Recent comments

It seems like most teachers of Dzogchen and Mahamudra require the traditional 4 Thoughts/100,000’s ngöndro first. Or, if they don’t, they’re looking to inspire you over a weekend, rather than follow you through the process over time. It’s good to know that between Aro and Evolving Ground there are a couple of teachers who thread the needle. Thanks again.

There is resonance with the Teachings of the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa.
New cannot replace old as they co-exist.
Worm holes can get very claustrophobic.
Myth of Freedom and Cutting through Spiritual Materialism are good starting places.
I chuckle if you have encountered his work, I am the fool.
Said with care and compassion for all struggling beings, may your path be clarified with peace and self knowledge.

Hi David,

Once again, I’m a latecomer to this site but am really glad to have found it. So much resonates that I’ve not found written elsewhere.

Regarding the Dzogchen ngondro–who the heck teaches it? All my online searching has turned up only Aro. Is that about right? Not that I wouldn’t go with Aro, maybe I would, but it might be nice to know what my options are. Any tips?

Thank you,

Sam

The honeymoon example Kegan gave and the ‘communal’ solution is wrong because

a) Randomly springing (i.e. without asking) a holiday on your spouse and kids means you didn’t take into consideration spouse & kids needs.

b) Go to places like Ikaria. This dilemma never shows up to begin with because everyone lives nearby and possibly in the same house.

Finally, I cannot see why you would not just say: - we (me & spouse) planned this holiday for just us. If all of us (me, spouse, parents, kids) want to get together; let’s plan something together - a holiday, picnic etc.

you get your couple holiday and also make it clear if you want to do an ‘all-together’ then its going to be another time, and planned by all of you (well maybe not kids).

Buddhists today are too attached to the Dharma. They spend too much time arguing about things they haven’t really experienced. Like the story about the raft, you should leave it when you’ve crossed to the other side.

Thanks for that, David. Makes sense. I’m fairly certain he does not, or did not, mix the two.

The quote you include is timely. It’s funny–approaching Vajrayana in my 40’s, I can dimly see that the work ahead is to undermine the very self I’ve spent the last couple decades working to strengthen, in however healthy a way. Or it’s to experience that self as made more of space than of particles. Or something.

Also intrigued by Aro Ter, I’ll have to check that out. Anyways–thoughtful stuff, all around.

Hi David,

First off, thank you so much for your writing. I devoured the whole Vividness site over the last 1-2 weeks and found it extremely interesting. I’m grateful to you for giving language to some of the discrepancies I’d struggled with and been unable to articulate.

Regarding the possibility that there may be multiple “flavors” of enlightenment, I thought you may be interested in this study.

I haven’t finished going through it, but one of the ways it was framed to me by a teacher I’ve worked with is that the evidence suggests the various maps of practice are in fact leading to different awakenings. For example, the hinayana map leads to neural changes that tend to shut down the sense of self, whereas the vajrayana tend toward changes that shift the seat of “self” from a more local to global sense of identification (e.g. identifying as lively spacious awareness itself).

I’m new to my explorations of vajrayana/tantra—I’m using those words as synonyms, which I think is how you do as well—but thought this was a fascinating bit.

I just wanted to submit a note of appreciation for the uncommon perspective of this page and the site as a whole. I had been planning to start the traditional ngondro of one of the Nyingma lineages this fall, but I admit that what I read here gives me pause.

I’d be curious to know if you are familiar with the late Harvard professor and meditation teacher Daniel P. Brown and his Pointing Out the Great Way method. Apparently students are guided through Mahamudra and Dzogchen without a ngondro requirement, which seems unusual. He says in an interview that psychotherapy is like a ngondro for Westerners–an intriguing notion (not to mention, for this well-therapized Californian, a convenient one).

Thanks for your time.

In Tantric initiations (I’m acquainted with Sakya Kriya and Nyingma Mahayoga/MahaAti) there is a point where the Lamas give transmission of wisdom mind. I have always understood that as the same as dharma transmission in the Zen tradition. In the Korean Zen tradition (what I’m acquainted with) there’s dharma combat between teacher and student and when the students realization is the same as the teachers it’s the transmission of wisdom mind. Maybe the semantics are different but to me seems like the same shit!

Another way Tolle makes his system attractive is that anyone can practice it and improve their life right now, in their living room, no strings attached. I think Budhism has a much higher perceived entry barrier. It scares people away thinking you have to find a teacher/Guru and practice for 100 hours to even know if this thing is working, and even then you wont know for sure it wasn’t just your bad Guru.

A Budhism Lite that required less input but didn’t distort the teaching could be attractive.

I’m actually pretty disgusted to hear that the sangha accepted slaves as gifts. It would be more than fine, if they accepted them and freed them. But to keep them in bondage is something I strongly disagree with.

I believe in the golden rule, do not do something to someone if you don’t want them to do it to you. I don’t want to be a slave, so I could never enslave someone.

I’m unsure of these scriptures, since they were written hundreds of years after the Buddha. Who knows what he really said.

So, I recently mentioned to my friend S. that I was thinking of trying mindfulness, and she said I should be careful of that. From this site, I was already aware of potential risk, but was a little curious about how she knew. It turns out, she knows some Buddhists (via the Extinction Rebellion movement) who communicated to her this very useful piece of information.

Well, my problem is that I’m too much in my own thoughts most of the time, and a little being-in-the-present might do me some good.

Lucid dreaming on the other hand … no, just no. I haven’t tried lucid dreaming in a long time, but back when I did I had a very bad experience that I did not recognize as such as the time. There were several potential causes, of which lucid dreaming is just one (having PTSD was one of the others). The lucid dreaming might have been nothing to do with it.

Still: DANGER DANGER DANGER.

Be careful with this stuff.

The thought “my life sucks, being in a dream I can control sounds like it would be much more fun” is, I think, a dangerous one. It is also probably not what motivated traditional Buddhists, but seems present in the contemporary lucid dreaming community.

Bad experience #2 was finding out what happens when I’m isolated for an extended period during covid lockdowns. This made me re-evaluate bad experience #1.

Dear David, there is so much truth and light in your posts! Thank you for speaking out, you are the hero for many of us sincere practitioners!

I felt huge relief from loneliness when I stumbled upon your blog. I’m happy I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

As for ngondro, I believe we have already developed a method to replace it - Enligthened Intensive by Charles Berner.

It’s the first method that really gave me a taste of enlightenment. I didn’t make it on my 1st seminar, but I did on the 2nd. And because of how its done, I find it to be the perfect preparation for tantra.

Its really one heck of a violent method but it works so well.

I have changed my mind about lucid dreaming. I now think it can be very dangerous. The risk is that you lose contact with reality without realizing that that is what has happened.

I have had a sudden thought about this:

What CBT calls “blocking out”, or using some distraction to avoid thinking about the thing that’s worrying you, might in the long run be extremely bad. Presumably just as bad if the blocking out activity is meditation, rather than surfing the Internet or some other distraction.

At this point, commenters may say “people who do that are doing meditation wrong”. Quite possibly. The main idea in this thread is that doing meditation wrong might be bad for you.

====

Possible things people might be blocking out at the moment: trying to suppress their fear of covid19.

(Lots of people I know have had covid19 in the past few weeks; all of them are ok, including one vulnerable person with previous history of respiratory infections.)

Humourous, lighthearted wisdom, so often sadly lacking among the more orthodox, thank you for this.

I find your description of Dzogchen as “simply wakeful awareness” interesting, if not frustratingly simple. In the context of the four naljors, could it be said that shi-ne is discovering the wakefulness of awareness just by itself, and that lhatong is integrating that wakefulness with phenomena?

As an aside, I love McLeod’s books. He’s probably my biggest influence in terms of practice, particularly the book Wake Up To Your Life. He has described that book as being about the the sutric path, but the final two chapters always seemed Dzogchen-ish to me.

Thanks, that is interesting. Coincidentally, just after posting that comment, I remembered that I have a Mahamudra book called ‘Mind at Ease’ on my kindle and started re-reading it. I do recall from before that the chapter on insight practices mostly deals with observing the nature of thoughts.

David, could you elaborate at all on thought being the essence of enlightenment in Tantra? Are they the essence of enlightenment insofar as all phenomena are the essence, or is there something special about thoughts?

When I read this page before I got the intended meaning of “politically correct” so didn’t have a problem with it. (Helps that I’m old enough to remember the 90s and half-British enough to know not everything is about America.)

But more recently I was reading the Aro site and saw Ngak’chang Rinpoche describe himself that way. That’s confusing - honestly didn’t know British people said that. Did he pick it up from you?

Aro isn’t, like, problematic so presumably it’s still in the sense of “willing to be offensive” not “actively politically incorrect/racist/transphobic”. But a Gen Z reader might not understand that.

Actually, Aro seems perfectly acceptable as something I could do, though I have to say the writing about vajra romance and teaching couples feels like 1st-gen boomer feminism. Zoomers don’t like it when you assign attributes to gender, and it doesn’t apply very well to gay couples. I’d survive but am hesitant to be the youngest member of any communities…

I started going through your writing from Meaningness, but kept on here because of dissatisfaction with secular mindfulness my Silicon Valley ADHD psych recommended (with an EEG mind reading headband and everything).

At first I was surprised because the meditation technique definitely does something, but their own reading material isn’t very impressive - it’s sensibly rational but a bit shallow, and when they try to expand the worldview a bit they get some random untrustworthy types like Deepak Chopra when I vaguely knew it came from Buddhism.

More importantly, the concept is sold with terms like “stress reduction” “relax” “calmness”, but what it produces is closer to “awareness” or “flow” along with other lessons (like that thoughts appear on their own without you deciding to think them). And that seems a lot more appealing personally. After everyone’s been stuck at home for a year or two, do we even want more relaxation? I’d rather learn to be more active.

Probably their “stress” is secularized samsara, and if so, that’d be a way to market the secular Tantra you’re writing about. Hopefully the audience wouldn’t see it as those “for men” brands that’s just the same thing with edgier labels.

It’s as you say. What I should’ve said is that the above comment did deserve to be here, but didn’t deserve to be the final word - it feels too authoritative that way, and while I’ve been reading the site the comments have been equally valuable (which is rare!).

I’m here because of dissatisfaction with secular mindfulness, which certainly is consumerist but that’s not my critique of it - so let me continue on a more relevant page :)

Enjoyed the page, but I feel like it detracts from the arguments if you let random megalomaniacs leave death wishes against you as the last comment for a whole decade. Don’t think much of his argument either; even if you don’t believe in a bear chasing you, it still believes in you.

“Serious spiritual practice does require committing to a single tradition.” Mu! Learn what you need from traditions, go your own way, free yourself. The answers are then right there.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

I couldn’t tell if the above comment was from a Buddhist or a Satanist, but I recommend having this picture open while you read it.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaos_magic_ritual_involving_videoconferencing.JPG

Hey,

in a previous comment there is a link to the page /terma-overview. However, it is inaccessible; for me it displays only

Sorry, you are not authorized to view this page. It’s probably just a draft.

Since it seems that it has already been there: Can you re-enable it, so that the links that lead to a deeper understanding of some writings and comments actually work?

Regards!

You talk about the base, path, and fruit of the yanas.

But only for the Sutra(yana) you give the fruit. I miss a sentence or parapgraph on the fruit of Tantra(yana), and I miss a sentence or parapgraph on the fruit of Dzogchen.

I think this is important as you state that a practice should only be taken if the fruit is what one wants, so at least one has to know what the fruit is.

In your page, you link to nyingma.com/The Nine Yanas.htm.

This site seems broken, for me it just displays

Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (19)

Same with the root site nyingma.com.

But there is actually a copy on The Wayback Machine, you could link to: → Here.

Could it be that there is more to say to the dangers of Vipassanā-based practices than about dangers of the four naljors because there are just much more datapoints for the first?

So your claim “I don’t know of anyone having serious negative consequences.” might just be because of low overall number of practicioners who are in a society encouraging data collection and data analysis?, meaning in the end we have to collect more data to make qualitative and quantitative assesments about the risks of Dzogchen practice?

You have some links to cheetahhouse.org. That server does (currently) not work (anymore), DNS resolution fails.

Since you seem to link to valuable comment: Can you somehow “repair” the links, pointing to other place(s) where that content is, maybe also to archived page(s) on The Wayback Machine?