Dzogchen in the Peak District

📍Geneva, Switzerland (Issue 209)

An incredible rainbow over Lac Leman, Geneva

There is neither creation, nor destruction,
Neither destiny, nor freewill.
Neither path nor achievement--
This is the final truth!

(Ramana Maharshi, from Nine Stray Verses, Collected Works, p. 138.)

We were in Macclesfield to meet James Low in a nondescript community hall near the station. James met us at the door, with long hair swept back into a tight grey ponytail, and big eyes like two glasses of water, bright, blue, and clear. I had heard him teach in the Waking Up app and remembered Dzogchen referenced often in my time in India, but I didn’t really know what it was all about.

In the week preceding the retreat, I had been feeling stressed and a little adrift; there is a kind of post-sabbatical shadow, an adjustment to the lower temperature of Europe, big questions to answer, the rekindling of friendships.

Reflection and countryside were exactly what I needed. The stormy weather cleared up. We were left with fresh, damp, dewy ground—a mossy green under gentle yellowing morning light. There is something of a museum about the Peak District: The now-smokeless chimneys of England’s dark Satanic mills dominate the quaint fielded landscape. These chimney stacks, peering over hedgerows, are the very first signs of a distant village. We would wander between them, following footpaths and canals, into the boujie coffee shops the cotton mills have now become.

When did the Peak District become so beautiful?! Well, we were relatively late: the hills around us had formed 350 million years ago, in the Carboniferous period, all submerged in some warm and shallow sea. Back then our Isles sat on the equator. Today, there is nothing equatorial about the Peaks: Hollinsclough, Lognor, and Buxton. Hardly tropical! —not a coconut, not a natural tan nor a palm between them. In time, the sea levels receded to what is now Liverpool, and the world’s very first land plants flourished in the swampy, coastal region that is now Bollington and Macclesfield. The titanic rise and fall of ice ages came and went, and those nascent plants were repeatedly covered in awesome ‘cyclothems’, crushed down into coal that enabled modernity.

Hundreds of millions of years later, our more recent ancestors in the Middle Ages discovered rich veins of coal and other metals, which we subsequently pillaged in the 18th and 19th centuries. Human beings, those soft-skinned mammals, were sent by their millions into cavernous long dark mines, only to blow-up or breathe in crippling black dust, all to enable ‘progress’. As early as 1696, it was written of the Peaks that they were ‘…Craggy hills Whose Bowells are full of mines of all kinds of black and white and veined marbles, and some have mines of copper, others tin and leaden mines, in which is a great deal of silver.’ (Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary). The Industrial Revolution arose, and a network of canals and cotton mills were built (it was cheaper to bring the cotton to the Peaks than to carry the coal out of the area). Now the mines are sealed, and the coffee shops are open; how lucky we were!

I had turned my phone off for the weekend, and this allowed me to really hear the profundity of James Low’s simple teaching. I say simple because — as he said himself — there was not so much to say. The insight he pointed to again and again, with different anecdotes and stories, is in front of us in every moment; it’s impossible not to see when we stop looking elsewhere, and perhaps because it’s so obvious, it evades us. It’s too conspicuous!

We spend our lives seeking only to discover, this is it?

Eugh! It’s so simple, in fact, that it undermines the notion of a ‘path’ or a ‘journey’. There is this very clear sense — when glimpsed — of ‘ohhhhh, that’s what they’ve been pointing to all along’. I needn’t go into his teaching. However, I enjoyed how he pulled us in, like a whirlpool bringing us around and around, closer to the central insight. We were quite delicately — charmingly, even — convinced. He spoke extemporaneously for two hours on the first day and seven on the second, with those eyes, absolutely clear and present, unceasingly equanimous.

And after all this teaching, I left the hall knowing nothing more about James Low! In fact, James explained nothing about who he was and how he became a teacher; he hardly mentioned the word Dzogchen (translated as ‘Great Perfection’); he had written books and yet didn’t tell us he had, they were notably not for sale at the back of the hall. Nor did James suggest we follow him in any way! The two days cost just £30, so he wasn’t there to make money. His teachings are all free on his website. There was no: ‘these are the results you’ll see if you practice’, no: ‘it will improve your life’, no: ‘subscribe!" It was decidedly non-commercial. Odd.

Simply, he seemed to me to say ‘this is it’ — this is your life, take it or leave it. So if ‘this is it’, I reflected along the silent canals, surely we shouldn’t worry quite so much.

On my morning walks, I packed a couple of books in my backpack. I was followed by staring sheep through fields under oaks and along rows of elms. Sometimes I felt like reading some Tiziano Terzani, and at other times some Robert Service. Most often, I’d not read at all but just loaf about, appreciating how the morning mist settled in the low belly of the green valleys.

James pointed out that we know ourselves so little that we carry a book around all day with us, and then not feel like reading! It begs the question, how am I so unaware of how I will feel, that I don’t know if or what I will want to read, an hour from now? How should ‘I’ make big life decisions if I don’t know how I will feel in mere minutes, let alone tomorrow?!

This illustrated clearly the emptiness of the Self. We are looking for some kind of concrete certainty. I want to feel that I — carefully considering all options, and checking in with myself — am certain of a job, or a travel plan, or a home. Society begs for certainty! We want absolute conviction! And yet, I can’t be concretely sure of much at all, not even of what I want to read.

This all resonates with me because the last few weeks required many life decisions. Where to live and what to do. These questions are answerable only unsatisfactorily. I was puzzled as to why.

This weekend in the Peaks gave clarity: The implication of the Dzogchen insight is we can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, put too much weight on these decisions. We can’t expect absolute certainty. In the ultimate view, reality is perfect as is; we can't do anything to make it better. It can all be enjoyed as an immaculate flow of energy that we get to experience, a flow of life that comes at us, and we either fight it or go with it. There is nothing graspable, nothing to hold on to. Our holding on, wishing for conclusiveness, is holding us back (well, at least, it holds me back) because so long as we seek something solid, permanent, and substantive, we’ll remain quite disappointed.

Everything changes, ice ages arise and recede, Satanic mills are built and converted to sordid little cafes, the springtime fills up the hedgerows which thin out in the autumn. We’re here, embedded in life, a part of it, whether we choose to appreciate it or not.