Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: Now I have a few more compliments for you because I feel
moved, and then we'll get right into it. I want to say that your
teaching is practical, clean, and accessible, very much so. And
when I first met you there was something different about you, I
couldn't put my finger on, and now I realize it's the quality of your
listening. Your listening is uncluttered by an active mind making
judgments, I see something there that could be really valuable to
me going forward. Your perception of yourself as an ordinary
person is both accurate and refreshing, you have a special gift for
making what seems like inscrutable Eastern mysticism accessible
to linear and logical Western minds like mine. There's a lack of
artifice in what you say and how you act, and your work appears to
me as a creation of a framework of understanding to be embraced
for a while and then discarded.
So getting right into your work, you say that your intention is
identical to that of the, I'm don't know if I'm pronouncing this
right, the Dzogchen tradition. Would you share what that is.
PETER FENNER: Well, the Dzogchen tradition is the tradition
that emerged in North West India and then went to Tibet, but it's a
tradition that's very minimalist, it's very aesthetic. What I
appreciate about it is that it comes from what I call the result level,
so I really appreciate traditions that are effectively saying, hey,
maybe we need to do much less in order to be at the state that all
of these traditions are talking about, maybe we can just
experiment with being here at the culmination of the path. We
just open that up as a possibility, we open up the possibility that
we can be here right Now in a way that there's no more work for us
to do, in a way that we say, where am I, Now, we can't even really
say where we are. Can I do more of this? Can I enhance the state
of consciousness that I'm in? We're resting in pure awareness we
can't enhance this because we're already in pure awareness in the
moment. So they are traditions that function at the result level,
and they speak to me very powerfully.
TRIP: Indeed. I've got eight pages of stuff here to go through with
you, so I do not want to ask you anything in particular because I
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