Illusion and reality

The play of experience which arises in a mirror is the key to understanding the nature of illusion and reality.  Just as waking and sleeping can be a seamless flow of awareness – so can birth and death.

p48, Tracts of the Sun : An Earth Orbit of Vajrayana Expressions.  Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books Worldwide, 2022, ISBN 978-1-898185-28-4

A grand illusion

Without the Lama there is no way out of the experience of infinite cross-referencing.  No matter how differently we experience our various explorations into the internalised world of ‘sense-making’, they always add up to the same thing: justification for our need to maintain a grand illusion.  This illusion is duality.

p143, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4 

Surrealism

Being that the phenomenal world is an illusion from the perspective of dualistic derangement – it is useful to have whimsical alternatives to such illusions.  Surrealism provides such alternative illusions – and prompts us to examine what we take reality to be. 

p181, Tracts of the Sun : An Earth Orbit of Vajrayana Expressions.  Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2022, ISBN 978-1-898185-28-4  

The illusion of continuity

Every moment is death. Every moment is birth. Death and birth flicker as cinematographic film flickers – and gives the illusion of continuity.

p198, Tracts of the Sun : An Earth Orbit of Vajrayana Expressions.  Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2022, ISBN 978-1-898185-28-4 

The fire of wisdom can burn away illusion

To practise Tantra is to plummet into wisdom-fire.  The word ‘fire’ is used because fire transforms solidity into emptiness and shows us the empty nature of the material world.  Fire is a fascinating element – it’s both tangible and intangible.  You can’t pick it up – you can only pick up what it’s burning. It’s intangible and yet it destroys or devours tangibility.  It has great power to transform substance, yet it seems to be substanceless.  So wisdom-fire as a Tantric term carries the sense in which wisdom; that is to say primordial wisdom, can change the world as we perceive it quite radically.  The fire of wisdom can burn away illusion – it can reduce our own hard and substance-orientated concepts to ashes. 

p12, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4  

The flow of whatever is

   Being is continually poised on the brink of effortlessness – but continually creates distractions in order to sustain the sense of divorced individuation.  These delirious, distressing, and dreary deviations from effortlessness are the mechanisms employed to maintain the illusion of duality.  Nonduality, on the other hand, is completely relaxed in the flow of whatever is.

p39-40, Shock Amazement: The four naljors and four ting-ngé’dzin from the Dzogchen series of the nature of Mind.   Khandro Déchen and Ngakpa Chögyam,  Aro Books Worldwide, 2018, ISBN 978-1-898185-45-1 

All our attempts to establish security fail

   We survey our perceptual horizon and categorise everything that appears on it as: proving our existence in terms of duality; disproving our existence in terms of duality; or as some vague neutrality, which presents no opportunity for manipulation either way.  All our attempts to establish security fail.  Our efforts fail because they are based on maintaining the illusion of duality.    
   There is no way that we can establish the security we’re looking for as long as we operate from the principle that duality actually functions.  In this sense, enlightenment is the continual realisation that duality is not functional. 

p108, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4

The force of illusion

Enlightened intention arises out of the experience of the singular field of reality and because of this, it manifests methods of understanding itself which are reflections of our sense of dividedness.  This enlightened intention employs the strategy of the apparently separate spheres of being, as a means of communicating the nature of reality to those who have become confused by dividedness.  So; within the view of Tantra, this portrayal of division is an aspect of the skilful means that destroys divisiveness.  Tantra uses the force of illusion itself, to destroy illusion.  Tantra functions in this way, because the energy of delusion is none other than the play of our own enlightenment. 

p55, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4

Dizzying heights of boredom

With respect to shi-nè – until you get seriously bored, you will not give up the illusion that there is something to be gained apart from what you are. 
Boredom plays an extremely important role as the altimeter of emptiness.  The spacious view of Dzogchen is only available once the dizzying heights of boredom have been recognised as freedom.   Boredom then transmogrifies into an ethereal translucent boredom.  It will still necessarily have an aspect of unease with it – but that is the key to an open dimension. 

p77, Emailing the Lamas from Afar, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9653948-5-7