Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditional Awareness

The very notion of making progress seems elusive. What would constitute progress, and where are we going anyway?

The nondual experience can be spoken about in terms of three parameters: purity, depth, and duration. By purity, I mean the absence of conditioned structures of understanding and interpretation. By depth, I mean the extent to which the unconditioned pervades or infuses our conditioned existence. By duration, I mean the length of time we can rest in

We recognize the distortion of our personality that has been caused by accommodating the needs and concerns of other people. We also see the possibility of living in respectful and mutually empowering relationships. This signals entry into the phase called coexistence.

As one of my main teachers, Lama Thubten Yeshe, often said, “Think big, act big, without getting caught in the magical, superstitious mind.”

Generally, a move away from the experience gets triggered when something happens that we think shouldn’t be happening.

Whatever it is that we need, we get others to do it to us—be it to hate us, love us, dominate us, or ignore us.

The approach I recommend is to cultivate this state of consciousness without trying to control or strive for it. When we let unconditioned awareness do its work, in its own subtle way, we find it infuses the various layers of our conditioning.

Every experience is deeply profound yet totally meaningless. We are not sure if this is the most real thing we have every experienced or if it is a total illusion. The Lankavatara Sutra expresses this dilemma this way: “Reality is not as it seems and nor is it otherwise.”

having people around to actively ignore us.