basic okayness
18 Jan 2025 - 08 Dec 2025
Basic okayness is a ground in experience that gives rise to an attitude. It is the felt sense that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you and nothing intrinsically wrong with the world. Basic okayness comes from a shift in the timbre of being, not from analysis or evidence.
- Opening Awareness p68
- A rough translation of kadag
In every situation, we have the opportunity to experience awe and beauty. This view is also more accurate. In Dzogchen, it is called kadag, or “primordial purity.” All reality is “primordially” pure because purification is impossible and unnecessary. Nothing has ever been impure. We only created the illusion of impurity as a reference point, to avoid the vertigo of vastness.
- Amazingly, I feel like arguing with this. I mean, it sounds good at first glance, but it also sounds like bourgie complacency. Something false about it. The world is definitely not OK, even if we are in a comfortable situation. Aside from all the day-to-day suffering, there seems something fundamentally broken in the world. Jewish and Christian culture acknowledges this, even if their theory of it is a nonsensical myth (Eden).
- Yiddish has a disdainful term for people who exhibit "okayness" – an alrightnik. I don't want to be a spiritual alrightnik. Speaking. of Jews, I'll nominate Kafka as spokesman for the fundamental not-okayness of the world. Also see my favorite quote from Notes from Underground.
- This is addressed
You discover basic okayness by remaining uninvolved with the anti-life morality, anti-self psychological explanations, and anti-world spiritual narratives we've all been fed. In time, in opening awareness, those thoughts and the accompanyig feelings drop away.
- Makes it sound so simple. But I am very attached to my neurotic and non-functional thoughts. Quite literally and strongly, I can't just stop because they are bad (or maybe I can, but it isn't was easy as it sounds). They arent just bad habits, they seem constitutive of who I am and I couldn't give them up without ceasing to be me, a scary prospect.
My motivation to meditate is not to prove myself worthy, to demonstrate my moral goodness, or to compete with other meditators. It’s mostly just to experience my own basic okayness and make space for the joyful experience of being in the world just as it is.
- – Reflecting on motivation in meditation practice (which is how I started this page)
- Yes the above is based on n obtuse overly literal interpretation.
- Dzogchen Street Preacher 0: Kadag - by David Chapman
When you recognize kadag, you recognize that nothing isfundamentallywrong with the world. There are no spiritual, existential, or cosmic problems. Only practical ones, which you can address practically, instead of metaphysically.