The Dynamic Energy of Being.
Rudolph Bauer Ph.D. Diplomate In Clinical Psychology, A.B.P.P.
The Washington Center for Consciousness Studies and The Washington Center for Phenomenological and Existential Psychotherapy Studies
In Dzogchen Prajna is the dynamic energy of Being. Prajna is the dynamic energy of our luminous awareness. As our awareness becomes aware of awareness, this awareness of awareness is Rigpa. As our awareness become aware of awareness, we become aware of our Being as awareness. In becoming aware of our awareness, we become aware of Being. Awareness is Being. Our awareness is our knowingness of and as Being knowing Being.
Doorways of Being
Our Openness of our awareness knowing awareness is the doorway of entering into our Being as the Being of our own awareness, which is Rigpa. Awareness is the Luminosity of Being and our own awareness is the Vital Energy of Being self-manifesting the Indestructible Life Force of Being. This life force of Being is Prajna. In Kashmir Shavism this life force of Being is Shakti.
Our own Being is Being itself and our knowingness of Being is our own Who-ness. We do not simply know Being with our mind alone. With our mind alone we know phenomena. Within the union of our mind within our awareness we know phenomena and the Being of phenomena simultaneously.
Our awareness as our who-ness knows the Being of phenomena. Our mind as “I” ness knows phenomena and our awareness as who-ness knows the Being of phenomena. We are ontic ontological Beings. We are ontic ontological knowers of phenomena and the Being of phenomena.
Da Sein and Rigpa
As Heidegger so artfully describes that Human Beings have an openness to Knowing Being. He calls this openness Da Sein. Dzogchen calls this openness Rigpa. Our profound Openness of our own Being to directly know and experience Being itself reflects our profound sense of our own knowing and experiencing Being as our Who- ness of Pure Being.
Our sense of Being is personalized. Our personal sense of self is ontological. Our personalized self is our ongoing continuity of Being. Our sense of self is our sense of our ongoing continuity of Being. This sense of self is ontological and not simply psychological. Our psychological sense of self is ontic. In the realm of ontic-ness, a person can feel that they are only their thoughts, or they are only affective states of mind. They are only their sensations. Or they are only their memories. Or they are only their fantasies.
There is a concreteness of experiencing when experience does not take place within the field of awareness which is the field of Being. The experience is that our affects are empty of presence, and our thoughts are empty of presence. Our sensations are empty of presence and our imagination is empty of presence. Presence is the radiance of the field of Being, Presence is the radiance of the field of Awareness.
Ontic Ontological Beings
Dzogchen calls the phenomenological knowing of our mind ‘sems’ and our direct knowing of Being through our experiential primordial awareness ‘semde’ or Yeshe (wisdom). Sometimes this direct knowing of Being is also called Jnana or Gnosis.
This distinction between our two ways of knowing is of great and essential importance both in Dzogchen and in Continental Phenomenology. Husserl explored our phenomenological knowing of our mind knowing and intuiting the essence of phenomena. Heidegger explored our awareness’s phenomenological knowing of Being and the Being of phenomena. Human Beings are phenomenological ontological Beings. Human Beings are ontic- ontological Beings.
“I” ness and Who-ness Integrated
The knowing of our mind is our knowing of “I” ness. And the knowing of our awareness is our knowingness of Who-ness. The knowing of “I”ness is our psychological knowing of mind. The knowing of Who-ness is our ontological knowing of Being.
Human Beings are ontic ontological Beings. Human beings have the sense of “I” ness as their mind. Human beings identify with their psychological mind as “I” ness. Human beings have a sense of Who-ness as their awareness of their Being and the Being of the world. Human beings experience their ontological Being of awareness and their ontological awareness of their Being as Who-ness. Who-ness is an ontological experience of ontological awareness. Ontological Awareness is Being and there is the manifestation of Being as the Ground of Being.
When we integrate the knowing of our mind within the knowing of our awareness, we can experience the two modes of knowing simultaneously in this mysterious union. We can know the essence of phenomena and the Being of phenomena simultaneously. The union of these two modes of knowing is the direct path of self-liberation. We can know the duality of difference and the oneness of Being simultaneously. Our union of ontic knowing and ontological knowing is the path of natural liberation. Just as we are! We are ontic ontological beings and being free is our ontic - ontological nature.
We can integrate our psychological sense of “I” ness and our ontological sense of Who-ness. “I” ness is our thinking, feeling, sensations, memory, fantasy, and our intuition of phenomena. Our Who-ness is our direct non conceptual sense of personal Beingness. Our Who-ness opens for us our experience of the Who-ness of Being of the World and the Who-ness of Cosmological Universe. Our Who-ness opens for us the ever- unfolding experience of our being Being the Ground of Being.
Ontological Knowing
In becoming aware of our own awareness, we become aware of our own Being because awareness is Being. Awareness is Being’s knowingness of Being. Upon become aware of awareness, we become aware of the field of Being in its self-arising and self-manifestation. In experiencing our own awareness, we experience our own Being as awareness. As we remain within awareness as the field of Being. We first experience awareness within us as Being within us.
As we sustain our experience of our field of Being within us and through us, we begin to experience ourselves within the field of Being surrounding us and going beyond us. We begin experiencing the self-manifestation of Being beyond us, around us, and through us. We begin to live within the field of Being. We begin to live within the Sea of Being infinite in its horizons and vast and multidimensional.
And then, in time we begin experiencing our ontological self as the field of Being. We begin experiencing our self as the field of Being and as the self-manifestation of Being. We then begin experiencing our self as the different dimensions of Being. We experience ourselves as our Being in the world as Being.
And we then experience our-self as the archetypal dimension of Being as we experience the imaginal direct perception of the archetypal dimension of our own Being and Being itself. And then we begin to have the profound experience of our self as the Ground of Being. We experience our self both as the manifestation of the Ground of Being and as the Ground of Being. This happens just as we are. The experience of being the Ground of Being is forever unfolding, infinite in its horizons, vast and multidimensional. This is the experiential unfolding of self-liberation.
Da Sein as Openness to Knowing Being
Our direct knowing of Being is what Heidegger calls Da Sein. As we become aware of our own awareness, we become aware of our Being, the events of Being, and Being in and of itself. As we become aware of our own awareness, we become aware of our own Who-ness of Being as Being. As we enter the field of awareness which is the field of Being we experience within us the vast infinity of our own Who-ness of Being within our own Being as Being. We experience our lived experience of own profound Who-ness of Being as Being itself. This ontological experience of Who-ness is both Empowering and Freeing.
Amazingly as we experience the ontological dimension of our pervasive primordial awareness, there arises spontaneously within us the ontological experience of Who-ness which is vast, and multidimensional and infinite in its horizons. Our profound sense of the Who-ness of our Being is the profound experience of Timeless Awareness within in time as time. Timeless Awareness is our experience of Ground of Being.
Our Experience of Who-ness
This Who-ness can be the amazing and the wonderous experience of profound spacious openness, profound trans -lucidity, profound vitality, and a sense of the unbound compassion of generativity. This ontological Who-ness provides an ongoing sense of continuity of Being life after life and death after death! Unborn and undying is the experience of ontological Who-ness as the Ground of Being. Our Who-ness is our experience of the Ground of Being as the Ground of Being. We are simultaneously the Ground of Being and the self-manifestation of the Ground of Being. We are multidimensional beings.
Our Who-ness is our experience of the Ground of Being as the Ground of Being. We are the manifestation of the Ground of Being. We are the Indwelling of the Ground of Being in Being. This is the essence of Dzogchen as elaborated by such Dzogchen masters as Padma Shambhava, Longchenpa, Mirpam, Dudjom Lingpa, Dudjom Rinpoche, Tharchen, Wangdor, Kungsang Dechen Lingpa, Rigdzen Dorge, Namkai Norbu, Norhla, Penor Rinpoche, Yang Thang Rinpoche.
This understanding is also the Phenomenological Ontology of Maurice Merleau Ponty and M. Heidegger. This ontological understanding of Who-ness as ontological self is also the essence of the Tantric Philosophy of Kashmir Shavism as expressed by Swami Muktananda in our contemporary time period and Abhinavagupta in the 9th century Cei.
Dzogchen describes this experience of Who-ness as our experience of our luminous openness of our Being as Who-ness. Our sense of self is no longer our psychology of mind alone but now our sense of self shifts from our psychological sense of “I” ness of mind alone to our sense of Who-ness as our ongoing continuity of Being. We are the manifestation of the Ground of Being. We are the ontological phenomenological manifestations of Ontological Source. We are the indwelling of the Ground of Being as a personal Being. Our sense of self shifts from being only a psychological to becoming ontological reality to becoming Being. Our sense of self becomes the ongoing continuity of personal Being life after life and death after death!
This experience of ontological who-ness is of importance in the mystical Islamic tradition of Il Arabi and Suhrawardi. This experience of ontological who-ness in Daoism is expressed by Dr. Yan Xin the great Chinese physician healer. In our psychoanalytic understanding in the light of Donald Winnicott, our foundation experiential sense of self is our ongoing continuity of Being. Our sense of self is our embodied sense of Being as our own being. Winnicott introduced into psychoanalytic thinking the ontological dimension of Beingness as did Menard Boss and M. Heidegger.
Dzogchen describes this experience of Who-ness as our experience of our own innermost Being! Our sense of self is no longer our psychology of mind alone but now our sense of self shifts from our sense of “I” ness as mind to our sense of Who-ness as our ongoing continuity of Being life after life and death after death. Our experience of Being is profoundly personal and profoundly ontological.
If we can become aware of our own awareness which awareness is our Beings knowingness of our field of Being, there arises naturally our own innermost sense of Who-ness which is profoundly personal, profoundly, and profoundly luminous and brings forth within us a multidimensional sense of the vastness of the Being of our own being. We can experience the vastness of Being by becoming aware of Timeless awareness of Being manifesting in time as us.
Intertwining
We do not simply have this primordial awareness, we are this primordial awareness, which is Who-ness vast and multidimensional and infinite in its horizons. Our sense of Luminous Who-ness can infuse our “I” ness of mind and the functions of our mind as “I” ness. Our ontological sense of Our Being as who-ness can infuse our experience of Being in the world and infuse our experience of the Being of others.
We live in the Sea of Being as the Being of a being. We live in the Sea of Being as luminous Who-ness. This is the experience of natural self -liberation available to everyone just as we are. This experience can be immediate and continuous. And this experience can be forever and ever, life after life and death after death.
We are simultaneously both the ontic knowing of our mind and the ontological knowing of our Being as primordial awareness experiencing the indivisibleness of our Nondual experience of Being and the Being of beings. We are simultaneously the Who-ness of our Being and the “I” ness of our Minds. Many people only experience the “I” ness of their minds and the Who-ness of their Being is experientially foreclosed. This can result in an ontologically Beingless existence lacking the depth and breathe of the fullness of Being.
The Mysticism of Ontological Who-ness
Our ontological sense of Who-ness is not the narrow sense of “I” ness which is often contextualized as a kind of witness consciousness or the narrow self-object viewing through the narrow knowing of our mind and the various functions of our mind. The sense of “I” ness of our mind as witness consciousness is an objectified knowing of mind staring into the phenomenological facticity of factual self and factual otherness. This is a form of ontic knowing. This is often, an objectified and objectifying state of existing-ness.
This “I” ness of mind alone knowing phenomena is for many of us a sense of the absence of Beingness as reflecting our absence of our direct knowingness of Being. Our “I” ness can become a felt sense of our conceptualizations about our self, and even the judgements about our conceptualizations of our self, and even the judgements about our affective states of experiential “I” ness of mind. This “I” ness easily becomes a self- conceptual-ness. Our sense of self becomes an enduring thought. Our sense of self becomes mentalistic. A mentalistic person is often a Beingless person.
The absence of Beingness is experienced as emptiness of self and emptiness of Who-ness. What remains is only the “I” ness of mind that lacks Being-full-ness.
The unhappy experience of our ontological empty state of Being-full-ness reflects our absence of our profound experiential ontological Who-ness. With the absence of ontological Who-ness there is the corresponding absence of a vital sense of ontological aliveness. Many human beings live in “I” ness of mind and lack the profound sense of the Who-ness of their Being. They lack the vital aliveness of Being. Some people may experience the ongoing lived experience of continuous deadness.
When we lack the experience of the Who-ness of our Being we will also have difficulty experiencing the Who-ness of the Being of others. We will relate to others cognitively and conceptually. We will not feel the field of Being that is between us and within us. The experience of the union of our being with the being of others will be limited and contained.
“I” ness as Mind alone is without the depth and the breath of primordial skylike awareness which is our human openness to Being and is our direct immediate non conceptual pre reflective knowing of Being as Being. This knowing of Being brings forth for us our innermost sense of Luminous Presence. The sense of Presence is our own innermost experience of the radiance of Who-ness. Who-ness is our ongoing continuity of Being. To live in the Luminous Translucid Presence of Who-ness is to experience self-liberation whatever Context or Eventfulness in which we find ourselves. We can live in the resonance of Who-ness as the Ground of Being life after life and death after death.
Who-ness is our experience of our Beingness of our luminous translucid field of Being. Our sense of self is our sense of our experience of our own Beingness of our Being and the radiance of our own Being and the spaciousness of our own Being and the vitality of our own Being.
To be absent of Being is to be absent of our ontological sense of self. To be absent of the ongoing continuity of Being is to be absent of the profound foundational sense of embodied Who-ness, embodied Presence and embodied Awareness. Our embodied sense of personal presence is the experience of our embodied radiance of Being as Who-ness.
Gautama himself suffered this anatman experience continuously and so he would naturally and painfully exclaim that all life is suffering and any desire for happiness whatsoever is both hopeless and only increases suffering. This is the personal phenomenology of ontological despair of being human, of Being absent of Being and Being Beingless.
Of course, early Buddhism did not experience who-ness and did not experience the ontological sense of Beingness as their own Being. Early Buddhist understanding embraced the anatman experience of non self, non-who-ness and non- Beingness. All phenomena are illusion and lacked the actuality of Being. The only way out of this Beingless state was to transcend, detach, dissociate and go beyond and go beyond personal consciousness into the emptiness of no-where-ness and no-who-ness. Our profound who-ness in essence is the Ground of Being. Our profound sense of who-less-ness is our experience of the absence of our Being-full-ness of our Ground of Being. The transcendental state is groundless nowhere-ness as no who-lessness.
The personal despair of human existing-ness is held by many religious traditions both eastern and western as the human reality. This despair is both sad and existentially and ontologically untrue. These various forms of Patriarchal Religious experience do not reflect our human ontological sense of Being-full-ness. These Patriarchal traditions separate the Being of source and the reality of phenomena. Phenomena is considered an obscuration of the truth of Being and the truth of source. Actually, our experience of self is our ongoing sense of continuity of Being as Source. Our Pure Being of continuous Who-ness the direct manifestation of the pure Being of source, life after life and death after death.
Patriarchal Illusion
Most Patriarchal traditions are focused within their Patriarchal formulations of Being on the One Who Knows Absolutely in which they consistently and relentless invoke the master slave relationship focused on themselves or their Institution as The One Who Knows Absolutely.
Moreover, the Patriarchal experience of domination and submission consistently and relentlessly projects the master slave relationship on to their Patriarchal “God” who is Absolute In Being and is The One Who Knows Absolutely and Omnipotently, and who eternally Punishes those who are not Obedient and Subservient to the Patriarchal declarations of Patriarchal Will and Desire. This God as entity is completely other then phenomena. This of course is not true and this untruth supports the illusionary omnipotence of the Patriarchal Function. This unhappy understanding is both sad and untrue. This unhappy theocratic understanding consistently unifies Religion and Royalty.
Lacan the great French Symbolic Psychoanalyst describes this Ancient and Ever present archetypal Patriarchal drama as “In the name of the Father”. Papal declarations of Roman Catholic infallibility reflect this illusionary experience of absolute knowledge and absolute domination. The cultic statement about “outside the church there is no salvation” is the confirmation of this illusionary grandiose distorted omnipotent ideation.
Fundamentalistic Religions and Fundamentalistic Traditions play this Sado- Masochistic -Master-Slave scenario drama Forever and ever and ever. This liberation through domination is focal in both in eastern religious traditions and western religious traditions. This liberation through domination is also focal in most monastic traditions wherein the Abbot or Lama is the one who knows absolutely. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are given to the symbolic One who knows absolutely. Submission is the most essential practice in most monastic institutions. “not my will, but thy will be done”.
When the Dali Lama was in Washington DC a few years ago, he was presenting the great and magnificent Kalachakra Tantra. He dramatically spoke about Lamaism as a Patriarchal Clerical illusion, and that Lamaism with its patriarchal illusion of omnipotence and omniscience could destroy Tibetan Buddhism.
Being the Field of Being
Our profound Who-ness is the essence of the Ground of Being. Our Who-ness is not simply “in” the field of Being. Our Who-ness is the vast field of Being and our Who-ness is the vast field of Being. It like our Who-ness is in the baseball field of Being and simultaneously our Who-ness is the baseball field of Being. Our Who-ness is not simply in the field of Being. Our Who-ness is not simply a place or ‘loca’ within the field of Being. Our Who-ness is the field of Being. Our Who-ness expands in time and through time. Our Who-ness is timeless awareness manifesting in time. This is the profound nature of our human beingness- awareness continuum.
Liberation takes place within our Person as Who-ness.
Our Who-ness expands into timeless awareness and is the spaciousness of vast awareness. Our Who-ness can be in total oneness within infinite numbers of Who-ness and still be separate. Our Who-ness may forever be unfolding infinite in its horizons vast and multidimensional.
Our Who-ness is completely and profoundly personal and yet our Who-ness is not an entity. Our person is our Who-ness within form and Our Who-ness is also completely formless. Our Who-ness is our singular knowingness of our Being as the field of Being. Our Who-ness reflects the different dimensions of Being.
There is our formless Who-ness as the Ground of Being. There is our subtle form of Who-ness as the singular formulations of the Archetypal dimension of Being, and there is our Who-ness who is the singular form of manifestation in our human realm of Being, life after life and death after death.
We will end with the biblical memory of Moses going up the Mountain to meet God and Moses comes upon a Burning Bush. And he says to the Burning Bush who are you. And the Burning Bush Replies “I am Who I am.”
Rudolph Bauer, Ph.D. Diplomate in Clinical Psychology, A.B.P.P. Washington Center for Consciousness Studies and The Washington Center for Phenomenological and Existential Psychotherapy Studies
Reference
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The All Creating Source or Kunjed- Gyalpo
There are a number of translations with different titles of this 8th Century Text, The All Creating Source.
1.The Supreme Source, Translated by Namkai Norbu and Adriano Clemente. Snow Lion Press,1999.
2.The Sovereign All Creating Mind, The Motherly Buddha by.E.K. Neumaier Dargyay. Suny University Press.1999.
3 The All Creating King by Christopher Wilkinson.2019.Independently Published.
4.The Kunjed Gyalpo Series, Translated by James Valby Publications. Shelburne Falls, Mass,
These are all great translations with different nuances