When resting in the natural state it is crucial that you distinguish between resting in mind and resting in awareness. If there is any struggle, any tension, any effort or striving, you can be sure that you are still resting in mind. If you are utterly relaxed in an open, expansive presence free from reference point, then you have relaxed into the natural state and can reveal the lucid clarity of awareness.
Recognize how you deviate into mind's play of appearances. Recognize how you get hooked by thoughts or feelings. The essence of deviating from awareness is a diminished presence. Whenever we are resting in the natural state and we start to fixate, reify or grasp to our experience, that is deviation and the result is a diminished presence in which we enter into mind and mental states.
Recognize the straying. Recognize the tension or struggle setting in. Then let go. There is no other method. There are a lot of other methods involving mind, but by relying on mental fabrication we cannot escape the cage of conceptuality.
Once we can rest in the natural state by simply letting go, we need instruction on how to maintain that state. Have settled naturally, we need to maintain the continuity of that natural state, which is the next instruction on rang-nay, or naturally abiding.
Very precisely said.
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