Originally posted by An Eternal Now:

I see... by no-solidity you mean Emptiness? The 'one action with the universe'.. can you elaborate?

IMO, 'Emptiness' is realised at the second stage non-duality. During the first stage, the visions has no inner-outer division, but all the 'colours' of visions are still there.

During the second-stage, the 'colours' becomes transparent and bright luminousity... resulting in better understanding of 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form'. Additionally, one experiences that one's action is the same as the action of the whole universe. One realises that space is an illusion and all activities are simultaneous with the 'entirety/whole'. This is meant by when we eat, the whole universe eats.

Hi Thusness,

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation. It is very clear.

To me, 'whatever arises already is' is a distinctive stage and insight. It allows me to maintain non-dual in activities... as there is the realisation that no 'need/effort' can be done to acheive non-dual.

Prior to this insight, there was the effort to drop the 'sense of self'. .. but the mind didn't realise that the effort was the split.

After a while, it gets really clear 'why' there wasn't a split in the first place... and therefore 'how' a split(subject-object division) can never occur in reality.

Before 'whatever arises already is' insight there was much unconscious/habitual effort to fix the split. After the insight, the experience is that no-split have ever occured at all... which enable no-self experience to be better 'integrated' with activities. With this, the benefits of the practice is more clearly experienced.

Financially and physically 2008 was a bad year for me too... as i quitted the full time job and got injured. Many a times, the worries contract and make one get lost in the contents and lose sight of the 'indestructable ...' At the same time, the experiences have been 'educational'.

Once again thank you so much for your advices and help.

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Firstly, will like to state that I am still learning... so this is just a sharing.

To me, the 'Now' concept can be quite misleading.

What is more important for me is to expereince no-self in what is happening. It doesn't matter whether there are thoughts or not. There is a difference in experiencing the world through a self and one without it. This to me is more important.

The Now concept can put one into a state of wanting to get into such a state. This will cause a thinking that there is a Now state and a non-now state... and that the Now state is better.

However, the insight of spontaneous manifestation will change this view. Spontaneous manifestion need a clear understanding and experience of no-self. Here, it doesn't matter whether there are thoughts, feelings or not... these expereinces are arising not from a self... and cannot be stopped by a self.

From the practice point of view, meditation is essential. It is also important to have the ability to realise one's blindspots... that is when one is unconsciously caught up. This can be very very subtle... and hard to discover... and presented the main difficulties for me.

The conceptual understanding is much easier that the realtime practice.

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Yah... Buddhism is the only religion that talks about "emptiness". It is a very profound realisation.... even more profound that the "non-dual".

Basically, 'emptiness' resolve a lot of mystery.

The word 'emptiness' and 'empty' is used in many other religions and spiritual practices too. This include Taoism, but the understanding is not the same. In many of these religion, 'emptiness' is referring to the Void. The Void in this case is the transcendental experience of All-pervading presence in a state of no thought.

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The author say that thought is a problem. It may not be entirely accurate.

IMO, when visual vision and thought imagery arise, there is a tendency to compartmentalise certain sections as entities, focus or objects. Next, there is a desire to modify that section. For example, in the visual sense, from the environment you are engaging a conversation with someone. The mind desires to change the 'person' into what it imagines will be the desired outcome. Example, you want to make the person think the way you think and so on so forth. The mind fails to see that this is 'hit and miss' and that the changes is really not dependent on the desire to modify the subject. Rather, it has got to do with the 'person' own willing or not.

So... to me, thought is the not the problem. Instead, the desire to modify and change 'what is' is the cause of suffering.

Also, when we say that we are not the thoughts or the body, unconsciously we have separated 'phemonena' from a 'untouchable' portion of ourself.

The difference at the non-duality stage is that, no attempt is made... Sensations are left as they are...

At the I AM/eternal witness stage, there is a seeking for the place beyond thoughts.

Also, at the I AM/eternal witness, no-suffering is preferred over suffering. There is no understanding that there is really NO blissful place that is beyond pain. When there is pain, there is nothing beyond it too.

So at the I AM/eternal witness stage, attempts may be employed by the mind to get rid of the pain... to go a place beyond the pain. The understanding that 'sensation and pain' is inseparable from Presence/Buddha Nature is not there yet.

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Just my opinion only,

I think Eckhart Tolle may have been suffering alot and suddenly he 'let go' of trying to work out his problems. This results in a dissociation from thoughts which give rise to the experience of Presence.

To me, 'I AM' is an experience of Presence, it is just that only one aspect of Presence is experienced which is the 'all-pervading' aspect. The non-dual and emptiness aspect are not experienced.. Because non-dual is not realised (at I AM stage), a person may still use effort in an attempt to 'enter' the Presence. This is because, at the I AM stage, there is an erroneous concept that there is a relative world make up of thoughts AND there is an 'absolute source' that is watching it. The I AM stage person will make attempts to 'dissociated from the relative world' in order to enter the 'absolute source'.

However, at Non-dual (& further..) stage understanding, one have understood that the division into a relative world and an absolute source has NEVER occcured and cannot be... Thus no attempt/effort is truly required.

http://www.radiantmind.net/index.php/radiantmind/written-entry/we-are-what-we-see/

The manifold of phenomenal appearances is primordially unoriginated and non-dual, just like an image reflected in a mirror. The nature of openness isn’t separate from phenomenal appearances, just as water and its quality of being moist are combined in a non-dualistic condition. Free of the limits of illusion, like an imaginary city, the instant things manifest they are in the condition of being primordially unborn.

Although the phenomenal world appears to be located (in time and space, in fact) it is the non- abiding dimension of being itself. The instant an appearance seems to disappear it does not in fact cease, (since ultimately phenomena) neither increase nor decrease. As such, phenomenal appear- ances do not exist in the way they appear.

These lines are from a text called the Natural Freedom of Being by the great Complete Fulfill- ment master Longchenpa who lived in Tibet in the fourteenth century. As we have said elsewhere, the Complete Fulfillment or Dzogchen tradition offers a spiritual perspective that is very consistent with our own work. Here we will unpack these few lines for they will help us understand the radical immediacy of the Complete Fulfillment experience which embraces and dissolves the sense of separation we create between ourselves and the world.

Longchenpa begins by stating that our sensory experience is uncreated and indivisible. He uses the analogy of a mirror-image to illustrate this idea. This is an image that is used frequently in nearly all Buddhist traditions to illustrate how our experience lacks any discrete and irreducible properties. In our own time we can also use the examples of film or video images. If we examine an image in a mirror the image gives the appearance of being composed of separate elements, yet in reality it is a single indivisible image. We cannot take the image apart and put it together in another way. The elements appear to be separate but in fact they are inseparable. As an image, the seeming boundary between one feature and the next signifies nothing. There is no change in constitution, or media that differentiates one feature from another. Even if the image is moving and changing its shape and constitution it cannot be broken up into separable elements.

From the Complete Fulfillment perspective the sense world is no different from the mirror image. While it appears to be divisible and manipulable like a set of building blocks, the idea that we can isolate one element of our experience and move it around, or replace it with another, is a linguis- tically created illusion. In particular, it is created through the language that attributes choice and agency to ourselves and others. The language of human agency produces the appearance of control and manipulation. We learn to claim responsibility when certain, often repetitive actions, occur in a predicatable way. For example, when our body moves as we stand up from a chair we say we choose to do this. At a more profound level, the image of a reflection in a mirror also illustrates the inseparability between a perceiver and that which is perceived. According to the Complete Fulfillment, concepts of a perceiver and objects of perception are theoretical abstractions, which have no basis in the domain of being. In the same way that an image in the mirror is inseparable from the mirror, similarly we don’t exist as something different from the universe that we experience. This is an extension of the idea that is now commonly accepted in the natural and human sciences, that our experience is “theory laden”. In other words, our perceptions are shaped and influenced by our beliefs, theories, and structures for interpreting the world. However, the Complete Fulfillment tradition applies this discovery in a far more radical way by demonstrating that even the most obvious and palpable dimensions of our experience, such as the feeling of being different from the things we experience, are but structures of interpretation.

The contemporary English mystic Douglas Harding has presented the visual dimensions of this disclosive space in a particularly accessible way through his notion of “having no head.” As Harding demonstrates in his writings, and through simple practical exercises, we never experience our own head in the same way that we experience those around us. In place of our head is a space that is the universe we experience. As Harding writes (p. 9), “This is not a matter of argument, or of philo- sophical acumen, or or working oneself up into a state, but of simple sight…. Present experience, whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent head.” Our own head is a theoreti- cal construct, inferred on the basis that we are like the people who show up within the field of our experience.

Though our limbs and torso are often revealed within this field, our head is never revealed as an object of perception. Were it ever to be where we “think” it is, it would occlude the possibility of experiencing anything else. If our head was where we “imagine” it is, the universe would disappear. As Harding says (p. 11), “there is one place where no head of mine can ever turn up, and that is here on my shoulders, where it would blot out this Central Void which is my very life-source.” Of course, you might say that the existence of our head as the gateway for our visual, auditory, and olfactory perception can be confirmed by reaching out and touching a mass that seems to rest on our shoul- ders, but as Harding says (p. 8), “when I start groping around for my lost head, instead of finding it here I only lose my exploring hand as well: it, too, is swallowed up in the abyss at the centre of my being.” In the place where our head would be is a space that is the universe as we experience it. Consequently, from this perspective we are the universe. As Harding writes (p. 19): “It is absolutely Nothing, yet all things; the only Reality, yet an absentee… There is nothing else whatever. I am everyone and no-one ...”

In the above lines Longchenpa uses the term openness (shunyata), thus connecting the Com- plete Fulfillment to the broad and powerful river of Buddhist wisdom contained in the Perfect Wis- dom (Prajnaparamita) tradition. In language reminiscent of the famous Buddhist text, the Heart Scripture, Longchenpa writes that “the nature of openness isn’t separate from phenomenal appear- ances.” The Heart Scripture itself says: “Form is openness and openness itself is form. Openness does not differ from form and form does not differ from openness. Whatever is form, that is open- ness. Whatever is openness, that is form.”

The point being made here is that there is no separation between that which is disclosed (i.e., the phenomenal world) and the disclosive field that makes the disclosure of any universe possible. A disclosive space is the field within which all things manifest, persist, and decay, exactly as they do. Ultimately, it is indistinguishable from the experiential field. It is the occurance of that which occurs in it. As Harding says (p. 60), “The Space is the things that occupy it.” This disclosive space cannot be created since this is tantamount to creating the universe. Further, to the extent that there is never a time when there is no disclosive space (time being an occurance within it), it is a vacuous concept. In fact, the disclosive space that is disclosed doesn’t exist. This is why Buddhist philosophers such as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti emphasize that the experience of openness is itself open and insubstan- tial.

A consequence of this level of immediacy is there is no act of perception. As the Heart Scripture also says, “in the sphere of openness there is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind, and there are no forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects of mind. Because there is no perception, there is no perceiver, or object of perception either. As Harding writes (p. 6): “[T]hese coloured shapes present themselves in all simplicity, without any such complications as near or far, this or that, mine or not mine, seen-by-me or merely given. All twoness-all duality of subject and object-has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it.” It is meaningless to say that the world is out there, or in here, because disclosive space is neither inside nor outside. There is nothing it doesn’t disclose, so it can’t be inside since nothing can be outside. Nor, can it be outside because whatever is inside is disclosed by this space. Also, because there is no inside or outside, this space cannot be said to be small or large, expanded or contracted, hidden or revealed, here or there. Furthermore, because there is no sense of here or there, there is no experience of distance within this disclosive space. The feeling that we are closer to some things and further away from others is an illusion created by the beliefs that things remain constant in size, even when they change their dimensions, and things can occlude each other. Consequently, we aren’t located within this space because we are the space itself. For example, when we sit in a room we believe that the room is located within a house which is within a city or town, but this isn’t given in our experience at all. That our room is located in a country on planet earth is an interpretation that is seemingly substanti- ated by memories.

Perhaps that is so, you might say, but I still have the experience of being located in this room. You might say you are sitting near the west facing wall, or standing in the middle of the room. If we say we are located near the west wall we do so on the basis of a belief that the room exists in a larger universe. Here the sense of location is derived, not from our experience, but that things exist “on the other side” of our experience. If we say we are in the middle of a room we believe that things can be more, or less distant from us, in virtue of believing that phenomena have stable dimensions, even when they shrink or enlarge within our field of experience.

Because the experience of distance and location deconstruct within the Complete Fulfillment perspective, there is no experience of motion or stillness. The phenomenon of walking or driving is completely consistent with us moving through a stationery landscape, or the landscape moving through us. In the absence of an arbitrary framework of interpretation, there is absolutely no way of distinquishing whether we are moving, or whether phenomena are moving through the clearing we identify as the locus of our head. Consequently, we are neither still nor moving. From the Complete Fulfillment perspective there is simply “an experience” of colors and shapes that modulate like reflections on water.

This thing that we call our “body” isn’t the locus of our identity. It is simply the most constant gestalt that occurs in “our” experience. Many of our visual experiences are accompanied on the lower periphery by an inchoate and indistinct sensation that frequently transforms into an experience of hands, arms and sometimes legs. We identify these sensation as our body because they invariably show up wherever we think we are. We think we are there because these limbs consistently display the same markings in terms of color, shape, size, weight, etc. If another set of limbs showed up with predictable constancy around the bottom half of our visual field, we would think that we were there. We interpret that we are walking when certain changes occur in our visual, auditory and tactile fields. In fact, we simply witness modulations in our experience like those that can be partially replicated with virtual reality technology. The difference between virtual reality and the Complete Fulfillment perspective is that virtual reality creates an impression of movement while we are statio- nery. This is partially a limitation of virtual reality technology which cannot yet replicate the pixel resolution of human vision, or simulate the muscular activity involved in actions like walking. But more significantly it is due to the memories we have of stepping into a virtual reality unit. But unlike virtual reality the Complete Fulfillment perspective doesn’t condition the experience of being in a fixed location with images changing around us. In other words, though the experience of real motion dissolves, it doesn’t produce the sensation of being stuck in the same location. Spatial location and dislocation both dissolve in this perspective. From the Complete Fulfillment perspective, reality is always a virtual reality.

Adapted from forthcoming book by Peter titled The Natural Freedom of Being. A free Audio CD Interview is available for those interested in the Radiant Mind Course.

(Thrangu Rinpoche)

....Although one recognizes the cognitive lucidity or the lucidity of awareness within emptiness, there are different ways that this might be recognized. For example, someone might find that when they look at the nature of a thought, initially the thought arises, and then as the thought dissolves, what it leaves in its wake or what it leaves behind it is an experience or recognition of the unity of cognitive lucidity and emptiness. Because this person has recognized this cognitive lucidity and emptiness, there is some degree of recognition, but because this can only occur for them or has only occurred for them after the thought has subsided or vanished, then they are still not really seeing the nature of thought itself. For someone else, they might experience that from the moment of the thought's arising, and for the entire presence of that thought, it remains a unity of cognitive lucidity and emptiness. This is a correct identification, because whenever there is a thought present in the mind or when there is no thought present in the mind, and whether or not that thought is being viewed in this way or not, the nature of the mind and the nature of every thought is always a unity of cognitive lucidity and emptiness. It is not the case that thoughts only become that as they vanish.

The word naked is used a great deal at this point in the text. And the word naked here has a very specific and important meaning because it is used to distinguish between understanding and experience, that is to say, understanding and recognition. it is very easy to confuse one's understanding for an experience or a recognition. One might understand something about the mind and therefore think that one had recognized it directly. Here, the use of the term "naked" means "direct;" that is to say, something that is experienced nakedly or directly in the sense that the experience is free from the overlay of concepts.

Whereas normally we have the attitude that thought is something we must get rid of, in this case it is made clear that it is important not to get rid of thought, but to recognize its nature, and indeed, not only the nature of thought but the nature of stillness must be recognized. In particular, with regard to thought, as long as we do not recognize its nature, of course thought poses a threat to meditation and becomes an impediment. But once the nature of thought has been correctly recognized, thought itself becomes the meditative state and therefore it is often said that "the root of meditation is recognizing the nature of thought."

There lived in the eighteenth century a great Gelugpa teacher named Changkya Rolpe Dorje, who from his early youth displayed the signs of being an extraordinary person. He became particularly learned and also very realized, and at one point he composed a song called 'Recognizing Mother.' 'Mother' in his song is the word he uses to refer to dharmata or the nature of one's mind. This song was so extraordinary that a commentary was written about it by Khenchen Mipam Rinpoche. In this song, Changkya Rolpe Dorje makes a very clear distinction between recognizing and not recognizing the nature of one's mind. In one part of the song he says, "Nowadays we scholars of the Gelugpa tradition, in discarding these appearances of the mind as the basis for the realization of emptiness and of the basis for the negation of true existence, and in searching for something beyond this to refute, something beyond this to negate in order to realize emptiness, have left our old mother behind; in other words, we have missed the point of emptiness."

Changkya Rolpe Dorje gives another image for this mistake that we tend to make. he says that we are like a small child who is sitting in his mother's lap but forgetting where he is, looks for his mother everywhere; looks above, below, left and right and is unable to see his mother and becomes quite agitated. Along comes the child's older brother, and the image the older brother represents is both the understanding of interdependence and the recognition of the nature of thought. The older brother reminds the child by saying, "Your mother is right here, you are in her lap." In the same way, the nature of our mind or emptiness is with us all the time, we tend to look for it indirectly; we look for it somewhere outside ourselves, somewhere far away. And yet we do not need to look far away if we simply view the nature of thought as it is."...