“A trackless path”: a book review you shouldn’t be reading

Awareness is right there in front of you

“A trackless path” is a book on Dzogchen (a type of Buddhism) that’s rated 4.9/5.0 on Amazon. It’s written by Ken McLeod — a translator, author, and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. The book is highly psychoactive and well worth reading. 

“A trackless path” is centered around an 18th Century poem called “The Revelations of Ever-present Good”, written by Jigmé Lingpa (why do these Tibetan guys always have names like Ligma). And — supposedly — it’s not a regular-ass poem, but some kind of high-octane concentrated top-tier product: it is considered to be a pinnacle of the Tibetan meditation tradition.

Look, maybe saying this would get reincarnated into a rat, a cockroach or into a cancer cell inside of a dying dog’s head, but I have to state the truth:

It’s a pretty shit poem.

But luckily, it’s also a pretty short poem — six pages that in prose would be three. The rest of the book — a hundred pages — is Ken's own stuff: his experience with Dzogchen, Dzogchen frameworks and Dzogchen terminology explained, anecdotes from his practice and occasional stories about his teachers. And Ken’s own stuff is good!

No outside, no inside and nothing in between — that quality of attention is
Mind itself, free from conceptual distortions.
Yet your thinking creates symbols for what is profound and clear.
How ineffective, you followers of union philosophy.

An actual quote from the poem

A big part of the poem is this sort of vague dissing of other approaches to spirituality and philosophy. “How ineffective, you followers of union philosophy” — my dear Tibetan guy, are you sure you yourself are effective in relaying your ideas to us? Maybe you could use a concept or two, even if what you are trying to teach is beyond the thinking mind.

So what is Dzogchen

Dzogchen is simply wakeful awareness, free of concepts. It’s right there with you, right now, right at this moment, right as you are reading this essay. That’s it.

This review might not even be worth reading. It’s entirely possible you are better off dropping reading it right now. Look, some guy in the 18th Century paid attention to his experience, then wrote a poem. Then some other guy translated that poem and wrote an entire book with commentary on it. Then the third guy (me) wrote a review of the book. Do you really need a chain of three different guys doing four levels of indirection from what’s right there in front of you — your own direct experience?

This could be you if you stopped reading this essay and simply L o o k e d

Breaking news: you are awake!

Dzogchen is simple — there isn’t much to it really. Set aside your concepts, set aside your mental figuring out, even set aside your meditation practice habits. Tap into the alive spacious vastness that is wakeful awareness. 

There are complications though. 

The main complication is that if you actually pause and try tapping into whatever your mind is doing at the lowest level of experience, you might not dip into a beautiful pristine lake of awareness but instead into a dull thoughtless boredom. Or you might even remain where you were and start to wonder: what is this awareness even.

(Jesse is saying actual quotes from the poem)

Just outlining Dzogchen in plain English is not enough to grasp it. Simple descriptive words don't do much. There is this vastness that lies beyond words and beyond concepts, the vastness out of which the fabric of thinking itself arises. You have to peer right into it. 

The book is woven out of Dzogchen frameworks explained, Ken’s stories about his teachers and his personal experience — and these are all great, but arguably not the most important part. The most important part is Ken’s carefully crafted words hinting at something in your direct experience, the fine low-level structure of it.

Sometimes I would read the book and words would do nothing for me. I’d zone out while going through the motions of reading the sentences, notice my attention drifting away and I’d return a few paragraphs back to where I was still sufficiently concentrated for the words to somewhat land — then try re-reading the paragraphs again only to zone out the second, third or fourth time. 

And sometimes… sometimes I’d be focused and I’d read paragraph after paragraph for several minutes, my normal waking identity would fade away and my mind would go like “Woah: I’m really this process that makes edges of ink lines into letters, letters into words, and words into meaning; I’m the book reading itself; there is something to all of it”. The black letters would look so vividly bright on the paper and a profound shift in my consciousness would occur.

The book produced a lot of flashes like this for me, although the vast majority of shifts would be much smaller than the one described in the previous paragraph. A typical flash would just be a small non-linguistic non-conceptual “woah” akin to a tiny ant getting to the top of a mountain and looking down at the horizon. 

What are these flashes? How can we get more of them?

A clash of worse and better psychotechnology

This book is clearly psychotechnological in its nature. Its purpose isn’t to communicate a certain amount of information through the medium of written text to the reader, but to change the reader’s mind in some beneficial way.

If we view the book as a psychotechnological tool — what is its purpose?  What is it even trying to do? Perhaps attempt to trigger some kind of cascade of shifts in the way a reader’s mind organizes itself. Perhaps unknot some tensions in the “factory firmware” of the human mind that was supplied by evolution. Perhaps reorder your life experiences towards simplicity. But whatever it is, the book is clearly doing something, intentionally. 

Tools are meant to be improved and refined. The author started with a vague poem that’s a couple hundred years old and built upon it — sort of like looking at a stone axe and forging an axe out of bronze, a better version of your previous tool. What does the next iteration of the book look like in the age of silicon? Computers are one of the most powerful tools in existence, and we have to figure out how to leverage this power.

We could start by collecting statistics on which passages in the book are the most effective. And then instead of giving you a wall of text, we could give you a few passages based on your current vibe: a simple AI could take your prompt and give you the most relevant paragraphs from the book. Or better yet: stick an entire Dzogchen library in one app which would allow us to find parts of other books with similar vibes.

But this is still mostly using the old tech in nicer ways, presenting letters on the screen in a bit smarter way instead of printing them on paper. A better goal is something like AI-assisted virtual Dzogchenscapes streamed via Neuralink directly into your brain. But could something like this be a meaningful iteration from a mere book rather than be a totally new invention? I think Yes.

“A trackless path” could help us get to some pretty futuristic tech if we ask ourselves the right questions. For example, why is this book so unusually effective — at least for a certain subset of people? My answer: it’s because experience — spiritual experience as well as normal waking experience has structure, there are patterns and regularities in it. Even if you go beyond all concepts where words no longer have meaning, you’ll find this certain structure in how the mind operates and updates itself. If we had a lot of precise data on low-level dynamics on the mind: from a futuristic brain implant or a modern-day EEG headset, perhaps combining it with measurements of skin temperature or muscle tension — then maybe we could tell a lot more about what’s going on with these shifts in the mind.

And we have a “language-beyond-words” — math. Math is a sort of universal language to describe reality. We use models and equations to describe patterns of tension in engineered and constructed structures — like buildings and bridges. Similar to this, we could use math to describe tensions in the fine structure of our minds. Minds run on physics, and the inherent physicality of our minds could help us build a mathematical model of Dzogchen microupdates. Once we have it we can have better enlightenment tech, be it a Dzogchen 2.0 VR headset or be it pouring momentary enlightenment right into your brain implant socket.

Why get people enlightened you might ask? There are serious answers about the benefits of enlightenment, or solving mental health crisis, or building a $100B tech company, or advancing important science. There are serious answers, but the reason I really want to do all of this is because it’s fucking awesome to hack on people’s brains and wirehead them a little bit, that’s fucking why.

Back to the mundane reality for a second. It should come as no surprise that the author holds a degree in math — I think this is more than a mere coincidence. Ken is a clear conceptual thinker — and it shows. He doesn’t try to find the equations describing how to update the mind towards Dzogchen consciousness, but he did a lot of systematic work in his head before he encoded this systematized meaning into poetic chapters of his book — the only level he could present his work on.  

Better psychotechnology is coming

There is this idea when discussing spirituality: the highest wisdom is ineffable. I call bullshit on this. Skill issue: git gud, bro! Sure, there is something to “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”. But I’d personally be ok with a slightly less eternal version of the Tao. I’d pay for even a crumbled photocopy of the eternal Tao, I bet it’s possible to use it as a starting point for enhancing it further.

We can develop better psychotechnology. We don’t have to settle for words, we don’t have to tell the eternal Tao — we can do other tricks to it. Minds run on physics, consciousness has an inherent mathematical structure to be discovered and described. Perhaps The Merge with AI will enable a runaway never-ending enlightened psychotechnological utopia in a spiritual tradition of your choice.

Introducing: iDzogchen. Designed in California, Assembled in Tibet.