I am not saying that when you have accomplished this kind of skillfulness, it is your highest achievement. The point is that you can do it. Maha ati is not so far from us. In fact, you behave in a maha-ati-like style all the time, not realizing it and not wanting to commit yourself to it. There is maha-ati-like mentality and maha-ati-like intuition and maha-ati-like perception going on in your state of mind that can be related to and worked with. We are not saying that you should be able to emanate buddhas and bodhisattvas from the pores of your skin, but we are talking about something very real. The realism of maha ati is enormously fantastic, and it is true.
Maha ati is the greatest teaching that one could ever think of. It actually makes sense. It is true without any fabrications of formal language. That is why maha ati is said to be closest to the heart of samsaric mind, and that is why maha ati is the end of the journey as well as the highest attainment.
MAHA ATI PRACTICE AS THE FINAL TEST
The practice of maha ati seems to be the final test. Maha ati is the way to attain enlightenment in one’s lifetime. It is a very concrete way of doing so, in fact. It is known that people have done this in half a lifetime, and even in just twelve years. The traditional anuttarayoga retreat practice of the six yogas of Naropa is designed to be completed in three years, three months, and three days. The idea is that if you actually pay enough attention in all those three years, three months, and three days, without being distracted by any external phenomena, you could end up enlightened.
In the case of maha ati, a time period such as twelve years does not refer so much to concentration, but to the actual heavy-handedness of the phenomenal world, which occurs when you see the phenomenal world according to what has been prescribed in the three categories of maha ati tantra.
The point of talking about all these practices is that maha ati is still a path. It is fantastic that maha ati people talk about practice. We should be thankful, because they might not have talked about practice at all, which would be embarrassing and not very kind. It would be like saying that those who have it, have it, and those who don’t, don’t know anything. Talking about practice means that maha ati masters bothered to think of other people. They thought about how we could do it as well. And beyond formal practice, there is also the meditation-in-action quality of living everyday life from the maha ati perspective of spaciousness and openness.
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Atiyoga: Heightened Experience
You have neither gone, nor have you come: the journey is here. That is journey, from the point of view of the maha ati tradition. You are not advancing toward anything at all, but you are advancing here, on the spot. There is nothing to be lost and nothing to be gained. You are here! Right in this very moment!
FOUR STAGES OF HEIGHTENING
In the main maha ati experience, or men-ngag gi de, there are four levels or four stages of heightening: seeing dharmata as real, increasing the nyam, insight reaching its full measure, and dharmata being all used up.1
These four levels are not purely experiences that you are going to arrive at, but they are the journey itself. The four stages of heightening in the maha ati tradition correlate somewhat to the four yogas of mahamudra. Progressing through these stages does not really mean that you are becoming better—that you are becoming a better magician, a better salesperson, or a better professor. They are simply stages of mind that you go through.
Basically speaking, we have a problem dealing with the phenomenal world. That is why we go to whorehouses or join the Mafia. It is why we check ourselves into the army and why we eat in a Dairy Queen. It is why we check ourselves into a Sheraton Hotel. Moreover, it is why we take a shower, why we shave, and why we comb our hair. It is the reason we take an airplane or a train. It is why we are sitting here.
But as you go through the four stages of dzokchen, you begin to deal with the phenomenal world properly, in a precise way. All four are based on the notion of bringing samsara and nirvana together from the point of view of practice. So they are working on the practitioner’s level, which comes out of shamatha-vipashyana discipline, together with some kind of basic vajrayana understanding.
Seeing Dharmata as Real
The first stage of heightening is realizing dharmata as it is, or seeing dharmata as real. In Tibetan it is chönyi ngönsum. Chö means “dharma,” nyi means “itself,” and ngönsum means “real”; so chönyi ngönsum means “real dharmata.”
At this stage, you let go of yourself and see real dharmata. Chönyi ngönsum is the intelligence of nonexistence. It is a sort of shunyata experience, where “I” and “other” cease to exist. The Sanskrit word for chönyi is dharmata, which means “isness,” “so-ness,” or “what is so.” Isness is the basic term that we use; but in terms of experience, we might call it “what is so.”
Dharma, in this case, refers to any phenomenon or norm that occurs in your mind. It has nothing to do with the Buddhist dharma; it is the dharma of the whole world. So at this stage, mind-made conceptualizations are regarded as a working base. Since there is enormous space everywhere, the consciousness of samsara and the consciousness of nirvana are no longer problems. There is just dharma-ness, or dharmata, seen as basic simplicity.
Dharmata is whatever arises as the product of nonmeditation. With nonmeditation, we begin to see dharmata in reality. At the maha ati level, this is regarded as the first step of concentration. Nonmeditation is free from the sophistries of both postmeditation and sitting meditation, but it is still our path; it is still being maintained by awareness. So even that accomplishment has to become awareness practice.
When you see a particular perception precisely, you begin to appreciate the process of cultivation that you have gone through. You realize that by means of shamatha-vipashyana, you have begun to experience reality. At the maha ati stage, you begin to experience a natural state of wakefulness. You experience that red is red, blue is blue, orange is orange, and white is white. You feel that your ayatanas are beginning to rise to a different level, a different state of being. There is a sense of being there precisely, a sense of awake. You might be woken up by the sunshine coming through the window, and even if you have lots of shades and curtains, you still wake up, because it is daylight. In fact, it is daylight now! That is why I say, “Good morning!” It is awake and precise.
You might already have experienced vividness, brilliance, and a sense of accomplishment, but at this point you realize that your experience is becoming more natural and alive. You are able to feel more deeply the fluidity of water, the burning of fire, the blowing of wind, the solidity of earth, and the accommodation of space. The experiences of passion, aggression, ignorance, and the other emotions, as well as anything that you experience through touch, smell, hearing, and the other senses, are more real and direct. Everything becomes so real and direct that it is almost at the level of being irritatingly too real. It is like feeling texture without skin on your fingertips. This experience is neither a threat nor a confirmation; it is just rawness. Ultimate rawness takes place.
Increasing the Nyam
Out of that ultimate rawness comes the second stage of dzokchen. In Tibetan this is called nyam kongphel. Nyam means “temporary experience,” kong means “further,” and phel means “expanding” or “developing”; so nyam kongphel means “temporary experiences expanding further” or “increasing the nyam.”
When you experience such rawness and ruggedness, such brilliance and precision, that experience is no longer subject to kleshas, hang-ups, or memories of any kind. So the temporary experiences of bliss, clarity, and nonthought begin to expand. You might feel an upsurge of energy in your practice, a great upsurge of power.
The reason these experiences expand is due to the nakedness of the first stage of the journey, because dharmata is regarded as real. By maturing to this level, your experiences begin to develop and to become proper and fearless. The rock that you have seen a hundred times begins to become rocklessness; the pond that you have seen before begins to
become pondlessness. But this is not just negation; out of that experience, you begin to develop a feeling of tremendous expansion. Any experiences that come along with meditation or postmeditation are regarded as an expansion of your own perception of the phenomenal world. Perception is the gateway. You develop a kind of sense perception of realization, of liberating yourself from the whole thing.
Increasing the nyam could be regarded as increasing delusion or confusion, but increasing delusion, confusion, aggression, passion, and whatever else goes on in your mind is also a part of the path. At this level, you do not judge your experiences. You do not say, “Now I am having a good experience” and “Now that particular experience is dwindling.” The phenomenal world is seen as a natural process rather than an attack or an encouragement. So by increasing the nyam, you are taking an enormous step. You are developing more, rather than regressing.
Insight Reaching Its Full Measure
The third stage in the dzokchen journey is rikpa tsephep. Rikpa is “insight,” tsephep means “come to life,” “become aged,” or “finally coincide,” tse means “measure,” and phep is “arriving” or “reaching”; so rikpa tsephep means “insight reaching its full measure.”
Rikpa is an interesting term, and difficult to translate. “Insight” seems to be the closest definition. Rikpa means that whatever you see is very clear, appropriate, precise, sharp, and luminous. There is the rikpa of eating food, which makes you fulfill your belly. There is the rikpa of riding, which makes you feel the gloriousness and gallantry of horseback riding. And when you have the rikpa of making love to somebody, there is a sense of fulfillment.
“Insight reaching its full measure” means that you are not shooting beyond what you want, or shooting too close to what you want. You are simply becoming a good citizen. Natural phenomena have been considered, the kleshas and other natural energies and processes have been considered; therefore you are there. So your insight has matured, basically speaking.
Here, insight means the great brilliance and luminosity that you have experienced as a result of your long journey of shamatha-vipashyana discipline. It also refers to the four yogas of mahamudra that you have already experienced. Insight means that you have realized all of that, and you have also seen dharmata as real and realized that your temporary experiences of bliss, emptiness, and nonthought are expanding.
As a result of all that, in rikpa tsephep your experience of this and that becomes further nonduality. This could be correlated to one taste; it is the higher level of one taste. Anything that provides any duality at all, including intellect, cognitive mind, responsive mind, mind of enthusiasm toward the world, mind of hesitation toward threats, mind that is pleasure-oriented and indulgent, mind that is giving birth and having the desire to give birth, mind having a sense of doing something, mind of sorting out this and that, mind of separating the synchronization of body and mind just in case there was any pleasure that we missed—all of that begins to change. Day and night, sweet and sour, hot and cold—any perception or realization of cognitive mind begins to reach a level where its intelligence, beauty, and goodness are kept, but its neurosis and its judgmental quality, and its back-and-forth journey between reference points, begins to be exhausted. Therefore, we say that insight has finally come to its conclusion, which is cosmic decency.
We really begin to separate dogma from insight here. This is the complete stripping away of all dogma. At this point, we begin to realize that the conventional idea of the trikaya—the dharmakaya as all-encompassing space, the nirmanakaya as the body of manifestation, and the sambhogakaya as the body of bliss—is a trip, a man-made notion. Those experiences begin to become tortoiseshells rather than the tortoise itself. The multidimensionality of spiritual materialism is finally seen through. At the same time, we see that destroying spiritual materialism is itself a form of spiritual materialism—and destroying that destroying is spiritual materialism as well. Finally we begin to see that even the idea of destroying spiritual materialism or cutting through becomes questionable.
Dharmata Being All Used Up
Number four, the last stage of the dzokchen journey, is chönyi sesa. Chönyi is “dharmata” or “dharma-ness,” se means “used up” or “exhausted,” and sa means “bhumi” or “place”; so chönyi sesa means the “place or state where dharmata is used up or exhausted.” Any realization, any attainment or experience of attainment, any experience of a higher level, any flash, any good glimpse of buddha nature—all of that is exhausted.
At this stage, dharmas are worn-out, wasted, used up. Dharmata, which we so cherished, has been used up. You think that dharmata is “Wow! It’s a great thing!” But then finally, you lose your heart. You give up your heart, your heart has been worn out, but that is the best thing you can do. When your heart has been worn out, and there is still a continuity of intelligence, there is nothing better than that! This does not provide you with any process of communication. There is not too much claustrophobia, nor too much liberation or freedom. It is very natural. When you let go more, you come back more—but in this case, you are letting go of both of those situations. That is the ti of ati, the ultimate of the ultimate.
If you experience things as they are properly, fully, and thoroughly, as I like to say, then that is dharmata: things as they are. But at the level of chönyi sesa, even that experience begins to be worn-out. So chönyi sesa is the stage when you have worn out even ultimate discoveries. This may be somewhat hard to believe, but it does happen, and you have to get to that stage.
At this point, the good experience of künshi ngangluk kyi gewa, or the natural virtue of alaya, which you were cultivating so dearly at an earlier level, at the level of resting your mind in alaya, is exhausted. Your attempt to cultivate relative bodhichitta is also exhausted. Trying to attain nonmeditation by overcoming the sophistries of this and that and thinking you have attained something is also exhausted. Journey becomes fruition, and fruition is journey. You have come a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle back to square one.
This is the highest level in the vajrayana discipline of maha ati. It is called the maha ati state. There are techniques and disciplines to accomplish this, of course, but we are talking in terms of sampannakrama, the actual meditative discipline that you go through on this journey so that all dharmas and their understandings, including enlightenment itself, are used up.
When we reach this level, we do not just stay breathless or bankrupt. A lot of energy, power, and strength begins to develop, and we gain what is known as the bird’s-eye view of samsara and of those who are suffering. We come down from our high horse, and we are more capable, because we are not bound by even the concept of liberation. We become great people who are capable of saving sentient beings.
You develop greater pain and greater sadness because you realize that there are millions, billions, and trillions of others who have not seen even a portion, a glimpse, or a hairline of the dharma. Because you feel greater pain, when you die, you automatically come back and take human form again. At this point, you are free from karmic volitional action and karmic debts, so you volunteer. You naturally come back, and you work harder for the sake of others because you can afford to do so. There is no motivation, or even planning, which could create obstacles. Instead, everything becomes a natural process. You naturally return, you come back, and that gives you strength to help others.
TWO TYPES OF CONFIDENCE. In the wearing out of dharmata experience, the wearing out of achievement, two types of confidence arise: nirvanic confidence, or yargyi sangthal; and samsaric confidence, or margyi sangthal. Yar is “upward” and is connected with nirvana, and sangthal means “confidence”; so yargyi sangthal is “upward confidence.” Mar is “downward” and is connected with samsara; so margyi sangthal is “downward confidence.”
The first confidence is that there is no fear of falling into samsara, and the second confidence is that there is no hope of attaining nirvana. Both samsara and nirvana are completely unnecess
ary trips. The wearing out of dharmata experience is the final state of hopelessness and fearlessness—it is utterly hopeless and utterly fearless. But again, please take note that at this point we are not talking about the end result, but about the path.
MAHA ATI DEVOTION
It seems that devotion goes all the way through maha ati—much more powerfully than anything else, in fact. The notion is that any luminosity, any brilliance that you see throughout the entire four stages, you see as an expression of the guru. You cannot experience any one of those stages by yourself; you have to be inspired by your teacher.
Chönyi ngönsum, seeing dharmata as real, is inspired by the teacher, because the teacher represents the entire world. Nyam kongphel, increasing the nyam, is inspired by the teacher, because the teacher’s permission and spaciousness have to be manifested in order to allow you to do that. In rikpa tsephep, insight reaching its full measure, the teacher’s maturity has to be shared with you so that you are relating with the teacher properly. Chönyi sesa, dharmata being all used up, is the level where the teacher finally lies down with you, because as much as you are an old dog, the teacher is an old dog as well. So the teacher’s teaching naturally expands.
The guru is implanted in your mind constantly. It is the guru who actually creates the possibility of dissolving your body as a rainbow. The tremendous sadness and yearning that you experience is devotion. When you use up all of dharmata, the reason this happens is because there is so much yearning and sadness toward the guru. You have a great appreciation for the lineage, so devotion becomes a natural process. In any vajrayana situation in which a samaya bond has been made, the guru is the only one who can actually make that particular mechanism operate properly.
The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness Page 82