Rudolph Bauer,Ph.D. Author, Tom Walsh, LCSW Editor
To become aware of your own innate awareness is to become aware of the luminous. This natural luminosity is the light of your awareness, the light of knowingness, the light of consciousness. This light illuminates experience. This light illuminates everything and without this light of awareness there would only be nothingness. You would only be nothingness. Sometimes this light may actually have color, such as white or blue or red or golden or lapis lazuli (bluish green). Most often this light is simply clear, luminous clarity, seemingly invisible. However, it only seems invisible.
The path of the siddhas (whether as manifested in Buddhism as Dzogchen and mahamudra teachings or as manifested as Hinduism as Shaivisim) is a path of light, the light of one’s own awareness. When Swami Muktananda says god dwells within you as you, he is speaking about the light of your awareness, the same light that allows you to hear me right now, see this room right now, and experience your own subjectivity right now. This light is not some secret tiny, little secret spot within you, a kind of seed. It is the light of knowingness itself.
When the yogis declare Deus (God) is light, they are speaking about the light of your consciousness which is ultimately infinite in its horizon and multidimensional. You are the light of awareness embodied in time and space.
The great Siddha master Padampa Sangye (often called the Lion of the Siddhas) would give these Dzogchen instructions that imply the following:
Awareness is the apprehended experience. Awareness is the ultimate reality of full luminosity.
Most often, you don’t experience this light directly, you miss knowing that you know it. Your own luminosity is most often focused in the mind, and through the mind, on the functions and objects of the mind. Since awareness illuminates the mind and the objects of the mind and is often obscured and, most often, never focused on directly. Yet this awareness is nothing other than your own self; and this awareness is beyond the mind. So the mind can not think it, conceptualize it. Because of this natural luminosity, we experience everything--thoughts, feelings and the world itself. This awareness is the illuminator of experience. Through our natural luminosity we are able to experience the innate luminosity that is the primordial light.
This natural luminosity and the primordial light are completely one and the same. The light is focusing on the light. This natural luminosity has the capacity to experience its own self, its own nature -- immanently and directly -- and thus this primordial light is easily known, even though it is beyond concept and beyond language and beyond the mind. Your mind is not your awareness although your awareness illuminates both your mind and illuminates its own self, its own primordial light.
The siddhas say focus your awareness upon that which arises and that which is experienced within this awareness field, this awareness space, this luminous spaciousness (wherein everything arises). This space illuminates that which is known and experienced. The space of psyche is luminosity. This luminosity illuminates everything you know, everything you experience. Your knowingness is luminous. Without this luminosity there would be no experience -- only nothingness.
Now focus on this space of luminous knowingness that illuminates your experience right now. Without this clear light of awareness you would know only darkness and would be without experience. So the highest and most powerful of all the dharmas is so close as to be easily missed. This is the great secret. This is the secret of the siddhas.
Know this natural luminosity with your eyes open and with your eyes closed. Know the light of awareness within and the light of awareness without -- the natural luminosity manifesting phenomena within you, and the natural luminosity showing forth the phenomena of the world. In this way, transparency and translucidity is attained by you and the transparency of experience and translucidity of the world is realization. Transparency is gnosis. Transparency is oneness.
Whatever you experience within this open focus of natural luminosity, will become luminous, both within and without. This experience of the unborn, yet natural, luminosity holding and illuminating experience becomes the instance of primordial full illumination.
NOW, if you wish to sustain the experience of natural luminosity, place that which you are experiencing within the scope of your awareness field of light. Simultaneously knowing the clear light of the field and the experience that the light is illuminating, THIS is the practice of natural liberation. THIS is the practice of light.
If you do not want this appearance of the light to disappear, continue to remain in your innate immanent awareness and you find that thinking and feeling, sensation and memory, fantasy and desire are all of luminous nature as is your own awareness. Whatever you experience will have less and less influence on your mind ...discursive thoughts will be experienced in the luminous clarity of the field and their intensity will dissipate as forms of light…your fixations will dissipate as forms of light. You will slowly but surely live in the fluidity of the beingness of being which is light.
Nothingness is not the ultimate. Radiance is both the ultimate, and pervasive. Radiance is multidimensional. Fixation on the functions of your mind and its objects block the natural luminosity of self revelation. Your full luminosity does not block thoughts or feelings or desire or imagination or any experience whatsoever. With full luminosity, experience becomes transparent and translucid.
Awareness arises within my self. In natural luminosity it does not matter whether thoughts cease or not because this elemental light of awareness never strays beyond bliss, clarity, and non conceptuality. In this way, one is always accompanied by meditation. This is the timeless abiding view. This is the view of timeless awareness. Everything is known in and through timeless luminous awareness. The actuality of appearance of phenomena is in time, appearance both within and without. The view is within timelessness -- luminous timelessness, transparent timelessness.
Because one has access to this natural luminosity within ones self, one can have access to the natural luminosity within the other. The light knows the light. And so, when two or more enter into natural awareness together the luminosity increases and is brought forth more explicitly and more dramatically, and more pervasively.
The self arising of luminosity is brought forth from within to within. As the light arises within you the light also arises within me. As the scope of the field (breath and depth) arises within you and beyond you, the scope of the field of light increases in me and beyond me. This is the bliss of co-emergence. Extension allows the experience of luminosity to become pervasive and pervade all things without sinking, without fogginess, without agitation and without scattering.
The true mandala is your own field of natural luminosity. Wherever you go you are in the mandala; you are the mandala. Wherever you go you are in the field of natural light and your experience is illuminated and the experience of the bliss of transparency and translucidity is available. And so the unconscious becomes conscious and hope which is the cause of fear disappears.