matter what feelings of happiness and sorrow we experience, none have
substantial existence and none are anything more than mental projections and
labels.
Whatever experiences of suffering or happiness we encounter, we should allow
the natural ease and calm of pure presence to just suffuse and permeate them
without allowing our own pure presence, in a process of reification, to arise as
objects and attachments to objects. If we gaze at these experiences directly, seeing
them clearly, the entire field of suffering and happiness will then vanish like haze
melting into the sky. When, in this way, apparent substantiality has been
ultimately penetrated, not once or twice but again and again, suffering and
happiness and all the experiences of samsara and nirvana will be experienced as
the magical illusion of a skillful magician, or like a dream, an echo, and the rest of
the eight analogies of phantasmagorical illusion. Whosoever is without hope of
happiness or fear of suffering, understanding that all experience is the great
illusionary display of mind itself, he or she will become a Dzogchen yogin or
yogini. If we understand that all appearances of our present life are naturally
insubstantial, then even the happiness and sufferings of dreamtime will be
recognized as dream. If dream is understood as dream again and again, then the
bardo will be recognized as bardo. More details on this topic will found in the
following chapter.
1.15 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SECRET OF MIND
The mind can be considered under two aspects: relative mind and mindin-itself—
what we call “the nature of mind.” According to the glorious Rongzompa’s view in
Applying the Mahayana Method, the two terms are “mind” and “luminous mind,”
or “enlightened mind.” “Mind,” the relative mind, is the intellect, characterized as
fictive and notional-conceptual; it is that mind which divides experience into an
apparent subject and apparent object. Luminous mind, on the other hand, is
nondual primal awareness, primordial spontaneity, the mind as it actually is. To
address the question of whether the intellect and luminous mind are one or two,
take the example of a firebrand and its circle of fire. When the firebrand is held in
the hand and whirled around at night, a wheel of fire appears. This wheel of fire
seems to be independent of the firebrand itself because nothing can be observed
in the dark other than the wheel of fire, but it actually has no independent
existence at all—it is totally dependent upon the firebrand and the properties of
the eye. The subjective intellect—our sense or experience of a self separate from
an observed “objective” field—is like the wheel of fire: we can say upon reflection
that though it appears and is experienced, it has no substantial existence
whatsoever beyond this appearance. When luminous mind self-manifests as a
condition of dualistic perception, it is called “fictive mind” and is just like the
wheel of fire, arising in dependence on something else and having no true
existence of its own. Primal awareness, free of dualistic perception, is called
“luminous mind” and is just like the light of the firebrand, on the basis of which
the illusion of a wheel can arise.