Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Experience versus realization.

Experience is temporary, fleeting, easily lost.
Realization is unchanging, seen, known, directly recognized.

Nyam is the Tibetan for experience. We have all kinds of experiences.
Bliss, clarity, non-conceptuality.
Visions, sounds, feelings.
Physical sensations, thoughts, emotions.
Sometimes we feel energetic and focused, sometimes tired and sleepy.
We get confused, then a moment of being awake.

We have all kinds of nyam, the point is to realize that they are illusory and to not become attached to them. We create all kinds of problems for ourselves once we try to recreate nyam, or always try to get back to a particular mental state, a particular feeling tone or perspective.

Tokpa is the Tibetan for realization. It is seeing directly free from concepts. You know and understand without an intermediary.  It is direct recognition.

Tokpa is recognizing your friend in a crowd. There is no question of whether it is, or is not. 
It is knowing fire is hot, water is wet. Realization is embodied and informed by the senses, we see things as they truly are. We see our own face, directly. 

The danger with tokpa is confusing conceptual understanding with actual realization.  Conceptual understanding can seem very certain and logically refined, but it is all thoughts and words.  We need to constantly recreate and reinforce our story to confirm our realization.

If you find yourself scrambling, feeling your realization slipping from you and trying to conceptualize your way back to that state, then you are holding onto a nyam that you are calling tokpa. Be careful, ego and grasping can create a very precipitous path. 

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