And as for baby-boomer parents cluck-clucking about illegal substances, ah, gimme a break. Still, I think I'll pass on the rave. But more power to 'em, I say.

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

Were you somebody different a thousand years ago? Will you be somebody different a thousand years from now? What is this One Self that is forever your own deepest being? Must you believe the lies of time? Must you swallow the insanity that One Spirit does not exist? Can you show me your Original Face, of which there is One and Only One in all the entire World?

Start as a human being in this culture, toss in madness, toss in mystical states, toss in being gay, toss in being HIV-positive, toss in religion that assures you God hates you for all of that - and then look me in the eye and tell me you can feel ok about yourself. I dare you. I just dare you.

Furthermore, it is not that Spirit is present but you need to be enlightened in order to see it. It is not that you are one with Spirit but just don't know it yet. Because that would also imply that there is some place Spirit is not. No, according to Dzogchen, you are always already one with Spirit, and that awareness is always already fully present, right now. You are looking directly at Spirit, with Spirit, in every act of awareness. There is nowhere Spirit is not.

One Taste is not some experience you bring about through effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to it, including the effort to "see it nondually".

A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons.