Oh, I don’t know about you, or what your circumstances are, but it seems I am being “drawn to go deeper” (so-to-say) than perhaps I had considered was actually possible given my outwardly appearing “Western Householder” lifestyle eh ?
What it has come down to is just how much of our whole existence can really be based upon an ongoing expression of non-dual Contemplation, whether at Home, at Work or anywhere else one is in the course of their Earthly Embodiment ! Or perhaps, more realistically, LOL, such “Integration” will have to wait until my days-of-employment are finally over eh ?
In any case, here’s some words from Chögyal Namkhai Norbu that I found Inspiring and, to a degree, reflective of my own Situation :
The important thing is to really discover instant presence. Instant presence isn’t the experience of emptiness, but you enter into instant presence through the experience of emptiness.
You can also enter into instant presence through the experience of clarity, or through the experience of sensation. In the end, when you know how to work and you know how to enter into instant presence through these three experiences, you can also discover that all your whole life is experience. You can enter into instant presence through any experience; everything becomes a method. When it is like that you are really Dzogchen practitioners. Try to train yourselves in this way and to truly discover what instant presence means. Merely to find oneself in the state of emptiness isn’t instant presence, merely to find oneself in Shine or in the calm state isn’t contemplation. Many masters in the West explain the state of contemplation as though [it] was only a state of emptiness, but if you are only in the experience of emptiness you will never have realisation; that is not the state of contemplation. If you want to go and visit Bodhgaya in India or Mount Kailash in Tibet you can travel in many ways, but in any case you have to travel and get there. Until you get there you have to travel. It isn’t enough to reach Kathmandu and stay in a nice hotel thinking you have arrived; if you confuse the hotel with Kailash you won’t ever get to your destination. This is an example. Thinking that the simple state of emptiness is the state of contemplation is like living comfortably in the hotel. That can be all right for a few days or a few years of relaxation from the confusion of samsara, but it won’t bring you realisation.
Ah, but of course, from the standpoint of Anatta, it is most important not to Reify a “Practitioner” / “Seeker” / the “I” anymore than it already is eh ? Rather, it is this selfsame Conceptual Construct of self-ness that seemingly requires a Deconstruction (of sorts) “leaving” what already is in fact our Non-Dual Nature eh ?
Ah, the Buddha has been compared to a great healer or physician prescribing Metaphysical Medicine to relieve the apparent suffering of what are (to some) themselves Buddhas in disguise, seemingly lost in the game of Incarnation eh ?
Ah, I’d say it’s probably very hard for non-meditators to appreciate the true depth of their seeming psychological self (as merely a mental construct) … and to even suggest it is really possible to differentiate ‘it’ (as just another appearance) from our ever present Presence of Awareness will likely be ‘scoffed at’ too eh ? 😀
Oh, now the following quotations from Namkhai Norbu are, I’d say, clearly of a Gradualist nature (as opposed to the Sudden teachings of spontaneous nondual presence) nonetheless as one who can’t claim to have “cast off” the physicality of the material body (just yet) his Words do, I find, “inspire” a certain down-to-earth realistic Attitude in reference to what is posited as the “Goal” of Dzogchen non-practice eh?
Simply put : Contemplative Contemplation is the “Way to Go” (for no-one at all haha) !!! 😀