Dzogchen cuts through chains of delusion

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

JAKARTA (JP): A friend of mine, a five-handicap golf freak, recently said, "The key to good golfing is living in the now. Never try to set a target or think what you will make".

For a while I thought he had been reading and repeating what I often said in my articles that I regularly sent him, but no, he did not even understand why I meditated. But meditation is actually something very universal. My friend is unaware that he is a meditator. He is the stage III free thinker we were talking about in the previous articles: generally speaking he is decent and ethical (like he only uses The Body Shop deodorant for its consistent refusal to test its products on animals), fairly intellectual and civilized, but has no religion or any particular inclination toward any spiritual tradition. He calls himself a heathen.

Never set a target is also true in meditation (and to a large extent it is true for many other things in life). Do not expect that you will have an out-of-body experience or cultivate psychic power. If you do, that will be a bonus but that is not why we meditate. The principle of non-striving is known as wu wei in Taoism, and is the core of all mystical traditions -- living in harmony with nature. And this principle is profoundly and beautifully reflected in the Chinese meditative martial art, T'ai Chi.

All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary or miraculous results. Yet most genuinely seek peace of mind, often with their own preconceived ideas of what this constitutes. When no such thing occurs, they may well be disappointed and frustrated. Grasping is the antithesis of meditation. You completely miss the mark when you bring all your attachment and desire to meditation.

Many people do not know that the real miracle of meditation is more ordinary but much more useful. It is a subtle transformation, and this transformation happens not only in your mind and your emotions, but also actually in your body. It is very healing. The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace and, most important of all, complete absence of grasping.

As you continue to practice any method you choose, then meditation slowly arises. Meditation is not something that you can "do," it is something that has to happen spontaneously, only when we have perfected the practice.

A Zen student asked his master: "Master, how do you put enlightenment into action? How do you practice it in everyday life?"

"By eating and by sleeping."

"But, Master, everybody sleeps and everybody eats."

"But not everybody eats when they eat, and not everybody sleeps when they sleep."

From this comes the famous Zen saying, "When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep." Surely my golfer friend would extend it into, "When I play golf, I play golf."

A student asked a Tibetan Lama to teach him how to meditate. The Lama answered, "Look, it's like this: When the past thought has ceased, and the future thought has not yet risen, isn't there a gap?"

"Yes," said the student.

"Well, prolong it: That is meditation."

In our ordinary mind, we perceive the stream of thoughts as continuous, but in reality there is actually a gap between each thought. You will always find a gap in which the Rigpa, the Tibetan word for the nature of mind, is revealed.

Perhaps it is startling that in the age that is deifying rationality, intellectualism and ambition, we are going back to a seemingly backward notion of non-thinking and non-striving. But what we often do not realize is that so much thought helps us put up with modern life's pressure and demands -- and so much it is a prerequisite of advanced spirituality -- but it is ultimately also a barrier, a serious one, in spiritual transformation.

Says Zen master Suzuki-roshi, "If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

Remember in the previous article, I was talking about how easy it was for us to be entrapped in negative emotions? It is because most of the time when these thoughts arise we never see through their real nature; we never see them as they really are. We do not even know when they begin and when they end; we are so carried away by their cunningness. This is called the "chain of delusion", and it is the root of samsara (suffering). Rigpa usually does not last very long, but if you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow up, then whatever thoughts that arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.

Do not feel guilty about strong negative emotions like anger, desire, envy and jealousy. We should not recognize them as a great opportunity to grow. The fact we react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that we are distracted, but also that we do not have the recognition and have lost the grounding of Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds us even tighter in the chains of delusion. This practice in Tibetan Buddhism is called Dzogchen. And the real secret of Dzogchen is to see right through the chains of delusion as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the calm of the ocean.

The author is director of the Satori Foundation, a center for study and development of human excellence through mind programming and meditation techniques, e-mail: satori@cbn.net.id.