During the Dzogchen transmission I attended last week, Rinpoche Namkhai Norbu made two related statements that provide the most precise and profound orientation to nondual practice I have ever heard.

Here are the statements Rinpoche made:

Instant presence is the potentiality of the middle.
Manifestation is qualification of the middle.

The Sanskrit word “sandhi” denotes this elusive middle. (Pronounced “sund-hee.”) The sandhi is a nondimensional “space” of infinite potentiality, a dynamic juncture between the manifest and the unmanifest. Living from within this infinite juncture is the fruit of all nondual practice.

Tantrik nondual practice uses many instances of sandhi in order to give practitioners a taste of this fundament of Reality. Some of these instances are:

The sandhi between day and night.
The sandhi between inhalation and exhalation.
The sandhi between one thought and another.
The sandhi between closely fitting objects, for instance between your body lying on the floor and the floor, or between your closed upper and lower eyelids.
The chakras–the sandhi from which you come into manifestation.
The sandhi of sushumna nadi, your central “middle” channel.

In nondual Tantrik practice, we meditate on these sandhi. We try to practice at the sandhi times of day, and the sandhi of each year (solstices). Kriya yoga consists of practices of opening into sandhi through the use of breath, visualization, and movement. The famous “so-ham” kriya is a practice of the sandhi with which many of you may be familiar.

The sandhi is a zone of perfect balance, spaciousness, stillness and dynamism, potential becoming, and potential unbecoming.

Imagine yourself riding a large ferris wheel. The wheel turns inexorably, moving your chair to the topmost point on the circle.

There is always that point at the very top of your circuit during which your upward movement is slipping out of being and downward movement is slipping into being, but nothing has definitively completed or begun.

The completion is in potentia, and the beginning of the downward phase is also in potentia.

We can all sense this. We feel dynamically suspended in the middle of a pause that cannot really be a pause because the wheel has not stopped turning. Yet, the ferris wheel sandhi feels as if it has duration, texture, pregnancy, spaciousness, and an indefinable specialness. We all wait for that very moment. It’s almost the reason why ferris wheels exist.

These sensory effects of the sandhi are not illusory or unreal. They are our human way of recognizing, literally remembering, the unnamable, indescribable zone from which all things come and go.

All things arise and subside from a reservoir of infinite potential. Thus, the sandhi is the most fundamental aspect of Reality. It is the most fundamental aspect of each of us.

Any manifest life is a “qualification” of sandhi. In other words, any form of manifestation is like sandhi with quotes around it, or the appearance of a limitation as a qualification of limitless potential.

Whatever life is, it appears as a result of a passage, like in those science fiction movies where people move from one world to another through a kind of silvery liquid diaphragm.

A required episode in this kind of sf features someone getting “stuck” inside the silvery liquidy filmy thing. While from the outside, the diaphragm looks nearly two dimensional, the person stuck within finds a space of infinite dimension.

Where do you think we got this idea? From our own experience, even if largely unrecognized by us!

The bardos are sandhi between manifest existences. A wise Buddhist Tantrik wrote: Every moment is a bardo. Every moment is this passage between becoming and unbecoming. We use the small instances of sandhi that shape our days to begin to sensitize ourselves to this fundament of the life process.

I know from the example of my betters, that it is from within the experiential rememberance of sandhi that we can begin to work more directly with the elemental play of the manifest world. I know from my own experience that within the experiential rememberance of sandhi is great contentment, equilibrium, and peace. And beauty. Extraordinary beauty.

I teach a class at a local nursing home. One of the meditations I regularly do with my class of elders is simple awareness of the sandhi at the beginning and end of each natural breath. This kriya involves absolutely no effort, no change of breath, no elongation, no mantra. The only “technique” is to gently place the awareness at the natural sandhi at the beginning and the end of each breath.

Being in a nursing home is stressful. Even more stressful is feeling helpless in the face of the slipping away of everything that oriented you to life: your senses, your mind, your friends, and in many cases, your children. As we do this simple kriya, the peacefulness and even joy that descends on these elderly faces says it all.

OM Shanti,
Shambhavi

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