awareness. The mind can remember our own many lives and see those of
others, and is clairvoyant. That is our conduct when all is completely
undefiled.
No matter what appears in informal contemplation, the gap between
meditation sessions should be understood to be like one of the eight metaphors
of magical illusion; and thereby we are released from desire, hatred, and all
emotional affliction. When positive or negative mental display arises,
convinced that it is without root or base, neither fixate upon it nor reject it.
While the ego still has not dissolved into its inner spaciousness, meditate
according to the profound instruction, abide by the law of karma, and through
devotion and pure vision, do not let the notion of sin or error stain the mind.
Stay alone in solitude, keeping the sutric commitments and vows. Without
distraction and frivolity, depend upon renunciation. Without desire, without
forming attachments, walk the path of selflessness. Keep death in mind and
keep the fires of exertion burning. Day and night, consumed by meritorious
activities, abandon the concerns of this life. Serve the rigzin-lama and pray
devotedly to him. Remain without any ambition or goal and stay in nonaction.
Abandon the distinction between oneself and others and eradicate fear and
hope. Take misfortune as the path and visualize all appearances as the lama.
Understanding that all experience is one’s own envisionment, get rid of
egoistic clinging. Since everything is without substance, sustain the joke of the
absurd. Understanding primordial emptiness and adventitious emptiness,
everything always arises as one’s own envisionment. Through such conduct,
by such means, practice day and night.
So long as mental conditions allow, optimize the creativity of pure presence.
Stay in a place of solitude. As long as we still make judgments and hold to
them adamantly, as long as virtue and vice are still distinguishable, we must
familiarize ourselves with nonduality. When there is apparent conflict, turn
the argument upside down and look at inherent pure presence. When there is
fear of birth and death, we familiarize ourselves with the meaning of
birthlessness. In that manner all internal and external phenomena arise as
dharmakaya, and we reside in the yoga of nonmeditation that is like the flow
of a river.In both sutra and tantra what needs to be abandoned are the shackles of
concepts and the shackles of attachment. But their manner of doing so is different,
as explained above. Some will run away from the poisonous tree, some will try to
cut it at its root, and some will take its fruit as medicine. The method of Dzogchen
yogins and yoginis is to allow every emotional affliction at the moment of its
arising to dissolve into its own natural state of being. There is no attempt to turn
the affliction into something positive or to neutralize it by application of antidotes.
Over time, through familiarization with the methods of Dzogchen, whatever
thought a yogin might have arises as the meditation; but from outside, from the
point of view of ordinary beings, the appearance of the fear of suffering and the
hope for happiness seems no different. Unlike Dzogchen yogins, ordinary people
turn these into solid entities, cultivating them or rejecting them, thus