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Fear of Flying

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Fear of Flying

Fear of flying is Ch.6 of Roaring Silence’s diagnostic name for the practitioner’s reluctance to leave the conventional-logic field and make the leap into nonreferentiality. The chapter names the reluctance and prescribes naming-the-reluctance as the working move:

“The tight box of conventional logic can become an avoidance, an evasion, a way around owning up to the fear of flying. You could make all kinds of highly reasonable excuses for not leaping into space. It can actually be something of a relief to cut through the eloquent escapism of erudite excuses and admit to the fear of flying. Somehow, coming to terms with the reluctance to abandon definitions is a positive step — a move toward working with how you are.” — Khandro Déchen

Ngakpa Chögyam’s complement:

“To acknowledge the fear of flying is to be open to investigating the nature of fear. From this starting point, fear loosens itself a little. It becomes workable. The idea of sitting becomes a positive challenge rather than an irritating threat.”

Key Points

  • The resistance is existential, not cognitive. What the practitioner calls “I’m having trouble understanding this” is often, structurally, I do not want to stop being the kind of someone who understands by this means. The resistance protects the conventional-logic field and the self-construction it carries.
  • Conventional logic can operate as evasion. When the practitioner persistently cannot “get” the teaching by thinking, the chapter’s first diagnostic is not “think harder” or “read more” — it is check whether the thinking itself is preventing the leap. Eloquent reasoning can be a sophisticated form of not-jumping.
  • Naming is the first move. Not overcoming, not pushing through — admitting. “Coming to terms with the reluctance to abandon definitions.” The Ch.4 diagnostic on Mistrust of Existence is already the ontological substrate; Ch.6 gives the practitioner-level acknowledgment move.
  • Fear becomes workable once named. Ngakpa Chögyam: the named fear loosens itself; unnamed, it presents as irritation, antagonism, or (most cunningly) “a waste of time.”
  • Working with a Lama forecloses retreat. The one-way-ticket analogy: boarding the aircraft is the commitment; once up, one jumps.

The Free-Fall Metaphor

The central pedagogical device of Ch.6’s Q&A. Ngakpa Chögyam narrates the physics and phenomenology of free-fall parachuting as a worked example of what realized reasoning (see Conventional Logic and Realized Reasoning) is based on.

The mechanics:

  • You fall at 32 ft/s² (acceleration).
  • You continue accelerating until terminal velocity — about 120 mph — which you reach in ~17 seconds.
  • “That might sound quite terrifying, but something odd happens at terminal velocity that’s somehow reassuring — you seem to stop falling. Your stomach catches you up and then it’s as if you were being buffeted by the wind.”
  • Spread-eagled in a flight suit, you can circle like an eagle on the column of wind. Khandro Déchen: “For a short time you can actually feel like an eagle.”
  • Ngakpa Chögyam: “You can even observe the curve of the earth and, to some extent, enter the eagle’s dimension of perception — a valuable experience for any yogi or yogini.”
  • You pull the rip cord; the parachute opens. Then, as the ground nears, “ground rush” — “a reversal of what people would imagine they would experience. The ground seems as if it’s coming up to meet you.”
  • You roll on landing (or step off the sky like an escalator with a square canopy). “Then… conventional reality recommences.”
  • Khandro Déchen: “Which is why most people want to go straight back up and do it again!”

The metaphor’s layered operation:

Free-fallPractice
Fear of leaving the aircraftReluctance to abandon definitions
The 17-second accelerationEarly practice — apparent worsening
Terminal velocity (“you seem to stop falling”)Nonreferentiality becomes stable; “being referenceless is not death” (Ch.5)
The eagle’s dimensionThe perceptual field of realized reasoning
Ground rushThe peculiar reversibility of dualistic perception from the nondual view
”Conventional reality recommences”Return to ordinary functioning, now recontextualized
”Go straight back up and do it again”Why practitioners continue

Two complementary metaphors inside the same conversation:

  • Khandro Déchen: “It would be like trying to explain the delight of making love to a lifelong celibate monk or nun.”
  • Ngakpa Chögyam (on the conventional rationalist’s disbelief): “You would say, ‘How can you argue with me about an experience you’ve never had?’ The rationalist would probably reply that you ought to be able to explain any experience in conventional terms to anyone.”

The structural payoff: experiential domains are not adjudicable from outside. The only adequate response to the rationalist’s objections is — as Ngakpa Chögyam gives it — “Suck it and see, then there might be some value in discussing it.”

How Conventional Logic Becomes Evasion

The chapter’s sharpest move is diagnosing reasoning-as-resistance. The conventional rationalist, confronted with a description from a domain they have not entered, produces objections:

  • “You can’t possibly feel as though you weren’t falling when you obviously were falling.”
  • “You couldn’t possibly see the ground coming up at you if you were falling toward it.”
  • “Prove these things to me by intellectual argument and I’ll consider trying it.”

Ngakpa Chögyam’s diagnosis: these objections are “highly reasonable excuses for not leaping into space.” What looks like rigor is actually pre-emptive protection of the conventional-logic field against the experience that would transform it.

Khandro Déchen sharpens: “Cutting through the eloquent escapism of erudite excuses” is what allows the practitioner to admit the fear. The admission is not defeat — it is the first non-evasive move.

The Positive Move — Admission

Two related moves the chapter recommends:

  • Admit the reluctance. Not justify it, not defend it, not argue against it. Note that one is reluctant, and let the reluctance be present without the apparatus of excuses.
  • Investigate the fear. “To acknowledge the fear of flying is to be open to investigating the nature of fear.” Once admitted, the fear can be worked with as a phenomenon rather than defended against as a self-justifying premise. This is the Ch.2 let-go-and-let-be applied to the practitioner’s own resistance.

The result: “Fear loosens itself a little. It becomes workable. The idea of sitting becomes a positive challenge rather than an irritating threat.”

The contrast with the irritation/antagonism described in the rationalist example is exact: unadmitted fear → irritation / antagonism / the objection-apparatus. Admitted fear → workability / loosening / sitting as positive challenge.

Working With a Lama — The One-Way Ticket

Ngakpa Chögyam delivers the structural analogy:

“Before boarding an aircraft to make the first jump, the instructor will usually issue a mildly ominous warning: ‘The only person who’s going to come back down to the ground in the aircraft is the pilot. It’s a one-way ticket — if you go up, you jump!‘”

Khandro Déchen:

“Working with a Lama has something of that quality, as you can see from the allusion to free-falling. If you never board the aircraft, you never make the jump — you’re never in the position to jump or to be pushed out into the air. To face the open sky by leaping from an aircraft and to face the open sky of Mind while sitting both require that you face the fear of flying.”

The structural claim: commitment forecloses retreat. Several related points:

  • The Lama-disciple relationship creates a configuration in which the practitioner’s usual escape routes from practice are less available. This is part of its function.
  • The aircraft is boarded before the jump is made. The commitment precedes the leap. This is unlike the conventional-logic frame in which “try it and see if I like it” is the default stance.
  • “To face the open sky of Mind” is paired with “to face the open sky by leaping from an aircraft.” The two are structurally the same — both require facing the fear of flying. The practice and the Lama-relationship are not two separate things; they are the same structure from two sides.

This rhymes with Ch.1’s “steadfastness in choice of Lama” on Testing the Teacher and with Ch.3’s Psychological Prerequisites (the warning that Tantra/Dzogchen require, not replace, baseline psychological health — part of what the aircraft-boarding requires of the practitioner).

Fear of Flying vs Mistrust of Existence

Two closely-related concepts worth distinguishing:

Mistrust of Existence (Ch.4)Fear of Flying (Ch.6)
Metaphysical — the primary dualistic fixationPedagogical — the practitioner’s resistance to practice’s demand
Substrate under reference-point productionSurface of the substrate when the practitioner is asked to let reference-points drop
Disguised as obduracy, irritation, obsessiveness, suspicion, depressionDisguised as conventional-logic objections, erudite excuses, reasonable delay
Loosens through sustained shi-nèLoosens through being named
Ontological — what drives the apparatusPhenomenological — what the practitioner encounters when the apparatus is asked to quiet

The two are the same phenomenon viewed at different altitudes. Mistrust of existence is what makes the leap look like death; fear of flying is the surface reluctance that experience of mistrust-of-existence generates in the practitioner’s pedagogical situation. Ch.6’s value is the naming move — fear-of-flying as a practitioner-level diagnostic that fits on a note card and can be applied in real time during resistance to sitting.

Why the Leap Is a Leap

The chapter’s title — Flight — and the springboard verse give the shape of the transition:

“These words are a springboard for the discussion of referencelessness. This springboard is built of ideas designed to undermine ideas. It is intended to enable a leap into the space of referencelessness — a plunge into an understanding of the vastness of what we are.”

Leap and plunge both name a decisive, non-gradual moment. This is consistent with the “instantaneous” registers of Dzogchen that Ch.10 will develop. Ch.6 is not naming a gradual transition; it is naming the moment when the practitioner stops trying to reason the next step and actually leaves the conventional-logic field.

The leap is not dramatic in form. Exercise 4 sat for thirty minutes is the same posture as Exercise 1 sat for thirty minutes. What leaps is not the body and not the outward form of the practice; what leaps is the commitment — to sit without the safety net of conventional-logic expectations about what sitting should do.

Practitioner Stance

  • When practice feels like a “waste of time”: check for fear of flying. The feeling of wasted time is a classic disguise of the evasion.
  • When reading is producing sharp objections: sit. The objections are diagnostic of the conventional-logic field defending itself; sitting is the only operation that alters the ground of the objections.
  • When the practice produces discomfort that seems unreasonable given the mildness of the activity: this is the free-fall analogue — the body is registering that something genuine is being undone, and the conventional-logic interpretation of “I’m just sitting, this shouldn’t be hard” is mis-registering what is happening.
  • When a Lama is in the picture: the one-way-ticket structure is operative. The commitment itself is a partial remedy for the fear of flying — it removes some of the conventional-logic escape routes. The practitioner’s job is to honor the commitment rather than re-litigate it.

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