' Dzogchen Wisdom '...

Let's take a look at what two Dzogchen masters have to say, starting with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche.

He says in his book: Present Fresh Wakefulness:

"Basically and fundamentally, our mind is utterly empty, sheer bliss, totally naked. We do not need to make it like this; we do not need to cultivate it by meditating, to create this state by meditating.

Give up thinking of anything at all, about the past, the future or the present. Remain thought-free, like an infant.

Innate suchness is unobscured the moment you are not caught up in present thinking.

That which prevents us from being face to face with the real Buddha, the natural state of mind, is our own thinking. It seems to block the natural state.

Rigpa, the Natural State, is not cultivated in meditation. The awakened state is not an object of the intellect. Rigpa is beyond intellect, and concepts.

This is the real Buddhadharma, not to do a thing. Not to think of anything Like Saraha said, "Having totally abandoned thinker and what is thought of, remain as a thought-free child."

Thinking is delusion.

When caught up in thinking we are deluded. To be free of thinking is to be free.

That freedom consists in how to be free from our thinking.

As long as the web of thinking has not dissolved, there will repeatedly be rebirth in and the experiences of the six realms.

The method: But if you want to be totally free of conceptual thinking there is only one way: through training in thought-free wakefulness. (rigpa).

Strip awareness to its naked state.

If you want to attain liberation and omniscient enlightenment, you need to be free of conceptual thinking.

Being free of thought is liberation.

This is not some state that is far away from us: thought-free wakefulness actually exists together with every thought, inseparable from it... but the thinking obscures or hides this innate actuality. Thought free wakefulness (the natural state) is immediately present the very moment the thinking dissolves, the moment it vanishes, fades away, falls apart.

Simply suspend your thinking within the non-clinging state of wakefulness: that is the correct view."

My comment: All the masters agree on this point, that any intellectual pursuit as trying to increase wisdom through study and analysis is only having an effect upon the intellect. The intellect is itself the functioning of deluded ego-consciousness. The intellect never becomes enlightened. The Natural State is thought free, intellect free... and no studying or analyzing gets you any closer. Any realization or intellectual insight is just a mental arising that occurs within and as our unchanging Awareness and offers no benefit or harm. It is a sudden seeing, a non-conceptual erupting of the Natural State into the field of consciousness that reveals the fact that there never was a "me" to be liberated, as the "me" was just a thought floating through the non-personal continuum of mind. We are not a person who has experiences, but rather the individual person is just an experience arising within a non-personal Awareness.

Lonchenpa said: A Buddha with a thinking mind is an ordinary sentient being (unenlightened), but a sentient being without a thinking mind is a Buddha.


-Jackson Peterson