Rudy Bauer,Author, Marisa Brown, Peter Bauer, Editors
In meditation we suspend our mind and free awareness to become aware of its own self. Awareness becomes aware of awareness. In discovering awareness, we discover that this awareness is a field- multidimensional and vast and infinite in its horizons. As Dudjom Rinpoche so often said: awareness frees everything.
Sometimes in Dzogchen this primordial awareness, this vast base of the sea of awareness, is called the Vajra vase body or Vajra vase dimension. It is also called the Vajra youth body, the Vajra youth dimension.
This languaging points to the unborn, undying, indestructible nature of our innermost essence, our innermost awareness, the basic beingness of our own being. Vajra is the symbol for that which cannot be overcome. It is unobstructed. It is our abiding nature that can be touched, experienced and completely lived in, completely owned. It is completely infusing.
This innermost awareness is also called the deathless state because, in experiencing this dimension of our own being, the fear of death dissolves. The fear of disintegration and annihilation dissolves. It is called youthful vase body because there is this eternal timeless awareness experience of youthfulness even though our body is decaying as we speak. To experience this primordial awareness, this field of beingness, this field of luminous knowingness, this field of oneness is to experience freedom, the bliss of freedom.
Unbound open awareness is beyond our mind, our thinking, our affects, sensations and memory. And yet, this awareness can contain the mind and integrates our mind and body. Meditation is the process of embodying consciousness.
This awakened awareness has three dimensions. The primordial source is dharmakaya which is infinite openness, infinite spaciousness, infinite emptiness, infinite potential, infinite compassion, infinite oneness, complete immanence. There is nothing beyond it. There is nothing to transcend. Everything takes place within this vast ocean of luminous spaciousness: radiance, light, infinite generosity, givenness. You and I are givenness.
Everything is manifested from and within the dharmakaya. The Sambhogakaya is the manifestation of the great elements, the luminous elements are the vortexual energies.
These are the archetypical powers that we call the deities and dakinis. This is the archetypical dimension of being itself which is actually our own beingness. Dharmakaya is your being. It is spaciousness and openness. Sambhogakaya is your being manifest in its energetic and luminous dimensions. Nirmanakaya is your own being in its manifestation as flesh and earth and sky, fire and water. Flesh.
The everyday dimension of your being, both the unmanifest and manifest is gnosis, knowing. Knowing, (gnosis) itself as you. This wisdom gnosis is oneness. Each dimension is completely in oneness with the other. Your personal awareness is the openness to openness of the vast openness of dharmakaya. Your personal light, the light of your awareness, the light of your mind, the light of affects and sensation, fantasy and memory, all are ultimately the light of primordial awareness manifesting in you as you. It is this world itself that you are of. You are not born into the world. You are born from out of this world and from within this world.
Just as you have the capacity to transmit your mind into others and others have definitely transmitted their minds into you, happily or unhappily, you also have the capacity to transmit your awareness, your primordial field of light into others and for others.
It is of the very nature of awareness to manifest itself, to incessantly manifest itself and transmit itself, to bring itself forth. Awareness is forever and ever manifesting and disappearing, forever concealing and un-concealing, creating and dissolving. Since we are that awareness, you and I have the same capacities. We emanate all the time. The generational mind can come through us and the primordial light and brightness, the primordial energy and shakti, the primordial love and great compassion can naturally come through us, spreading into the realms we live in and enter.
This is actually the great compassion. It does not take effort. It is happening naturally as compassion manifests itself as us and in us and for us.
To the degree that you and I can sustain the experience of being the body of light, the body of the vajra youth, this radiance of awareness, the clinging-the desperate impossible clinging, the impossible grasping, the fearful and terrified grasping- will dissolve. To the degree we can inhabit the body of light, sustain the body of light, this terror will dissolve. You will experience your body and your being as a fleshy body of light. It is an experience of youthful ongoing continuity of being. Life after life, death after death. The deathless awareness state becomes your own.. You can be nuts but you can be a luminous nut. You can be an ass and still be a luminous ass.
You and I can place ourselves in this wisdom gnosis, this non-conceptual awareness, and think and feel in this vajra vase body, the youthful body of light. I fill myself with light, fill myself with the luminous resonance of this room, the luminous resonance of nature, the luminous resonance of all the sentient bodies. The bodies of sounds, the body of appearances, the body of smells, even the body of affective states, all reveal luminosity.
There is no Buddha elsewhere, no God elsewhere, no Shiva elsewhere. Divinity is completely here and now, forever and ever and ever.