Dzogchen: Visible evidence of progress!

[ralis]

Very interesting!

Thanks for the info!

 

It would be interesting to know if some of the western outdoor students ever reached or went through that phase in training to estimate the worth of being "member of the club".

The evidence so far seems to imply that you get further as an intelligent "renegade" with the ability of critical thinking.

 

 

I have not met one Buddhist who claimed having physical problems from these practices. The ones I talked to have no comprehension of this. Actually it was a Sikh teacher who helped me recognize what was happening to me. She is part of a community of Sikhs North of here. My first retreat with Norbu and sky gazing for 10 days really opened things up. At times I felt as if I would dissolve while sky gazing.

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[asunthatneversets]

It would be interesting to know if some of the western outdoor students ever reached or went through that phase in training at all to estimate the worth of being "member of the club".

If you have to estimate the worth of liberation (and are assessing that worth for your own benefit) then you might as well not even bother.

 

The evidence so far seems to imply that you get further as an intelligent "lone wolf" who has the ability of critical thinking for himself.

What alleged evidence is that?

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[goldisheavy]

Is there visible evidence and objective proof for success and progress in Dzogchen practice?

Oh yeah, there is!

If you are able to enter Rigpa and to stabilize it, then at one point, Clear Light will begin to flood your body and "strike" your karmic winds.

These karmic winds are:

1. The 'life-supporting wind' (Tib. sok dzin lung; Wyl. srog 'dzin rlung). Located in the brain, this lung regulates functions such as swallowing, inhalation, and concentration.
2. The 'upward-moving wind' (Tib.gyengyu lung; Wyl. gyen rgyu rlung). Located in the chest and thorax, this lung regulates, among other things, speech, the body's energy and vitality, memory, mental endeavour and diligence.
3. The 'all-pervading wind' (Tib. khyap ché lung; Wyl. khyab byed rlung). Residing in the heart, this lung controls all the motor activities of the body.
4. The 'fire-accompanying wind' (Tib. me nyam né lung; Wyl. me mnyam gnas rlung). Found in the stomach and abdomen area, the fire-accompanying wind regulates digestion and metabolism.
5. The 'downward-clearing wind' (Tib. thursel lung; Wyl. thur sel rlung). Located in the rectum, bowels and perineal region, this lung's function is to expel faeces, urine, semen, and menstrual blood. It also regulates uterine contractions during labour (to allow the foetus to be 'expelled'

 

This process leads to severe symptoms of wind disorders, as described here by Dudjom Lingpa:

 

 

I know a woman who basically practices all day long for decades what she describes as "awareness meditation" while gazing motionless into the space of her book store and which she developed by herself as some kind of buddhist practice.

At some point, she encountered severe symptoms of many sorts which she interpreted as "kundalini awakening" including feeling like she would burn up and getting burn marks and blisters all over her body!

 

Well, from a Dzogchen point of view, obviously something much more significant than a "kundalini awakening" happened to her due to her self-made practice.

Obviously she is a practitioner of "highest capacity".

And concerning rainbow body...the last time I saw her she had lost almost half of her weight while being completely healthy and without having changed anything in her way of life...

 

So obviously there is successful Dzogchen practice without having a guru,

there are objective signs of progress visible to everyone who knows to interpret them...

...and I'd really like to know how many of our guru-students who got their "direct introduction" developed visible signs which can not be explained conventionally like getting burn marks and blisters all over their body which prove that Clear Light is flooding their body and transforming their karmic winds (and their body) into Clear Light!

 

ZOOM, you are obsessed with "objectivity" aren't you? That's going to be a huge stumbling block for you in your practice, assuming you even practice anything beyond TTB posting and speculation.

 

By worrying how you look on the outside from a 3rd person perspective, you cannot actually release your mind properly. In fact, by conceiving of other people as substances, you are blocking your mind.

 

You should realize that all authentic Dzogchen practitioners do not view a human being as a substance, and therefore, what would customarily be considered external, is no longer viewed as external, since it has no own-being, so it cannot be granted externality. This is standard Yogacara and Madhyamaka which are accepted in the Dzogchen circles.

 

The human beings you encounter in this waking experience are no different from the human beings you encounter in your dreams. They're not real in an objective sense. The whole of life is a visionary experience. And Dzogchen practice takes advantage of this realization in order to do what they call "allowing all phenomena to self-liberate."

 

In order to even attempt this practice, you must already have a firm understanding of the mind. If you think the mind has something to do with the brain, you can't even attempt Dzogchen. Like I said before, Dzogchen requires a capacity higher than tantrism. So test your capacity for tantrism to see if you meet it first. If you do meet it, go ahead and look into Dzogchen more. Otherwise you're wasting your time chasing miracles and immortality.

 

Here's a test: take a sip of plain clean water into your mouth and make it taste like honey in your own mouth.

 

Test #2: Go out when it's cold, and allow your limbs to freeze. Then visualize heat streaming in your body and by comparing the visualized heat with the non-visualized cold, allow the heat phenomena to cross over into the non-visualized domain. In other words, allow the subtle visualized heat to gain so much vibrancy and visceral feel that it becomes phenomenally real. The result should be a detectable warming of your body.

 

Test #3: The same as #2, but in hot weather. Visualize ice or cool water/wind inside your body.

 

If you can pass one or all of these tests, maybe it's not a complete waste of time to investigate Dzogchen. Otherwise your mind is too dense for Dzogchen and you should practice something simpler.

[deci belle]

Is there visible evidence and objective proof for success and progress in Dzogchen practice?

Oohhhhhh~ success and progress.

 

Complete reality has no such referencing relative to the ignorance or the enlightenment of inherent nature. Complete reality doesn't need proof~ only ignorant ambition requires this.

 

To bad it isn't easy as you would like to imply.

 

It only proves that you don't know what you are hoping for. (ouch!)

 

Your self-affirmations by way of these threads you've been starting seem so futile.

 

Why don't you just be silent and accomplish complete perfect enlightenment? It doesn't have a name and isn't attributable to people, much less your currently favorite spiritual tradition.

 

Instead of creating new identities to spray as, why don't you take a break from your completely perfect intellectual speculations and uncertain self-affirmations? I mean, you don't actually know what it is you want as far as I can tell. If you had certainty, which you don't, you wouldn't be wasting any time trying to prove to the bums you ARE certain.

 

What ARE you waiting for. What do you need to do first before you see your nature and borrow Padmasambhava's bitch-cat?

 

 

 

 

ed note: spell you® correctly in 6th paragraph

Edited August 15, 2014 by deci belle

[ralis]

Oohhhhhh~ success and progress.

 

Complete reality has no such referencing relative to the ignorance or the enlightenment of inherent nature. Complete reality doesn't need proof~ only ignorant ambition requires this.

 

To bad it isn't easy as you would like to imply.

 

It only proves that you don't know what you are hoping for. (ouch!)

 

Your self-affirmations by way of these threads you've been starting seem so futile.

 

Why don't you just be silent and accomplish complete perfect enlightenment? It doesn't have a name and isn't attributable to people, much less your currently favorite spiritual tradition.

 

Instead of creating new identities to spray as, why don't you take a break from your completely perfect intellectual speculations and uncertain self-affirmations? I mean, you don't actually know what it is you want as far as I can tell. If you had certainty, which you don't, you wouldn't be wasting any time trying to prove to the bums you ARE certain.

 

What ARE you waiting for. What do you need to do first before you see your nature and borrow Padmasambhava's bitch-cat?

 

 

 

 

ed note: spell you® correctly in 6th paragraph

 

Instead of lecturing, which in this case you offer no real solutions or evidence that you yourself have any experience with the problems as pointed out by the OP, why not speak from personal experience.

Edited August 15, 2014 by ralis

[goldisheavy]

Instead of lecturing, which in this case you offer no real solutions or evidence that you yourself have any experience with the problems as pointed out by the OP, why not speak from personal experience.

 

ZOOM was not framing disturbing experiences as problems. He was framing them as objective signs of progress.

 

I've experienced symptoms like I am walking around doing my contemplation when suddenly part of my leg feels like it's burning for seemingly no reason. It usually goes away quickly and I don't consider it a problem.

 

If you experience serious problems of this kind, there are many solutions. One solution is to preemptively smooth out your body in the same way Chinese "park people" do it. Of course when I say "body" I don't mean exactly what materialists would understand by that term. So a dream body is still a body, for example.

 

You can smooth out your body in many ways. One way is to look for stale or stiff areas and to deliberately gently move those areas of the body either by massage or by you yourself adjusting the bones and muscles. This is a more mechanical approach. So if I feel chest pain, I can gently stretch my arms out, breathe in to expand my rib cage, no sudden or heavily forced movements, hold a bit, breathe out. This takes care of a lot of minor issues. And doing this repeatedly trains the mind to expect the body to be more fixable and more fluid, so next time it's harder for the body to fall into a bad state to begin with. It's like your mind knows that you'll be able to smooth out the wrinkle anyway, so it doesn't bother presenting you with a wrinkle, since your mind knows that'd be a waste.

 

Another way is to use visualizations. These can be so many. You can connect your visualization to breathing or to other bodily movements, or you can use disconnected stand-alone visualizations. Connected visualizations tend to have more power because there is a bridge between imaginary and real in that connection. So, if you extend your subjective phenomenon of breathing to penetrate the pores of your body, in and out, as you breathe, because this occurs as one indivisible phenomenon, it gains potency from the breath side because you conventionally think breathing is real whereas you conventionally think imagination is unreal. By hitching imagination (unreal) to something you consider real (breath), you can create an effect that's more powerful than a disconnected visualization would produce. An example of a disconnected visualization would be, for example, visualizing white light suffusing your body and healing it, and this white light would operate in a way independent of breathing and anything else.

 

But basically the way to manage symptoms is to:

 

1. Realize they're visionary.

 

2. Never allow the symptoms their full expression. As soon as they appear, smooth them out right away.

 

3. Train yourself to expect a healthy condition.

 

4. Stop looking for signs! Expectation is a powerful manifestation agent. If you crave and want signs of progress, your mind will absolutely throw some your way. And if you think health disturbances are useful signs and you crave such signs, you can bet you'll experience health disturbances because your mind is just trying to be nice to you by manifesting your expectation.

Edited August 16, 2014 by goldisheavy

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[goldisheavy]

I should say more on the issue of signs.

 

Problem is, people do need signs, otherwise they have no clue if anything is happening or not.

 

The trick is to find wholesome signs. For example, if you can reliably change your body temperature, that's a sign of progress that doesn't ruin your health. If you can sit down and move a mental body out of your "physical" body (astral projection), that's another sign that doesn't ruin your life in any way.

 

Good signs come to you as enhanced freedoms of experiencing as opposed to hard-to-manage challenging conditions.

 

So let's do more examples. If you can run very fast while breathing very slowly and with a low heart rate, even as you run quickly, that's a good sign.

 

If you can fast for 6 months without pain, without losing weight, without hunger (or by using visualizations to control hunger), that's a good sign.

 

So again, here you have signs which are not ruinous and aren't challenging. If you can fast for 6 months as I describe above, it should subjectively feel to you that fasting is not even a real challenge. If you feel challenged by fasting, that's a sign that you need to train more.

[goldisheavy]

 

Do you get visible burn marks and blisters also...?

 

I never let it get to this point.

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[goldisheavy]

And, can you create visible burn marks and blisters by "creating them in your subjective reality"?

 

I never tried. Considering that for me even changing body temperature would take some doing, then I imagine purposefully creating a blister would be very difficult.

 

I don't worry about such things. I know where I am at in my practice. I know what's further up ahead. I just calmly do my thing day in and day out.

 

The fact that there may be some people who can lift 1000 lbs doesn't bother me when I lift my 50 lbs weights. And I recommend the same attitude to everyone else. Practice in line with where you are at instead of hoping.

[goldisheavy]

...but you believe they would appear if you would "let it go to this point"?

 

I imagine if I let heat fester, I'd probably get skin rash, like redness maybe. I doubt I'd get a blister.

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[goldisheavy]

Find wholesome signs. Blisters are not wholesome signs.

 

For example, if you have myopia, why not heal it up? Wouldn't that be a better sign than creating a blister?

 

I've improved my visual acuity through practice before. Sadly when I stopped, my acuity became shittier. This is probably because I had bad visual habits that reinforce themselves when I am not actively counteracting them in practice.

[goldisheavy]

How do you interpret what happened to the woman I talked about in the initial post in connection with Lingpa's descriptions?

 

I interpret it similarly to you, actually, minus objectivity. They're signs, but they're not the kind of signs you should welcome into your life, if you ask me. They're brutal signs, basically. Unnecessarily brutal.

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[goldisheavy]

Dzogchen is basically what I call "non-conceptual relaxation." This is different from normal relaxation. Under normal conditions, when we relax, our experience falls into a habitual pattern. So for example, if I relax on the couch, my human body doesn't vanish. It just softens up a bit and goes limp. But the heart still pumps. Lungs still work. Etc. How is this possible if I am relaxed? Well, that's because these are manifestations of habit. Habit can be arbitrarily deep and arbitrarily stable, so it's not something that should be easily dismissed as "mere" habit. Habits demand respect.

 

OK, so if normal relaxation simply drops us into habits, why is that? There is a background expectation in our mind about how the body should be, about how to relate to other beings and the environment and so on. When you practice normal relaxation, those expectations are fully in place, fully effective. So for example, if you always think that your mind is the brain, when you relax, your idea about the mind being merely the brain doesn't change. If you think your body has its own independent-of-mind substance, then relaxing your body doesn't change that idea and its associated experiential expectations.

 

Contrary to this, Dzogchen style relaxation is a relaxation in the context of holding no expectations whatsoever. To put it bluntly, it is nothing short of unmitigated insanity. All the ideas about "objectivity" and "what is normal" and "what is real" are out the window. Then, you relax with a mind void of expectations. When this is done, first you fall into habits as during ordinary relaxation described earlier. However! As you keep doing it, habits begin to melt. That means, for example, your habit of relating to your human body as if it were made of substance will begin to melt in your mind, and that will drastically alter your experience in due time.

 

So if you consider that our expectations about phenomenal reality (this is distinct from ultimate reality) are like blueprints, when you practice Dzogchen style non-conceptual relaxation, you are basically burning up the blueprints of reality as you know it. It's like going voluntarily insane, basically. And, once the phenomenal reality blueprints are sufficiently burnt up, it begins affecting manifestation body. And at some point this can become evident to your neighbors (not to be confused with objectivity!).

 

So Dzogchen practice, in its raw and uncorrected form, will basically remove structure from your currently ordered experience and make it chaotic. This is why practitioners can experience all kinds of chaos if they go all the way with this. And insanity is a guarantee down this path. Of course eventually there is 100% freedom of manifestation, so that's the big payout. But before you get to the freedom part, your caged experiential patterns become de-structured. This can be amazingly painful and scary.

 

The solution here is not to practice pure Dzogchen. Mix Dzogchen and tantric practice. Don't dive into raw chaos. Use visualizations and form new and better blueprints for your life. This will reduce the power of the Dzogchen practice, however. So you can't get something for nothing. Either you get the power of complete freedom very fast, and you pay for it by going crazy in every way, or you go down a smoother path toward a better realm, which means less freedom, slower, but with fewer challenges.

[ralis]

Dzogchen is basically what I call "non-conceptual relaxation." This is different from normal relaxation. Under normal conditions, when we relax, our experience falls into a habitual pattern. So for example, if I relax on the couch, my human body doesn't vanish. It just softens up a bit and goes limp. But the heart still pumps. Lungs still work. Etc. How is this possible if I am relaxed? Well, that's because these are manifestations of habit. Habit can be arbitrarily deep and arbitrarily stable, so it's not something that should be easily dismissed as "mere" habit. Habits demand respect.

 

OK, so if normal relaxation simply drops us into habits, why is that? There is a background expectation in our mind about how the body should be, about how to relate to other beings and the environment and so on. When you practice normal relaxation, those expectations are fully in place, fully effective. So for example, if you always think that your mind is the brain, when you relax, your idea about the mind being merely the brain doesn't change. If you think your body has its own independent-of-mind substance, then relaxing your body doesn't change that idea and its associated experiential expectations.

 

Contrary to this, Dzogchen style relaxation is a relaxation in the context of holding no expectations whatsoever. To put it bluntly, it is nothing short of unmitigated insanity. All the ideas about "objectivity" and "what is normal" and "what is real" are out the window. Then, you relax with a mind void of expectations. When this is done, first you fall into habits as during ordinary relaxation described earlier. However! As you keep doing it, habits begin to melt. That means, for example, your habit of relating to your human body as if it were made of substance will begin to melt in your mind, and that will drastically alter your experience in due time.

 

So if you consider that our expectations about phenomenal reality (this is distinct from ultimate reality) are like blueprints, when you practice Dzogchen style non-conceptual relaxation, you are basically burning up the blueprints of reality as you know it. It's like going voluntarily insane, basically. And, once the phenomenal reality blueprints are sufficiently burnt up, it begins affecting manifestation body. And at some point this can become evident to your neighbors (not to be confused with objectivity!).

 

So Dzogchen practice, in its raw and uncorrected form, will basically remove structure from your currently ordered experience and make it chaotic. This is why practitioners can experience all kinds of chaos if they go all the way with this. And insanity is a guarantee down this path. Of course eventually there is 100% freedom of manifestation, so that's the big payout. But before you get to the freedom part, your caged experiential patterns become de-structured. This can be amazingly painful and scary.

 

The solution here is not to practice pure Dzogchen. Mix Dzogchen and tantric practice. Don't dive into raw chaos. Use visualizations and form new and better blueprints for your life. This will reduce the power of the Dzogchen practice, however. So you can't get something for nothing. Either you get the power of complete freedom very fast, and you pay for it by going crazy in every way, or you go down a smoother path toward a better realm, which means less freedom, slower, but with fewer challenges.

 

There are a number of practices that will lead to deconstruction, but I think sky gazing is the most rapid and the most disconcerting. That can also be practiced with the space around objects.

[Wells]

.

Edited October 28, 2014 by ZOOM

[goldisheavy]

In my honest opinion, your "practice" seems to me like creating a state of permanent self-hypnosis and I'm sure most psychologists would agree with my opinion.

I mean, what is the difference between your state and the state of a guy under hypnosis other than you don't get the suggestions from the outside but give suggestions to yourself?

In both cases, the results are simple hallucinations.

I don't see any spiritual worth in it.

To the contrary, you create illusions and euphemise them as "subjective reality" while denying objective reality.

What you do is lying to yourself and more and more departing from reality instead of moving towards it.

 

I understand exactly what you mean. However, what you call "objective reality" is precisely the self-hypnosis that you accuse me of engaging. The difference between us is that I know I am hypnotized and I am manipulating my hypnotic content. You assume that you're in touch with objective reality. So that means you don't realize you're hypnotized. Therefore, you cannot alter the hypnotic content in any way that isn't allowed by that content itself. That leaves you a slave to all the suggestions present in suggestive appearances.

 

In fact, I pity you because you seem motivated and intelligent.

But you use your intelligence only to justify your willful descent into a self-created illusion.

You are becoming an "Anti-Buddha".

So obviously, the reason for your sad fate is that there is a fundamental truth you failed to understand:

That there is in fact objective and ultimate reality (which can be described by physics through dimensions and energy).

 

I wouldn't say "anti-Buddha." I mean, Buddha himself said that conceit meant any sort of comparing of yourself and other. How would you establish what you call "objective reality" without comparing notes?

 

So what happens to laws of physics after your human body dies and you are reborn in a different realm?

 

Why would Buddha say something like this:

 

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.024.than.html

 

Yea, you definitely will not have an easy time arguing Buddhism with me.

Edited August 16, 2014 by goldisheavy

[BaguaKicksAss]

Could you folks please save the rest of us some time and highlight the posts which give actual detailed information (instead of just saying the other person is wrong), thanks .

[goldisheavy]

Could you folks please save the rest of us some time and highlight the posts which give actual detailed information (instead of just saying the other person is wrong), thanks .

 

Longchenpa says you're wrong. Dirty Vedantin!

 

Just kidding.

[BaguaKicksAss]

How do you interpret what happened to the woman I talked about in the initial post in connection with Lingpa's descriptions?

 

That is a curious thing, do you think it is a good or bad thing she is experiencing? Odd stuff isn't always a good sign.

 

I personally figure she likely came in with that ability or different wiring.