Preface to Two Posts about the Results of Ordinary and Extraordinary Insight
Two posts that follow this one present a cohesive results framework for the path of Buddhist awakening. In instructions to my students, I call this presentation the Three Debunkings. It covers the default mode of human perception, the endpoints of Ordinary Special Insight, and the phenomenological outcomes of Extraordinary Special Insight. Each debunking corrects partial obscurations in the prior level of perception.
Limitations of the Current Presentation
This Three Debunkings presentation omits clarifying details, such as subattainments for each outcome and the typical stage-specific methods that I borrow, adapt, or outright innovate to support them. In this regard, I reach across Buddhist (and sometimes other mystic) schools for the “greatest hits” for gaining openings efficiently and completely.
This presentation is also, stylistically, a dense “firehose” of information that takes a 500- or 600-page book to carefully unpack for your full comprehension. Even the terms Mother (in Nyingma, Base) and Infant (in Nyingma, Knowledge of the Base), are not usually clear to those practitioners coming from the Nyingma rather than Bon Dzogchen tradition. A table to clarify some lexicon parallels will follow in yet another post and will later be linked here.
Contextual Intersections
The two parts will appear in introductions to two separate major parts of my book, Ordinary insight and Extraordinary insight. However, the second debunking, included in the Ordinary part, in terms of practice relies on the Third Yoga of Mahamudra in addition to jhana and vipassana.
More simplistic ways exist to delineate this map. For example, the latter part of my Curriculum Overview simply lists the names of each attainment and subattainment, and briefly describes how each is experienced as a permanent baseline shift in sensory perception. I recommend reading the Curriculum Overview before proceeding to the two, more detailed posts.
This current results framework also addresses only what I call Tier 1 of a high-level four-tier path progression. This Tier 1 concerns the correction of dualistic misperception, the ending of Fundamental Suffering. It does not cover the longer path of integration:
release of psychosomatic dualist holdouts in the body (mainly through chakras)
correction of maladaptive habitual thought content no longer fueled by No. 1
actualization of awakening through loving action in and for the world
Tier 1 is the easiest and fastest to finish, brings online amazing peace and joy, and serves as the optimal platform from which to integrate the other three tiers.
Isolation of Theravada or Vajrayana
The first part of the current framework presentation, up to “Debunking 2,” covers Ordinary Special Insight, so it should be understood to fall short of Great Perfection View proper. However, from my own practice and reality testing with others, I can affirm that it relies on supremely efficient and effective preliminary methods for practicing Great Seal (Mahamudra) Third Yoga and Fourth Yoga, as well as the parallel stages of Great Perfection Trekchod.
The reason that I left my long career in publishing to teach and write Dharma is that, in my long observation, different “factions” of Buddhism have half a solution to the challenge of attaining realization in this lifetime, but not the other half.
Deficits of a Theravada-Only Path
For example, Theravada-heavy Pragmatic Dharma, from where my practice first took off under the mentorship of Daniel M. Ingram, stops too short of “enlightenment” by stopping with a revised four-path model. Pragmatic Dharma abstains from mapping not only the other three tiers beyond sensory perception, but also
Third and Fourth Yogas of Mahamudra
Dzogchen Trekchod
Coherent theorization and practice of “nonlocality”
Togäl visions
The bodhisattva ideal
Cessation of Progress of Insight stage “cycling,” including cessation of the Dark Night stages.
Deficits of a Vajrayana-Only Path
Even worse than stopping short is having no gains to begin with. This unfortunate occurrence is often, if not usually, what happens in Great Perfection (Dzogchen) teachings in the West—something I say as the currently devoted Great Perfection practitioner that I am.
Usually, what happens is this: A student attends a mind-to-mind and oral transmission of Trekchod, a teaching which resides in the Secret Pith Instructions division of the Great Perfection tradition. It sells well because anyone can walk in off the street and be promised quick opening of Rigpa and immediate access to Trekchod.
But this skipping to the end goal causes several major problems that can and usually do delay awakening for years, decades, or even a whole lifetime. Chief among them is the rarity of individuals across eons who can actually sit down and cut through all layers of obscuration at once. Traditionally, this would be possible only for the highest-capacity practitioner among nine levels of capacity.
If the practitioner has not, moreover, opened and lived with each “layer” of opening separately, then his or her pedagogical understanding and therefore experiential self-diagnosis of Rigpa will be a wild guess at best and severely prone to delusion. The master would need to follow the individual’s practice closely and not instead rely on the assumption that a mass class landed Rigpa for everyone in attendance. This truth should be common sense.
Most on retreat who are assured that they are resting in Rigpa are actually experiencing the first or fourth jhana, or the ordinary insight stages of the Arising and Passing Away (A&P) or Equanimity stages. I’ve seen and heard this scenario repeatedly on group retreats, but because the detailed Ordinary Special Insight Maps have been truncated, or lopped off and discarded for the entire group, no one catches on that something is missing.
Instead, practitioners return home, enter the Dark Night unknowingly, and therefore quit practicing until the next retreat, where they can get another inspiring A&P hit misidentified Rigpa. This outcome is as tragic as it is common.
In my metamapping, the formless commentarial-style jhanas from Theravada are the uncannily on-target preliminary practice of individual facets of Trekchod, nonlocality, and the Fourth Time. True, I haven’t found anyone who has published or taught this kind of map, but its coherence is compelling—I would even go so far as to say irrefutable.
I eventually discovered that the Aro gTér tradition, regardless of what anyone thinks of its lineage’s “legitimacy,” teaches the jhanas as the only preliminary practice in its Great Perfection curriculum, so at least this kind of mapping is arguably not merely an isolated conclusion.
Advantages of a Metamap
So, even though a long list of “baby steps” will seem counterintuitive to perhaps most attracted to Buddhist awakening, and certainly to those with buy-in to the Great Perfection, it offers whole-path efficiency superior to empty promises of magical bypassing transmissions.
I realize that these statements are bold and controversial, but we must begin somewhere on road comprising the hundreds of years that it will take for a specifically Western-friendly Fourth Turning to emerge in a consolidated, agreed-on form. Meantime, my alternative syncretic mapping is my stake in the ground, plunged down here for the sake of all beings.
Another advantage of baby-stepping out Ordinary Special Insight in Tier 1 is its provision of actual early attainments—that is, permanent nondual shifts in sensory systems of seeing, hearing, and feeling. Because diligent practitioners can gain these shifts relatively fast, despite the many separate steps, they enjoy early confidence that motivates the rest of the path.
Other advantages are many. One is that the practitioner, by gradually stepping up into Rigpa this way, gains both an intellectual and an experiential pedagogy—that is, a thorough understanding of what Rigpa is and is not, what Trekchod is and is not. This was my path, and I’m of the higher end of middle capacity. I moved from the beginning to stable, teacher-confirmed Trekchod in 11 months. That is what I mean by efficient.
My Highest Purpose: Removing Barriers
The construction of my metamap starts pedagogically from the endpoint of Great Perfection View and backfills in the “baby steps,” the layered facets and pointers most quickly leading to the complete and stable View and to the end of all Views. My highest purpose is to remove what in my personal experience and continued observation has amounted to unnecessary institutional barriers accessible intellectual understanding and awakening.
Exterior barriers generate internal barriers that disrupt or prevent faith and confidence in the work. I want you to understand, not be daunted by, the barriers to authentic Buddhist awakening, barriers including foreign language, hyper-metaphoricity, “twilight language,” and foreign cultural packaging with which Westerners often struggle to resonate. For more on this topic, see my teaching philosophy and approach.
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.