Practicing the Yoga of Radiant Presence is about developing sensitivity to your own experience and noticing the actuality of what appears as your experience. It's about being actively engaged with the presence of your experience, outside of interpretation or any context you're holding it to be.
You don't need to do anything special or contrive anything. There's no requirement to maintain any state of mind or achieve any special condition. The power lies in noticing this actuality, the presence of your experience. This noticing is transformative and does all the work.
So, in essence, the practice involves being with this presence, noticing it, and allowing it to reveal itself to you. It's about letting yourself feel the fullness, the openness, the undefinability of this presence. As you do this, you'll find yourself spontaneously moving from a world of mental definition and interpretation into the actual world of complete transcendence.
Remember, this isn't about learning to do something you're not doing or acquiring some new skill. You're always experiencing your experience. This field of radiant presence never goes away. It's about noticing what this field of radiant presence actually is.
Now, how do you notice the presence in your daily life?
The sources below helped generate your response ...
- The nature of radiant presence is it's intrinsically more obvious and less obvious by its nature
in various circumstances and so on from time to time.
And it's just like that.
So, practically speaking, in terms of what I've arbitrarily called the yoga, you take
advantage of that fact by where it's easy to see it, see it.
And by seeing it, you will come to know it better.
It will show you what it is.
It will teach you what it is.
You will become sensitized to it and familiarized with it.
And the more familiar you are with it, the more sensitive you are to it, the more you
recognize that it's actually present in conditions where it is less explicit, or seemingly less
explicit.
It's not actually less explicit.
It's just explicit in modes that you're not recognizing, say.
But as long as there are modes where you are recognizing it, then that's your point of
contact.
In other words, do it where it's easy.
Work where it's easy.
It's like if you want to get out of jail and you have to tunnel through the wall, and at
one point the wall is only a quarter of an inch thick and at another point the wall is
only a quarter of an inch thick, where are you going to dig your tunnel?
So work where it's easy.
Source: 2012.zip: Springretreat7... - The essence of this yoga, what I call this yoga, the yoga of radiant presence, is the development or more accurately the realization of sensitivity to subtle energy.
Sensitivity to what is called psychic phenomena. Sensitivity to nuances, let's call them experiential nuances that are not normally classified within the normal human, you know, framework of qualifying what's going on here.
It turns out that what this is consists of a vast, literally infinite sea of, call it energetic phenomena, you know, subtle qualities.
And we experience these qualities, let's call them the lower frequency or the denser aspect of these qualities as what phenomena we think of as physical.
So we see, you know, we see bodies, we see the environment, we hear physical sounds, you know, and so on and so forth.
But if one becomes aware, if one becomes sensitive to one's experience carefully, one will notice a vast range of actual qualities, experiential flavors or qualities or what have you, we don't have language for this, that do not correlate to specific physical phenomena.
And ordinarily within a normal human framework, these are written off as noise, you know, noise in the system or fuzz or just, you know, whatever.
But in actual fact, it's not like that.
Source: 2014.zip: 2014 Spring Retreat4... - Then the practice of the yoga of radiant presence is to just to attend to that movement of energy that's happening.
Discover it.
Discover that it's the case.
And if discovering it can and seems to involve attending to it, that's fine.
But ultimately discovering it involves attending to the fact that there is no attending to it.
When you say you're doing it, but look, okay here, here's this experience here, right?
So how is this experience here?
You will discover that and you will discover what you are, what this is, what's doing it and so on and so forth.
And you also discover the substance of what it is.
You discover the whole thing because it's all one, what's doing it and what it's made of are all the same thing.
And it's what you are, or it's all that exists anyway.
It's what you are by default.
And so in the process of noticing that, or the process of discovering that may look like all kinds of things.
It may look like attending to things or thinking about things or this, that or the other.
But none of that is of the essence because it's not a matter of following some mechanical recipe of do this, do that.
It's all about developing your sensitivity to intelligence, developing the subtlety of your engagement with your own experience.
What it is does all the work. You don't have to do anything.
Source: 2015.zip: 2015 07 10... - We take advantage of this fact in yoga of radiant presence by noticing the actuality
of what appears as our experience.
We'll be getting into that much more precisely in terms of what is appearing and how it's
appearing as experience.
Noticing the actuality of what appears and how it appears is powerful.
It is transformative.
It spontaneously reorients and readjusts your orientation to what you are to what this is.
You don't need to do anything.
It's nothing you need to do.
It's nothing you need to contrive.
It's nothing you need to maintain.
It's nothing you need to assert.
Just noticing this actuality, the actuality has power.
It has objective force and that power is transformative.
That power does all the work.
There is no requirement to do anything or create anything or maintain any state of mind
or achieve any special condition or avoid any other condition or this, that or the other.
It's very unimportant.
In general, pay attention to the actuality of your own experience.
By that I mean the presence of your experience.
It's very easy in retreats and talks.
We'll be spending a certain amount of time sitting around this room.
There are other places talking and I'll be droning on.
It's really easy to numb out and get hypnotized and get spaced out on the words and get into
a passive condition.
So don't be passive.
Be actively engaged with the presence of your experience.
Source: 2012.zip: 2012 10 24retreat... - The means of the yoga, the means of the yoga
and the goal of the yoga. So you're using the goal as the means. Presence refers to
sexuality. This presence, this is presence. It is radiant in that it unceasingly and intrinsically
presents itself as an infinite spectrum of qualities, which we all know. Experience always
looks like something. Even if you're in deep sleep it looks like something. In a dream
it looks like something. Every moment of your waking life looks like something. This something
is the radiance. I call it radiance because, as Michael said, it's a fulgent. You don't
need to go to it and try to coax it out. On the contrary, it shines forth like a spotlight.
All these characteristics force themselves into your experience. Obviously that's a little
heavy-handed. But they shine forth. Color shines forth, light shines forth, sound shines
forth, unstoppably it radiates. It's a radiance, an unstoppable radiance. Thought appears. Thought
radiates unceasingly. Sensation, subtle qualities that we don't have names for continually wafting,
drifting through the field of experience. It's unending radiance. And the radiance is
within and of this presence, this actuality, this field of experience. So, yoga of radiant
presence is simply noticing the fullness of this actuality, which is not particularly
difficult to do because you're always doing it. You're always experiencing your experience,
but it simply means that. So it's a matter of just feel it.
Source: 2013.zip: 2013 02 04... - I mean, you know, again, I'm calling it, just to have something to talk about,
I'm calling it the Yoga of Radiant Presence, because that's an evocative name
and it's actually fairly accurate in many ways.
But it is the spiritual process and there is no other spiritual process.
And all spiritual processes that look different than that, if they're genuine, are actually that.
And they may have superficial trappings that involve wearing funny clothes and adopting funny names
and saying and doing funny things, but none of that is actually of the essence of what's actually happening.
It's actually doing the work.
So this is sort of the stripped down on steroids version.
No prostrations, no Sanskrit names.
I mean, you can do all that and that's fine, it doesn't hurt the process,
but it doesn't actually add to it, it's just trappings, it's just, you know, lifestyle choices.
[silence]
The only thing that actually does anything, the only thing that's actually effective is what I call noticing,
which is being with this presence to some degree outside of interpretation,
outside of an interpretive framework, outside of a context that you're holding it to be,
which is always a revelation.
And this happens, again, all the time for everyone.
You know, anyone whatsoever from time to time sees a beautiful something and goes, "Wow!"I mean, they may go, "Wow!"
Source: 2012.zip: 2012 10 26retreat3... - You can't find presence, but it's intuitively palpable that it is present.
And it is radiant in the sense that it presents as all of this inconceivable experiential qualities that are unendingly presenting.
And it is a yoga because it is engaged in its own process of self-engagement for its own inconceivable purpose, if any.
All of this shit is happening. All of this amazing experience of your life and learning and processes going on.
And it is all of that. It is doing all of that. So that process aspect of it.
The yoga is the intrinsic action of reality itself. So reality itself, the action that it is doing to the extent it is an action.
And so the extent there is doing, because those are both abstractions too, is nothing other than this here, the yoga radiant presence.
So anyway, that's a more kind of a formal presentation and I apologize for the fanaticness of it.
But, you know, it can be difficult to present this coherently and inclusively. Well, it's impossible.
So during the course of the next several days we'll be approaching this from many, many, many different angles.
But the important point is this. This that is right here, the presence of your experience is what all this is about.
And the fundamental fact of the yoga is that what this is right here is inconceivably beyond anything you've ever thought it is.
Source: 2015.zip: 2015 11 15retreat... - This is the Yoga of Radiant Presence.
You don't need to be sitting in half lotus in a temple with all sorts of foreign sacred objects around them,
obnoxiously noisy, pervious, spinning, in order to be exploring this astounding condition.
You never depart from it, this is it. Your experience is this radiant presence.
And calling it a yoga is just a glorified way of pointing out how astoundingly, intrinsically interactive it is.
How you're always engaged with your experience, you're always exploring it, you're always being with it,
and boldly going where no one's gone before.
And you can notice that fact.
And the whole feeling tone of what's going on changes drastically when you begin to notice what it actually is like, what it actually is.
So, this morning was your maybe first exposure to my idea of the Yoga of Radiant Presence.
Any questions or observations or struggles or anything at all?
I do.
I find sometimes the radiance is so bright I have to close my eyes. It's so glowing and vibrant.
It is. Oh, it can be intense, it can be intense.
And it can provoke all sorts of extreme reactions.
It can provoke emotional reactions, it can provoke physical reactions.
When you really tune into how profound and how astounding and how powerful this actually is, it is impactful.
And it can be extremely impactful.
The word kept coming out for me refreshed, like on the computer.
Source: 2012.zip: Springretreat2... - So, yoga of radiant
presence is simply noticing the fullness of this actuality, which is not particularly
difficult to do because you're always doing it. You're always experiencing your experience,
but it simply means that. So it's a matter of just feel it. Feel the fullness, feel the
openness, feel the undefinability, the actuality of this presence. And simply doing that, it
by its very nature will reveal itself. It will deepen, it will reveal its subtleties,
it will reveal its nuance. It will seduce you into its nature and you will find yourself
spontaneously moving from orienting yourself towards a world of mental definition, a world
of narration, a world of interpretation, a world where you think you know what things
are and what's going on, into the actual world of complete transcendence. It transcends narration,
it transcends description, it transcends definability. It transcends conflict. It transcends conflict
without eliminating, without denying conflict. It inclusively transcends conflict. It transcends
all limitation whatsoever and you discover that you are that. This is that and it shows
you that. And this realization is the realization. This realization is what's called enlightenment,
what's called realization, simply noticing what this field of radiant presence actually
is. And again it's easy because you always are. This field of radiant presence never
goes away. This is not a matter of learning to do something you're not doing or acquiring
some new skill.
Source: 2013.zip: 2013 02 04...