Chapter 2: Rigpa/Nature of Mind

Spiritual Initiation

One of the first things that struck me about the Buddhist teachings that I was receiving was that they seemed to focus on the mind almost entirely. I found it odd that the goal was something they called “the nature of mind.” The guru “pointed out” this “nature of mind” to you and then your path began. The initiation into the path of dzogchen was the “pointing out instructions.”

This was in contrast to the “shaktipat” initiation of Baba, but there were some points of similarity. In both cases it was an initiation into the spiritual path. Around Baba, people got shaktipat and had a whole variety of experiences. Some had physical kriyas or spontaneous movements, not unlike some of the manifestations of spirit associated with what we used to call “holy rollers.” Others had more subtle inner experiences. Some experienced samadhi or meditative absorption. Some did not have any perceptible experience, but their lives began to change.

The whole thing was initially quite confusing to me. I couldn’t pinpoint any particular experience of shaktipat, yet there I was living in an ashram and doing full- time spiritual practices and furthermore, I had accepted a guru and aspired to surrender completely. So obviously something had happened. Later, I realized that I could meditate, which I felt I could not before. Actually, I realized that a certain experience which I was familiar with was, in fact, meditation.

Before meeting Baba, we had spent time with a yogi who instructed me in meditation, saying to sit quietly and empty my mind of all thoughts. No matter how hard I tried, I could not eradicate all thoughts from my mind. The idea of meditation as an absence of thoughts lingered in my mind and made it difficult for me to recognize the effortless gliding into an altered state in Baba’s presence as meditation.

It took a long time to reach the conclusion that I was spiritually awakened. It was more subtle than what I had understood it to be. Also, I think it was partly due to the fact that it was not something completely new for me. We learned that if one died after having been awakened, but before attaining realization, one would be reborn and continue on the path. It was called “yoga bhrastha.” It seemed a likely category for me since there was not something new in my consciousness with Baba, but rather a formal entry onto the path.

Ordinary Mind or Awareness

Later with the Buddhists, I learned that their approach is to delineate two aspects of mind. Of course, on any non-dual path everything is ultimately one, but on the relative plane, there are two. One is the realm of “ordinary mind,” which is characterized by the “poisons of the mind” - anger, ignorance, greed, desire, jealousy and pride. It is the world of egoic existence where everything is experienced through the lens of the “little me.”

The other aspect of mind is “rigpa” or awakened mind. This is Awareness, with a capital A. It is the realm of pure experience, of things as they are without the poisons of the mind. It is the “nature of mind,” pure, unsullied, free, clear, enlightened.

When I first heard teachings on rigpa, I saw that I had experienced it, although it is not really an experience in the way so many spiritual experiences are. There is no alteration of the senses and there is no emotional or mental component. It is like seeing how things really are for the first time. It could be described as the lifting off of a cloak of ordinariness to see the clear light of day, or like waking up from a dream and seeing that the dream was not reality.

My first conscious experience of this was my initial LSD trip, which, because it was a drug-induced experience, I felt didn’t really count. As I lifted off, I suddenly saw and felt in a totally immediate way how things really are, how everything is connected to everything else, how everything is magical and radiant and totally perfect and loveable. There were, however, lots of visual manifestations and very definite bodily sensations. It was, after all, a drug. But I knew I had seen the truth and that nothing short of this vision of reality would ever suffice.

This powerful initiation was the impetus for our trip to India in search of a guru. I had another experience of it once in the early 70’s in the courtyard of Baba’s Ganeshpuri ashram late one evening as I sat hoping he would come out. A very subtle but enormous shift suddenly occurred which dissolved all psychic contraction. Everything ordinary and dualistic and problematic just fell away. There I was, fully enlightened. I knew it was the highest experience possible.

During the time it lasted, I knew that I knew everything, although there was no content to it. I sensed that if I had wanted to, I could access any fact, time or place, but there was no need. Things were as they were and it was all sublime, while at the same time completely ordinary. The word that came to mind was “real.” This was the real nature of life. Baba never did come out, but it didn’t matter at all, as all desire had vanished.

Nothing in my visual field was different in any way that I could put my finger on, yet my experience was totally transformed. There was no ego, yet my sense of myself was intact. There was no dissociation or anything the remotest bit weird. There was not a problem anywhere. It lasted about a half hour but changed me forever.

For some reason I did not share this experience with anyone. Perhaps it was because there was not the vocabulary in that culture to share such a thing. When I first heard the teachings on rigpa, the language used rang a bell and I knew that was exactly what they were talking about. It matched perfectly with my experience. It was the experience of my first LSD trip and later, the experience in Baba’s courtyard. For me, it was a kind of clarity, a combination of presence and detachment, and a profound falling away of all grasping.

Having the egoic substratum of my life dissolve was totally shattering – and yet completely unremarkable. It was so strange – a complete simplicity amidst everything as it was. It could be likened to the idea of being the still center of a cyclone. It was Reality without any bells and whistles. There were no colored lights, no angels or celestial choirs or orgasmic waves of bliss. It was the natural state of mind without the so-called poisons.

Resetting the Goal

To hear that this was the goal was a great relief to me. I had spent years trying to attain some kind of spiritual experience which I thought of as necessarily associated with surrender, with bliss, with powerful shakti, with the blue pearl, or with being uplifted to some heretofore unimagined heights.

Now I was told that this simple experience was really the goal. It was a total validation for me because it is what I had actually been told by an inner voice in the courtyard experience. Some soundless voice in my mind had told me that this was the highest, the goal. It took a long time for me to get to the place where my own experience matched what I was being taught.

The formula I had latched onto from Baba was to get shaktipat (or kundalini awakening), and then to continue meditating and having devotion to the guru as everything unfolded automatically. In retrospect this is exactly what happened, though it unfolded in a totally unexpected and unforeseen way.

Although there were a lot of guidelines during the dzogchen retreats as to how to facilitate the awakening to rigpa, eventually I figured out that once again, it was really grace. There are, however, ways to become grace-prone, an expression I first heard from Adyashanti.

The completion of the ngondro, for example, made a practitioner more grace-prone. One of the practices of the ngondro is the practice of guru yoga, merging one’s mind with the mind of the guru. The others are taking refuge, generating compassion, making offerings, and confessing which includes a purification of the effects of non-virtue.

Since I had faith in this path, I was willing and even eager to follow it as it was laid out. I remembered the stories of Sri Ramakrishna and how he had followed the sadhanas of many different spiritual paths, including even Christianity.

Recently Swamiji read from an unpublished talk of Baba’s in which he spoke on the mind, saying that it is another name for the Goddess Chiti. He said that all feelings are the shadow of the mind, which is consciousness. This sounded more like the Buddhist teachings on rigpa, but for some reason I was never able to hear Baba’s teachings in a way that included my experience. I would get hung up on “the Goddess Chiti” and project some kind of extraordinary outer force.

During a study group at Swamiji’s Shiva Ashram, I came across a description of the 4 states which are laid out in Kashmir Shaivism. I had heard descriptions of the waking, dream, deep sleep and turiya states many, many times, but never had I connected my experience of “enlightenment” in the courtyard with the turiya state. But the description fit and suddenly I did make that connection.

It is likely that most of the things that I had gotten from the Buddhists are also present in Hindu philosophy, but they had not touched me in the same way. When I first moved into the gonpa, it seemed that the Buddhists talked about things that I had not heard before, but as time went by, I came to the conclusion that most (but not all) of the differences were ones of attitude, focus, or semantics.

I am reminded of T. S. Eliot’s deeply provocative words: “…the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” It is an apt description of the spiritual path.

I concluded that it was simply my karma, for whatever reasons, to have finally arrived at the place – with the Buddhists - where I could hear and relate to the spiritual teachings and apply them directly to my life. Although the way they were expressed seemed to be the reason why they clicked, I do believe that it really was a matter of readiness and karma.

Expanding My Mind

When I first heard about rigpa and the pointing out instructions it all seemed quite clear and understandable, but for many there was the same kind of vagueness and confusion that I had experienced when I first began with Baba. People attended a retreat during which pointing out instructions were given, but then they were not completely certain about what it was or if they had really experienced it. Many assumed that they did, since they had gone through the outer initiation. I harbored doubts, however, based on my observations that the initiation didn’t seem to have changed them.

This was my critical and judgmental mind at work. My reasoning was that if a person really had that experience, then how could he or she behave in unenlightened ways? If they really knew the truth, why didn’t they apply the wisdom of the experience to their lives?

This was really a judgment of myself. I believed that I hadn’t gotten what I wanted from spiritual life when I first moved into the gonpa because I still behaved in negative ways. For me “getting it” didn’t count unless it changed things on the ground, in ordinary life. I knew I was still proud, angry, jealous, greedy and ambitious. And so, of course, I saw these qualities in others.

I took my first dzogchen retreat during the summer of 1997, having completed the required set of practices called the ngondro. This retreat included receiving the pointing out instructions from Lama Drimed, and also teachings on what that meant and how to proceed. According to the new formula I had now adopted, I focused on accessing rigpa using dzogchen techniques. Fortunately I knew what I was going for, but that certainly didn’t mean that accessing it was easy. It had eluded me all the years since that courtyard experience in Ganeshpuri back in the early 70’s.

I knew that I was still full of striving and effort, although I understood that rigpa required a relaxation of the mind. Sogyal Rinpoche calls it spaciousness, a wonderful description. I began to make efforts to expand my mind – to make it more spacious - which were fruitful. As the mind becomes larger, it loses specificity, just as the details of the ground change when one is taking off in an airplane. The lack of harmony and the clutter of the airport and environs disappear as one rises. The higher you get, the more beautiful everything looks.

The irritations, desires, and sadness over past hurts slowly began to fade away as my mind relaxed and expanded. I began to look at surrender in a different light. Rather than surrender to an outer guru, to a set of beliefs, to specific conduct, to particular practices – all of which felt limiting to me - I could surrender to a more spacious version of my own mind, or as they say, the nature of mind.