J-L wrote (on the Yahoo DzogchenPractices list regarding the
etymology of Trekcho:

Basically Khregs refers to'rigidity' or hardness, and chod
pa means 'to cut', 'to eradicate'. It is short for Khregs-
se chod-pa, which indicates both a process and a state,
meaning 'Eradication of the Rigidity'. You can put whatever
you want under Rigidity: ego-grasping, mental elaboration,
passions, ignorance, etc.

Comment:
J-L, first of all many thanks for your efforts to shed light on
some of these amazing practices. Your quote re: “Eradication of
Rigidity” reminded me of something I thought about once regarding
the saintly Ramana Maharshi’s teenage decision to find out what
it was to die. I realized that, as a Hindu, he had more familiarity
with dead bodies than we have in our so-called ‘advanced’ countries,
and would have understood how a body stiffens into rigor mortis.
Thus his attempt to duplicate death would have included the
stiffening of all his muscles. I recently found verification of
this in a quote from his description of the event as follows.
Various versions can be found on line.

The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inward and I
said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words,
'Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is
dying?... This body dies.'
I at once dramatized the occurrence of death. I lay with my
limbs stretched out stiff, as though 'rigor mortis' had set
in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to
the inquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed
so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word 'I'
nor any other word could be uttered.
'Well then,' I said to myself, 'this body is dead. It will
be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and
reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead?
Is this body I? It is silent and inert but I feel the full
force of my personality, and even the voice of "I" within me,
apart from it. So I am Spirit, transcending the body. The body
dies, but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by
death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.'
All this was not dull thought; [rather] it flashed through me
vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost
without thought-process. 'I' was something very real, the only
real thing about my present state, and all the conscious
activity connected with my body was centered on that 'I'.
From that moment onward, the 'I' or Self focused attention on
itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished,
once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken
from that time on.

Comment:
Rigidity, concentration, fixation – all these words point me towards
an application of the will that seems necessary first of all before
one can relax and still retain ‘focus,’ as it were. This topic came
up earlier in DzogchenPractices in the discussion on Zhine and the
need to fix the gaze without blinking on the meditation object. This
comes up of course in Patanjali’s ‘tratak’ exercise as well as in
some Theravada Buddhist exercises involving fixation on a ‘kasina,’
more or less a mandala, until the afterimage is burned into one’s
awareness. It seems to me that Dzogchen’s “relaxation” and Trekcho’s “relaxation of rigidity” implies a previous state of intense applica-
tion of the will to develop one-pointedness to a permanent stage –
after which the ‘relaxation of rigidity’ makes great sense, but not
before. Thank you again! Very helpful!

Breath-holding and Ramana's rigor

I’ve been looking again at Ramana Maharshi’s ‘death’ experience
as a youth, and am now pretty sure he included ‘body rigor’ i.e. a
full body contraction to duplicate rigor mortis - (see quotes below
from “Happiness and the Art of Being” by a Michael James who spent
some years at Ramana’s ashram with his main disciples.) See:
http://www.happinessofbeing.com/resources/happiness_art_being.html
for an online copy of th 500+ page ebook. The two words in
bold below are my edits.

Ramana:
'All right, death has come! What is death? What is it that
dies? This body is going to die – let it die.' Deciding thus, he
lay down like a corpse, rigid and without breathing, and
turned his mind inwards to discover what death would
actually do to him. He later described the truth that dawned
upon him at that moment as follows:
"This body is dead. It will now be taken to the cremation
ground, burnt, and reduced to ashes. But with the destruction
of this body, am I also destroyed? Is this body really 'I'?
Although this body is lying lifeless as a corpse, I know that I
am. Unaffected in the least by this death, my being is shining
clearly. Therefore I am not this body which dies. I am the ‘I’
which is indestructible. Of all things, I alone am the reality.
This body is subject to death, but I, who transcend the body,
am that which lives eternally. The death that came to this
body cannot affect me."
Although he described his experience of death in so many
words, he explained that this truth actually dawned upon him
in an instant, not as reasoning or verbalised thoughts, but as a
direct experience, without the least action of mind. So intense
was his fear and consequent urge to know the truth of death,
that without actually thinking anything he turned his
attention away from his rigid and lifeless body and towards
the innermost core of his being, the pure consciousness 'I am'.

His use of the word 'rigid' in describing how he lay down and
duplicated the death experience makes me think I'm intuiting
correctly that he included the rigor mortis he had observed in
corpses. Keep in mind that in India, as in many third world
countries, exposure to dead bodies is much more common than in
our over-sanitized -- and death-phobic -- culture.

Breath-holding is a very ancient technique in mystical circles - in
fact, some levels of samadhi in yoga are defined as 'breathless' --
and of course there are those occasional fakirs who allow themselves
to be buried alive, etc. Also, as I've writen on this blog before,
the original Christian baptism involved suffocation - the baptizer
clapped one hand over your nose and mouth so that you wouldn't inhale
water while being held under. The idea was to keep you there until
you passed out but not until you died. I've checked this out with a
couple of ministers and they agree with me (!). Of course the baptizer's
skill involved knowing when to let you up - probably when you ceased
struggling. At that point the body probably had released various near-
death, endorphins and the baptizee had 'seen the light,' so to speak.

Native American warriors also were remarkably stoic when captured and
tortured, and here again there were probably some NDEs triggered by
initiations that involved breath-holding.

As children, many of us experimented with hyperventilating and then
stiffening the body and holding the breath - and thus passing out -
so I'm pretty sure I'm onto something with all this. In fact, in 1977
I was visiting a bar in Oakland, and demo’d to a bunch of guys,
mostly African-American, how a combination of the bellows breath, a
toke of MJ and the Camel asana will take you out. About three guys
tried it, and each passed out to come back, eyes shining. I figured
we could’ve started a new religion on the spot, and beat a hasty
retreat.

Someone responded to the above regarding breath-holding as follows:

"The technique about holding the exhale is also used in Magical
Work to power a thought form. As for the "reset"....holding the
breath,inhale or exhale,gives the cells a feeling of oxygen
deprivation. They start to freak and can be programmed in
that agitated/moving state. Similar to pointing an iron bar to
magnetic north and striking it with a mallet. It becomes a
weak magnet. With the cells,you want to align them to a
mantra or visualization while resetting with the held breath."

Interesting!

By the way, all these 'on the edge' exercises that I post here and
elsewhere are for your general interest only. You try them at your
own risk.