Join Loch Kelly the creator of the mindful glimpses app in this insightful conversation with renowned author, meditation teacher and neuroscientist, Sam Harris. In this deep dialogue, Loch and Sam explore the vast landscape of meditation, non-duality. They share their personal early encounters with Dzogchen and Mahamudra teachers and teachings. Sam and Loch offer distinctive contemporary perspectives on mindfulness and non-duality. They shed light on how mindfulness can be a powerful gateway to understanding what creates suffering and a doorway to access our true nature which liberates us. The uses of attention and different types of awareness are also explored. Also offered is a practical exercise to transition from the spotlight of attention to a more expansive and encompassing non-dual awareness and a natural embodied compassion.
51:57 The episode features Loch offering a guided practice which Sam then participates in and then shares what he experiences. This short inquiry style glimpse is designed to explore non-dual awareness. It familiarizes listeners with the next stages of embodied presence and awake loving flow consciousness. These mindful glimpses serve as invaluable tools for accessing the awake consciousness that is already here within all of us.
You can now explore all of Loch Kelly’s practices and teachings on the new Mindful Glimpses app. This innovative meditation and wellness app offers daily micro-meditations, step by step programs, and simple-yet-advanced tools for awakening.
Sam Harris, an author, philosopher, and neuroscientist, explores a wide array of subjects, from neuroscience and moral philosophy to religion and meditation. He holds a philosophy degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Sam is also an accomplished meditation practitioner, having trained with various teachers. He’s made meditation more accessible through the creation of the Waking Up app, offering a modern and scientific approach. Sam also hosts the critically acclaimed Making Sense Podcast.
Connect with Sam Harris:
Website: https://www.samharris.org/
Loch Kelly is the creator of the Mindful Glimpses app, award winning author, psychotherapist, and meditation teacher known for his unique practical methods that support awakening as the next natural stage of human development. Backed by modern neuroscience and psychology, Loch introduces Effortless Mindfulness, an ancient form of nondual meditation that allows immediate access to our embodied awake nature which arises as calm, clarity, and compassion.
Connect with Loch:
Mobile App: https://mindfulglimpses.com
Website: https://lochkelly.org/
Donate: https://lochkelly.org/donate
Transcript:
Loch: Welcome to the Effortless Mindfulness Podcast. I’m Loch Kelly. And here I share talks and deep dialogues with leading experts in the field of meditation, psychology, and neuroscience. Together, we’ll explore how everyday people, like you and me, can live an awakened life of clarity and compassion. You’ll also find micro meditations in every podcast episode.
If you want to try more of these, you can go to mindfulglimpses.com to download the new app to experience immediate benefits. Because the love and peace we are all seeking is already here anywhere, anytime. Enjoy.
Alright, it’s my great pleasure to welcome here today, Sam Harris. Sam,
Sam: Hey, Loch, great to be talking to you,
Loch: Great to talk to you. So this is always exciting to have a colleague that [is] involved in the same project. And we can dive deep and give those who are listening a sense under the hood of what’s going on with us. How we’re seeing things and how things are unfolding.
Sam: Yeah, we’re playing similar games here, talking about the nature of mind. But I’m happy to explore anything you want to talk about.
Loch: Okay, that sounds great. Yeah, let me begin with something we have very much in common. I’ll read a quote from your book, Waking Up, where you say about our common teacher, “Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of self directly even in ordinary states of consciousness.” The instruction was, without question, the most important thing I’ve ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering – fear, anger, shame – in an instant. So there’s a lot there, but certainly I would agree.
And that’s a pretty profound thing for me. Also, the instruction that I received, I would consider to be the most important thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve been taught by another human being. Do you want to say a little about either how you came to meet, or what it was like with that instruction?
Sam: Yeah, there’s a lot to talk about there. Let me know if you view the matter in the same way I [do]. I don’t think in the end, there’s any magic involved. I really don’t think it requires the extraordinary agency of somebody who is extremely stable in this realization, although that is what is in fact billed as, as true in the Vajrayana tradition.
It’s a matter of information in the end and preparation on the part of the student, right? You have to have enough concentration and mindfulness to be able to pay attention in the way that’s being indicated. But at the end of the day, while I’m incredibly grateful to Tulku Urgyen and to my other teachers, I actually don’t think it had to be them in that moment.
It really just had to be that exact instruction. Granted, I could be wrong about this. But that’s the way I think about it now. As to how I got in the room with him, it was a somewhat laborious and uncertain process. I heard about him, this neuroscientist, Francisco Varela, who was a student of his. [He] told me I was in. I met him in India at the mind and life conference with the Dalai Lama. I was just tagging along with some of the people who were actually invited to that conference. And I met Francisco and I had come from — now studying with Poonjaji. He was a nondual Advaita teacher, a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. And he had really obliterated my goal-oriented striving coming out of Vipassana.
I had come to him with just a very goal-oriented, rub-two-sticks-together-to-get-fire model of how mindfulness works. He did everything within his power to disabuse me of that. But I was still left not sure how to practice. So I just found myself going to Dharamsala for this conference. I met Francisco. I got to talking to him about the difference between gradual and sudden approaches to realization. And he told me about his Dzogchen teacher, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. I came away from that conversation knowing that I should just go straight to Kathmandu to try to get teachings with him.
So that’s what I did. But when I got to Kathmandu, when I got to the monastery in Bouddha, it was the front door of his whole operation at that point. I just asked to see him. I was met with what I later learned was the usual sort of gatekeeper triaging filter. Which was to say, ‘Oh, no, he’s not available. He’s on retreat.’ And so then I was left with his son, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche.
I spent, I don’t know what, it might’ve been 10 days or so taking teachings with him. Just getting oriented with the whole Dzogchen [and] Mahamudra approach to things. Never realizing that there was some magical incantation that would have gotten me actually up to Nagi Gompa to see his father. As I went back to the U.S. and met Surya Das, who you might know, who’s spent a lot of time in France on multiple three year retreats. And he had a foot in both worlds. He had been a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Das’s Hindu guru. And then he’d also had a deep background in the Tibetan system. He studied with Karmapa and other people, Khensur Rinpoche and also Tulku Urgyen.
When I told Surya about my predicament, he said, “Oh you just didn’t understand how to get up to Nagi Gompa to see the master.” So we organized a trip with me and Surya and some other Vipassana teachers who were close friends at that point, like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. We decided to also go see Poonjaji because Surya wanted to see Poonjaji as did Joseph and Sharon. And so we did. We created this sort of whirlwind nondual Yatra pilgrimage where we went to Lucknow for 10 days.
Then we went to Kathmandu, I think for 10 days or two weeks on that trip. I described that somewhat in my book, Waking Up, and various points in the app, what it was like to go from Lucknow to Tulku Urgyen’s world. And some of the differences in emphasis and teaching there. But in any case, we showed up knowing how to get past the lions at the gate, courtesy of Surya Das at that point. And then we got in to to see Tulku Urgyen where he was technically on some kind of retreat.
He was never really leaving his room, but he was still seeing students periodically. So we came in and got teachings with him. So that’s how I got there. I don’t know if you have any more questions about that. But I’m happy to get into the actual experience with him.
Loch: I don’t think it requires a guru or a particular teacher. It’s not magical that people are now able to recognize through the principles of this approach. And interestingly, one of the things I don’t think I showed last time we talked. One of the reasons I was there 10 years before you, and we’re 10 years apart. I’m 10 years older, so we were probably there at the exact same age in our life.
Interestingly, the reason he was giving it out more freely probably then, he may have tightened up a little bit afterwards. But he said, and he wrote in an article or an essay that he responded to a question, he said, “I did three, three-year retreats. And at the end of the third three-year retreat, I realized that the instructions I had gotten from my uncle when I was 15. Nothing had actually changed.” So he was saying I figured I might as well give it out. Because you never know who might be available for it. And so he didn’t require at that time any preliminaries and wasn’t making a big deal about it. He was just as we do now saying, this is natural human consciousness.
This doesn’t require the religious trappings, or the preliminary practices. If you get it, if you don’t, then you can do the preliminary practices and come back again.
Sam: Yeah, he gave us some abbreviated Ngöndro to do. He was giving us the teachings as well. But then he just — to be his students and not be embarrassed, to call ourselves his students.
He wanted us to do some abbreviated ngöndro. So we were doing that alongside studying the nature of mind and trekchö and with him. And then we went back to the State. Then I made, I forget how many, trips to Nepal to check in with him periodically and refine my understanding of things.
I think I probably went three times or four times to Nepal over the course of two years before he died. And we were also studying at that point with Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche and sitting in longer retreats with him. We brought him to the States and organized a two month retreat at this Zen center at Dai Bosatsu that we rented for that, which was really great.
And I also sat another month with him in New Mexico. So we were integrating the teachings, outside of Nepal mostly, but then continually going back and getting more face time with Tulku Urgyen. But it was really that first trip, that first meeting, where It was quite remarkable just from the perspective of being a stranger to. I had just been there a couple of days and his generosity and his wife was dying at that point.
And he was just teaching on all cylinders. He would occasionally be interrupted by something with his wife. And then he would come back and he’d be teaching more. I remember the session where the point of no return for me was. I was alone with him. And I had a translator with me who I believe would have been Eric at the time. He was really one of the great translators. That was an amazing piece of good luck because when you’re talking to a teacher who doesn’t speak any English, and it’s all running through a translator, you really are at the mercy of just how good the translator is.
And I’ve been in a wide range of situations with Tibetan lamas. Eric was so good, you just really felt like he wasn’t even in the loop. It was just a direct communication with Tulku Urgyen. But yeah, it was that last time on that first visit, where I was just resolving any doubts I had about this being it. Is this really the thing to pay attention to? And do I have it correctly established? Just this initial stage of, what’s often referred to as resolving the view or removing all doubts as to the view.
This is something a lot of people struggle with. And if there’s any role to be played by a great meditation master, it might be at this juncture. Again, I bracket everything I’m saying here with an acknowledgement that there may be some things I don’t understand about this and about what even happened in my own case.
But it does seem to me that if you’re in the presence of someone who’s superior insight you really have no doubt about, right? So there really is a hierarchy between you and that person that you can feel. This person is, this really is your older brother or sister on the way. And you’re now resolving your uncertainty with them, provided you’re correct about this. And you really are being given good information by someone who really does understand what it’s like to be you and the kinds of things you are going to you are liable to be confused about.
I think it’s quite common. For people to have this insight into nonnduality, into selflessness, into emptiness, depending on how you want to describe it. And for them to, it’s in the beginning. It can be so brief and so ordinary, even, that it’s significance may not be readily apparent. Especially if someone hasn’t spent a lot of time meditating, trying to understand what this whole selflessness business is all about.
And they haven’t lived with the frustration of trying to climb the mountain by the gradual path. Then you give them this glimpse, it may seem like a kind of gimmick, right? Or just trick of the mind that doesn’t really reach very deep. It doesn’t answer existential questions.
As an antidote to all that ails them psychologically. It doesn’t immediately advertise its power. So they have this curious moment of, “Oh, what was that?”
I do believe that many people have had this experience listening to us too and never meeting us and never getting a chance to actually talk to us, face to face. I also would not claim, I would not imagine that I have stabilized this thing to the degree that Tulku Urgyen had. So you know, it’s a less auspicious circumstance. So the thing that I really got from him in that moment was him saying, yeah, that’s it. Don’t get confused.
It would be possible for you to get confused, 10 minutes from now, a year from now that maybe there’s something else to pay attention to. No. This right here is it. Because in the beginning it doesn’t meet all of the tests for a spiritual realization that people might imagine they could put to it if they only were thinking along those lines.
And yet if you continue to explore it, it absolutely does. And so… I think there’s this vulnerable moment at the beginning where you could go either way and, unless you’re someone like. I don’t know who, Milarepa, or somebody who when the first glimpse of nonduality dawns, it just obliterates everything else.
And you’re not distracted again, but that was not to be in my case.
The Three Vital Points
Loch: Yeah, it is a kind of a tender moment. It’s that wobbling in between, kind of finding the ground in your conceptual mind and knowing that, and finding the new view that knows by itself what’s true.
You just reminded me of one of the things that is in this tradition that started at the Garab Dorje, the three vital points. So simplifying this whole thing into these three vital points. First one is [to] directly recognize your true nature. And then number two is decide for yourself that it’s true. But that deciding for yourself is not from your small self, and it’s not from going back to your mind. It’s actually from your true nature. Your true nature knows that it’s true and doesn’t have to refer to a book or a teacher or a scripture or something. And then the third vital point is, proceed with trust in the spontaneous unfolding.
So there is a proceeding, some deliberateness. There is some trust which is built from the other two. But then it is a kind of a continual unknowing and letting go. And it’s not an either or of I’m not awake, I am awake. Or there’s no I to be awake, so there’s no self. So it’s this amazing entry into this new way of being.
And I would say that you mentioned the kind of gradual and direct path, so those… I think that was one of the main things was having been in the more direct path. Scholars call it the constructivist approach of deliberate mindfulness, and then the innatist approach. So all that means is that the reason that something like a pointing out or a glimpse or a turning around in a split-second works is because the awakeness doesn’t need to be constructed or developed. It’s naturally here already.
That’s the first huge difference in what you and I are, what we like as a way of approaching it. Not to say that other, there’s a lot of other approaches, paths, et cetera. But that was true that I had gone up like you and had this– in 20 minutes felt like I did at the end of a 21-day. And it was with eyes opened and felt more embodied, open-hearted, connected, everything was as you say, free of fear, worry and shame.
And yet ordinary kind of ‘oh, this is me without all that neurotic stuff,’ and being dominated by the fearful brain that’s trying to survive and become somebody someday.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, and crucially it was without any basis for striving in a goal-oriented way. You know, there’s this phrase in the Dzogchen teachings which recurs a lot, ‘taking the goal as the path,’ right?
And what that means is, you recognize nondual awareness, Rigpa, and it’s completely unconstructed, unimprovable nature. The translation of Dzogchen is great perfection or great completion, right? So this is, this thing is already perfect. It’s already complete and you’re already identical to it, right?
And you can only think otherwise. So when you’re no longer identified with thought. Once you have recognized awareness in this way and you become mindful right, before you recognize awareness in this way, you can be mindful of the evidence of your unenlightenment, right?
You can be dualistically aware of, ‘Oh, here it’s just still me again, still not a Buddha.’
But once you recognize the nonduality of awareness, then your mindfulness discloses that again. And in each moment of that, there’s no basis to seek it, right? There’s no basis to hope for it in the future. No basis to make a path out of it. There’s just a return to the nature of mind. So the goal becomes the path. And the path of practice at that point becomes a mere enjoyment of the goal. Then your failure to be a Buddha is, perhaps it’s no less galling in the aggregate. But it’s paradoxical in a way that it wasn’t. Because in each moment of looking, you can’t actually find the evidence of your own enlightenment.
The evidence is always a thought about what happened a moment ago, when you weren’t mindful.
Recognizing Awake Awareness
Loch: Yeah, so that in some ways, when you recognize awake awareness, Rigpa, nature of mind, and you’re aware as it, and then you’re aware from it, you don’t need to analyze that things are coming and going and have no stability and that there is no self. It’s like ‘ yeah, of course.’ Because that’s the way that sees when you’re in that view. Then are thoughts coming and going?
And for me, the thing that I started to do is explore a little more of the Mahamudra as a kind of transition from Vipassana, so Sutra Mahamudra. Sutra, so it acknowledges the Sutra tradition. It’s a Mahayana tradition that actually is North Indian, so it’s not owned by Tibetans. But then they took it on and thank goodness they preserved it.
There are a couple more ways to look. So that’s the first looking is to have awareness look back and see the absence, and then see the — not see, but experience the centerlessness, and then to not stop at the absence, but to start to realize there’s an everyday mind or small self, then this subtle mind or subtle body, which is the mindful witness, which, in some ways, is what I call a transitional subject.
You can actually go from small self to mindful witness and say, ‘oh, I can see, I have no self.’
But you’re actually looking at it from this new self, which is a point of view that’s a meditator. So then looking back through that even you realize that there’s no thing. But then where you’re aware from is this Rigpa that has a palpable quality of not just absence or emptiness, but knowing.
And then what the relationship is to aliveness or movement or consciousness as it moves. Is it moving through the awareness, or is it actually arising as the world and as yourself? And what’s called same taste in Mahamudra, seems to be the thing that’s often not talked about in, even more the initial Dzogchen and even the Advaita/Neo-Advaita or the — it’s that move to really feel the nonduality of awareness and aliveness.
That they’re not two, that ultimately, the two truths of Buddhism, the ultimate reality and the relative reality are not two.
Sam: Yeah. I should say one thing about Tulku Urgyen, that I think I always neglect to point out. I always refer to him as a great Dzogchen master, but he obviously was also a Mahamudra lineage holder.
And it was never totally clear to me what was explicitly Dzogchen and what was explicitly Mahamudra in his teaching. Because I’m certainly not a scholar of either tradition, but I’m certainly less of a scholar of Mahamudra.
Because I tend to, when I look at the old texts they tend to be just Dzogchen texts. So he clearly mingled both teachings in a non-sectarian way. And the other thing to say about him, which I’ve said before, for which I really don’t have a good explanation, is that in my experience, and I think this is in the experience of many other people because he was really celebrated for this.
He was just, his style of teaching was so much clearer than that of any other Dzogchen master I met. And, I’m not sure, and so much so that. I left that whole experience, bouncing around Dzogchen masters for five or ten years feeling like I may not have actually understood the practice or gotten the teachings, but for having met Tulku Urgyen.
Like every other Dzogchen master I studied with, even one who I became very close to and who I consider also one of my root teachers, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. I spent much more time with him than I spent with Tulku Urgyen in the end. And he was, every bit as celebrated as a Dzogchen master. But he was really teaching me. He was really just continuing on the basis of what I have learned from Tulku Urgyen and the practice I had established there. And honestly, I don’t think he ever said anything on his own that would have gotten me from zero to one, had I not already been able to do that with Tulku Urgyen. It still would have been just an attitude toward practice, a kind of a nondual attitude would have been encouraged.
And in many cases studying with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, or any of these other great lamas who I had the privilege of meeting and getting teachings from, in many cases, those, the teachings were presented in very symbolic ritualized ways where, there was some empowerment going on and there’s, there’s lots of Tibetan being chanted and some things are being translated.
But not everything’s being translated. And there’s ritual implements being shown. There’s a kind of an invocation of magic that maybe works for somebody. But it’s absent my recognition through the really precise instruction of Tulku Urgyen. I think I would have been still just getting a vibe from all of that and not really been able to practice it.
Loch: Yeah, I agree. I think, and having studied, especially with, yeah, many other Zen and Vipassana and different Dzogchen teachers, it was more, certainly with Dzogchen, trappings of, you call it magic or religion or ritual or kind of being in the club of doing it the way they do it in a way that worked for them. But I think what we’re doing and what worked for us is, understanding the principles. And in some ways, once I got the feel of it and recognized the awareness that was aware of itself, I sat. A lot of what I did is I would, just at that time, a lot of these books were being translated.
So I’d read everything like skim, read it for anything new. But then I’d start practicing. I was actually working in an outpatient clinic in Brooklyn, New York, seeing community psychiatric and people in recovery. And, we’d have about eight clients scheduled a day. But maybe five or six would show up because of other situations or where they had to be. And I would look out the window and start to curiously let awareness show itself to itself and back things up.
Once I realized that awareness has intentionality, meaning not will, of course, but but that you don’t have to do from thought or from the doer that there is, once the awareness is aware, it’s moving, it’s knowing, it’s using your hand, it’s using thought. As in Vipassana, they say that thinking is considered the sixth sense.
It’s not who we are. It’s appearing to this awake consciousness. And then when it starts to look to itself, and show itself, and show, [and] then follow. Okay, how am I going to get re-identified or contracted? Oh, isn’t that interesting? How does the awareness unhook? And look back. Then once it looks back, how does it rest?
Once it rests, what’s the relationship to thought, feeling, sensation? Is it just coming and going? Or what happens when it starts to feel it’s like ocean and wave more than sky and bird? And that ocean and wave started, ah, to drop into this feeling of safety.
So it almost took me out of this existential body-brain relationship, nervous system primacy of scanning for danger and into a Tai chi master view, internally and externally, so that I could respond but I didn’t have to be on alert for survival or looking at any trauma from the past. I had this capacity to be with whatever was here. Then I’d just be curious about the relationship to what arose and what’s it made of. So you know, almost an inner Dharma starts to show itself once you curiously shift from a mindful meditator to an awake awareness, or Rigpa based-view.
Sam: It’s in that brief span, less than a second, at least initially, where you can see that there is no one, that you are not on the edge of experience looking in, or you’re not on the edge of your life appropriating experience. There is just experience without center. Again, so it’s always available, no matter what was arising a second ago. Therefore it doesn’t, in principle, require any buildup or continuity of mindfulness or anything else to get there, right? It’s already the way consciousness is. So you’re not improving anything by having had a great meditative experience for the last 45 minutes.
Again, it’s orthogonal to the contents of consciousness. It’s not improved by the vastness of a psychedelic experience. And it’s not actually cramped or degraded by the contraction of a neurotic experience. Like you could be as neurotic as you want up until this moment. Then you look for the center, and there is none.
So the energy of neurosis doesn’t even have to dissipate. Although it will, if you keep doing that. It will, because you’re no longer creating the circumstances for it to arise subsequently. But your freedom from neurosis isn’t predicated upon the energy, the physiology of your contraction, whether it was anger or sadness or embarrassment or whatever it was.
Your freedom isn’t predicated on that dissipating suddenly, right? Because even in the midst of that energy, you can recognize there’s no center and no one to be captured by the energy that’s there. People who are, there are various cohorts of people we’re talking to now.
There are the people who don’t have the foggiest idea of what we’re talking about. And they’ve probably stopped listening. Then the people who are desperate to understand what we’re talking about and are frustrated. They know they haven’t had this experience or they’re uncertain about whether they’ve had it and they’re struggling to have it.
They want to get this thing and now we’re leading them in circles around it. Then there’s the people who’ve had it and they’re just working out its implications. And I would say for this second group, the frustrated, you know all I can say is that it’s a twofold message. One, your frustration is just another mind state for you to be mindful of right? It’s just there’s no reason to succumb to that, or to prolong that just recognize it and let it go.
But conversely you shouldn’t be satisfied with your meditation practice until you really are satisfied with it, right? Like there’s a reason to be dissatisfied with a dualistic, goal-oriented practice where you can’t actually savor the fruits of freedom as your practice. And so I would count– again, this seems somewhat paradoxical: but it really is a twofold piece of advice. One is, don’t be frustrated. On one level, this is what your life is for to work out this riddle. And it’s a fantastic thing to be paying attention to.
And there’s no — on some level, there’s no rush. Just enjoy this process. And what’s more, recognize that impatience and frustration and all of that and feelings of effort that point nowhere, all of that is just more thought and mental phenomenon that you can just let go of.
There’s nothing to do, but notice your thinking and come back to mindfulness. Don’t short circuit this process. Because the frustration is useful in that, there really is a there. And you shouldn’t be satisfied until you’ve clarified this experience for yourself.
Loch: In the Mahamudra, the step before that is, there’s actually no experience, there’s awareness, contentless, timeless, free, centerless. If awareness looks to itself, it has no boundary, no center, but it’s equally inside and out. It’s what’s clear and empty, and then it arises as aliveness or experience.
Sam: So what are you saying when you say that there’s no content or there’s no experience? What does that mean in the context of having your eyes open and seeing the sky and the trees and hearing? It’s that we’re not talking about a cessation experience where the lights go out, so…
Loch: No, it means that consciousness that is perceiving is, the definition of Rigpa, which is awareness that’s empty in a sense that it is not made of anything. There’s that which comes and goes and that which is the nature of mind is empty, clear light. And that’s a kind of a radical statement. But that view that it has clarity and knowingness that’s prior to thought, that isn’t made of thought, even though there’s arising contents, whether your eyes are open or closed, that the perceiving has a samsara and nirvana perception, that it’s dharmakaya. They call it dharmakaya, is pure. Then sambhogakaya is energy and experience. And then nirmanakaya is the normal everyday reality.
But that dharmakaya rigpa, when people, that’s where a lot of the Advaita Vedanta people hang out, as if that’s the end goal, not experience, but Pure awareness. Then the Mahamudra goes to that, and then recognizes it has the same taste as experience. And that’s what drops you in, is when it’s not just pulling back to be aware of experience or emptying to be aware of experience, as if experience is an object to whom, what’s the relationship to experience.
You’re aware from experience is actually the arising everywhere as dancing emptiness, or dancing awareness, there’s not a second thing called experience. When you say experience, you may very well mean what’s called simultaneous mind.
Sam: Yeah, when I say experience, I’m not differentiating it as a separate layer beyond just the unity of awareness and its contents, right?
Loch: Yeah, so that’s the key is that is such a different experience than a mindful witness looking at contents.
Sam: Yeah. And so the way I have summarized this elsewhere is that it’s very easy to – when you’re practicing mindfulness in whatever tradition, this might have been what you were talking about with Advaita a moment ago — it’s easy to assume a kind of witness position where, however unimplicated in what’s being witnessed, we can begin to feel like [we’re] on the edge of the river of consciousness watching the contents flow by. But you’re not on the riverbank. You are the river, right? There is just the river.
Loch: That’s what we’re talking about, the same thing.
Sam: I think there’s this deeper issue of it being possible to emphasize the cognizant versus the empty quality of this thing.
So you can get biased toward the emptiness side where there’s nothing and nothing concrete, nothing is independently inherently existing. And there’s just this dreamlike condition of appearances and you, however subtly, I feel like there are concepts intruding there where you’re you’re amplifying or advertising the insubstantiality of things for yourself by you know covertly asserting that this is the way things are and you know conversely you can be emphasizing the cognizance, the knowing quality. That’s what’s real.
That’s what you are. And this, I think that’s what you’re saying with respect to the Advaita approach. And some version of that gets you an experience of oneness as opposed to an experience of emptiness, right? Like it’s not that either from the Dzogchen point of view, it’s not one and it’s not two.
But it’s not one because there’s no center, there’s nothing to reify, there’s nothing concrete about it, and it’s not just one because there’s a multiplicity of everything. Everything still appears in all its diversity.
Loch: And it’s not nothing, yeah.
Sam: And it’s not nothing, yes. But it’s also not, it’s not many things because there is only this condition of appearance.
Loch: Yeah, it’s all-at-once-ness. So Tsoknyi Rinpoche describes, he says there has to be the three qualities of the nature of mind are empty essence, awake clarity and compassionate activity or unimpededness. So I think that there, for me, it’s not an either or, it’s a three for a full awakening.
Natural Loving Kindness
You have to have that. And when you drop into that, for me, having worked with a lot of people who have this anxiety and sleeplessness, the way I work with it is to go to the root existential anxiety, which is the sense of self. But that once you realize no self, if you just stay there in deconstructing it, you can get flooded.
Willoughby Britton’s study– because you’ve deconstructed the ego defenses, the conscience, the superego, but that when awareness recognizes itself as aliveness, empty clarity, unimpeded activity, there’s this dropping into this sense of basic goodness or okayness or ground to being, bodhicitta, and there’s no anxiety there.
There’s like a sense of both being a unique, human being that has stuff that’s not working so well or disappointment or fears. But it’s the root, the ground is existentially, that suffering is plucked away at the root. And then this, what they say is, that the true nature is the alleviating of suffering and the flourishing of positive qualities.
So that positive quality isn’t really like a quality. But it is like natural loving kindness, natural compassion, natural feeling of not being separate, of being interdependent, as you say, not separate, but not interdependent, which is really the emptiness experience. And I think that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about awakeness and experience.
Sam: Yeah, the Buddhists will hate this, but it does strike me as pretty similar to the Hindu yogic concept of Satcitananda, “Sat”, being, consciousness, bliss. Absolutely. Those are the three faces of the jewel of the capital S self, right?
The nondual self which is what you’re describing there is interesting. And I think it is. Is something that probably comes more and more with practice, the sense of the feeling tone is, it’s not the loss of self, the loss of center, it’s not just a negative achievement, right? There is a feeling quality to what remains that one can be more and more sensitive to.
And it’s not just that you’re no longer suffering from that thought you had a moment ago and no longer identified with this cramp of self, right? There’s what’s left. And what’s left actually by sheer good luck seems to preferentially allow for compassion and love and ease of being and positive characteristics. It’s not like you’re getting flooded with terror as a result of this insight. It’s sweet.
Loch: If you just do – that’s the thing is almost like giving the full map right away. Even though it will unfold for people in different ways, but mentioning the emptiness, empty essence, clarity of knowing and the compassionate expression.
So even if they don’t feel it right away, you move, as you said, the goal is the path. So you introduce the end. When you glimpse, you can get at least the ground quality of it that takes you out of dysregulation of your body-mind being primary in terms of interpreting results. And that’s what throws people into anxiety is this dysregulation going up into hyperarousal, fight or flight, or down into dysregulation into freeze or hypoarousal, their system is dominated by mind and nervous system and body.
And when you relieve it from this center, but give it a new operating system, then you feel grounded and relaxed and connected and curious and able to allow these, the Brahmaviharas, which are supposedly the houses of the divine, the loving kindness,
Sam: Compassion.
Loch: Equanimity, yeah.
Sam: Sympathetic joy.
Loch: Yeah, joy.
Sam: Yeah, I feel that the suffering that could possibly attend an insight into selflessness is still born of thinking about it in the next moment. There’s this kind of fragmentation experience that people have. They have some experience of, let’s say, groundlessness. They feel like there’s no core to the mind. But then they’re immediately identified with a thought about why that’s so scary, or why that’s a bad thing. The reason why I think there’s– correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not– I don’t have your clinical experience at all so I’m not, this is just based on my thinking about it, but there’s some percentage of people who feel quite destabilized by my argument against free will.
So this is not a meditative exercise. This is just me saying that, here’s why the concept of free will doesn’t make any sense. And I push hard enough on that door and for some percentage of people, they feel pretty unnerved by the implications of this argument and so much so that I now issued disclaimers.
Whenever I talk about free will, I say, listen, if any, if at any point along the way here, what I’m saying begins to feel like it’s not good for you, then by all means change the channel. But I think it’s, I think, the sense of free will is really the other side of the coin of the sense of self.
There really is, it’s just, there’s just one coin here and it’s got. Two sides you might emphasize. When you’re talking about people having a glimpse of selflessness and then feeling lousy, some flavor of lousy, I do think, or at least I imagine, that they must be captured by their thoughts about something.
Oh my god. Wait a minute. What there’s no self that how it’s more than who. You know, they’re still talking to themselves on some level. And they’re not noticing that and how that is producing the anxiety and the discombobulation.
Loch: Yeah, it’s like the protective system Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps The Score.
They’re not thinking about it. But when the protective system or the ego defenses are dissolved, when that job of the doer or the problem solver or the me is just taken away, there’s no will, there’s nothing, then either the protective system comes in and ” danger!”, or the unconscious in more of the deconstruction that Willoughby Britton discovered. It just allows repressed contents to flood the system that have been kept there by this small self. So to upgrade immediately with the goal is the path that it’s less dangerous to do direct path if you really point out the clarity and the embodied same taste and the interconnected feeling that has capacity to be with what is arising and can titrate it if needed, if it needs to calm down, or then it can go. That’s why small glimpses are a good approach for people.
I don’t know if you want… Let me [do] like a short little series of shifts and then you can comment on it.
Sam: Sure. Yeah.
Inquiry Practice
Loch: So this is one that some people know who know me and it’s an inquiry. So the presentation is pretty much what we’ve been talking about, which is that the current sense of small self tends to feel like it’s in our head. It is operating from conditioning that is trying to be safe and trying to be helpful. But it’s limited to the body mind. It’s contracted, and it’s searching for safety through solving problems, looking for problems. So it’s not just the ego center, but it’s also the metacognitive checker that’s also looking.
So they’re both looking for problems and trying to be safe. But they’re staying within this small body mind world subject object. The premise is, if there’s an awake consciousness that’s non thought based but is here, that may be revealed, then just see what you find. The series of pointers goes like this, that people can try. So it’s an inquiry that you can understand with your mind. But then as the problem solving energy or pattern begins to relax, notice what’s aware, and then let the awareness make these shifts.
So the first inquiry is, what’s here now when there’s no problem to solve?
Just let that be understood with your mind. Feel what it’s like, just for now, to relax the problem solver, and then just be aware of what is here and what’s aware when you don’t refer to thought.
And then just notice what’s it like to be aware of this and what’s it like to rest as this awareness.
Just notice if the awareness has any boundary, color, shape, whether it’s equally inside and out.
And notice if there’s a clarity or alertness that could respond if needed.
And then just curiously, as this awareness, notice whether it needs to orient, or use thought, allow the first movement or energy.
Or curiously notice when the first thought or sensation arises, whether it’s moving through the space or is it arising like a movement of the awareness. So what’s the relationship of this open mind, this open awareness and aliveness sensation, your body and the world?
And then just notice where are you aware from?
If you don’t go back to that point of view in your head, or even a mindful witness, what’s it like to be aware from centerlessness that is equally everywhere, nowhere, and here.
And see if you can find a ground-quality or some way to orient toward ‘this is my mind, this is awareness.’ Find [this] natural, spontaneous, effortless mindfulness from this other level of mind.
And then welcome all experience. Feel like there’s a little welcoming. How do you feel toward thoughts or parts of you that arise, or the room, if there’s a little okayness or well being or feeling tone, that’s not a normal emotion, but is a natural sense of fabric of reality.
So empty essence, clarity, and unimpeded capacity to respond.
So from here you could move your hand or you could say, I am thinking this thought and then let it go.
And who is the I? Where are you aware from? What’s this sense of being?
That’s walking through the different pointers or dimensions of each of the movements of recognition, realization as emptiness, clarity, interdependence, pointers that are very simple but can be uncovered just by pointing or glimpsing. Yeah.
Sam: I love that approach. The first thing you did at the beginning, the reflection, what is here when there’s no problem to solve that does something interesting psychologically.
And for a moment, I was trying to intuit the structure of that because it has its desired effect. And I think one Vipassana way of thinking about it is that what it does is it puts you in a state of non-clinging, right? Because most people who are just getting ready to meditate, okay, now we’re doing something. Okay. I’m closing my eyes and lock is talking to me and now I’m going to get somewhere. And then you say what is here when there’s no problem to solve. You’re inviting the mind to relax its meddling efforts to change anything at all, right? So you’re not trying to get rid of the discomfort in your head or your back.
You’re not trying to improve or correct or amplify or diminish anything. Is that by definition, all of that is you trying to solve some sort of problem. What’s the problem with just this everything left on its own to do whatever it’s going to do. And so that just following the, the angle, the intended angle of what is implied there, the mind just comes right into balance and you’re just open awareness. So it’s a very nice way to start. And then, personally, I just find myself dropping into, Rigpa practice there. Because I can’t– the thing that happens, once you actually know how to practice nonndual mindfulness, you can’t practice dualistic mindfulness.
Like you can’t, because the moment you try, it just, it’s like saying, don’t be mindful, that’s the same thing as saying, be mindful.
Loch: Try to do nothing. Yeah, so you just go right down the chutes and ladders.
Sam: Just drop all the way down the stack from there. But the picture of the mind you were building up is something that definitely works for me, which is the recognition that there’s nothing precious or cloistered about this intuition of emptiness that needs to be defended from the energy of life. It’s almost as the first time I’ve thought about this, but it strikes me as somewhat similar to the Dzogchen instruction, which I think usually comes under the rubric of like a Rushen practice where you’re at some point it took Tulku Urgyen would say this, and I think Tsoknyi must also give this instruction, that you just have to break your meditation.
If you’re luxuriating in the classically meditative state of mind where it’s feeling blissful and like the gooey center at the center of the tootsie pop of meditation. And you’re, ‘ah, finally, this is it.’
That’s the moment where you’re meant to recognize that no, none of that’s it. Those are transitory changes in the physiology of your body based on what you’re doing, right? This is going to go away in five minutes. So just break this and recognize that this very state of nondual insight can be expressed in perfectly ordinary energetic states. Like at this moment, from this frame of mind, you could also just jump up and check your email.
Like there is nothing else by which you would check your email. But consciousness itself–
Loch: From here. Yeah. And you could operate from both, from the both-and. You don’t have to, like in a meditation state, feel this, and then have to break it. Meaning, ‘Oh, now I have to go back to my thinking mind and the problem solver in order to answer my email.’
It’s actually not like escaping the problem or the problem solver. It’s upgrading the problem solver to being. And then you can do from being without having to contract into a thinker or a manager. So you’re optimally relating. And, once you familiarize, so that’s the wonderful translation of the word meditation, gom in Tibetan is familiarize.
So once you recognize and realize, then you just familiarize. Then you lose it, no big surprise, just re-recognize, and realize, and familiarize. So it’s a lot of “ize” in there, but–
Sam: Yeah, we need t-shirts printed.
Loch: Right? Or at least, magnets for the refrigerator.
Great. Wonderful.
Sam: Nice to speak with you again, Loch.
Loch: Yeah, wonderful to be in contact and I really value having a colleague and being on this journey together and being able to share back and forth and share with other people who are interested in this approach. And I think it’s really unfolding in a way that’s very beneficial to many people.
So I’m glad we’re able to speak and share all this.
Sam: Yeah, likewise. And thanks again for everything you’ve contributed to Waking Up. I know people have gotten tremendous value from your guided meditations and I know people are really loving what you’re giving there.
Loch: Yeah. Thanks so much, Sam. Yeah, it’s really great. Look forward to meeting in person someday soon.
Sam: Yeah. Likewise.
Loch: Thanks for listening. This podcast is offered freely, and if you’ve enjoyed this, please download the free trial of our new app at mindfulglimpses.com. There we offer daily micro meditations and in-depth programs to support your awakening.
