"The experience of awareness is like being frightened or terrified. It is that kind of intense non-conceptual experience."
This from the commentary on Creation and Completion.
It has hit me light a bolt of lightening. If pure awareness is as effortless as fear, or any other intense emotion, then those emotions are the gateway to enlightenment.
When I sit with fear, it gives way to fearlessness. The concept that the fear was based on has burned off. All that remains is for the fear to burn off.
An insight this morning.
Just as I awoke in my dream, back in my 20s by recognizing that I was dreaming, I can awaken every time I recognize that I'm thinking.
There is no fundamental difference between thoughts in what seems to be waking life, and thoughts in what seems to be a dream. They are both made of the same clear and powerful substance of mind.
Had an insight this morning that the "taste of purification" is not so much developing a taste for what is pure, but is a recognition of the purity that is always here in the nature of mind.
I choose to sustain the recognition of this purity for the rest of my life. The recognition of purity has a physiological response, like the taste of a strawberry. Everytime I recognize it, I have that response and the recognition is embodied.
This is taking fruition as the path.
Feel the sadness, don't be the sadness
I can apply the consciousness practices to this.
And I can be the happiness.
1. My Happy Losar insight. Taking refuge and becomming a Tibetan Buddhist creates the conditions of being "locked in." Like RRSPs, like marriage, like any lifetime or longterm committment, there is an accumulation of resources and rewards. Having a Sadhana practice bears emotional fruit, and strengthens the subtle body in ways that a more variable practice probably doesn't. But the real driver is devotion. The increasing sense of inseperablity between my essence and that of all the buddahs, gurus, and deities, is what created the condition for sustained non-duality.
2. The paradox in the Way of the Bodhissatva of the something that doesn not exist, and yet is not nothing, creates the conditions for rest. The result is the ground of wisdom and an understanding of the true nature of mind.
When something and its nonexistence
Both are absent from before the mind
No other option does the latter have.
It comes to perfect rest from concepts free
3. The mind is not a thing, but an event. If we can see it this way then we can see feelings as events, and "clarity as an infinitely expansive state of awareness." This helps us see the mind as a flow, not a fixed thing. And as a result everything is simply part of this flow.
4. It is a very powerful practice to remember a dream and ask "who is dreaming this dream?" Stay with it and any sense of integrated self soon dissolves.
5. If the key to sustaining wisdom seeing yourself as pure, or purifiying how you see yourself?. Or maybe both. During Tantra immersion I will toggle with both these insights.
Whether one meditates on an elaborate or concise version of creation stage, there are three main points: Clarity of form purifies attachment to the appearing object, recollecting the purity frees one from clinging to corporeality, and maintaining pride vanquishes clinging to ordinary self.
Important takeaway: "recollecting purity" does not mean remember some kind of pristine energy or identity. It means being able to see the conceptual models as conceptual models and purifying attachment to these concepts. E.g. "I hate myself," I can see that this self I believe is solid and object of entrenched aversion is actually empty. Also the "I" that is doing the hating is empty. This becomes clearer still when I develop a counterpoint vision of a self as a deity.
Tara visualization helps to develop that recognition of the fundamenta emptiness of all mental models.
I have serendipitously booked a room that is in a home owned by Mark and Angela. It is on a pretty peninsula, like Fortune's Rocks. Jenn is there.
She is still dead, but a new, eternal version of her has spawned. She's essentially what she always was, delightful, warm, fun to be around. Her life force is undiminished.
I worry that we don't have much time together, but the day also feels open and infinitely stretched out. We have all the tme in the world to be loving, dear friends.