SvatahSiddha Introduction

It's a long story; to tell it properly, I must tell the story of almost my entire life.

Sustained non-responsive attention is the key; to get there the instinct to respond must be overcome.

I reached that place through loving surrender to the underlying process that we witness unfolding. There is the bliss that comes from a mind in harmony and when directed to its source a feedback occurs.

There was a vision of a shining golden light that resulted that would reoccur every time I approached my meditations in this way.

This was the approach it took.

There were a series experiences that led up to the collapse; they began the night before with me asking myself the question "why did Huang Po call it one mind instead of non-duality?"

I was shown a vision of the one mind. It was a closed surface of inward pointing golden vectors of distinct senses with nothing either inside or out. However, the inside while being empty was the subject of a frame by frame prediction of the next state based on the mutual expectations of all of these sense vectors. This represents all of the observers to the unfolding we share.

Based on my understanding at the time I believed that the state of the world was like the block universe but instead constructed of experience and branching based on choices. This understanding had with it the idea of a wide variety of initial choices or seed conditions being explored. So I asked myself "what about the other sets of conditions?"

When I asked myself this question, countless eyes turned to look at me from every direction including underneath. These eyes were just a looking without any response but I recognized their looking was the same as the golden light I would see in meditation. I became scared and stopped. They stopped looking. I asked the question again and they turned and looked again.

This was the empowerment of the buddhas that is attributed to the 10th buhmi.

I remember posting about it on the dzogchen subreddit the next morning.

The next night is when the cessation happened.

Often when I would do the meditation causing the golden light to shine when I would finish there would be a sensation of pressure in the center of my head. After the second hour of meditation the pressure was present and I was sitting with my attention on it waiting for it to go away.

My visual field began flickering with images that changed so fast I could not identify what they were. This culminated in what looked like stained glass covering my entire visual field but morphing around as though I had taken an extreme dose of psychedelics. There were four or five colors repaired in many patches and they were separated by a thick black line. Suddenly like a hydraulic line bursting I was vented through my forehead.

This part becomes harder to understand. Just like when we wake up from a dream, the inner world of the dreamer is lost and the outer world of the dreamer is the inner world of the person who has awakened.

I was mind that dreams this world but every detail of my dreaming life had been lost and I found myself with a new outside, one with different (less specified) established outside conditions. What was no longer found outside was the understandings that were inside now.

If you wake up from a dream, the ideas that were developed in that dream life are gone.

It is those ideas that are developed that are stored in the repository consciousness. When the repository consciousness is emptied, we wake up sequentially from the lives of the identities whose conclusions those understandings were.

There are many layers of this, but at one point the idea of time and space is just an idea again and this is the boundary of the formless realms.

Ultimately, there is no inside and outside left and there is just the light of a primordial unconditioned awareness shining in a dimensionless and conceptionless void.

It vibrates with the willingness to spring back into experience and it is covered in points of vibration that correspond to those eyes that looked at me. They are the buddhafields and the trail of experience that led to this place came from one of those vibrating points.

The return is the reversal of the process, but the understanding of the true nature of things is not lost and without that ignorance the whimsical path is followed back to the conditions that supported the realization.

I was overjoyed at the truth of the buddhadharma. I heard flutes it was 4:30 in the morning and no one was playing any music.

This happened a little under 4 years ago during the summer of 2020. I was using the word retreat loosely to refer to the global lockdown and particularly that I had spent a few weeks at that point self isolating and largely restricting my communications to discussions around the Ch'an Masters. I was meditating around 4 hours a day. Lots of things were happening as a result.

I examined the buddhadharma briefly during my investigations into the various esoteric traditions. At the time the schools seemed to be clearly techniques driven at a result. Theravadins want the world to leave them alone. Mahayanans want their selves to leave them alone. Vajrayanans are practicing magic/rituals in order to have the conventional ideas about the world leave them alone.

I wasn't interested in suffering; the world had already demonstrated its essential joy to me. The lesson of directing your efforts towards the benefit of the whole is reflected in numerous traditions. I have aphantasia which means I don't visualize and my exposure to other esoteric traditions left me both not amenable to what I saw being taught and without access to the tools they utilized (e.g., the visualizations of deity yoga).

What I understand now of the buddhadharma comes from having recognized it firsthand. My recognition is of someone who has found many maps reflecting the territory that they just came from. This referential knowledge base was built trying to communicate what I arrived at and recognizing it everywhere I looked.

Buddhism is one of many schools of direct pointing. The only thing that changes between those who realize ultimate truth is the perspective they bring to that realization when they return and the audience that they return to communicate with.

There is a perennial philosophy that will always be rediscovered. It is written into the structure that builds the conditions that are experienced. We have been engaged in the process of understanding and with those understandings fresh realities are born.

When we give up the process of understanding and surrender our activities completely, the lack of interaction causes the process generating conditions to fall back into itself undoing each step that has been done in order to reveal what is always found resting before these (and every other set of) conditions have been imagined into the repository consciousness.

The world is a process of improvisational creativity and our role has always been "yes and..."

I've never had a similar experience under psychedelics, but I am quite experienced with psychedelics. When I was a teenager/young adult I sold LSD for many years. The paneling of the colors was unique in my experience, but the way they moved around was very very familiar.

Hello old friend!  Wonderful seeing you here! 

Do you mean that focusing on an object, for instance the visual snow, will cause it to cease?

I understand this. It's what I use in finding my focus. When it clears, I find clarity. Though, the clarity doesn't last long, yet.

If I have something like pain or tinnitus or any other sensation that might be conventionally undesirable, my practice is to use it as my object of meditation and in that as the object of meditation naturally leads to jhana, the source of my initial concentration is left behind just as is done with the breath when that is what is being used.

I was suggesting that if you do this you might find that the visual snow becomes increasingly less. For me, the sensations usually go away when my attention from them lifts into increased states of concentration.

Awareness is uninterrupted even when it's contents seem discontiguous. Many short events repeated throughout the day are the best way to build habit or reflect on right view.

I've done a bunch of effortful meditations but none have been as good as the ones where I was aligning with the well-being that is flowing from the deepest parts of creation.

There's not two types of things happening here. Everything that is known is known to something it is like to be, a manas, an I am who knows.

If we want our mind streams to be able to relate to higher beings or their realms, we must find the place in the set of things we know where our understandings overlap.

We must look to the contents of our repository consciousness that we share. This is where unfocused, ungrounded, and unlimited bodhicitta is key.

This is the attitude that is held towards us from the root as each creative momentary impulse flows down from the alaya-vijana through the heavens (which are the projections of the Sambhogakāya) and culminates in your experience here.

Original bodhicitta is the unconditioned willingness to experience that is the vibrancy before conditions arise; this is a universal unbound love.

The hair shirt idea is that every time you notice visual snow, you could reflect on the unblemished nature of our awareness or on the emptiness that is the complete lack of any independent causation or origination to be found in anything (a personal favorite definition of shunyata). It could remind you to remember clarity.

Something like this.