The visions arise through day and night practice that

extends over a period of years, and as the habits of mind,

emotions, lives of weighted actions, and deep-seated
concepts of time and space slowly dissolve away, you see
directly how this world manifests out of essence, an
experience of light, shape, and color that is all
encompassing. Your physical form and the world around
you are turning into light and yet you still go for water,
cook food, and take care of your daily needs. As you walk
down to the creek, the land and the plants glow with light,
it is naturally the way of all things, so simple, just as your
hand is made of light as it lifts the jug of water.

      The four visions of Togal unfold in the same way as the

growth cycle of a plant. The seedling of light that emerges
from the luminous seed in your heart puts out seed leaves
as the onset of the first vision. The seedling grows, puts
out more leaves, and the first buds of flowers as the
second vision, and then matures and blossoms as the
total effulgence of the third vision. The energy then turns
inward, concentrating the dynamic force of the essence to
set seed in the fourth vision, which brings you to the
ultimate resolution of all phenomena as a seamless whole.
There are specific landmarks along the path, but the four
visions are not single events, they are whole arenas of
experience, each with their own texture.
      The experience of the fourth vision is very smiler to the
transformations of a plant going to seed. The plant no
longer sets buds and the final delicate flower petals dry
into furling shapes of darkening and opaque color. All the
energy of the plant goes toward the seed. With the same
inexorable power that drove their increase, slowly,
unerringly, the visions recede from the limitless horizons of
the full expanse of the third vision. There is a quietness,
an inward turning, light returning to the point of origin. This
is the most profound of all the visions. It is easy for the last
vestiges of manifest identity to ride the visions outward,
surrendering to the glory and the wonder of ever
increasing experience, like a waxing moon reaching an
effulgence without limit, the mountaintop beyond
mountaintops, the sky beyond all sky. Having embraced
the full scope of experience, as the visions turn that
vastness inward, condensing it into the now awakened
seed, the last bit of identity still residing in the body rides
the vision inward and downward, in the last surrendering,
surrendering even the expanse of the radiance.
      All your experience is now seamless. Simple gestures
of nature, the colors of autumn leaves, dewdrops on a
blade of grass, an apple by candlelight, are just as
wondrous as the visions or the bursts of light. There is a
complete acceptance of all levels of experience as unity
forever beyond sundering, and with this unity    comes a
softness and a depth like the endless bottom of the sea, a
massive oceanic tenderness, relentless, fluid, and
immense. The four great qualities that support the
practice, openness, transcendence, oneness, and
spontaneous presence are all one now; they are the
same, no longer divisible into four, the perfection of the
single sphere.

      The inner guru, your heart, is the essence, it is its own

intent calling you to recognize, guiding you to and through
experience. All you need to do is become aware of its call
and have the courage to follow it. Its voice is within he
wind, sounding from the stars, in your heart.

      Walking the trail, massive trunks of two big sugar pines

at the curve up ahead seem to move past each other as
we approach, illusion of 3D so convincing, so enticingly
"real", space, the last great ignorance, in front, behind,
near, far, all depend on point of view, in perspective
drawing the point is at a distance, the vanishing point, in
direct perception the vanishing point is you, the arising of
the single sphere erasing all sense of in between.
10/10/04

      Beyond nothing needing to be done, abiding naturally,

effortlessly, organically, nothing has changed yet in
reference to past experience everything has changed.
12/5/04

      A feeling of the body going away, a sensation, then no

body there, even the vision goes away, like no one
watching or experiencing nothing, then i'm back again.
12/7/04