Why Sky Gaze?
The Tibetan school of Dzogchen has a meditation technique that’s called Sky Gazing. Dzogchen’s emphasis is on existing in a state that is free from conceptual traps. You allow what is to unfold before you. It’s sometimes misunderstood as an ‘easy’ school of practice because ‘nothing’ sounds so simple. But ‘nothing’ in fact is the hardest state of being to achieve. Which is why Dzogchen is considered by some to be the highest school and the most direct path to the sacred, the path of mysticism and elevation, one in which masters have, after years and lifetimes of penance and Sadhana that may not be apparent to those looking on, arrived at a control over the subtle.
The subtle elements are air, breath, thought, awareness, consciousness - the aspects of the mind that have no tangible manifestation. Indeed the ability to control whether they obtain a tangible manifestation is the role of the mastery.
So, it’s very easy to look upon a monk who is sky gazing and imagine that he is doing, in fact, nothing.
What he is in fact doing is this, looking up at the sky, and seeing its expansiveness for what it is, the vastness of it, in all its dimensions, not as a passive onlooker, but one who is one with that vastness and expanse. Who is co-mingled with existence and its eternal truth himself in a stillness that no passing sound or disturbance can interrupt or shake, no matter how great we may think it is. The passage of the clouds remind us of transience, and Gautama, the Buddha, himself reminded us that all of life itself is just a flash of lightning across the sky. What we embroil ourselves in, take to be real, true, difficult and arduous, though it may seem like that when we live it, caught between the dualities of fair and unfair, good and bad, success and failure, is made explicit when you sit and merge your personal subtle energies with that of the universe.
As my yoga teacher said to me, “your body needs air” but also, our bodies need that dissolution into the ether, that reminds us we are no different, body, mind and spirit, from that of the universe.
So find an empty spot if you can today, and lie on your back and gaze at the sky. It is not Dzogchen by any means, but it is a small vision of what the Infinite peace and stillness feels like. And even a little is a window to the soul in our bleak times.
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