You Are Already Awake

Reflections on Awareness and the Far Reaches of Human Potential

A friend of mine was a soldier in Vietnam. Out on patrol one day, a mortar shell landed near him and exploded. He was thrown into the air, shrapnel buried in his midsection. A wound that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

But something else happened in that moment. As he flew through the air, before he knew whether he would live or die, his mind opened into a state of awareness unlike anything he had ever experienced. No pain. No fear. No past or future. Just a radiant clarity so complete and compelling, so foreign to anything in his life up to that point, that it completely reorganized his identity.

He couldn’t make sense of it afterward. He had no framework for what had happened. No spiritual vocabulary, no philosophical context. All he knew was that his understanding of his own mind, and of what was possible for a human being, had been permanently altered. And he had no idea where to look.

He spent more than three decades searching.

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The Inner Sky

His search took him in many directions. Eventually it brought him to a meditation retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher that Richie and I have both studied with for many years. Sitting in that retreat, something clicked. He had finally found the language for what had happened to him on that battlefield.

The word in Tibetan is rigpa.

Translated literally, rigpa just means awareness. But this translation misses something. This is not ordinary awareness, the kind we operate from most of the time, which is filtered through layers of identity, habit, memory, assumption, and reaction. It isn’t the awareness shaped and narrowed by who we think we are, by our personal history, by the million small lenses we’ve accumulated over a lifetime without realizing it.

Rigpa is not that. It’s the nature of awareness itself. The open, knowing quality of mind that underlies all of our ordinary experiences of self, while being completely beyond them. The classic image is sky and weather. Clouds, storms, clear days, all of it arises within the sky and passes through it. The sky is never touched.

This is what my friend had glimpsed. The shock of being so suddenly at the precipice of death stripped away everything ordinary, and for a few seconds he saw what was underneath.

Mingyur Rinpoche calls rigpa our “inner sky.”

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The Most Direct Path

Within the Tibetan tradition, this recognition of rigpa is considered the most direct path to awakening. It doesn’t require a gradual transformation through meditation or a slow refinement of character. Rather, it’s a recognition, available right now, of something already present and already complete. The “fruitional approach,” as it’s sometimes called, begins from the premise that you are not a broken thing that needs to be fixed. You are already in this moment, as awake as you will ever be. The work is to see that clearly, to stop overlooking it.

But of course, that’s harder than it sounds.

Rigpa is so simple that we don’t believe it. It’s so close that we look right past it. Like the air you breathe, or, if you’re a fish, the water you swim in. The very immediacy of it makes it invisible.

Getting in touch with rigpa involves two parallel streams of practice.

One is the direct method: learning to glimpse this pure awareness, growing familiar with it through repeated recognition, until what was once a rare flash becomes something more continuous. In the Tibetan tradition, this typically happens through so-called “pointing out instructions.” These are experiential instructions given by deeply experienced teachers that guide students to explore different states of consciousness, and eventually helping them see beyond all these shifting states to the underlying “essence” of mind that has been there all along. This is described as “meeting your own mind face to face.” But you’re not meeting the busy, reactive mind crowded with thoughts and reactions and memories. It’s a direct encounter with the very nature of consciousness.

There are many ways to get a glimpse of awareness: Being in nature, moments of joy and celebration, experiences of awe and wonder. But most of these experiences come and go without us recognizing what just happened. They’re just memorable experiences that quickly pass by. To nurture them, we need to recognize what they are and learn how to find our way back to them. This is what “pointing out instructions” are for.

The other stream is slower and less glamorous. It works with everything that blocks this encounter from happening. It unearths our mental and emotional habits and loosens the rigidity of our unconscious beliefs. It illuminates the places where we’re stuck, the patterns we return to compulsively even knowing they don’t serve us. This stream of practice is known as “ngöndro” in Tibetan, which translates as “foundational practices.” This path includes a whole series of meditations and contemplations:

• Reflections on the unique opportunity we have as human beings

• Contemplations of the fragility of the circumstances we take for granted

• Meditations on how easily we get caught in cycles that don’t serve us

• Practices that reorient the heart toward compassion

• Imagination-based practices that help us to let go of old mental and emotional baggage

• Meditations on generosity and giving that upend the feeling of inner impoverishment that many of us carry through life

Most people spend years with these practices, doing the unglamorous work of loosening up the mind so that a glimpse of pure awareness becomes possible.

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A New Frontier in Contemplative Science

Almost none of this has been studied.

Richie has spent decades studying some of the most advanced meditators alive, including Mingyur Rinpoche. He documented brain states that are genuinely extraordinary, both during meditation and at baseline. But that research captures the outcome of decades of training. It doesn’t show the before and after, or what happens to an ordinary person when they have their first glimpse of pure awareness.

There are so many interesting questions we have yet to explore: What actually happens in the mind and brain when someone recognizes pure awareness for the first time? What do the foundational practices do as they slowly loosen the hardened layers of self? What shifts in someone who has been caught in cycles of suffering and begins, for the first time, to see through them?

We don’t know. We haven’t looked.

The process of recognizing and growing familiar with rigpa reflects the far reaches of human potential, an area of inner exploration almost entirely unmapped by modern research. Richie and I talk about this often. There’s an unwritten assumption running through most of the scientific literature on mental health that simply being free from psychological disorders is the best we can reasonably hope for. That being “okay” is as good as it gets.

These teachings point in a completely different direction. They describe a dimension of the human mind that isn’t damaged or in need of repair. A source of clarity, care, and creativity that isn’t something you build toward but something that’s already here, already whole. Many wisdom traditions point to this same territory. The Tibetan tradition does it with particular precision and depth, but it isn’t alone. The mountain has more than one path, and people have been finding their way up it for a long time.

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Finding Your Way Home

My friend’s story from Vietnam has stayed with me since he shared it so many years ago. He didn’t arrive at an experience of pure awareness after decades of meditation practice. He stumbled into it in the worst possible circumstances, and had spent thirty years trying to understand what it was. He wasn’t looking and searching simply to understand what he’d experienced. He was lost and he wanted to find his way back home. He just needed a map.

Most of us are not going to have a dramatic beginning to our journey like my friend did. There are many ways to get a glimpse of pure awareness. But his story captures something important about the human condition: We spend much of our lives looking and searching. We don’t always know what we’re looking for, but there’s a vague sense that something more is possible than whatever it is we’ve got going right now. But we’re looking outside ourselves. It usually never occurs to us that what we’re looking for might already be here, and that the place to find it is not outside, but within.

My friend found that out on a battlefield in Vietnam. He spent thirty years finding his way back. But the path doesn’t have to take that long, and it doesn’t have to start with a mortar shell. It is right here, waiting to be recognized.

Warmly,

Cort