At the Threshold

I am becoming less and less interested in complexity.

The Dharma is vast beyond measure, but complexity can become another place to hide and stay busy.

We can add more teachings, methods, maps, empowerments, philosophies, and experiences, and still miss the most important question:

Where is the doorway to recognizing our true nature?
And how do we return there, again and again?

This is the essence of the practice I keep coming back to.

Practice is not about creating a special state. It is not about becoming peaceful or more spiritual. It is not about removing ourselves from the stressful situations of our life and watching from a safe distance.

The doorway is much closer than that.

It is this very moment, unfolding just as it is right now.

This breath. The rustling of the leaves. The crow cawing in the distance. The weight of our body in our seat. The movement of the mind appearing right now in our present awareness.

But we have to know how to meet it.

If the mind is agitated, restless, and scattered, we begin with stillness. We practice shamatha. We let the body settle. We let the breath settle. We let the mind come home.

There is no need to force the door open when the mind and our emotions are spinning. First, we become still enough to see.

But stillness is not the goal. This is an important point.

Stillness is a doorway. It gives us a vantage point to look deeper, but if we cling to stillness it becomes another state, another identity, another safe space for self.

So once the mind is settled, we begin to familiarize ourselves with the nature of mind. We notice stillness within movement, and movement within stillness. This is the uncommon vipashyana method of Mahamudra and Dzogchen.

Thoughts, sounds, emotions, and sensations all arise. The world appears and our experience unfolds.

And then we look at our experience: does this movement disturb awareness, or is this movement the play of awareness?

In Dzogchen, there is a distinction between the ground of awareness and the play of awareness. The ground, or zhi in Tibetan, is open, empty, and unchanging. The play, or tsal, is the dynamic display of appearances, thoughts, sensations, and experience.

The ground does not waver. The play never stops.

But they are not two different things. They are both present right now, in your own awareness. Just look!

When we are caught in the play, we are bound by time, concepts, self and other, hope and fear. A thought appears and we become the thinker. An emotion appears and we become the story behind it. A sensation appears and we become the body. The whole world becomes solid and real.

But when we recognize the ground, appearances do not need to stop. Thoughts do not need to stop. Life does not need to quiet down.

The play is recognized as play and free in its own place.

Experience is vivid, but empty. Appearing, but insubstantial. Unceasing, but impossible to hold onto.

The ground is not an empty void. It is not spacing out. It is not withdrawing from experience.

It is the spacious field of awareness in which everything appears and unfolds. Internal happenings, external happenings, self, other, thoughts, sounds, sensations—all of it is the movement and play of the spacious field of awareness.

And yet, when we look directly, none of it can be found as solid or lasting.

This is the threshold.

The doorway is emptiness. Not emptiness as an idea or philosophy, but emptiness experienced in the insubstantial nature of this very moment.

And because the nature of emptiness is luminosity, experience is unceasing and spontaneously present.

Remember the two truths: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Empty yet apparent, the union of clarity and emptiness, awareness and emptiness.

This is the experience of emptiness while resting in the natural state. The ground is empty, but its display is unceasing. The nature of mind is originally pure, and its expression is spontaneously present.

Meditation brings us back to this threshold again and again.

If we are restless, we settle.
If we are settled, we see clearly the empty nature of mind.
If thoughts arise, we recognize them as the dynamic display of awareness.
If appearances arise, we recognize their empty play.
If stillness is present, we recognize the abiding nature of mind.
If movement is present, we recognize the unceasing luminosity of the nature of mind.

Again and again, we return to the threshold, the doorway of naturally occurring, ever-present awareness. The inseparability of emptiness and appearance. The single sphere of ultimate bodhicitta.