Discussions about neidan practice results often revolve around extraordinary claims — from supernatural powers to immortality. After fifteen years of practice, my experience suggests something far less spectacular, but perhaps more relevant: a gradual shift in how the sense of self is perceived, and with it, the way suffering is experienced. The contrast between what is promised and what is actually observed is large enough to deserve a closer look.
The Bait
I remember that my first contact with the Yidam technique was through this text:
Lady Tsogyal asked the master: Why is it important to practice the yidam deity?
The master replied: It is essential to practice a yidam deity because through that you will attain siddhis, your obstacles will be removed, you will obtain powers, receive blessings, and give rise to realization. Since all these qualities result from practicing the yidam deity, then without the yidam deity you will just be an ordinary person. By practicing the yidam deity you attain the siddhis, so the yidam deity is essential.
The framing surprised me. So, the practice is aimed at obtaining powers first and foremost, while “realization” — whatever that meant, and supposedly the essential goal — comes last?
The whole thing seemed absurd to me. Suppose I set my mind on levitating, and perhaps, after years of work, I succeed. But I still haven’t reached the essential thing, what is supposed to be realization or enlightenment, which for me is nothing other than knowing what I actually am. On top of that, by chasing levitation I’ve strayed from the essential goal. If I levitate without knowledge, I’ll just be an idiot who levitates. Until I come to know what I am, better to keep a low profile.
In verse 13 of the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra I found a possible explanation for this framing. Shiva tells Shakti: “These were taught to help unawakened people make progress on the path, like a mother uses sweets and threats to influence her children’s behavior.” (Translation by Christopher Wallis)
The Real Fruit
The real fruit, if we stick to the Buddha’s words, is not achieving powers to show off to envious neighbors, nor immortality. What the Buddha promised was the end of suffering. Nothing more. And nothing less.
And although I cannot say I have reached the end of the path — far from it — it seems increasingly evident to me that the end of suffering lies in clearly perceiving the nature of what we call “I.” Through meditation, in my case induced by energy work, the successive layers of the “I” are peeled away one by one◊The layers of the Self.
First, the narrative self, which is perceived as a mere social interface, constructed through language and thought, and therefore discarded. That’s not me.
Then the biological self, which identifies as distinct from the “other,” which has a perception of 3D space necessary for survival and a sexual drive to reproduce◊The biological BIOS — this too gets dismantled. That’s not me either.
And upon feeling myself as a pure consciousness, free from thought and the limitations of a physical body, the first hypothesis that comes to mind is that this disembodied consciousness is my “true self.” This tendency comes from concepts instilled by the religious conditioning I received as a child. Aha, I’ve found my true self which, as it happens, is my immortal soul◊The pull toward belief.
But even this hypothesis raises suspicions. Immortal? Am I supposed to spend all eternity perceiving reality as “me”? Just imagining spending a thousand years locked in this self seems more like a punishment than a reward, let alone a few eons. No, it can’t be that.
What I perceive is that the last thing left to discover — to perceive rather than speculate about — is that even this sense of being a pure, disembodied consciousness appears to function as another interface — more subtle, but still structured. What remains is not a new entity or a deeper self, but the absence of anything that can be clearly identified as such. And therefore, it makes no sense to consider things like “my self will be annihilated and that’s terrible” or “my self will live happily forever and that’s wonderful,” when it turns out the self doesn’t even exist.
I increasingly see it as a plausible endpoint of this trajectory: that as the sense of self is seen more clearly as a construct, the intensity of suffering diminishes. Not because anything transcendent is attained, but because the structure that generates the problem is no longer taken at face value.
But of course, if you state plainly that this is what you’ll achieve through neidan practice or non-dual meditation, the proposition loses its appeal. Hence the approach of offering sweets and threats, with the idea of incentivizing practice so that the practitioner, once past the pleasure trap◊Pleasure as signal in the case of dual practice and the need to acquire powers, arrives at this conclusion on their own.
This is clearly indicated by the last of the 10 Ox Diagrams◊Entering the marketplace: After this revelation, the practitioner doesn’t become a divine being or anything of the sort. They simply return to the marketplace with dangling hands and a soot-smeared face, but perceiving this reality and passing through its pleasures and adversities with the same smile.
What About the Other?
If you perceive that your own self doesn’t exist and therefore you can pass through your pleasure and suffering with the same attitude, should you care about the pleasure and suffering of others, who also have no real self? That would be the nihilistic conclusion, but in practice I’d say there’s a safeguard.
Just as, even though my self isn’t real, I continue to avoid my suffering and seek my satisfaction — because the organism keeps functioning, preferences persist even without an “owner,” pain still hurts even if no one “possesses” it — I try to do the same for others, because in a prior phase I’ve already perceived that the other, whether saint or criminal, is exactly the same as me, and that their pleasure and suffering are also mine.
It’s not about loving your neighbor as yourself because it’s a divine commandment that must be obeyed whether you like it or not, but because when the distinction between self and other is erased, empathy and compassion are a natural result.
If such shifts were more common, one could expect a reduction in unnecessary conflict. Whether that is realistic is another question.
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