Buddhist Dzogchen view is beyond the intellect and concepts.
All phenomenon lack inherent essence, including thoughts and emotions. Therefore thoughts and emotions are self-liberated as burglars in an empty house, a snake untying its own knots, or as if meeting an old friend. Pick one of the three. Furthermore thoughts and emotions are merely energy currents in your body. You can actually feel emotions in the physical chakras.
Also there is heavy emphasis in Dzogchen about the present moment.
Alwayson, have you attained the rainbow body or experienced the content of any of the terms you use? Are you speaking from direct experience or reporting learned knowledge? What is your aim with this topic?
If something is not self-experienced yet… then it seems we can only rely on what other’s have told us about what terms point to. The discussion becomes empty of REAL content and is doomed to become speculation only, based on hearsay, and there is no ability to confirm (for our selves) any of the points of views from any angle.
I left the academic world because they enjoyed so much to speculate and compare point of views about other’s theories and terms. And I assure you, that is an endless road. Then it eventually comes down to comparing sources and judging the reliability and validity of those sources, and trying to find new sources of information to hit the others in the head with. 
All with the aim of trying to “proove your point of view”. In a such discussion, repeating the same argument over and over again does not make it more valid. To be academically superior new arguments must always be found to overshine the combattants.
Are you mostly interested in the former - is your intent merely to have an academic intellectual discussion here, or are you also experiencing any of the things you mention above? If we don’t go to our inner source on spiritual matters, we are relying on outer sources. Will it satisfy us, make us peaceful and loving towards all human beings? Nope. I eventually found it to be so much more rewarding to experience myself.
I’d love to hear some of your own stuff or personal verifications of what you claim to know, if you’d like to share!
“Buddhist Dzogchen view is beyond the intellect and concepts.” Are you?
Love, emc
Hi, I would still genuinly like to have a better idea of the use/meaning of the word ‘merit’ in Dzogchen Buddhist thought if anyone could help. With respect to all, divinefurball
emc,
I agree. I do not even know if the rainbow body exists from personal experience. I said that before in this thread.
Oh, I’m sorry, I must have missed that post. Thank you for your honesty! I must add, that I think that sometimes there’s nothing wrong with having academic discussions - much useful knowledge can be shared through those, particularly when it starts with a clear question as this topic did. In combination with own reports they can actually be delightful, so please continue to share your wisdom and knowledge in forum!
Love, emc
lol, I don’t have any knowledge or wisdom, except in a literal sense.
There is a wisdom or yeshe “current” that flows in everyone’s body which is used to obtain rainbow body as far as I minimally understand.
But this stretches my comprehension at this point.
Hi alwayson. you said: “There is a wisdom or yeshe “current” that flows in everyone’s body which is used to obtain rainbow body”. Thank you very much, that is a valuable contribution and I appreciate it. It sounds like it must have something to do with merit as you were describing it. I will have to give it some thought and do some research. Thank you again.
If anyone else knows anything about this topic, I would appreciate thier sharing.
Wishing the best to all, divinefurball
Emptiness is another name for Buddha. Nature of mind is another name for emptiness. Buddha-nature is another name for nature of mind.
Everybody stop. Sit still. Do nothing. See mind. Try that.
I assumed some people on this forum have already realized the nature of mind.
I discovered the nature of mind about two years ago. Not that there is an I.
I is just a thought literally.
Hi all. Why not just continue on and conduct a civil discussion, share information, and see what we can discover together about the thread topic? With hope for the best, divinefurball
PS: Konchok Ösel Dorje, Christi, EMC, alwayson, and others, I very much appreciate your remarks.
Hi All,
Here’s an interesting site that might be pertinent/useful to this discussion:
http://www.rainbowbody.net/
The mind that says, “This is My view,” is really suffering.
Hi Kirtanman, thanks for that. There sure are a lot of links over there. I was doing a little googling to, and I found this in a preview of Lama Yeshe’s book Becoming The Compassion Buddha: “The psychological process when you meditate on emptyness is that all your conceptualizations of what you are, how you are, all your ego projections, are dissolved; these appearances totally dissipear from you consciousness. What remains is wisdom energy, and that wisdom is transformed into the divine, radient light body of Avalokeshvara. Another way of saying it is that you have a psychic wisdom body, a conscious mental body, like a rainbow body. It is not one that you can physically touch and say, “There it is,” but it is perfectly, totally existent…Sometimes people just think that they have powerfull tantric methods and can transform poison into the path, that they are yogis or yoginis and can do anything. In fact, thats just ego. You have to be carefull. Even if you have some power, you must be very carefull about the effect you have on other people.” Maybe some of you can find some other pertainent material. With thanks for your contributions divinefurball
Some more fine words by Lama Yeshe: When we practice tantric yoga method sadhanas and transform our consciousness into the transcendent, rainbow body of our meditation deity we should simultaneously recognize the unity of the rainbow body and its non-dual nature. The rainbow body of the deity is totally non-dual. Non-duality and the transformation, the transcendent experience of the clean clear, crystal rainbow body, are completely one. It’s like it’s there, but it’s not there. If you were to try to touch it, it would be like trying to touch a rainbow. Your hand can’t feel it yet there’s something there. It’s real; there’s some energy there. You can’t say that a rainbow isn’t real because you can’t touch it by hand.
Sometimes when I’m watering my garden there’s a rainbow in the spray. If there are any students around, we’ll have a conversation about the reality of a rainbow. Our physical senses are really gross, and because a rainbow is relatively insubstantial, we tend to think it’s nonexistent. But a rainbow is as existent as a concrete wall. We can’t say that a wall is more existent than a rainbow just because it feels solid to the touch. Both are equally real.
How does a rainbow exist? Through the coming together of various factors, such as water, light and so forth. It’s an interdependent phenomenon that simply reflects the combined energies that make it up. That’s the way in which it exists and that’s all there is to what we call a rainbow. We know it’s not solid, that it’s simply a conglomeration of parts to which we give the name rainbow.
The way in which the transformation—the transcendent experience of the divine deity body—exists is exactly the same as the way in which a rainbow exists. In reality it, too, exists but in experiencing unification we recognize it as non-dual, non-self-existent and insubstantial. There’s nothing physical to touch; it’s simply the reflection of a combination of parts in the mirror of wisdom. Although it is a clearly apparent vision, completely transparent, simultaneously it is absolutely non-dual in nature.
By developing this kind of awareness, we become more sensitive and our dull, animal attitude is eliminated. We become more sensitive to the subtler aspects of reality. Then even concrete walls can appear to us as insubstantial and as something we can perhaps pass through. We can have such powerful experiences.
Perhaps you’ve heard stories of some of the early Mahayana yogis and yoginis who left imprints of their hand in stone or stepped into rocks as if they were pools of water. We think these are simply magic tricks, hypnotic illusions. That’s not true. We don’t believe such things are possible because of our limited view of the nature of material energy but such things are not only possible, they happened.
I’ve seen people on TV smashing a pile of bricks with their bare hands. It looks like magic. If I brought a pile of bricks into this room, how many of you could smash even one with your bare hands? It looks like a magic trick, but it’s not. We know that there are people everywhere who can do this. How do they explain it? They say that instead of regarding the bricks as physical they regard them more as a concentration of energy and by focusing their minds they are able to smash them by hand.
Our problem is that when we are faced with something like this, inside us there’s a mind going, “Impossible, impossible, impossible. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” We have to banish that mind from this solar system. Anything is possible; everything is possible. Sometimes you feel that your dreams are impossible, but they’re not. Human beings have great potential; they can do anything. The power of the mind is incredible, limitless.
In the meditation session, then, we try to experience the unity of insubstantiality, non-self-existence, and the blissful, radiant, rainbow body and single-pointedly contemplate on that. But then you might ask, “It’s all very well doing this in retreat but what happens when I get back home and have to go to work? How can I meditate on non-self-existence in the real world?”
The answer is that if you can have an experience of non-duality during formal meditation, when you are out and about during the breaks, working or doing whatever else you do, when you look at the objects of the sense world you can simultaneously perceive their non-duality. Then the normal concrete vision that once made you feel small and insignificant no longer dominates your life.
When you’re at a retreat course you should be contemplating in this way all the time: during the meditation and discourse sessions and when you get up and go outside during the breaks, as well. As I always say, you should make the break times meditation sessions too. Transform everybody you see as well as all other objects into the divine Manjushri rainbow body and recognize the unity of the blissful light body and non-duality.
People have different experiences when they try to meditate. For example, you might find that for the first half of a one-hour session, your concentration is good, but for the last half hour it’s impossible. Too much superstition arises. This shows that your energy is unbalanced. You put too much energy into the beginning of your session and when it’s used up, you come down. Sometimes this can simply be result of physical weakness and eating food or having a drink can solve the problem. More often it’s a result of unskillful practice. Instead of putting all that effort into the beginning of the session, start off in a more relaxed fashion and try to ration your mental energy so that it lasts the entire hour.
Other people find that they have too many superstitions at the beginning of the session but that after about thirty minutes they settle down and their concentration is good from then on. That’s often the fault of not being mindful before the session begins and bringing outside influences into the session with you. Because of that, you don’t have enough penetrative energy at the start, but as the outside influences wear off, your concentration improves. In the previous example you needed to slacken your energy at the beginning; here you need to put in more effort at the start.
Meditation means working with mental energy, so you need to be sensitive to how much fuel you’re adding to the fire. If you don’t put in enough, the fire dies out. If you put in too much, it finishes too quickly. You should learn from experience how much effort to exert at which time.
Also, when you meditate, you can start speculating: “Now I’m a meditator. Before, I wasn’t a meditator. Perhaps today I’ll get enlightened.” You start to think about the past, present and future. That’s not good; that, too, is superstition. Make a conscious effort to stop stimulating discursive thought. Some people distract themselves by thinking, “This is great; I’m getting beautiful visions. I’m blissful.” Or you might start visualizing others having a good time, dancing or whatever, and get caught up in being a spectator, distracting yourself in that way. All this is just more superstition. Perhaps you start intellectualizing, “Let me see if I can become nothingness” or “Let me see if I can visualize the most beautiful deity.” This sort of mental expression is distraction; it is in the nature of superstition.
The main point of contemplation, of visualizing this evolution into the deity, is to stop your ego and superstition from functioning, so all such mental speculation is uptight energy that only makes you more uptight. It is much better to be a bit loose, relaxed. When your mind arrives at the object of contemplation, just leave it alone; let it go. Don’t worry; just contemplate.
You know what Zen masters say: “When you cut, cut; when you cook, cook; when you eat, eat.” That’s good. When you contemplate, contemplate. That’s enough. Don’t start thinking, “Great; my concentration is really good.” It’s superstition; it’s no good. When your mind settles on the object of contemplation, loosen up; let it go.
But “loosen up” doesn’t mean be unaware. You have to maintain awareness; retain mindfulness. The connotation of “loose” and “let go” is when you’re mind is in the right channel, loosen it and let it go instead of thinking this and that, binding it with the rope of discursive thought.
Even if thoughts come, one after the other, most of them are objects; they’re not your subjective mind. No matter what those objects are, transform them into the divine, blissful, rainbow body of the deity and allow them to sink into you, the deity.
Lama Yeshe gave this teaching at Manjushri Institute, England, in July 1977. Edited from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive by Nicholas Ribush.
I am going to speak from personal experience for once.
One key to the whole thing is realize “I” is a thought literally.
If you doubt this, take one day and narrate your day in the following way. When you are walking up stairs, repeat mentally “I am walking up stairs.” Go to a public place and especially narrate mundane details, such as “I see wrinkles in that girl’s jacket.” Focus on mundane sounds. Like if you go to the mall on this day, and you hear a baby crying, repeat mentally a couple of times “I hear a baby crying”. Do this the enire day in conjugtion with the second key.
The second key is to realize there is no such thing as time. Time is purely a manmade invention. I welcome counterarguments to this, because I will prove that time does not exist except as a thought in the head. There is only one moment in time ever.
The third key is focusing on physical emotions in the physical chakras when interacting with people.
Ya know… for the first time I agree with you… on at lease two of three points (maybe because they come from your silence? )… the “I” is a thought created by the mind (“I”, “me” and “mine” keep us bound to this world, hence spiritual practices… to go beyond the mind… to become free from the attachment to the “I” thought), time and space are created by the mind. The third… well I am not sure what you mean by keeping focus on the chakras when interacting with people? How does that help Alwayson?
Theres more…
Once you realize that you only exist as a thoughtform packet in your head
…you realize that other people in your life, your friends and family, ONLY exist as thoughtform packets in your own mind (and in their own minds as well).
And also you realize that noone can ever accomplish worldy things, because first off they don’t have inherent existence. Secondly there is no time. Third, what is really is happening is that matter is just moving around.
What’s the matter then?
There is nothing the matter