Psychological Stepping Stones - Introduction

There are a series of subtle-body noticings that come with working through the four Dzogchen empowerments, as translated here by Herbert Gunther in Chapter 5 of 'Meditation Differently'.

I have no claim, whatsoever, on any Dzogchen lineage. I have this book, a reverence, and some attention that I'm training my will upon. This book has helped deepen my appreciation for exactly what initiation, or empowerment, can liberate. I do not claim in any way that there is a spiritual athleticism, to be practiced, in working through these four stages of empowerment, simply by reading these words, strengthening visualisation processes, and spacing out the stages, across time. I only have the record of what went on, for me, when I worked through this material.

Gunther highlights the empowerment journey as progressing from the external to the internal, and from the arcane to the super-arcane. Linearity, however, definitely doesn't apply, in this work.

The purpose of the empowerments is to mobilise the individual's inner potential and have it mature into what is best described as that individual's autonomy as an expression and a measure of their relations with their environment. There is a liberation, in the growth of cognitive capacity in emancipation from organismic and representational restrictions. It's highest expression would then be what has been termed the ec-static intensity as it becomes experienced in it's pristine awareness modes [italics mine].

'the river of the empowering force that is nothing else but
    the beingness of Being;
the river of the empowering force that is
     self existing resonance;
the river of the empowering force that is
      the five pristine awareness modes;
the river of the empowering force that is the five gnosemes
      the dominant figures in the prototypes of conscious life.' p 50.

These rivers are associated with developmental lines that constitute the dynamic body image, ranging from the affective-organismic to the spiritual and ecstatic.

An individual finds themselves always already in a social context. In this place, interaction and communication are constitutive of the individual, and evoke corresponding processes, when shared. Ritual is a kind of social language that serves to symbolise social communication.

In the first of the the initiatory processes, a flask of water is used, to symbolise purification, a restoration and recognition of an individual's highest potential. The Dzogchen thinker's realm is Being's abidingness. This endogenous pristine awareness has central dynamics that are already 'on the move' - a mandala or spiral movement that starts from the whole, of Being's spontaneity. In it's movement it forms a socio-human reality that is itself a process of uncovering a universe in which the human individual is being disclosed to an understanding of her being.

'The outer is but inner, raised to a state of mystery' - Novalis

The formative outer phase is the activity configurational setting, that is a reflection as the way [italics mine]. The empowerments are imaged as occurring in the mandala of the process structure that is the self presentation of Being to itself, by way of symbolic re-creation, in the uniquely singled out cognitive space of the experiencer's whole multi-levelled body awareness. This self sensing process reflexively instantiates itself via:

1) Sense-perceptions - iterative feedback between outer and inner world where we continously re-cast and re-mold our experience of reality;
2) intensification of the sense-perception process.

Before initiation it is vital that the student learn to see themselves fresh, with new eyes. To see things as meanings. Transformative vision applies equally to household utensils as it does to the conch, a mirror, a lute, fruits and a scarf (symbols of sensuous pleasures). Transformative vision applies also to fellow household members. Five flasks with five scarves symbolising the complementarity of male/female aspects of the protopatterns of synergetic consciousness are arranged at the five expected points. Learning to see household members on the energetic level sees these scarves become vital identifiers, the territory of gods and goddesses.

The gate opens, the sweat begins. :)


Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.