Essential Dzogchen
Essentially, we are Dzogchen bliss

These teachings are principally about clarifying confusion. Tulku Urgyen wrote about Dzogchen; “It is what a spiritual practitioner needs to reach complete enlightenment in a single lifetime.”

Padmasambhava explains:
“You must make sure your dharma practice becomes the real dharma.
You must make sure your dharma becomes the real path.
You must make sure your path can clarify confusion.
You must make sure your confusion dawns as wisdom.

“When you have understanding free from accepting or rejecting, after knowing how to condense all the teachings into a single vehicle, then your dharma practice becomes the real dharma.

“When, in any practice you do, you possess refuge and bodhichitta, and have unified the stages of development and completion*, and means and knowledge, then your dharma becomes the real path.

“When you combine the path with the view, meditation, action and fruition, then your path clarifies confusion.

“When you exert yourself in practice, having fully resolved the view and meditation, then your confusion dawns as wisdom.

“No matter what practice you do, failing to unify development and completion, view and conduct, and means and knowledge will be like trying to walk on one leg.”

The following is from “Dzogchen Essentials”:

“Dzogchen is the pinnacle of Vajrayana, yet this pinnacle is poised upon the foundation of Hinayana and Mahayana, and includes all the precepts from the lower vehicles, even within a single practice. To quote Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, “In Mahamudra and Dzogchen, the training is not to stray from the empty awareness that is the awakened state of the Buddhas. This empty, aware state of all Buddhas, the awakened state, is also compassionate…by not straying from the empty and aware awakened state, one automatically never breaks the precepts of the lower vehicles.

“At the same time, Dzogchen is not for the ambivalent. The path itself is like a very restricted package tour; we cannot make our own itinerary, even though we might be tempted to fall back into old habits of picking and choosing.

“As Tsoknyi Rinpoche states, “It does not make sense to grab at the highest teachings and reject the rest. It is pointless to invent some personal idea of Dzogchen to train in. If you do, then Dzogchen becomes something fabricated, something you have made up. Calling your own theories ‘Dzogchen’ is a foolish pretence that has nothing to do with the genuine and authentic teachings.”

*Development and Completion:
We create a visualisation (a representation of a quality) and then, realising its emptiness, melt into emptiness, reminding us that all projections are emptiness. This apparent and empty form of the deity is a rainbow fabrication of emptiness in which we dissolve. Dissolve into bliss.

Development stage: the yoga of imagined deity.
Completion stage: the yoga of the deity of actuality.