Dzogchen is Radical
In Dzogchen you are energetically projecting and conceptually constructing your thoughts, your mind, sense of self, emotions, sensory perceptions, your body, your home , your world and all people appearing in it. You aren’t perceiving “through” a body’s sensory systems, you are merely projecting perceptions as if in a dream.
This world is the same as the bardo in that both are your own mental constructions and projections. There are no objectively existing phenomena as people, objects or bodies in Dzogchen. The creative power is called “Samantabhadra”, which is who you actually are at ALL times. It’s very similar to the single, all creating “god” of various theological traditions, except in this case you are the all-creating god of your universe that appears “objective” and pre-existing.
In most cases you are creating and projecting a “self-consciousness” that believes it’s existing in a world and body that objectively exist in a real and stable pre-existing space/time universe. In this case your creative power is relegated to being a seeming subconscious or “other” higher power that remains “backstage” while projecting the stage, the stage set, the actors, the roles, the scripts, the audience and the theater.
Our current experience is being an “actor” on the stage dramatizing a role according to a fixed script, while the producer/director remains unknown backstage.
You leave clues for yourself from time to time called moments of synchronicity or unexplainable coincidences that occur. This is when a single subjective experience seems to match up with some “objective” experience that leaves a magical sense of wonder. It’s almost seen that the projector of the subjective experience is the same projector of the seeming “objective” event. Religious people would usually say “god” arranged the “coincidence”; how true, how true. Except they see their “god” as being someone “other” than themselves.
Dzogchen is bringing the subconscious “higher power” into full consciousness. At that point, the secondary “self-consciousness” ceases being projected as the current identity.
In Sufism, those great Sufis who realized this, declare “I am Allah (god)”. And any who actualize this, seem to have the powers like one who is lucid dreaming in their own dream, but in the waking state.
For materialists or quasi-materialists; this view is too radical, it puts you in the driver’s seat of the car that you are projecting as well as the roads you are driving upon and the imaginary pedestrians you run over.
The secondary, egoic-self loves this story, because it believes it can now project whatever it selfishly wishes; EXCEPT that secondary consciousness as “me” is itself a mere inanimate projection being projected by who you truly are; whose wishes are always being fully expressed and fulfilled in every moment of consciousness, as that moment of consciousness, however the “real you” projects it.
Our seeming shared co-existence, is due to the fact that we all share a common Basis (zhi) as a single Dharmakaya; the real author, director and producer of the total play that’s always perfect, perfectly synchronized, and perfectly performed.
The theater, the stage, the actors and the stage props that make up the play are called “Thigle Chenpo”, the Great Hyper-Sphere. The Author remains like an empty crystal sphere in which the Thigle Chenpo appears, as a reflection appears in crystal clear sphere, without effecting the sphere.