The Crone
The Mother
The Maiden
The Womb

The Union
The Drop
The Heart
The Seed

H U M

A H

O M

Χ Ρ Ι Σ Τ Ο Σ Α Ν Ε Σ Τ Η

"The presence of the Gods . . . reveals the incorporeal as corporeal to the eyes of the soul by means of the eyes of the body."

Iamblichos

"Like a feather that is blown wherever the wind takes it,
a weak and undisciplined mind is easily influenced by its environment and can be blown off the path.

Until your mind becomes like a mountain that no wind can move, take care of who you mix with, and how you spend your time."

~  Chamtrul Rinpoche

Walking the Path is like carving wood, chipping away piece by piece as you hammer on forth...

Good things take time. It is balance that keeps the progress steady.

Rest and Effort.
Rebound and Hit.
Control and Force.

Measure, then Carve.
Observe, then Strike.
Stop when the work is finished.

The Radical non-Path of Dzogchen: The Vehicle beyond the Causality of Spacetime.


Dzogchen is radical.

Dzogchen, or “The Great Perfection,” represents the most direct, non-gradual tradition within Tibetan spiritual thought, and radically departs from the doctrinal and cultural frameworks of institutional Buddhism. It teaches that there is no path, no progress, and no final goal because one's primordial nature is already fully awakened. This luminous nature is called rigpa (Tib. rig pa, Skt. vidyā), pure awareness beyond subject-object duality. In Dzogchen, the assertion is unambiguous: you are already Buddha, and awakening lies not in practice or becoming, but in recognizing what has always been.

In the traditional language of Dzogchen texts, all appearances—internal thoughts and external phenomena—arise as the dynamic expression (tsal) of rigpa. They are not caused by external agents or karmic chains in the ordinary sense but are the spontaneous display (rolpa) of one’s own luminous mind. As Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche notes: “The key point is to recognize the nature of mind and remain in that recognition. Then everything is self-liberated.” (As It Is, Vol. 1, 1999).

In recent times, the term Radical Dzogchen has been used to distinguish the teachings of early Dzogchen authors, as they are, without the modifications that came into Dzogchen due to the influence and persecution exerted by the New Schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Radical Dzogchen calls for a return to the crux of Dzogchen as it was expressed in its original revelation.

As Keith Dowman writes, “Dzogchen is a nonreligious, nonsectarian, trans-cultural science of enlightenment that requires no beliefs, supports no institutions, needs no dogma and belongs to no tradition.” (Dowman, Spaciousness: The Radical Dzogchen of the Vajra Heart, 2004). Likewise, the Tibetan master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu taught, “Rigpa does not belong to any culture or time; it is the universal condition of all beings.” (Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State, 1996).

John Myrdhin Reynolds underscores this point, writing: “Dzogchen is not a religion, nor a philosophy, nor a cultural worldview. It is the direct recognition of what is always already the case—pure awareness itself. Therefore, it can be practiced by anyone, anywhere, regardless of belief or culture.” (Reynolds, Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, 2000).

These radical statements reflect Dzogchen’s core conviction that awareness (rigpa) is not the property of any religion, ethnicity, or philosophy. While preserved mostly within the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, its essence transcends Buddhism itself. In the view of Dzogchen, the ultimate experience of any faith—religious or secular—is the nature of mind itself. When the non-view of the Great Perfection is truly assimilated, all paths, regardless of form or doctrine, converge in the same realization. The Dzogchen Sangha welcomes devotees of all traditions, beliefs, ideologies, and lifestyles along with their practices into its non-sectarian expanse. However, this radical inclusivity is a blasphemy to any form of fundamentalism, which clings to division due to the psychological need of the individual to be one of the “elects”, whereas Dzogchen sees in the infinitude of multiplicity the indivisible ground.

The Radical non-Path of Dzogchen: The Vehicle beyond the Causality of Spacetime. Part 2.


Keith Downman (The Yeshe Lama, 2014) further elaborates: "Radical Dzogchen in its primary sense, implies a total commitment to the broad, unstructured, nondogmatic praxis of the Great Perfection in the now. Such broad praxis takes the individual’s karmic patterning, genetically originated and then modified by behavioral conditioning, as the starting point, and then through recognition of the nature of our being utilizing its nonaction as the overarching precept informing our momentary experience. Embodying that precept, we remain relaxed in our authentic nature. The imperative here is an involuntary recognition of the ineluctable immanence of the Great Perfection. The starting point is thus known as an unlimited altruistic spontaneity."

Since Dzogchen’s starting point is altruistic spontaneity of unfathomable inclusiveness, Downman concludes: “Thirdly, following intimately from those concerns, radical Dzogchen, transcending all cultural forms, entails an appreciation of our own home grown cultural forms and values to an extend even greater than those of the Indian and Central Asian cultures that first generated and then hosted Dzogchen, (The Yeshe Lama, 2014).

Traditions of Dzogchen do not teach, in the conventional sense, but rather point out the Real. There is no path to traverse, no qualities to cultivate, and no enlightenment to attain because the state of enlightenment is the natural state of the mind. Furthermore, there is no self or phenomenon to purify and transmute because all beings are already empty and luminous in their arising. As Chögyal Namkhai Norbu affirmed, "The base of Dzogchen is the primordial state, the nature of the mind, which is beyond dualism and beyond any idea of progress" (Namkhai Norbu, The Crystal and the Way of Light, 1999). These Buddha-Words of Namkhai Norbu stem from the Kunjed Gyalpo root Tantras, in which it is declared: “The mind itself is the Buddha, and there is nothing to seek elsewhere”.

The luminous mind—rigpa—with its innate clarity, radiance, and spontaneous presence, is always known only in and as the non-dual immediacy of the present moment. This direct, unmediated perception discloses the now not as a temporal point in linear time, but as the timeless expanse of primordial awareness. This pure presence manifests now in and as noncausality and nonstriving, in and as boundless spaciousness (klong), in and as the unobstructed buddhafields (buddhakṣetra), and in and as the ungraspable luminosity of mind’s nature. The now is guru-vision, purity, and release, and ultimately, the here and now is Buddha.

Consequently, there is no need to climb a ladder of virtue or meditate through aeons of lifetimes or transmute the impure energies of Samsara. That which is beyond causality and conditions cannot be seen by the emergence of any cause or condition. You are That. Be quiet and behold the Thusness.

The Radical non-Path of Dzogchen: The Vehicle beyond the Causality of Spacetime. Part 3.

Longchenpa, the greatest Dzogchen master of the 14th century, puts into words the vision of the Great Perfection with finality: “As immutable ever-present, buddha in buddhafields, we are instantly and innately empowered as buddha; The universe is spontaneously liberated and perfect in the now, so do not strive to make alteration—everything is already perfect, everything unfolding as supreme all-accomplishing spontaneity.” (Spaciousness, 2004).

In this way, Dzogchen undermines the very structure of soteriology itself. There is no journey, no path, and no traveler. The final realization is not an attainment but a recognition of the ever-present, self-knowing awareness that underlies and is all experience.

This vision is epitomized in the metaphor of the movie and the screen: just as a movie projects fleeting images upon a changeless screen, so too do all mental and sensory appearances arise within the changeless field of rigpa. But the screen and the projections are not two. The flawless eye of rigpa perceives that there is no separation between the seer and the seen. Everything is clear light awareness playing with its non-self.

The teachings of Dzogchen are not a method of progress, nor a doctrine of belief. They are the science of radical phenomenology pointing out the lived, direct recognition of the heart-essence of being human — a remembrance that you are already free. All appearances are liberated as they arise, recognized as spaciousness itself. This view liberates Dzogchen from religious bias, doctrinal limitation, and cultural enclosures, offering a universal key to the primordial truth of being. The proliferation of Dzogchen into the global landscape heralds the end of the Kali Yuga, as Guru Rinpoche, the primordial Teacher, prophesied, “At the end of the Kaliyuga, Dzogchen will burgeon and flourish while the lower vehicles will wane”.

R E M E M B E R A N C E


There is no process of sculpting.
The bowl was always there.

There is no path.
The nature of mind is enlightenment.

Mind does not need liberation. It is already free.

A bowl like this is not made. It is found.


D I S
C O V E R Y

Yet neither word here is the whole of the truth,
and both state in part nature's being.

The perfect Between of Anatman will soothe
the tiresome search of the soul for her youth
and one will remember true seeing.

I am the Rite-fulfilling Mother,
throned as swirling Fire and Stillness;
the symbols all dissolve in me,
and semblance ceaseth as deceit.
Only the Intelligible, in unknowing, shineth,
gleaming forth from the Unseen.

I am the Ineffable Trace,
in very truth Intelligible, the One beyond all Mind.
I utter nothing, yet show forth all;
a union not by any adding,
but in timeless knowing void of self
The No-thing shineth; and I am the All.

There is no bound unto the Godhead;
no Fountain is, save the Abyss.
In thee and me there is one Logos,
unspeakable, yet owned
only in holy Silence.
And I am the Mortal Heaven,
the Little World made Great!

Om Tare Tutare Ture Svaha.

In the Adytum of the Real, there is no self, nor other, no path nor progress, yet the Unique Shineth, Part 1.

From the depths of the subconscious, there arises a felt sense of being apart, an energetic contraction into the image of a separate ego, a citadel erected to guard against the vastness of the world, which seems threatening to the one who trembles within it. For many, this is the only mode of existence they know: to live as if cut off, striving to prevail, to succeed, to preserve one’s imagined boundary. This is the veil of duality.

And within that veil, there stirs a subtle anguish, a whisper of absence that can be drowned for a time in the intoxication of fulfilled desire, only to return more insistent, more piercing than before. The voice of the abyss affirms: Something is missing, something concealed, as though a secret lay behind the fabric of existence. This sense of lack drives us toward religion, toward therapy, or toward the promise of some great Enlightenment. We seek a teacher because we believe in ourselves as seekers; we kneel because we believe there is ground to approach. Yet as Plotinus taught, “We are ever the One, yet by ignorance we wander as many.”

We go to a teacher, who himself may stand within the same perception of being an individual among individuals. And thus, he speaks to us as such, counseling discipline, meditation, or inquiry as a ladder by which the self may ascend. He may even have glimpsed awakening, and yet, persuaded by the dream of progression, he still teaches becoming rather than being.

This is the seduction of chronos—the drunkenness' of the “not yet.” It is the subtle decadence of a spirit that cannot abide in the raw splendor of the present, and so invents stages, virtues, methods, and paths in order to defer the encounter with what already burns at the heart. The eternal is displaced into the future so that the timid may forever chase and never arrive. Such is the neuroticism of gradualism: it hides terror of immediacy behind a theater of progression.

Such teachings say: “To be free, you must climb this path.” And so we labor, for the very structure of our upbringing and the whole edifice of society is built upon the myth of acquisition. But in striving, anticipation arises. There is always another goal, another fulfillment deferred into the future. This is the samsaric cycle in its most subtle form: the endless seeking that sustains the illusion of separateness. Proclus would name it the “fall of the soul into division,” and the Dzogchen masters call it ma rigpa—ignorance of what already is.

Yet liberation is not an attainment. It is not an object gained, but the collapse of the reification of the one who would gain. Liberation is loss, the undoing of the illusion of a seeker. When the radical truth is heard as the legein (speech) of Being-Spontaneously-Hereness there dawns a sense of absence, strangely blissful: there is nothing to get, nothing to hold, no one to claim victory. Pax Aeterna—Perfect Victory.

And yet, here is the paradox. In the non-dual Awareness of what is happening, in the pure Here and Now, where there is not even the thought of self and other, only then does the Individual shine forth as authentic. For what appears as “individual” is nothing but crystallized light of the boundless radiance, a unique facet of the One, gleaming without separation.

When we experience ourselves as channels for the expression of enlightened activity, full acceptance and clarity of proactive choice are an immediate result.

This is how an ascent will be fast and steady.

Neither going to the summit, nor not going to the summit.
Intending without trying, put force in each effortless step.
And at the place between conviction and indifference,
find the cave overlooking many towns and villages,
to meet and make the primordial Guru,
so he may watch over that which is Good,
and Good may be that which is Watching.



Image: Nicolas Roerich

H O W C H A N N E L S
A R E M A D E.

It is simple.
Realize the Roaring Silence of Aliveness, Dharmakāya.

T A P O U T.

Let go.
Offer up.

Do not give up – offer up.
The subtle difference is that one is casting away carelessly –
and the other is giving mindfully, devotedly.

So, offer up Becoming,
and enter
Being.

Any non-effort that follows will have unimaginable impact.

Offer up Will.
Offer up Self.
Offer up Form.



Image: Amore e Psiche. Antonio Canova, 1793.

T A P I N.



Awareness – Presence – Bodhicitta.

Open-minded open-heartedness.

Divine Roaring Silence.



With that wordless prayer in the heart-mind,
the weight of trauma falls off the mother’s shoulders,
depression's face turns hopeful, loving, kind,
the pain of passing heals grieving heavy boulders,
yet never had you thought it possible –

What spell is there to overcast the bind
of your own nature and the Buddha’s Mind?