The experience of the non-dual awareness of rigpa is quite wonderful. It is freedom from the restless striving of the samsaric mind. It is not a dull peace, but the opposite. It is pure wakefulness. It is light, open, radiant, and blissful. When we are no longer preoccupied with self-centered pursuits based on the insecurities of the illusory self and its desires and aversions, the world arises in the purity of the natural state in a vivid, pristine display of beauty. For the practitioner stable in rigpa, all experiences arise as an ornamentation of the nature of mind, rather than as a problem or delusion.
But recognizing rigpa is not like taking a drug or having some kind of high experience. It is not something found by performing an action or by altering oneself. It is not a trance or a far-out vision or blinding light. It is what we already have, what we already are. When there is expectation about rigpa, it cannot be found. The expectation is about a fantasy; we look past what is already present. What can be expected from emptiness? Nothing. If there is expectation, only frustration will follow.
Experience of emptiness is like experience of space. In the direct recognition of space, the recognition itself is luminosity. That is rigpa. Not knowing this is ma-rigpa, ignorance, our samsaric mind. Space is a good analogy to use, because there is nothing to reference in space. It has value though it is nothing: in it can be built a stupa or a house. Anything can be built if there is the space for it. Space is pure potentiality. It has no up or down, in or out, boundaries or limitations. Those are all qualities we conceptualize in space, not qualities of space itself. There is little that we can say about space, so we normally describe it in terms of what it isn’t. This is the same as emptiness; though it is the essence of all that exists, nothing can be affirmed about it because it is beyond all qualities, attributes, or references.
There is nothing more than what is present right now, wherever we are, whatever we are doing. Look up: the empty essence is right there. Look left, right, behind, inside: the empty essence is there. Rigpa, the nature of our own mind, knows the essence and is it. Sometimes we feel a strong desire for spiritual experience. That is good: we can generate compassion, do visualization, practice generosity, or do many other practices. We can work with the conceptual side of the path or develop certain qualities in ourselves. But rigpa cannot be worked with. If we do not know the base where we are right now, then we cannot find it until we stop looking for it.
On one level, delusion does not exist and never has. The base of everything is and has always been pure. This direct realization is always accessible, but is unknown to the individual. When we enter the path, we try to obtain this knowledge. But trying has to do with thought and effort, and trying, thought, and effort—in one sense—work against the realization of rigpa. Rigpa is found when no effort is put out, not even the effort to be a self. Rigpa is the complete absence of effort, it is unfabricated and spontaneously perfect. It is the stillness in which activity occurs, the silence in which sound occurs, the thoughtless space in which thought occurs. Having to try is the karmic effect of ignorance—we are paying off the karma of habitual ignorance by trying to understand. But rigpa is outside of karma, it is the awareness of the base, and karma takes place in the base. When we recognize and realize rigpa, we no longer identify with the karmic mind.
What we search for is closer to us than our own thoughts, than our own experience, because clear! light is the ground of all experience. So, when we refer to the “experience of clear light,” what do we mean? It is not really an experience at all, but rather the space in which subjectivity, sleep, dream, and waking experience occur. We sleep and dream in the luminosity of the kunzhi, the essence of wakefulness, rather than have an experience of kunzhi in us. It is only from our limited perspective that we think of it as an experience that we have.
When the moving mind dissolves into the pure awareness of rigpa, we see the light that has always been, we realize what we already are. We may then think that it is “our experience,” that it is something that we made by practicing. But it is the space in which experience arises recognizing itself. This is the son rigpa knowing the mother rigpa, pure awareness knowing itself.
BALANCE
Normally clear light is spoken of in positive terms—emptiness and clarity or openness and luminosity. Although these two aspects are a unity that has never been separated, as an aid to practice we can think of these as two qualities that must be balanced.
Emptiness without awareness is like the sleep of ignorance: a blankness devoid of experience, empty of all discriminations, entities, and so on, but also empty of awareness. Clarity without emptiness is like extreme agitation in which the phenomena of experience are taken to be substantial entities, physical and mental, that impinge on our awareness with the insistence of a fever dream. At night this state results in insomnia. Neither extreme is good. We must balance these so that we neither lose awareness nor are trapped in the illusion that what arises in awareness is solid and independently existing.
DISCRIMINATION
Rigpa is never lost and it is never not rigpa. The very ground of our being is pervasive, self-existing, empty, primordial awareness. But each of us must ask ourselves whether we know this primordial awareness directly or are we distracted from it by the movement of the temporal mind? And each of us must answer for ourselves; no one can tell us the answer.
When we are involved in internal processes, we are not in rigpa, for rigpa has no process. Process is a function of the conceptual moving mind; rigpa is effortless.
Rigpa is like the early morning sky: pure, expansive, spacious, clear, awake, fresh, and quiet. Although rigpa does not actually have any qualities or attributes, these are the qualities against which the teachings suggest the practitioner check his or her experience.