Everything Is Light: The Circle of Total Illumination

Everything IS light!

An excellent book!

Love this book, perfect for the Dzogchen practitioners

Stunning, marvelous, space-born! It calls out the unique view of Dzogchen with no holding back. Probably best for people who have some deep experience with Tibetan Buddhist meditative/contemplative practice. The introduction alone is worth the price--for me at least, there are bits of history and details of meanings that I've never read before--not to mention Keith Dowman's marvelous range of vocabulary and choice of words. But, the tantra, paradoxically, is truly beyond words and a grand support for Dzogchen practitioners.

It doesn’t get any more radical than this. Everything is Light is an incredibly rare and wonderful cultural and intellectual event. It is a paradox that something can come across such a great span of time and space to arrive on the cutting edge of a radical avant-garde in the life of the mind. Here is a piece of literature, a thousand years old, transmitted from the other side of the globe, from the most remote peaks of the Himalayan Mountains, that creates a new paradigm of what it means to be conscious. This book is a canonical work in the Dzogchen corpus and is included in the great canon of Nyingma literature, the Nyingma Gyuebum. The text provides its own authorial tradition which attributes the text to Garab Dorje and claims that he received it in a vision given to him by Vajrapani. This gives the text a scriptural stamp of authenticity indicating it originated in the supernatural realm and was passed in vision to our world. It is thus an early precursor of the terma tradition. The Tibetan literary tradition imputes that the text was first written in Sanskrit and brought to Tibet in the 8th century and translated by Vairosana. Vairosana, one of the first five monks ordained in Tibet, was given the assignment to travel to India and gather texts and translate them into Tibetan. However, no copy of the text has been found that dates back to this period, and no Sanskrit version is extant. The earliest version was first published sometime between the 11th and the 14th centuries, implying that it was originally written in Tibetan. The text consists of 97 chapters in the form of a dialogue between two deities in the Tibetan pantheon: Vajradhara and Vajrapani. Like many texts in the terma tradition, the writing is in both verse and prose and is highly poetic throughout. The language is captivating, even entrancing. The text tells us, “These words are actual awareness of pure presence/Arising from within, naked and untainted./They apply symbolic representation to indefinable truth.” (P. 103) In this text the idea that you meditate for periods of the day and then return to your normal activities is exploded. If you no longer realize the nature of mind once you end a meditation session you have lost the very thing you were seeking. If you can’t express this awareness in the normal consciousness of daily activity, then your meditation is just another activity of life, like reading a book or watching a show on television. The realization of the original nature of mind is called nonmeditation (sgom-med) and it is with each person every moment as the ground of awareness. The text provides a detailed definition in Chapter 48 where it refers to nonmeditation as “uninterrupted intrinsic presence”. The author explains that nonmeditation is distinct from meditation in that it involves no mental processes and no action of any kind. If the focus of attention is caught in the activities of mind, absorbed in the stream of consciousness, following the chatter of interior dialogue, it masks or clouds the original nature. By keeping the primary focus at the level of original nature all the conceptual play and the flow of sensory input and the emotional reactions, the daydreams, the judgments and opinions appear as images on the mirror of the mind. The mirror itself is indifferent to its content and is open to any content of any kind. This is referred to as “all- inclusive identity”. Nonmeditation is simply resting in the natural state. This is opposed to meditation which involves various operations of the mind. Meditation involves mental effort while nonmeditation is a total relaxation into the natural state which is veiled by any activity, even the activities of meditation such as one-pointed awareness, calm abiding, penetrating wisdom, visualization or mantra recitation. The natural state is beyond cause and effect, and encompasses mind and stands out as the source or ground of all phenomena. The experience of the natural state is not a suspension of thinking or conceptual activity. The natural state is characterized by lucidity, alertness and openness. It is non-judgmental and has no opinions. Nonmeditation is done with the eyes open, alert to all sensation, open to all possibilities. There are no antidotes to apply, nothing to change, simple self awareness illuminates everything and sees everything as light, even materiality dissolves in a perspective that observes it from the vastness of time and space and knows that any material form present in awareness will dissolve in the continual flow of changing possibilities. Keith Dowman provides an Introduction and a series of Appendixes that are helpful to anyone wanting to make use of the text. In the Introduction he says, “Radical Dzogchen is the distilled essence of Vajrayana, a doorway into the experiential nondual reality of being human, and as such engenders no belief and no argument.” Nonmeditation has the clarity of simple observation. The Glossary of English Dzogchen Technical Terms is both an illustration of how the translator works with the text and a detailed explication of the basic attributes of Dzogchen. Keith Dowman has been publishing translations of Tibetan texts since 1970 and has been teaching Dzogchen nonmeditation worldwide since 1990. This text is a source of the basic principles incorporated in what he has come to call Radical Dzogchen.