Monday, January 14, 2013

Sky Gazing: When the blue sky of mind meets the blue of the third eye

In my early attempts meditating on my third eye  I started seeing swirling deep electric blue color on the screen behind my closed eyes.  At the time I thought to myself "That's nice, but lets not get distracted by it." I've since discovered what you can do with that blue light, liberating it into the emptiness of mind.

To do this I first do some pranayama to clear the energy channels within in me.  I find it useful to envision previously enlightened beings that might have already done this, helping me.  This helps me to take the "I" out of the equation as it shifts my identification from my conditioned self to an the imagined guru who is capable of doing what I want to do.  I settle into a deep awareness of my body and surroundings then use a breathing pattern of inhale, inhale a bit more, hold and breath out to get the blue light going behind my closed eyes.  This becomes my object. I then ask my self "what is the mind that is seeing this." As I look for this I find emptiness, stillness, silence and space.  The realization comes that the nature of this mind is like blue sky and its looking at blue sky.  There is no boundary.  Opening my eyes I soft focus on a point in space against a dark background and see a hint of the same.  For me there is a cool sensation in the head that goes with this state.

I got here I guess because of late I've been doing so much reading and practice of the techniques of Bön Dzogchen, particularly following the writings of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Lopon Tenzin Namdak. The later's Heart Drops of Dharmakaya was not as easy a read as Wangyal's works but was rich in insights. Working through it was like discovering little gems of wisdom after slogging through much Tibetan philosophy. I certainly think it helped to have read Wangyal's works first.

The gem that really lit off a light globe for me was this:

"The ordinary sky has nothing to do with the practitioner.  The sky is just the base of vision: the dark blue that appears to the practitioner spontaneously exists in his or her nature...

Up until that point I had been trying to soft focus on a point in space against a clear blue sky.  But as clear blue skies are a rarity here it was proving difficult to do on a regular basis and I had been thinking of doing it against other plain backgrounds such a white wall or a totally darkened room.  I reasoned that this may have been why the Tibetan yogis were fond of dark retreats although such a retreat seemed to have been a lengthy exercise of several weeks, not something the average westerner can do easily, certainly not without worrying the hell out of family and friends. But when I realized its not the ordinary sky they were talking about I made the connection that led me to the above.

Why do all this?  Well the result is sheer bliss as your mind stops its incessant chatter and you realize that all form and all space around form emanates from the mind and that the mind is empty (blue sky).  Which is all a long way of saying that you experience the non-dual without drugs or becoming a monk and meditating for years before experiencing it.

My goal now is to carry the awareness that comes in this state of mind into ordinary life and into the dream world. I'm working through Tenzin Wangyal's The Wonders of the Natural Mind and his book on The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep.  It's all a bit of jigsaw puzzle for me at the moment but I am a firm believer that if you want to know something or do something badly enough seeking within is a good place to start finding the answers along with just doing it and letting experience guide you. And for all those now screaming at me that you can't do this stuff without 'transmission' from a guru I would say that by doing guru yoga (my visualization of a guru) I'm getting that as well as indirectly from those who have written the books and made the videos that I have learnt from. And anyway we are all one which I think is probably the answer to everything. There is no distinction between me and guru, no us and them, no internal experience and external experience.

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