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Roaring Silence - 06 Flight

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Roaring Silence — Ch.6 “Flight”

Sixth chapter of Roaring Silence — the opener of Part Two (“Dzogchen — Principal Means of Entry”). Part One (Chs.1–5) introduced the view, the practice, and its phenomenology; Part Two develops the practice in technical detail. Ch.6 is short, methodological, and pivotal: it announces that further reading without sitting will produce only confusion, distinguishes the kind of reasoning needed for the rest of the book from the kind that brought one this far, completes the with-form arc of shi-nè, and frames the leap into nonreferentiality with the free-fall metaphor that gives the chapter its title.

Chapter-Opening Verse — The Springboard

“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.”

The book’s most explicit self-statement of method. Three loaded moves:

  • “Springboard” — the function of the conceptual apparatus is launch, not arrival. Ideas are scaffolding; using them as content (as the rationalist would) misses what they are for.
  • “Built of ideas designed to undermine ideas” — recursive. The book’s concepts are self-cancelling in operation: they do their work by dismantling the conditions for ideas to be load-bearing. This is the Dzogchen-textual register: a teaching whose surface is conceptual but whose target is the cessation of conceptual rest.
  • “A leap into the space of referencelessness — a plunge into an understanding of the vastness of what we are” — pairs leap (action, decisiveness) with plunge (gravity, direction); names the destination as vastness rather than as a state. The verse repeats inside the chapter and operates as Ch.6’s compressed statement.

See Conventional Logic and Realized Reasoning for the methodological scaffolding the verse deploys.

”Sit When You Part Company With What Is Being Said”

The chapter is unusual in giving an explicit reading instruction:

“We would like you to put this book down every time you part company with what is being said in terms of comprehension — and sit. This is the exercise that goes with this chapter.”

A footnoted gloss extends this: “This actually applies to the study of any Buddhist method or to hearing oral teachings from Lamas.”

Two consequences:

  • Reading and sitting must be interleaved from Part Two onward. “This is an experiential book, so unless you already have experience or a strong link with what is being expressed, to read further without practicing will just lead to confusion.” Ch.6 is the chapter where the authors stop carrying the reader and start expecting the reader to be cooperating practically.
  • Verification is by sitting, not by argument. “There is no point in taking these explanations on trust. It is vital to verify the material through experience. Anything that is accepted for any reason apart from its being consistent with one’s firsthand experience will eventually become an obstacle. The method of shi-nè should be employed in order to discover whether these explanations are valid.”

The “shall-eventually-become-an-obstacle” formulation is sharp — uncritical acceptance is not just useless, it is prospectively damaging. See Testing the Teacher for the parallel principle on testing the Lama through one’s own practice.

Conventional Logic vs Realized Reasoning

The chapter’s main technical addition — a distinction between two registers of reasoning:

“Conventional logic is what is regarded in the world as being acceptable. Realized reasoning is based on experience that lies outside the realm of conventional logic. There is no way in which we can approach the realm of realized reasoning with the battering ram of conventional logic. All we can do is ask how we can arrive at the level of experience from which we will be able to relate to realized reasoning. The answer to this question is made up of methods, the first of which is the practice of shi-nè.”

Three structural points:

  • Asymmetry. Conventional logic cannot reach realized reasoning. The relation is not “more advanced reasoning” — it is reasoning from a different field of experience. The “battering ram” image marks the failure mode: trying to break in from outside.
  • Methods are the bridge. What can move one from conventional to realized reasoning is not better thinking but practice (specifically: shi-nè, named here as the first method).
  • The opening is bidirectional. “Once we have gained some experience of sitting, we will begin to open to the stream of realized reasoning that bases itself on the field of experience into which we have entered. Once open to realized reasoning, we become encouraged to bring everything to the level of experience.” Practice opens experience; experience opens reasoning; reasoning encourages further bringing-to-experience. A virtuous cycle, not a linear progress.

See Conventional Logic and Realized Reasoning for the full treatment.

Exercise 4 — The Final Phase of Shi-nè With Form

“Sit in a posture of comfort and alertness. Find the presence of your awareness only in your exhalation. Allow your inhalation merely to happen. Allow yourself to dissolve your experience into emptiness with each exhalation. If you find that you have drifted from presence, simply return to presence and remain. If thoughts arise, allow them to dissolve into emptiness with each exhalation. Try this for thirty minutes. See how it goes. If you are used to sitting for longer, sit for as long as you would usually sit. See how it goes.”

The practical instruction. Four operations:

  • Find presence only in the exhalation. The form-element is now the out-breath alone. The in-breath is no longer a focus; it is allowed to occur on its own.
  • Allow inhalation to merely happen. Non-attention to the in-breath is the technique, not laxity. The natural rhythm carries the in-breath; presence is reserved for the exhalation.
  • Dissolve experience into emptiness with each exhalation. The out-breath is the moment of release — for thoughts, for mental imagery, for any arising. Not “watch the out-breath,” but release with it.
  • If drifted, simply return. No additional gesture, no analysis of the drift, no second-order practice. Return is unceremonious.

Duration: thirty minutes minimum, longer for experienced practitioners. The instruction is dialed for someone already sitting.

Exercise 4 Follow-Up — Three Diagnostic Points

The follow-up section delivers three key diagnostics for what completes the with-form arc:

1. Shi-nè With Form Completes Here

“This is the final phase of shi-nè with form. You have let go of the in-breath, and now you are merely allowing the outflow of your breath to dissolve thoughts or mental imagery into emptiness.”

Exercise 4 is the terminal exercise of shi-nè with form. The book’s earlier exercises (Ch.2’s three) progressively reduced the formal scaffolding; Exercise 4 reduces the breath-focus from full breath cycle to exhalation only. The next stage is without form. See Shi-nè With and Without Form.

2. The Gap Warning — “Seeking Gaps as a Quest” Is Self-Defeating

“You may already have had experiences you could describe as gaps between thoughts… Whatever you have experienced, it is now crucial to avoid seeking gaps as a quest. Seeking gaps as a quest is a self-defeating process. The goal of the activity of grasping at gaps cannot be achieved because gaps are only achieved by nongrasping.”

This is the chapter’s most operationally important warning. The structure of the failure:

  • The practitioner notices gaps (real Ch.4 phenomenon — see the gap diagnostic on Shi-nè).
  • The gaps are felt as the desired outcome of practice.
  • Practice retools itself toward producing gaps.
  • The retool is grasping. Grasping prevents what it grasps for. The practice has corrupted itself into the very operation shi-nè is meant to interrupt.

The principle is general — applicable to any subtle attainment that the practice begins to produce. Notice the parallel with the Ch.4 gap diagnostic: the three reflexive moves on a gap (grab / retreat / retract) are now joined by a fourth, slower-acting failure: chronic gap-seeking as the practice’s hidden agenda. The remedy is the same as the Ch.2 vital points — non-coercion.

3. Gap Spans Several Breaths → Threshold of Shi-nè Without Form

“You may have found that the thought or mental imagery that arose with the in-breath simply dissolved into spaciousness with the out-breath, creating a gap at the end of each exhalation. If you continue to practice in this way, you may find (or you may already have found) that the gap at the end of one out-breath spans several breaths without any mental event manifesting. At this point it becomes possible to enter into the practice of shi-nè without form.”

The structural marker of with-form completion: when the gap stops being one-per-exhalation and begins spanning multiple breaths, the form (breath-attention) has done its work. Shi-nè without form — the practice that the rest of Part Two will develop — becomes possible. The marker is empirical, not stipulated by chronology.

The Head-Jerk Technique

A small-scale body remedy for two energy disturbances:

“You may find that while sitting you get disturbed by subtle tendencies to scatteredness or drowsiness. These manifestations of our energy can be subject to adjustment through a simple exercise involving the head and neck. If you become a little drowsy, you can work with that by jerking your head upward three times… Likewise, if you feel scattered and unable to settle, jerk your head downward three times.”

Two-axis remedy:

Energy disturbanceDirectionRepetitions
Drowsy / sinkingHead up (jerk upward)3
Scattered / unable to settleHead down (jerk downward)3

Practical caveats: enough decisiveness to function; not so sharp as to injure the neck. Repeat as needed.

This is the chapter’s only somatic technique — small but operationally significant. It addresses the energy-side of the Three Diseases of Shi-nè: drowsiness as a face of distraction, scatteredness as a face of complication. See Three Diseases of Shi-nè.

The Free-Fall Metaphor — Conventional Logic vs Realized Reasoning, Lived

The Q&A’s first exchange is the chapter’s central pedagogical device. Ngakpa Chögyam: “I will tell you what it’s like to fall out of an aircraft at eighteen thousand feet. I hope that will give you a clearer picture of what we mean by the terms conventional logic and realized reasoning.”

The mechanics of free-fall:

  • You fall at 32 ft/s² (acceleration).
  • Continue accelerating until terminal velocity — about 120 mph, reached in ~17 seconds.
  • At terminal velocity, “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 clown-suit (the parachuting harness/flight suit), you can circle like an eagle, observe the curve of the earth — “to some extent, enter the eagle’s dimension of perception — a valuable experience for any yogi or yogini.”
  • Pull the rip cord. Parachute opens. Then “ground rush” — “a reversal of what people would imagine they would experience. The ground seems as if it’s coming up to meet 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 teaching contained in the metaphor:

  • Free-fall is the realized-reasoning analogue. The free-faller’s experience is structurally inaccessible to the rationalist. The rationalist insists on counter-intuitive descriptions (“you can’t possibly feel as though you weren’t falling when you obviously were falling”) and arguments that try to bend the experience back into conventional terms. The free-faller’s reasonable response: “Suck it and see, then there might be some value in discussing it.”
  • The conventional rationalist’s objection is the fear of flying in disguise. Khandro Déchen: “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.”
  • Naming the fear is the positive move. “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.”

KD’s complementary metaphor: “It would be like trying to explain the delight of making love to a lifelong celibate monk or nun.” The point: experiential domains are not adjudicable from outside.

See Fear of Flying for the full treatment of the metaphor and the diagnostic.

Working With a Lama — One-Way Ticket

Ngakpa Chögyam delivers the analogy’s practical bite:

“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… 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. Choosing to work with a Lama puts the practitioner into a configuration where the only way down is the jump. This rhymes with the Ch.1 “steadfast in choice of Lama” material on Testing the Teacher but adds the irreversibility note explicitly.

”Strong Link” — Reading Without Understanding

The Q&A’s second exchange. “What do you mean by a strong link?”

Khandro Déchen: “An intuitive emotional response. You could say that when there’s a certain feeling about the material, it would be possible to read without understanding.”

Q: “And that wouldn’t be frustrating?”

Ngakpa Chögyam: “Not necessarily — or if it were, it still wouldn’t damage the enthusiasm to read on. But this is all highly speculative. I made this comment about strong links because there may be people who have perceptual resonance with this material based on their experience of existence.”

A small but important opening: the chapter’s general advice (sit alongside reading) admits an exception — those with intuitive resonance can proceed even where comprehension lapses. The honesty of the qualifier (“highly speculative”) preserves the practice-not-faith register.

Claims Catalogued

Chapter-body claims:

  1. Part Two opens here. Conventional logic is no longer sufficient; further reading without sitting will produce confusion.
  2. Sit when you part company with the material. Reading should be interleaved with practice from this chapter onward; verification is by experience, not by argument.
  3. Anything accepted apart from firsthand experience will eventually become an obstacle. Strong methodological constraint on uncritical assent.
  4. Springboard verse: the book’s words are scaffolding designed to undermine themselves; a leap into the vastness of what we are.
  5. Conventional logic vs realized reasoning — two registers; the latter inaccessible from the former by reasoning; methods (first: shi-nè) are the bridge.
  6. Exercise 4 — find presence only in the exhalation; allow inhalation to merely happen; dissolve experience into emptiness with each exhalation.
  7. Final phase of shi-nè with form. Exercise 4 completes the with-form arc.
  8. Seeking gaps as a quest is self-defeating — gaps are only achieved by nongrasping; chronic gap-seeking is itself the obstruction.
  9. Gap spans several breaths → threshold of shi-nè without form.
  10. Head-jerk technique. Three jerks upward for drowsiness; three downward for scatteredness.

Q&A-added claims:

  1. Free-fall as the realized-reasoning analogue — terminal velocity, the eagle’s dimension, ground rush; experiential domains are not adjudicable from outside.
  2. Conventional logic as evasion — the tight box of conventional logic can become an avoidance, an evasion, a way around owning up to the fear of flying.
  3. Naming the reluctance is the positive move — coming to terms with the reluctance to abandon definitions.
  4. Working with a Lama is a one-way ticket — “if you go up, you jump.” Both the open sky of leaping from an aircraft and the open sky of Mind require facing the fear of flying.
  5. Strong link permits reading without understanding — intuitive emotional response; perceptual resonance with the material based on one’s experience of existence.

New Pages Created From This Chapter

Footnote (Retained)

Fn.1 — This actually applies to the study of any Buddhist method or to hearing oral teachings from Lamas.

The footnote generalizes the sit-when-you-part-company instruction beyond Roaring Silence and beyond Dzogchen — it is the proper relation to any Buddhist methodological text or to oral transmission. Verification by experience is structural to the tradition, not local to this book.

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