Bliss Queen

Emphasizing neither renunciation nor transformation, though incorporating both into its preparatory practices, the Great Completeness privileges a method know as "self-liberation" (rang 'grol), sometimes described as "liberation in its own spot" (rang sar 'grol). Liberation takes place in the situation just as it is, because one's mind and all things are, despite powerful appearances to the contrary, primordially pure. If one has not yet made this essential discovery, the Great Bliss Queen ritual can prepare one for it. If one is familiar with the Great Completeness perspective, one performs the visualization and recitation of the Great Bliss Queen ritual entirely within an experience of innate awareness. In either case, the ritual encompasses the three nondualisms already discussed. One way of accessing the primordial purity so important to the Great Completeness tradition is a practice known as "pure vision." This involves visualizing companions, family, surroundings, and so forth as creations of light, the habitat of an enlightened being. From the viewpoint of the Great Completeness, such pure vision is not an imaginative overlay, but a move toward understanding things as they are. As Khetsun Sangpo taught it, this practice allows you to understand that apparently ordinary things and persons have "been [primordially pure] from the beginning" so that "you are identifying their own proper nature. Your senses normally misrepresent what is there, but through this visualization you can come closer to what actually exists." In short, by identifying one's body, companions, and world with those of the Great Bliss Queen, one develops the ability to discover what has always been there. This being so, there is no need to renounce or change anything, only to see it more completely. This is the Great Completeness tradition's special mix of ontological and cognitive nondualisms. Unlike the tantric traditions, in which it is necessary to cease the coarse sense and mental consciousness in order for the most subtle mind of clear light to appear, the Dalai Lama observes that "in the Old [Nyingma] Translation School of the Great Completeness it is possible to be introduced to the clear light without the cessation of the six operative consciousnesses. " Hence the possibility of "discovering" what is already in our midst. Such discovery reveals a spontaneous presence (yon dan hlun gyis grub ba) of collateral qualities such as clarity and spontaneous responsiveness. Thus, comments Longchen Rabjam, "primordially pure primordial wisdom is free in the face of thought and the primordial wisdom, with a nature of spontaneity, abides as primordial radiance, and profound clarity."