Naked Seeing

Naked Seeing investigates visionary yogas in the Tibetan Bön and Buddhist traditions: practices in which a meditator spends long periods of time in a dark room or gazing at the open sky, with the goal of experiencing luminous visions. The book examines these practices in two major esoteric traditions, known as the Wheel of Time (Kalacakra) and the Great Perfection (Dzogchen). As both of these traditions began experimenting with sensory deprivation, they found that immersion in darkness or light resulted in unusual experiences of seeing, and those experiences could then be used as gateways to pursuing some of the classic Buddhist questions about appearances, emptiness, and the nature of reality. This book presents the intellectual and literary histories of these practices, and also explores the meditative techniques and physiology that underlie their distinctive visionary experiences.

The book contains complete English translations of three major Tibetan texts on visionary practice. These are: a Kalacakra treatise by Yumo Mikyo Dorjé, The Lamp Illuminating Emptiness; a Nyingma Great Perfection work called The Tantra of the Blazing Lamps; and a Bön Great Perfection work called Advice on the Six Lamps, along with a detailed commentary on this by Drugom Gyalwa Yungdrung.