Self Liberation in Phenomenology and Dzogchen, Essays EMPTY MIND, TRANSITIONAL SPACE AND THE DISSOLVING OF SELF OBJECT FUNCTION By Rudolph Bauer, Phd Wed, Oct 23, 2013 Rudolph Bauer Ph.D., Author We have focused on the transmission of the field of awareness and on the extension of the field into the present, the past and the future. We have focused on cutting through methods which are forms of the methodology of the ancient Vajrakilaya. We used cutting through methods as ways of dissolving mental structures. We especially focused on the primitive superego's structuring of unhappy experience. We use various methods of awareness cutting through configurations of awareness. This is why these actions are so direct, immediate and powerful. We are using awareness to cut through the configurations of awareness. We focused on the apparitional dimension of the Dakini. We experienced how the apparition may seem to go beyond our body boundaries and seem extrinsic to us. And yet, at the very same moment, that Dakini is the nature of your own awareness. The Dakini is not a projection of your mind, but the manifestation of primordial awareness in you, as you and your circumstances. Remembering the difference between mind and awareness is important. The Dakini is both completely within you as you, and beyond you as the world. This is the nature of the archetypical realm. The Dakini is not a function of your psychology, but is the very nature of the ontology of subjectivity and the nature of the ontology of the world. To experience this apparition is to be open or privy to the anima, the anima mundi. Psyche! You and I live in psyche. And, if you are open experientially to that dimension of actuality you are very, very lucky. The task is becoming what you are, Aham Ah. And so, you become the apparitional. This is a path of completion for you, but not necessarily for the person next to you. In time, you see through the eyes and feel through the hands of the Dakini. Tat tvam asi. You are that. The symbolic realm of the great compassion is available for you, for your protection and actually the protection of others. This apparitional dimension will help you to go beyond your mind and the superego structuring of experience which enslaves you and those around you. I have spoken about not having teachers in your mind, nor having father and mother in your mind. This is important in your liberation from being in the mental drama of the eternal family and freeing yourself from childhood states of mind. This does not mean you do not love your father and your mother. It does not mean you do not love your teachers. It simply means you do not always locate them in the representational sphere of mind. This mentalization encloses the relational experience within the representational mind alone. Relational experience can be situated in the vast field of awareness. I will make a commentary from the point of view of the self object function. The self objects are actually those others who help us sustain self. This self object function, this very personal function of having another help us by holding and resonating to our sense of self, is so important. The self object begins in the beginnings of life and manifests through various developmental periods. The self object function appears and reappears over time and throughout time. In the beginning and for some time , the self object is external and gross, and can be both in the real or in the symbolic realm. By gross I mean physical, such as real person or real animal, or real apparitional being. Then, slowly but surely, the self object function of that person or situation is becoming internalized. In the deepening and in the owning of the self object function, the self object and the function become more subtle and more internal. Eventually, the self object function becomes the self, itself. The self object becomes immanent to and within the self, itself. The self object function is the nature of awareness itself. You release the configurations of the self object function. Your awareness is the self and that which holds and sustains self. Timing is completely important in this endeavor. And so, I have no mother and father in my mind; I have no teachers in my mind. I have gratitude. Gratitude sustains the self object function within your self as your self. Idealization is useful to a point and then becomes containing, and keeps you a child. Lama Tharchin Rinpoche spoke so beautifully on the death of his guru and about what his developmental task was at that moment. Dissolving the self object function results in empty mind and fullness of awareness. I will now speak about the same and similar function through the language of Winnicott. Winnicott spoke about the function of the personal mother and how necessary this function is for a child to become a person. He also described how the personal mother dissolves and becomes the environmental mother. The experience transforms from the experience of the personal mother to the experience of the environmental mother, meaning the world or aspects of the world as mother. You can see this confidence in persons who have made this transition from good enough mother to the environmental mother, from object focus to being in the world within its infinite horizons. By world, I do not mean physical earth, but the world as the being of Being itself. Winnicott describes the capacity to enter transitional space and to live within the transitional space and transitional relatedness with its freedom and generosity of spirit. Transitional space, the intermediate area of experience, is free of superego domination. The transitional space transforms and is no longer simply within me and my body. This intermediate state, this place of potential space, becomes the space I live in and dwell within. The transitional space unfolds from interiority within me to the very space of my life. From dwelling within the transitional arena within my self and transforming into wherever I am, I live in the transitional dimension. Transitional is not simply within me but becomes the mode of the being of the world. This, of course, gives freedom to be present and to keep moving within the freedom of transitional relatedness. To free your self from the objects within in your mind allows the very objects, in actuality, to become the field of awareness. In death, the objects of your mind become the field of awareness. In death, the object of your relatedness become the field of awareness, the sea of awareness. The object or person in your mind dissolves into the sea of awareness. The teachers in your mind dissolve into the sea of awareness, the field of awareness. They are no longer objects of your mind, interiorized pictures or memory, but the actuality of the field of awareness. When you feel the awareness field you are feeling within the awareness field their traces unfolding their wonderful support. But, they are not in your mind unless you bring them forth. Where are they? They are the very field of awareness itself. Within your awareness they are of the nature of awareness itself. And so you live in awareness and live in the humanness of awareness, which is the Buddha. You are free within the spaciousness of your mind. In doing so you are more free of psychology and live within the cosmological view. Sometimes people do not live in the field of awareness, which is infinite in its horizons, and confuse the generational field with the field of awareness. And so they are forever limited within the generational field. Ultimately, representational becomes the non conceptual. The mind becomes the field. You want to live in the field and not the mind. In dissolving the mirrors of your mind, the field of awareness becomes the mirror of its own self. Immanence mirroring immanence. Written by Rudolph Bauer, Ph.D. A.B.P.P. The Washington Center for Consciousness Studies