Creating Samsara

The true nature of all sentient beings is buddha-nature and all phenomena are fundamentally pure.

Subjective identifications and external appearances are empty phenomena, spontaneously arising as the play of the elemental energies. Even filth, disease, and apparently evil beings are naturally pure.

Yet we suffer.

Unless we actually abide in the nature of mind, talk about non-dual presence and primordial purity remains only talk about concepts, ungrounded in experience.

It is easy to allow Dzogchen to remain theory, and not put it into practice. My teacher, Lopon Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, often points out that it is a mistake to confuse the non-dual view of Dzogchen with the practitioner of Dzogchen who struggles in the dualities of samsara.

While the Dzogchen view is non-dual, in ordinary life there is pure and impure, positive and negative, helpful and harmful, and we have to know the difference and act accordingly.

Earlier in the book I wrote about the five pure lights, about the process through which the purity of the elemental energies comes to be perceived as the substantial, dualistic world we experience around us.

Because we do not recognize the nature of our own minds, we come to identify with a “me” in opposition to all that is “not-me.” Our identities are constricted and we experience phenomena as separate from us.

This process is rooted in the wrong view that things and beings exist independently. Our internal confusion becomes external manifestation.

Conversely, as we experience the external world and ourselves as empty luminosity, we start to thin the primordial ignorance that traps us in the cycles of suffering. There is no conflict with anything in experience. The elements naturally settle into a balanced relationship. Through recognizing and abiding in the nature of mind, we dissolve dualistic experience into the empty radiance that is its basis.

Correcting the view isn’t about changing beliefs, though that is a start. It means changing the processes of experience and dissolving the dualism of subject and object. We must recognize our own nature—buddha-nature—directly.