You have been told that meditation is something you do.
You sit down. You apply a technique. You concentrate on the breath, or you label thoughts, or you watch sensations move through the body.
You are doing meditation. You are the meditator. The meditation is the activity being performed.
This whole picture is wrong.
It is not wrong because the techniques do not work. They work. They produce calmness, focus, insight, sometimes more.
It is wrong because what they are pointing at is not something you do.
What they are pointing at is what is left when the doing falls away.
In Dzogchen there is a term, rigpa, which roughly means the bare knowing that does not require effort to sustain it.
The teachers say it is not produced by meditation. It cannot be produced by meditation, because it is what is doing the meditating.
You do not cultivate it. You recognize what is already cultivating itself.
This is why the Dzogchen texts call the highest practice non-meditation.
Not the absence of sitting. The absence of the meditator.
Notice your meditation the next time you sit.
There is a sitter. There is a technique. There is a person checking how the technique is going.
Three layers of doing, stacked on top of what was supposed to be silence.
You have been adding to the silence.
The silence is not somewhere you arrive after enough technique.
The silence is what was here before you started adding.
Effortless non-meditation is not a more advanced technique.
It is the removal of the technique.
The mind will hear this and immediately ask what to do instead.
The asking is the doing. The mind cannot conceive of anything that is not done.
So let the mind ask, and do not answer.
The not-answering is also not a technique.
It is what is happening when you stop reaching for an answer.
A traditional Dzogchen instruction:
Do not follow the past. Do not invite the future. Do not alter your present awareness. Rest.
Read each line slowly.
Do not follow the past. The thought that just arose, do not pursue it.
Do not invite the future. The thought that is about to arise, do not summon it.
Do not alter your present awareness. The awareness that is here right now, do not improve it.
Rest.
Rest is not an instruction. Rest is what is left when the three previous lines have removed everything that was not rest.
You cannot rest by trying to rest.
You can only stop the not-resting.
The not-resting is the following, the inviting, the altering.
Three movements of the mind. Each one a small grasping. Each one announcing that the resting is not yet here.
Watch the three movements.
Not as a technique. As what is happening.
The watching itself is not a fourth movement. The watching is what was always there underneath the three.
Longchenpa wrote in the fourteenth century:
Resting in the natural state, all phenomena self-liberate.
Self-liberate.
The phenomena release themselves. The thought arises and goes without your processing it. The feeling arrives and departs without your interpretation.
You are not liberating anything. The liberating is happening on its own.
You only ever interfered.
The interference was your meditation career.
The watching of the breath, the labeling of the thoughts, the management of the body. Small interferences, each one well-intended, each one obstructing the self-liberation that would have happened anyway.
This is not an argument against technique.
Technique is what the mind needed to get tired enough to stop. The breath-watching exhausts the watcher. The labeling exhausts the labeler. The body-scanning exhausts the scanner.
By the time the watcher, labeler, and scanner have all collapsed, what is left is what was always there.
You used the techniques to wear out the technician.
When the technician is gone, the technique is no longer needed.
You sit and there is sitting. A thought arises and there is the arising. The body breathes and there is breathing.
No one is doing any of it.
This is effortless non-meditation.
Not because effort is forbidden. Because effort has no one left to perform it.
You will not stay here.
The technician will come back. He will pick up the breath again, start watching, start labeling. This is fine. The pattern is old.
You do not need to fight him. You only need to notice that what he is producing was already happening without him.
The producing was the only thing he ever added.
Sit for twenty minutes today without a technique.
Do not call this a technique either.
If you find yourself watching the breath, you are not failing. You are watching the breath.
If you find yourself labeling thoughts, you are not failing. You are labeling thoughts.
If you find yourself wondering whether you are doing this correctly, the wondering is what is here.
None of it is the problem.
The problem was thinking there was a problem.
The natural state is not somewhere you go.
It is what does not need to be reached because nothing has ever left it.
Including the technician.
Including the wondering.
Including this sentence.
Rest.
Sources: Padmasambhava, Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness, 8th century. Longchenpa, Treasury of the Natural State, 14th century. Traditional Dzogchen pointing-out instructions.