In the first case an assumption is rendered that the nondual awareness of pure presence is the natural disposition and that nothing can be done to attain what is already there in reality.
that we are already in that inexpressible nondual reality in which absolute and relative are one. The difference seems as basic as that between chalk and cheese; the gradual and the immediate paths are incommensurate.
In the view of Longchenpa in this treatise the gradual and the immediate paths are the two sides of that same coin; they may be as far away as the earth is from the sky but they complement each other.
asserts that we are presently under the spell of magical illusion and that by recognition of that fact we are, instantaneously, released from a conceptual cage into an enchanting reality that is pure pleasure itself.
We begin in the heat of desirous attachment to our egoistic selves, and merely through recognition of our deluded condition, chilled out in the birthless and deathless space of reality, we find respite and release in the magical display of our everyday life.
It is such contemplation that provides the sense of vast mystery, exhilarating and uplifting, that allows us to recognize our momentary release from the heaviness and density, the confusion and pettiness, of samsaric existence. That title also carries the sense of a resolution of the dilemmas of dualism in a respite of relaxed, carefree refreshment, basking in the sun of intrinsic awareness.
All our experience of life is like last night’s dream; it is like a magic show of an infallible master magician; it is like optical illusion; it is like a mirage in the desert; it is like the reflection of the moon in water; it is like an echo reverberating between mountain crags; it is like a cloud land which we call the city of the gandharvas; and it is like an apparitional emanation, like a phantom or a ghost. Thus this book is a manual of atiyoga that opens the door into Dzogchen’s nondual reality, the reality of maya — magical illusion, happiness.
Maya and its Aspects
The first is ‘the basic immaculate maya’ that is our original, natural, disposition. It is this nondual maya of our self-illuminating awareness that constitutes our innate three-dimensional buddha-being inseparable from its intrinsic primal awareness. This unitary reality presents itself spontaneously and perfectly in every instant of the here and now as an integral part of the cosmic whole, like a hologram. This is the maya of the Great Perfection and in its nondual awareness it lies beyond the intellect.
The second aspect is the delusory maya created by the intellect, known as ‘the maya of false conception’. This maya arises within the space of immaculate maya as a loss of the natural intrinsic awareness of our original disposition, and we call it ‘ignorance’. This maya unfolds as the wheel of life.
As the primal awareness of immaculate maya is increasingly adulterated by attachment to the daily round, so the function of mind that we call the intellect increases in its capacity to structure and differentiate a reality that is vast unstructured space.
This belief system and the maya of experience that it manifests, however, is never cloven from the vast expanse of compassionate clear light in which it arises. The ‘maya of false conception’ and the ‘basic immaculate maya’ of our natural disposition are one.
The nature of this actuality is illustrated by the analogy of a magic show. Just as a magician contrives the illusion of an event out of light and sound — son et lumière — wherein the stage props of the illusion remain unchanged, so the delusive, spectacular, maya emerges out of the fundament of the clear light of the nature of mind. This clear light is in turn illustrated by the metaphor of the mirror that reflects endlessly yet remains untainted by the images that appear in its surface.
The second instance of maya is the delusory, dualistic world that we are convinced is real and in which we believe.
Longchenpa’s fourth functional aspect is the maya of primordially pure pristine awareness. This is indistinguishable from the basic immaculate maya. It arises with complete ego-loss — surrender — and it subverts all sense of distinction between subjective inner and objective outer perception.
the nondual reality of being can be extrapolated and pictured as a magic show and the cognitive aspect described as the clear, immutable, expanse that is like the surface of a mirror: in those very moments we realize the ground of transformation out of which samsara and nirvana emerge. This is our starting point. Still cloaked in the delusions of ignorance we are fully aware of the pristine perfection of our natural disposition.
Although such moments of timeless awareness are trans-formative in our experience of them, the unremitting habitual tendencies ingrained by dualistic experience through the history of the human race and through our own endless succession of rebirths — through ‘genetic’ and ‘personal’ karma — we relapse into the dualistic world of samsara. Samsara is composed of an amalgam of belief systems the product of which Longchenpa terms ‘contaminated maya’.
And certainly we believe in a compound of name, form, energies, consciousness and proclivities as a self, an ego, an objectively existent being that is born from a mother’s womb and which develops though age to experience sickness and finally death. We ‘believe’ in the veracity of our sensory experience. Although we know first that every sensory perception is contrived by the structure (the shape and form) and the function (‘seeing’, ‘hearing’) of the sense organ as sensory stimuli impinge upon it, and, second, by the projective and interpretive cognitive functions of the intellect, believing those perceptions to be real we reify them as objectively existent physical/mental reality. These karmically induced chronic habits of interpretation and projection may be termed ‘genetic’ insofar as the basic beliefs about the external world are determined by the structure and function of the psycho-organism itself.
On a superficial, preparatory level, we can begin by shaking the bigotry of the intellect by undermining its logical certainties, its habits and presumptions. That implies a rejection — or at least a ‘phenomenological bracketing’ — of the overt product of the senses. The crass naïve materialist thumping the table and saying, ‘And isn’t this real?’ is in denial of the ineluctable dominant cognitive component of every perception.
Every sensory perception whatsoever is a ‘light-form’ contaminated by innate mental propensities to concretize itself as an external entity — an alien ‘other’ — and to react to it with positive or negative attachment. By focusing upon it as an aspect of pure light the ‘object’ is deconstructed cognitively until only the light of cognition remains, leaving us nothing to hold on to, nothing to be attached to, nothing to reinforce the preconceived notion of an ‘external’ object cognized by an ‘internal’ perceiver.
In that way, all beliefs manifesting as thought-forms are rendered non-affective and effete, to be self-reflexively released at the instant of arising.
If our experience of the nature of mind is in fact an indication of our original, natural, disposition then the rolling snowball effect is now activated and an unmediated process that deconstructs existential reality continues to overwhelm the seemingly implacable steamrolling logic of karmic propensity. It is axiomatic that the Dzogchen view is symbiotically coincident with Dzogchen meditation, or rather Dzogchen nonmeditation. This nonmeditation is the ultimate instrument of decontamination. It is indicated in the Dzogchen view as nonaction, an absence of all contrived mental action during meditation sitting. It is glossed also as ‘non-deliberate activity’.
This third aspect of maya, the technical illusion, can be pictured as the magical illusion of Dzogchen yogis and yoginis striving to resolve the fantasies and paradoxes that the intellect creates. Every technique of sadhana has a starting point, a path and a goal; a beginning, a middle and an end; preparation, application, ‘seeing’ and familiarization.
‘seeing’ to insight into the sameness of every situation that provides a continuity of unbroken moments of pure presence; and finally ‘familiarization’ to the constant presence of pure presence where karma is exhausted.
Every belief system is hypothetical, a superficial construction, capable of replacement by an alternative set of beliefs. It is all delusion. It is deceiving, duplicitous, spurious fiction. It is a lie. In that way, by rejecting fact as ‘true’, we begin to relieve ourselves of the density and heaviness, not to say bigotry, of our beliefs about the nature of reality.
Everything that is, all our experience up to and including mystical experience of the divine, is untrue: it is invalid, inauthentic; it is falsehood, a lie; it is fiction; it is spurious or counterfeit. It is unreal. Thus in ordinary parlance when we say ‘That is true!’ in response to a statement of fact we should be aware that in fact we are asserting the truth of illusion.
Profound religious experience simply provides an example of the magnificence and beauty of maya and demonstrates its capacity to mesmerize and enthrall. Such experience is also zero-dimensional, like brushing one’s teeth.
When this dualism of relative and absolute becomes so beguiling that our attachments are intractable, we should remember that the didactic distinction in Buddhist logic between conventional (or relative) truth and absolute truth is also a formulation of the intellect, another final trick of maya.
Conceptual projections are a seductive strategy of maya to impose a pragmatic intellectual distinction — a cloak — upon what in direct experience is utterly beyond the intellect, inconceivable, inexpressible and unimaginable.
Following Longchenpa’s exhortation in his meditation precepts to regard all experience as illusion, we are left suspended in the timeless basic space of maya.
The starting point is recognized as the goal. The implication is that since recognition is the sole prerequisite nothing can be done to achieve accomplishment of this nondual maya. To regard every situation as a magic show is simply to relax into it and enjoy it. Thus — non-action. The difficulty — the impossibility — of verbalizing nondual maya directly is surmounted by the use of the eight similes.
Maya Yoga as Atiyoga
That nondual maya we may call the unity of relative and absolute or the natural disposition. The recognition of the limitations of our subject/object dichotomy places our consciousness in the arena of atiyoga where there is only the thinnest, subtle, most transparent distinction between knowing and not knowing. In fact, both knowing and not knowing are pure presence: knowing is pure presence itself and not knowing is the effulgence of pure presence, its energetic expression.
Nirvana lies in the clear seeing — in the clarity — not in the specific form that is seen when suffering and anxiety color the entire spectrum of possibility.
That is to say, there is no specific discipline or conduct preferable to any other, or any lifestyle that facilitates the realization of the nature of mind more than any other. Insofar as all conduct is karmically determined until all karma is exhausted, whatever arises is an appropriate karma. Thus the gradual path may consist of the lifestyle of monk, yogin or layman, religious or secular.
It is irrelevant which persona clothes our body-mind or which role we play in the drama of life — a lesson taught clearly in the Mahamudra tradition of the Mahasiddhas where any trade or profession could be used as the vehicle of transformation.
The layman who is free of the dualistic vows of Buddhist praxis, however, has greater space, perhaps, in which a true, undiscriminating, anonymous, unselfconscious Dzogchen aware-ness may grow.
The outer and inner rushen practices, the vocalization of the syllable phat, for example, provide a powerful mode of deconstruction of intellectual interference in direct perception. When the Dzogchen view has been lost, the semdzins constitute a vital backup. They can provide subtle perceptual touchstones that re-open windows upon — and then doors back into — the Dzogchen view.
Instruction for the main practice given at the beginning of the meditation section in each of the eight chapters of analogy is essentially the same. It reiterates the crucial injunction ‘Regard all experience as maya’.
Rather, since every perception, objective or subjective, external or internal, is — in Longchenpa’s oft repeated phrase — ‘absent yet apparent’ the instruction provides a moment of pause, a space of non-referential samadhi, wherein the paradox of all situations, all perceptual and mental events, being nothing yet something, necessarily and immediately evoke the nature of mind, opening into the thought-free vast expanse wherein all experience is founded.
In the main practice of maya yoga, sitting in silent meditation, an enduring tendency grows to advert again and again to the precept ‘all experience is a magic show’. The resultant psycho-logical dissonance is resolved only by surrender to the nature of mind. If at the outset the dissonance of that dilemma is felt only weakly, or if it diminishes through time, then some discursive elaboration may be used, like, ‘This is all a dream; it’s all floating in space without any foundation; there’s nothing solid inside or outside; it’s a conjuring trick of the intellect; it’s all hallucination’, and so on, and thereby a conceptual aspect of the Dzogchen view is re-established and the sense of a nondual all-inclusive supra-mental reality is entered upon.
Longchenpa’s eight analogies — dream, magical illusion, echo, apparition, etc. — serve as illustration of the ‘always already’ reality of the immediately cognizant experience of all events as maya, ever ‘absent yet apparent’.
The antidote to the false dilemma posed by the intrusion of this non-formless element of meditation into the atiyoga scenario is the Dzogchen view in which relative and absolute are inseparable and where space/time is subsumed by nonduality.
Just as a king calls upon his minsters to provide expertise and ministerial functions according to their skills and aptitudes to facilitate his projects and purposes, so the Dzogchen yogi or yogini at the center of the mandala spontaneously includes any of the vast array of skillful means and practices arranged as in concentric circles at varying proximity to him, according to their relevance, in completing the timeless moment of pure presence. ‘The king’s employment of his ministers’ in the Dzogchen mandala of praxis is exemplified by Longchenpa’s encouragement to practice the methods that the tradition offers to deconstruct emotion (at the end of the last stanza of The City of the Gandharvas: The Seventh Analogy).
emotions are intractable and our gaze is weak we may utilize the similar tantric precepts that transform the five emotions into the five aspects of primal awareness represented by the five buddhas.
In the timeless moment of the guru’s blessing the four samayas of Dzogchen atiyoga — absence, openness, spontaneity and oneness — are recognized as binding us primordially, involuntarily, whether we know it or not.
Further, wherever, the nature of mind in its vast spaciousness is evoked by Longchenpa’s simile of the sky, which is frequent, openness as emptiness is to be inferred. The first pair of samayas — absence and openness — applies to the phase of Breakthrough and the second pair — spontaneity and oneness — to Leapover, the phase of fruition.
This is the skillful means of atiyoga and allows the Dzogchen dialectic to perform its magic, beginning with the assertion that since ignorance arises in and as the pristine nature of mind, it never becomes anything other than the nature of mind.
What is the difference experientially, for example, between the imperative to ‘recognize spontaneous self-existent intrinsic presence’ and the instruction ‘to let our minds settle, without fluctuation, without hope or fear in the mirage-like space of all experience (The Fourth Analogy)’ or ‘to settle in sameness, allowing the mind to perceive whatever arises like the reflection of the moon in water’ (The Fifth Analogy).
A magic show is a conjuror’s professional gig. A magic show is a magical display, in our case a multi-dimensional, omni-sensory, display of maya.
People are nothing more than phantasms, like those that populate our daydreams. To reinforce the notion of the duplicity of maya, we can say that our perception of people is a lie and that our perception of the world we live in is a universal lie. Because the recognition of those lies provides an occasion for lightness of being we can also call it a joke — a cosmic joke. Longchenpa insinuates the notion of the universal lie and the cosmic joke into the section on meditation.
The emphasis here is on the external world as delusion because it has no core, no nuclear essence or ‘self’. Our samsaric environment is certainly visible to the senses but it is actually non-existent, ‘absent’, because it is groundless. Examine it with the eye of insight and like optical illusion it vanishes and our rational reservations inevitably disperse. The seemingly external sensory panorama appears to be real only because of our need to perceive cognitive security in every sensory event, a process that flows naturally from our emotional validation of an ego or self in order to be free of the fear of ego loss. Thus, recognition of the sky-like nature of mind is directly proportional to our ego-loss.
Maya is like the reflection of the moon in water, or like a reflection in a mirror. Maya is not a reflection of a discrete, separately existent, object. In another famous analogy evoked in atiyoga the sensory phantasmagoria is likened to the rainbow spectrum produced by the refraction of a sunbeam through a crystal. Maya may be a refraction of clear light, but it is not a reflection of a seemingly concrete object. The significance of the reflection of the moon in water, again, is its magical nature. It appears but has no substantial existence. We cannot put a finger upon it, let alone grasp it. Try to touch an image of the moon in water and the clear reflection disperses into dazzling proliferation of ripples. We simply need to recognize it as it is.
The image is not so much ‘spontaneously created’, implying a creator, a creation and the act of creating, but rather it is a timeless moment of inexpressible reality neither created in a temporal process nor existing as a crystallized object of creation. The maya of all situations is spontaneity, free of the limitations of all temporal concepts. Non-action, on the other hand, is the natural disposition in which the spontaneity occurs, implying surrender of all goal-orientation and seeking strategies.
With this recognition there is nothing further to do. There is no distinction to be made between absolute and relative because experience of the moment is beyond the intellect and nothing we may think or believe makes any difference to the reality of immaculate maya.
Especially, he considers the emptiness of words of praise and blame in order to illustrate the emptiness of all sensory impressions whatsoever. When taking other people’s words as the occasion for familiarizing ourselves with all experience as echo, besides realizing the nature of mind we cultivate the invaluable virtue of patience.
We know intellectually that all experience is like a city of the gandharvas, a project of maya, that action is non-action in its essential nature, and that renunciation and engaged commitment are equally delusory.
With the experientially based conviction that the entire mandala of our experience is like an apparition, we can burn our progressivist bridges and slowly abandon the process of egoic intellectual deconstruction that has brought us to this point. The dualism of subject and object that particularizes and concretizes specific elements of our experience is no longer valid, so like rabbits’ horns all our fictive imputations upon the emptiness of reality dissolve. Our opinions and preferences become a part of the universal, intersubjective, delusion and the only reality is what lies beyond ideational concepts and constructs, and the interpretive and selective functions of cognitive mind.
Any discussion about the nature of reality is mere speculative hot air. Even the verbal function of pointing out the nature of mind is delusion.
Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment
In the space where all experience remains in potential, emerges a grand display of nondual awareness and illusion, the original spontaneity of our sovereign nature of mind: indivisible from that, unmoving, to that we bow down.
Dream The First Analogy
In unchanging basic spaciousness, the vast sky of mind’s nature, a space of unstructured brilliance and emptiness, flawless buddha-reality shines like the stars as the spontaneity of inseparable being and awareness. This intrinsic clear light, with its perfect responsive spontaneity, this is our original, natural disposition, known as basic immaculate magical illusion.
Just like dream, they are seemingly real but without existence, and we feel the misery or the joy of each of them.
From time immemorial, conditioned to such relativity, our environment, corporeality, pleasures — our lives, envisioned as good or bad, are happy or sad; out of delusion, unity appears in manifold guises, like an infinite variety of realistic graphic art, and, believing in them, delusive appearances are incessant. Ah, yes, this world is just a dream.
The actuality of all experience is like a dream and in its momentary groundless gleaming, undeniably perceptible, it is uncrystallizing light-form, a deceitful flash, a diaphanous form of emptiness. Yet delving deeply we find neither truth nor falsehood, for neither present nor absent, it is beyond all conception; we know it like the sky, inexpressible, unimaginable, fundamentally ever fresh and pristine.
The Meditation Utterly convinced of this view that all situations, samsara and nirvana, are just like dream, follow this instruction to experience it in meditation. Sit upon a comfortable seat in half-lotus posture, take triple-gem refuge and cultivate pure bodhi-mind, then in empty unitary space, which is the utter sameness of all experience, apply concentrated attention to this empty magic spell.
All of our life’s experiences up to yesterday, just mental images, are like last night’s dream, and what we see now, absent yet crystal clear, absent yet apparent, is the mind’s delusion.
Yesterday and today are just like dream; tomorrow and the day after, all our future, only dream.
When all that we see, all that we do, all that we think, is consonant with dream, our experience is disassociated, unfocussed, in slow motion, evanescent. That is training in ultimate non-attachment. Appreciating delusory objective appearances as dream, the intellect lets go and the grasping immediately ceases — the objective aspect debunked, the subjective side retires. Then whenever the mind meets situations as dream, the intellect searching inside and outside and in between for something substantial and solid to grasp, unable to find any point of reference it subsides into all-penetrating sky-like space, and intrinsic presence devoid of all compulsive mental activity arises spontaneously as simple empty clarity.
While in the daytime becoming familiar with dream-reality, at night when the need to sleep overcomes us we lie down on our right side upon a comfortable bed like Buddha Sakyamuni in his nirvana posture. When the breath is quiet and the eyes are still, at the heart center, with dreamlike concentration, visualize a white A of shining bright translucent crystal, diminishing in size from a fingertip to a hair tip, and dreamlike clear light arises. At first we may dream many fearful dreams, but mindful of the dream the fear dissolves of itself; when natural concentration is effortlessly achieved the yogin knows his dream as lucid dream.
Further, we travel wherever we wish, to pure lands, to foreign countries, or to Akanishta, where we see buddhas and hear their impeccable word and achieve jnana and samadhi and multitudes of dakinis. Through thorough integrated practice day and night, the creativity of pure presence will surely manifest, the core undistorted, infallibly actualized:
Magic Show The Second Analogy
Just as primal awareness spontaneously arises in the sky-like space of the primordial nature of mind, shining like luminous stellar spheres, so, out of miraculous, all-penetrating, womblike spaciousness, the imaginings of dualizing ignorance arise by themselves as the delusory triple world with its six mythic modes of being, which — absent yet apparent — is all magical show.
Undivided in terms of purity or impurity since it lies beyond samsara and nirvana, it is the spaciousness from which samsara and nirvana emerge; it is the ground in which samsara or nirvana arises according to the presence or absence of intrinsic presence; it is our primordial essence; it is our natural disposition. This ground of being is like a bright mirror reflecting images yet remaining untouched by the reflection of any image; its surface containing neither black nor white color yet it is the fount of both black and white images.
All instances of magic show are synchronicitous magic
and like a magic show contrived from symbols and spells all experience is exposed as insubstantial and unreal, a small part of a web of continuously mutating illusion. that looms larger than the bare bones of its constituent parts.
We now know the six mythic modes of being as delusions, fantasy beings with fantasy pleasures, fantasy feelings and fantasy lives and deaths, believing in fantasy truths and falsehoods, populating fantasy lands and fantasy cities.
Pure from the very beginning, it is all a magic show, magic show because it is apparent but has no real existence, magic show because it is a function of coincidental conditions, magic show because it deceives and enchants then vanishes: brand all samsaric appearances as delusory, as ‘magic show’.
You fortunate ones, convinced by your direct experience, you recognize that no situation has any reality, that emerging from nothing and vanishing into nothing, pure from the beginning it is all but a magical show.
Enchanting illusion can also be known like this: it is a magic show of pure mind that is immutable, unchanging, spontaneity; it is a guileless ubiquitous master, like the sky, like the sun, or like a wish-fulfilling gem, displaying unlimited creativity and total responsiveness, that is the unelaborated simplicity of pure radiance.
The Meditation Behind the realization of this view of magical illusion we cultivate enchanting illusion as the cosmic joke. In preparation, as before, aspire to a sense of magical illusion. Constantly, day and night, moment by moment, our main work is to attend to each inner and outer event as magical show appearing by force of circumstance, as lies, without heart or meaning, diaphanous and unreal. Our loves and hatreds, positive and negative affectivity,
whatsoever emotions are aroused, certify them as illusion. Train in this unreality. We see now that both outer, seemingly material phenomena and inner, mental experience, are all like magic show. Because they are contrived by circumstance, because they are spurious and duplicitous, because they are mere light-form, always regard them as instances of a magic show. At time for sleep, as before, relax into dream-space, into enchanted unreality, unelaborate in its simplicity. Whatever delusive dreams arise are now known as illusion and we are free from fear and craving for truth. Working dream as illusion, transforming emanation, travelling magically into pure lands, cultivate all as before.
Optical Illusion The Third Analogy
The sensory world, environment and beings, happy and sad feelings and mood-swings, all absent yet perceptible, are like ominous shadows cast by a lamp, like a double image appearing when the eyeball is pressed, like projected fears on a dark night.
Under scrutiny that delusory vision dematerializes and it is evident that like the sky it is impotent, mere light-form without existence, like optical illusion, so we just let it be, denying it all credibility. It is pure space! it is timeless! it is primordially pristine! Do not try to localize it! do not try to conceptualize it! What is inchoate light without dimension cannot be caged by obsessive, biased, constructs.
As in the day so at nighttime: fix the mind in the heart center and sleep in the space where everything is like optical illusion. Lucid dream, and so on, as before, will certainly arise.
All moods, feelings and qualitative judgments,
like mirage, are mere vanity, empty in essence, and the apparent world and our fictive lives, all experience, inner and outer, all and everything, like a mirage, does not exist but still shines, its nature primordially ever fresh and pristine. We recognize it as timeless, without center or parameter.
Reflection of the Moon in Water The Fifth Analogy
The mind, uncircumscribed, uncontaminated, uncontrived like the reflection of the moon in water, simple, empty light-form, unstructured, we now know as profoundly peaceful, thought-free, utterly inexpressible primal awareness, unmoving from the space of its own clarity.
Since pure mind has no purpose whatsoever, we envision it without outside or inside, beyond thought; since reality surpasses all invidious, partial distinctions, we give up the struggle for spiritual capital and status. Unthought, always a multiplicity, as primordial space, everything that appears, however it appears, all things are like the reflection of the moon in water; not true, not false, samsara and nirvana the same, let the mind relax into the space of reality just as it is.
With receptivity that takes every occurrence as friendly, knowing the spontaneity of the cool, nondiscriminating, bliss, now we are left without anywhere at all to go and we stay in this pure mind in the primordial ground. With such realization, abiding in such space, unerringly, we familiarize ourselves with all experience as the reflection of the moon in water. The fortunate person should faithfully recognize that whatever occurs is a floating, shimmering, mythic reality.
No absolute can be observed in the relative world; ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ are divisive analytic figments: all in this timeless moment is beyond the intellect.
Knowing the web of structured projections as our own mind, because the timeless moment cannot now be affected, the delusory net of constructs has no purchase, and there is nothing at all to actually grasp and reify. Knowing that, we go beyond mental projections.
Whatever occurs, luminous energy without intent, positive or negative, it is an echo-like event; whatever it is, it bursts, leaving no trace, so relax into zero-dimensional unitary space. Smile lovingly now at these delusive appearances, at pure evanescence with nothing to hold to, airy, elusive, disassociated wisps and billows, flickering make-believe, a glittering phantasmagoria.
All praise and blame, words either sweet or bleak, is empty sound, with nothing concrete to comprehend; mind’s value judgments all meaningless, we recognize all these sounds as empty echo.
Scrutinized and found absent, all is empty vibration; fully apprehended, it is as empty as the sky where neither good nor bad, benefit nor harm, can occur. Giving it no credence since in truth it is empty, we recognize all sound and vibration as enlightening echo. Thereby, timeless samsaric loads are lifted, and the fire of anger and hatred is extinguished. Here we gain sublime patience and avoid wretched depression and in due course, we approach the riches of the buddhas.
Samsara has been forever nirvana: our delusive thoughts evaporate like clouds, we know the serenity of our original home, and we cherish this empty clarity and the perfect peace of primal awareness.
‘Doing’ and ‘not-doing, ‘cultivating’ and ’abandoning’, are one; but so long as the mind clings to substantiality and the ego-self, please comply with this deep teaching that counteracts emotion. We are wise only when we realize the unity of inner and outer
bursting through into the nature of mind.
Breaking through, the habit of reification broken, we let them be just as they are, and projecting nothing we abide in the nature of the ground of being, where, timelessly, the nature of mind is saturated by spaciousness. The three and five poisons emanate from mental constructs, but when scrutinized no substance can be found; emotion, like apparition, is quite without substance, so we leave it alone as empty creativity.
we recognize this mind, absent yet apparent, as illusory apparition, alpha-pure and pristine. Everything looks real to the babes, but intellectually fabricated phenomena and their attributes, all derived from karmic propensity, cannot be held to be real; free of perceptual duality that reifies things as ‘this’ or ‘that’,
we know it all as inexpressible, boundless openness.
Color and form are a blazing lamp to those who can see, but to the congenitally blind mere words reveal nothing; whoever is blinded by words, uncomprehending, he or she cannot see the bright sun of mind’s nature.
But blinder than the blind are the scholarly fools, expatiating like parrots, puffed up by conceit, the heart-meaning obscured by the web of their concepts, in their ignorance like the blind in a world of color. Unknowing, they believe in the truth of their own thoughts! Alas! How sad, those most unlucky people! How stubborn! The heart-meaning always eludes them.
Its light-forms uncrystallizing, untainted by fabricated beliefs,
it shimmers and glimmers with an unbroken natural happiness. Sky-like mind, its clarity unconceptualized, knows an unstructured, unelaborated mind-sky. In this moment, all situations appearing like apparition, the mind’s contents released in apparition, desire and hatred, hopes and fears, the ego, like apparition, starting point, process and fruition are released.
The divine madman, aimless, ungrasping, transparent,
in his uninhibited spontaneity has no pretense, no hopes or fears; whatever appears is unmotivated unitary space, all-penetrating sky the buddha-dynamic of spontaneity.
Concluding Verses
I have collected the elixir of sutra, tantra and oral instruction and expressed them as stainless sunbeams. Through that virtue may all beings without exception perceive all situations as unoriginated illusory evanescence, and achieve higher and higher understanding beautified by the buddha-trikaya. Abandoning the intellect that craves security in what is only dream, magic show, mirage, reflection, echo and apparition, let primal awareness and spontaneity regain their primacy.
In this brief transit, until I attain my goal, practicing virtue in this world of men, on the path of peace, realizing skillful means, may I release innumerable beings from this fictive world.
This sun of dharma with its myriad stainless rays — primal awareness shining — dispels the darkness of unknowing, emptying the ocean of samsara to its last drop, revealing the unbounded continent of freedom.
The Motion Picture The Ninth Analogy The buddhas in their wisdom will say that all our experience is like a moving picture. Again, listen to the elucidation of that truth. Mind’s nature is like a motion picture, the film and the screen indivisible. The moving picture is the magical illusion, the delusive maya that constitutes our world,
a continuum of pleasure and pain, anxiety and joy. But the silver screen is cognitive emptiness remaining untouched by the events it reflects. Earthquake, tsunami, firestorm, hurricane, birth and death, love and hate, appear, yet the screen stays pristine, always immaculate, never intruding, like the surface of a bright mirror. The self-conscious viewer, objectifying the image on the screen, illustrates delusory dualistic maya where maya is the foe to be subdued. But for the movie-goer enrapt in the movie, like a child engaged in play-acting but fully aware of each moment as it turns, his pristine mind and the movie are at one. Thus, the movie experience is like nondual maya. Relaxing into that all-embracing cognition, the picture and the screen are a unitary whole. Without the screen — no picture; without the film — just blankness:
the two united — pure joy!
The critical mind observing the movie discriminates between brilliant and poor direction; appreciating the good and decrying the bad he cultivates the karma that determines his rebirth. In his engrossment in the moving picture, attached to what comforts, rejecting what dismays, affirming what pleases and negating what hurts, his biased propensities are refined and increased. Believing in the reality of the beings on the screen, pulled into the magical illusion of the moment, seduced by the deceptions of movie-maya, attached to the action as if it were our own, in turn, we laugh and cry, we hope and fear, captured by the projections created by karmic proclivity. Believing in the reality of the beings on the screen, beguiled by make-up and choreography, by the cunning manipulation of light and sound, losing sight of the human material underneath, identifying the actor and actress with their roles
we babes perceive them as real and true celebrities.
there now is only the flicker of evanescent light-form and the joy of detachment from every eventuality.
The busy mind returns from its peregrinations,
relaxes into the natural disposition, returns home to the heart center and surrenders to the joy of the mind’s essential nature. We are one with the emanation of magical illusion, the maya of the primal awareness of our being. Here and now is pure presence, timeless, nondual, the gnosis that is the heart’s desire. The flow of this moving picture never ceasing,
every instant is complete in itself, yet inseparable from the whole. The river-flow training keeps us present.
The eye of insight, psychic powers, samadhis and perfectly responsive spontaneity are achieved, and living as buddha we provide guidance to living beings. Familiarize yourselves with all situations as a movie!
Samsara is an interference pattern, a meaningless jumble, until illumined by the laser-like light of the mind; then all our samsaras are nirvana, patterns of light, like a hologram, awareness of clarity and emptiness.
Experience all the events of the waking state as holograms, all form as shimmering, scintillating light-form, abiding where inner and outer, present and absent, are one, where mind and its transparent creations are only one.
but the essentials of the two lifestyles are the same — solitude, simplicity, sensory reductionism and one pointed engagement in the nondual vision.
Reynolds, John Myrdhin. Golden Letters. Snow Lion: Ithaca, 1996.