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Four Dzogchen Meditations

A RUSHEN MEDITATION: DISCERNING DIFFERENCES

Part of the unique preliminary practice for Dzogchen is called rushen. It includes analytical contemplations that employ the rational powers of the mind; in these contemplations we use the well-honed, focused mind like a sharp tool to penetrate further into reality. This special self-inquiry helps us recognize the essential nature of mind.

The word rushen literally means “discerning the difference between”—traditional images are separating the wheat from the chaff or a kernel from its husk. We use the practice of rushen to distinguish between the dualisms that confront and confuse us: between samsara and nirvana; between bondage and freedom; between small mind and Big Mind, or Buddha-mind; between finite conceptual mind and infinite awareness; between finite self and our true Buddha-nature.

Now let’s use the self-inquiry part of rushen practice. Let’s penetrate further into heart and soul, and perceive the essential nature of mind. We can use investigative self-inquiry to unmask ourselves and deconstruct the illusory prison that ego built, thus gaining insight and the wisdom of awareness.

Exploring the age-old question “Who am I?” is an open-ended inquiry that takes us beyond thoughts and mere concepts. This is one of the very best practices to help you get to know your true nature, beyond your illusory conventional self. Recognizing our natural mind, Buddha-nature, helps us live freely in the present moment, without preconceptions about what we’ll get out of it. Let’s discern the difference between the ego, which strategizes and manipulates, and the spontaneous natural heart-mind. The heart and mind are beautiful in their natural state. We can afford to leave them alone. The better we come to know and accept ourselves, the more at home and profoundly at peace we can be, wherever we are. Whoever we may be.

Who or what is experiencing your present experience? Rushen meditation helps us to discern the difference between what we seem to be and think ourselves to be, and our original nature—who we really are. We identify ourselves with our body, but are we really our body? We identify with our thoughts, but are we really our thoughts and states of mind? This analytical meditation brings to bear the microscope of discriminating awareness.

Practice self-inquiry now by asking yourself:

Who or what is experiencing my present experience? Is it my body? Do the eyes and ears hear? (Remember a corpse has eyes and ears, but it doesn’t see and hear.) Where is the experiencer, the perceiver? Is it in my head? my torso? my heart? Perhaps within the body and also all around it, like a nimbus, an astral body or a luminous sphere?

Mind is the knower. Consciousness animates the sense doors, perceiving all that transpires through the gates of the senses. What is the essence or nature of this mind? Peer into the nature of your own mind in this very present moment. Know the knower. See through the seer, and be free.

Does the mind have a particular shape or form? A color? A size or weight? Is it always the same or simply a stream of consciousness, a collection of various mind-moments and mental events—like the ever-changing weather, dependent on fluctuating circumstances and conditions? Do I have one mind, several, or many? Is it separate from the mind of another being and of all others—or is it connected? Is it perhaps part of universal cosmic consciousness?

In a moment of no thought, how is it, and what is it? When one dies, where does it go? Can you tell me? Can you say? Where do your thoughts come from? Where do they go when they pass on? Where does thinking stem from? Try to say something about this. The effort could be extremely revealing. You could have a close encounter with yourself.

Who is thinking, hearing, seeing, wondering? Who am I? What am I? What is happening right now, this immediate instant?

Turn the mind back upon itself with this laserlike question: Who is experiencing your experience right now? And then let go of thinking.