Writing from Recognition
By Michael Erlewine
“Michael, let the breath go all the way out. Don’t worry, it will come back!”
— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Ann Arbor, February 1974
Insight Meditation as a Slipstream for Words
For years I have been asking the same question in print. In November 2023 I described how I write and then admitted, “I have not seen it described as I am describing it. And you know that I have looked.” Nearly three years later I am still asking. This is my attempt to stop asking and simply set it down. Here it is.
I write from the Recognition of the Nature of the Mind. Not about it, but from within it.
The pith dharma teachings speak of remaining and going. Remaining is nyam-zhak, meditative equipoise: non-duality, resting in the nature of the mind, fully immersed, with no subject and no object.
Going is jey-tob, post-meditation: our ordinary life of subject and object, off the cushion. Most of us do not stay long in equipoise. We dip in and take a sip, and we only know we were there when we come back out into our ordinary duality.
I use that experience of non-duality (nyam-zhak) when I write. I have learned to do this, and it took me a long time to master that. And I take something in with me: a seed thought, an idea, a sentence that is not yet right. I carry it into the non-dual forge of Recognition, rest there for a moment, and spontaneously come back out. What returns has been opened up, with enough space around it to draw the right words to itself in completion. Then I go in again, and again.
It is like skipping a flat stone across a still pond, touching the surface of the water as it goes — sampling. Immerse, look. Immerse, look. After all these years the alternation has become a single seamless stream, a glowing continuum, and like a flashlight I can turn it on whatever I am working on.
It works on revision as well as on the first draft. Like blowing glass in a furnace, I carry words and ideas into the full-on present non-dual moment. When I come out of non-duality, I examine what immersion has done to the words and make use of the space around them. The sentences come back better for the experience, purified or truer. What was stiff loosens, and what was false shows itself. That is the whole method.
Its only product is the words on the page, yet the process is complete in itself. I am resting in it like pure oxygen (clarity), the duality and non-duality have merged.
For a long time, I apologized for this, because it does not match the textbook descriptions of what a practitioner is supposed to be doing. I am done apologizing. What follows is how I came to it:
Mother Nature, a night in Berkeley, a weekend with Trungpa Rinpoche, thirty-six years with Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, a Recognition in the summer of 2008, and a long year of trying to bring that recognition to the page. Then I set out the method itself as plainly as I can, beside the names the lineage gives to what I found.
The Roots, Before the Dharma
Long before I ever heard the word dharma, I was a naturalist. As a boy I could spend whole days outdoors watching insects and plants, and I never had to try to concentrate. Love of the subject did that for me.
Attention that grows out of love needs no effort. I did not know it then, but that was my first taste of what I would spend the rest of my life learning to find again.
As a young man I went looking for it in ideas. In 1963 at the request of a professor, I wrote a paper on the philosopher Hegel, trying to understand his concept of ‘Synthesis’, how two become one, how opposites are taken up and resolved into something more. I was circling something I could not yet name.
Then, one night in May of 1964 in Berkeley, the circling stopped. For a time the line between subject and object simply collapsed. I realized that the impending world outside, the same world that I feared, was my own projection. This changed everything.
There was no one looking and nothing looked at. I had no teacher to tell me what it was and no words for it, and this insight never faded. And I never forgot it, and I never stopped wanting to know what had happened.
Ten years later, in 1974, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche came to Ann Arbor, Michigan and I was his chauffeur for the weekend. At one point he sat me down in a professor’s office and taught me shi-nay, Tranquility Meditation, himself.
He also gave me the words at the head of this essay: Breathe out and let the breath go all the way out; don’t worry, it will come back. As he said that, all my fears of death and dying vanished. He was referring to the breath, and I did not fully understand them then. It took me most of my life to see that he had handed me the whole method in a single sentence. Let go, relax.
The Long Training
The real training began with a winter drive to Woodstock, New York in 1983, to learn to meditate properly. I expected to be taught to sit and watch my breath. Instead, I was started on tong-len, sending and taking, and I soon learned that my dharma practice depended on my doing it.
I went on to complete the ngön-dro, the Extraordinary Preliminary Practices, and did it twice for good measure. I became a student of the Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche and stayed his student for thirty-six years. I attended all thirty-one of his annual ten-day Mahamudra teachings, and for some years I oversaw the transcribing of them and preserving them.
One of those instructions changed everything. Rinpoche would ask us to look at the mind and tell him: is it red? Is it blue? Where is it? He was not asking us to think about the mind but to search for it in our gut, the way you would knead dough or the way you would search a room for your keys. After that teaching, for about three years I practiced that way, from the gut or hara and with heart, searching rather than thinking. Searching my mind.
I also have to be honest about the other side. For thirty-two years I did Tranquility Meditation (sitting Shamata) with great effort, and it got me nowhere but bored. I pushed, I strained, and I sat. I say this not to complain but because understanding this matters as to what follows. When Insight Meditation (Vipassana) finally dawned, Shamata (Tranquility Meditation) arose with it fully formed. I had learned Shamata as a child with my focus on Mother Nature.
Recognition, 2008
I had received the ngo-trö, the pointing-out instruction, from great teachers more than once. The first time, from one of the Karmapa’s heart sons, it did not take. Later Khenpo Rinpoche pointed out the nature of the mind again in a 10-Day Teaching on the union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen by Karma Chagme, and this time I saw what I had been doing wrong. For the next few years, I practiced more or less all day in everything I did.
Then, in 2008, at age sixty-seven, I was laid off from my job as a senior consultant for NBC. My sense of myself as a provider was shattered. That same year the 17th Karmapa visited America, and between the two, something in me came loose. I was for a time devastated.
For the first time in decades, I stopped my daily dharma practice on the cushion. Instead of that, I went out at dawn, every day for six months, crawling through the wet grass with a camera and a macro lens. When everything fell apart, I did not take refuge in my dharma practice but leapfrogged that and went back to where I had started as a boy in Mother Nature.
One morning, peering through the lens, I stopped seeing the plant or bug at the end of the lens and instead saw the seeing itself Seeing. There was no one looking and nothing looked at, only vivid, thought-free clarity.
And this time it was not momentary but stayed. That was the beginning of hlak-tong, Insight Meditation, as it is practiced within chak-gya chen-po, Mahamudra.
Khenpo Rinpoche confirmed it. A lama friend, Lama Karma, who had completed two three-year retreats came to visit and named the dharma teacher who had shown it to me, not a lama, but what is known as the “Lama of Appearances”, Mother Nature itself.
Rinpoche always said the key to Recognition was familiarity, and I learned he meant it literally. Recognition is not meeting a stranger. The teachings compare it to seeing an old friend’s face in a crowd. For me that old friend had been waiting in the fields and streams since childhood. And familiarity is not a single meeting. It has to be worked, the way bread dough is kneaded, over and over, until it takes and holds its shape. Recognition stayed because it is a realization, and realizations are forever — a one-way street.
From the Lens to the Page
At first the recognition lived only outdoors, behind the lens. Inside my home at night my mind was quite ordinary again. So, I went outside in nature and I watched the sun come up for more than six months.
When winter drove me indoors, I set up a small studio and managed to keep the door open to Recognition there too. But what I wanted most was to bring recognition into writing, the work I do every day. This was almost impossible.
I tried with everything I had. For more than a year I tried to will it, pushed, and pushed again, and nothing moved. I could not lift my little finger with force of will or effort.
What finally moved the needle was the opposite of trying. When I began to relax, something shifted, just a tiny amount. Then, inch by inch, the opening in my Recognition widened until it took in writing completely.
A camera lens taught me why. You turn the focus ring until the image is sharp, and then you stop turning. Keep turning and you lose focus. Effort is like that. It is scaffolding. It is needed to put the building up, and then it has to come down, or it hides the very thing it helped to build. Years of over-effort also leave a residue, a habit of straining that remains long after the reason for it is gone. I still am removing effort from my dharma practice.
Tilopa’s advice to Naropa comes down to his “words of Advice:
Don’t prolong the past,
Don’t invite the future,
Don’t alter the present,
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Just Relax As It Is.
My year of trying was not wasted. Effort was the obstacle I had to wear out before I could hear that advice.
The Method Itself
Here is the method set out as plainly as I can, as an instruction.
The Sip of Tea
For thirty-one years Khenpo Rinpoche taught me, and told us that a session of actual Mahamudra meditation could be as long as it takes to pick up a teacup and take a sip. The session is short, only for a moment. The point is not to make the sip longer but to take a sip again, and again, one after the other. One moment of rest in the nature of the mind, then back out to ordinary duality, but recursively.
The Alternation
And when writing, I have a thought in mind.
I enter into Recognition (non-duality), rest there, and then come back out into ordinary duality. Then I dip again. Immerse, look, immerse, look, like a flat stone skipping across a pond sampling the water. I live on the borderline, crossing and recrossing it, the way the tide comes in and goes out on a beach.
The alternation is the whole secret. All reflection and no immersion leads to a kind of madness, thinking about thinking without end. All immersion and no reflection leads to nothing, to timelessness, with nothing brought back. The razor’s edge is the alternation itself. Meditation, I have come to see, is an endless process and not a state.
The Chain
Repeated often enough, the sips string together like beads on a mala, until they become what I once called “a constant chain of illumination.” Insight then works like a flashlight. Whatever I turn it toward is illuminated.
The Seed and the Forge
I do not go in empty-handed. I take a seed with me: a thought, a phrase, a question I cannot yet answer. I carry it into the forge of non-duality and rest there with it. When I come back, the seed has been opened up. There is space around it now, enough space for the right words to gather. Words come back carrying a trace of where they have been, like a kind of perfume. I once described it as words being pinged off the immersion.
Revision in the Furnace
This is the part I have never seen described. The same process works on revision. A glassblower puts the glass back into the furnace again and again to keep it workable. I do the same with a draft. I take a finished sentence back into recognition, come out, and look at it. What was stiff loosens. What was false shows itself. Concepts that went in freeze-dried come back alive, even feral. Editing itself becomes a dharma practice.
In the Lineage’s Own Terms
None of this is outside the tradition. The Kagyu teachings divide practice into nyam-zhak, resting in equipoise, and jey-tob, literally “what is obtained afterward,” post-meditation. The great Mahamudra manuals of Dakpo Tashi Namgyal and the Ninth Karmapa, Wangchuk Dorje, are largely about how these two come together.
The goal is nyam-jey zung-juk, the union of meditation and post-meditation, where the two can no longer be told apart. What I call immersion is nyam-zhak. What I call reflection is jey-tob. What I have done is put their union to work on the page.
Jamgön Kongtrül Rinpoche speaks of mother and child luminosity. The mother is the ground, the basic clarity of mind. The child is each experience of that clarity along the path, coming closer and closer until child and mother meet. My repeated sips of recognition are the child the luminosity of non-duality at work, one meeting after another.
Tilopa’s instruction is to relax, as it is. The teachings on tha-mal gyi shay-pa, ordinary mind, and hlen-chik kye-pa, co-emergence, say that what we fail to recognize is not too far away but too close. Thrangu Rinpoche taught that thought itself is dharmakaya, nam-tok chö-ku. If that is true, then the thoughts and words that come up in writing need not be obstacles. They can be a path.
Words arising from recognition are also one of the lineage’s oldest forms. Saraha’s dohas were short verses of realization. Milarepa’s gur, his spontaneous songs, came on the spot, in answer to a question or a place.
The treasure teachings, ter-ma, are received in the mind, sometimes as little more than a tone, and then worked over for years into finished form. In my own modest way, I have drawn new astrology from the mind like that.
Closest to home is Trungpa Rinpoche’s “first thought, best thought,” which shaped Allen Ginsberg and the poets around Naropa. That teaching honors the first arising: catch the fresh moment and leave it alone. What I do also works on the second thought and the third, on the revision. Each return to recognition gives a clean look at the draft. It grows from the same root, and I think of it as one more branch.
No More Apologizing
For years I prefaced these writings with apologies. This may not make sense. This may not fit the textbooks. I am not a teacher. I am still not a teacher, but I share my experience. And I have stopped apologizing for reporting what the practice has done.
The teachings themselves say that a teacher’s whole job is to introduce the student to the nature of the mind, so that the student can become independent. Once Recognition has been pointed out and confirmed, the guru’s work is done, and the rest is up to the student. The whole aim of the training is that independence.
My recognition was confirmed by my root lama Khenpo Rinpoche in front of a room full of Mahamudra students, that a practice I had developed on my own was authentic. His last words to me before he passed were to keep extending and expanding my Recognition.
The refuge name he gave me, Chönyi Rangdrol, means “Self-Liberating One’s True Nature.” I take both as instructions.
There is still real caution here, and I want to say it plainly. The tradition distinguishes nyam, passing experiences of bliss, clarity, or no-thought, from tok-pa, realization. Writing from nyam would only be writing about a pleasant mood. What makes this work is that the recognition is there to return to, and in my lineage that recognition is pointed out by an authentic teacher. This is not a technique anyone can pick up from reading about it.
But I have also learned that the urge to share what I have found is not ego. It is Absolute Bodhicitta, the wish that others, too, may see what I have seen. So, as Popeye the sailor man said, “I yam what I yam.” I have to stop apologizing for who and what I am.
One sip. Then the cup comes down, and there is the next sentence. Then the next sip.
Trungpa Rinpoche told me to let the breath go all the way out, and that it would come back. It did. It comes back every time, and it brings fresh words with it. That is all I have been trying to say.
Afterword: Where It Leads
Where do I go from here? There is not much choice. I go on with non-dual non-meditation, Mahamudra and Dzogchen, both in my writing and in just living.
Something has been happening over these last months. I noticed it gradually, and then one day I realized it all at once. My ordinary dualistic mind and my non-dual Insight Meditation have each changed. They are moving closer to one another, into the same space.
When I began, there was a clear shift each time. I invoked Insight Meditation, rested in it, came out, and reflected on the experience. Immerse, look, etc. Now that shift is less obvious. It is more as if I am in non-meditation, the non-dual mode, more of the time. The two modes have mixed, and each now sits somewhere in between what they used to be when they were separate.
Mixing means becoming more alike, moving toward the same space instead of different ones. There is less distinction between the two modes, and that shows up in my Samsaric existence. Waking life has become somewhat more transparent, more like a hologram. Samsara itself seems more transparent, along with everything else. Whatever I am doing, whether it relates to dharma or is just ordinary life, has become a bit more the same.
It does not seem to affect my writing or my Mahamudra non-meditation. What it does is extend Insight Meditation into everything I do, more than I can remember, and not just into writing. The skipping stone I described at the start hardly leaves the water now.
I notice one small sign: there are more typos in what I write, many more. I take this as a mark of the mixing. Perhaps the part of the mind that used to stand back and check is no longer so separate from the part that writes.
The lineage has names for this. The union of equipoise and post-meditation is called nyam-jey zung-juk, and the teachings say that in post-meditation, appearances come to be seen as gyu-ma, like an illusion. I am not going to name a stage for myself. The texts warn against that, and it is for my teachers to judge. What I can say is what the experience is like, and that the instruction has not changed. Don’t grasp at it. Don’t try to hold it in place. Let it be as it is.
What this means, I still have to figure out. In the meantime, I keep doing what brought me here. And as Trungpa Rinpoche told me fifty-two years ago: let it go all the way out. Don’t worry, it will come back.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net Note: If you would like to have access to other free books, articles, and videos on these topics, here is the link: SpiritGrooves.net.
As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
