REFLECTIONS ON DZOGCHEN’S FOURTH TIME RETREAT
Reflections from Jon Ferrer, Wisdom Sun practitioner and Wisdom Council member
There are intervals and swells I move through with keeping a daily spiritual practice. One moment I am deep in the momentum of staying the course, I feel present, focused, attentive, my head is above water, everything is in its right place. Then suddenly, I'm noticing my eyes going buggy searching endlessly online to buy something I want but don't need. In this state I feel out of balance, almost as though I’m hypnotized and buzzed from overstimulation; I am a body in a material world.
During the days leading up to the retreat, I was approaching a limit. I missed three doctor’s appointments due to my lack of attention to scheduling, lost my daughter’s favorite hat, and I hadn't taken a break from work since last year's winter holiday. Nothing dramatic, just the natural wear from the gears turning and raising a family. On top of all this, I was starting to feel the pinball effect of experiencing a world zooming toward me from every direction, competing more and more frantically for my attention, time, and space. The retreat happened at just the right time.
I honestly didn't know what the topic of this retreat was until a few days beforehand. To me, what was more important was to finally be present, in person with Wisdom Sun.
As someone newer to Tibetan Buddhism, I had heard Dzogchen mentioned a few times. I looked it up online, but never came away with any coherent understanding of the mind's "natural state of being”. I wondered if a natural state of being would not feel that great after spending hours of my time online looking for things like cool-looking pens to buy.
Amayra New Year, June 21st.
The Retreat Begins
One of the first things Rose offered us in the morning was a simple mantra that set the tone for the rest of the day:
I have all the time in the world.
As we chanted this together, I wondered how many times have I said this in my adult life? Rarely. Maybe I've felt some inklings of it on vacation, but somehow even vacations start to feel like a countdown before getting back to the "real world”. After repeating it a few times, I felt a lightness enter the room, as if everyone had finally given themselves permission to let their burdens down. I was really happy for all of us to share that together.
The rest of the day, Rose guided us through different perspectives of time, and it felt like a moving meditation in itself. She drew from theoretical physics to ancient, indigenous beliefs, and told us how railroads and naval navigation and trade routes created the need for synchronized clocks in London. It was fascinating to hear how some cultures view time as a river running away from us rather than toward us, and how some cultures view ancestors as future beings rather than beings left behind in time. The more perspectives she offered, the more my own ideas about time began to loosen.
Rose pointed us toward those moments when we are creative or in a playful mood, like how children seem to project imagination into reality. These are times when we allow ourselves to transcend time and sort of leave it behind altogether. Whatever that state is, reflecting on it opened up something in me.
For the Yoga Nidra practice, Rose invited us to bring an eye mask and a cozy. I was all go for it, always glad for any rest I can get as I work nights. And it seemed everyone else was into it too.
We each made ourselves a cozy nest with meditation pillows. Soft, humming drone music played while Rose guided us through the limbs of our bodies into deep relaxation. I blanked out into sleep, and then all of a sudden, as if an internal clap resounded in me, my eyes snapped open into the darkness of my eye mask. I had been asleep. I awoke to Rose still guiding the meditation, gentle sleeping breaths floating from different corners of the room. I followed her voice, attention to a limb, the limb fading into the expanse of the universe, repeat. My consciousness seemed to move out of my body and take in everything around me: distinct food smells from lunch, city automobiles rumbling by, small birds in nearby trees, muted snoring. I wasn't struggling with any of it the way I would at home in sitting meditation. In that moment I truly felt that everything I was experiencing was no different from me, and me no different from it, for once my mind wasn't fighting for perfect peace and quiet.
When we came out of it, I looked at my watch a little taken aback and said "It's four thirty!" to Rebecca, who was sitting nearby. By my sense of time at that moment, we had just come back from lunch.
Gaelen made an observation that day after the Ocean-like Being meditation, an earlier exercise Rose led us through, that has stayed with me. He noticed how much of our experience may feel separate on the surface, yet is also deeply similar. We perceive the same world, feel the same range of emotions, and our eyes and hearts meet darkness, the same unknown. All of these levels of perception happening simultaneously in our bodies and minds, whether we are aware of them or not.
The material we covered about Dzogchen's Fourth Time felt beautifully open-ended like a living piece of poetry. Learning about so many different perceptions of time—the formation of clocks in London, the Ocean-like Being meditation, singing Tilopa's Six Nails, learning about the rhythmic celebrations to mark time around the world—opened up a curiosity in me about how we perceive time. After all, how can we possibly define time, or say which view of time is true?
If I can share one insight from this retreat after taking it all in as a whole, it is how I look at the feelings of love and joy in a whole new way. They ebb and flow in the intervals between our metronomic ideas of time, in the moments we make for play, movement, writing, singing, dancing, creating, and improvising. Arising in those moments where we unknowingly step outside our logical, rigid sense of time altogether. Then, the world feels less separate and more woven together as one expansive, shared experiential field.