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Maybe here is actually not so bad and so fantasies of somewhere else being better can make it difficult to just be here.
Some people go to psychotherapy for years and years to enquire into how the patterns of their existence arose from childhood events. But more important than knowing about yourself, and having a narrative you can tell about yourself, is to be yourself. What would that mean? To be yourself before you think about who you are. To find yourself at home in yourself, not struggling with yourself or being disappointed in yourself and not hoping to be other than yourself. These are all little side roads you can spend many years travelling down. ‘If only I were somebody else, I would be happier.’
When we were young we were rowing very quickly because we hoped to get somewhere, but now we think we are stuck in an endless ocean but we better keep rowing as there is always more and more to do and to learn. But it never comes to an end.
The fantasy of control is the fantasy of the individual ego separated from its own ground. Therefore, in the practice we are relaxing and opening to experience the underlying safety net of the integration which is always already there. The term dzogchen means ‘the great completion’. If something is complete you should leave it alone because if you try to do more when something is already complete it will be spoilt. The world doesn’t seem complete to us but maybe that’s because of how we look at the world. If we can see the natural completion of each moment then the issue is not what to do with it, but rather, here I am as part of this time and place so then moving in the environment, as part of the environment, is responding to the invitation of the field. I don’t need a great game plan in my mind. I can trust that life will be enough. I have to trust that being here with you will provide some words. I don’t have any words that are prepared. I look around and I see people’s faces and something comes out of my mouth, because it’s not all up to me. We are here together creating a mood of communication. Your interest feeds my capacity to share something with you. The fantasy of being an isolated individual would not be helpful to me just now. If I think, ‘Oh my god, what do you all think about me?’ then I can feel myself shrink into something very small: ‘Perhaps I am doing it wrong.’
This is dzog pa chen po – it is complete – it is just this. What else should it be? ‘Ah, but James you could have been talking about something else? Why did you choose this when you could have chosen that?’ This has gone and that has never arrived. How you can compare the fantasy future to the vanished past I don’t know, but we do it all the time and this is how we persecute ourselves: ‘If only I had done that!’ Not possible. Each moment is this.
Helicopter… earth… helicopter…earth…this is how we live. With hindsight we think we understand what we should have done but this is a betrayal because we are extracting ourselves from the lived continuum into a world of ideas.
When human beings live together and get a little bit of money they build a little bit more – in English we say higgledy-piggledy – a kind of organic mess – and that is quite a human, warm and nice place to live.
and the people, but I don’t see my mind. I don’t see my buddha nature. Maybe it is not there. Maybe I am not ready. Maybe I need to gather the two accumulations of merit and wisdom. Maybe I need to do more offerings and do more prostrations and then in some future life when I am a better person the doors of paradise will open. Maybe I need to have more faith. Perhaps it is not like that. If it is here the issue is to find the way of seeing, which in fact is the way of being, being open to the fact that everything that we experience and everything that we seem to have is, itself, ungraspable.
This is our experience in life: our mental structures and views don’t work as a precise description of our interactive becoming. Here we see the essential problem. The image that we build up about ourselves and other people are descriptions of individuals, of some things which can be known, but our actual existence is interactive.
When you are fully present in the activity you can swerve and respond very quickly to avoid stones, or changes in the snow, because you are collaborating with the world as part of the world; you are not attacking it. It is like this when people are learning to windsurf.
AI Summary
The Mirror of Clear Meaning by James Low presents key insights from the Dzogchen tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.