The Four Tuning-In Phases

Arriving on my front door step from India this summer was a gorgeous lime green and vivid yellow covered secondhand hardback book, costing a measly $8.50, called 'Meditation Differently' by Herbert Guenther. This edition was published just the year before he passed away, being in 2005. It smells of incense and resin.

My recent lacking-in-confidence trait has been to give a paragraph by paragraph summary of the books that I am reading, barely straying from the revered words of the author lest I make the gist of their work too incomprehensible to read, via the filtering through my own mind, and the typing of my (inevitably distracted) fingers.

Guenther is far too dense and terse in style to make that habit possible with this book, really - phonetic-Tibetan is scattered liberally throughout the text, as are his occasionally obscure parallels to Western philosophy. There are some secret never-been-revealed before (I think) teachings on the psychological meaning of empowerment, the snying-thig, the essence of all essences, the Dzogchen approach to reality and two Mahamudra teachings on the Four Tuning-In Phases. It is the last of these I'm looking at today.

This book gives me material to meditate on, as well as meditations to do. I'm sort of enchanted with it. I'll draw out some of the skeletons of his translations of Mahamudra and Dzogchen texts as he has made available here, and we'll see how I go with incorporating at least some of this depth into the lunchtime mindfulness classes at uni.

There's a typical set up to most of these teachings, where there is a short invocation and a long invocation that includes gnosemes (vowel utterances that perform  a function like symbolically indicating the complementarity of the feminine and masculine aspects of Being). This long invocation usually ends linking into the beginning of the teaching.

An apology is nearly always given for the shortcomings of the teacher, right at the very end. I feel right at home. :)

The translation in particular of the Four Tuning-In Phases that I am working with is originally the work of Padma Dkarpo (1527-92).

The text points to the interconnectedness of all things - the warmth of goal realisation in studying this text, the delight arising from it's challenge, the existent and non-existent entities of one's reality, all of these have dependent origination.

The four unpollutable Tuning-In Phases of psychic awakening are:

1) Single pointedness;

The explosion of time-and-space psychic energy, experienced as a ceaseless opening up. Worldly matters matter less.

2) Dissociation from conceptualisation;

Not anticipating spiritual wakefulness or fearing samsara. Not holding onto, nor forcing change in, anything. One feels like a pauper having discovered precious treasure.

3) Single piquancy;

The deeply felt understanding that  the phenomenal 'that which lights up' and the noumenal 'that which is dynamically open, nothing' are indivisible. Subject-object dichotomies have subsided.

4) No-more-model building.

Whatever lights up and whatever has concretely arisen is already, in totality, present. Anxiety is a non-entity here - your experience, right here, now, is the finished model, the only possibility. One stands free of the notion that something has been imaginatively built by an imaginative builder.

The objects of one's experience in this realm do not come-into-existence - there is a sense of an uninterrupted flow of unity.

Being's dynamics are conceptually undivided, ontically without origination, non-dual and not within the scope of representational thought.


The point is to withdraw outwards/inwards, to a stage where thing and no-thing-ness do not obtain to dualism. The interface between quiescence and agitation comes tumbling down, too, sheer joy arises, and a sense of the primordial 'time before time' comes to permeate experience.

We become aware of our 'ec-static intensity' - the sub-moment-to-moment fluctuation between zero intensity and pristine lucidity, and that's lucidity in terms of 'light'.

I could bathe in this for hours. Oh. I think I have :)