Thogyal
In the Dzogchen teaching of thogyal, what does thogyal mean? Tho means forehead. Your forehead is in front of you. In your head, you have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, all the organs of the senses are on the head. The functions of all the senses, what I call the ‘office’ of the mind, are in the head. Some people say that mind is in the head, but it is not in the head, it is in the centre of our dimension because it is the essence of our existence. The essence of existence is always at the centre, not at the border because it has its dimension. Mind has the dimension of our physical body, but the organs of the senses are all on the head.

When we live in dualistic vision, we cannot have any contact with objects if we do not open our eyes, our ears, etc. For that reason, we receive all [sensory] information through the head.

When we talk about the five senses, we say ‘subject’ and ‘object’. ’Subject’ means our organs such as our two eyes, while ‘object’ refers to what we are seeing such as form, colour, etc. We have ‘subject’ and ‘object’ for all our senses. But we also talk about the consciousness of the five senses. What does ‘consciousness’ mean? It doesn’t mean consciousness such as judging and thinking with the mind but simply receiving all information, which is immediately communicated to our mind. This function is called the ‘consciousness of the senses’ even though we usually consider consciousness connected to our mind, to judging and thinking. So tho, the forehead, is related to all these functions.

Gal means ‘passing’ and in Tibetan it is a verb. We say chuwo gal, we are crossing a river. We are crossing from here to there. This is the real meaning of thogal. How can we pass? When you learn Dzogchen teaching such as thogal, there are four visions, in succession, with very precise instructions connected with your position, breathing, the way of gazing and the way of using your senses. When you follow these instructions precisely, you can feel them, you can have these visions. That means you are integrating your existence in this thigle, in chonyi ngon sum, your potentiality of sound, light and rays that manifests in front of you. The fourth stage means that you have completely succeeded in totally integrating your existence in this thigle. In that moment you have the realization of the Great Transference. You no longer have death because in general it is our physical body that dies and in the Great Transference our physical body has already been transferred into the thigle. This is realization just like Guru Padmasambhava [manifested].