From a Dzogchen perspective, natural awareness (rigpa) is not something to be created but something already present, habitually overlooked. The most fundamental obstacle is ignorance (ma rigpa), a basic not-knowing that actively misperceives reality as composed of solid, separate, inherently existing entities. This ignorance expresses itself as dualistic fixation: the entrenched habit of dividing experience into subject and object, self and other, and then grasping at this division as ultimately real. In this way, awareness is continually diverted into a world of seeming separation, where its own nature is never directly recognized.

Upon this ground of ignorance, a range of obscurations arises. Emotional afflictions—such as attachment, aversion, pride, jealousy, and dullness—stir and cloud the mind, giving rise to reactivity and turbulence that make simple presence difficult to sustain. These emotions are not isolated events; they are supported by deep habitual tendencies (bagchags) and karmic obscurations, the ingrained patterns of thought, speech, and action that perpetuate confusion. Such patterns keep the mind circling in familiar grooves, reinforcing the same misperceptions and reactions again and again.

Another major obstacle is conceptual elaboration, the ceaseless stream of mental fabrication that overlays direct experience. Instead of resting in the immediacy of awareness, the mind spins stories, judgments, analyses, and interpretations, including subtle spiritual theories and identities. Even when meditation is undertaken, there can be subtle grasping at meditative states—bliss, clarity, non-thought, or even a notion of “emptiness” or “awareness” itself. This effortful striving and attachment to particular experiences quietly strengthens a spiritualized sense of self, rather than allowing the natural state to reveal itself.

Finally, distraction and lack of recognition play a decisive role. Distraction pulls attention outward to sensory objects or inward to discursive thought, so that the simple, naked knowing quality of mind is never noticed or is quickly lost. Even when a teacher points out rigpa directly, there may be a tendency to look for it as some special object or altered state, rather than recognizing it as the very nature of the present mind. In Dzogchen, the path does not consist in forcing these obstacles away, but in seeing them clearly as movements within awareness itself; through such recognition, they are understood as self-liberating, revealing the natural awareness that was never absent.