The Debunking That Refines Unbounded Wholeness into Nonlocality
As we learned in the first two debunkings, awakening requires a series of views, each subsequent view debunking the previous one to some extent. Figure 1 expands on the first two debunkings by unpacking the refinements of Unbounded Wholeness (UW), beginning with Unbounded Wholeness 1 (UW1). The refinements remain grouped according to the three basic aspects of reality: time, space, and cognition.
Figure 1. Three Levels of Debunking Prior Views, with Focus on Refinement of Unbounded Wholeness
Figure notes. Unbounded Wholeness 1 (UW1) is a high mystical quasi nonduality that, in feeling, tends toward monism: It feels more unitive and “spherical,” or omnidirectional, than the earlier nonduality of perceiver-percept, which feels more subject-object bilateral. Although extremely healing and nondual in terms of the cosmological-scale aspects of Mother and Infant, UW1 nonetheless still depends on a subtle reification of emptiness as totalizing space. This spatialization of emptiness as Mother Space, which is a necessary stage of awakening, persists because of some subtle dullness. The practitioner therefore practices intensifying the Infant (Rigpa) to “burn off” the vastness that characterizes UW1. This brightening and stabilization of the Infant aspect ushers in UW2, which is characterized by nonlocality, or what A. H. Almaas calls unification through nonlocality (“unilocality”).
UW2 emerges as follows. As shown in Rows 4 and 5, that the Mother in UW1 has no bounds begins to change from a sense of a containerizing superspace to the more properly empty no location, which means that distance is meaningless. In parallel, that the Infant brings no penetration over to the Mother changes into the more radical no obscuration in the first place. This change recognizes that openness is always already unblocked. Finally, that the Manifold’s arrow of time is experienced spaciously, as no dispersion of separate timepoints, changes into a further recognition: that no dispersion of timepoints means no directionality of “time” at all. Because all is already right here, empty essence is purity, knowingness’s all-inclusivity is brilliance, and the timeless display of all particular appearances is all-at-once-ness.
Contemplation of Rows 4 and 5
In the figure, the deconstructions represented in the little cloud shapes of Rows 4 and 5, you will notice, do not stay in their columnar “lanes.” This mutual reinforcement to the point of blending characterizes Great Perfection theory and doctrine: When you trace the Mother in traditional texts, you end up articulating the Infant and Manifold; when you trace the Infant, you end up in the Mother and her Manifold expressions; when you trace the dynamism of the Manifold you end up in the openness of the Mother as recognized by the Infant.[1]
Pause and spend some moments contemplating the multiple mutual influences of the three aspects on one another by considering the cloud-shaped terms arranged across Row 4 and then consider those across Row 5. Then proceed contemplating down each of the three columns of clouds. How do the words in these shapes qualify or expand on one another? This set of contemplations is in itself a fruitful practice.
Contemplation of the Mother Column
With the Mother-consciousness aspect of realization, emptiness (openness) is experienced in UW1 as “one taste” of all-being-equally-empty, so it is spacelike. Recognized and stabilized, this abiding experiential sense of Space, or vastness, is pervasive and limitless, having no bounds (see Row 4, Column 2).
But despite its boundlessness, as well as the practitioner’s corelessness, it also feels somehow outbound. This out-going directionality in experience derives from some remaining dullness in the practitioner’s recognition of utter emptiness (openness)—although it is an extremely subtle dullness and therefore difficult for the practitioner to identify.
Because of this outbound directionality, emptiness-as-Space reifies the otherwise completely unqualified openness into a separate background (container) of all foregrounded (contained) particulars. This reification happens even when Space is known as pervading or constituting all apparent particulars. Thus, UW1 is the classic mystical experience of high nondual oneness—the real nonduality of Mother and Infant “in embrace,” rather than the earlier subject-object nonduality of individual perceiver and specific region of percepts.
Contemplation of the Infant Column
The UW1 remaindering of Mother as Space influences the Infant-consciousness. The Infant, which begins as the practitioner’s vantage-point recognition of the Mother, is experienced at first as a going-out to the Mother, penetrating her and illuminating her with one’s “own” knowingness—even though the Mother is already all (see Row 4, Column 3).
Actually, the “always already” knowingness does not belong to the Infant’s “side” and therefore does not depend on its “going,” “penetrating,” “pervading,” or even “illuminating” the Mother, except from the subtly instantiated perspective of a perceiver’s causal vantage point. This said, UW1 cannot be skipped: For UW2 to emerge, this specific reification must deconstruct. Until then, this UW1 view, although partial, is also immensely healing.
Contemplation of the Manifold Column
In addition to influencing the Infant, the overall UW1 theme of Space also influences the Manifoldness of all by conceiving of its “many folds” as spread out and serialized into timepoints that that “go” (see Row 4, Column 1).
As vast Space is experienced as out-going, so too is time experienced in UW1 as somehow still forward-going even though psychological time now feels “spacious.” This (con)fusion of spatialization with going means that time remains subtly reduced and compelled as an “arrow of time,” in which “now” seems to have emerged out of a “past” and to be pointing to the “future.”
Contemplation of the Third Debunking
Now we contemplate the outcomes of the third debunking of a prior view.
The Mother
With Debunking 3, the mythopoetic trope Mother Space deconstructs, with the result that the “field” is understood and experienced not as a Cartesian coordinate system of distances, nor a theater of things and acts, nor an expanse—but as utter nonlocality (see Row 5, Column 2).
This shift is UW2, which is not a nonduality union, but instead resembles Indra’s Net: Every particular in reality is not only the totality, but also is every other particular as such. With UW2, the Infant brightens to an extent that burns off the dulling fog of Space, revealing no center, no edge—no background, no foreground.
The Infant
With the recognition of nonlocality, which A. H. Almaas calls unification through nonlocality (or “unilocality”), Infant Clarity sheds its role as causative “penetration” or unilateral “illumination” of Mother Space. Nor does the Mother’s and Infant’s shared luminous knowingness point to knowledge-as-certainty. Even in the practitioner’s experience of uncertainty, perfect knowingness remains already here, exquisitely intimate.
Consequently, “omniscience” is not a vast index of known particulars. Instead, the abiding knowledge of knowingness as atemporal, uncaused, and unowned means simply that nothing is obscured, blocked, or in need of penetration in the first place, for there is no “taking place” (see Row 5, Column 3).
The Manifold
With the unification of the three aspects in the dismantling of spatialization into nonlocality, the infinite variety of the Manifold ceases to be a dispersion of timepoints, as well as a directional timeline. Each “point” is nonlocal, after all, not “taking place,” not taking up space. When time is thoroughly recognized as actually neither coming to nor going from a “now,” then all psychological time pressure ceases, and Buddhahood is at hand (see Row 5, Column 1).
Why an Efficient Path Is a Progressive One
All this serial view-adoption and view-debunking may seem “on paper” like a prolongation of the path of realization, but this step-by-step progression of outcomes has advantages:
Thoroughness
Ongoing diagnostic accuracy
Pedagogical matching of experience to theory and doctrine
Practice that follows this progressive map ensures that no facet is accidentally left out of the awakening. It is complete and therefore amenable to accurate diagnosis, layer by layer, opening by opening. With this specificity, an A&P Event from Ordinary Special Insight is not mistaken for extraordinary opening of Rigpa, as often enough happens on teacher-led retreats.[2]
Because the practitioner proceeds through each layer of awakening, one at a time, he or she lives with each new layer for a while and therefore comes to thoroughly understand it and integrate it. Understanding and integrating each layer is more difficult to do with “package deal” openings, which are often, or usually, incomplete or mistaken in the first place.
It must be acknowledged, too, that it is much easier to open a single dimension of awakening than it is to sit down, cut through all levels of obscuration at once, and be sure that this opening is the big “it.” By contrast, this progressive map sets the practitioner up for whole-path clarity, minimized need for remediation, and therefore optimal efficiency. We must qualify, though, that efficiency depends on capacity and especially on self-motivation.
Contemplation beyond the Three Debunkings
The pedagogical apparatus of debunkings and the mythopoetic Mother-Infant dyad finally dissolve, as do all contingent views, leaving only the positive “qualities” of purity, brilliance, and all-at-once-ness (see Row 6).
The Mother construct vanishes into purity. This purity is often styled additionally as “primordial” or “potentiating” purity, but these additional qualifiers are timebound, time-pointing, whereas true purity is without limits, without such localization to a time before and causative of separate manifoldness.
The positive quality of brilliance conveys both the sharp clarity of knowing and its self-recognition as knowledge.
And, finally, all-at-once-ness is the positive way of expressing timelessness, which is why it is traditionally styled the Fourth Time—so called because it includes yet transcends the nominal Three Times of past, present, and future.
These three qualities of purity, brilliance, and all-at-onceness remain distinguishable in awakened experience. Yet they are one, as Tarthang Tulku writes in Time, Space, and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality: “Within—or as—presence, Space, Time, and Knowledge shine in their respective ways, without being mixed together. Yet, they are not three things, and in fact each is all three and all three remain an uneffected synthesis” (1977, p. 294).
Notes
[1] For one of my favorite such narratives, well worth studying to appreciate how even in narrative the three aspects shade into each other, see Chapter 4, “The Explanation of the View: Ita-Khrid,” in John Myrdhin Reynolds’ The Practice of Dzogchen in the Zhang-Zhung Traditoin of Tibet (2013). Great Perfection view consists of an irreducible series of chiastic (crisscross) narratives.
[2] The mistaking of early A&P for Rigpa is only one example of many made by both students and retreat masters lacking a map, or lacking important parts of an otherwise complete map. It happens too often, even in the professedly nonsectarian Rimé movement.
Welcome! I’m Jenny. Back in 1982, at the age of 19, I began studying Eastern philosophy and doctrine. In the late 1990s, I authored a 400-page doctoral dissertation comparing Zen koan aporias to the deconstructive rhetoric of silence in modern American texts—an East-West interface that still informs my teaching and writings today.
2010 marked the beginning of my formal Buddhist meditation practice. After engaging Theravadin practices in late 2013, Stream Entry quickly happened in August 2014. Mahamudra Fourth Yoga stabilized in July 2015. I then began practicing within the Bon Dzogchen tradition and began writing content now informing The Critical Path to Awakening (forthcoming). In 2017, I founded Axis Mundi Awakening to offer an intensive whole-path Buddhist awakening program to select, highly motivated students. Interested to learn more? See my teaching approach and curriculum overview.