Actuality Of Being: Dzogchen and Tantric Perspectives

Chapter One

Religion, Spirituality, and Self-Knowledge

When we talk about religion and spirituality, we do not normally make sharp distinctions between the two. Somehow these two concepts get conflated. Even though these two ideas are intimately related they can also be seen as distinctive. From the point of view of religion, there is a connection with certain sacred texts, rituals, and so on. For instance, at birth, the child may be initiated into a particular religious order. They may have a birth ceremony, and there may be all kinds of significant ceremonies along the way, until the final death ceremony. However, religion does not necessarily deal with an individual’s life particularly. One may have strong religious convictions and one may have strong emotional attitudes involved with some particular religious belief systems, but nonetheless, the whole process can remain quite impersonal.

If we look at spirituality, it can be seen quite differently. When a person develops a spiritual approach, they can become liberated from certain religious constrictions that are placed on them. They may stop being reliant on religious authority, rituals, and holy texts and begin to turn within. Instead of living day by day, and living life by the book, one begins to question one’s attitude towards religious practice, and can start to question the values of certain religious convictions that have been held. One begins to become more spontaneous, open-minded, and less dogmatic. One can be a religious person and be dogmatic, but if one becomes a spiritual person, then one is instigating a process towards being totally undogmatic.

We can see that by becoming spiritual, one is also beginning to enquire into the possibilities of building self-knowledge. What is meant by self-knowledge? If we start to look into that, we realize that self-knowledge has to do with the understanding of our self, and that is not all. Self-knowledge also has to do with our understanding of others. Usually, when we talk about self-knowledge, we tend to think that self-knowledge requires us to dig deeper and deeper into ourselves to begin to know something about ourselves. However, if we do not include others, the more we dig into ourselves, the more we are likely to find nothing but confusion and a disarrayed state of being. It is sometimes much easier to look at someone and see what they are going through, what their attitude is, how they are managing things, and how they conduct their life, than to look at ourselves.

We can look at another person in an involved way, without being overwhelmed. However, when we become too self-engrossed, no matter how much we try to discover things about ourselves and our situation, it can become more and more overwhelming. In this particular context, when we start to look at self-knowledge, we need to remember that knowing oneself is developed in conjunction with understanding and knowing more about the human condition, and thus knowing others.

When we look at other people, we are usually completely governed by concepts and labels. Buddhism talks about the limitations of concepts and labels, and the importance of seeing their limitations in a very personal way. Even though we may understand these limitations, the strong habitual tendency is to continue to use them. If we begin to look at the limitations of concepts and labels, we can realize that generalizations are the worst enemies towards self-understanding and self-knowledge.

We have an inveterate tendency to label people. We always categorize people in different ways so we have a neat system that gives us something quite definite. For example, we may believe a particular person is very aggressive or lazy, and so on. If we deal with people in that way, then we do not understand a person at all. Rather, what we understand is the image that we have created of that particular person because no one is just a totally aggressive person or a totally lazy person. Therefore, when we are dealing with individuals, it is extremely important to look at the person’s individual circumstances and situations. A person is never made up of just one thing; a person is made up of an amalgamation of things, which Buddhists call the five skandhas. The five skandhas, also known as the five aggregates, or five heaps, are an amalgamation of a variety of characteristics that challenge the idea that any person can be categorized by putting a label on them.

The five skandhas are: 1. Form—your physical body. Traditionally, these are listed as the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body and mind. 2. Feeling—the sensations you experience in your body, including all pain and pleasure. 3. Perception—the sense organs, and the corresponding sense objects. Put them together—eye and light, nose and smell, et cetera, and you have perception. 4. Mental formations—all your concepts and thoughts, from the most mundane to the most sublime. 5. Consciousness—your awareness of the first four skandhas, form through to perception.

Along with overcoming excessive categorization is the importance of overcoming duality. That is, looking at religious and metaphysical concepts much more personally. Usually we have all kinds of dualistic metaphysical and religious concepts such as god, the world, the self, eternity and temporality, being and becoming, and so on. What we develop is a world completely constructed in our own head, which is totally polarizing. On one side we have good, eternity, being, and on the other side, we have becoming, temporality, and suffering. We are going to look at those polarized concepts and look at the possibility of overcoming such a dualistic predicament that we have personally established. We are going to be looking at how to transcend the particular predicament of duality.

People often wish to be a part of a religion due to a personal feeling of temporality and a broad sense of uncertainty. The metaphysical concepts of being, god, eternity, and so forth, are used as a form of security, so that while we are still subjected to change, there is an underlying belief that there is something beyond the uncertainty that does not change, that is totally beautiful and perfect.

In the context of this book, we won’t be looking at Dzogchen from a religious perspective as much as looking at the possibilities of transcendence, transcendence from dualistic concepts such as being and becoming, eternity and temporality, self and world, and so on. According to Dzogchen, the world we live in is subject to changes, becoming, and temporality. These are not qualities or experiences that one needs to escape from or discard. Rather, it addresses the idea of being fully involved and fully engaged, which is not something we normally manage to do. Instead of assuming that the life we are leading, or the world that we live in is dissatisfactory or evil, we need to be more directly in touch with the world without the overlay or separation created by presumption and predetermined beliefs.

The Dzogchen system of teachings does not give any way out of this particular sort of experience of the world. It describes how we can better relate to the world that we live in. It is also involved with life-enhancement and trying to understand the present situation much better and overcome the resentment against time. In our minds, temporality can be seen as a most evil thing.

We can feel completely helpless knowing that we cannot undo something we wish we had not done, or do what we had failed to do. Because we know we cannot change the past, we can feel completely helpless or even resentment against time. Also, we may embark on particular projects or behaviors to bring about certain predetermined results, building a type of future with great expectations. When our expectations are not achieved or the circumstances do not arise as we had hoped, resentment against time can arise again, and the impending death that we all experience can be seen as the ultimate resentment against time.

Understanding temporality and working to overcome resentment and helplessness against temporality is at the foundation of Dzogchen practice. Understanding this pervasive condition can help us develop an ability to face uncertainty more courageously, thus curbing our seemingly innate tendency to flee such pervasive uncertainty by constructing all kinds of mental concepts of eternity and certainty.

From the Dzogchen point of view, the other Buddhist schools of thought such as Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana or Tantra, are seen as providing different approaches and perspectives to addressing the samsaric condition. Hinayana is seen as the approach of renunciation; Mahayana as the approach of purification; and Vajrayana or Tantra as that of transformation or transmutation.

Dzogchen practice is known as the approach of self-liberation. In this approach, the practitioner is not trying to transmute or transform themselves into something sublime or elevated, as is the case in Tantra. Rather, the approach directly confronts what arises in the mind, whatever presents itself. Whatever one experiences is seen as it is, free of extrapolation. Whatever problem one may have thought existed in the past can be seen freshly as it arises, and ceases to present itself as a problem. The problem begins to get resolved on the spot. This is why it is known as the path of self-liberation.

The notion of self-liberation has developed because in the Dzogchen tradition there is not a set view. Dzogchen practitioners do not hold a particular philosophical view, unlike most other schools. The Dzogchen tradition considers all Buddhist schools of thought, and the varieties of views within those schools and those of other religious traditions, are simply seen as different views based upon different value systems. Therefore, all the views are seen as relative. There is no absolute view as there is no absolute knowledge. Such a conclusion is drawn from looking into our experience of the world. We can find we do not experience anything that is eternal or has eternal essence. We observe the process of change and flux, the juxtaposition of varieties of forces, different causes and conditions interacting, coming into and out of existence.

When we begin to investigate the temporality of our situation, what we have seen or what we have known is recognized as relative. Our experience of what we have seen and known in the past has become extinct, and something new has replaced it. Even if we look at something that seems to be fairly stable and persistent in time, that seeming persistence of an experience or object turns out to not be persistent. There is absolutely nothing that has not gone through changes, no matter how gradual the changes happen to be.

By recognizing the temporality of the world and our experience, the concept of identity, of thing-hood, of person-hood, and the concept of the agent and action, is thrown into chaos. We usually think that a person has an identity—that the person who was born on a certain day, in a certain year, is the same as the person who is living now. However, the person is still the same person, but at the same time they are not same, because they have completely changed over time. We acknowledge that we have changed physically, but mentally, we may believe there is something inside of us that is totally solid, unlike a material object—therefore it must persist. If one believes in reincarnation, one can have the view that something unchanging has been there before we are born, and will persist after we die. Even then, in relation to consciousness, nothing is seen as unchanging.

When we start to think about how we make this division between mind and body, the concept of our experience, concept of objects, and concept of a stable world, et cetera, we begin to realize that all this is based upon interpretation. It is a conceptual construction which does not correspond to the reality of things at all.

When we start to develop this kind of attitude, we begin to realize that any kind of view that we might cultivate can only be relative. Also, any kind of knowledge that we might accumulate can only be relative, as knowledge of anything unchanging and persistent without the potential for extinction cannot be found. Whatever we experience, whatever we know of, is relational, and therefore completely relative. Therefore, if what we know and experience is relative, then the knowledge itself must be relative as well. We can’t know of something that is relative and then feel that the knowledge is something eternal and immutable. Therefore, it is said that in Dzogchen, the only view that one can develop is what we might call perspectivism—all views and attitudes are only a perspective we hold in relation to a particular thing, experience, or event.

This kind of attitude does not lead to nihilism, as some might think. Relativism can be frightening because if everything is seen as fundamentally based on perspective, fixed notions such as good and evil are also seen as temporal, which can put into question the idea of a fixed moral structure. Concerns of a moral structure being undermined can arise. Will we revert back to barbarism? Rather, relativism gives us the opportunity to have a different perspective on morality. Moral belief systems are often grounded in religious and metaphysical views where human beings are seen as amoral by nature, and therefore, morality has given the gift of standards and certainty in how to behave, which is often seen as extraordinarily precious. However, in this context, morality is not defined in terms of abiding by rules, regulations, and what one ought to do, but rather based more on the person’s honesty. A person’s honesty comes about by realizing that one no longer needs to deceive oneself by pretending to be moral or wishing to be seen as moral. Rather than abiding by certain rules and regulations set out by others, one tends to take fuller responsibility oneself. When we abide by rules and regulations that are preset, it may be easier to be moral, but that may make it extremely difficult to be honest.

There are a lot of notions, even in Buddhism, whereby the whole idea of morality is based on reward and punishment, so we become like the Pavlovian dog¹—if we do certain things we will be rewarded, other behaviors and attitudes will be punished. We don’t become moral because we have decided that is the best course of action to take, but rather, we become moral out of fear, because we don’t want to be punished. It can be argued that society’s structure is based on that model and it is instilled in us from childhood on.

In the Dzogchen teachings, there are no strict rules as such, mainly because good and evil are not seen as independent and permanent. Rather than being seen as a fixed aspect or feature of the world, they are seen as part of one’s own psychological state of mind. Good and evil are not seen as eternal principles, but rather are seen as being subject to time, based upon historical and temporal events, so therefore they are not seen as