WHAT IS DZOGCHEN?
When you hear or read about Dzogchen, think that it is about yourself. The Great Perfection means that your essence is primordially perfect in itself.
Dzogchen [dzog chen] literally translates as: [dzog] "perfection," "achievement," or "realization" which is [chen] "complete," "great"; that is, it means "complete totality," "the great fullness," or "the great perfection." Thanks to these teachings, many great Masters have achieved what is known as the "rainbow body" because
Dzogchen is the supreme and direct path to realization and the path of self- liberation—in a single lifetime—from the illusory cycle of samsaric transmigration.
When you hear or read about Dzogchen, think that it is about yourself. Think of the Great Perfection, which means that your essence is primordially perfect in itself. The Great Perfection refers largely to the essence of humanity, the essence of the individual. And although you sometimes feel: "I am getting old, I have this knee pain, my head hurts, I have this confusion," despite all this, you can still think: "I am the great perfection."
The Dzogchen path is a journey to the center, it is a path to the essence and the source; it is not a philosophy or a religion: it is a journey to oneself.
Generally, we say that the essence is beyond anything; it is beyond concepts, words, philosophies, and religions.
You can think about yourself and how you experience yourself; you can reflect on this by asking yourself: "How do I experience myself?" Another question would be: "Am I experiencing what I truly am?" When you decide to find yourself, you are embarking on your spiritual path. But what do we mean by this? What do we understand by a spiritual path? What is your goal, what is your plan? You want to be free, to recognize the essence, to reconnect with it, to remain there, and to continue.
When you hear the words: "You are going to meditate, try to relax," you change something: you modify your posture, and then something changes. You have the idea that you must relax and that something must change, that this is the time to follow your spiritual path, and that you must modify many things. What you are saying is that you have to go somewhere to find yourself, and that is not the Dzogchen approach.
In Dzogchen, different means are introduced to recognize ourselves, and it is said that this recognition comes through experience. Without experience, it would be very difficult to recognize ourselves. Even self-recognition is an experience. Every time we talk about meditation, we are talking about experience because that is all there is: everything is experience.
In principle, it would make no sense to have experiences if we had no connection to the one having the experience.
No matter how incredible the experience, it is not what counts; what counts is who has it.
When the master introduces you to the natural state of the mind, he asks you about your experience of it: whether the nature of the mind has a shape or color or a precise location; then he asks about the origin and nature of thought: where thought arises, where it remains, and where it dissolves, and who observes the thought. He might ask: "Who are you?" or "What is your mind? Does it have a color or a shape?" or "Where do your thoughts come from?" without even suggesting an answer. Only when you have achieved deep understanding through your own experience does the master show you the nature of the mind, directly pointing to the knowledge you have acquired through your own experience, and gives you an explanation about kunzhi* (the basis) and rigpa* (awakened consciousness) and their inseparability in the primordial state. In this way, your understanding will be clear and real, since what the master explains and clarifies is the knowledge that you yourself have acquired through your own direct experience. The master does not introduce his own concept, nor something that you yourself have not experienced (that would produce merely intellectual understanding); he introduces you to that which you have already found within yourself.
It is necessary for you yourself to have this direct experience, and the surest way to have it is to practice zhiné. Otherwise, it is very easy to have intellectual fantasies about the nature of the primordial state, about "emptiness," "clarity," "light," "supreme joy," and so on. When you access the natural state through the practice of zhiné, you can understand it completely and are able to enter and remain in the state of contemplation. That is trekchöd, one of the two main Dzogchen practices.
In Dzogchen, there are four ways of introduction to the natural state of the mind:
Through the senses. Through memories. Through thoughts. Through emotions. Observe these four experiences, which are all you can have at this moment. To do this, ask yourself: "What am I hearing? What am I seeing? What am I remembering? What am I thinking? And what am I feeling?" and connect with all those things.
Each of these ways is a door, and that door can function in two directions: as an entrance or an exit. In your daily life, experiences, especially if they are intense like emotional experiences—attachments, envy, fear—are almost always used to exit, that is, to move away from yourself; the moment you have the experience, you forget that it is connected to the one having the experience. The perception of your true nature is obscured by the intensity of the experience, and you completely lose yourself.