Introductory post to the practice can be found here.
As I continue to offer refinements to this mind-bending (and eventually mind-snapping) illusory form practice, I recommend reflecting on some of these tips as a form of contemplation. What we’re talking about (hearing), and eventually discovering (through contemplation and meditation), is not easy. It’s very subtle, and goes against the torrential forces of the way we’ve been taught to perceive. This practice will lead to a perceptual and epistemological revolution, precisely what the Rebel Buddha discovered as he overthrew the tyranny of ordinary appearance. It will also provide a glimpse of how the awakened ones see the world.
Refinements for our practice: While gazing at the object, don’t focus on any particular aspect of it. Instead, allow your gaze to relax to where you don’t see any given thing particularly clearly. This invites a reduction of the intensity of visual appearance, which otherwise tends to suck you into the appearance, and is when you make the fundamental mis-take of taking the appearance to be solid, lasting, and independently out there.
This is precisely where we go non-lucid in the most foundational way – where we lose the essence in the display. We lose our mind (or at least half of it, the emptiness half), whenever we take things to be real. We lose the essence (emptiness) in the display (luminosity). As we’ll see, we’re blinded by the light – the display of form, which is nothing but frozen light – the runaway light of the mind.
Looking at things in this new way invokes a non-dual experience of appearance and mind (subject and object, mind and matter, internal and external). So keep your gaze diffused, open, and receptive to whatever you experience, without judgment. If you focus too much on the details of what you see you’ll promote your fixation on the apparent separateness of mind and object, on duality.
This next tip is important: with this practice we’re attempting to use the experience of visual perception as an opportunity to dis-cover the mind’s true nature (its luminous empty nature); to reveal the emptiness or insubstantiality that is not separate from the clarity of the perceptual experience. With practice you will discover that what you are really looking at here is not the object per se, but the nature of the experience of the object – which is the inseparability of emptiness and luminosity. You will discover that there actually is no object, and even no “out there.” This is true daytime lucidity, which is what transforms a non-lucid life into a lucid life, precisely what the ultimate lucid dreamer, the Buddha, discovered.
The physicist Richard Henry lends a hand: “The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things… The universe is entirely immaterial, mental, and spiritual, and we must learn to perceive it as such.”
Hang in there – LOTS more to come on all this. We have to keep coming at it again. . . and again. . . and again, and we have plenty of time in the months ahead to do this – properly. But please keep this in mind: nothing will change for you if you don’t engage in this practice whole-heartedly. You have to really look. Don’t let the “answers” provided spoil the questions, the queries I’ll continue to invite. The impact only comes when you finally see for yourself.