What’s so truly amazing as a sentient being, a human being, is that the flows that make up us, the flows that help give rise to our own unique experiences and feelings and perceptions, and even mental activity and mind — are flows that carry content. And yet are also at the same time are pure flow of nature, unfolding altogether in nature in this fine-free-yet-together way. So the bit of a leap that we embark on today is — what is it like to simply settle directly into perception? Whatever the content of perception, there’s that underlying togetherness as a flow of nature. And we get to settle directly into that underlying nature. It is not separate from the content. Even so, it is unconditional. No matter what the content, and no matter what we feel about the content, still a flow.
What is it like to simply settle directly into the flow of perception? We start with sound — and wonder where would we go to simply settle directly into the receiving of sound? Patrul Rinpoche speaks of not seeking outside and not turning inward to look either. We can bathe in the flowing altogether experience of silence and space and sounds. Nothing to grasp outwardly or inwardly. Nothing to seek.
Simply Settle Series: A Practice That’s Not a Doing
Two words from Patrul Rinpoche’s Self-Liberating Meditation — simply settle — so resonated for me. Not from the perspective of a Dzogchen practitioner — I’m not one. More like hearing a piece of music where I couldn’t begin to know the mind of the composer, but I can share what it evokes in me.
What it evokes comes from over ten years of Taoist practice with Master Wonchull Park, who is also a physicist. He always starts with what is immediate, tangible, and in a way universal. And I needed that. I had such a tendency to over-try, to over-control, to really just torture myself with pretty much any practice. One of the practices that first opened up for me was something so basic — laying down to the ground. It gives me a starting place where I can know that way of nature is there. As much weight as I give the ground, the ground is going to hold me up. I don’t have to search for it, make it, go someplace else for it. I just get out of my own way and simply settle into the support that’s there. As Master Park says, it’s already laid down reality.
So this series takes that tangible metaphor as its starting place and asks — what else is a way of nature we can simply “lay down” to? What else could we simply settle into without having to create it, cultivate it, or alter it in any way, as Patrul Rinpoche says? From laying our physical body upon the earth to simply settling into the flow of nature, we can come to know a direction in practice that’s not toward what should be but is simply is-ward. A practice that’s not a doing. And then wondering what it would be like to apply that to both thinking and non-thinking, to the nature of mind itself, to whatever is arising in our experience.
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