The Observer and the Taste of Presence · Chapter 20 · Part IV
The Gap and Its Absence
If every act of knowing carries a structure of subject facing object, with a ground behind the appearing, then every taste of presence is already filtered through a gap. Any act of knowing carries the structure with it, so the direct taste cannot be reached by adding one more act on top of the rest.
The tradition's answer is not that a bridge is built across the gap. It is that the gap was never holding anything up. When the standing-behind is seen through, there is no longer a witness positioned apart from what appears, and no ground that appearances must be measured against. What remains is the immediacy of appearing itself.
This is why the experience can be vivid and direct. Vividness here is not intensity added to ordinary perception. It is the absence of the mediation that normally makes perception feel distant. The emptiness that applies to the dull applies equally to the vivid. The immediacy is not a quality that makes appearances more real. It is a quality of how they are not being held at a distance.
Longchenpa's The Natural Freedom of the Nature of Mind takes self-release (rang grol) as its theme. Seen from the side of thinking, thoughts arise and are not followed, and in not being followed they do not become a wall.
The question that follows is whether this is an achievement or a stopping. If the gap is a construction, its absence is a stopping rather than an accomplishment, and the taste is available wherever the construction is not running. If the gap were inherent, the taste would be impossible, and practice would only demonstrate the gap. Madhyamaka and Dzogchen both take the first view. That means the book owes an account of why the construction persists so readily, and of what in practice loosens it.
A caution belongs here. "No gap, no ground" can become a new ground: a confident description of non-duality that the reader is invited to possess. The immediacy is better described as something that appears when the standing-behind is not being maintained, not as a state the reader can now be sure of.