Finally, a 21st-Century
Lamp on the Path to
Great Perfection realization
This pragmatic curriculum overview introduces the Axis Mundi Awakening results framework.
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Theory and Maps
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Methods with Precision
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The Path Begins with Knowing What Is Possible
You are suffiently aware of your suffering to seek a way out. That's a start, but following the path all the way out requires equal parts perseverence and confidence. Paradoxically, perseverence depends on confidence, or faith, yet confidence emerges from perseverence. Despite this conundrum, the two differ in difficulty: Perseverence requires continual effort, whereas a basis in confidence generally requires only recall of some antidotes to doubt.
Demystification
In Buddhist doctrine, we learn of the Five Hindrances to results, and we learn that the most poisonous one of the five is doubt. Because so many of the sources of doubt are institutional, as well as untrue, a good first step onto your path is to separate disempowering myth from the reality that many contemporary laypersons preceding you already enjoy.
Myth 1. Only monks, nuns, and retreatants awaken.
Busy contemporary laypersons who practice with precision and regularity can reach full realization. Moreover, bringing awakened awareness to the world of human relationships, off the meditation cushion, characterizes the highest levels of the Great Seal (Mahamudra) and the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) level of practice. Sequestration behind walls or robes, or in caves, does not.
Myth 2. Only sanctioned elders should speak.
Those practitioners and teachers with actual knowledge, know-how, the opening under consideration, and precisely articulated phenomenology are suited to speak openly for the benefit of all. Instead of on oligarchy, the new turning thrives on natural meritocracy.
Myth 3. Information should be secretly shared down to few.
Content should be shared openly and honestly at a roundtable of those who want to learn maps, phenomenology, methods, and what opening is possible and when. Practitioners are expected to be sovereign, responsible adults in the execution of their path. They therefore should be entrusted with information once they understand the Law of Karma. Instead of paternalism, the new turning thrives on mutuality.
Myth 4. Authentic Dharma is always veiled in metaphor.
Although poetry is a method, especially at the higher end of the path and on retreat with a master, Dharma transmission can and should meet beginner and intermediate practitioners where they are, with language that is transparent, explicit, and as denotative as possible. In our culture, which is characterized by process-analysis thinking, summary tables and technical illustrations support comprehension and retention
Myth 5. Practicing well requires intensive study of philosophy.
Strong practice is informed by both Eastern and Western psychology, not philosophy. Famously, the Buddha himself often refused to answer questions about metaphysics, having decided pragmatically to “teach suffering and the the end of suffering.” In our new turning, Western self psychology and object-relations theory add depth and dimension to our understanding of illusory self structure and the default processes that maintain the illusion of essential structure.
Myth 6. Buddhism was set in stone by twelfth-century Tibetans.
Lama Anagarika Govinda writes that the Buddha-dharma is neither static nor nationalist, but living and universal: “[It] conveyed a universal meaning, beyond cast, creed, or race, and expressed the laws of a timeless reality. This reality has to be rediscovered from generation to generation, from century to century—nay, from one civilization to another, and every single individual has to realize it by his own experience, in the depth of his own being” (1976, p. 3).
Myth 7. Dharma resides in the grace of the guru's dispensation.
Dharma flows from clear goals, precise methods, and reality-tested maps. The rest of this Curriculum Overview page summarizes submaps of gated attainments. These maps help marshal students’ practice efforts into their own insight, realization, and liberating wisdom.
Pragmatic Dharma
American Pragmatism, the quintessentially American philosophical movement of the late nineteenth century, holds that the truth and meaning of any idea is solely a function of its practical outcomes. The historical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, in teaching not abstract ontology or epistemology, but human “suffering and the end of suffering,” modeled and enjoined a path based in pragmatism.
The Buddha was concerned foremost with human psychology and experiential results that make a difference to our lives. With the historical Buddha as our model, updated and culturally resonant models of communion can flourish and dispel institutionalized sources of personal doubt. By dispelling the myths just listed, you begin to form confidence in all that is truly possible for a devoted and diligent practitioner of the holy Dharma.
A Clear Path Requires a Results Framework
Although the Axis Mundi program personalizes entry points and practice sequences for each phase of practice for the individual student, its metamap, which has been tested and refined since 2015, supports the entire journey for all. In addition to ensuring wholeness and efficiency, this syncretic organization of submaps fosters the student’s confidence by steadily building each attainment on similarily “gated” previous attainments.
Mapless Haplessness
Before you learn specifics of the Axis Mundi map-based curriculum, consider two illustrative anecdotes—one from a teacher of mine and one from a student.
Years ago, one of my teachers mentioned over dinner that one of his new students, a beginner, was diving into an advanced tantric wrathful deity practice as a first entry to meditation. Why? Because that student saw a book about the specific practice and said, “It sounded cool!” My teacher didn’t need to explain that, predictably, the student quickly floundered. We laughed knowingly because this situation is the norm rather than specific to that student.
Although countless niche Dharma books teach one isolated theoretical or practice morsel, little, if anything, exists to empower the practitioner to do the following key requirements:
Plan a complete course to enlightenment
Document and interpret preliminary results
Accurately diagnose stable attainments
Navigate the naturally gated levels of practice
Instead, the Dharma book market resembles a buffet with no defined meal courses governing menus, and no menus governing recipes. Without continuity-of-care and whole-path guidance, a practitioner may risk misdirection toward the overall goal, as well as toward mastery of the currently alluring practice morsel.
More recently, a new student of mine explained that she practiced devotedly in traditional Buddhist settings for years but was lost: “It was as though I walked into a vast, dark warehouse of schools, teachings, and practices with only a tiny personal flashlight,” she said. “I can aim my little light into one dark corner, then into another, and then into another, but I couldn’t see at all how each momentarily illuminated area fitted with or related to the others.”
Both stories illustrate the importance of a map-based practice, and they illustrate what typically happens without one.
Yang to Yin
Great Perfection (Dzogchen) view (tawa), as well as realization, teaches us that “progress” and “gaining” are notions necessarily bound up with egoic grasping and linear time, both of which condition suffering. Despite this truth, aspirants aren’t always “in the view” when off the cushion. They find that between our Buddha-nature and our eventual Buddhahood there is path. And path is timebound right up until the moment that it’s not.
Because life is short and confidence emerges from early gains, the efficiency of our off-cushion project plan matters. Moreover, because postmodern Westerners are habituated to linear process-analysis, the Axis Mundi curriculum meets them where they are by emphasizing a progressive, detailed map that succeeds by means of “baby steps.” These steps require consistent, zealous effort. Such yang emphasis on goal-direction and diligence yields early attainments soonest.
After the momentum of early meditative skill-building, insight, and attainment, the many previously mastered steps, like rungs on a rope ladder, are pulled up behind the advancing student. The farther up the path the student advances, in other words, the simpler and shorter the practice sequence becomes. In this way, we can realistically build the practice up to timelessness and automaticity off-cushion, as the full yin complement naturally emerges.
We can analogize (below). If a perfectly level plank represents optimally efficient and effective practice, then we may suppose that the fulcrum is equidistant from the two ends of the plank. The leftmost end of the plank is the effortful, energetic (yang) approach to practice, and the rightmost end is the open, receptive (yin) approach to practice. This scenario of a fulcrum at the precise midpoint would be true, however, only at the midpoint on the path.
In truth, for the plank representing practice to stay level, meaning optimally balanced between exertion and receptivity, the practitioner must move his or her practice “style” (fulcrum) toward the yang end or the yin end, as appropriate to the path’s current timepoint. If the fulcrum remains at midpoint throughout the path, then the excess weight of the yang or the yin, with respect to phase of practice, will cause practice to tilt into imbalance and stall.
Attainment Recipes
Any serviceable map must delineate not only a results framework of attainments, but also the supporting attainment-specific practice methods. In other words, stages of awakening are best articulated not in mere abstract theory, philosophy, metaphor, or doctrine, but as specific psychology, applied method, and resulting phenomenology. The converse is also true: Practice methods are best understood and engaged in their stage-specific theoretical context.
Each attainment on a submap resembles a recipe, with its three elements:
Goal. The goal is the “big picture” theoretical understanding of the experiential shift to be worked toward.
Method. The method consists of stepped-out practices and their place in a specific submap sequencing.
Results. The results are the student’s phenomenologically detailed articulation of new baseline experience.
In a cookbook full of recipes, the goal is the glossy color photo of a cake you want to bake. The method is the list of ingredients and steps for mixing, baking, and cooling. The results are the food critic’s description of precisely how the orange rum zum cake tastes.
Similarly, in any phase of practice, the goal contextualizes and motivates the methods. The methods realize the goal. The phenomenological results, articulated by the student, ensure that the goal has been wholly met.
The Broadest Overview Reveals Four Tiers
Multi-lifetime maps such as the Tibetan Five Paths (Ten Bhumis) can be interesting to contemplate, as "you are here" speculations go. But they are not pragmatic, because they reveal nothing about how to modulate your practice in this lifetime. Instead of emphasizing these speculative maps, the Axis Mundi program conceives of the broadest pragmatic map as four tiers, each being the student’s successive emphasis in the current lifetime of practice.
Four Broad Phases
As tiers, four progressive phases of practice may be patterned pyramidally, with the correction of the sensory subject-object fixation across all three senses (seeing, hearing, and feeling) forming the foundation (below).
Specifically, ascending up the pyramid means passing through the following phases:
Correcting dualistic (subject-object) sensory misperception
Opening “holdout” psychosomatic polarizations residing in the coarse and subtle body
Ending identity-based cognitive distortions that formerly emerged from and reinforced the psychosomatic tier.
Relinquishing self-importance in acts of loving purpose.
Most of the rest of this Curriculum Overview page explicitly addresses only Tier 1, correction of misperception.
The Progression
After the “mind” awakens from sensory misperception (Tier 1), some polarized sites of reactivity remain hidden in the body (Tier 2). Each of these regions forms an interface between perceptual felt sense and our nonintegrated subpersonalities, or autonomous complexes, which cognize in maladaptive ways. This second, psychosomatic, level of practice involves chakra work or other tantric methods to reveal and release these hidden “knots” into wholeness.
After the “untethered” somatic distress is largely healed comes a period in which the student notices that he or she still engages compulsively in cognitive distortions that formerly both arose from and reinforced the somatic level of reactivity (Tier 3). This phase is downright odd. It is experienced as a cleaving of the (healed) felt sense from the (still distorted) cognitive habits. This leg of the journey tends to take longer to resolve than the others.
Finally, karmic patterns increasingly arise and unwind in the process known in Dzogchen as dharmakaya release, which ends at Buddhahood in dharmadhatu exhaustion. During this process, the practitioner finds his or her life aligning with altruistic purpose and bodhisattva activity that benefits the collective (Tier 4).
Edges and Center
Although this pyramidal schema proves useful as a general reference, it is important to note that the tiers do not compose a perfectly linear progression of perfectly discrete phases, but only a generally observed pattern. The best way to understand this qualification is to recognize that one’s level of practice always involves three overlapping points in a subprogression:
a “cutting edge”
a “center of gravity”
a “trailing edge”
Each of these three characterizations applies to the practitioner’s current individual dimensions of awakening. For example, at a specific point in time, a practitioner’s cutting edge may be turning the third chakra to light (Tier 2), but the same practitioner concurrently may have a trailing edge in recognizing luminosity of the visual sense sphere (Tier 1).
The center of gravity refers to most of a practitioner’s current practice dimensions. For example, if the practitioner is still working on the last substage of luminous nondual seeing-consciousness (trailing edge, Tier 1) and is also easily dropping a few maladaptive cognitive framings (cutting edge, Tier 3), the practitioner’s center of gravity is nonetheless Tier 2 because most of that person’s progress is currently being made with chakra practices (somatization).
Methods Are Constructive and Deconstructive
Drilling down, we find the four Axis Mundi practice divisions. One is constructive, serving to support, heal, expand, and empower the self-structure. Two divisions form the Buddhist deconstructive practices of insight into the radical openness of all constructs, including self-structure. The fourth division is the meditative absorptions (jhanas), which straddle both contructive and deconstructive dimensions, as well as ordinary and extraordinary levels of insight.
Self-Sovereignty
As teacher and psychologist Jack Engler writes in Transformations of Consciousness, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody” (Wilber, Engler, and Brown, 1986, p. 49). Engler’s chapter 1, titled “Therapeutic Aims in Psychotherapy and Meditation: Developmental Stages in the representations of the Self,” addresses a tendency in the West for “no-self” practices to subtend personality disorders and insecure attachment disturbances.
The aim of a Buddhist practitioner is to end fundamental suffering by recognizing that separative boundaries and core identity are empty—that is, transparent, permeable, and ultimately illusory. Nonetheless, during and after awakening we continue to stand forth in the world from a human personality. To achieve true wholeness rather than fetishize a dissociative nihilism, we must balance emptiness of self with optimal self in relation to others.
Accordingly, the Axis Mundi curriculum incorporates culturally sensitive tantric and somatic practices to transform defensive self-structure, including any dissociative version of “no-self,” into the sovereignty of extraordinarily powerful beings. Such practices are prescribed in preliminary, remedial, and integrative intervals, as appropriate for the student.
Ordinary Insight
Complementing the transformative expansion and enhancement of the self, the Axis Mundi path emphasizes ascending levels of insight into the radical openness (“emptiness”) of all apparent structure, including the layered trifold structure of the self:
entitihood
individuality
identity
An insight is a lightning-fast preverbal understanding that the following Three Illusions are merely conditioned colorings, or self-defense mechanisms, staining all experience:
Essential permanence
Separate entitihood
Achievable satisfaction
Ironically, these illusions meant to protect the self from a threatening world intensify the self’s suffering. Traditionally termed Ordinary Special Insight, this phase of practice debunks these Three Illusions, revealing in their place the truth of the Three Characteristics of Conditioned Existence:
Utter transience
Universal entitylessness
Pervasive unsatisfactoriness
Seeing these Three Characteristics until they cannot be unseen ushers in a life-changing renunciation of samsara, which means cyclic wandering from desire to suffering. In addition to the practitioner’s being plunged into this deep renunciation, a life-enhancing shift in baseline sensory perception and feeling suddenly opens. When stabilized, such shifts are traditionally known as attainments or gains.
Extraordinary Insight
On this basis of renunciation and early deconstruction of self-versus-other illusions, highest Buddhist practices can be engaged. These Extraordinary Special Insight practices “uncover” unconditioned truth and develop the wisdom that liberates us from both the illusory confines of separate self-structure and the not necessarily reassuring groundlessness of the Three Characteristics of Conditioned Existence.
Extraordinary Special Insight begins with Great Seal (Mahamudra) emptiness-of-time practice. Eventually, it sheds the subtly reified sense of emptiness as Space. Transience deconstructs but without instantiating permanence. Nonduality exceeds its subtly retained duality without devolving into monism. And, when the Space analogue of emptiness burns off like dross, timelessness and nonlocality clarify the recognition of irreducible openness.
The Hybrid Role of Jhana
Central to early and intermediate attainments is mastery of the four formed meditative absorptions (jhanas). Jhanas are deep states of refined joy and peace. The purpose of jhana practice is emphatically not “concentration,” as is routinely said, but expansion.
Jhana nurtures positive self-transformation—specifically, the student’s felt sense of expansion beyond bodily boundaries. Yet jhana simultaneously dissolves contractive identifying-with and identifying-against processes that ordinarily compose the felt sense of a bodily core. In turning one “inside-out,” as it were, jhana practice instills expansive self-sovereignty while also hosting deconstructive insight into the illusoriness of self-structure.
Rather than segregating jhana from insight, as most programs do, the Axis Mundi program encourages insight from within each jhana. In fact, the higher four formless jhanas point to the facets of later Extraordinary Special Insight uncannily. That early Theravada alone tends to “own” the jhanas, while the Tibetan traditions alone “own” the high automaticity end of the path, marks a tragic loss of efficiency to sectarianism. Fortunately, a crosswalk now exists.
Ordinary Insight Generates Progressive Gains
Attention-based misperception generates our default sense of being a separate self, over here, against everything else, over there. This misperception is the root of fundamental suffering. In Ordinary Special Insight practice, this dualistic misperception deconstructs because broad metacognitive awareness increasingly subsumes narrow attention. Practice focuses on transient sense data across three senses: the felt sense, the auditory sense, and the visual sense.
Summarized here as a simplified list is the standard order of attainments. Most are intrinsically “gated” by prerequisite attainments. Some minor variations in sequence exist for some practitioners, however. For example, some predominantly visual learners gain Nondual Seeing-Consciousness 3 (NSC3) before opening Interoception-to-Space (ITS). The sequence as listed here is not only the standard one, however, but also the most efficient.
The Ordinary Insight attainments are predominantly nondual, meaning that they dismantle the illusory hard line between the subject-perceiver reference point and the object-percept reference point. Although these gains significantly decrease fundamental suffering and increase sustained happiness, the higher realization of Extraordinary Special Insight exceeds a remnant bilaterality inherent in nonduality. All this said, Ordinary Special Insight is a required practice phase.
Second Jhana
Among the four pleasurable “formed” meditative absorptions (samatha jhanas), the second jhana (j2) provides the ideal access point for beginning insight practice (vipassana). Second jhana induces raptures (piti) and bliss. Important for access to insight, it also enables the practitioner to drop effortful attention and sustained metacognitive evaluation of the state. This automaticity fosters meditative pliancy, the serviceability of the mind and body for ever deeper work.
Arising and Passing Away
The second vipassana jhana, Knowledge of the Arising and Passing Away (A&P), is the insight counterpart to samatha j2. The insight stage (vipassana-ñana) comes with bliss, sensory acuity, heightened sexuality, fascination with magic, ability to sit long hours without pain, and urges to proselytize. Its insight is into utter transience—hence, the name of the stage. It ushers in the Progress of Insight (POI), a cyclic succession of 11 stages mastered until Theravadin Stream Entry.
Theravadin Stream Entry
Stream Entry is the first of four “path moments” in Theravadin mapping. Stream Entry is an event in which all, including consciousness, suddenly ceases. It occurs in meditation when temporally overlapping arising sensations, or visuals, synchronize into a single passing formation. After cessation, all of reality “reboots.” For some, Interoception-to-Space (ITS) is immediately attained, but not everyone has such a dramatic Stream Entry event or gains ITS as a result.
Models that consist of counting all four Theravadin “path moments” to liberation are not the focus of the Axis Mundi map. Nevertheless, the POI and its four paths do, to a significant extent, correspond to specific perceptual changes that constitute the true gains. Tracking the POI stages brings several practical benefits into daily life. Doing so also surfaces extra information that confirms the student’s current level of practice and readiness for the subsequent level.
One wonderous outcome of Stream Entry is the significant drop in effort required to walk the rest of the path. Rather than the practitioner’s feeling as though the path demands an uphill exertion, the “stream” of the awakening process carries the practitioner forward. Helpful magical synchronicities likewise become frequent and obvious. Because of the increased automaticity and ease that Stream Entry brings, it is uniquely important as the major goal of early practice.
Interoception-to-Space
Interoception is the human perception of signals arising within the body’s interior. Most of these signals inform us of a state that is negative, one prompting action to restore homeostasis. The bodily core, from which these signaling sensations arise, is also associated in self psychology with part of the self-structure: self-identity. Jhana practice works directly with this interiorization, gradually expanding the practitioner beyond his or her bodily boundaries.
This expansion, this being “turned inside-out,” resembles a felt sense more than it does a mental state. In jhana meditation, which involves closing off the senses from the outer world, the more deeply one is absorbed into the bodily interior, the more intensely felt is a vastness that seems somehow continuously outbound beyond our default bodily boundaries. The pinnacle of this felt sense is the fifth jhanic aspect of the fourth jhana (j4.j5), j5 being Boundless Space.
Interoception-to-Space (ITS) is the nondual attainment, when stable in everyday life, of this felt sense of space. It is the corresponding disidentification from the bodily core, or “center,”—the inner atmosphere of self-identity. If not gained at Stream Entry, then it is attained early on Theravadin third path. ITS “gates” access to the attainments that follow, with the exception that the more minor attainment, Nondual Seeing-Consciousness 3, may come first for visual learners.
Nondual Hearing
Soon after attainment of ITS, the practitioner will notice correction of dualistic auditory misperception. In the human default mode, sound seems to happen over there, yet the sense door that perceives sound is over here, on or in our head. Where is the “sound”? Three main corrections of Nondual Hearing-Consciousness (NHC) happen to the auditory sense.
Space Dome of Sound
The practitioner notices that, in any environment rife with overlapping individual sounds, each one can be heard simultaneously with the others yet extremely distinctly. Narrowness of attention has become a broadly inclusive metacognitive awareness of sounds. The Axis Mundi practice coined for this work is the Canopy Forest of Sound.
Soundwave Elongation
Within the space dome of concurrent sounds, the practitioner experiences each sound as cadenced along an unusually elongated waveform, rather than as direct or instantaneous. When this effect is first beginning to be noticed, the practitioner may sense that his or her hearing-consciousness exists at the location from which the sound originates.
Sounds within Silence
During the silence of jhana practice, most practitioners will eventually notice a continuous unlocatable sound resembling a gazillion tiny chimes. The sound is most noticeable as a high-pitched, soft shimmering, but lower pitches modulate, creating a multidimensional soundscape of sounds within sounds. Not strictly nondual without additional context, this gain in Dzogchen context is the dharmata of sound. In Theravadin contexts the sound is referred to as nada.
Nondual Seeing
Nondual Seeing-Consciousness (NSC) emerges over months, sometimes years, in three stages that together become “layers” of interpretive emphasis. NSC2 is, however, the mature version of the NSC attainment, often referred traditionally to as luminosity. NSC3 isn’t obviously nondual, and it can emerge before NSC1 and even before ITS for some practitioners. By contrast, NSC1 always comes after ITS and before NSC2. Each NSC phase has subphases.
NSC1: One Expanse
The first phase and “layer,” NSC1, entails a couple of ways of experiencing, or describing, a shift in how the practitioner knows the visual field.
Early on, the perceiver is fused with the object, but in way distinct from the default (con)fused unconscious enmeshment of the self with arising and passing objects and events. Instead of the subject’s pulling the object over into his or her “head” or region behind the eyes for processing, the perceiver’s “mind” is instantly over there, completely fused with the object, where the object is—as though the mind has left the body’s former location behind.
In the mature subphase, the perceiver and percept, as well as all points in-between, are experienced as a single, indivisible, solid-state expanse: “Subject” and “object” are experientially known to be mere abstractions inferred post hoc from one expanse. The whole expanse is known immediately as an immovable whole never divided into separate locational reference points.
NSC2: Immediacy
In contrast to the all-inclusive stillness and space of NSC1, NSC2 normally begins as the subtle bilateral flowing of the formerly discrete perceiver and percept “sides” into each other. It is as though the formerly separate entities continuously dissolve into two currents that—so long as the gazing situation continues—cross sides and intermingle.
As the mind speeds up to track the whole universe of arising-and-passing atomistic sensations of the early subphase simultaneously, the temporal sense of interflowing “sides” is replaced by an atemporal always already abiding interbeing, or nonlocal knowingness. That is, the NSC1 expansiveness, and therefore its remnant sense of time, becomes meaningless and drops out of experience. All, including all points along any line of perspective, are equally nonlocal and immediate.
NSC3: Vividness
NSC3 is the heightened acuity with which all particulars of the visual field are perceived. Its vividness includes color saturation, high contrast, sensitivity to numerous individual motions simultaneously, and increased parallax. Unlike NSC1 and NSC2, NSC3 seems to manifest most obviously as intensification of the particularized contents of experience.
At first, NSC3 may seem to lack a nondual component. The vividness of all the arising-and-passing particulars of the visual field requires a heightened orientation to them, however. This orientation emerges from the perceiver’s markedly diminished subject-position identification. The contribution of NSC3 to nonduality is that this field-presencing subject-disidentification is the same no-self configuration that marks ITS and early NSC1 more obviously.
NSC3 differs in that its orientation is more obviously to the variegated field, or manifold particulars, whereas the new orientation in NSC and ITS is emphatically to the field as empty expanse. As a congruent “platform” from which to open NSC1, ITS is more obviously nondual than NSC3 because of NSC3’s hyper-particularizing, instead of matrix-like, emphasis. Nonetheless, both depend on some extent of emptiness of self.
More Mapping
For a more integrated, nuanced summary map of Ordinary Insight, see the book excerpts linked in the penultimate section of this page.
Extraordinary Insight Exceeds Nondual Models
Subject-object nonduality is impressive for reducing suffering and revealing serenity, but Extraordinary Insight exceeds nonduality. Mahamudra and Dzogchen bring a healing level of wholeness that is clearly “spherical,” although without center or circumference. It releases remnant bilaterality. Athough this quasi-monist wholeness opens early on, just as NSC1 preceded NSC2, ultimately the wholeness is experienced as empty of space, location, and time.
Unbounded Wholeness 1
Delineated here are the key experiential features of the Dzogchen recognition that Axis Mundi calls Unbounded Wholeness 1 (UW1), which feels like limitless vastness. Unbounded Wholeness 2 (UW2) follows, characterized by nonlocality. Both phases of Unbounded Wholeness correct a remnant bilaterality of relationship in nondual experience.
Deconstructed Time
The Great Seal (Mahamudra) and Great Perfection (Dzogchen) level of practice continues to work with the sensory spheres of feeling, hearing, and seeing. Practice differs from Ordinary Insight, however, in its deconstruction of impermanence. This unique emphasis begins in the Third Yoga of the Great Seal, specifically with the Emptiness of Time practice, which accomplishes the cessation of psychological time. This shift is from the subtle mind to the supersubtle.
Sphericity
Ordinary Insight ends “attention bounce” between individual percepts, or objects, out there, as well as between perceiver and each percept reference point. But Extraordinary Insight ends the bounce between entire sense spheres. This sense sphere “bounce” is difficult to catch in action, but it is a sense of “jumping over” a “wall” between, say, feeling and seeing, instead of experiencing both senses with perfect equality and concurrence.
The sense sphere integration into one sphere begins with recognition of the emptiness of time as characterizing the broadest metacognitive awareness. UW1 elicits a unitary sense of vastness, with the dynamic proliferation of particulars arising and passing within that one still, unchanging vastness. With its intensified clarity, UWI “drowns out” the sense that the once dual subject and object are now nondual. It reveals that within nonduality is embedded a subtle “dual.”
Some scholars have referred to Dzogchen as having “monist leanings.” Experientially speaking, they are correct: The notion that vast awake awareness “contains” arising and passing particulars reintroduces a barrier and a hierarchy intrinsic in containerization models. For example, in some true monist models, an eternal God exceeds and contains all that comes and goes. However, UW1 is not the final experiential Dzogchen recognition; UW2 follows.
Three Facets
In the Bon Dzogchen lexicon, the vastness is called the Mother-consciousness (kunzhi), and the proliferative particulars may be called the manifold (tsal). When the two are integrated, practitioners may feel “stuck,” not knowing exactly what is “missing” from realization. What is missing is the individual’s crystal clear recognition of the Mother-consciousness essence, an essence that consists of essencelessness. This clear recognition is called the Infant-consciousness (rigpa).
We already have seen these three dimensions of UW1 as aspects of the separate sensory openings of Ordinary Insight. For example, the three Nondual Seeing-Consciousness layers reveal correspondences:
NSC1 is like the Mother (kunzhi) aspect, in its vastness.
NSC2 is like the Infant (rigpa) aspect, in its unmediated knowingness.
NSC3 is like the Manifold (tsal) aspect, in its vividness of field “particulars.”
Because NSC is stably open before coming into Extraordinary Insight, Third Yoga Mahamudra and Dzogchen recognitions happen completely and more efficiently than otherwise would be the case. The openings of the individual senses in Ordinary Insight fail to rise to Dzogchen realization for two main reasons:
Attention bounce persists between entire sense spheres.
Within each sense sphere a subject-object bilaterality persists, even though it is nondual.
When students transition from Ordinary Insight to Extraordinary Insight, they will have already completed some constructive practices that integrate the Mother aspect with the Manifold aspect. This integration dissolves some persistent “walls” between between the felt sense and the auditory sense. This work precedes the NSC work.
Bon’s metaphor for total integration of the sense spheres with one another, as well as of the three facets with one another, is that Mother and Infant “embrace.” That embrace proliferates the infinite particulars of reality’s manifold. Thus, in true realization the Mother, the Infant, and all particulars of the “content” of experience merge seamlessly. They then remain three recognizable facets of realization without ever again being fully distinct from one another.
Unbounded Wholeness 2
When the Infant opening (rigpa) is stable throughout everday life, Trekcho, meaning “cutting-through obscurations” practice, begins. With it, the Infant’s clarity of recognition of the Mother is dialed up to 11, so to speak, which “burns off” the felt sense of her as vast containerizing space. Although her vastness is a necessary stage of awakening, during Extraordinary Insight it signals some subtle dullness despite the stable opening of the Infant-consciousness (rigpa).
What A. H. Almaas terms “unity through nonlocality” (“unilocality”) is originally treated in the Flower Garland (Hua-yen) tradition. Although the sphericity of UW1 differs greatly from nonduality, unilocality (UW2) differs from nonduality even more. Indra’s net is the analogy: Every apparent particular and every contingent aggregation or “whole” contains, penetrates, reflects, and is enveloped by every other particular and aggregation. The result is immediacy, resembling that of NSC2.
The distinction from NSC2 is that the immediacy applies not only to physical vision, but also to thought. For example, one may close one’s eyes and remember the Bubble Room restaurant on Sanibel Island. Instantly, one’s total awareness will be there, where the restaurant is or was, while the body’s original location seems to have vanished. Chunks of time may go missing, psi phenomena may emerge, direct valid cognition is enhanced, and frank out-of-body travel may ensue.
Visions (Direct Crossing)
In Extraordinary Insight work with vision, the especially hard line between reference points, as well as the stubborn remnant sense of distance between reference points, makes vision the last sense to become perfectly immediate. Another way of putting this fact is that the Infant (rigpa) facet is the last to perfectly open, even as it was the last aspect to open at the Ordinary Insight level of practice with vision.
When Dzogchen Trekcho practice is mature, and when UW2 has opened, some practitioners may begin having visionary experiences. These are not “inner” visions, but instead are spectacularly brilliant and colorful visions that happen out in front of the practitioner. These Togal (thodgal) visions, also known as leap-over or direct crossing-over, evolve through four (or in Bon five) stages over months or years. The culmination opens the Fourth Time and therefore Buddhahood.
The practice is a leap-over or direct crossing because it hastens the process of dharmakaya release, which is the gradual release of karmic traces from all lifetimes. Consequently, it is said to enable the practitioner to reach full enlightenment, which is Buddhahood, within the current lifetime. Even if not all visionary stages finish, each stage finished carries significant benefits. For example, the third visionary stage signals that the practitioner will reach Buddhahead at death.
More Mapping
For a more integrated, nuanced summary map of Extraordinary Insight, see the book excerpts linked in the next section.
Next Read the Book Excerpt Starter Pack
The following book excerpts are the next step for understanding in a more integrated way how Ordinary Special Insight and Extraordinary Special Insight develop from the same trifold characteristics of reality. These articles are best read in order, left to right. See the Book and Articles page for more draft excerpts from The Critical Path to Awakening: Model, Map, and Method for Contemporary Buddhist Practice (forthcoming).
Preface to Two Posts about the Results of Ordinary and Extraordinary Insight
The First Two Debunkings for Correcting Dualistic Sensory Misperception
Debunking That Refines Unbounded Wholeness into Nonlocality
Commitments
Because Axis Mundi provides intensive, individualized whole-path guidance aimed at no less than enlightenment, its student body is necessarily small and selective. A prospective student ideally brings the following priors to our initial conversation:
Has carefully read this and the Home page
Is beyond a “shopping around” phase
Is not teaching others meditation or mindfulness
Has practiced daily for a while with no stable opening
Is self-motivated to practice meditation daily
Agrees to study assigned resources
Has or will set up a simple altar
Can quickly read and follow written instructions
Agrees to keep a detailed daily practice journal
Has the resources to continue month to month
Has no symptoms of serious psychopathology
Practices for the liberation of all beings
