Big Bang Meditation — From the View of Dzogchen
Creation and dissolution are not events in time; they are the spontaneous display of your own primordial awareness.
Most beings imagine the “Big Bang” as a prehistoric explosion that kicked off some cosmic drama they arrived to billions of years late. Cute enough. But from the Dzogchen view, the punchline is obvious: The Big Bang never stopped. It happens every time a blink arises. That tiny, involuntary closing and opening of the eyelids is not just biology — it’s the natural display of mind’s radiance momentarily relaxing into its own ground and shining forth again. Let’s look from the only place that matters: the view beyond the blinker.
1. Your Blink Is the Birth of the Universe
When the eyes close, the entire display dissolves. Not because something “vanished,” but because what you took as a world was never separate from awareness in the first place. In that instant, appearance returns to its source: empty, open, unconditioned knowing — rigpa. Then the eyes open, and the luminous display reappears effortlessly: colors, shapes, stories, identities, preferences, dramas. The full shimmering play of mind’s energy. Each blink is simply the self-arising, self-liberating display of awareness. A Big Bang with no beginning and no end.
2. In the Blink, Emptiness Becomes Appearance
Your true nature is empty clarity — not a void, but a living openness beyond all “things.” This is the heart, the innermost reality. The play of forms — the “everythingness” that rushes back with the opening of the eyes — is the radiant expression of that emptiness. This is the head, the conceptual overlay. Heart = emptiness (awareness). Head = everythingness (consciousness). One essence, two inseparable aspects. In Dzogchen terms:
- Awareness (rigpa) is empty, open, unborn.
- Consciousness (sem) is the luminous play of appearances.
In the blink, rigpa relaxes into its natural state, and the energetic display spontaneously erupts — a universe without distance from its source.
3. Timelessness Appears as Time
Before perception reconstitutes, you are resting in the timeless expanse — not as something attained, but as what you already are when the fixation on phenomena relaxes. Then, as the senses reengage, the illusion of time reassembles itself: a past to regret, a future to chase, a self to protect. In Dzogchen, this is not a cosmic tragedy. It’s simply the playful ripple of the infinite pretending to be linear.
4. Meditation Lets You Witness the Display Arise and Self-Liberate
Meditation in Dzogchen is not “doing” anything. It’s resting in the natural state long enough to see how the entire display arises from emptiness and dissolves back into emptiness without any effort from “you.” You witness directly how:
- emptiness appears as form
- timelessness appears as time
- awareness appears as consciousness
- heart appears as mind
- Nirvana appears as Samsara
And — crucial point — how all of it liberates itself the moment it appears, like writing on water. Nothing to everything, and everything to nothing, with no one orchestrating the transition.
5. Enlightenment Is Recognizing the Loop Was Never a Loop
From the relative view, it looks like a cycle: Nirvana → Samsara → Nirvana. Emptiness → appearance → emptiness. Heart → head → heart. From the Dzogchen view, the cycle was never actually happening. There is only the single, seamless nature of awareness displaying itself in different modes. Enlightenment is simply recognizing this — not as an insight, but as the immediate reality of experience. The show keeps playing, but you stop mistaking yourself for a character.
6. The Meditation: Everything Open, Nothing Closed
Dzogchen meditation is direct and uncompromising:
- Eyes open… no seer, no seen
- Ears open… no hearer, no sound
- Nose open… no smeller, no scent
- Tongue open… no taster, no taste
- Body open… no feeler, no sensation
- Mind open… no thinker, no thought
Nothing to accept, nothing to reject, nothing to modify. All sense doors wide open, naturally. All perceptions arising as self-liberating display within the vast field of awareness. This is not “heart watching head.” This is the single essence appearing in two modes at once.
7. No Judging, No Fixing, No Controlling
Judgment contracts awareness into a point. Fixing assumes something is broken. Control assumes separation. In Dzogchen, perception is perfect the moment it appears — not morally perfect, but complete, unobstructed, empty, luminous. Interference is delusion. Non-interference is liberation. Just let the universe arise, liberate, arise, liberate — without grabbing, pushing, or storying anything.
The Heart of It
You are not the observer of the Big Bang. You are the source, the display, and the awareness that knows them as inseparable. You are emptiness and appearance. Heart and head. The blink, the Bang, and the unchanging presence that holds both. The Big Bang didn’t happen once — it is the spontaneous, continuous expression of your own primordial awareness, faster than mind can grasp. Meditation doesn’t create enlightenment. It reveals the enlightenment that never left.