Typically, there are those things on one list of what is nice and pleasant and spiritual or “good meditation.” And then there’s the other list. And there’s a feeling that what we need is to take what’s over here and change it to what’s over there on the better list. When it doesn’t work, we can get caught in a layer deeper of distress. That hurts.
We’re taking some aspect of ourselves, some aspect of our experience, and saying, “Go away. You’re not allowed into the altogether party.” And I’m actually not even gonna look into my own experience and see the altogether party while you’re around. I’ll wait until you go away first or fix yourself first, and then I’ll look, because then I feel like I’ll find something good and together and nice. As Patrul Rinpoche says, “This is not the genuine view; it is favouring the good and rejecting the bad.”
But what if, underneath it all, instead of that kind of existential, fundamental striving, there can be more of this trust that everything, every arising, shares the same nature? The great party. The great together interdependent arising party. And when we let ourselves settle directly into the very nature of whatever is arising, it doesn’t change it. It was all already always that way. And yet our experience of it can shift. It’s the non-shift shift.
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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