Aro gTér Dzogchen and Tantra Teachings Wiki

Roaring Silence - 11 Appendix 1 Questions and Answers

18 min read

Roaring Silence — Chapter 11: Appendix 1 — Questions and Answers

Source: raw/roaring-silence/Roaring Silence - 11 Appendix 1 Questions and Answers.md

The book’s first appendix — and the only chapter that is entirely edited Q&A from formal teaching events (the main chapters interleave teaching prose with Q&A; this chapter is Q&A throughout). Structurally it sits between the completed main body (Ch.10) and the lineage description (Ch.12) / glossary (Ch.13). Its function is to deliver the practical scaffolding the main body’s view-and-practice exposition deliberately set aside — sitting posture, retreat structure, daily-life integration, motivation, kindness — in a register that does not interrupt the curriculum-spine the main body builds.

Five named sections, each addressing a different “openness”:

  1. Physical Openness — sitting posture
  2. Temporal Openness — retreat structure, daily timing, durations
  3. Attuned Intent — motivation without the “drag factor”
  4. Kindness — the compassion-emptiness mirror; love and compassion as one energy; sympathy for “enemies” and ourselves
  5. Everyday Life — integrating practice with movement, noise, work

Section-by-Section Summary

§1 — Physical Openness

The chapter’s most concrete and least-doctrinal material. The Q&A walks the reader through sitting posture from the practical concerns (back pain, distraction) backward into the principles that ought to govern arrangement.

Key moves:

  • Body knowledge. “In order to develop the practice of shi-nè, one needs to encourage body knowledge. We need to physically remember the state of natural equipoise and balance.” The posture issue is not separable from the practice issue — the body that does not know its own balance does not allow the mind to rest.
  • Comfort is non-negotiable. Pain in the body becomes pain in the practice. “It is crucial not to be distracted by your physical posture.”
  • Spine sits at 90° to thighs. This is the chapter’s structural rule. “A good upright chair can be useful for sitting as long as it keeps the thighs and spine at ninety degrees to each other.”
  • Chair is not a concession. “Using a chair of this type should not be considered a concession to age. Anyone can sit in a chair, no matter what age one happens to be — the position is as worthy as any other.” Removes the cultural signaling that frames Western practitioners’ chair-use as inferior to cross-legged seating.
  • Cross-legged-on-cushion is a typical first-sit mistake. Specifically: cushion alone (no block, no zafu height) → knees higher than hips → pelvis tilts back → either slouch (back pain + drowsiness) or strained-straight back (back pain + fatigue) → pins-and-needles in legs.
  • The principle: “Raise your buttocks high enough from the ground to allow your knees to fall below the level of your hips — it’s that simple.” Whatever cushion / block / stool / chair arrangement achieves this is acceptable.
  • Posture criterion: “The posture should help us to be both relaxed and alert.” Relaxed and alert (not one or the other; not lying down).

§2 — Temporal Openness

The chapter’s most extensive section. Treats retreat structure, daily timing, durations, and the relation between sitting and ordinary life.

Key moves:

  • Refusal of dropping out. “Becoming a real practitioner is not necessarily about giving up relationships, home, and job in order to disappear into the mountains of India or Nepal — no matter how spiritually romantic that may seem. We are advocating an escape into reality, rather than an escape from it.”
  • The integration view of Dzogchen. “The view of Dzogchen in particular is one of integration, and that view is particularly pertinent for the West at this time.” This grounds the appendix’s whole orientation toward householder practice.
  • Tsam = “confines.” “The Tibetan word tsam,[footnote: mTshams] which is usually rendered as ‘retreat,’ actually means ‘confines.’ The idea is that you establish the confines in which you practice.” See Tsam. Retreat can be solitary or in groups; can last an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, three years, or any of these; can be open or closed.
  • Group retreat → solitary retreat sequence. “Group retreats are a good basis for solitary retreats. Solitary retreats are by far the most intense kind of practice and certainly the strongest method of transforming your notions of what you are. But it’s not wise to go into solitary retreat too quickly.”
  • Weekend solitary as the unmarked maximum. “We would not recommend that anyone engage in a solitary retreat for longer than one weekend” — without consulting a teacher near the time.
  • Soft and hard limits. “People have two kinds of limits — a soft limit and a hard limit. If you don’t push yourself beyond your soft limit, you’ll never get anywhere. But if you try to push yourself beyond your hard limit, you’ll damage yourself and become disenchanted with the whole idea.” The principle generalizes beyond physical posture to all aspects of practice intensity.
  • First thing in the morning is the unmarked best time. Reason: “The time when you wake up is quite special because, although you may well have been conceptualizing wildly in the dream state, at least there’s been a break from the habitual patterns of waking conceptuality. At the point of waking, there’s no accumulation of ‘today’s conceptual patterns.’ The time of waking is an opening between two long tracts of crowdedness.”
  • Get up immediately on waking. “The only way to get up skillfully is to get up immediately on waking. Gradual waking up drains your energy and often leaves you feeling as if you could use another night’s sleep.” The luxurious-drowse state is not restful — it is most unrestful, and it dilutes both waking and dream consciousness.
  • Buddhist practice as waking up. “Buddhist practice is geared toward waking up. Linking the practice of waking from the sleep of misapprehension with waking from nightly sleep is a powerful coincidence in the development of practice.”
  • Meditation shawl. Maroon or red is the recommended color — red as the color of energy (and per footnote 2, red rather than maroon in the Aro gTér lineage, following Aro Lingma’s advice to return to Padmasambhava’s original color). The shawl, the cushion, the stool become “wonderfully familiar” supports for practice.
  • Padmasambhava → red robes → Tirthikas backstory. Extended footnote-style aside: original Buddhist robes were yellow (sulfurous-stream-dyed rags as per Shakyamuni’s instruction). Padmasambhava moved to red as outer symbol of strength against the philosophical extremists (Tirthikas — footnote 3: monism, dualism, nihilism, eternalism) who had adopted yellow. Tibetan practical economics produced the maroon shade. The Gélug school under Tsongkhapa moved back to yellow when conditions had changed and purity rather than energy-against-hostility was the priority.
  • Sit-time quality > sit-time duration. “It’s good to sit for a length of time that you can manage every day. Don’t be tempted to sit for longer than you are really able. … It’s better to sit for five or ten minutes a day than for an hour every once in a while. Daily practice is vital.” The argument: the discipline of going-through-the-motions for an hour can be worse than five honest minutes.
  • Promises to oneself. “Only make promises to yourself that you know you can keep, otherwise you’ll never have confidence in yourself and you’ll find that you won’t be able to make promises to yourself at all. Being able to make promises to yourself is keenly meaningful.” The integrity-of-intention point.
  • Ultimate view vs relative view on place of practice. “It’s possible to sit anywhere and under any prevailing conditions, but for that you need to have ultimate view. As long as you only have relative view, some situations are conducive and others, nonconducive.” The relative-view advice: prepare a place; some objects (candle, incense, awareness-image of Padmasambhava or Yeshé Tsogyel) help; the creative ritual of preparing the space is itself a practice-support.
  • The seduction analogy. “If you invite someone to your home because you’re strongly attracted to the person and you’d like to get a romantic liaison going, then you need to create conducive circumstances.” The same logic applies to the relation with one’s own practice.
  • Tibetan refugees, National Geographic, painted tin cans. “No matter how poor you are, you can put some care and effort into making your environment pleasant.” Material poverty is no excuse for a slovenly practice space.

§3 — Attuned Intent

Substantive treatment of motivation as a technical practice-issue. The section develops the distinction between attuned intent (single-pointed, aerodynamic motivation) and motivation with a drag factor (mixed, conflicting motivations that slow goal-attainment).

Key moves:

  • The motivation diagnostic. Q: “I want to practice but I keep not finding time.” NCR: “When you want to meditate more than you want to use your free time in other ways, you’ll find less difficulty.” The blunt move: not-doing-X is identical with not-wanting-X-more-than-other-things.
  • The wisdom of insecurity. Q: “I guess I’m confused.” NCR: “That’s better! Splendid! That’s a much better place to find yourself. … We don’t like confusion because within the space of confusion definitions become vague and intangible. That makes us feel insecure. Accepting or relaxing in that insecurity is in itself a practice. This is the wisdom of insecurity.” The connection back to Mistrust of Existence is direct: confusion is mistrust’s affective face; relaxing-in-confusion is its dismantlement.
  • Motivation has to make experiential sense. “You’ll enter into practice when it makes sense at an experiential level. If we want to meditate because we think it’s a religious observance, then real motivation may never arise from that.” Motivation that is borrowed from “the Dharma books say” cannot sustain practice.
  • Motivation propels into practice; once there, motivation must stop. “Motivation has to propel you into practice — but there it must stop. If you fill your sitting space with the desire for progress, you’ll stifle your developing awareness. So letting go of motivation is critically valuable. When we sit, we should sit without purpose — without hope or fear.”
  • Attuned intent: motivation without a drag factor. “It’s motivation without a ‘drag factor.’ It’s streamlined — aerodynamic. It gives you access to incredible power and capacity for accomplishment of whatever needs to be accomplished.” See Attuned Intent.
  • Drag factor. “When our motivation is mixed, it can be said to have drag factors.” Example: wanting to help someone and wanting to be seen as helpful. The two motivations conflict and each undermines the other.
  • Kindness-intention as gravitational counterweight. “Kindness-intention cuts against the gravitational pull of divorced individuation. Divorced individuation is what keeps you earthbound. In order to accelerate into the unimaginable, we have to let go of the ballast — jettison the habits of view that create drag factors.”
  • Insinuation strategy. “Insinuating kindness-intention into our unskillful motivation in order to undermine the process of distraction” — the practical technique. Mixed motivation is not condemned; kindness is threaded into the mongrel pack so it can become more dominant over time.
  • The car-and-swim metaphor. “Acquisitiveness mentality can also be aerodynamic in some respects, but we end up flying into high-intensity narrowness and frustration. Kindness can help us in our attitude toward sitting. But when we are sitting, there should be no motivation whatsoever. Motivation gets you to the cushion or stool, but then it has served its purpose. Your car takes you to the seaside, but if you want to go for a swim — you have to leave it behind.”

§4 — Kindness

The chapter’s section on the relation between kindness/compassion and the emptiness-realization the main body has been developing. The section answers the question “isn’t kindness supposed to be the basis for emptiness-realization, not its outcome?”

Key moves:

  • The mirror-image argument. Q: kindness-as-basis vs emptiness-as-basis-for-spontaneous-compassion seem to be opposite teachings. NCR: “What we have here is the contentious issue that realization can be discovered by methods that contradict each other — methods that are the reverse or mirror image of each other.” The two methods are not antagonistic; they are reflections.
  • Why methods can mirror each other. “If enlightenment made sense from a relative standpoint, it would be a relative state of being. The fact that it’s not possible to speak in relative terms about ultimate experience without using paradoxes is what defines the relative view as dualistic and the ultimate view as beyond dualism.”
  • The integration of both. “If we generate kindness, we imitate enlightenment, and in imitating enlightenment we facilitate the realization of emptiness. If we let go and let be through the practice of the Four Naljors, we discover that kindness is the spontaneous expression that is liberated by that unfolding.” Both work; both can be practiced; their realization is the same.
  • Kindness divisionless. KD: “Kindness is divisionless, and divisionlessness is enlightenment. Both love and compassion are free from the inhibitions and constrictions of self-orientation. Selfishness springs from a sense of dividedness.” This is the section’s load-bearing definition: kindness = divisionlessness = enlightenment.
  • Love and compassion as aspects of one energy. “They’re aspects of the same energy.” Conventional usage distinguishes them; realized reasoning sees them as undivided.
  • Compassion for enemies — sympathy for the devil. “Until you lose the victim concept, you have to work within the scope of your limitations. Generating kindness toward people who may wish to victimize you is actually the very best means of protecting yourself.” Plus: NCR’s “sympathy for the devil — and sympathy for ourselves. … If we have no knowledge of ourselves, then how can we include Hitler in our vow to liberate all beings?”
  • Compassion includes oneself. KD: “Compassion includes us — we need to love and look after ourselves. If we have no love for ourselves, it’s not possible to have compassion for others.”
  • Compassion is not idiot weakness. “Compassion that is concerned about being seen as weakness is maybe not really compassion at all. It’s only possible to take advantage of weakness, but not of compassion. With compassion — with great kindness — there’s no concept of being taken for a ride, because you’re joy-riding anyway!”
  • The closing claim. KD: “This is why sitting is so important. We have to confront what we are and acknowledge it before kindness can arise and flood the world with our unrestrained warmth.” The chapter’s bridge between sections §4 and §5: kindness requires the self-confrontation that sitting delivers, and manifests as the everyday-life integration the next section will describe.

§5 — Everyday Life

Closes the appendix with the question of how practice integrates into the rest of life — the operational side of the integration-view that opened §2.

Key moves:

  • Letting go of sharp divisions. KD: “By letting go of the sharp divisions between the times when you’re sitting and the times when you’re not sitting. Sitting is a little bit like going into retreat — it’s a period of time when you completely let go of all involvement.”
  • Awareness manifests continuously. NCR: “Sitting is a space in our lives where we can nurture our awareness, but awareness should manifest continuously.”
  • The Dudjom Rinpoche quote. KD: “His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche once said, ‘The initial experience of rigpa is rather like a baby thrown ruthlessly into the battlefield of arising phenomena.’ This means that you have to nurture the experience of awareness.” The chapter’s only cited senior-Lama quote; lands the integration-claim under transmission-authority.
  • Jé-thob (post-meditation period). “If you want to develop the postmeditation experience, the jé-thob experience, you’ll need to make sure that you leave time for it. If you sit for an hour, make sure that you have at least fifteen to thirty minutes for the jé-thob period.” The technical Tibetan term for the post-meditation transition. See Jé-thob.
  • Method of no-method. Q: “Is there a method?” NCR: “No.” KD: “There is no method. There’s just being.” Q: “I feel as if there’s nothing for me to get hold of in that, as if there should be something more.” NCR: “Like something that would enable you to ‘be’ in a particular style, rather than simply being? … The method is a method of no-method. The method is simply being. If you find that you can’t continue in that state of simply being, then you can try to be mindful.”
  • Tripping over things as the alarm clock. Q: “And if you can’t be mindful?” KD: “Then you trip over things. It’s life’s way of reminding us to be mindful.” NCR: “From a Tantric perspective you could say that the pawos and khandros observe your lack of mindfulness and give you an ankle tap that sends you sprawling onto the ground.” The chapter’s only reference to the dakas/dakinis in this section; landing on the everyday register as life-as-feedback.
  • World as teaching. “You can let the world speak to you. You can listen to the world. You can see what the phenomenal world is mirroring. … It’s a free teaching.” The four marks (impermanence, sickness, old age, death) read off ordinary observation. The path requires no special revelation.
  • Ultimate vs relative view on noise. “There’s no such thing as a distracting influence. This is the ultimate view. You distract yourself — you can’t blame the noises, as they have no volition or distracting intention in themselves.” But on the relative view: “You do have to find a situation where you’re not intruded upon by noises that have a regular or intelligible pattern.”
  • Velcro to intelligible sound. NCR: “The intellectual faculties lock like Velcro onto intellectually produced sound unless you have considerable meditative stability. So if you have to battle to keep your attention off intellectual noise, it can become a bit like trying to swim with a few fur coats on.” The phenomenological-mechanical detail of why distinguishable speech / music is harder to sit through than traffic hum.
  • Driving the car as the practice. “In this way, driving your car is the practice. The idea that the Four Naljors cut you off from the ‘outside world’ dies hard, so I must emphasize that whatever methods of meditation are taught in other systems, these Naljors are not about turning inward. There’s no inward or outward bias in these practices — just being, in order to heal the dividedness of inner and outer.”
  • The rejection of the East-as-better fantasy. Multiple Q&As. India is not more peaceful (Hindi film music; Indian tourist parties; the Ganges). The retreat-cave hat means your retreat is wherever you are. Even in soundproof rooms, body sounds intrude. The path is transcultural.

Cross-Wiki Material

New Pages from Ch.11

  • Attuned Intent — the technical motivation-concept the §3 section is named for; the drag-factor analysis; kindness as the gravitational counterweight to divorced individuation
  • Tsam — mTshams; “confines”; the Ch.11 Q&A’s substantive treatment of retreat structure
  • Jé-thob — post-meditation period; the named transition between sitting and ordinary activity
  • Kindness — the §4 section’s substantive treatment of kindness/compassion as the wisdom-mirror and the everyday-life expression; the divisionlessness equation

Existing Pages Extended by Ch.11

  • Shi-nè — sitting posture (chair as worthy seat; spine 90° to thighs; knees below hips); duration-and-quality; the morning-as-best-time argument
  • Meditation Isn’t Getting Used To Is — the daily-practice / promise-to-oneself pattern; the method-of-no-method rephrasing of “meditation isn’t”; quality-over-duration
  • Active and Passive Imagination — kindness-generation as imitating enlightenment (a use of active imagination that facilitates emptiness-realization)
  • Divorced Individuation — kindness-intention as the gravitational counterweight; the “ballast” formulation
  • Mistrust of Existence — wisdom of insecurity as the dismantlement-gesture
  • Changchub-sem — Ch.11 substantiates the bodhicitta-as-spontaneous-from-Dzogchen reading via the mirror-argument
  • Presence — jé-thob extends presence into post-meditation; world-as-teaching is presence integrated with ordinary life
  • Relaxation — the wisdom of insecurity is “relaxing in insecurity,” extending the Dzogchen sense of relaxation
  • Roaring Silence — book page entry

Editorial Notes

  • Ch.11 is structurally an appendix, not a continuation. The main body completed at Ch.10. Ch.11’s function is to deliver the practical scaffolding the main body’s view-and-practice exposition deliberately set aside. The appendix register lets the authors address material that would have ruptured the curriculum-spine if interleaved into the chapters proper (sitting posture in Ch.1 would have felt like a manual; retreat-structure in Ch.7 would have interrupted the lha-tong development).
  • The five “openness” framing is the chapter’s own structuring device. Physical, temporal, attuned-intent, kindness, everyday-life — each is named as a kind of openness, not just a topic. This implicitly extends the Dzogchen view (openness as the operative term) into the practical scaffolding. The chapter’s doctrinal framing therefore continues even at this appendix-level.
  • The Ch.11 Q&A material is more senior-practitioner-friendly than the main body suggests. Several moves (the wisdom of insecurity; method-of-no-method; the “no inward/outward bias”; ultimate-view-on-noise) function at the lha-tong / nyi’mèd register, not the introductory register. The appendix is therefore not simply a beginner’s manual — it is a re-traversal of the material at the everyday-life integration level.
  • Some material recycles the main body’s claims (presence in the breath; let-go-and-let-be; the dissolving of inner/outer); the contribution is not new doctrine but new placement (the doctrine restated in the practical-scaffolding register where the practitioner most needs the reminder).
  • Footnotes 2 and 3 deserve note: footnote 2 specifies red (not maroon) as the Aro gTér color following Aro Lingma’s instruction; footnote 3 names the Tirthika philosophical extremes (monism, dualism, nihilism, eternalism). Both extend material that was developed elsewhere in the wiki (Aro gTér, potentially future stub for Tirthikas).

Graph View

Backlinks