[excerpt from Prairie Mind (Somov 2017)]

Dzogchen is the vasteness of each moment.  It is the natural simplicity of being which, in itself, is the only teaching or practice. Dzogchen  […] makes this declaration of simplicity as the lion’s roar of reality. […] Its roar is simply a roaring silence: the self-existent proclamation of self-existence confidence [which] is the empty confidence that has no need for reference points. […] The enlightened state is simply there as the basis of what we are.  The roaring silence of this utter totality is the empty thread upon which the glittering beads of each moment of our being string themselves.

Ngakpa Chogyam & Khandro Dechen, Roaring Silence

Skygazing is the core practical application of Dzogchen meditation.

Lama Surya Das

You are looking at the sky and feel the freedom of space.

FLW, The Destruction of the Box

When you relax your attention, mind relaxes too.  Mind – after all – is a deployment of attention, a focusing of awareness.  Dzogchen practitioners know this doctrinally and experientially.  Frank Lloyd Wright must have known this intuitively.  

Wright’s architecture is about freeing attention: the vanishing walls, the disappearing corners, the blurring of the outside with the inside – all of that is an invitation to relax your gaze, to stop tracking, and to relax into a soft view.

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The indisputable key element of Wright’s architecture was “leading the human vision beyond walls” – “out of the ground and into the light.”  This is a Dzogchen vector of consciousness.  This is nothing less than architectural skygazing. 

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Dzogchen is a form of Tibetan Buddhism.  In translation, Dzogchen means “Great Perfection.”  Dzogchen teaches how to return to the primordial state of mind – to a state of rigpa.  Rigpa mind is a mirror mind, a mind that reflects anything and everything in front of it, without discrimination or judgment.  Rigpa is nondual awareness, nondiscursive awareness, noninterpretive awareness.  Rigpa mind is prairie mind.

Rigpa, according to Sam van Schaik, is "free from elaborations" (srpos bral), "non conceptual" (rtog med) and "transcendent of the intellect" (blo 'das).

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Skygazing is an essential Dzogchen technique, an experiential access-point to rigpa.  It is misleadingly easy and profoundly subtle.  Here’s how Lama Surya Das, an American Dzogchen lama, describes it:

“Skygazing is the core practical application of Dzogchen meditation. It is how we learn to relax, let go, and let be in the natural state of things, just as they are.... We gradually release our small, narrow, egotistical, dualistic minds....  Skygazing means opening up and decontracting, space-mingling, dissolving in the infinite… Simply gaze into the sky or any undifferentiated expanse of space—such as a ceiling, a blank wall or a green lawn. Use the infinite panorama of emptiness as a metaphor for openness and awareness, release your fixations and preoccupations, breathe out—and simply let go into it."

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Skygazing is space-mingling.  So is Wright’s architecture.  Wright’s architecture equates spaciousness with openness.  Wright’s organic architecture is about “opening up” and “decontracting” – it is about a prairie state of mind, a natural condition of liberated openness of being.  Wright’s architecture forces us – nudges us – to notice space.  

And to notice space is to mingle with it.  

I said “with it” but space is not an “it.”

Space is neither “this” and nor “that.”  And that is why Wrightean architecture of space is fundamentally nondual and dzogchen. 

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Wright’s emphasis on the spaciousness of light and the enlightenment of space is an invitation to look up, to open up, to stare into nowhere in particular.  It is an invitation to just see What Is instead of looking – hustling – for something. 

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Looking is predatorial in nature.  We look for something … to eat.  Looking is paranoid in its intent.  We look out for someone … who wants to eat us.  Looking is instrumental in its goals.  We look for something … that we can use, and, thus, objectify.  

Seeing is different.  Seeing just is.  It has no evolutionary agenda.  It is hustle-free.  And, therefore, liberating.

Seeing into space – spacing out – is not-looking.  Seeing into space – by definition – has no point to focus on.  Seeing without a point, without an agenda, into nothingness is mind just being rather than mind doing.  Looking is a “doing.”  Seeing is not.  Looking has an effort to it.  Seeing is effortless.  

This kind of seeing is “being mind” rather than “minding.”  This kind of seeing into space is space-mingling.

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Space-mingling of Tibetan or Wrightean kind is also akashic in nature: in seeing into space we are looking at the medium that births us and unites us.  The void is not a vacuum but a plenum – the womb of matter – the undifferentiated that differentiates into forms – into us.  So as we see into space we see into our common, primordial origin.  And as we see into space we are literally taking notice of the invisible common denominator that we all collectively share.  No matter how different we might all be, we all share one and the same coordinate of being – the universal space that we are in, that we ourselves are.

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There is no evidence to suggest that Wright was familiar with Dzogchen.  Dzogchen school of Buddhism, unlike, say, Zen Buddhism, was slower to catch popular attention in the West.  Yes, Wright did hang out with such brokers of East and West as Gurdjieff who might have been in a position to introduce Wright to something like a Dzogchen view of space.  But it would have been unnecessary – Wright understood space and its role in human experience intuitively and well enough to play with space on the architectural plane.  Perhaps, Wright caught the space-bug from Emerson.  For my money, I want to believe that at some point Wright simply looked inside himself – contemplatively – and then looked out at the world around him … and saw no difference.  

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There is a lot of neuro-buddhism to skygazing and space-mingling.  Here’s an explanation from James Austin, best known for his book Zen & the Brain. 

“Highly adept Tibetan meditators also engage in a separate practice of “sky gazing.”  They approach this practice gradually while learning  how to cultivate a stable form of receptive, intensified, “open presence awareness.”  […] These adept meditators are deliberately choosing, at first, to direct their open eyes upward toward empty, cloudless space.  At the same time they are still trying to maintain an empty mind that remains open to realize the unity of awareness within this matrix of space.  Rigpa is a term used in the Dzogchen tradition.  It refers to an advanced state of consciousness devoid of all concepts, a state regarded as exemplifying the “unity of emptiness and cognizance.” It is said to represent a particular “knowing” of unconstructed space at this deepest level. “

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So, that’s just another description of sky-gazing, in this case from a medically trained neuroscientist.  But we are not onto the neuro-buddhism of it yet.  We’ll get there in a tick or two.  

For now, another passage from James Austin on sky-gazing that brings us a full circle back to Frank Lloyd Wright:

“Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche recently described [ … the] way he learned about [sky-gazing] from his father, a celebrated teacher […] of Tibetan Buddhism.  His father would ‘simply sit in front of the large window and gaze off into the sky’ above the Kathmandu Valley.  Pointing out through the window, he advised his son: ‘Look out into the blue sky.  Pure awareness is like space, boundless and open.  It’s always here.  You don’t have to make it up.  All you have to do is rest in that.”

A sage in front of an open window, staring into space – that is the intended lot for any inhabitant of a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  

A Prairie mind is a Dzogchen mind.

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Now, let us learn from James Austin about the neuropsychological/neurophysiological underpinnings of star-gazing.

According to Austin, we have two lateral cortical systems of attention: dorsal and ventral.  The dorsal neural circuitry is “top-down” and is used “when we’re already biased by prior cues and then make fine-tuned adjustments to the actual sensory stimuli as they next start coming in.” 

The dorsal “top-down” system of attention is also used to “continually monitor […] fresh, incoming data in order to respond […] in an appropriate manner.”  The dorsal system of attention “in general […] helps us reach out with our hands and respond accurately during tasks.”

Stated more poetically, this system of attention “impales the stimuli and anchors them” for processing.  Put differently, the dorsal system of attention is a system of engagement: it engages our attention, accelerates it, fine-tunes it.  It helps us zoom in onto a stimulus of interest.

The ventral neural circuitry of attention is a “bottom-up” system.  Its job is to disengage our attention.  The ventral system of attention un-sticks us from a stimulus, un-glues our attention, frees it up so that our attention can be re-deployed towards a new stimulus.  

If dorsal attention system is an attention accelerator, ventral attention system is an attention brake pedal.  

Here’s how Austin states it: “the bottom-up functions of [the] ventral system respond automatically to each fresh need to disengage attention from whatever target it was fixed on before.”  

The ventral system helps us “shift attention.” The ventral system of attention is about reorienting attention, redirecting it.  “To what?” asks Austin, and answers himself: “To whatever new stimulus happens to arrive from the vast global sensory world outside our skin.”

By now you are probably beginning to see the connection between sky-gazing and the ventral system of attention.  Sky-gazing, as a form of looking out, is a shifting of attention towards the “vast global sensory world outside our skin.”  Sky-gazing – looking out – spacing out – turns on the ventral system, disengaging us from our stressful, stimuli-tracking tunnel-vision of dorsal attending. 

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Austin adds that this ventral attention – particularly right-hemisphere ventral attention – 

“is relatively free from the […] heavy commitment to language with which evolution burdened similar regions of the cortex [on the left hemisphere].  This raises an intriguing possibility.  After repeated training, could profoundly selfless insights be able to evolve wordlessly, especially if they mostly happened to be flowing through the bottom-up [ventral] processing pathways?”

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So, Austin – like Dzogchen sages before him – advises: 

“Suppose you have an idle moment.  Perhaps in the past you would have been programmed by a habitual need to look down, reach for a cell phone, and start fiddling with its keys.  Instead, your gaze might now simply drift up casually to observe the clouds in the sky.  And in this more relaxed state, you wouldn’t be Self-consciously aware of any rationale for doing so.”

This, Austin, posits is what might happen after decades of practice of “letting go.” 

“Letting go itself becomes a fluid, ongoing, habitual expression.  It unfolds almost as involuntarily as the phases of your natural independent breathing cycle.”

Might we expect the same from someone living in a Wrightean building with its vanishing walls, disappearing corners, and the seamless interplay of inside and outside that leads our vision up and away?

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Wrightean architecture is not only Dzogchen – it is also (neurologically) ventral.  And, in a manner of speaking, it vents our attention out, out into the space.

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Wrightean architecture is allocentric – other-focused.  By focusing you away from you it turns your sense of self off, away from what Austin calls “I-Me-Mine triad” towards the non-possessiveness and non-territoriality and non-discursiveness of empty space.  It’s architecture of letting-go.

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James Austin also adds: “Language presents an interesting coincidence with regard to the emphasis on the allocentric, upper field, and upward gaze theme […] The Sino-Japanese word for “sky” is the same as the central Mahayana Buddhist term for ‘emptiness.’”  And Austin – in his book Meditating Selflessly – offers an ideogram for emptiness on the cover of his book.  When you look at this ideogram of sky/emptiness by Tanchu Terayama, you see a Prairie School/Wrightean house design: a horizontal roof-line, a row of floor-to-ceiling windows below, and a ground-line – a simple sandwich of Wrightean earth-lines. 

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“I raised my head, looking up

And saw the cloudless sky.

I thought of absolute space, free from limits,

… Then experienced a freedom

Without center, without end.”

Do these words belong to an 18th century Tibetan sage, Shabkar, or to a 20th century paradigm-shifting architect Frank Lloyd Wright or to a 21st century medically trained neuro-Buddhist James Austin?

Does it matter?  

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So, what are we to borrow from all of this?  Nothing and everything at the same time – an upward gaze.  And that’s enough.