with Keith Dowman
“Regarding the yoking of mind and appearances, Surely thought then would create everything.
What about if I think of the nature of my mind? Does just thinking the thought make it so?
That is not my idea of liberation!”
Jigme Lingpa
Excerpt from the introduction to The Yeshe Lama: Lingpa’s Dzogchen Atiyoga
A Radical Dzogchen Translation by Keith Dowman
“Thus, in the dzogchen dharma-reality taught by Guru Rimpoche, we are free of all specific identity. Floating on the surface or hovering weightlessly, the lotus-born adept is free of the mud at the bottom of the lake in the here and now. And we are all lotus-born – if only we would admit it; if only we could allow it. We are all free of all past rebirth, free of the traumatizing experience of womb, birth canal and infancy. We are free of everything that provides the root conditioning from which the ignorant must strive to liberate and exonerate themselves. When we recognize the nature of mind, the cumulative potentialities of experience that constitute karma are already transformed into the spontaneous compassionate responsiveness that is buddha.”
Guru Pema Here and Now: The Mythology of the Lotus-Born
Translation and commentary by Keith Dowman
“Surely we should hope that Dzogchen retains a deep sacred place within Tibetan consciousness, but our principal aspiration is for Dzogchen to take root in the West and heal the deep rifts that Judeo-Christian dualism has created in the meta-structural consciousness of the People of the Book.
In order for this to occur, the supra-cultural meaning of Dzogchen should be lifted by its existential bootstraps out of its monastic isolation and primping cultishness into the clear light of day, where it can be embraced by the existential and literary mainstream that is open to a Nondual view of the world. This translation attempts to move literary Dzogchen exposition in that direction.”
Keith Dowman, from the preface to Spaciousness: The Radical Dzogchen of the Vajra-Heart