For me, solo retreats nourish and energise practice in daily life. This year, while preparing, I listened again to Ken’s instructions on the sky-gazing practice.
Ken: There are a number of teachings in various traditions on sky-gazing but the one that I’ve been exposed to and feels most complete is one from the Dzogchen tradition in which there are three skies, just to make it complicated. The practice consists of sitting or lying down in a location where ideally all you have is sky in front of you. There were caves that were carefully constructed in Tibet on the sides of mountains so that when you sat in them if you sat in a certain position you saw nothing but sky. There was no other reference point whatsoever.
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And then you quite literally look at the sky. Now as Tilopa says, “When you look at space, seeing stops. When you look at mind, thinking stops.” It is important to look at the sky, or to put it slightly differently, to look into the sky. So you’re actually looking. You’re not just letting your eyes go into soft focus because there’s nothing to look at. When you do that you actually become passive and probably move in a somewhat dull direction. The looking is active.
And the first sky is what we ordinarily call “sky”; it’s an infinite expanse of blue in front of us. And you look at that or into it. And just because the way the eyes are constructed there will be pixelation, and variation in shades and so forth you know. Pay no attention to all of that, that’s just stuff, and look. If the looking is active you’ll find a couple of things. In the beginning you probably won’t be able to do it for very long ’cause the intensity, the clarity is a little overwhelming, and you just find you’re sort of short-circuiting. But as you do it again and again you’ll build up more capacity. And as you look with that active looking you find it is actually difficult to hold any train of thought. I should mention one other thing on the practical side, at this altitude wear sunblock.
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So there’s that active looking into the sky. And as you engage that and increase your capacity to hold that gaze into the sky—very hard to hold together the ordinary train of thinking—it just keeps disintegrating. Which of course is part of the purpose of this practice. And you find you’re beginning to experience calm-abiding, shamatha, just resting. But it’s got a little more juice than shamatha and meditation because you’re opening to the sky, and there’s just all that energy of the light coming in filling your whole mind and being with light and energy. So it’s quite a powerful practice.
And as your mind, or the thinking process, crumbles and disintegrates—and it doesn’t do this immediately so don’t get your hopes up—you find, speaking technically, the sensory consciousnesses become less and less dominant in one’s experience. That’s the five associated with the senses except the one for seeing, of course, and the mental consciousness, which is associated with thought. And you’ll find that the seventh consciousness, the emotional mind, which is what I like to call it, also subsides. And you’ll find yourself resting without much sense of “I.”
And basically what’s happening here is that you’re experiencing basis-of-everything consciousness. Sanskrit term for that is alaya-vijñāna. Now in basis-of-everything consciousness there is no explicit sense of “I” or “other” but it is not beyond duality. There’s no explicit sense of I or other, and as Dezhung Rinpoche explained to me, it’s clear, empty, and ineffective. And for those of you who want the Tibetan for ineffective it's lung ma bstan (pron. lung ma ten).
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Carolyn: It’s interesting that that’s lung ma bstan because that’s the dullness in meditation too.
Ken: Sure, yeah. It’s as Dezhung Rinpoche would say, stong gsal lung ma bstan (pron. tong sal lung ma ten). lung ma bstan is often translated as neutral but there’s no juice to it, that’s the idea. Now, this is a little bit of an aside, but particularly in reference to Carolyn’s comment, it’s important. There are countless meditators over the centuries who mistake resting in alaya-vijñāna for enlightenment and it’s not.
Again Dezhung Rinpoche explained this when he was giving us mahamudra instruction: it’s empty, clear, and ineffective. No juice—however you want to describe that to yourselves. It’s like a block of ice. And alaya-vijñāna to buddha mind is like ice to water. That is, ice is clear, can see right through it, you don’t know it’s there, and it can’t do anything because it’s a block of ice. And when you rest in it, bringing active attention into it, basically the ice melts. And then you have empty, clear, unrestricted experience. And the lung ma bstan, the ineffective becomes unrestricted. So it becomes very, very alive.
Having no mental imagery or experience of "hearing" thoughts, my mind is naturally rather quiet. Rather than a flow of thoughts I experience a stream of sensations and feelings punctuated by silent thoughts. Looking into the sky dissolves the sense of I and other, and each time I do the practice, I recall Ken's often repeated advice: “Don’t work at practice, let practice work on you,” and also a line from T. S. Eliot that he often quotes: “The rest is not our business.”
James Low sums it up like this:
From Open to Life 8
James: If we're not ripe, it's not going to work.
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So how do we become ripe? How do we become? Well, when we want things to ripen, it's better if they can ripen on the tree, and when the tree is rooted. So we root ourselves in the source, in the ground, in the openness, and we resource ourselves by exposure to the ripening forces, the warmth of engaging in the world, blowing with the wind of circumstances, absorbing the rain of the confusion which can flow on to us very easily, and gradually we ripen. Don't force it. Trust you will ripen. Everybody has buddha nature, everybody has buddha potential, but you have your unique individual story, and your path will not be like anyone else's.
In Open to Life 7 and many other retreat recordings, James also teaches a practice that doesn't depend on an unrestricted view of the sky. It's called the guru yoga of the three ah.