Into the Heart of Life (18 page)

Prajna paramita, or wisdom

We have looked into shamatha a little bit, this idea of making the mind more quiet and collected, more one-pointed. We have also considered the fact that shamatha helps the mind see to the bottom of the lake. But it doesn’t remove the mud; it doesn’t remove all the garbage and all the weeds at the bottom.

When I was in Lahaul, outside my cave, there was a flat area sort of like a patio. It was of hardened earth and on the surface were clusters of pretty little flowers. When it rained or snowed, it all got very muddy, and I decided to put down some large flat stones. That meant I had to pull out these small flowers. I decided that the only way to get rid of these delicate flowers was not just to remove them, but to really pull out the whole root system so they wouldn’t grow again. I imagined that I could just pull and it would come out. But as I started to trace the roots of these little flowers, I discovered that they literally went all the way across the patio. The roots were spread out and interconnected through a huge underground network, although only a few little clusters of flowers were visible on the surface. The weeds of our mind are like this. On top, they look attractive. “Oh, I love chocolates,” or “I love new clothes.” So innocent. But these roots of our desire are deep and thick and they spread out and underlie everything. This is the problem. These roots of our negativities, our delusions, our ill-will, and our greed are so deeply imbedded in our mind that they permeate everything, and often we don’t even recognize them for what they really are. We may ask, what is the point of pulling them out? We pull out a bit here and we snip and trim a little bit there, but that doesn’t deal with the pervasive root system.

It seems to me that vipashyana meditation is dealing with the mind on two fronts that ultimately come together as the realization of the empty nature of the mind. First of all, we are dealing with the fact that our mind is permeated by these very deep negative impulses which create so much pain and problems in our lives, for ourselves and for others around us. Then beyond that, there is the whole question of who experiences this pain and these problems in the first place. So we will deal with these just in brief, as this is a huge subject.

Through the practice of shamatha, our mind quiets down a bit. And as our mind quiets down, our thought stream usually goes through three stages. At first, it is like a waterfall, just crashing and cascading down. And then it becomes like a turbulent river, gradually becoming more placid as it goes along. Eventually, the river opens into the ocean. Perhaps now in our calm-abiding meditation practice our mind has got to the point where it is no longer a cascading waterfall; it is more like a calmly flowing river. At this point, we don’t need to go into that ocean of samadhi, or deep absorption. That is not so important here. We just need to get our mind more quiet; we just need to acquire the ability to concentrate on one point, to have single-pointed concentration. These two are required, but we don’t need to be in the state with no thoughts whatsoever.

Previously, as we were developing one-pointed concentration, we ignored the thoughts. We didn’t give the thoughts any attention. We were giving attention to the focal point of our concentration, which was the breath. Now, however, we apply that concentration to the thoughts themselves. This is said to be like somebody sitting on the bank of a river just watching it go by. We are not trying to dam up the river, or change the river flow in any way; we are just sitting on the banks of our mental river, watching the thoughts flow by. We are not trying to interfere with the thoughts. We are not doing anything about the thoughts. The important thing is not to be fascinated or caught up with the thoughts—
“Oh, that’s an interesting idea. Hmm, yeah, right”
—and in the next minute, our mind is swept away downriver.
“That’s a terrible thought. How could I think of something like that? I am supposed to be a Dharma student. A Dharma student never thinks like that,”
and again we get swept away. We need to just watch the thoughts flowing by. However, there are some simple dos and don’ts of watching the mind. If we watch the mind very tensely, keeping all the thoughts together, ready to pounce the minute we forget anything or if any thought wanders off—“every thought, mustn’t miss a thought”—we end up with what is called in Tibetan
lung
(pronounced “loong”), which is the imbalance of primal energy, or what is called
qi
in Chinese. The Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi said that the way to control your cow is to give it a large pasture. As we try to develop these qualities of awareness and mindfulness and observing the mind, it is very important to give the mind a wide pasture and not keep it too tight. That extreme tenseness is not what we mean. Rather we mean this sense of allowing our thoughts to come and to flow, and meanwhile, we are just knowing, just observing, just seeing the thoughts, and if we miss a few, it doesn’t matter.

So this is the next stage after we have been practicing with the breathing or with some object in front of ourselves. When the thoughts have calmed down a little and are not so chaotic, and when our one-pointedness, concentration, and awareness have become a little more strong and well-defined, then we turn the attention from the breathing to the mind itself. According to Buddhist psychology, we cannot have two thought moments at the same time. Two mental states cannot arise in our consciousness simultaneously. Our mental states are incredibly rapid but nevertheless they are sequential. Therefore, as we have more moments of awareness, we have fewer moments of discursive thinking. As our awareness becomes stronger and more constant, it stops jumping back and forth between awareness and discursive moments and becomes just awareness. Thoughts begin to slow down, there are fewer thoughts, until finally it appears that the thoughts have completely stopped. There is no more movement in the mind. The mind is completely quiet and the awareness is extremely sharp. When we get to that point, then we start to develop what is called insight. We begin to use this intelligence to look into the mind itself.

As I said previously, we live from our mind; we only experience anything through our mind. Yet we don’t know that mind itself. We’ve never looked at it. We say, “I think,” “I remember,” “in my opinion,” “my judgment is.” We are full of judgments, intentions, ideas, thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and memories, but what is a thought? What does it look like? Where does it come from? Where does it stay? Where does it go? What does it feel like? What does it look like? “I’m angry,” “I’m happy,” “I’m sad”—but what does an emotion look like? Where is it coming from? So we use the mind to look at the mind. We try to see what a thought is—what does it look like? What is it? We can think about a thought, but can we actually experience a thought?

We can continue to investigate the mind. “Okay, there are times when there are thoughts. And then there are times when there are no thoughts.” Is that the same or different? And then what about the awareness which is observing the thoughts—is that awareness the same as the thoughts, or is it different? And what does that awareness look like? Can we see the seer? Can we observe the observer?

And then, of course, we may ask ourselves the question of questions: “Who is the observer?” I am not giving you the answer! We say, “I think,” “I remember,” “I like,” “I do not like,” “I am happy,” “I am sad,” “I am a good person,” “I am a bad person,” but who is this “I”? Normally we never ask; we never look. This is the heart of it because we are always clinging to our false identifications which cause us so much confusion and misery.

We identify, first of all, with the particular body we have: “I am a woman,” “I am a man,” “I am white,” “I am black,” “I am brown,” “I am Asian,” “I am European,” “I am American,” “I am African,” “I am beautiful,” “I am ugly,” “I am tall,” “I am thin,” “I am fat,” “this is me.” But of course we are not our bodies. We are connected with our bodies, but we are not our bodies. When we die, we leave behind the body, and the consciousness goes on. All those memories, all those identifications which are bound to our physical form are only temporary. They are not who we really are. They are the role we are playing at this particular point.

We have all had endless numbers of lifetimes, in endlessly different forms, certainly as both male and female, in many different countries, in many different guises; and each time we thought, “This is me; this is who I am.” When we die, we abandon that particular form, and as we take on a new form we think, “This is me; this is who I am.” We identify with our thoughts, our opinions, and our judgments, and we identify with our memories, especially sad ones, especially difficult ones. We cling, and we revolve our whole identity around our suffering. We are such perverse beings, but when we look into our mind, we see that memories are just thoughts—that’s all. Events that we are remembering are over; they were gone years ago. They are not here; they do not exist. All that we are left with are our thoughts, but when we look into our thoughts, in themselves they are quite transparent. A thought is not a thing. So why are we are identifying with them so closely?

In one of the sutras, Ananda, who was the Buddha’s cousin and attendant, says to him, “How is it that all these other buddhas have beautiful pure buddha realms where it is so perfect and lovely, and you have such an awful buddha realm?”

And the Buddha said, “My buddha realm is completely perfect. It is just your impure mind which sees it as awful.”

Our impure perceptions create the reality we perceive. But of course that is not to say that therefore the whole of external phenomena is purely illusion. It is not exactly an illusion. The Tibetans say it is like an illusion. It is like an illusion because we project and are not conscious that this is our projection. Since our perceptions are ego-distorted and impure, we do not see things as they really are. We only perceive our own version, which is based on delusion.

We are looking at the mind. We are looking at the flow of thoughts. Now, while we are observing the thoughts, and the awareness is very strong, the thoughts begin to slow down. It is like a film: if the film begins to go slower and slower, then one recognizes the individual frames rather than the projected movie. Likewise, if our awareness is clear and steady, the thoughts begin to slow down and can be recognized as thoughts linked together. And it can happen that when our awareness is very clear, the stream of thoughts parts for a moment, and there is a gap between the last thought and the next. When there is a gap, the observer directly merges with that which is underlying the thought, the clear light nature of the mind. In that moment there is the direct intuition and realization of the nature of the mind: non-dual, non-conceptual, unconditioned, beyond thought. We can’t think about it, but we can experience it.

In this kind of meditation the idea is to get as many flashes as we can of these moments of non-dual vision and to prolong them. As the mind naturally rests in this unborn awareness ever more frequently and for longer periods, eventually the meditator will remain in that state of wakefulness the whole time. It is a level of awareness which has no boundaries. There is no self and other. The sky has no center and the sky has no circumference; it is boundless. Now the sky is all-pervading, not just above us but everywhere. It is space. Without space, we could not have anything because space is everything. Everything comprises space with just a few protons and neutrons swirling around. If there were no space, nothing could exist.

When we come into this room we see the people, we see the chairs, we see the microphone on the table, but we can only see them because of space. And yet we don’t see space itself. Outside, inside: it is all space. I read somewhere that the actual solid mass of the human body occupies a space no bigger than the head of a pin. It is all space, and that spaciousness is reflected in the true nature of the mind. When we talk of our true self, we have the idea of someone sitting inside us—a bigger, better, more wonderful
me
. But that is not what we are talking about at all. When we realize the true nature of our being, where is “I,” where is “other”? In space, I can’t say that this is my bit of space, and that is your bit of space. It is just space. Where is the boundary? On the earth we can put up fences, but in space how can you put up fences? Where does it begin? Where does it end? And the true nature of the mind is like that.

The true nature of mind is beginningless and endless and it has no center and no circumference. It is a boundless interconnection with all beings. It cannot be seen; it cannot be thought about conceptually. But it certainly can be experienced and realized. It is the mind of a buddha. And this vast, spacious quality of the mind is filled with all the wonderful qualities of wisdom and compassion and purity. It is not empty or vacuous. Comparing the nature of mind to the sky is good because it gives us a vast feeling of infinity. But space isn’t conscious, whereas the essential quality of this inner spaciousness is awareness, knowing. If we did not have this quality of knowing, we could not exist. It is clear awareness behind the working of our senses that allows us to know anything; it illumines our thinking and our emotions. Behind the movement of the conceptual mind is vast silent knowing. It is so simple. But we don’t believe it. And it is sad indeed that we miss it. We overlook the simplicity in front of us.

When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I worked in a library. At that time, my mind changed for a while. I was very conscious that when sounds came into my ears, they were merely vibrations hitting on my eardrums; and I was very conscious that the things I saw were just things that were being seen. My mind was as an empty house in which all the doors and windows were open and the winds were blowing through and no one was at home. I was very aware of each of the senses, each working in its own sphere, but they were not me or mine. Now this may sound very cold, but in fact as I looked into the eyes of the other people around me, I could see how extremely involved they were in what they heard and saw and thought, and how there was no inner space. On account of this their minds were so turbulent, just as my own mind normally was. Immense compassion arose within me because I understood our predicament so clearly.