This has been my formal practice for over two months now. The differences between the unfolding phases of awareness have become clearer both on and off the cushion. During the past couple of weeks, my off the cushion practice has started to resemble more my formal sitting sessions. It is now easier to recognize the various developing qualities of the awareness continuum and going through the phases is more natural and requires less effort.
Preliminary practice
I start my sits with guru yoga, first doing a visualization of benefiscial beings of dharmakaya and then Padmasambhava, all of whom will kindly clear the obscurations of the body, speech and mind. After the routine, there is feelings of devotion and bliss and the body feels light and spacious. The mind is clear and unobsructed with little fluctuations.
The clarity and stability increases as I continue the practice with a short round of concentration meditation until all arising phenomena loose their solidity and become a flow of energetic and rapidly changing vibrations. This marks the shift to the subtle level of the mind. After easing up on the concentration, the flow of sensations becomes steady and orderly, the automatic concentration is on. This creates proper foundation for the insights of emptiness meditation.
Emptiness, subtle level of the mind
Emptiness meditation will further refine the flow of sensations: gross level grasping ceases and arising phenomena are no longer experienced as me or mine. There is a feeling of spaciousness in the body as the observer can no longer be located in it’s volume. The feeling of certainty about the dubious nature of the agent has been a ongoing feature of my baseline for a while, so at this phase not much negating is needed. I look at the transient and transparent essence of self and affirm the mind perspective (sensations and thoughts are experienced as fluctuation of the mind field) and it’s emptiness as the basis of operation. Because a cloud of gross selfing would prevent further refinements, strong view on the emptiness of self is essential.
Timeless, very subtle level of the mind
The awareness opens up as changeless, infinite and ever-present expanding field. Unconditioned cannot be constrained by concepts like time and space. As the mind looses it’s grasping on temporality and fixed dimensions, a considerable expansion takes place and the basis of operation shifts to the very subtle level. With the expansion comes a feeling of peace and tranquility. Everything appears freshly and vividly and there is a dream-like quality to the experience.
Although the space feels huge and unchanging, at this stage it is still stuck around the shape of the body. The diffuse volume of the illusory agent that is observing the space is preferred over rest of space. The two perspectives, mind and events, are experienced as separate components of existence which gives rise to duality between the observer and the object of observation. Without fully experiencing the emptiness of time and space, even more fundamental merging of those two perspectives is possible.
One taste, extraordinary level
There is a clear difference between observing the unobstructed field of awareness (very subtle level) and being and embodying it’s vastness (extraordinary level). As the sitting develops, the boundlessness matures and continues to expand in stages as exceedingly subtle layers of grasping are let go of. The world around the meditator is no longer ”out there”.
At the lower level of one taste, all sensations, emotions and thoughts are experienced as manifestations of the awareness itself, arising and passing away in a playful manner, like a vibrant shower of colors, shapes and mental events. They merge together into a unified field of perception, everything arising more rapidly and brightly. Moving mind becomes equal to the mind staying still. When seeing, there is no difference between the centre and the periphery and as a result gross movement of the mind towards visual objects cease.
As it develops further, all duality between mind and event perspectives collapses. From the mind perspective there is huge vastness vividly manifesting itself in various forms and shapes. From the event perspective, there are various vivid forms and shapes that are made of huge vastness. Looking at a wall at arms lenght feels like being face to face with unobstructed space of empty awareness. All seeing is infinite awareness, all body sensations are infinite awareness and all mental events are nothing else but infinite awareness. This is true non-duality.
Complete equality of sensations and their impermanent and interdependent nature brings forth a feeling of appreciation, bliss and joy. As the view is stabilized, it will develop into automatic emptiness. At this point there is no need to look for the empty nature of arising phenomena. All phenomena present themselves already empty upon arising without any grab to them, an unimpeded flow of emptiness.
At this stage the mind stays completely effortlessly and there is no need to apply any kind of remedy to keep the mindfulness on the object. Staying on the object is technically not even possible. Awareness is undivided from it’s manifestations and there could hardly be any observer separate from the object of observation. All duality is gone, the heat of the fire is none other than the fire itself.
At this high end of extraordinary perspective, there is no doer left and nothing to do. The mind stays contentedly on it’s own empty nature. Abiding in non-dual nature of the mind and the automatic emptiness inherent to it, are the two prerequisites to see beyond the last remaining cloud. The agentless awareness still has a strong habit of taking in the experience only in tiny parts. This pre-stimulus like involuntary movement toward objects in mind space, also called ‘attention bounce’, is faster than intention itself. Taking in unbounded union of awareness is just not possible when this mental process is going on. It is felt as a subtle remaining restlessness that limits the lucidity of the awareness itself. Because of this, all manifestations of the awareness still seem to happen relative to a reference point in space. There is nothing a meditator can do to make past this point, now the view itself is the meditation. This view is taken with the help of crossing over instructions and as a result there is no longer taking to mind anything particular.
Knowing mind’s essence, Rigpa
Pristine unobstructed and naked awareness blissfully abiding on the totality of experience. All distinctions has ceased so there is no abiding or non-abiding. Pure beingness fills all of space like water pervades all of the ocean. Now the lucid nature of the mind shines forth making the whole experience translucent that is very special and utterly normal at the same time. The mind space now flows through completely unimpeded, the smallest details are as much in focus as the space itself around them. All points of reference are lost.
There are usually many energetic side effects at this phase of the sit. Undistractedly continuing like this on the cushion strengtens the view. The purity of the perspective grows and it gathers momentum like a stone rolling downhill, making it self-sustaining.
For me, this perspective usually develops slowly as I continue the sit after the shift from the extraordinary perspective to rigpa. It can also be very spectacular when it happens suddenly, like a picture of a sky was suddenly replaced by a direct unbounded experience of it.