| | I see a lot of people talking about Dzogchen and would like to ask, could anyone please explain these practices to me in language I can understand? I will speak a bit about where I am coming from and what I am looking for so maybe it will be easier for you guys to respond.
Over the past year, thanks very much to this forum/group and those who contribute here, I have been having various insights into the emptiness of various things, which have changed things a lot for me. My baseline state is that this body is 95% of the time happily bumbling around by itself having a lovely time, sometimes excited, sometimes sad, but very content, in a world which could easily just all be a dream. Not much push or pull on reality that I yet notice. Quite a lot of thoughts, 95% of which seem not at all a problem, just like the neighbour having the radio on. Sometimes there is suffering, which is experienced as mental stuckness/tension around sensations relating to strong desires.
how I am trying to understand self-liberating/letting go I am really drawn to the very simple practice of letting patterns of tension around emotion/thought systems self-liberate. I am a bit confused about the difference or similarity between spontaeneous self-release, and having to seeming work on patterns of suffering. I will explain this as I understand it, any help is very welcome.
So, suffering arises as physical and/or mention tension around a fear and a thought. Normally within a second or so, the actual root fear is recognised/felt/accepted as just a sensation, it is self-liberated, but sometimes things are sticker.
In my experience this might happen in the following way.
E.g. I see a someone I am sort-of romantically involved with being physically intimate with someone else at a party. Fear arises, but the attention seems to contracts around the fear sensation, and the sensation is treated like a problem. Various mental strategies for avoiding it play out over a few seconds like "they shouldn't do that, I must fix this somehow". Then this is quickly seen through, and the thought becomes "I shouldn't be reacting like this, I need to work more on accepting etc,", so then I might go into just trying to feel the sensation... but actually even in this "just feeling", there is a subtle tension because there is someone treating this feeling is a problem and is trying to feel it in order to change it. The attention is still "tensed" around the sensation. Then when this final "trying" to feel it is dropped, the attention seems to open out, the tight fear sensation seems to spread as a warmth through the chest and arms, and there is a relief, and a ease and a good humour about things, rather than any mental tension of trying to fix. As soon as the subtle holding is noticed, there is an instantaneous forgetting, spontaneous release. A problem which never existed.
Sticker things that don't spontaeneously release
Now, when the problem is something where I can feel the actual emotional fear, sometimes this takes a few seconds, sometimes minutes. But sometimes - more rarely - there are situations where I feel tense and awkward but can detect no emotion. The body is obviously reacting with tension, e.g. holding itself away from a certain person, but I cannot detect why or what emotional system is doing it. In these cases I have to really investigate the situation before an emotion becomes apparent, then it can release in this way.
An example. I saw my mother, we talked for a while and it was evident that my body was holding itself far from her. I did not know why though, I couldn't feel any sadness, anger, nothing really around the heart or gut. My mind was clear and lucid, but a bit tense. So we played a game where we looked into each other's eyes and just said whatever words came to mind, in turns, a bit like noting I guess. Soon enough after a few minutes there were words like "misunderstood", "distant", "disappointed" and I started to notice feelings of sadness and anger. Instantly I knew what seemingly innocent tiny details of our interaction had triggered this block, and the pattern then self-liberated over the next minute as truth became apparent.
I think that with deep set patterns like family or lust-related stuff, there will be a lot of this kind of exploration, or deeper-diving meditation which will be needed to make the root of the pattern clear to self-liberate.
What I would like to achieve:
It just seems natural to unfold all this stuckness, which seems to be all be rooted in hidden fear. Also I notice that the more of these sticky fear-based patterns I liberate, the less selfish I am and the more helpful I am to other people, in ways which continually surprise me.
So my questions are:
1. I have heard trek chod talked about as spontaneous release. Am I broadly on the right track with what I wrote about?
2. I can see the value in having very fine sense clarity of all the very subtle sensations (eergy pathways if you prefer) in the body - heart and gut especially - as a lot of deep patterns which can cause stuckness seem to have their keys there. Do the Dzogchen practices have specific exercises for this?
3. What is Thogal? How is it different?
4. What are the stages or visions of trekchod? What do they represent?
5. Do the practices emphasise any special skilful means, like visualising, or like trying to work on specific aspects, like all the deep rooted patterns related to sexual stuff, or does trying to fix things in this way just lead to more tail-chasing?
6. I saw omega point's great article about this, http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5424997 and basically I was left perplexed by the difficult (for me) language in it, and wondering whether it is pointing to a totally different mode of practice or just using technical words for things which most post MCTB 4th-pathers (not fetters model 4th path) are naturally doing?
7. are all these things secret, and have I committed some sort of dharmic faux pas in asking? sorry if so.
Sincere thanks for any help afforded, and gratitude to everyone who contributes here on this forum. I think there are probably a lot of people interested in these practices and maybe this thread will be of benefit to them. |