Transcript
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The host welcomes attendees, introduces the series and the field’s mission, and presents Dr. David Germano as the evening’s speaker. Germano briefly introduces himself and outlines the structure of his talk.
Speaker A
Foreign.
5:01pm Mountain Standard Time.I want to welcome everyone who was able to make it.I think more people will filter in.We had a pretty big signup list of over 150 people.So I think that's a positive sign that people are interested not only in Tibetan Buddhist praxis in general, but more in a more detailed fashion in the Dark Retreat and toyal and things like that.
So a quick pitch for the work we're doing at the field.We teach primarily Tibetan Buddhist contemplative practices, but also different types of yoga.We've done work with Yoga Nidra, Deity Yoga from India.A range of nervous system regulation practices are available to the community.We pulled together three approaches with their own unique integrity.We're not trying to create the next great spiritual formula.We're trying to basically provide teaching and community for people who are interested in psychological or therapeutic understanding, embodied practice, and the more Zogchen style praxis of unconditional immediacy.So personal, interpersonal, spiritual, sort of held together, used at one's discretion rather than collapsed into a single formula.And I really want to thank Justin Wall.He's made this series of conversations with scholars possible for us at the field.
So big round of applause for Justin.He's been proactively reaching out to and inviting these amazing scholar practitioners who've joined us in this space.
And tonight is no exception.
Sorry, I gotta type.Someone's chatting at me.But tonight I want to present Dr. David Germano.He'll be addressing Dark Retreat as it sits within the larger world of Dzogchen scholarship and practice.He's the professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia, Executive Director of the Generative Contemplative Initiative, and he was the founding director of the Tibet center and Contemplative Center Sciences center at uva.
So with that, I think we're all very impressed and excited to hear from Dr. Germano.So I'll pass it over to Dr. Germano.And thank you all for attending.It's really great that you're here.
Speaker B
Hey, thanks so much, Peter.And I'm grateful to you for hosting this here on the field, which I think is a really great venue for a variety of things contemplative and particularly with regards to Tibetan Buddhism.And I'm grateful to you for doing that.I'm also grateful to Lama Karma, Justin Wall, who's an old friend and colleague, for organizing this and putting together such an interesting series, which I have at least read the summaries of and followed with great interest so I'm really happy to be included today and happy that all of you have made the time to show up.So I'll give you a little bit of background then.Basically, I have 26 slides.
So I'm going to be talking for an hour, an hour and 10 minutes at the most, and we'll leave it 20 to 30 minutes for questions at the end.I don't have a prepared talk, so I'll just be talking more spontaneously.But as you can see, the slides are quite structured, so it's not that spontaneous in the end.
And I do talk fairly fast.But hopefully the slides will help you.That's one of the reasons I include the slides, because otherwise people get lost in the blizzard of words that I tend to unleash.So my background is Tibetan Buddhism.As Peter said, it's pretty much my whole adult life.Since I was 21 years old, that's what I've been doing, which at this point is a number of decades.And in particular Dzogchen is something I studied and practiced from the very start of that, I think, really within the first year I was studying, I stumbled upon a text written by the 14th century teacher Longchampa, and I looked at it for 30 seconds and I said, that's my tradition.And it turned out that was exactly the case.So there's some things I could talk about with quite a degree of authority, but this is not necessarily one of them.
I've been studying Dark Retreats now for intensely for maybe like seven years or so, and I certainly have read a lot of texts, but I haven't really pulled back yet and tried to synthesize them.So this is really the first time I've ever given a talk about Dark Retreats.So it's a little bit of a scramble to kind of put it together.Some of it comes from a variety of things.To give a context, then the very end of it is more about the Dark Retreats in particular.And I have practiced these traditions, although I make no great claims for.For my achievements in that context.So that's what you're going to get today.So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and we'll just start the talk.
Germano begins by defining dark retreat terminology and framing contemplation as a generative human capacity. He surveys the major Tibetan traditions that include darkness meditation and distinguishes their different lineages.
Speaker B
So just a moment.
Now, if the screen sharing isn't working, please just give a shout.Otherwise I'll assume everything's good.So munsam is the kind of common Tibetan word or mun ti.Munsam means dark retreat, literally.And mun ti means guidance on the dark.And those are the two primary ways in which People talk about darkness meditation, apart from very specific names they might give it.So in the.I'm going to start first, start with just some kind of context for thinking about Tibetan Buddhist contemplation by asking a very basic question, which is what is the deep structure of contemplation?And not just what is the deep structure, but what's the art?What's the aesthetics, what's the design?
How.How does contemplation get put together in terms of that deep structure?And this is something I've been working on now for a number of years, which is Peter alluded to the Generative Contemplation Project, which is something that Lama Karma, Justin Wall is involved with, and a number of other meditation teachers, lineage holders, designers, technologists, scholars, scientists.And the idea is to look at contemplation as a generative, a deep, generative human capacity, the way that we think of language as a deep, generative human capacity, where you basically learn a mastery of a kind of set of building blocks and you learn a set of principles for how those building blocks get put together.And then finally you learn a set of context or a life world in which those practices make sense.
So we can ask the same question of meditation that we ask of language.What is the lexicon?What are the fundamental building blocks, the postures, the gazes, the breathing patterns, the analytical techniques, et cetera?What's the grammar?What's the way in which those elements get varied?What's the ways they get put together in particular kinds of orders?How are they choreographed to produce meaning and deep impact in a practitioner?And finally, what are all those contexts, philosophical, cosmological, somatic, spatial, temporal, et cetera, that flood into whatever practice you do in a particular time, in a particular culture and give them their full resonance and mean and impact.So against that background, just briefly mention the main traditions of darkness meditation in Tibet, the Wheel of Time, which I understand, for those who are participating in the overall series, heard from Michael Sheehy, who's a well known expert in that kind of field, and that's in that context.
They talk about the Yoga of Day and the Yoga of Night, the Yoga of Day being looking into the sun or gazing, not the sun, gazing into the sky during the daytime, and the Yoga of Night being darkness meditation.
And my understanding is the Jonang sect is their only really robust retreat tradition in this.There were other traditions that studied the Kalachakra or the Wheel of Time Tantra, but only the Jonang had a really robust tradition of actually practicing these things.Now there are Also references within the Cogdu tradition, these six Yogas of Naropa, a famous anthology of particular practices that are deeply somatic, that look into the interior of the body, so called subtle body practices.And in that context, there is references to Darkness meditation as one of the options for the so called illusory body technique.But at least for me, I'm not an expert in Kagyu traditions.And it's unclear in provenance.Namely, it's not clear that that isn't just something borrowed from the Kalachakra tradition or the Great Perfection tradition, as opposed to something that actually goes back to India.And then there's the Bumpo tradition of the Great Perfection.
The Great Perfection existed across multiple sects, but really it was primarily the Bumpo and the Nyingma tradition that had Great Perfection or Dzogchen traditions and Sub traditions.And the Bumpo Great Tradition.Great Perfection tradition had its own long standing ancient Dark Retreat traditions.Drew gelwa in the 13th century, or drew Gelwa Yungjung, someone that I've translated and studied in the past, Sharza Tashi Geltsen, more of a contemporary 20th century figure.And other traditions in the Bumpo Great Perfection have talked about Dark retreats and articulated various kinds of practices.And finally, what I'm going to be talking about today is the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, whose Dark retreat traditions go back to the 11th century, starting off with the Sub tradition of the Great Perfection, called the Seminal Heart or Ning Tik.Most famously or complexly, there was the 14th century revealed tradition called the Black Quintessence or the Yangti Nakpo.
And there's also a variety of other Nyingma traditions that have Dark Retreats with complex interrelations to the other two.The Seminal Heart of Utok, the Utok Ning TikTok, the Freedom Upon Seeing Primordial Knowing, the Yeshe Tongdro.Sorry, that's spelled wrong there.The Sky Iron Tradition, and so forth.So a broad variety of traditions, but not found in every sectarian tradition at all.
But even within that, there's still a great degree of diversity.That's one of the things that's impressed me over the past seven or eight years, studying many different traditions of Dark Retreat.They are not a single tradition, apart from the fact they take place in a dark environment or a pitch black environment, and see if that's a difference.
He explains his analytical framework for meditation using the ideas of lexicon, grammar, syntax, semantics, and context. He then introduces a theory of change for contemplative practice, including mediators, moderators, and incidental factors.
Speaker B
Okay, that looks like it's working.
Speaker A
Okay, cool.
Speaker B
Okay, so
Speaker A
there you go.
Speaker B
Okay, good.
Okay, so this is what I was talking about in terms of thinking about contemplation as a generative human capacity that involves a lexicon, a grammar, and a set of contexts to use those terms analogously from language.The lexicon being these building blocks, postures, gazes, breathing patterns, et cetera.The grammar being the way that you vary those building blocks, which in linguistics is called morphology, like run, ran, running, et cetera.You can take a particular posture and vary it, take a particular breathing action and vary it.Then syntax being there's particular ways or sequences that you can put these things together and other sequences that you really can't.
And then the semantics, like how do you produce meaning?How do you produce impactful experiences in the practitioner?By choreographing or artistically arranging these different components and with different rhythms and finally the context.So that's the main thing that we did.And then I just briefly went through these four different great traditions of dark retreat in the context of Tibetan Buddhism.
And I think that catches us up then.And then I clicked on this one.And the question then is, okay, given that, how does contemplation affect change?And so I'm going to offer just a thought about this, which is we have different kinds of outcomes in contemplation, and they can vary with intention and with framing.An example I often cite is shapkar, a famous 18th century Tibetan Buddhist saint.
In his very famous autobiography, he talks about someone coming to him who has lost their yaks, and he does a deity yoga meditation in order to find their yak.Now, deity yoga meditation is typically thought, as, in some traditions, the preeminent Tantric Buddhist practice, and one that aims to transform the practitioner into the identity of a Buddha.But in this context, it was to find a yak.And so the outcome of a contemplation can be very different depending upon how it's framed and what the intentions are.One bring to it, brings to it.
Otherwise, clearly you have cognitive shifts and specific experiences you have people aspiring to, and the resulting outcomes being shifts in how they are in the world, how they are present in the world, their kinds of behaviors, the kinds of things that other people witness and experience.Of course, a variety of awakenings, realizations, integrations.Things dissolve, new relationships are formed, transformations are had, things are, let be new capacities.A whole big literature about capacities or achievements, so called siddhas in Sanskrit, both ordinary and extraordinary in character.And then you have more pragmatic goals like my knee hurts or I've lost my yak and so forth.
So the basic theory of change, theory of change being a term that essentially accounts for, if you do this activity then, and you say that it produces this outcome, what's the theory behind that?Why do you think that activity is going to produce that promised outcome?And so when we look at contemplative practice in this context, we can take the elements, the particular building blocks, those postures, those gazes, those cognitive gestures, et cetera.We can look at how it's sequenced, we can look at the context that gives it a broader meaning.That's the practice itself.
Then we can look at how you practice.What's the sustained practice look like?How long do you practice each session, how frequently do you do it in a day, how long do you do it over the course of a year and so forth.And so taking that practice and that so called dosage gives you an outcome.And then the question is, when you analyze that practice, for example, a dark retreat, then you can ask the question, if I analytically understand all the different methods, all the different experiences, all the different contexts that are at play when someone does a seven day dark retreat, I can ask the question, what factors or what combination of factors mediate between that activity or that practice and that outcome that you hope to aspire to or that you actually achieve?
So mediation would be a mediator, would be something that's absolutely crucial.If you no longer have that, the practice will not achieve its goals.So is darkness itself sufficient?Sometimes people are just introduced in the darkness and said, just let it be, see what happens.They're given no instructions at all.
Sometimes they're given very elaborate instructions.And so the question is, what are the mediators for any given meditative practice, such as a dark retreat?What is absolutely indispensable?And then moderators are factors that are not indispensable.You can let them go and still achieve the outcome.
But what they'll do is they'll moderate the outcome, they'll influence the outcome.It'll be more durable, it'll be more deeper, it'll be more persistent, et cetera, in character.And finally, of course, there's things that are just purely incidental, they just don't matter.You could visualize that body as gold or as red.It's not going to change the practice.
You could do the practice for seven days or 14 days.It's not going to change the practice.That would be an incidental factor.And so in the work that we've been doing with the Generative Contemplation Initiative, we start with indigenous results and theories, meaning Buddhist, Tibetan ideas.What do Tibetans say that this particular meditation will achieve?
And what are the theories that they offer about how that will happen?And then based upon that, we look at more multidisciplinary considerations, drawing upon contemporary bodies of knowledge from outside of Buddhism, whether scientific or humanistic or from other sectors.
This section lays out the philosophical background for Nyingma and Dzogchen dark retreat, including the 11 topics of Longchenpa’s account. Germano describes the primordial ground, illumination, ignorance, the body’s luminous channels, death, and liberation.
Speaker B
So with that in mind, that's just kind of a general background about how I think about contemplation.That will tell you why I'm going through the series of slides that I am.I'm going to start with some context of darkness meditation, the philosophical context in particular, because when people come into the a dark retreat in the Nyingma tradition, typically they are going to have a kind of overall sense of certain kind of core ideas and premises and philosophical teachings about the nature of the universe, the nature of mind, the nature of body, the kind of overarching story of human life, or all life in general, or the universe in general.
So I want to just briefly go through that, and what you see here is three different pictures of yogis that are doing what we're going to see is called Yoga of Luminosity.The one on the left is looking at the sun, the one on the right is looking at the moon, and the one at the left is looking at the sun peeking through the kind of mountains in the evening time.So for a philosophical background, I'm going to have two slides here, or actually probably about three or so, that just give you some really core ideas.Now, Longchampa, based upon earlier Dzogchen, Ning Tik, or Great Perfection, seminal heart text, famously summarized the story of Dzogchen, the story of the universe according to Dzogchen, into 11 topics.And I call this the Buddha Nature story because it's really all about Buddha nature.It's grounded in an account of this idea that all life is pervaded by some divine nature, which is called a Buddha nature.
But that idea of Buddha nature differs profoundly in terms of different Indian Buddhist texts and how Tibetans took that up from the 8th century onwards in their own traditions and in the context of tso.The Buddha nature, as we'll see, is profoundly active.It's profoundly dynamic.It's happening, it's acting, it's dynamically expressing itself every moment in human life, in any form of life.
And it's also multiplicitous.It's not just one inert thing buried inside your karmically laden body, but rather it pervades the body in a multiple of forms.And so the basic story begins with the ground.This is the primordial ground.This is said to be a ground which is empty in essence, radiant in nature and pervading in care.
And this ground is purely latent, purely potential.It's said to be like a vase with a divine, youthful body inside the vase, but you can't see it because the vase is sealed up.There's just a deep interiority.And so that ground, at some point, they say, a wind of primordial knowing stirs inside the vase, and the seal breaks open.And when it breaks open, there's this flow of dynamic luminosity out of the vase.
And that dynamic luminosity is called the illumination of the ground.And the illumination of the ground takes the form of pure lands, of Buddhas, of mandalas, of Buddhas that stretch across the sky.And at the same time, there's like an incipient capacity to reflect, to know, to be aware, that also emerges out of that vase.And that capacity to be aware, there's this bare awareness without any kind of embodied form.It says one ground and two pathways.
And so in the illumination of the ground, one pathway is recognition and liberation, which is called Samantha Badra, or in Tibetan, Kundu Sampo, or in English, the All Good.This is the primordial Buddha, the Buddha that wakes up the moment they flow out of the ground as this capacity for consciousness.But the other pathway, the two paths, one ground, two paths, the other capacity fails to recognize, and that's called marigba, or a lack of awareness.Sometimes people translate as awareness, but in Tibet, sorry, as ignorance, but in Tibetan, it's literally a lack of awareness.And that's the error.
That's the error that produces cyclic existence, ordinary existence, and that lack of awareness, which at first is just this, just absence of awareness, absence of recognition that the illumination of the ground is its own manifestation, that they're one, that they're unitary.It's not a dualistic thing, and it introduces dualism then.And then concepts begin to proliferate.Then the 12 links of interdependent origination kick in, and bodies, form and karma takes shape, and the cyclic existence comes into being.The third topic is what's called pervasion, which means pervading Buddha nature, this pervading divine, divine identity that even within cyclic existence, even within this embodied existence that's unaware of the primordial ground, unaware of the illumination of the ground that's constantly spilling out inside the body and inside the mind.
Even there, it's still present.The ground is still present within the heart of all life, which is the fundamental assertion of Buddha nature.And the fourth topic is the location where is it located?And so this talks about that in the heart and in the brain.In the heart we have 42 peaceful or serene Buddhas, a serene mandala of divine Buddha nature.
In the crown, in the head, we have a wrathful mandala or a fierce mandala, 58 fierce Buddhas and associated divinities.And we have other Buddhas that are flowing throughout the body.And so the location is within the heart.Awareness is said to exist, this primordial awareness.And this primordial awareness is not inert, it's not static.It's constantly spilling out into the rest of the body through this network of luminous channels.And so the basic idea is that this primordial knowing is the primary nature of human existence.And it's constantly active, but it's constantly being converted into this ordinary, dualistic, clinging mind with its patterns of aversion and attachment and ignor because of that fundamental lack of recognition.And so the body number five, the four, was really about the mind, five is about the body.So where in the body is this pervading divinity, this primordial knowing, this Buddha nature, this dynamic Buddha nature, this ground of empty essence, radiant nature, pervading care?
And it's in the body, it's in these luminous channels.So typically, Tantric Buddhism talks about three channels that branch into thousands of other channels throughout the body.And those three channels here are called Samsaric channels, ordinary channels, impure channels.And the pure channels are these channels of light that go from the heart to the head to the eyes, and then also run throughout the entire body.So that our bodies are constituted by these channels of luminosity or light.
And the gateways then are the eyes and the other senses, the ears, nose, etc.And this luminosity goes from the heart and spills out through the senses into the external world.And this becomes the basis for visionary practices of meditation, for example, in dark retreats.Because number seven is the sphere, the sphere is the external sphere, the expanse.And so our inner luminosity spills out through the top of our head, through our eyes, through our ears, into the space around us.
And we can then experience it in visionary meditations.And so eight, contemplation, then is literally, how do we take that into our experience?What are strategies, techniques, practices that allow us to take this thing that's happening that we're unaware of and bring it into our awareness so we can begin to activate that latent possibilities and capacities we have, if we're fundamentally aware of the self presencing, unitary nature of what we experience.And that's really kind of going back to these techniques that take us back to the first topic with All Good.And that capacity to recognize the.
The luminous manifestation of things.Number nine is signs and measures.This is like a phenomenology of contemplation.What are the kinds of experiences that tell you you're on, you know, you're going down the right direction, you're going in the wrong direction, et cetera.10 is the intermediate phases, which talks about death, dying, sorry, dying, death, rebirth, and so forth.
And it traces these same processes because it argues that in the moment of death, the same process happens that happened at the beginning of the universe, the illumination of the ground.So when we die, our structured, embodied, cognitive existence all collapses.And in that collapse, we faint away, and we're really immersed back into this formless kind of ground.But our karma wakes us back up and we experience this explosion of luminous visions, because our karma is weak at this point, are the kind of latent propensities of all these actions we've taken in countless lifetimes.And so.And we no longer have our structured material existence.And so we see the exteriorization of the luminosity of the heart in the space around us, and we have another opportunity to become liberated.And finally, topic 11 is the fruit, namely Buddhahood itself.And then much more quickly, just to summarize this, then the Dzogchen Ming Ti tradition, which is the basis for all the dark retreat traditions afterwards.
He summarizes Dzogchen as a five-part structure: ground, illumination, error, path, and fruit. The talk connects these to breakthrough meditation, direct transcendence, dreaming, death, and the creation of pure lands.
Speaker B
Even if they go by different names, it's very clear that they're indebted to these traditions from 11th and 12th and 13th century.Called the seminal heart of the Great Perfection.It tells a story where the Buddha nature is the primary agency in all forms of life.We see it at the beginning of cosmogeny.It's the Buddha nature that breaks open that vase and starts the beginning of the universe.It's also the Buddha nature that forms our worlds.There's a story that after all good becomes liberated, he manifests this enjoyment body version of himself, which looks like the Vairochana, which is a literally the illuminating one, the illuminating Buddha.And the illuminating Buddha is this vast cosmological Buddha that has many worlds, like in the pores of its skin.The pores of its skin have water, and in those water are all these world systems.And in its begging bowl, held by its above its hands, there's like a stack of 25 galaxies, and we're the 13th one of those.
So cosmology, embryology, it tells a story in the Mother's womb of how a child takes shape.
And when the child takes shape, it's not simply driven by the karmic leftover of all the actions or the traces of its actions and habits and habituations from its previous life, but rather there are two eyes in the middle of the mother's womb.And those eyes are called the eye of the Elements and the eye of the lamps.And the lamps are the word for the the Buddha's Dharma or the Buddha's teaching, or the Buddha's inner essence.Because whenever a Buddha is first enlightened, they set forth the lamp of the teachings to illuminate the darkness in the ten directions.And so that eye of the lamps in the mother's embryo is the presence of this spiritual force of the Buddha nature, and it drives the creation of the embryo.And there's a detailed account of embryology from the perspective of the Buddha nature being the driving, dynamic and then endurance after the cosmos and the world and our bodies exist, then how do we endure it in terms of individual life forms?
Psychology, that underneath our mind, the nature of our mind is this primordial knowing that's present in our heart.And its dynamism and its dynamic expression is constantly driving us in the unconscious, even when we're not aware of it.And physiology, that the physiology, the way they account for the body, the experienced body, but also the body, they map out throughout the limbs and the eyes and the head and the heart and so forth, is pervaded by these luminous channels and these accounts of how the primordial knowing's light is expressing itself throughout the body.And epistemology, how do we know the world?
How does knowledge take place?How does authentic vision take place?And this again is this account of the luminosity flows from inside ourselves to outside.And when we experience mandalas and visions and Buddhas and so forth, they're actually an external expression of an internal reality.And then finally, the ends of things to mirror the beginnings of things.
Soteriology.How do we become free?How do we become Buddhas?How do we become liberated?How do we enjoy a more authentic existence again?
It's not because we create something, it's not because we construct something, but rather it's because we allow this inner reality to fully express itself.It's not a construction project, it's a.It's a.It's a letting be project.It's an expression project where something inside us, beyond our conceptual mind, expresses itself fully, and we allow that to happen.
Thanatology, the science of death, the science of death tells us in Tibetan Buddhism in this tradition in particular, that the nature of death is this collapse of structured existence and this brief set of visions which we again have the capacity to recognize or not to recognize in the context of death.And finally, eschatology, the end of times, the end of the entire cosmos.And there's a story in Sok Chen Ning Tik that says at some point in the far, far future, like a far future sci fi novel, all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas will be done with their work.Every sentient being will be liberated.And at that point it says there's nothing left but liberated beings.
And so all of the emanational bodies swirl up into the enjoyment body, and the enjoyment body swirls up into the reality body, the dharmakaya, and the reality body swirls up into the expanse of reality, and the expanse of reality swirls up into primordial knowing.And there's only primordial knowing in the entire universe.And then many eons go that way.And then at some point in that vase of that interior within the expanse of reality, primordial knowing stirs again and the whole thing starts over.So sorry to say.
So, if we summarize this in terms of five chapters, we have the primordial ground of pure potential, what pre existed the universe and what continues to exist in our heart.It is Buddha nature.The ground and Buddha nature are the same thing.And in fact our own awareness is the same thing.So the ground, Buddha nature and our own awareness, each one empty, luminous and fully aware.
And this is what breakthrough meditation does in so breakthrough meditation in Tibetan tekja, sometimes called cutting through or cutting through rigidity and so forth.That meditation is something where you simply find the capacity to rest with full self awareness in that primordial ground of pure potential.Then there's the illumination of the ground.The way that ground by its own nature spills out into dynamic, spontaneous, self organizing, luminous presence mandalas, pure lands and so forth.And that in Sokchen is what's called tugel or direct transcendence.
Where in dark or in looking off to the side of the sun, or looking at the moon, or looking at a fire of a candle, you cultivate the spontaneous expression of the illumination of the ground as it flows from your heart through these luminous channels via your eyes into the space around you, and you recognize it as self presencing.You're able to endure in that breakthrough meditation within the context of direct transcendence.Meditation number three is when you stray into error.It's that notion that samsara is not because of some fundamental sin or some corruption of being, but it's simply an epistemological error.And if we correct that error, then we can come back to that moment of potential liberation.
And so all these referential meditations we're going to be talking about, meditations about subtle body and visualizations and manipulating your breath and so forth, all of these are dealing with samsara.They're necessary because of samsara.They're necessary because of the deeply embodied, habituated nature of this error.And for us to work through those, to get back to the possibility of simply resting in the primordial ground or witnessing the illumination of the ground with full recognition.To get us to those first two primary meditations, we have to deal with our lives, basically to open that space up.
And fourth is the awakening of the path.And this is the entire contemplative curricula that you find, which I'll be showing you in the context of one of the most prominent Dark Retreat traditions and in the classic Sochen curriculum.This is the direct transcendence, preliminary practices that we'll be briefly looking at, which are called the differentiation of Samsara Nirvana, where you act out in these kind of embodied, spontaneous ways, or these four meditations, where you imagine your subjectivity as the syllable whom, and you do various things with it, or you look at your mind and ask for every sensation, thought, et cetera.Where did you come from?Where do you stay?Where did you go?And so forth.And finally there's the Buddha's reawakening, where the illumination of the ground becomes the capacity to act efficaciously and compassionately in the world.So the Buddha is expressed as these awakened bodies and these primordial knowings, which is beyond meditation.
And so the illumination of the ground, which dissolves when you recognize it, takes place in sixth context.
There's the cosmogony, the beginning of things, and Samantha Bhajra's freedom when he recognizes it, or they recognize it as self presencing.And then there's the live now, every moment of every life form, human, insect, animal, et cetera.In their deep embodied unconscious, the illumination of the ground is perpetually happening.It's this primordial awareness, this awareness that's coterminous with life, that is constantly, spontaneously, dynamically expressing itself, even if we're unaware of it.3.
At night, when we dream, every night we collapse.We have a simulation of death or an emulation of death, where our structured cognition collapses.Back into the ground.And then vision reawakens from the ground, which is dreaming.Dreaming is way we experience at night the illumination of the ground.
And number four, meditation.We can go into complete darkness.We can look at the side of the sun and from our heart to the eyes to the objective sphere.We can trigger it by overwhelming the senses, overwhelming with like an abundance of light or an abundance of darkness.And it allows us then to experience the illumination of the ground in real time.
And then five is death, as I've already talked about, the serene and fierce mandalas of Buddhas that are born out of the dissolution of death, which brings us back to the ground.The illumination of the ground always starts from the ground.And then six is the Buddha's creation of pure lands.After a Buddha wakes up, everything dissolves.But then out of that dissolution, profound acts of divine creation take place.
The Buddha creates mandalas, the Buddha creates pure lands.The Buddha is a world creating figure.And that creation of worlds is not karmic, it's not negative, it's not impure, but rather it's this dynamic, fluid illumination of the ground, but pervaded by self recognition.
Germano turns to Longchenpa’s distinction between referential and self-emergent practices. He develops a detailed model of effort and effortlessness as modular, scalar, and directional, with shifting agency between practitioner and experience.
Speaker B
So in that context, before we can get to the dark retreat proper, we have to ask the question, how does effort and effortlessness work in so meditation?Now, this is Longchampa's classic systemization of great perfection meditation.In the 14th century, meditative practice is called taking into one's experience.That's the literal term, that's the primary term he uses for contemplative or spiritual practice.And so we have boundaries like, I'm going to start here and stop here in terms of time.I'm going to do it in this place.I have disciplines of posture, disciplines of the mind, disciplines of speech, you know, silence, chanting, et cetera.
And Longchampa offers a vision of two categories of meditative practice.The first one he calls referential practices.And referential practices are characterized by, and this is a whole anthology of Buddhist practices.Now, you could say these are Dzogchen, because he includes them in the Dzogchen tradition.But they're not the primary practice.
They're to be used as necessary to again, work through that error, work through that embodied, habituated nature of your life, so you can get back to the capacity to do the second set of practices which are the primary practices in Son.So these referential practices are called so because they refer to things.They focus on objects, intentionality.Like, I intend to visualize that deity.I intend to do an analytical meditation on emptiness.I intend to focus on that syllable there also very focused on techniques like do this, do that, et cetera, and less so on experiences.And so the logic of the practices tends to come more from what you do in order to create the capacity for these experiences.There are still experiences, but it's very technique heavy.They tend to be detailed in scripting, like, you know, scripting out what you should be doing in the practice from start to finish.
There's also a karmic logic that pervades these practices.Karma is just a word for action, human action, human agency.And in particular it's glossed as patterns of acceptance and rejection.There are things we accept, there are things we reject.And so we accept these, we reject those, and we do this in an intentional way.And it involves dualism, it involves effort because we're expending effort, we're doing things with our mind is telling us our body has to do this, our attention has to do that and so forth.
So we're expending energy and it feels effortful.It feels like I'm in control, I'm a, you know, command and control.It's referential practices.And so Longchampa basically gives an anthology of the entire history of Buddhist meditation under the category of these referential meditations.The yoga food are these alchemical practices where you take substances.
The clothes is this famous fierce lady or inner fire practice where you simulate sexuality by visualizations inside your your body with a flame blazing up and white ambrosia and the crown melting down.And having these experiences of four joys which can be done with a sexual partner, without a sexual partner.Dreams, cultivating the recognition of dreams.And at nighttime practice the meditations, the profound secret mantra are literally the ones about sexuality.And subtle body meditation, the means of concentration of God and men is a whole variety of practices, most famously summarized as 21 that involve a kind of immersion in the sensory experience of specific things.
It can be sound like there's a famous one called the Vajra Song.There's also emptiness.Meditation is one of the examples.Meditating on the letter ah, et cetera.A whole variety of practices.
But the thing that binds them all together is is they're about cultivating a deep immersion in a sensory experience or a conceptual, working your way through conceptual experience into this deep non dual absorption and the wisdom of Buddhas.For Longchampa, even in the referential meditations, he'll just throw in these techniques, which are no techniques at all, just to keep reminding people that for him the experience is primary.But for Longchampa the real primary practices, the practices of breakthrough or take cha.Direct transcendence or Tugel or the dark retreat, these are the self emergence practices and these are the heart of Dzogchen.Now if we contrast them to the referential practices, they involve letting be.
Not intentionally doing this and doing that, but letting be and having the logic be driven by self emergent processes that are deeply embodied, that come from outside of our mind's control.And so instead of focusing on techniques that are scripted out, it focuses on how experience unfolds and you're just doing little adaptations, responses or simple practices and so forth.It also has a gnostic logic.Instead of accepting and rejecting and making all these boundaries between things, this is myself.That's not myself.
It's everything is porous, everything is fluid, every boundary is open.And so as a consequence, since experience is unfolding itself, since we're just letting be, we experience this as effortless.We're not expending effort.And so the primary practices here is the breakthrough meditation, which is this experience of the ground without conceptualizing it, without reifying it, experiencing the vibrant, lucid, free flowing nature of our own primordial awareness.And then the direct transcendence preliminaries are these practices where you listen to the sound of the elements, water, fire, wind and space.
Like going to a fire and just immersing yourself in the fire.Not of course your body, just your ears listening.And then also these practices where the differentiation of cyclic existence and nirvana, where you just run crazily around expressing yourself physically, verbally, mentally, for hours and hours until you absolutely collapse out of exhaustion and experience the nature of the ground.And then you restore yourself with these very simple postures and, and activities, then direct transcendence, which is cultivating self emergent visions in the sun.And as we'll see originally, darkness meditation is an enhancing technique.It's a secondary technique, not the primary technique, although Slater flips for the most famous tradition of dark retreats.So a little bit more quickly.Effort and effortlessness.So what's the definition of effort?Effort is just the expenditure of bioenergetic resources.
And how we perceive that like effort is not simply how much glucose or oxygen or attentional resources we spend on something, it's also how we perceive that expenditure in terms of our available resources.So for example, if we think I just spent 90% of my resources, the effort kind of exponentially increases, even though it doesn't change the nature of the resources we spend.If we spend that same amount of resources, but our perception of our resources is much larger, then we don't actually feel the same degree of expenditure of effort.So effort, of course, is diverse.It's mental, physical, verbal, there's many types.It could be individual, it could be a collective effort, it could be intentional effort, it could be spontaneous effort, but it's also modular.Now what that means, and I'm going to show this in a moment, is it's not one thing when we say, oh, this is effortful, this is effortless, it's not one simple thing we can just point our finger to, but it's actually many different little modular dimensions that our mind is just putting all together and saying, oh, that was very effortful, or that was so effortless.
And it's also scalar, which means effort is not a binary.It's not, oh, it's effort or not effort, but rather it's 0 to 100, it's 20% effort, it's 70% effort, it's 30% effortless.So it's scalar, it's on a scale.
And every one of those little modules that make up effort or effortlessness are also 0 to 100 in nature.They're spectrums and there's a directionality to it.And that's a really important thing I'm going to exhibit in a second.So vector means it's going like, am I going towards effort or away from effort?Am I going towards effortlessness or away from effortlessness?
And again, there's not just one kind of effort.I could be going towards releasing physical effort while increasing mental effort.And the really important thing I'm going to show in the next slide is the key to understanding these meditations, in my opinion, is the transitions between effort and effortlessness and how there's no one type of transition.There's a number of transitions in how we go between effortlessness and effort, or between effort and effortlessness.And in the context there's this shifting agency.
So when I'm doing a very intentional meditation, like I'm the subject, I've got all the agency.But when self emergence starts to happen, when things begin to ripple up from the interior of my body, or things begin to unfold in the space around me spontaneously, or I feel that the blessings or grace of the Buddha's descending into my visualization and animating it, the suddenly the subject of the meditative action, the agency that's being expressed shifts.So I as the meditator, I can be the agent, but I can also be the patient, the receiver of the activity.So that's A very important point.So I'm not going to go through these in detail.This is something I came up with.I can send you a reference to an article where I've written about it in detail.But it's 12 different parameters of thinking about these modules in effort and effortlessness.
Twelve different scales.Each one of these is like a spectrum.
So the more intentional it is, the more effortful, the more self emergent it is.The more effortless, the more scripted, the more effortful, the more spontaneous, the more effortless.Or.
Or number oh, number six.The more I feel like I'm an individual self completely separate from the world, from the Buddhas, from the visualization.The.The more effortful, the more that I feel my boundaries are porous and I'm entangled with the object, with Buddhas, with the world.The more effortless it is because the larger the resources are, the more agency there is outside of just my own mind and its expenditure of effort and so forth.
So each one of these, the left hand side of the two paired terms is correlated with effort, and the right is correlated with effortlessness.But it's a spectrum.It's like 0 to 100 for each one of those.And that's just a kind of thinking about effort and effortlessness in Tibetan Buddhist contemplation.
He gives examples of transitions from effortful to effortless practice, including deity yoga, exhaustion-based settling, and dissolution. The discussion broadens into a history of spontaneous vision in Buddhism, dream states, and authentic visionary experience.
Speaker B
So just to wrap this up, this little thought about effort and effortlessness, here are some different ways that we transit between effort and effortlessness.
I can ride a bike over and over and over, and it's very effortful at first.Then it becomes effortless.I can practice the piano.It's so effortful, doing all those damn skills.And then it becomes effortless.
Or I can study the Four Noble Truths.first it's like, oh, oh, effort, effort.Then it becomes effortlessly perceiving.I visualize myself as a Buddha, or as Tara, or whatever, whoever.And at first it's very effortful.Oh, it's green, how many legs, how many arms, how many heads, et cetera.Very effortful.But at some point it becomes effortless and spontaneous.A totally different direction would be I do frenetic activity, like in the differentiation of Samsara Nirvana.Practice for hours, just doing whatever thought, speech, physical activity comes to mind.
And then finally I become exhausted, and that's called settling into naturalness, where I find the nature of the mind, because I've expressed every possible permutation of my being for hours.And now all I can do is settle back into this natural state.That's a totally different transition from effort to effortlessness or dissolution.And evocation at all deity yoga practices.You start by reducing the world to emptiness, and then you evoke the deity out of emptiness.
And at the end of every deity yoga practice, you dissolve the visualization back into emptiness.So these are also efforts, dissolution.I just let go of the visualization.How much effort is that?But for me to painstakingly create and evoke that image of my own body as the body of a Buddha, that takes effort, at least originally.
And then there's these relational exchanges where in empowerments, I feel the teacher is transmitting something to me, filling up my body, my mind as a vase, where I'm doing nothing, or the Buddha is descending into me, or I'm having visions of mandalas or pure lands or other kinds of somatic experiences.And this is related to some degree to self emergence, the idea that if I'm receptive enough, if I just sit, that these emergent experiences will happen.I'll listen to the sound of water at a waterfall for hours and hours and I will begin to hear voices.Those voices will self emerge.I'm not visualizing them, I'm not creating them.They are self emerging from my attentive experiencing of the world around me.So, and in direct transcendence or dark retreats, when the visions arise, not visualizations, but visions, they're self emergence.And so that's from effortlessness or from a simple effort, a simple discipline of keeping a posture and holding my gaze in the darkness, then all this effortless self immersions happens.
So if you look across these six, you see they're all involving effort to effortlessness or effortlessness to effort, but very different patterns of activity.And we have to be attentive to those to really understand what's happening.
So how does spontaneous vision become a Buddhist practice?So this is just a little history of different aspects across the history of Indian Buddhism, where we have spontaneous experiences or visions being fundamentally important practices all across the history of Buddhism.So elemental disc visualization, otherwise known as casinos, where you visualize these colored discs that represent earth, water, fire, et cetera.And then gradually you begin to have these spontaneous proliferation of your visual field as their concentration gets deeper and deeper and deeper.And there's this very long standing ancient discussion of the signs of deep concentration, where you have experiences of luminosity.
In Mahayana Buddhism, there are these vision quests called Recollection of the Buddha, where you fast, you pray, you do austerities in the forest in the hope that Buddhas will spontaneously appear to you, or pure land devotions that yield visions or Mandalas and visualizations of deities that become instantaneous, or any meditative experience is self emergent.You don't say, like, I will now have an experience of bliss.You can hope for it, you can do things to foster it, but when the experience comes, it's visceral and it's unpredictable.Or most famously in Indian Buddhist Tantra, if you retain the winds, you push the lower winds down, pull the.Sorry, push the upper winds down, pull the lower winds up, hold them in the vase of the abdominal region.
Then the winds, which represent the currents of psychophysical energy in the body, are no longer cycling around the body, supporting perception, conceptual activity, and so forth.And so you begin to experience deeper and deeper states of mind which are reflected by these external experiences of luminosity and the wheel of time.The Kalachakra famously has an 11th sign.Not just eight signs, not 10 signs, but an 11 sign, where there's a dark blue sphere, and the Kalachakra Buddha in male and female form appears within that sphere spontaneously.
So with that in mind, just to pull back slightly from Buddhism for a second, we can think of different types of vision.There's ordinary vision, it's dualistic, it's object focused, it's highly predictive, meaning it knows what it's known before and it predicts how the world's going to be.It's constantly processing for saliency, what's important to me.So there's bias, there's heavy interpretation, and then there's dreams which are deceptive.Why are they deceptive?
Because we don't realize their dreams.We think they're real, but they are very different from ordinary vision.A lot more fluidity, a lot more mutability.Things change instantly.Boundaries between things are much more porous.
And then there's lucid dream, lucid dreams where they're no longer deceptive.We understand them as self presencing, we recognize them as self presencing, and we can begin to intentionally engage in the creative process that's happening in dreaming.And in Buddhism, they talk about eight analogies of illusion.Dream, magical illusion, perceptual illusion, mirage, echoes, a city of spirits that appears in the sky.The reflection of moon in the water, where we might think, oh, it's the actual moon.And then apparitions, hallucinations, also deceptive.There are things where for some reason, maybe it's psychological problems, maybe it's the influence of some substance.We have these unwilled, spontaneous projections that we take for real.We don't understand that they're just self manifestations.Or phantoms where you see something and then you're kind of in it suggests images and your consciousness completes that suggestion and like a Rorschach test and et cetera.
And then we have visualization where you intentionally produce a visual phenomena that you're seeing.And then you have authentic vision, at least for Tibetan Buddhists, which is instantaneous.It's self emergent.There's none of your intentionality is there?But it's deeply understood and transformative for you as a person.
And then of course there's dissolution when you have experiences of things dissolving away or becoming porous and you have these fundamental non dual experiences.
This chapter explains karma as boundary-making action and contrasts it with primordial knowing and self-emergence. Germano describes how dark retreat and related practices cultivate spontaneous visions, signs, and progressive visionary phases.
Speaker B
So with that in mind, these are all different images of Tugel meditation and what you see in doing those.We can talk about self emergence and authentic visions in the context of the Great Perfection.So I've mentioned karma.Karma is literally the word for action.It's the practices that we do in the face of the suffering and, and constant change in our lives.
We are constantly engaged in practices and those practices have effects.We are constantly creating boundaries.The boundary of who I am, what I'm capable of, what I'm willing to be, the boundary of my friends, the boundary of my community, the boundary of my people, my nation, my species.We're always constantly making these boundaries by accepting things, rejecting things.We do it biologically.I'm going to eat this, I won't eat that.Emotionally, I, I want to have this emotion, not that emotion.I want this friend, not that friend.Hey, humans are the only species that matter.Hey, I'm willing to accept animals, but not insects.Oh, I can accept insects, but not fish, et cetera, et cetera.So karma and boundaries, the action, the practices of our life and the entities and selves and boundaries that they constantly set up.So what does it look like?
What practice does it look like?When we decide to let go, we let go of that kind of action, that action of accepting and rejecting, of creating boundaries, of constituting selves, constituting worlds.
Relax those boundaries, relax those actions and let this primordial knowing come to the fore and in.So the opposite of karma is primordial knowing.The opposite of primordial knowing is karma.Typical human practices versus the kinds of activities that the tradition is trying to cultivate.So the terms of the art, they talk about self emergence, self presencing, self arising.
The word for natural in Tibetan is literally according to self.
And so there's a whole variety of self emergence, some of them very common, like our mind wandering, our mind just Wonders, you know, it wonders here and wonders there when we let it go.Daydreaming, emerging mastery, when we have mastery of something and it just like emerges without any kind of thought, any kind of meditative experience, exhaustion, release, unpredictable sensory experiences, spontaneous vision, awakening of primordial knowing.And so in meditative practices, what I would argue they're doing is they're creating like a choreography.There's an art to how they manage effort and to invoke effort and then release effort as a way to facilitate this effortless self emergence.
So the effort of holding the posture, the effort of making slight adjustments in my gaze, but refusing to go all the way and begin to engage in the effort that conceptually produces something, that visualizes something, and I think effort interwoven with release is, Is the most powerful method for eliciting self emergence.And crucial in this is the role of reflexive recognition.To recognize as self.That's the constant call in so recognize as self.Recognize as self.Presencing.Recognize that what you perceive and who you are are of the same reality.There's not a kind of dichotomy between self and other.The boundaries are porous and open and fluid and so forth.The same call that's made upon all death rituals in so recognize as self.Recognize as self.Fierce, you know, terrifying deities.Recognize as self.Serene Buddhas, but so intense, you just died, you're upset.
Recognize as self.
You're doing darkness retreats, terrifying things happen, other things happen.Recognize as self.You're doing meditations off the side of the sun in tugil.Again, recognize as self.And so a Buddha, the word for Buddha, sange, is literally dissipating and expanding.That's who a Buddha is.A Buddha is one who dissipates the consequences of human practice and actions, reification, conceptualization, but then also is expanding into activity, expanding into kind of luminous form.And so natural and self emergent agent of Buddhas, they're within all life.They're within.And they're also the way that Buddhas, awakened Buddhas are characterized so tugel meditation, it's a discipline of waiting.In a sense, you have boundaries.I'm going to meditate from this hour to that hour.You do it in particular places where you have a clear vision of an unbroken sky and the sun.There are particular body postures.It's not like a do nothing.
There's certain attitudes you take, certain gazes you take, and so forth.
But you're doing so in the service of waiting for visions to manifest.You're not going beyond Those efforts into the efforts that deliberately, intentionally manufacture a focus object of meditation.And these visions, as we saw, are the same visions of light that happen at the beginning of the universe, that happen in dreaming, that happen in meditation, not medication, and that happen in death.And so there are techniques, as I just mentioned, but you're waiting for the self emergence.And so much of this is about the unfolding experiences and less about the techniques.
The techniques become increasingly less important as the visions unfold and begin to have their own logic and take over the nature of the meditation.And so you're dependent upon signs and measures to tell you are the experiences unfolding in the right way.And so there's this disciplined letting go.It's not just a letting go free for all.And there's this whole theorization of how luminosity in our body manifests in the world around us.
And so it's a practice of self emergence, largely unscripted, but still shaped, still making responsive adjustments.It's like an improvisational drama.And so you have four visionary phases, from the beginning to the final phase of enlightenment.And gradually the visions increase in scope, they become more complex, they become more articulated images.They go from patches of light to fully formed mandalas of Buddhas, at least for the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
And you pair it with the breakthrough meditation, because the breakthrough meditation is what allows you to recognize it as self.And finally, there's an old debate in this tradition.The mainstream position is that all the visions eventually dissolve, but there's a subset of people in Tibet who believed the visions were then permanent, were just perpetually there.
He shifts to the history of dark retreat traditions and focuses on the Black Quintessence cycle. Germano outlines its curriculum and the seven yogas, showing how dark retreat becomes the central practice in this lineage.
Speaker B
Okay, I am watching the clock.So how is darkness part of the great perfection meditation?
This is just a really very simplistic look at the diversity of dark retreat traditions across, you know, 11th century to 21st century.There are many different traditions, different people making revelations, so called treasures in Tibetan Buddhism, or writing intentionally expressed compositions, but very different practices often.And so we're still in the preliminary phases of sorting out all these traditions and their historical connection and which was first and how this one was influenced by that one and so forth.So not our main topic.The black quintessence is the one I want to talk about here in my conclusion, which comes about in the 14th century, and it's a live tradition today.It's disseminated in particularly by Sang Nak Tulku in Montana at his Avam center.And also Justin Van Bujdos, who's got a Yangti Yoga center.And I know Lama Karma, Justin Wall has also practiced this.
And Transmitted it.And so it's a very live tradition.
And these are just some of the key texts.There's this tantra called the Core of the Tantras, instructions on the key points of the single golden grain of the Black Quintessence of the Great Perfection.And then there's these three scrolls, the first scroll, the intermediate scroll, the final scroll, and there's the oral transmission.And there's an original core of nine texts which might go back to the 14th century.And dung Sorepa, who.
Who it's said to have revealed these as.As revelations.But they're expanding over time.Different people have different versions of the cycle, they add text.And the most famous one today is in the 20th century, an individual called Trulc Donak Lingpa, which I'll be talking about next.
Now, in the original.Sorry, the original Great Perfection, Dark Retreat, is found in the 11th through 14th century.We find it in the 17 tantras.We find it in Longchampa's work in the 14th century.And this has a very clear structure.It's presented as an enhancement.It's not the primary meditation.It said the primary meditation is called the Yoga of the Day, where you go off and you get an open sky and you stare off to the side of the sun and you use the rainbow light to cultivate visionary meditations.This is a supplement to that.It's a peripheral practice and it has two parts to it.The first part is called the Intensive Focus of the Ocean, where basically you press your eyes in a variety of ways to create these luminous visual sensations.Very effortful.And you see different kinds of things, patches of colors, spheres, et cetera.
And there's this whole phenomenology of the different kinds of light that you experience.But gradually you get to the second phase, which is called Entering the brightness, which is effortless.
And this is when you no longer have to press your eyes to stimulate these colorful experiences in the dark, but rather the luminous visions just spontaneously manifest.So it's a relatively simple form of the meditation, and it's what we find in the older text.Now, the Black Quintessence has a very different.I'm not going to be going to the details of it just to respect the tradition, but it has an entire contemplative curriculum.So it starts with very common, ordinary, extraordinary preliminaries we find all across Tibetan Buddhism, reflection on the basic philosophical premises of Buddhism.
The nature of human life, impermanence, suffering, the nature of karma.And then these extraordinary preliminaries where you do these visualizations as a way to prepare yourself for Tantric meditation and also cultivate this relationship to others as well as to the tradition and to its lineage.So refuge the cultivating the thought of enlightenment, mandala offerings, Vajrasattva purifications and Guru yoga.And then the second part of the contemplative curriculum is this three spiritual bodies where you have Padmasambhava, Valukateshwar and Amitabha visualized inside themselves.It's a generation stage or DT Yoga kind of practice.
And then you have this another one called the Enlightened Pith of the Dakini or the Sky Dancer.Here is visualized as Yeshe Tsogel.And there's this Sevenfold Jewel Cycle, which is basically an anthology of Perfection phase practices like the six Yogas of Naropa, most of them being practices where you work with your subtle body, but also includes Dream Yoga where you cultivate lucid dreaming or transference when you transfer your consciousness at the moment of death.So these are classic practices found across all Tibetan Buddhist traditions.And then you have these serene and fierce deities, the Hundred Deities, the hundred Serene and fierce mandala that is in your heart and your brain and is also what you experience the moment of death according to the Great Perfection tradition.
And you do these practices with also these older practices of calming the mind and facilitating insight.And then you have again some more of these Diya Yoga practices, the quintessential enlightened mind of Samantha Badra or All Good.And then you go to the classic Dzogchen Ning Chi practices, the differentiation of Samsara and Nirvana, where you act like this guy, just like crazy, just whatever comes to your mind.You do it for hours and hours until you collapse and experience this settling into naturalness.And then there are these classic Great Perfection seminal heart preliminary practices of body, speech and mind.You hold your body and visualize it as a vajra until you collapse.You visualize your speech as a whom, like you can see here on this.This little yogi guy.And you, you do different things with your.Your hums, you send it out of your nose and you twirl it up a tree or you travel across the universe and just a kind of improvisational practice.
And then you have the real core of the practice and the thing that's innovative about this tradition, which is the seven Quintessence Yogas of Radiant Light.And I'm going to show you those in just one moment.And then it culminates in the Dark Retreat proper, which is called the Seven Days or the Seven visualizations.So what are the seven yogas?Which as far as I can see is a distinctive, at least so far I haven't found it somewhere else.
There's the Dark Guidance of the Dark Yoga.That's the seven days, the seven visualizations practice.That's the kind of core of the tradition.And a truly distinctive version of Dark Retreat, very different from the original son Dark Retreat tradition.And then there's the White Guidance.That's called the Dark Guidance.The white guidance is gazing at the sun with the sky.Sorry, gazing at the sky with the sun to your back.And the flip here is Dark Retreats are seen as the primary practice.I wrote preliminary, I meant to say primary practice.
And all the other ones, including Tugel, are enhancement practices.They're supplementary practices.So it completely flips it.So now Dark Retreats, instead of being enhancements, are the core practice.The third practice is the hybrid guidance where you cultivate light within the darkness.You kind of work with both light and darkness.And then the red guidance of the sun is when you do classic Tugel meditation where you focus your eyes off to the side of the sun.And then the yellow guidance is the Moon Yoga where you gaze at the moon in nighttime, a much more difficult practice because the light is not so naturally effervescent as it is with the sun or within darkness.And then there's also the Fire guidance where you basically use a lamp and you focus on the wick, the flame of.It's more like a candle than a lamp.
In Tibetan they say lamp.They mean like a buttered lamp.And finally, the seventh one is the meaning guidance of Pith Yoga.And that's the moment when all the visions dissolve and you're just left with this kind of basically immersion into the ground with a full kind of self awareness.
Germano surveys the many variables that shape dark retreat across traditions, including duration, setting, diet, posture, gaze, breath, and visual techniques. He closes the lecture portion by sketching a preliminary theory of how sensory deprivation and subtle body work may function.
Speaker B
Okay.
Oh, I forgot about this slide.Sorry, I'm.I'm running.I'm taking too long.So I'm going to go through this quickly.
These are just variables, like looking at all the Dark Retreats that I've translated in Tibetan Buddhism, I just tried to kind of summarize the different variables that are drawn upon in terms of techniques and that from these variables you have the creation of all this diversity in Dark Retreat meditation across Tibet.And so if you start over on the left hand side temporal, how many days do you do it?You know, like in terms of the, in the darkness, how many sessions do you do of meditation each day in the darkness?How long are they for?What's the overall context?
Like the context that I gave you of Dzogchen is very different from the Kalachakra context.And so that's going to affect your experience in that contemplative practice.What's the residence?Sometimes there's like detailed instructions about how to build a dark retreat.Other times they say go do it in a cave.Other times they say use blindfolds, which they call little darknesses.The diet.There's a lot of discussion of the kinds of food and drink that you should be taking.Oops, sorry.
I'll just show that slide there.What kind of food and drink?Like, if you have to down regulate, you have to energize.Different kinds of postures, different kinds of gazes.There's different techniques for pressing on the eyes.And also you can visualize different sacred syllables with your fingers.Om.Ah.Whom.The state of awareness that you bring.
How do you engage with the visual content?Do you just let it be or do you move it around or do you perforate it, or do you guided around the visual field?Do you visualize anything?What kind of breath work do you use?Some.Some have breath work, some don't have breath work.Some have detailed, subtle body visualizations in the darkness, others do not.Techniques for eliminating obstacles.Some incorporate dream yoga and luminosity, meditation at night and lucid dreaming, others do not.The integration of light or little pinholes of light.
There's actually Dzogchen practices, as James Gentry at Stanford has recently shown, that actually use hallucinogenic substances to cultivate visionary experiences.I haven't seen that in the darkness.That's in the context of like Tugel meditation, other meditations you might do.And finally, how do you transit?And so I'm going to end here, which is really inadequate because I'm not ready to offer a theory of change for dark retreats.So I put this together just in a couple of moments.I'm going to work on this over the summer.But first you have to ask, like, what are the elements involved here?Sensory deprivation, eye pressing, spontaneous visions, letting be awareness.A key issue is obviously we are an ocular centric species, meaning the visual sense is our primary sense.
So it's the primary sense for which our bondage is expressed and where our liberation can take place.All of our senses in Sokchen are talked about as sites of liberation.And.And there are practices of tasting, smelling, touching, hearing, and so forth.But the vision being our primary sense for our species is the primary place where we bond ourselves by projecting our emotional obsessions and our conceptual categories and our biases.And so forth into the visual field.And so when we're deprived of that, we're being deprived of the primary way that we express our articulation of the world.And so it collapses, which is how we get back to the ground.And it strips our vision back to its pixels, back to the primary little, you know, dots and speckles and so forth, from which vision gets constructed so we can see freshly the way we haven't since we were, you know, infants, the way in which vision emerges as a constructed, habituated thing in our existence.
And the subtle body work, I've thought about a lot, like, why do we do subtle bodywork in the darkness?
Because in some sense, our bodies are our original inner darkness, you know, so it's illuminating that embodied unconscious, while our external darkness, our external sphere is now in dark.There's something really powerful about that breath work, clear relationship to the mind, the issue of dosage, the issue of the state of mind and the curricular context, everything that precedes it.Okay, so sorry, I took longer than I wanted to, but I'm going to stop there.And that leaves us 15 minutes for any kind of questions.
The Q&A begins with a question about secrecy and the future of dark retreat. Germano argues that traditions must adapt ethically and creatively to survive, while remaining accountable to Tibetan communities and changing historical conditions.
Speaker B
There you go.
So I don't know how we proceed with questions.Is someone going to facilitate or do you want me just to look?
Speaker C
I believe Peter will be returning, but in the meantime, if anyone does have questions, feel free to raise your virtual hand.And, David, maybe you can just go around and build them.
Speaker B
Sure.I can't really see everybody on one screen, so maybe you can put something in chat and I can look at the chat.
If you want to, just put your name there and I'll call on you and you can.Okay, I see the raised hand.Kahlo or Kyle?
Speaker D
Hey, David.It's Kyle from Brazil.
Speaker B
Sorry.
Speaker D
Thanks a lot for your talk, man.Amazing.Really amazing stuff.So my question is, around the secrecy on these days, around these subjects, do you think it's now more open to talk and even practice this type of approaches and meditation, like dark retreats?And how do you visualize the future around these types of practice in a sense of.From humanity in general?
Speaker B
Yeah, well, I think there's a couple issues around secrecy that are fundamental.The first thing is these traditions come from Tibet.And Tibet are a people who are under tremendous pressures in the modern times.
And so it's not a trivial issue for us just to say, oh, I studied Tibetan Buddhism, I can read Tibetan, or I studied with this teacher and so forth.Now I can do whatever I want to.I think that's problematic, deeply.Problematic, it's unethical.And so I think there's all sorts of ethical issues there.What are we doing for Tibetan people?Like, what are we as individuals doing?What are we as organizations doing?And I'm not saying there's any kind of simple guidelines, but I think all of us need to ask those questions.And so that's something I ask myself a lot.So if I put that to the side for the moment and I just conceptually think about how I think about these issues, I think we're in a time where secrecy is going to be the death of these traditions.And so there's two problems.
One problem is so many of these lineages are deeply imperiled in Tibet and outside of Tibet and Bhutan and elsewhere itself.And I worry that secrecy is just going to mean that nobody really has a living transmission and understanding of many of these texts and philosophies and practices and so forth.And the second issue is that we need radical transformation.
If these traditions are actually to take place on North American soil, they have to be stripped down to their essentials and reanimated in a way that makes sense in modern times and modern contexts.And that's not just for Americans.It's also true for young Tibetans.Young Tibetans and Bhutanese are also struggling with their traditional.We have reached a time where collectively, across this world, across this globe, change has radically changed in character.
It's not the old change, it's much faster in character, much more complex, much more pervasive.And it's exponentially changing in every moment, in every sector.And so from all across the world, including Tibetans, Bhutanese, Himalayan people and so forth, and especially including us, we need to engage in kind of radical re envisionings for, in this case, contemplative practices to continue to be relevant and pertinent.They have to adapt with the time.And that means we have to understand them at a deep, deep level in terms of experiences, in terms of methods, in terms of how these things are varied over time, so that we can then adapt to these constantly changing circumstances to create refinements that are going to make sense.
People often say, oh, how can you change these things have been like this forever.They've not been like this forever.I've studied silk Chen for 1200 years.Every single century, it was radically changing.The only thing that doesn't change in this world is what's dead.
Silk Chen is not dead.It's alive and it's still changing.And so radical change has been the history of son and it will be the future as long as it's still alive.
He answers a question about reincarnation and the role of these practices in preventing regression across lifetimes. Another question leads him to discuss the many visual depictions of visionary experiences and how textual descriptions relate to lived practice.
Speaker D
Yeah.Thanks a lot, my friend.
Speaker B
Sure.
So I'm happy to.Sean's iPad.
Let me see.Do you want to read your question?
Speaker A
I'll read it for him.
Speaker B
Okay.
Speaker A
He wants to talk about reincarnation and regression.
At what point do these esoteric practices help with preventing regression across reincarnations, especially for Bodhisattva vow takers?
You want me to repeat that?
Speaker B
Yeah, no, I got it.Yeah.
Well, I mean, I can give you the traditional Tibetan Buddhist answer to that, I think, because Tibetan Buddhism, of course, is one of the many cultures around the world that is a reincarnational culture.So they believe in reincarnations across species and across multiple generations and so forth.And so the, one of the primary indigenous promises of these practices is that it produces.
Well, I mean, I think that the, the mainstream response to that would be that all these practices are helping with preventing regression across reincarnations.Because if you look at the theorization in.So they talk about like other traditions in Tibetan Buddhism talk about the nature of the mind with this universal ground consciousness, the alaya vishnana or the so called kunchi, which literally means the ground of all that.The ground of all.Every time we do an action, it deposits a trace in our embodied unconscious.
And these traces migrate from life to life to life and are what give shape to the capacity for us to engage in continued spiritual growth or undergo regression and so forth.So I would say it's not just esoteric practices, but the Tibetan Buddhist way of theorizing that is that all of these practices from, you know, just doing circumambulation, prostration offerings and so forth, all the way to these high end practices like deity yoga and, and fire meditation and tugel and dark retreats and so forth, that they're all helping with preventing regression.But the more fundamental these practices dig into the nature of one's existence, the more fundamental they're going to be in terms of creating spiritual progress across multiple lifetimes.And so circumambulation, et cetera, et cetera, aren't digging that deep.But when you're stripping yourself down to the very essence of your reality and experiencing this ground and in the way the ground moves into illumination, their argument would be that that's going to produce much more fundamental transformation that persists throughout lifetimes.
So I see the next one is Jan or Jan. Oh, can I elaborate on the various images?
So there's, I mean this is a whole category.There's must Be like, I don't know, 20 or 30 different versions, probably more.Where you have manuscripts, where people just, you know, take a page or two and they draw these little.Oops, sorry.They draw these little diagrams of various aspects of the visions.
And we also have some contemporary accounts.I mean, there's one.I forget the name, that California couple that are.Were artists and they drew stuff.There's also a.
A big coffee table book from the Bumpo tradition of modern art, of these traditions.There's also, in some cases, murals.There's the famous Lukang murals behind the Potala palace in Lhasa, Tibet, and there's also some murals elsewhere.So there's many different versions of those.And when you actually read the text, it can be very challenging to figure out what they're actually talking about.I mean, some are very clear, but some are like, what is that?And I remember when I was first studying these in the 1980s, you know, back then there was no Internet and no PDFs and all, none of this stuff.And so I used to carry like a hundred pounds of books all over Eastern Tibet.And I'd go to these famous son teachers and I would actually literally draw pictures of things and I'd say, is that what it is?You know, just to try to get kind of clarity.
And I think what I found is that.And especially looking across all these images is some of them are.I think there is definitely a clarity to what's being referred to.And some.I don't think there is at all.
I mean, I often think, like, when you look at these accounts of the visions, like, how's it going to happen this way and that way and so forth.What really happened is in the 11th century, when this tradition started, in the Nyingma tradition, there were certain practitioners and people who were doing these, and they were writing their own experiences down, and those became canonical, so everybody had to refer to them.And.But whenever I'd go to a prominent teacher and I'd say, hey, is that how this actually happens?And I remember Kempo Jime Punsok, who was one of my primary teachers, very famous, so teacher in the 20th century, he.
He would say, eh, it could be this way, it could be that way.You know, it's like.I mean, and that was the kind of answer I got very frequently that it's just really depends on you and your experience.So those images are showing particular early versions of the kinds of things that you see.And there are Tibetan names that appear in the literature that those are correlated to like one is, is called Mik Mangri, which means designs of many eyes, you know, and I think that's like a tic tac toe board with lots of eyes.
Or another one is called like a multicolored silk brocade and that is given like this, I think, blue with red dots in one of those images and so forth.
Okay, send the reference article.
Yeah, it's a free article online.
Let me just look at the URL real quick.
It's a little bit of a complicated article, but it's, it's all about that issue.So that's, that's the article.
Germano reflects on who historically practiced these methods and notes the limits of the available social evidence. He suggests that earlier traditions may have been broader and less elitist than later institutional forms.
Speaker B
You can just download it from that URL.
Speaker A
Do you want to go, Daniel?
Speaker E
Sure.Thanks.First of all, David, just.Wow, impressive.There is so much that I feel like there's a lot.We're gonna all probably be absorbing this for a little bit of time.One quick question I have for you is a little bit about like, who practiced this traditionally?And you know, we, we hear about this as being a pretty advanced practice.And as someone who's done some of this a little bit, I can see why.
But I'm just curious about, as you've talked about, there's these variations of duration and, and, and, and again, all the different types of, of approaches you bring to this.I'm just curious as you've looked into this again, like how who are some of the folks that have, that have been doing this?Is this really been just advanced practitioners?Have there been aspects of Dark Retreat that have been open to, to, you know, lower level practices or.I don't know.Hopefully that's being clear, but just curious of what you've come across.
Speaker B
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we really understand very well the social context of some of these contemplative practices prior to the, you know, 1950s and so forth, because we have, you know, literature.But a lot of the literature, the narrative literature is coming from elite people and they construct elite stories and so forth.And they don't necessarily take care to tell the stories of ordinary people and so on.So it's a little bit hard to pierce that kind of obscurity and see like to what degree we're just ordinary people.
But I will say that I have heard in modern times, friends of mine who are very prominent figures in Tibet itself will say that when someone older comes to them, they don't waste their time doing this practice and that practice, they just shoot them right into son.So the older people are, the more likely they'll just say, you know, go, go do learn.You don't have to do like 50 years of this and that and everything in between and so forth.So that's an example where I've heard just ordinary people being moved right into SO practices.I've also heard in, I mean this is contemporary times.But Gangteng Tulku, who I do not know personally in Bhutan, I was talking to someone who's involved with organizing his more recent work, which is he's been teaching these Sokchen practices that we've been discussing today to a broad variety of people, like in large scale retreats in Bhutan.
And you know, and I don't know, like to what degree is that something traditional or something innovative for modern times?But that's the case where just ordinary people, as long as they show up and are serious, he's been leading them through a systematic curriculum of these practices.So I, I personally think it's.When you look from 11th through 20th century, things got more and more elitist over time.
So the Nyingma tradition itself from the 17th century, for a variety of historical reasons, became more and more prone to monasticism and to kind of the systematic study of Mahayana philosophical treatises and so forth.And so I think that changed the character of the tradition.I think when you look back earlier, you saw a really wide variety of people were engaged with the tradition in ways that I personally think more healthy.
A participant shares reflections on gray visions and clear light, prompting Germano to discuss the value of talking about contemplative experience. He describes a project using microphenomenology to help communities describe subtle meditative processes more skillfully.
Speaker B
Glenda is the next person.
Speaker F
Hello.Thank you so much, all of you.And the synergy of the group, it just so beautiful.I wanted to share something.I thought of when Jan asked that question about the visions.
You know how I can't help but compare.I have a vision about that vision or whatever is what I found is I was discarding the color gray in gray.I've learned because this pure blackness of presence and its luminous glow are so close the mind can't process it.So it sees gray.And so in these visions there'll be gray swirls, gray lines.
So don't discount that.
Just go with it.Save it be you're seeing the clear light.You're seeing clear light.The clear light glow of this pure black luminant presence source, wherever you want to call it.Thank you.
Speaker B
Thank you.Yeah, I'll say.One of the things that I have a passion for is people's contemplative experience.I think we have a little bit of a pathology about it in modern times and I think we need to overcome it.Like the pathology is like, you know, the spectrum.
On the one end of the spectrum, it's like Every meditative experience is secret and you have to shut up and don't talk about anything and so forth.And the other side of the pathology is like, I had such amazing meditative experiences.I want to bore you to death by telling you all about them.So I'm interested in thinking about how can we, as a series of communities, foster a more healthy environment to talk
Speaker F
about
Speaker B
our meditative experiences, share them with each other in ways that can.Can lift up.I've talked to a lot of people over the last four years about their meditative experiences, and I found it very useful for my own practice and my own thinking.And so we have a large project over the next three years that's looking at, so, meditation, using a technique called microphenomenology to try to describe the most subtle kind of levels and processes and then think about how to convert that into something that could be used within meditative communities.So
Speaker F
I would love to participate in something like that.And that's what I find too.It's an openness that is just an openness that people.Then their mind opens to wonder of everything.It's not limiting, not secret, not boasting, but it's just openness.
Thank you.
Speaker B
Yeah, thank you.
The final question asks about minimum effective practice for householders balancing work and spiritual life. Germano responds that practice rhythms differ by person, encourages attention to what yields traction, and emphasizes respecting one’s own experience alongside teacher guidance.
Speaker B
I think Sean again,
Speaker A
I think Anyana, I think she's.Hello.
Speaker B
Okay.Sorry, I
Speaker A
missed.Probably keep this as our last question.Okay.
Speaker G
Hi, David.Thank you so much.A really, really amazing, just incredible concentration of.
So much.And personally, I've been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for 25 years with Vajrayana empowerments, also yoga, recently yoga with Kundalini breathwork.And my question is, despite all of this work, inter, including psychology and therapy and lots of.Lots of things, it feels like there's not much progress.And so I'm faced with a conundrum which is I also, you know, I'm a householder.I'm a householder, Yogini.I have a job.I have, you know, responsibilities.And.And I'm kind of perplexed around, like, the minimum effective dose.
I think you referenced it in one of the slides.Like, what's the.What's the minimum that I need to do every day to be able to progress in a meaningful way in this life?And I want to say one more thing.Andrew Holocheck, I really like the way he framed his particular inquiry, which is, you know, he recognized early on that life is precious and fragile.
And so what's the best use of this?How can we best use this life?And so with all that as context, I wonder if you have any.I know Your theory of change is coming in the summer, but any insights around a household or practitioner and making forward progress with these dark practices?
Speaker B
Yeah, well, that's a great question.
And, you know, that's one of the things that we're trying to look at.I don't have any great wisdom to offer you today.I mean, I suffer from the same dilemma, which is I may spend a lot of my time in Tibetan communities and in Tibetan texts and so forth.That's not the same as actually doing practice.So I find that I myself go through these rhythms where I might do a lot of practice and I might, like, burn that practice up for a long time, and then I find myself pathetic again.And then I try to, you know, find my way back to practice.So I think everybody's got different rhythms.If you look at Tibetan Buddhist stories of liberation, you see very different rhythms.You see people that spend a lot of time very focused in contemplation, and then they just spend years, you know, very focused in kind of activity and so forth, and others, like, going back and forth, back and forth.
So I think everybody's got different rhythms to their lives.
I think the science, you know, scientific research is trying is starting to show us some.Some general things, but even those things, they're.They're like nomathetic.They're talking about norms across broad degrees of people, and you can't really take that and just apply it to yourself.So I think the, you know, the best thing to do is just see within the constraints of your life and different practices, where are you getting the most traction?I mean, these are really obvious things to say, but where are you getting the most traction?And what's the proper dosage for you?Because what the dosage is.I mean, what the tradition says is going to be very.It's going to be like a norm, and it's not going to necessarily apply to each person.
So some people will say, oh, for this practice, you know, if you do it for, like, the dark retreats, I've often heard, you know, do it for at least seven days.The tradition typically says seven days.Do it for seven days.Some people have said, like, well, it's around the seventh or eighth day, where something really begins to move or happen for me and so forth.So.
So I don't have any great answer for you in general.I think just the best guidance is to.Is to respect your own experience.And to the degree that you have someone available to talk and, you know, who has experience themselves and share guidance with you, that's Great.But also, I just think it's really important to respect your own experience.If something's not working, then maybe the practice isn't for you.Maybe you're not doing it enough.Maybe you're doing it too infrequently, or maybe the practice could be varied in a way that could then get traction for you, whereas this way doesn't get traction.I mean, one of the things I've learned in doing these analyses of practices is just how many different variations there are of a given practice.Like, I might have learned to practice from this person this way, but when I look back over the historical record, I find 50 ways to do it that can be very, very different in character.
And some of them I'm like, that's much better suited to me than the one that I Learned in the 21st century, you know?So I'm hoping with this bigger project that we can share that experience with people so that in addition to the importance of a living teacher, they can also have access to the historical record and kind of check it against their own experience.Because I think these should be experimental and exploratory without minimizing some of the dangers involved and without minimizing the importance of a lived teacher.I also think that the best lived teacher is really ourselves in a way.And if we're not respecting our own experience, then things go astray.
And, of course, the tradition says that the ultimate guru is your own awareness and experience.
The session ends with thanks from the speaker and hosts, along with contact information and closing remarks. Participants say goodbye as the event concludes.
Speaker B
So
Speaker G
thank you so much.Yeah, I really appreciate that.
Speaker B
Sure.
Thank you so much, all of you.I enjoyed.I wish I could have been present, you know, in real reality.But I appreciate you all coming.And anybody who wants to write me can find me.
I'll just put my email here.A short email.Feel free to write me.I'm happy to hear from you all.I think that's my email.
Yeah, that's it.Okay,
Speaker A
cool.And
Speaker B
thank you, Peter
Speaker A
and Karma, to the participants.And thank you, David.That was very.That was mind blowing.That was really fun.
Really appreciate your presence here.
Speaker B
Yeah.Thank you.
Speaker A
Thank you.Okay, look for the video to be released probably on Friday or Saturday.
And, David, I'll.I'll circle back with you later in the week.Thanks, everyone.
Speaker B
Okay,
Speaker A
take care.
Speaker B
Bye.
Speaker A
Bye.Bye.
Speaker C
Bye, everyone.
Speaker A
Bye.Thank you, Ocean.Thanks for staying a little longer.Yeah, good night.Night, Nate, Roger J.
Take it easy.Bye for now.