When about to settle in the natural way of mind-essence, some people merely try to stay conscious and aware. Then they rest in this state of mental consciousness with the feeling: “Ah, how clear!” Other people fixate on a state of utter void as if their mind had gone blank.
Both of these cases, however, are simply aspects of consciousness clinging to a dualistic experience. Whenever this duality occurs — between the clarity and the one perceiving clarity, the emptiness and the one perceiving emptiness — look into the nature of this stream of rigidly fixated mindfulness. By doing so, you pull up the stake to which the dualistic mind, which holds to a perceiver and something perceived, is tethered, and make room for the naked, wide-open natural state of awareness — a luminous emptiness without center or edge.
To apprehend in a nondual way this luminous and open, natural state is the essence of awareness. It is the dawn of naked wisdom, free from the veils of fixated experience.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
from the book Pith Instructions: Selected Teachings and Poems
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Further quotes from the book Pith Instructions:
- Clinging to the body
- No modification
- Guidance of a qualified teacher
- Emptiness and the law of cause and effect
- Under the influence of the three poison
- The body does not truly exist
- Eating tasty but poisonous plants