Someday their egg will hatch

Some people believe that they should just keep on meditating, and someday their egg will hatch and they will fly out of the shell and ascend to a completely different level. Actually, it’s not like that at all. We should not think, “The awakened state must be something really special. If I practice this long enough, one day a door will open and I will see it and all the qualities will pour into me.” It’s pointless to have this kind of attitude. If we really want something spectacular, we will indeed have opportunities for that, in what is called the “temporary meditation moods” of bliss, clarity and nonthought. These can occur, but such sensational experiences do not help to cut through thoughts. On the contrary, they generate even more fixation because we start to think, “Wow! What is that? This must be it!”. Many subsequent thoughts arise in response to the fascination with these experiences. As I mentioned before, realization involves a process called recognizing, training and attaining stability. It’s similar to planting the seed of a flower. You plant it, water it and finally it grows up and blossoms.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Rainbow Painting (pp. 121-122). Rangjung Yeshe Publications.

Rainbow Painting is a very profound book, though much of the content doesn’t make sense until one has a direct experience of awakening. This passage, however, is crystal clear. We tend to get fixated on special states as a sign of progress; this is also because they are so damn nice! And, more positively, the fixation can arise because they do enable devotion and progress (and potentially some emotional healing), even if they are not themselves the goal of practice. I’m trying not to throw too much shade on jhanabros, but I worry that there are people with the desire to practice seriously that are getting stuck in a cul du sac.

However, there is something paradoxical about how rigpa/awakening etc is discussed - both pristine primary purity etc but also something quite mundane. There is something about special states that is concrete in a way that awakening is not, which is another reason I think people are drawn to them. Annoyingly, I would say that both aspects (non-ordinary and mundane) are true, and depending on where someone is in their progress, either needs to be emphasized. In a way it’s true that “there’s nothing to do” and no meditation is needed, but that attitude too early on will not lead anywhere. And yet on the flip side, sticking with the notion that it’s all about experiencing a succession of meditative experiences is also a hindrance to “progress”. Maybe one way to cut through the paradox is to say that the extraordinary becomes the mundane and vice versa. When bliss arises it’s just “ho hum” as my teacher would say. But when walking the dog becomes living in the sacred world of the mandala, that’s when things get really interesting.