perspective, only when the clouds clear you could see the sun shining forth. And as long as the mind is clouded over by one solid construction after another, layers and layers of thought, sense of self, time, and the solidness of emotional reactions. All that stuff is like layers and layers of clouds. So, the radiance of the infinitely vast awakened awareness, an ocean of awakened awareness-love that’s always right here, is obscured like the
That’s what the Heart Sutra mantra is all about. It’s a description of the stages of emptiness practice. It goes like this in Sanskrit [“gate” here sounds like gah-tay]: Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā
Always right here is an infinitely vast ocean of awakened awareness-love. You are never apart from that. But you don’t realize it. And the reason why you don’t realize it is that that unbounded wholeness of awakened awareness-love cannot be apprehended by a partialized stance. The partialization can’t recognize the whole. Every operation of your information processing system partializes, from slowest to fastest operations. So, the slowest operation is thought.
So, the entire video game of your information processing system is set up to obscure awakening—unless you get special instructions that help you to see beyond it. Those are the pith instructions. And if you see beyond it, even if for a short time, you shift out of that particularizing, that partialized mode, to being the unbounded wholeness of the radiance of awakened awareness.
And after a while you develop what’s called dengwa, confidence. Even if it clouds over, it’s like a thin veil—it seems perfectly ridiculous to you—you can never lose what’s always right here. That changes everything, when you’re confident you can never really lose it again. And that finishes the second map.
So, you hold both those views simultaneously—the vast expanse and the liveliness—and you don’t engage anything that comes up. But non-engagement isn’t a strategy because that’s engagement; it’s part of the view.
The average time if you do that practice 24/7 is about six years. If you supplement it with energy-drop practices you can get it down to about two years. And then you achieve what in Buddhism is called sangye.
So, the outcome of dharmadhātu exhaustion is you don’t have any negative states of mind left.
We say the mind is stainless—I like to translate drime as clean, the field of experience gets cleaner and cleaner. Imagine the implications of that for mental health. No negative states whatsoever. And what comes out when they’re no longer obscured are eighty positive qualities of mind that flourish, come out all at once. So, you achieve the epitome of mental health which is all positive qualities of mind and no negative states left for the rest of your lifetime. Except if the Patriots lose. [Quiet laughter] If the Patriots lose that’s still a negative state. Short of that, it’s relative, relatively speaking. That’s my best practice, right? Then, at that level of practice, all karmic memory traces are eradicated. At that level of practice, ordinary perception changes and is transformed. Everything changes into light rays and the sound of awakened awareness expressing itself to itself.
Wherever you see the boundaries, open right into those as empty space, as if you’re pouring space into space.
AI Summary
Cloudless Mind, Volume 3 by Daniel Brown presents key insights from the Dzogchen tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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