Musings

How to Lose Your Mind Part 6

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:36:00 +0000

The third section of Gampopa’s instructions for mahamudra is about refining how thatness arises. The first of the four instructions in this section is about groundwork:

For groundwork, practice teacher-union with faith, devotion, and awe three times a day and three times at night.

This one sentence is a bit of a challenge for this newsletter. There are five topics here:

Groundwork
Teacher-union practice
Prayer
Faith, devotion, and awe
Do you need an actual teacher

Groundwork

Many people regard groundwork as mere preliminaries to practice, that is, the stuff you have to do before you do the real stuff. This is an unfortunate misconception. Groundwork is what makes it possible for you to practice effectively. The more work you put into groundwork, the fewer problems and disruptions you are likely to encounter in your spiritual journey.

In mahamudra, many practitioners hold onto ideas about how mahamudra should be, how it should feel, what the experience should be, etc. When they sit and do nothing, they hold themselves a little apart from the practice. They are unwilling or unable to sit in the mess of confusion and reactivity they encounter and let the turmoil act on them. Often, they do not have the skills to recognize when they are distracted. Nor do they know how to move in the direction of balance when they are out of balance. Nor do they have the mental strength and stamina to maintain attention when reactive patterns come up.

Instead of experiencing direct awareness, they try to understand direct awareness conceptually. Instead of accepting what arises in practice, they strive for ideal states. Instead of meeting and resting in what does arise, they try to change or eliminate anything that does not fit their understanding of how practice should be or how practice works. As a result, they relate to practice as something that they do, thus reinforcing the sense of a separate self. They try to think through the practice and control what they experience. By holding onto a separate self and trying to control experience conceptually, they prevent the practice from working on them.

Groundwork properly done is quite ruthless. The rigor and demands of groundwork cut through expectations and efforts to control what you experience. Groundwork goes a long way to reducing, if not eliminating, such problems. It also creates conditions in you in which the practice itself may be able to flower.

Teacher-union practice

In teacher-union practice, you hold your teacher in mind and pray to him or to her. Your teacher is mahamudra. The living human being with whom you meet and talk is how you, at this point in your practice, experience mahamudra. This is a mythic way of speaking, a way of speaking that goes much deeper than a literal interpretation. Traditionally, to assist you here, when you practice teacher-union, you may think of your teacher as Vajradhara, Padmasambhava, Je Tsong Khapa, Machik Lapdrön, or any other figure who represents this understanding to you. Whether this figure is someone you have met or not, whether from the past or present, whether historical or mythic, whether male or female does not matter. What matters is that this figure, this presence, expresses for you what you yearn to know. You pray from there.

When you do teacher-union practice, all your teachers are present, all of them, from your earliest years to the present day — your mentors, your coaches, your trainers, anyone and everyone from whom you have learned something that meant something to you or something that has stayed with you and has helped bring you to where you are right now. Even if you do not think of them explicitly, sooner or later as you go deeper into this practice, they show up, and you melt in gratitude for how they helped you come to this point, whether they did so gently or harshly, wittingly or unwittingly, or intentionally or unintentionally.

Prayer

In the Tibetan tradition, there are several different kinds of prayer. In teacher-union practice, the word for prayer comes from the verb to throw seeds out — your requests are seeds that you are sowing in a field. There are hundreds of teacher-union prayers in the Tibetan tradition. Find one that speaks to you. Some are very short, a few syllables, a virtual mantra. Others are longer, up to six or even eight lines, each line freighted with meaning.

Pray to touch what you yearn to touch. Pray to see what you yearn to see. Pray to know what you yearn to know. Pray to be in a way that you are not. In sowing a field with these requests, you are reaching out to what you do not know. You are praying to form a connection, however tenuous, with something that is beyond your touch, beyond your knowing, beyond your being. When you pray, let yourself feel the yearning burning in your heart and mind. Feel it burn and burn, even to the point that it moves you to tears, Let yourself feel this fire until you know that it cannot be put out, even if you wanted to put it out.

When you pray this way, you may encounter anger, fear, pride, greed, frustration, depression, darkness, helplessness, abandonment, and oblivion — everything under the sun, under the moon, under the stars, and everything upon which no light has ever shone. It is just you and your teacher, and your teacher’s silence is deafening. You see that you, yourself, are responsible for whatever arises. You, yourself, have to meet it, however you can. At the same time, you may encounter bliss beyond conception, gratitude beyond expression, and peace beyond expectation, waves upon waves that leave you gasping for breath. You have no say in what arises, no control at all. Yet a feeling of connection begins to form. To what you have no idea. It leaves you utterly speechless in awe and wonder. Everything, good or bad, that you thought you knew or understood falls away and you are left naked and alone in a vastness of devastating unknowing.

At the end of your practice session, feel the presence of your teacher, the presence of mahamudra, dissolving into you. The body, mind, and heart of mahamudra join with your body, mind, and heart — pure clear water pouring into pure clear water — and there you rest.

Faith, devotion, and awe

As Gampopa wrote earlier, faith, devotion, and awe are the genesis of mahamudra. I have chosen these three words to translate the Tibetan phrase dad pa dang mos gus (pron. dä pa dang mö gü).

Faith is the willingness to open to whatever arises in our lives. We develop faith through prayer and practice. As our practice or prayer deepens, we uncover an increasing capacity to live in this willingness.

Devotion is constancy in the care, respect, and precision we bring to what arises — whether it is bowing when we enter a temple, how we wash dishes or speak with someone, or how we attend to what we and others are feeling. As a student, I attend to my teachers with devotion. As a teacher, I attend in a similar way to my students with devotion. Like faith, devotion develops through practice, particularly when we have intimations of possibilities or a door opens unexpectedly.

Awe is the feeling of being intimately connected to someone or something infinitely greater than we are. It, too, develops through practice, deepening as we engage mystery more and more fully.

With these descriptions, it becomes clear, I think, why Gampopa writes that faith, devotion, and awe are the genesis of mahamudra.

Do you need an actual teacher?

Maybe it is just a generational thing, but it seems to me that this question comes up more frequently than it used to. Perhaps it is partly due to the wealth of material now available on the web. People find teachings that speak to them, and put together a practice portfolio of their own, drawing on the vast riches of teachings in a way that was virtually impossible before the web was developed.

Maybe this works, but I don’t know. What I do know is that if we look at any other discipline, playing a musical instrument, say, or martial arts, or the practice of medicine, the question of needing a teacher rarely, if ever, comes up. Further, no matter how talented a person may be in music, say, they are going to be a better musician if they study with a teacher. Why would spiritual practice be different?

That being said, it can be hard to find a good teacher. Then there are all the accretions of tradition. They can be wonderfully helpful on the one hand, and they can also be difficult to work through on the other.

Teacher-union practice in particular is fraught with misunderstandings. Many people no longer know what it means to have a religious or spiritual relationship with a living person, with a teacher. Psychological and cultural differences are other sources of confusion, and translation issues abound. In other words, the potential causes of confusion are many and profuse, and the problems that arise from that confusion can be long-lasting and difficult to remedy. It is for this reason that I have tried to spell out the various aspects of this practice as clearly as possible.

Teacher-union practice is not for everyone. No practice is. But if you choose to pursue it, you will almost certainly find that the stripping away of assumptions, expectations, and projections that inevitably takes place in the practice of prayer leaves you well prepared for mahamudra practice, as do the shifts into opening (faith), engagement (devotion), and what lies beyond words (awe).

How To Lose Your Mind Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:08:00 +0000

I continue to find this little text by Gampopa quite amazing. To do it justice, I am constantly polishing the translation while I write these commentaries. This polishing has resulted in more changes to the translation on the website, some of them quite subtle.

These mahamudra instructions dovetail beautifully with the Diamond Sutra. I strongly urge you to make regular reading of the sutra part of your mahamudra practice. My translation of the Diamond Sutra, This Unexpected Jewel, is ideal. I translated it to be easy to read aloud, as several of the reviews on Amazon have corroborated. I’d love to hear about your experience of joining the practice of mahamudra as Gampopa teaches it with reading the Diamond Sutra. Please email me at ken@unfetteredmind.org about your experience and please consider posting a review on Amazon, too.

The second section of How to Lose Your Mind is “Pointing out how it comes to be.” These are essentially pointing out instructions, as the commentary below makes clear.

We have already looked at the first and second points, that faith, devotion, and awe are the genesis of mahamudra and that excellent teachers are conditions for mahamudra. Let’s now look at the last three points in this section.

Although mahamudra has no method, this unaffected mind is a method.

Although mahamudra has no path, this undistracted mind is a path.

Although mahamudra has no result, this freeing of mind in empty experience is the result.

Together, they form a practice unit, a three-legged stool so to speak. If one is missing, practice falls apart.

The first part of each sentence is about how mahamudra is. Mahamudra has no method, no path, and no result. In other words, mahamudra is not something that is fabricated. It is just there. Nor is it something you arrive at. It is already there. Nor does it become something through your practice. These are the three legs of the stool I mentioned above.

The second part of each sentence points out how you come to be mahamudra, that is, how you actually lose your mind. For this, there is a method, there is a path, and there is a result.

In developing clear stable attention, you are working at something. At the very least, you are working at developing the ability to rest clear and present. In the development of insight, you are working at looking, looking until you can actually see nothing. Then you learn how to rest in the looking and look in the resting, bringing these two together.

At some point, a subtle shift takes place. It may be initiated by a feeling of deep faith or devotion, by awe, or by compassion. It may be initiated by a pointing out instruction from a teacher. It may be initiated by a chance occurrence when you are doing nothing in particular. In this shift, at least for a moment, you are nothing, or, if you prefer, you are not a thing. Maybe it lasts more than a moment. For today, the important point is that there is a shift.

You may not experience the shift as a shift per se. You may quietly and undramatically become aware of a quality that you had not known was there. It may be a clarity of unfathomable depth, a peace in which thoughts are like sparks of light, or a feeling of well-being in which all physical and emotional tensions subside on their own, or some combination of these. It may be right at the limit of awareness, a possibility lurking behind clouds that your awareness does not quite penetrate, hiding in the ordinary activity of mind, or intimated in the eruption of strong reactions.

Once this kind of experience insinuates itself into your practice, how you practice needs to change. It needs to move from cultivating qualities and capabilities to becoming accustomed to what is already there. It moves from the metaphor of a path or journey to, possibly, the metaphor of recognizing a room that you have always been in, but forgotten.

As you practice, if and when that quality or qualities arise, don’t do anything. As my teacher used to say, “Just recognize and rest.” Just recognize what is happening, and rest there. This simple instruction is profoundly important. It is the key to gradually becoming accustomed to what the shift is revealing.

Here is where the three instructions come into play.

In the moment of recognition of that shift, whether it arises explicitly or through intimation, there is almost always an urge to bring it out more vividly, or hold onto it, or to make it happen again.

Do not do anything. Anything you might do to enhance the experience is an affectation, trying to make something special or different by adding something that is neither needed or called for. Rest in the unaffected mind. Not doing anything is the method. Don’t try to make the mind unaffected. That really does not work. It’s a contradiction in terms. The way to practice is to let things be just as they are, however wonderful, however horrible.

It is also quite common to feel that you are getting somewhere in your practice. You are experiencing intimations of clarity, peace, emptiness, well-being, etc. And you have a method, the unaffected mind. You are on the path! But mahamudra has no path. You are not going anywhere because there is nowhere to go. Again, do nothing. Just recognize what is happening, and rest.

A third impulse it to turn these shifts and intimations into evidence that you, precious you, are not only getting somewhere, you now know the destination. You have turned mahamudra into a result, something you can achieve.

This is where the third instruction comes into play. Mahamudra has no result. As long as there is any sense of you apart from what arises in experience, you have not lost your mind. Again, do nothing. Let these thoughts be. Just recognize what is happening, and rest.

These three instructions point out what gets in the way of your being mahamudra. You cannot do anything about the arising of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. That is life, and, in the end, that is all that life is.

What you can do is stop mucking things up.

Don’t make what you experience into something else.

Don’t make what you experience into signs of progress.

Don’t make what you experience a destination.

In other words, don’t panic.

How To Lose Your Mind Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:07:00 +0000

Translation is just hard, particularly when the two languages are in unrelated language families. Something felt off with my previous translation and I have just consumed a couple of hours revising it to:

While mahamudra is not dependent on conditions, teachers are conditions for mahamudra.

Part of the reason I prefer this translation is that it more easily allows some of the points I want to make in this commentary.

Let’s begin by recalling that in this section, the first part of the sentence describes how mahamudra is, while the second part of the sentence describes how it comes into being.

Mahamudra just is. It doesn’t go in or out of being. When I say “how it comes into being,” it would be more correct to say “how we come to experience it.” The first and second parts of each sentence in this section should be understood this way.

Now, what does this mean, teachers are conditions for mahamudra?

Please note that I translate this sentence without definite articles and in the plural.
“The teacher is the condition for mahamudra” is unduly restrictive. “Teachers are the condition for mahamudra” is less but still unduly restrictive.

Remember also that when it is said that mahamudra can only be received from a teacher who has also received this transmission, the unspoken message is that what was once discovered can never be discovered again. This is just not true.

Teachers do not cause mahamudra, nor are they the source or genesis of mahamudra.

How, then, are teachers conditions for mahamudra?

Broadly speaking, teachers perform one or more of these five functions:

help the student remove what gets in the way,
help the student see the right direction and move that way,
point out the nature of mahamudra when the student is ready,
help the student stabilize their experience and understanding, and
confirm the student’s experience if needed.

The first is essentially purification. It may take many forms, from purification practices such as Vajrayasattva meditation to the physical hardships Milarepa had to endure building a tower for Marpa. Purification may take place through the trials and demands of life itself or through the deliberate engagement of certain practices. It is not about achieving a state of purity, but coming to the understanding that nothing else in life is worthwhile, or, to put it another way, to recognize and commit to what calls the student to spiritual practice.

In the Tibetan tradition, the second point, orientation, is usually developed through philosophical investigation, using logic to eliminate any other way of directing effort and attention. For example, verses 9 – 14 in Aspirations for Mahamudra present one way that mahamudra philosophy is formulated. While this approach works for some people, there are many other ways to come to what, in the dzogchen tradition, is called the view. Prayer and faith provide another way and the cultivation of the four immeasurables as I present them in Chapter 7 of Wake Up to Your Life is another. The development and exercise of compassion through service or the exercise of attention and awareness in art, music, crafts, or athletics are also possible paths. Part of the teacher’s role here is to ensure that the student is being shaped by these practices in a way that prepares them for mahamudra and not losing their way in, say, the intricacy of logic, the demands of service, the aesthetics of music, or the competitiveness of sports.

The third point refers to the traditional pointing out instructions, but pointing out can be done formally or informally, by using established methods, by using whatever is available in the moment, by drawing on energy transformation, or by creating conditions in which the student’s mind stops. The point is for the student to let go of beliefs and belief structures and simply fall open, if only for a moment. This may also happen through resonance, startle or surprise, physical, emotional, or cognitive exhaustion, confusion, and so on.

The fourth point, stabilization, applies when the student has experienced mahamudra but their experience is susceptible to distraction, decay, or corruption. For instance, in the Ganges Mahamudra, Tilopa speaks to Naropa very differently from when Naropa was experiencing one hardship after another in following Tilopa’s demands.

The fifth point comes into play when the student experiences a shift, perhaps on their own without any explicit pointing out, yet cannot take it in or does not recognize or appreciate its significance. The four faults of mind nature from the Shangpa tradition come to mind:

Too close — you don’t see it.

Too deep — you don’t fathom it.

Too simple — you don’t believe it.

Too fine — you don’t accept it.

A good teacher can do much to help the student have confidence in their experience without lapsing into pride or any other feeling of specialness.

A teacher must also be attuned to where the student is. For instance, if a teacher does not recognize problems that get in a student’s way, no amount of pointing-out instructions are going to help. In fact, untimely pointing-out instructions often exacerbate problems. Similarly, if a teacher does not recognize that a student has experienced a shift into mind nature but cannot take it in, the student may never develop the confidence to stand in their own knowing.

Do note that some teachers are especially helpful on certain points, and may not be helpful on others. Because relatively few teachers are capable in all five, you may find it necessary to work with different teachers at different stages of practice.

Are teachers necessary, then? One only has to look at other disciplines to answer that question. Can people learn to play a musical instrument by themselves? Sometimes, but even the most talented musicians usually benefit from studying under a teacher who is both capable and suitable. Ditto for artists and athletes.

More could be said about how teachers are conditions for mahamudra, but this is probably enough. Just make sure that your teacher has visited the ruler of the universe at least once.

How To Lose Your Mind Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:02:11 +0000

In the last two newsletters I discussed how mahamudra is:

Mahamudra has no genesis,
Mahamudra has no causes,
Mahamudra has no method,
Mahamudra has no path, and
Mahamudra has no result.

I also described a way of taking in these five points, taking them in to body, speech, and mind in such a way that each of them changes something in you. That change makes mahamudra practice more accessible.

Now we turn to the second section of Gampopa’s instructions. How does mahamudra come into being? Of course, some philosophers will jump all over me for posing such a question, but this is a practice text and we are faced with a simple fact. We may know about mahamudra, but we do not know mahamudra. How do we bring knowing mahamudra into being?

Here, Gampopa makes five more points:

Although mahamudra has no genesis, faith, devotion, and awe are its genesis.
Although mahamudra has no causes, excellent teachers are its causes.
Although mahamudra has no method, this unaffected mind is its method.
Although mahamudra has no path, this undistracted mind is its path.
Although mahamudra has no result, this mind freed in pure being is its result.

It seems that Gampopa is negating what he wrote in the first section. This kind of negation is not unusual in Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist practice. Often, what seems to be a direct negation indicates a shift, either of perspective or of level. If we do not recognize the shift in perspective, or, as is often the case, if we have not experienced the shift in the level of attention, awareness, or presence, then we cannot understand what is written. The best we can do is come up with an intellectual interpretation, and that is not much help. Most of the time, we are left puzzled or disconcerted by the apparent contradiction. The Diamond Sutra is filled with these kinds of negations. For instance, see §22.

In this text Gampopa is kind: he presents the negation and then tells us what the shift is — a shift in perspective from what mahamudra is to how mahamudra comes into being. Please note, Gampopa is not writing about what life is. He is writing about how we experience life. Today, we look at the first point: faith, devotion, and awe are its genesis

Why faith, devotion, and awe?

All of these, if cultivated deeply, leave you speechless, each in its own way. To put it another way, faith, devotion, and awe temper you in both heart and mind, just as fire, folding, and quenching temper steel.

How to cultivate faith, devotion, and awe?

In the end, I have found only one way that feels true in both practice and result. There are others, no doubt, but I cannot write about what I don’t know.

I go to why I was drawn to spiritual practice in the first place. I go back to the beginning. Why am I doing this? If the answer comes in words, I use those words to pose another question that uses the word why. For example, let’s say the first answer is “I wanted to become enlightened?” Then I ask “Why?” Now I have to go deeper. I repeat this questioning until I cannot go any further.

For a long time, the answer that I eventually came to was “Because I wanted to know that I knew something.” When I asked, “Why? again, my mind stopped. There was a palpable and powerful feeling for which I had no words. Yet in that stopping I felt a willingness to meet, open, and learn from whatever I encountered on this path, that is, I felt faith. I also felt a deep quiet passion that would keep me connected with my teachers and see me through whatever difficulties I encountered, that is, I felt devotion. And I felt awe, that feeling of being intimately connected with something that is infinitely greater than me.

I have practiced this way for many years. Now and then, the answer just before my heart and mind stop changes or shifts, but the next “Why?” still puts me straight into a profound unknowing where faith, devotion, and awe quietly grow stronger and deeper.

This is how I cultivate these three qualities. How do you get to the Total Perspective Vortex? Write to me (ken@unfetteredmind.org) and let me know.

How to Lose Your Mind Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:01:26 +0000

In the last newsletter, I discussed the translation of the first point of the five points, that mahamudra has no genesis. This means that mahamudra has no beginning, or, to put it another way, that there is no thing that grows into or becomes mahamudra. I also pointed out that when we sit quietly with that statement and let it sink into the body and into the emotional field, a shift takes place, and we rest a little more deeply and a little more quietly. That shift may not happen immediately, but with a little practice, it happens for most people. In this shift, the sense of time drops away. At least, that’s how it is for me. It may arise differently for you.

Today, we turn attention to the next four sentences in this section:

Mahamudra has no conditions.

Mahamudra has no method.

Mahamudra has no path.

Mahamudra has no result.

We practice with these four points in exactly the same way as the first point. We rest quietly, holding the sentence in mind, and letting it sink into the body and the emotional field. Sooner or later, you sense a shift. The shift has a different flavor for each of these four points. Below, I note how I experience these flavors. Again, they may arise in a different way for you. For more detailed instruction, please look at the last newsletter.

Mahamudra has no conditions

This sentence could also be translated as “Mahamudra has no causes.” Here we are using the word “cause” as it is normally used in English. If we water a seed we have planted, we can say the water causes it to grow. Without water, it probably won’t. The same holds for nutrition and sunlight. Causes, conditions, both work in English as translations of the corresponding words in Tibetan and Sanskrit.

The shift here is also subtle. For me, it has the quality of “there is nothing I can do to make mahamudra happen.” When you sense that shift, the best thing to do is nothing. Rest.

The aim here is to assimilate each of these statements, not by trying to understand them or figure them out, but by letting our mind, our emotional sense, and our body become attuned to them and let them in. That is why I say just hold them in mind and let the meaning sink in. The shift for each of them is an indication that the meaning has begun to sink in.

Mahamudra has no method

No translation problems here. In most of our meditation training, we rely on some method, following the out-breath for instance, or holding in mind that we are a deity, or repeating a mantra over and over again. A method is a way of working at meditation practice, refining the quality of attention, developing skills, or building capacity. For mahamudra, there is no method, there is no way to work at it. Now let that point sink in. Again, at some point, you sense a shift. Here the shift may have the quality of “there is no way to work at this, no way to make it happen.”

As you have probably noted by now, there is physical, emotional, and cognitive resistance to each of these points. The way of practicing I am suggesting here is not mahamudra per se, but a way of preparing mind, heart, and body for mahamudra. Each of these points is easy to understand conceptually, but quite hard to accept. Thinking about each point and trying to convince yourself that that is the case usually reinforces the conceptual mind, triggers various forms of emotional resistance, and negates any chance of the body absorbing or assimilating the possibility. That is why I suggest holding it in attention and letting it sink in.

Two more to go.

Mahamudra has no path

The metaphor of a path, a journey of some kind, is used extensively in Buddhism. We start here and go there, and these are the stages, etc. Mahamudra is not like that. Mahamudra is not a thing. There is no path and there are no stages. As before, sit quietly with this statement and let it sink in. Cognitive resistance arises in many ways, as arguments or reasoning, for instance. As soon as you notice you are thinking, drop everything and start again. Emotional resistance also arises in many ways, as frustration, as boredom, as confusion, as dullness, or as explicit emotional reactions such as anger, greed, or envy. The body, too, may express its resistance as agitation or sleepiness, discomfort, or inexplicable pains or other sensations. No matter. Just keep resting with the point and let it sink in. With this point, when a shift does take place, it may have the quality of clarity or non-thought.

Mahamudra has no result

Again, hold this in mind and let it sink in. Everyone’s experience is different, of course, but don’t be surprised if resistance in mind, heart, and body arise quite strongly with this point. No result? Then why am I doing this, then? Suddenly, you are thrown right back to why do you practice at all.

Don’t fall into arguing or analyzing. Let the voices quiet down on their own. Let the emotional reactions break, crash, and subside, like waves breaking on a beach. And let tensions in the body resolve themselves. When you sense a shift, it may have the quality of opening into a larger space, a much larger space, as body and mind relax in a way you may not have experienced before.

I suggest you work with just one point for a week or two, until you have a clear sense of the shift that indicates that the point is sinking in. Then move on to the next one. The aim here isn’t to understand the point, but to create the conditions in which the point can actually sink in and start changing you. Each of these points initiates a change in you. The cumulative effect of these changes is to make mahamudra practice more accessible.

Otherwise, practicing mahamudra may be a bit like being told that 42 is the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything.

How to Lose Your Mind Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:00:11 +0000

My translation of Gampopa's text is now up on the website. You can find it here. It is probably a good idea to bookmark this page as we go through the text line by line.

The text has three sections: how mahamudra is, how mahamudra comes to be, and how to hone thatness. My commentaries are about the aspects of practice that Gampopa is pointing to in each section. In many of the commentaries, I will comment on the translation challenges in that section and explain why my translation may differ from more conventional usage.

First, what is mahamudra? Mahamudra is a word that points to a way of experiencing life in which awareness and experience are not separate. Keep this in mind as you read these notes.

Let’s turn to the first section: how mahamudra is.

Mahamudra is not a thing. It is not an object of knowing. In particular, it is not something that can be known or understood by the conceptual mind. To drive this point home, to nail it down, Gampopa writes:

Mahamudra has no genesis,
Mahamudra has no conditions,
Mahamudra has no method,
Mahamudra has no path, and
Mahamudra has no result.

The aim of these absolute negations is to reduce distractions and problems. Mahamudra practice largely consists of doing nothing. We rest in awareness. We try not to fall into confusion. We don’t make an effort to have some particular experience. We don’t try to practice anything. Whatever comes up, we try not to do anything with it or to it. This not doing may be simple, but it is not easy.

These five negations are useful. How do we use them?

Today, let’s look at the first one: mahamudra has no genesis.

This sentence is usually translated as “Mahamudra has no cause.” This translation is misleading because it is a misuse of English. It’s like saying that an acorn is the cause of an oak tree. No! An acorn grows into an oak tree. It does not cause an oak tree.

In the context of mahamudra, Gampopa is saying, “There is nothing that becomes mahamudra.” In other words, there is no mahamudra acorn that you can plant and let it grow into the mahamudra oak tree. No such luck.

Let’s consider this from a practice perspective. Let mind and body settle, and then quietly say to yourself, “Mahamudra has no genesis. There is nothing that becomes mahamudra.”

What happens?

There is usually a shift. It’s subtle, but with a little practice you can usually feel it in both mind and body. At first you may not even notice it. When you do, it may last only a moment. No matter. That's why we practice.

Again, let mind and body settle for several minutes. Rest with the breath, or say your favorite prayer. Rest in the sensations of your body, the sensations of breathing. Don’t try to do anything. Just rest. After a while, again say to yourself, “There is nothing that becomes mahamudra.” Do this periodically, allowing a good bit of time (5-10 minutes) before trying again each time. Sooner or later, you sense a shift.

For me, when that shift takes place, a stillness is present, but it’s a bit deeper and clearer than the stillness of not thinking and the sense of time drops away. Then the shift fades or I start thinking about something.

Once you start to sense that shift, you will be tempted to try to hold onto it, to deepen it, to explore it, or to regenerate it as soon as it fades away. Too bad. You are no longer practicing mahamudra. You are doing something. You are working at something. Don't! Stop working. Stop trying to make something happen. Stop trying to control what you experience. Stop falling into distraction.

Rest in the shift. When it fades away or you fall into confusion, continue to do nothing. Just rest. The shift opens a door to another possibility. In a half-hour period of meditation, elicit the shift maybe four or five times at the most. The aim here is to let your mind and body assimilate the ineffable clarity and stillness in the shift. You cannot do that. So don’t. All you can do is pose the question now and then, and then allow the assimilation to take place.

That’s enough for today’s newsletter. We’ll continue in the next one. I’ll try to write these weekly, but if I miss one or two here and there, DON'T PANIC. Come to think of it, maybe you should keep a towel handy, too. You may need it.

How to Lose Your Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Fri, 23 May 2025 23:10:00 +0000

How to Lose Your Mind

The One and Only Path of Mahamudra

by the peerless Lord Gampopa

I bow to my excellent teachers.

There are three points to this presentation of mahamudra:

1. Nailing down how it is,

2. Knowing how it comes to be, and

3. Honing thatness.

1. The first has five points:

1. Mahamudra has no genesis,

2. Mahamudra has no conditions,

3. Mahamudra has no method,

4. Mahamudra has no path, and

5. Mahamudra has no result.

2. Knowing how it comes to be also has five points:

1. Although mahamudra has no genesis, faith and devotion are its genesis.

2. Although mahamudra has no conditions, excellent teachers are its conditions.

3. Although mahamudra has no method, this unaffected mind is its method.

4. Although mahamudra has no path, this undistracted mind is its path.

5. Although mahamudra has no result, this mind freed in pure being is its result.

3. Honing thatness has four points:

1. For groundwork, practice teacher-union with faith, reverence, and devotion,
three times a day and three times at night;

2. For the main matter, consistently place mind without distraction and
rest without affectation.

3. For the conclusion, once all that appears is experienced as mind,
hone the vitality of awareness.

4. As energy shifts arise, keep practice and meditation steady
until any sense of mind is gone.

Energy shifts arise in two ways:

1. Unconducive energy shifts and

2. Conducive energy shifts.

For the first, whatever the unconducive energy shifts — unstable attention, illness, panic attacks, doubts, and so on — they arise from your practice. Knowing all these are energy shifts, without suppressing them, settle in the outlook and practice of thatness and practice from there. When you do this, at some point a conducive energy shift suddenly arises.

For conducive energy shifts, first the shift into mind resting arises, then the shift into presence emptying, then the shift into knowing arriving, and then the shift into clinging unwinding.

When these shifts arise, don't be content with your practice. Keep moving forward steadily.

First, don’t be content with just mind resting.

Practice seeing presence emptying again and again.

Don’t be content with just seeing presence emptying.

You must practice coming into knowing arriving again and again.

Don’t be content with just coming into knowing arriving.

You must practice clinging unwinding again and again.

Don’t be content with just clinging unwinding.

You must practice until your mind is freed in pure being,
any sense of mind is gone, and you are completely awake.

This concludes The Pure Essence of Mind, The One and Only Path of Mahamudra.

Translated by Ken McLeod in Windsor, CA in April 2025

What is pragmatic Buddhism?

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:28:00 +0000

Pragmatic Buddhism at Unfettered Mind is about effective methods of practice:

effective ways to build skills and abilities,
effective ways to instill, uncover, or open to deeper understandings, and
effective ways to live practice in your life.

Pragmatic Buddhism is about the tools, understandings, and experience you need to meet the challenges you may face in your spiritual journey. It does not mean merely using Buddhist perspectives and methods to resolve problems in your life.

While one of the effects of practice may be the resolution of various problems, another effect may be the compounding of such problems to the point that you have to make radical changes in your life.

One aim of pragmatic Buddhism is to provide you with ways to develop the skills and capabilities you need to meet such challenges.

Pragmatic Buddhism is grounded in the bodhisattva vow. This is where it starts. As it is presented in the Diamond Sutra, the bodhisattva vow is the intention to free beings from the vicissitudes of samsara without ever conceiving them as beings. Compared to how compassion is usually understood, this is a compassion of a completely different order — the union of compassion and emptiness.

Pragmatic Buddhism is based in traditional Mahayana and Vajrayana and their time-tested methods of practice that include:

The development of stable attention, insight, and the uncovering of direct awareness;
Mahayana mind-training including loving kindness, compassion, taking and sending (tonglen), the six perfections including the perfection of wisdom, and the Great Middle Way;
Vajrayana practice, including teacher union, deity creation and completion, energy transformation, and protector practice.

Pragmatic Buddhism means that you are resourceful and practical. Its motto might be “I don’t do what I know does not work.”

In every generation teachers have enhanced, combined, and distilled the practices they received from their their teachers to meet the particular situations of the times. This willingness to be creative and innovative applies not only to methods or practice, but also to the translation of texts, the integration of prayer and meditation, how students and teachers meet to talk about practice experience, the formats of retreats, the rituals and ceremonies that support practice, and the skillful use of technology.

To visualize or not to visualize

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 05:23:00 +0000

Today, I am going to consider the word visualize, or visualization. The Tibetan word is dmigs.pa (pron. mikpa). I've long suspected that there was a problem with the usual translation of visualize, but it was only when I was writing The Magic of Vajrayana that I was forced to face the fact that there was something seriously wrong with that translation.

After a few conversations with other translators, my doubts were confirmed. The word dmigs.pa is used in a number of other contexts and seems to mean "to hold something in mind." It is also used in the phrase dmigs.med.snying.rje, which is usually translated as non-referential compassion, but could be glossed as "compassion that arises when nothing is held in mind."

Okay. That's the background. How does this affect practice?

First, despite all that is written, don't feel that you need to generate a mental image. Some people can do so quite easily, but many of them find that the mental image that they see so clearly in their mind doesn't help them in their meditation.

As I wrote in The Magic of Vajrayana (see pg. 82), forget about visualizing the deity and forget about imagining you are the deity. Instead, be the deity. Don't hold in mind an image of the deity. Instead, hold in mind that you are the deity.

Let's take Chenrezi as an example. Chenrezi is awakened compassion, compassion and emptiness arising together, just as a candle flame arises as both heat and light. Say to yourself, "I am empty compassion. I am Chenrezi." What happens?

You may feel a sudden shift in your body as much as your mind. For many people, that shift is not subtle. The mind goes empty and the body does not know what to do.

Okay. That's a good start.

Now rest in that shift. It will probably feel unfamiliar and, quite possibly, a little uncomfortable. No matter. Rest there. Rest and be empty compassion, be Chenrezi. Let your body and mind absorb the fact that you are empty compassion and that you have all the capabilities and qualities of awakened compassion. Don't think about it. Don't visualize. Don't imagine. Just hold in mind that you are empty, groundless compassion and open to the infinity of possibilities that entails.

Parts of you may arise in rebellion. If they do, remember that you are the deity. What does Chenrezi do with those parts? You know because you are Chenrezi. You don't have to think about what to do or strategize. It's right there. It's a knowing that is right there. It's a muscle that you, the ordinary you, has not flexed before, but it's still right there, ready and waiting.

The feeling of being Chenrezi will, of course, come and go. Whenever it fades, don't try to recover it. Instead, take a short break. Let mind and body rest. And then, be Chenrezi and rest in the shift.

Practice questions

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 19:30:00 +0000

Newsletter, Nov. 6, 2007

Nagarjuna said that Buddha nature is empty.

In the Tibetan Kagyu tradition, Thrangu Rinpoche sees buddha nature as the indivisible oneness of wisdom and emptiness.

The Dalai Lama, representing the Gelukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism, sees buddha nature as the "original clear light of mind" but is at pains to point out that it ultimately does not really exist, as it is emptiness.

The view of Buddha nature varies from school to school.

Do we just pick one? And what does a practice on buddha nature look like?

The way that can be named

Is not the way

Neither buddha nature or emptiness are things. They are words used to refer to certain experiences. The experiences cannot be expressed in words. Nor can they be understood conceptually. But you can have the experiences, which is to say that buddha nature and emptiness can be known through experience, even though they cannot be understood.

One doesn't "practice" emptiness, or, for that matter, buddha nature. In such practices as mahamudra or dzogchen, one rests in experience, neither entertaining thoughts or emotions, nor suppressing them:

don't be distracted

don't control what arises

don't work at anything

Best to do this in short periods, so mind and heart stay clear and awake. Gradually, as my teacher said, you will come to know you are nothing, and, in being nothing, are everything.

how do I simplify my life

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 19:09:00 +0000

Practice tip -- how to simplify your life. (newsletter 29, June 2012)

Question

I wondered if you would ever consider writing on the subject of "how to simplify your life"? I'm thinking of how to use dharma teaching as a way to interact with our daily world -- such as suggestions on how to limit the amount of stuff, engagements, technological distractions, just to name a few.

Response

It's a matter of inclusion and exclusion, what you include in your life, and what you exclude.

If you have trouble deciding, you aren't clear about your priorities. If you try to simplify your life before you are clear about your priorities, you usually end up in a mess. Different agendas come into conflict and without an overall vision or direction, you can't make the necessary decisions.

Think of the proverbial starving musician. She knows what is important in her life. She's willing to put up with bad bar gigs and difficult audiences so she can write, play and sing her own songs. Yes, she certainly hopes to win a following, but it's the music that is important to her, and that's that. Music comes first, and as long as she is able to eat and find a place to sleep, she's more than okay with that.

And then there is the young attorney or MBA. He's equally clear about his priorities. Money heads the list. He endures brutal workloads, long hours, demanding and unsympathetic bosses, time away from his wife and children, all to realize his dreams of being rich. You may not agree with his choices, but he knows exactly what to include and exclude.

How do you use dharma teachings as a way to interact with your daily world? Very carefully.

Buddhist practice, like art, like business, has its own set of priorities and one is to be free of distractions. If you are going to probe what is beyond thought, it's helpful to have less to think about. And that translates directly into a simplified life with relatively few decisions that have to be made.

Do you really want to reduce the number of decisions you have to make each day?

Then the first practice is reflection on change and death. Why? It leads you to reorder your priorities from top to bottom so that you doradically simplify your life and, as a consequence, have much less to think about.

It's a straightforward practice, but not that easy. It consists of taking in two facts that you already know.

You know you are going to die. And you know you don't know when.

Imagine you are going to die in ten years. Ten years from today, the lights go out in your world. What would you do with you life?

Now imagine you are going to die in one year. What would you do?

And imagine you are going to die in one month. How would you spend that month?

These are not gentle questions, but they do serve a purpose. They give you a pretty good idea of what's important to you in your life.

Now go further. You do not know, and cannot know, when you are going to die. What happens to conventional notions of success - happiness, gain, fame or respect? These are important to most people. For many, they form the basis of their lives.

What about you? How important are happiness, gain, fame and respect to you? Or are you looking for a deeper connection with life itself?

Think about this. You won't be able to simplify your life until you are clear here.

You are going to die and you don't know when. How do you live in this paradox? There is only one way. Dowhat life calls for now because life calls for it, not because you hope to enjoy the results. Whether its planting a garden, going to school, saving money, building a career, time with friends, a political campaign, a vacation or hobby, you engage it because it is your life calls for it. Forget about being around for the results of your efforts. You have no idea whether you will be or not.

Now you have much less to think about, no?

In letting go of hopes (and fears), you become clearer about what is important and what is not and that makes it much easier to let go of (i.e., exclude) other considerations.

Stuff? What do you really need in order to pursue what is vitally important to you?

Engagements? Friends, associates, activities, there is no end to what you can do. Time is one major factor, and energy a second.

Technological distractions? What use do you have for email, Facebook, an iPad, a car, a refrigerator, or a book? These are all forms of technology, some older than others. For any technology, consider if and how it is useful to you.

Reflection on change isn't the only approach to simplification. There are others, of course.

In Mahayana Buddhism, it is the ideal of compassion. Compassion, and the cultivation of compassion, inform your every thought and action. This naturally leads to the practice of awakening mind (bodhicitta).

For others, it is awe, a sense of being intimately connected with something that is infinitely greater or deeper than you. This leads to a path based in faith and devotion.

A little practical advice. Before you start to simplify, tighten up your life a little. Organize your day a bit better and pay more attention to time. As an example, arrive at appointments and meetings on time and end them on time. You soon find that you have more time - to consider the questions suggested above, to reflect on what is vital, important and meaningful to you, to decide what to cultivate and what to let go.

Once you are clear about that, everything else follows.

Point 7: Guidelines

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 06:40:00 +0000

The seventh point of Mind Training in Seven Points is called Guidelines. Where commitments (point six) are about avoiding emotional reactions and approaches to life that break your connection with practice, the purpose of these guidelines is to keep you on track. Through these instructions, you develop ways to meet what arises in your life, internally or externally, that enables you to use what arises to deepen your experience of emptiness and compassion.

Because the Tibetan word for guidelines is often translated as precepts, it is good to remember that in Buddhism these instructions are descriptive rather than prescriptive—they describe how a person who has trained deeply in this tradition meets the reactivity that inevitably arises in the course of formal practice and going about his or her life. These behaviors and ways of working arise from within, not exactly naturally, but from training penetrating deep into your system and burning out reactive habituations. If you take these instructions as precepts and, without training deeply, you try to do what they point to, you run the danger of making your body and mind brittle and frangible, and susceptible to unpredictable eruptions of suppressed reactive emotions.

Before I describe some examples, take a look at the map at the beginning of this practice tip. You can also find it on Unfettered Mind's website: a map of the Mind Training instructions. This map lists all the mind-training instructions, grouped in the seven points. I have added an additional layer of organization with various subgroups in points six and seven. I came up with these subgroups when I observed that the author, Chekawa, clearly had a certain logic in mind when he wrote this text.

General Guidelines

For the first subgroup, a Tibetan saying comes to mind:

In India, practitioners practiced one deity and saw hundreds.
In Tibet, practitioners practice hundreds of deities and see none.

As Jamgön Kongtrul the Great once said:

When you study, learn everything under the sun.
When you reflect, keep an open mind, like the sky.
When you practice, do one practice and go deep like the ocean.

In general, you do better finding one practice that speaks to you, and then devoting yourself to it completely.

Reminder Guidelines

The guidelines in the second subgroup are ways to create an internal environment that nurtures spiritual practice and enables mind-training to go deep. To put it another way, these are ways that you develop to make it possible for the practice to work on you.

Maintenance Guidelines

These guidelines make it possible for the practice to go deep in you. Memorize these four groups of three and take care to ensure their presence in your practice and your life.

Extension Guidelines

The fourth subgroup ensures that you don’t end up in a comfortable practice cocoon. Keep extending and reaching out both internally and externally, letting the practice work more deeply and more broadly.

In reviewing these groupings, I see that it makes more sense for the first two in the last subgroup to be included in the fifth subgroup.

Guidelines for Addressing Imbalances

The fifth subgroup is about practicing in such a way that you don’t inadvertently create imbalances in your practice.

Sometimes, despite your efforts, imbalances do arise. One of the surest ways to generate imbalances is to try to make something happen. In doing so, you are almost always indulging one or more reactive emotions, and that indulgence causes problems. These same instructions help correct imbalances by pointing you in the direction of balance. The main point here is to practice with a quiet consistency and let the practice work on you, rather than trying to make something happen.

Guidelines for Avoiding Imbalances

The sixth and last subgroup, which I need to rename, is basically about bringing a poverty-stricken attitude to practice, practicing from the hungry ghost realm. Such an approach to practice is always problematic. Boasting reinforces your lack of confidence. Hypersensitivity reinforces a sense of self. Impulsiveness undermines stability. And expecting thanks for practicing means that you regard yourself as special in some way.

Conclusion

Mahayana mind-training is a complete practice in and of itself. In this series of newsletters, I have tried to convey an understanding of each of these elements of practice—groundwork, formal practice, practice in life, a condensed formulation of practice, what mastery looks like, what commitments are involved, and guidelines for nurturing practice and understanding. Any system of practice includes all of these elements, along with prayers—e.g., lineage prayers, refuge and awakening mind, dedication, aspiration, and good fortune prayers, etc.—that set a context and provide a framework for this practice. By way of conclusion, the prayer Opening a Path to the Sea of Awakening sets out a framework for the practice of taking and sending, covering everything from being a bodhisattva and releasing beings from the six realms to the nitty-gritty of the pain and confusion of daily life.

Point 6: Connection

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 20:55:00 +0000

The sixth point in Mind Training in Seven Points is about maintaining a connection with the practice of Mind Training. This practice element comes into play when a fundamental shift in awareness and experience reveals to you the possibility of living in the union of compassion and emptiness. Such a shift needs to nurtured, not by trying to hold onto it, but by coming into it again and again until its place in your formal practice and in your life has become strong and stable.

For this aspect of practice, Chekawa Yeshe Dorje, the 12^th century author of Mind Training in Seven Points, uses the Tibetan term dam tshig (Pron. damtsik, Skt. samaya). Samaya is usually associated with Vajrayana, and it is somewhat unusual to find it in a system of practice based in the sutras. However, in his introduction to The Great Path of Awakening, his own commentary on Mind Training in Seven Points, the 19^th century master Jamgön Kongtrul notes that while Mind Training in Seven Points stands firmly in the teachings of the sutras, it partakes of the tantras, that is, of Vajrayana. It is for this reason that I have always regarded Mind Training in Seven Points not only as a potent practice in its own right, but also as a valuable bridge into the practice of Vajrayana.

That being said, let us consider the term samaya. What does it mean? And what does it mean in this context? The term is usually translated as commitment, or as sacred oath. Etymologically speaking, the Tibetan means binding word, that is, a promise. The promise is usually taken to mean the promise to perform certain rituals, to do certain practices, to refrain from certain actions, and to hold certain kinds of awareness or ways of experiencing life. But when I look at the range of these promises, it seems to me that all of them are about maintaining a connection with the kind of shift in awareness and experience I mentioned above, and, to the extent possible, the transformation of experience that comes about through practice.

It is also helpful to remember that the many lists of do’s and don’t’s in Buddhism are more descriptive than prescriptive. They describe how a person is likely to live and conduct his or her life when awake rather than how you should live and conduct your life now. (See a previous newsletter on this topic: https://conta.cc/3I8QYgN)

Many teachers, from Atisha in the 11^th century to Paltrul Rinpoche in the 19^th, have said that it is impossible to keep samaya and it has to be restored again and again. As an exploration, in the preceding sentence, try replacing the word samaya first with the word commitment, and then with the word connection. How does the sentence sit with you in each instance?

For me, the word connection speaks more to my experience than commitment. I am committed to practice, but I lose connection with it again and again. I renew the connection by coming back to the practice, or recalling the echo of transformation of experience, usually in my body. This feels more accurate than saying I have broken a commitment.

Why did Chekawa choose this word? He was a notable scholar, and his choice was not arbitrary. He may have wanted this section to carry a certain weight. He may have wanted to emphasize how important it is to keep connecting with the union of compassion and emptiness.

When you look at the actual instructions in this section, all of them are about avoiding actions and attitudes that break your connection with that union.

Take “Behave naturally,” for instance. When you behave naturally, you do not act from a sense of self. When you act in a contrived or artificial way, you are acting from a sense of self, and the connection with compassion and emptiness is gone.

“Give up any hope for results.” That one is pretty straightforward. Whenever you find yourself hoping for something to happen in your practice, something to happen to you, you are deeply enmeshed in a sense of self.

“Don’t make practice a sham.” This one, too, is about performing.

Finally, what about “Don’t look to profit from sorrow”? Well, if you are looking to make a buck, literally or figuratively, from someone else’s pain, what can be said about your relationship with compassion?

Once the possibility of living in the union of compassion and emptiness has opened up in you, both your practice and your life change. In your formal practice, let the flower of compassion and emptiness bloom in your heart. In your life, let what you do and how you do it, what you say and how you say it, flow not from yourself, or your self, or even from your Self, but directly from the understanding that has awakened in you.

Point 5: Mastery

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 04:54:00 +0000

The fifth point in Mind Training in Seven Points is mastery. Whatever the discipline, mastery comes through the blending of two abilities: the ability to move and respond to what arises and the ability to go empty in what arises. The first arises through constant refinement of technique, the second through resting in mind nature.

Issai Chosanshi, in The Demon’s Sermon on Martial Art, writes:

The essence of mind is selfless and without desire, and thus at peace and undisturbed. This leads to moving without moving.

In the midst of ultimate peace and absence of desire, when external phenomena arrive, the mind responds, but is not attached to its function.

The essence of mind does not move. What moves and responds is the function of mind. The essence is at peace and contains the myriad principles and the clarity of spiritual strength. Function follows the laws of the universe and responds to innumerable situations.

You may find Cutting up an Ox, one of the poems in Thomas Merton’s The Way of Chuang Tzu, helpful in understanding the way mastery develops and how it functions. Each of Chekawa’s four instructions on mastery focus finds an echo in this poem.

First, “All instructions have one aim”, namely, the taming of a sense of self. There is much misunderstanding on what “taming the sense of self” means, and it may be helpful to clarify a few points.

A self isn’t an entity. It is a reactive pattern that presents experience as a world out there and a self in here. As a reactive pattern, it comes and goes. All of us have had moments when we are completely engaged in life. Any sense of a separate self disappears and life is, for a short time, magical and intensely meaningful. On the other hand, we also know how threat, neediness, or shame trigger a strong sense of self, as do many other factors. As I explained in Wake Up to Your Life, Chapters 5 and 6, when triggered, sense-of-self reactive patterns give rise to reaction chains associated with the five elements. Those reaction chains in turn coalesce into the reactive patterns of the six reactive emotions, giving rise to the experience of the six realms, i.e., samsara. Thus, as my teacher always said, if you cut the reactive pattern of the sense of self, you cut the root of samsara.

Classical presentations of Buddhism are often understood to mean that the aim of practice is to eliminate any sense of self. Good luck! This pattern is biologically, genetically, emotionally, psychologically, culturally, and even spiritually conditioned. It is basic to our functioning in our lives.

The point in Buddhist practice is to come to know experientially that a self is not an entity, that a sense of self is a reactive pattern. When you train deeply in attention and insight, you first see that there is no self as such. There is nothing there, that is, there is no thing that you can point to and say, “This is what I am.”

When the mind moves, you usually fall into confusion and the world of experience splits in two, self and other. In the experience of a world out there and self in here, you take both the self and the world to be real—I am here and there is a world out there.

Here is where the instruction “experience what arises as like a dream” comes into play. When you can stay in the knowing that all experience, the experience of the world out there, the experience of the self in here, is groundless, you cut the sense-of-self pattern. You experience it all as movement of mind, as if you were dreaming, and that changes how you function.

The cook in Cutting up the Ox puts it this way:

But now I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct…,

It is, however, important to note that the spirit can follow its own instinct only because the cook has trained in cutting up oxen for years. The how of cutting up an ox is deeply instilled in mind and body. If there is no training in the functioning of mind and body, there is no technique to blend with the essence of mind, and this is a mistake that many people make. A master therapist is unlikely to be a good surgeon. A master horseman is unlikely to make a good lawyer.

There is another wrinkle in here that is often overlooked. Later, the cook says:

True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away...

When we encounter difficult situations, we may then move into the world of I and other, but we do so in a different way. We listen, we feel, and we do with full attention.What we are experiencing tells us how to move and respond. In doing so, we are not confused by the “I” here and the world there. Instead, we make use of them, to listen, to feel (these are other ways of knowing) what to do. When the difficulty passes, so does any sense of I and other as separate.

If you are of the view that no sense of “I” should ever arise, I suggest you read The Mysterious Technique of the Cat in The Demon’s Sermon on Martial Arts.

The second of Chekawa’s instructions is about the two witnesses to what you do, other people and your own awareness, or, to put it another way, the external reference of social norms and the internal reference of awareness itself. When you are no longer deluded by a sense of self, you have nothing to defend. Awareness operates freely. Imbalance in what you are doing is sensed as soon as it arises. A master musician knows when a note isn’t quite right even if no one in the audience picks it up.

Thus, in Cutting up the Ox:

Method? said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
“What I follow is Tao (the way)
Beyond all methods!”

Needless to say, this instruction is susceptible to corruption, and the history of Buddhism is littered with the (figuratively speaking) corpses of those who were deluded about their own understanding, who thought they were following the Tao, but were really being led by the mechanisms of their own reactive patterns.

The third instruction is about a joyous state of mind. On this point, the cook says:

“Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away.”

Whenever the sense of self subsides and you act, a deep and quiet joy pervades your being. But action in harmony with the world, clean, and appropriate, does not elevate you above others. You do what needs to be done—no more, and no less. Then, whatever the task, cleaning up afterwards is part of it, and you do so with the same sense of joy.

The last of Chekawa’s instructions on mastery is that your practice is set in motion whenever the situation warrants it. The habits of practice are so deeply instilled in you that your body, or other parts of you, may know before anything has registered consciously that a certain word, a certain gesture, a certain action is called for, and it happens. Again, you see this principal operating in every discipline, from soccer to sculpture, from medicine to metal-working. As I write in The Magic of Vajrayana, “You do not even think about how to apply it to your life, for the moment such a thought arises, you have already separated from your life and from clear empty knowing.”

From all of this, you see that mastery does not come from deciding to be a master. It comes from long and deep practice. It comes from continuous refinement of technique and continuous resting in mind nature. This holds for everyone, even for those who have great natural talents. And this is the point of this fifth point.

Forget about achieving anything and forget about becoming a master or anyone special. Work at practice to develop skills and build capacity.

In the beginning, most people need to learn how to practice from someone who has solid practice experience. As you learn and become more skilled, you may reach a point where you are able to take feedback from your own practice experience. The critical factor is not how much practice you do, but how much you learn and assimilate in the course of practice. The primary skill to develop is, without relying on the conceptual mind to recognize imbalance and move in the direction of balance.

To build capacity, on the other hand, does take time and repetition. It takes time for capacity to build in the body, in the emotional mind, and in awareness. Capacity is almost always built through repetition. Care needs to be taken not to practice in such a way that you generate imbalances. In spiritual practice, the critical capacity to build is attention, the ability to stand in your experience of reactive patterns and be neither taken over by them or suppress them.

Devote yourself to practice, develop skills and build capacity, and let the results mature in their own way, in their own time.

Sources:

The Demon’s Sermon on Martial Arts, by Issai Chozanshi, trans. William Scott Wilson

Losing Ourselves by Jay Garfield.

The Way of Chuang Tzu, by Thomas Merton

Note:

Taking a leaf from Jay Garfield’s book, I applied Merton’s Cutting up an Ox to the mastery section of Mind Training in Seven Points.

Reflections on a Changing World

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 18:37:00 +0000

So many things are changing so deeply that I and more than a few people I know are at a loss to understand exactly what is happening and why. Some of the factors on my mind:

The pandemic, with all its inconveniences large and small, and more importantly, the constant sense of danger despite the vaccines and the very real loss of family, friends, and colleagues who have succumbed to this persistent yet unpredictable disease.
Pollution, the results of which now include not only the steady poisoning of our environment but also climate change, with changing weather patterns, floods, wildfires, disease, uncertainties in food and water supplies, and other repercussions, many of which we are only beginning to feel.
War. After almost 80 years of relative peace in Europe, the invasion of Ukraine has become a full-scale war of attrition, Europe is rapidly rearming, and hundreds of millions in Africa and the Middle East are threatened with starvation as life-sustaining fertilizer and grain shipments have been severely disrupted.
The devastation of existing social, political, and financial orders by technology in general and social media in particular, with whole sections of societies often held hostage by a few bullies who all too easily avoid being held to account.
Unprecedented levels of mass violence in the USA, including the repeated slaughter of children in their own schools.
Increasing turmoil as corporate, financial, educational, medical, judicial, scientific, and governing institutions struggle to maintain cohesion and remain viable as they come to terms with this chaotic world.
Unprecedented levels of burnout and exhaustion as professionals in virtually every arena struggle to provide financial, legal, medical, therapeutic, or other forms of service and guidance.

In an effort to get a clearer picture of what is happening and why, I have found these four sources particularly helpful (among many others):

Ray Dalio’s The Principles of Dealing with the Changing World Order (a video synopsis may be found here)
Peter Zeihan’s demographic and strategic analyses (many videos, but these two are representative: the collapse of globalization and the changing character of war
Jonathan Haidt (https://jonathanhaidt.com) in his books and articles provides thoughtful analyses of the sociological and psychological factors that have contributed to this state of affairs.
Brad Gregory’s Rebel in the Ranks, a detailed history of the Reformation and its aftermath, what it bequeathed to the world, and its ramifications (up to 2017, when the book was written).

These sources have not brought me peace of mind, exactly, but they have given me ways of placing these matters in a bigger picture.

We have entered a period of turmoil in human affairs. It has happened before, but changes of this magnitude usually happen only once in a person’s lifetime. Thus, it is almost always like nothing any of us have experienced before. It typically lasts 10-15 years. A new order eventually emerges. Whether that new order emerges peacefully or through revolution or civil war is hard to say because there are factors in play and their interactions are impossibly complex. What that new order will look like and how much of it I will live to see, I do not know.

What does any of this have to do with Buddhist practice?

The short answer is not much. The current turmoil in the world belongs to the realm of human affairs, the playing out of cycles that span decades, if not centuries, cycles that are affected and sometimes disrupted by the unpredictable effects of new technologies on the functioning of human society and the dynamics of the planet on which we live.

The world of human affairs is the world of human affairs. It is not samsara. Nor is it nirvana.

Samsara and nirvana do not refer to situations in the world. They are ways that we experience life. This is an important to understand and remember.

Samsara is how we experience life when we do not know what we are. In that unknowing, we take the way life presents itself to us as real—a world out there and a sense of a self in here that perceives the world out there. Clouded by confusion about the nature of experience and clouded by patterns of reaction to what we experience, we struggle. Unfortunately, the way we struggle is self-perpetuating and it is difficult to break that cycle.

The aim of Buddhist practice is to break that cycle, to end that struggle. That is nirvana.

Nirvana is how we experience life when we do know what we are. This knowing is not an ordinary knowing. It is not a conceptual knowing. It is a qualitative different kind of knowing, a direct knowing not mediated by the conceptual mind. In that knowing, we are not presented with a sense of self that perceives a world out there. Instead, knowing and experience arise without separation. We are what arises in experience, all of it. In particular, in this knowing, there is no one thing that makes us what we are. And there is no “other”.

The purpose of Buddhist practice is to develop the skills and capacities that make it possible to develop, uncover, fall into, or be visited by this knowing.

Hence the instruction from countless mystics, from Ajahn Chah to Rumi, from Niguma to Julian of Norwich, from Chuang Tzu to Black Elk, to open and listen to everything that arises in experience. It is all we have and all we ever will have. Through practice we find a way of being with all that we experience, a way in which we don’t react to any part of it and, in doing so, we no longer inflict on others our inability to know and experience what arises in our lives.

Why is there so much Buddhist teaching on practice in difficult times?

Clearly, it isn’t to help us resolve the difficult times. That is almost always beyond our power. Personally, I think it is because difficult times bring out deeper levels of reactivity, levels that in turn place more demands on our practice. In meeting those demands, we have to move to deeper levels of understanding, insight, clarity, compassion, and peace. When we are able to meet difficult situations and not fall into reaction, struggle and suffering end. That is the purpose of all the practices we do, from basic attention to awakening mind to deity and energy practice to mahamudra.

If you are making this journey, that is what you are called to do.

More than a few people who know little or nothing of spiritual practice per se also speak to deeper or higher levels of knowing. Two such are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Hannah Arendt.

From Solzhenitsyn:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

Through my own practice, I also came to understand that good and evil do not exist out there. Evil, whatever form it takes, is the result of deliberate ignoring. Good, then, is the result of paying attention. The dividing line is in me. If I can meet what arises without reacting to it, then, again in Buddhist terminology, the five aspects of timeless awareness come into play—seeing clearly, appreciating differences, sensing balance and imbalance, doing what needs to be done, and being in all of that in direct knowing. In particular, others do not arise as “other”. They arise as human beings like me. On the other hand, if I fall into reaction, then something in me shuts down. I ignore or disregard some aspect of experience, imbalances arise, and problems ensue, in me, and in the world around me. I lose touch with my own humanity and visit that loss on others. This, for me, is the essence of evil, the ignoring of another person’s humanity, the relegation of another human being to the category of “other”.

Arendt in her essay Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship writes:

the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds.

Spiritual practice acts like a mirror, and sooner or later, you find yourself looking in that mirror. For me, the only question that counts at that point, is “Do I work with what I see, or do I turn away?” Why, I cannot say, but I have repeatedly chosen and continue to choose to work with what I see. For this, I feel deeply grateful, though to whom or what I cannot say. It has not been easy, but the alternative always seems to be worse. In this process, I have to question not only myself, but everything that I think I know or understand. And I think this is what Arendt is pointing to. The qualities that develop in us from questioning ourselves deeply are precisely the qualities that make it difficult for us to accept things at face value or how they are presented to us by an arbitrary authority. These same qualities may make it possible for us to exercise personal responsibility even when it means that we may pay for it with our welfare, our well-being, or even our lives.

Both these people had deep experience with authoritarian regimes. Given where we may be heading, I think it is worth paying attention to what they have to say. We may not be able to affect the course of human affairs, but at least we can live and die knowing that we did not let such authoritarianism, in all its different guises, infect us with its ideology and strip us of our humanity. We all have to die at some time. Some ways of dying are worse than others.

Point 4: Condensing Practice

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:01:00 +0000

The fourth point in Mind Training in Seven Points is a condensation of the essential points of Mahayana Mind Training—the Five Powers. Here, the Five Powers refer to five principles of practice for experienced practitioners. To my knowledge, these Five Powers have no connection or correlation with the five powers and the five strengths that appear in the thirty-seven factors of awakening.

The five powers describe how to make the transition from practice as something you do to practice as something that is part of you. This being the fourth point, it is assumed that you have a developed a solid basis through groundwork (point 1), are thoroughly familiar with the main practice (point 2), and understand how to live the practice in your life (point 3).

The five powers are particularly relevant for practitioners in today’s world where we have access to a proliferation of teachings and practices.It is all too easy to take a little from here and a little from there and put together a program of practice that may or may not cover the essentials. Often, as I discovered when I was teaching, practitioners who developed such practice programs wittingly or unwittingly left out important aspects of practice and wondered why, after ten or twenty years, they saw little or no change in their spiritual development. For whatever reason, they were unable to make the transition from practice as something they do to practice as part of who they are.

This transition is often not easy. To make it, you must give up the illusion of control over your life and be willing to work with whatever comes your way. You must shift from working on the practice to letting the practice work on you. When you let the practice work on you, what you think about what is happening—whether practice is going well, whether you are going to achieve anything, whether you have what it takes, and so on—becomes irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that you do the practice. When you take this approach to practice, practice slips beneath the cognitive mind and you feel its impact emotionally and physically. At first, you may not notice anything, but over time, as you give yourself over and over again to the practice, you find that changes take place in how you sit and move, how you speak and listen, how you experience the world, and how you respond to what you experience—in ways that you did not anticipate or expect.

What I present here applies to any practice, but I’m going to put this in the context of Mahayana Mind Training, and specifically, bodhicitta, awakening mind, the union of compassion and emptiness.

One

Let’s assume you are familiar, deeply familiar, with your practice. You have worked at it for a long time, you know its ins and outs, you know the pitfalls, you know what needs to happen, but for some reason the practice hasn’t gelled, taken root, or blossomed—whatever metaphor is most apt for you. Rather than doing the practice, an approach that always has a sense of performance to it, throw yourself into the spirit of the practice. This is a bit like jumping off a cliff. Throw yourself into the union of compassion and emptiness. Let yourself drop into being completely open and completely responsive—nothing for you to hold onto, nothing inside you and nothing outside you. You are completely naked, without even a skin to mark the point at which “you” ends and “the world out there” begins. Practice from there. Do taking and sending from there. Live from there.

In the beginning, do this for very short periods, just a few seconds. Both body and mind often react with shock when you do this, and practicing in or from a state of shock is not helpful. Instead, do this for just a few seconds, enough time to register the shift, but not so long that you go into shock. Do this three or four times, and then rest, letting body and mind adjust. If you do too much, body and mind become rigid and brittle, and this is not a good place from which to practice. When you do this a few times each day, over the course of weeks or months, you may find that you can actually rest in the shift, at least for short periods. Gradually, very gradually, extend the time, always letting body and mind adjust to the shift. Don’t push away what arises. Just keep connecting with bottomless emptiness and infinite compassion and practice from there.

Two

When you practice this way, you experience all kinds of ups and downs. Don’t be carried away by the ups or the downs. They are just part of the process through which mind and body adjust. Instead, let the momentum of your previous practice carry you through them. Keep coming back to the union of compassion and emptiness. With the ups, give away the joy, happiness, or love that arises, and take in the struggles and suffering of the world. For the downs, take in the comparable struggles and sufferings and give away the joy and well-being, the comfort and security, you know. This is one of the great aspects of mind training, and of awakening mind—whatever you experience, you incorporate right into the practice. This is not a heavy handed incorporation. When you feel good, touch it, send it out, take in others’ suffering, and move on. When you feel bad, touch it, take in the pain of others’, give away your own joy and well-being, and move on. The point of this principle is not for you to feel better, but for you to relate to what arises in a different way.

Three

Strew your life with seeds of spiritual growth. Let compassion and emptiness express themselves in your life. You don’t need to do anything dramatic. In fact, it is more important and more helpful to focus on little things, on how you speak, on how you move, on how you cook, or how you clean up after a meal, on how you take care of your children, how you drive, how you shop, and so on. When you bring attention to how you take care of the ordinary routines of life, you soon become aware of all kinds of conditioned behaviors. Don’t try to change the behaviors directly, as many people do with their New Year’s resolutions. This approach is rarely effective. Instead, find a small way in which you can start to change a behavior. For instance, in putting dishes away in a cupboard, drop open and then put the dishes away. Or, if you notice that you often interrupt others, take a breath before you speak, and see what happens. If you always drive in the passing lane, try driving in a different lane. Be creative and sow seeds everywhere. Practically speaking, three or four at any one time is enough, and won’t overwhelm you. Remember, small changes are easier to make than large ones. Yet once a trickle of water seeps through a dam, it’s only a matter of time until the dam gives away. In the same way, once a seed of change that you have planted sprouts, it’s only a matter of time until the way you experience life changes.

Four

In everything you do, do it without a sense of self. Whenever you notice that you are focused on your self, on how you are doing something, on what it means to you, and so on, go empty. How do you go empty? If you have a connection with awakening mind, bodhicitta, drop into it, and then go about whatever you were doing. If that connection is not strong or stable, then take a breath, and exhale slowly. Then go about whatever you were doing. Don’t try to use thinking to let go of a sense of self—the results are always absurd. “Oh, I’m letting go of my sense of self,” is one of the surest ways to solidify it.

A sense of self is closely connected to the illusion of control. The feeling of being in control is one of the more reliable indications that a sense of self has taken over. When you feel in control, go empty. When you go empty, there is often a moment of fright, because something in you knows that you are not in control. Experience that moment of fright, and go about your life from there. In this way, you nourish awakening mind by meeting what arises in compassion and emptiness.

Five

Make a wish. Make many wishes. Make big wishes. It is said that of the thousand buddhas that will appear in this eon, the last one aspires to do more to help beings than the nine hundred and ninety-nine buddhas who will have already appeared. That’s a big wish. Make a comparable wish and try it on for size. See what happens. Aspirations such as these plant seeds in you that will grow into intentions. Intentions grow into actions. When you act, things change. At the beginning and end of each day, take a moment and dream a little dream about bodhicitta growing in you, and then let that dream become a wish.

Rely on these same five powers when you feel death knocking at your door. Not only my own teachers, but Kongtrul the Great, the author of The Great Path of Awakening, all see the five powers as the best way to meet the end of your life, and you can practice them every night as you go to sleep.

Nothing in what I’ve written here is about being a better person, being healthier, healing old wounds, being more effective in your life, or getting more done. These five sources of power describe how you create the conditions in which your spiritual practice becomes how you actually live. Instead of trying to be a certain way (an approach that inevitably involves a sense of self and a sense of control), use these five principles to set in motion dynamics that do not depend on the conceptual mind, but on touching the union of compassion and emptiness that is the very core of your being.

Point 3: Living Practice

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 16:22:00 +0000

The third point in Mind Training in Seven Points is living practice. In living practice, you bring whatever you have developed in formal practice to how you live your life. In particular, you bring it to difficult situations.

Difficult times bring out deeper levels of reactivity, levels that in turn place more demands on our practice. In meeting those demands, we have to move to deeper levels of understanding, insight, clarity, compassion, and peace. In other words, difficult situations make practice easier: you don’t have to hunt for reactive patterns or try to get in touch with them. There they are in all their glory, waiting as only a machine can wait—insentient, devoid of life—for the right trigger to set them in motion and make a mess of your life once again.

Practice is not intended to make difficult situations less difficult. It is not intended to resolve them or make them go away. Instead, through meeting difficult situations, you build the skills and capacities that make it possible for you to stand in powerful reactions, experience them without being taken over by them, know what they are, and let them resolve themselves. To put it another way, one way you fulfill the bodhisattva vow is to not indulge confusion—not fall into confusion and make others suffer for your inability to experience what arises in you.

Movement in mind does not by itself cause you to fall into confusion and reaction. You fall into confusion and reaction because as soon as the mind moves, something in you takes the movement as I or other. That something has many names, but it is sufficient to say that it is a deeply conditioned pattern with great momentum. When it operates, the field of experience splits in two and you have once again taken birth in samsara.

How do you live practice? As in the second point, for any instruction there are three steps:

learn how to do it.
train it until it becomes second nature.
remove everything in you that prevents it from taking expression when it is called for.

Trying to remember an instruction is not enough. The conceptual mind is too slow and too weak. Nor is it a matter of observation, observing the contents of your mind. That just reinforces a sense of I separate from what you experience.

Whatever the discipline, these three steps are essential if you are going to live your practice.

Broadly speaking, two kinds situations drop you into confusion: pleasurable ones and painful ones. Pleasurable situations can be just as problematic as painful ones, and you are more likely to be seduced by them. In pleasurable situations, you relax. Attention dissipates, and the next thing you know, you have fallen into reaction, succumbing to pride, desire, jealousy, or greed.

When life is good, enjoy it. As you do, however, keep three themes in mind and touch into them again and again.

The first theme is emptiness. Open completely to the experience of pleasure, in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and then ask, “What experiences this?” Don’t try to answer. Just look, and rest in the looking for a few moments. You see nothing. As you touch emptiness, the pleasure doesn’t go away. It may take on a dream-like quality, there and not there at the same time, but it’s still there. You are just less likely to be hooked by it.

The second theme is interdependence. How did this pleasurable situation come about? It is the result of many different factors, and it is absurdly arrogant to take the view that you and you alone are responsible for it. Open to all the many factors that came together to give rise to this pleasure, and then to the totality of what you experience right now.

The third theme is taking and sending. Send the pleasure you experience to others, and in return, take in their pain, confusion, and struggles. Here you experience pain and pleasure at the same time.

None of these themes change the actual experience of pleasure. They do, however, ground you in groundlessness. Life is a mystery and it arises like a dream. Contrary to a deeply held belief, you are not the sole author of what you experience. And pain and pleasure are always present—in every situation, in every person, in every part of you.

When you live practice this way, do so quietly, consistently, and with a light touch. Do it without fanfare, without patting yourself on the back.

The same instructions apply when you encounter unpleasant or painful situations. The route is different, but you still end up experiencing pleasure and pain at the same time, taking in the pain of others and giving to them whatever is good in your own life (and, no matter how bad the situation may be, there is always something good).

This way of living is described by many masters. In the Hsin Hsin Ming, the 3rd Patriarch of Zen wrote:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything.

Niguma, one of the progenitors of the Shangpa tradition in Tibet, said it this way:

Like and dislike are the mind’s disease,
Certain to drown you in samsara’s seas.
Know that there is nothing here at all,
And then, my child, everything is gold.

Point 2: Practice

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 17:39:00 +0000

The second point in Mind Training in Seven Points is practice. In a spiritual context, practice is what you do to make an instruction come alive in your life. It involves a steady refinement of skills and capacities that typically proceeds through three steps. The first step is to learn how to do the instruction. The second step is to train that instruction until it becomes second nature. The third step is to remove everything in you that prevents the instruction from taking expression when it is called for.

These three steps, learning, training, and removal, must all take place at three levels, the level of the body, the level of feeling and thinking, and the level of awareness—in other words, the whole of your being. In some traditions, you begin with the body and work up to the level of awareness. In other traditions, you might start at the level of awareness, and work down to include feeling, thinking, and the body. Some train all three levels simultaneously.

Because Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes mind, many people practice with little or no engagement of the body. In a compassion practice such as taking and sending, for instance, they are often unaware or worse, ignore, how emotional resistance to compassion takes expression in the body and ride over it. This, of course, is a form of suppression, and results in problems down the line. The body level is important because, for me at least, it is where I most reliably detect imbalances.

Another important element in practice is listening, listening to the body, listening to feelings, even the small ones that are often afraid to make themselves known, and listening to the sound of your own voice, both the voice you use to communicate with others and the interior voices that various parts of you use to communicate with each other. There are other levels of listening that are more difficult to describe, but these three give you a good start.

Listening doesn’t mean that you take what you hear at face value. Just because something feels right doesn’t necessarily make it so. Take listening deeper, until you know not only what is being said but also who or what you are listening to and who or what is listening. This knowing is not arrived at through analysis, inference, or deduction. The knowing on which you rely on in practice must be a direct knowing, a knowing in which you have gone empty.

And that is probably the most important point in practice, that you learn how to go empty, whatever practice you are doing—whether it is a physical practice, a ceremony or ritual, a prayer, the cultivation of some quality be it compassion, loving kindness, or devotion, or a way of experiencing life, be it as a dream, a mirage, or a reflection. It sounds simple, and it is, but simple does not mean easy. Going empty is a letting go not only of self, but also any self-investment in doing the practice or in the results of practice.

That self-investment can often recognized by a clinging to the illusion of control that arises when a transition begins, a transition from you working on the practice to the practice working on you. If you can, when that clinging to a sense of control arises, let it be like any other thought or movement in mind. Let it be and don't do anything with it as you step, perhaps for the first time, into the unknown.

Point 1: Groundwork

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 17:32:00 +0000

In Chekawa Yeshe Dorje's Mind Training in Seven Points, the first point is:

First, do the groundwork.

Tibetan instructions such as this one can be deceptively concise. The Tibetan word for groundwork in the text is in the plural—do the groundworks. Let's dissect this a little.

In the context of Mahayana Mind Training, this one line refers to three kinds of groundwork:

The general groundwork for spiritual practice, namely, the four reflections to change your view of life
The specific groundwork for Mahayana Mind Training, that is, the four immeasurables, particularly loving kindness and compassion
The practice session ground work, that is, teacher-union or guru yoga—a way to begin a practice session.

When you engage a practice, any practice, it is helpful to know and understand the intention of the practice. What is it meant to do?

The four thoughts are the precious human birth, death and impermanence, the workings of karma, and the shortcomings of samsara. Their intention is to re-orient your life to spiritual practice. In order to engage spiritual practice effectively, you must value spiritual practice more than anything the world has to offer (death and impermanence). You must also understand and respect that the genesis of your struggles is in you, in how you act and react to what happens in your life (karma). And you must be clear that emotional reactions, no matter how justified or understandable they may seem, will never bring about peace (shortcomings of samsara). The four thoughts are tried and tested practices to develop those understandings, but they don’t work for everyone. How you find a way to those understandings is up to you, but you need to come to them somehow, through reflection, through life experience, or through some other way. But keep in mind that, as someone once said, “Experience is the best teacher, but her bills are horrendous.”

The specific groundwork for Mahayana Mind Training is loving kindness and compassion. Taking and sending enhances and deepens those qualities, but it does not generate them. You have to have developed a relationship with these two qualities in order to do taking and sending. The loving kindness and compassion here are not ordinary loving kindness or ordinary compassion. They are spiritually motivated, that is, they arise from touching the universality of the human condition, they are cultivated without regard to social or cultural contexts, and their aim is the wish that every being goes beyond the conceptual mind, knows and experiences the groundlessness of experience, and thus touches the peace and freedom that lies at the very core of our being. For a power approach to the four immeasurables, see Chapter 7 in Wake Up to Your Life. For an ecstatic approach, see The Four Immeasurables—Practice.

As for the groundwork for a practice session, in teacher-union practice you pray to your teacher or other figure that embodies what you, yourself, seek to know. Through prayer, you form a relationship with what you do not yet know, and that relationship provides a basis for your formal practice session. In prayer, in reaching out this way, you raise the level of energy in your system, and that higher level of energy also acts as a basis for your formal practice.

Many people regard groundwork as the preliminaries to practice (as ngöndro is often translated), the stuff you have to do before you do the real stuff. I felt the same way for a long time. It wasn’t until I encountered pretty severe difficulties (those horrendous bills that you have to pay when experience is your teacher) that I began to appreciate the importance of groundwork. In particular, I found that working at groundwork practices brings about three changes:

It brings out and strengthens the willingness to practice,
It develops skills and understandings that mature only through repetition and experience, and
It builds capacities and abilities that are needed to engage practice fruitfully.

Thus, when I began to teach, I consistently encouraged students to take the time to build a solid foundation.

The Middle Way and the Vertical

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 21:14:00 +0000

We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we use to create them.

—Albert Einstein

I have lost track of how many conversations I’ve had over the last few months about polarization in today’s world, despair about the future of this country, of Western society, or the environment, or the interregnum we seem to have entered with the crumbling of institutions and the order on which they were based.

Here are a few thoughts.

In Aspirations for Mahamudra, Rangjung Dorje writes:

It doesn’t exist: even buddhas do not see it.

It doesn’t not exist: it is the basis of samsara and nirvana.

No contradiction: the middle way is union.

May I know the pure being of mind, free of extremes.

Implicit in this verse is some very important meditation instruction.

The first two lines are two opposing views, each supported by an incontrovertible argument.

Mind does not exist. Why? Even buddhas do not see it.

We are not talking about belief here. If you tell me something exists, it has to be sensible, able to be perceived, in some way. I cannot sense mind, and if even the most capable people in the world, i.e., buddhas, cannot sense mind, then what does it mean to say it exists?

On the other hand, to say mind does not exist is also wrong. Why? Mind is the basis of all experience—samsara and nirvana being an elegant way of saying all experience.

These are not abstract philosophical propositions. On the one hand, when I look at mind, I do not see anything. There isn’t anything there. On the other, because I experience sights, sounds, thoughts, and emotions, something is going on. I must have a mind.

The next line says that this is not a contradiction. How does that work? This is where the vertical comes in. They come together, not in the sense of merging with each other, but in the sense of no longer being contradictory.

A basic principle of Buddhist practice is that when you have two apparently contradictory positions, hold them both at the same time. Do not go in the direction of one or the other. Hold them both.

That is, essentially, the definition of the Middle Way. The Middle Way is not about balance. It is about avoiding falling into an extreme position—order or chaos, eternalism or nihilism, monism or pluralism, etc. To avoid falling into an extreme position, hold both poles in mind at the same time. Don’t try to reconcile them. Don’t try to balance them. Just hold them, both of them. This is not an intellectual exploration. It has to go deeper than that.

It may take a while. It may take days, months, or even years. Eventually, you see that both views come from a common source, a source you may not be able to put into words, but a source that you can sense, intuit, or feel deep in your being.

It is as if these two conflicting views are two sides of the same coin. You could not see the coin before. You could only see one side or the other, so heads and tails were in conflict. But when you see the coin itself, everything shifts. The seeming contradiction disappears, not because heads and tails merge, but because heads and tails are seen to be two facets of something that you can now see.

In the case of mind, you come to a knowing that is totally different from the knowing that you are used to. I’ve translated the word for that knowing as the pure being of mind. Others have translated it as mind nature. It is empty, clear, and unrestricted.

This is a movement into the vertical because this knowing is a higher knowing. It is not a rational knowing. It is not a conceptual knowing. But it is a knowing, and when you are able to touch it, apparent contradictions disappear—form and emptiness, for instance, or movement and stillness, or sound and silence.

What is important here is the move to the vertical, a move that comes about through holding apparently contradictory positions at the same time for a long enough period of time for a higher knowing to form.

When you move to the vertical, you are able to experience divergent views, but the move comes at a cost: you cannot hold onto either of the earlier positions as absolute. Long cherished beliefs may have to be let go. Some people find that too difficult. They prefer to hold on to those cherished beliefs, even it it means they stay in turmoil and conflict.

As for applying this principle in your life, make it part of your practice. Hold opposing views in your meditation until the move to the vertical takes place, until there is a shift in how you see and understand. It is impossible to say how long this may take, anywhere from a few minutes to a few years. You cannot manufacture higher orders of knowing with a wave of the hand.

When you discover how powerful and how wonderful this method can be, you may want to share it with others. That is much trickier. In doing so, you are essentially moving into a teacher role. You must be capable of holding a field of attention in which the movement to the vertical can take place. I did so, both with students and in my business consulting. In both situations, I was in a position to hold the field of attention and address the emotional material that inevitably arises when people see they have to let go of cherished beliefs.

Better, I think, is to plant seeds, and let the seeds sprout and grow at their own rate. To plant a seed, introduce a different perspective, but don’t argue for it or defend it. Just introduce it and trust that if the ground is fertile, it will sprout when the time is right.

Cultivating Faith

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 21:09:00 +0000

Why do people today have so much trouble developing faith?

Faith, unfortunately, is often not well regarded in our culture. In the minds of many, it is equated with belief. It is also equated with hope. It is also regarded as something that is irrational, a position adopted without supporting evidence. This last view of faith is particularly pernicious in my opinion because it implies that there is no valid form of knowing outside of the logical or rational mind—and that is just not true. These views are pervasive, and many people have difficulty in letting them go and giving themselves to a path in which faith looms large.

Rather than say more about those difficulties, I am going to describe a way of practice through which different aspects of faith have developed in me. Here, I’m using the word faith to refer to the willingness to open to whatever arises in experience. In this respect, it is the antithesis of belief, even though many people use these words interchangeably. In this vein, James Carse in The Religious Case Against Belief presents a clear distinction faith from belief.

In the Tibetan tradition, to develop faith in one’s teacher or the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha), the usual instruction is to contemplate the qualities of one’s teacher, or The Three Jewels. This approach did not work for me—too much thinking, too much scope for idealization, and too much propensity to degenerate into belief.

A first step for me was to acknowledge that there was something I wanted to know—the nature of mind, for instance, or emptiness, or whatever term you want to use. I had to acknowledge that to know that was more important to me than anything the conventional world had to offer.

That is a reasonable starting point because I think it is very difficult to practice effectively unless you feel that way. To acknowledge that to myself was not easy because to do so meant that I was no longer in control of my life. Control is an illusion, of course, but it is an illusion that many of us in the West are loathe to give up.

Once I acknowledged that I wanted to know mind nature, it was clear that I was going to follow that calling and submit to its demands, whatever they were, wherever they led me. And that, right there, is one aspect of faith.

A second step was to acknowledge that to know what I wanted to know required a completely different kind of knowing or understanding. It was not hard to arrive at an intellectual, a conceptual, understanding of mind nature, say. But a conceptual understanding did not take me very far. It was like trying to taste an apple by thinking about an apple. It just doesn’t do the job.

One can, of course, go into all the subtleties of emptiness, all the philosophical ins and outs, as masters and scholars have over the ages, but that path never appealed to me, and my teacher never encouraged it.

When I came to understand that a completely different kind of understanding was required, I was stuck. I did not know how to proceed. Sitting meditation has always been difficult for me and I just could not develop the kind of stable clear attention that was described in the texts and that other people talked about and which, supposedly, led to the knowledge I sought. What to do?

Largely through grinding away at the ngöndro or groundwork practices, I first came to understand prayer as a way to form an emotional connection with what I sought to know. In teacher-union practice (guru yoga), for instance, you pray to your teacher as the embodiment of awakened mind, or, to put it another way, as the actual knowing of mind nature. In a series of blogposts in 2016, I discussed in some detail a prayer that is the central to that practice. You can find the blogposts starting at https://musingsbyken.blogspot.com/2016/05/line-1-treasured-teacher-i-pray-to-you.html

Over time, however, I came to see prayer and faith differently. I came to see faith as a kind of knowing, an opening to whatever I was experiencing, and prayer as a way of building that ability. In other words, prayer became the primary way through which I developed or deepened faith.

For me, as least, it was important to rely on actual prayers and to give voice to them. If I just said them in my mind, they did not engage my body. Giving voice to them, saying them out loud, became a physical declaration that I was reaching into the unknown and was prepared to receive whatever came of that. For a long time, actually giving voice to my deepest longings was quite difficult. It required a ruthless honesty that acknowledged that I really was reaching out to the unknown.

That has become the essence of prayer for me, whether it’s the prayer of refuge, a prayer to my teacher, or a prayer to buddhas and bodhisattvas along the lines that I wrote in The Magic of Faith.

What I want to know is not in what I know. It is in the unknown, and prayer is the first step in forging a relationship with it.

There are many different kinds of prayer, and the kind I’m talking about here might be called supplicatory prayer, reaching out, asking, to connect with what I don’t know. I have to do this with complete humility. Any sense that I know what I am doing, any sense that I am in control, any sense of “I” at all, means that prayer stays in the conceptual domain, and goes nowhere. Thus, prayer is also a way of letting go of “I”. This is not easy, for any number of reasons including not only my psychological and cultural conditioning, but also my academic training and the way we are conditioned to think in this culture.

Basically, to reach out to the unknown means that I have to step into the unknown. That is where the relationship begins to form and that is how faith grows.

Rest in the experiencing of breathing.

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Sun, 02 May 2021 20:41:00 +0000

When you do your regular meditation practice, sit comfortably, and let your breath settle a bit. Then, as you breath out, let the exhalation be a little bit longer than your natural breathing rhythm for three or four breaths. Then let your breath come and go naturally.

Now rest in the experience of breathing. Don’t focus on any one thing. Just rest in the experience of breathing.

As you rest in the experience of breathing, you see that it is both very simple and amazingly rich. There are countless sensations associated with breathing, and your inclination is to focus on one or other of them—the sensation of the breath moving through the nostrils, the movement of the diaphragm, the expansion and contraction of the lungs and torso, the coolness at the back of your mouth during the inhalation, and so on and so and so on. In many methods of meditation you do focus attention on specific aspects of the breath. In this instruction, however, I am pointing you to a different approach.

Rather than focus your attention on any of these, keep the field of attention open. Whenever you notice a sensation—the ones mentioned above or any other, include it in your field of attention while you rest in the whole experience of breathing. You don’t have to name the sensation or identify it. It’s enough to include it.

Your attention may collapse down onto a sensation you notice. If that happens, return to the experience of breathing and rest there. The sensation you noticed will probably come and go in your field, that is, you will sometimes be aware of it and sometimes not. That is also part of the experience of breathing. Keep returning to the experience of breathing, keeping the field of attention open, and include in the field everything you experience.

Sometimes you may feel that your attention is darting from one sensation to another. Don’t try to control it. Whenever you notice your attention darting around, let it dart around as you rest in the open field of attention and the experience of breathing. Darting attention is sometimes an aspect of your experience of breathing.

Thoughts and feelings may come. Some of them may come and go on their own. Others may grab your attention. When that happens, sooner or later you realize, “Oh, I’ve been distracted,” Again, don’t try to control your mind by focusing on the breath. Return to the experience of breathing and the open field of attention, and, to the extent that you are able, include the thinking and feeling and all the associated sensations.

Do the same with sleepiness or dullness. This is a little more difficult, but dullness, too, is a sensation. Include it in the field of attention. That dullness, also, is sometimes part of the experience of breathing.

Keep coming back to the experience of breathing and resting there.

As you do this on a regular basis, you may see that some of the sensations of breathing are more pronounced or more present on some days than others. No matter. Whatever you experience on a given day as you rest in the experience of breathing, keep including it in the open field of attention.

Some days, you may be overwhelmed with thoughts about this or that—something happening in your life, memories from the past, or thoughts about the future. You fall into distraction over and over again. Some days are like that. To the best of your ability, keep returning to the experience of breathing, even if it’s only for a second or two before the next thought grabs your attention and carries you away. Keep returning and resting, accepting the turmoil the same way you accept a howling wind, or thunder and lightning.

Some days, you may experience and deep stillness or peace, extraordinary well-being, even bliss, or moments or periods of almost blinding clarity. No matter. Include these experiences as you rest in the experience of breathing. You find yourself hoping for those experiences or fearing that you will never experience them again. No matter. Include all that, too, in your field of attention.

Over time, you find that your relationship with all the comings and goings of your mind changes. Whether you are busy or steady as you practice, clear or dull, happy or in pain, the breath is always there to return to, as is that open field of attention. You begin to sense a quietness, a stillness, a peace, that has little to do with how you are feeling or what is going on on any given day. And there is a concomitant clarity, even when you are sleepy or dull. Everything you experience is there in that clarity and peace, but it seems the clarity and peace are not clouded or affected for better or worse by what arises as you breathe.

Clouds appear and dissolve in the sky. The sky does not obstruct clouds and clouds do not obstruct the sky.

When you notice that clarity and peace, you may be tempted to hold onto it, or try to generate it, or control it. Whatever you try to do with it, you fail. If, instead, you keep returning and resting in the experience of breathing, you may see that you, that is, the sense you have of yourself, is also a sensation in the open field of attention, and that it is not you at all who is sitting there meditating. And that is a kind of freedom, freedom from the tyranny of "I".

People try so hard to understand all this, but they try to understand it with their minds, and it just doesn’t work. The understanding we seek has nothing to do with us. It is not something we can make happen. The best we can do is to create conditions. Resting in the experience of breathing in the way I’ve described here is one way to create those conditions.

Translator's Studio: Garab Dorje's Three Lines

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 21:14:00 +0000

What makes a translation work? For poetry and for practice-related texts—pointing-out instructions, oral pith instructions, songs of mystical insight, and even certain sutras—what makes a translation work is the effect it has on the reader. Ideally, when I translate a text, the translation elicits an experience in the reader that is at least an echo of what I experience when I read the original.

Garab Dorje’s Three Lines That Hit the Nail on the Head is probably the most famous pointing-out instruction in the Dzogchen tradition. It is a profound and somewhat enigmatic first-century text that has inspired much commentary and instruction. Numerous translations have been made. I have translated it three or four times myself. None of them, I feel, reflects either the power or the poetry of the original. What, I wondered, would happen if I broke a few conventions and really focused on the experiential quality? In this article, I lift up the hood on the translation process and show you a little of how I go about it, what happens, and what it leads to.

For those of you who know Tibetan, the three lines are these:

ངོོ་རང་ཐོོག་ཏུ་སྤྲད༔
ཐག་གཅིིག་ཐོོག་ཏུ་བཅད༔
གདེེང་གྲོོལ་ཐོོག་ཏུ་བཅའ༔

Tibetan is a monosyllabic language. Almost every syllable is a word in its own right. Because the formal written language was developed to express Buddhist thought and practice, it often takes only a few syllables to express profound instructions and insights. Yet even by Tibetan standards these three lines are extraordinarily dense. They pack a punch in their combination of key technical terms, poetic meter, alliterative emphasis, precise instruction, and experiential impact.

A word-for-word rendering with minimal accommodation to English idiom or grammar might read this way:

Meet your own face directly.
Cut one rope directly.
Go with confidence and release directly.

As they say in business, “Price, quality, service—pick any two.” The same often holds for translation. Literal accuracy, clear meaning, experiential impact—pick any two. In most translations the highest priority is literal accuracy. If the translation conveys the meaning clearly, so much the better. Experiential impact is rarely a consideration. The absence or presence of experiential impact becomes obvious when you read a translation out loud.

From the perspective of literal accuracy, the phrase meet face in the first line is an idiom and is usually rendered in English as “recognize.” “Face” is taken to refer to one’s own mind or mind nature. Thus a typical translation might read “Recognize your own face,” “Recognize your own nature,” or “Recognize mind nature.”

In the second line, Cut a rope is also an idiom. It means “Decide.” Thus we have “Decide on one option.” However, the word “decide” in English is quite a bit weaker than the Tibetan idiom. The Tibetan carries the idea of coming to a decision so deeply that all other options are eliminated. “Conviction” might be one possible rendering, but because one can be convinced about something that is completely wrong, it is not the right word. In an earlier translation, I had tried “Be absolute about one point”—a choice that is accurate in terms of meaning, perhaps, but unattractive in terms of sound and rhythm.

Literal accuracy, clear meaning, experiential impact—pick any two.

Finally, in the third line, the idea is to continue, to keep going, to become familiar with this way of experiencing life. You have recognized your own face or nature. You have decided on the one option. Now you make it part of your life by relying on your confidence in the experience that movements in mind release themselves or let go on their own. The idea of release is often rendered as “liberation,” or “liberate,” but the form of the verb in Tibetan has no agent; there can be no liberator as such. Because an agent is implied by “liberate”— someone or something sets you free—some translations use the term “self-liberate.” It is workable, but I feel that the image is wrong, and with four syllables it is clumsy English. I use the word “release” because, at least in theory, an outer agent is not necessarily implied. A knotted snake unties itself. Thoughts and other movements in mind just let go, seemingly without reason or agent. They vanish as they arise, like drawings on water or snowflakes on a hot stove, when the energy in your attention is at a sufficiently high level. But I am getting ahead of myself a little.

When we choose literal accuracy as our top priority, we usually end up with something like this:

Recognize directly your own nature.
Decide directly on one option.
Continue directly with confidence in release.

This translation has quite a bit going for it. It is clear, to the point, and straightforward. I am being told to take three actions: recognize, decide, and continue. Yet although the translation makes sense, it does not move me. As I think about it, questions arise. What does “recognize directly” mean? It doesn’t sound quite like English. Ditto for “decide directly” and “continue directly.” My own nature— what’s that? One option—what option? Continue with confidence—continue what?

Stumbling blocks are places where the reader starts to think about the words. In writing and in translation, they are problematic, particularly when you are trying to move the reader into a nonconceptual experience.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD.

Now that we have a basic translation, we need to take another look at what we are doing. Is there a way to eliminate these stumbling blocks? Is there a way to make these lines pop with energy? Is there a way to make something happen in the reader? Perhaps we should start with the key ideas—recognize, decide, continue—and see what can be done with those.

Here we run into a peculiarity of English: we have two vocabularies. We have a sophisticated, intellectual, and conceptual vocabulary based on words with Latin roots, most of which came into English after the Norman Conquest. The French invasion did not obliterate the language of the countryside and the streets completely, however. Old English with its Germanic and Norse roots survived, though it first broke up into several regional dialects and then recoalesced into a common tongue. Philosophers, intellectuals, and academics generally gravitate to the Latinate vocabulary because it offers a wide range of precise terminology steeped in classical thought. Poets and writers, however, find that the energy and power of English are in the old language, in words that have Old English, Germanic, or Norse roots.

“Recognize,” “decide,” and “continue” are all Latinate—reconnaître, décider, continuer. They are accurate and precise translations, but they lack power and energy. What to do?

In translation, when I run into difficulty expressing something in English, I go back to the Tibetan and go deeper into the meaning. What does it mean to recognize your own nature, your own mind, your own face? What experience does this refer to? Where in life do we find ourselves committing to one option and eliminating all others? What does it mean to have the confidence that thoughts and emotions release themselves in the groundlessness of experience? And what about this “directly”? What’s going on with that?

“Directly” is the one word that is repeated in each line. The Tibetan is ཐོག་ཏུ (pronounced tok tu). It means “directly” or “immediately.” Again, we run into those vocabulary issues: Both these words are Latinate and both have lots of syllables. They are adverbs, too. You lose power in writing and speaking when you use too many words, too many syllables, or too many adverbs. Here we are translating pointing out instructions, which are pithy, poetic, and punchy. How do we point something out in English and deliver a punch at the same time? We say “There!” We could say “Right there!” for even more emphasis, but in writing, less is usually more. “There!” seems to say everything in one syllable.

We could also ask to what the Tibetan ཐོག་ཏུ refers. It refers to what you are experiencing right at that moment. When you sit with your teacher and follow his or her instructions, when he or she asks you a question and your mind just stops, your teacher might say “There!” or indicate in some other way that you are experiencing what he or she is pointing to. There is a sense of immediacy in the Tibetan. According to the 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is its use. If we follow his guidance, “There!” conveys the meaning at least as effectively as “directly.” Let’s try “There!” to translate ཐོག་ཏུ.

Now, what to do with “recognize”? Let’s go back to the actual experience of recognizing. Here it is not recognizing another person, but recognizing something about yourself, about what you are. Consider the situation when someone, a good friend perhaps, or someone you are getting to know, says, “Do you know that you are . . . ?” and she names some quality. It may be a compliment. It may be a criticism. It may be just an observation. At first you don’t see it. What is she referring to? She says it again or gives you an example. You still don’t see how that quality applies to you. And then you do. “Oh! Yes, I am that.” You recognize that quality in you.

That is what is happening here. A teacher, a fellow practitioner, a line in a book or a song, or a question from a student points you to a clear empty knowing that cannot be described in words, a knowing that does not rely on understanding or concept. You are a bit stunned at first; there is absolutely nothing there. But then you see. Underneath all the confusion of conceptual thinking and emotional reaction, underneath all the ideas you have about who and what you are, there is nothing—no self, not a vestige—but there is a clear empty knowing. There! This is what you are.

At this point, we could take a chance. Instead of trying to find another word for “recognize” that conveys that experience, why not go right to the experience? This is what you are. Recognition is implicit here, but that fits well with how the Tibetan original works. In Tibetan, grammar is centered more on what happens rather than who does what. Let’s take this for our first line.

There! This is what you are.

Interesting. Let’s keep going and see where this approach takes us.

The next line falls into place a little more easily. For some time now, I have been comparing mystical practice with musical practice. They are different, of course, but there is a lot of overlap in terms of the calling, the yearning, seeking out guidance, apprenticeship, training, experience, tribulations, struggles, transformation, accomplishment, and acquired skills. Many musicians pursue music at considerable cost to their health and well-being, they ignore or let go of alternative careers, and they may even neglect important relationships. They do so because they have to—nothing else matters. The same holds for mystics. Nothing else matters.

Nothing else matters? That phrase seems to capture the decisiveness of the second line better than “Decide on one point.” “Nothing else matters” conveys more than an intellectual decision. It carries emotional and experiential weight. Nothing else matters! And it does not contain any adverbs or any long words. It is a leap, of course, and it is definitely not a literal translation. However, we are going for clear meaning and experiential impact, not literal accuracy. And, perhaps fortuitously, the act of deciding now becomes implicit in this line, just as the act of recognizing became implicit in the first line. Let’s go with it.

There! Nothing else matters.

TWO DOWN, ONE TO GO.

The last line is the most difficult in Tibetan—so many ideas, so few words. We now have an additional challenge. At this point, we have

There! This is what you are.
There! Nothing else matters.

Both lines are six syllables. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to put the third line into six syllables, too? In practice, that means five, because “There!” counts as one. Five syllables to express confidence, release, and continuing—definitely a challenge.

Perhaps we could get away with using trust instead of confidence? That would help with the syllable count. But what about release? What about continue? I could not find any shorter words that might work. I tried different formulations, including one that was a bit dubious grammatically: “Trust— let it unfold.” Still, I was not satisfied. Something was off.

Most teachers explain these three lines in terms of view, meditation, action, or, to translate them in another way, outlook, practice, and behavior. Outlook is the utter groundlessness of experience, that empty clarity that is our human heritage—this is what you are. Practice consists of coming to that again and again, whatever we are experiencing—nothing else matters. Behavior, how we live this, how we make it part of our lives, is based in the confidence of what we have already experienced—movement in mind releases itself, and this knowing is always present. If we let it, this knowing unfolds in every moment we experience. Mystically speaking, we make it part of our lives by having the confidence to step out of its way and just let it be. How do we say that in five syllables?

I am OK with “Let it unfold.” It isn’t literal, of course, but it seems to carry the idea of stepping out of the way and letting awareness be itself. The sticking point is the idea of trust or confidence. Ah! To keep the parallelism with the other two lines we should make the key idea implicit rather than explicit, and the key idea in this line is confidence. How do we make it implicit? I tried different ways, but nothing worked. Then, while I was listening to a flute duet played by a couple of friends in a bookstore in Sebastopol, California, it came to me:

There! Now let it unfold.

Why does “Now” work? I’m not quite sure, and it may not work for everyone. Perhaps it’s because it says (again implicitly) that you have come to this point and there is nothing to do but live in this awareness. To do that requires a great deal of confidence—confidence that mind, or mind nature, or natural awareness, functions just fine when it is freed from the fetters of conceptualization and reactivity. “Now” seems to say all that without saying it.

We are finished. The translation is complete, or, to be precise, we have taken it as far as I know how. As you see, at each step I have chosen clear meaning and experiential impact over literal accuracy. Does it work? The only way to know is for you to read it aloud and let it resonate in you. Then you will know whether it works or not. Here you are:

There! This is what you are.
There! Nothing else matters.
There! Now let it unfold.

Links for Taking and Sending (tonglen)

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 20:46:00 +0000

Links for instruction, exploration, and practice for taking and sending and Mahayana Mind Training

noreply@blogger.com (Ken McLeod) — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 20:42:00 +0000

Taking and Sending on the Front Line

Last month I received an email from a social worker in Germany. I found it quite moving and she subsequently gave me permission to quote her email.

Here, slightly edited, is what she wrote:

I had had many really bad experiences with Tonglen (taking and sending). At the best it sent me into a deep depression and it would take me months to climb out. If I tried it when I was not in a good state of mind, I became suicidal.

Last week I was listening to a podcast from you about the 37 practices of a bodhisattva and you started to explain taking and sending. First I thought about skipping this part but finally decided that just listening to the explanation won’t harm me and that then I could still decide what to do with it. And listening to you finally there was someone who addressed my problem with Tonglen practice, a problem with which I have been struggling for about 15 years now. The teacher here had explained that I have to breathe in the bad stuff, let the heart transform it, and then breathe out the good stuff coming out of the transformation. My heart just would not transform the bad stuff I had breathed in into something positive, no matter how hard I tried. I just couldn’t do it. (This touched stuff inside me which directly sent me down the road of depression, meaning of life, why live at all...) To hear from you that this is not what the practice is about was such a relief that I gave it one more try. And it was amazing. Breathing in all the bad stuff other people experience and breathing out all the good in my life I have finally something I could do. What a relief! I couldn’t believe it. I kept doing the practice this way, and it was doable.

The next day at work (I am a social worker in a big hospital in Munich taking care of palliative patients and severely burnt patients) I was visiting a young cancer patient and her daughter. The patient herself and her daughter have both worked as cancer researchers in alternative cancer treatment, convinced in their belief that the treatments they developed could cure people. But there she was now, in a normal hospital, dying, completely in panic. In addition to the grief and pain in the face of approaching death, their whole belief system about their life’s work was also breaking down. Just physically being in a room with them was excruciating. I felt myself retreating and trying to find something to do to make it more bearable at the same time. Instead I stopped myself from reacting and did taking and sending for two or three breaths. The effect it had inside me was amazing. Instead of trying to get away from the pain, I could move toward it. My ability to just be there (there was not anything more to be done at this point) changed the atmosphere in the room completely. When I visited them the next day, the daughter followed me out of the room and thanked me.

After that I tried both ways of doing the practice, the way you describe it and the way my German teacher taught, trying to do the transformation in the heart. I wanted to get some understanding of what makes such a difference. As far as I can see at the moment, the transformation thing gets me out of direct experience and into a subject-object thing. I have to do something with the object to stop the suffering of the world. It feels like a battle lost before it had even started.

Now when I do the practice, I first just sit and let the experience of everything being mind arise, and then move into taking and sending. There is all the negative stuff but encountering it from there it is just experience happening and the good stuff is like an infinite space of joy which is just available, never getting less no matter how much I give away, not even if I try to give it all away.

This, of course, was a wonderful email to receive, and there are several points in her account that I’d like to touch on.

First, taking and sending (Tonglen) is an exchange, not a transformation in which you change the pain of the human condition into something good. As this person noted, “the transformation thing gets me out of direct experience and into a subject-object thing. I have to do something with the object to stop the suffering of the world. It feels like a battle lost before it had even started.”

This misunderstanding, which is now quite widespread, comes from an unwillingness to face the facts of the human condition, namely, that we struggle with life. We struggle with life because things are always changing. When our lives are going well, we struggle to keep them going well. When our lives are difficult, we struggle with the difficulties. We can, through practice, or through life, learn not to struggle with what arises in our lives. Taking and sending, when done as an exchange, not a transformation, leads us and trains us to be in what arises in our experience, good or bad. Or, as a friend of mine puts it, it undermines our tendency not to feel.

The second point is “let the experience of everything being mind arise.” How do you do that? Here is one method you can try. The idea for it came from a tweet by Brad Warner, a Zen teacher in LA.

Ordinarily, we think of ourselves as being in the world. But in a dream, it’s the other way round. W e feel that the world of the dream is in us in some way. (That being said, other cultures see the dream state in different ways.) Take a moment now and open to everything you experience, feeling that you are in the world. Everything, your room, buildings, cars, roads, trees, mountains, wind, sounds, etc., is, in some sense, out there. Rest in that for a few minutes. Now, imagine that you are dreaming and that you know that you are dreaming (a lucid dream). Again, open to everything, your room, buildings, cars, roads, trees, mountains, wind, sounds, etc. Feel how everything is, in some sense, in you, without trying to define what “you” are. Rest in that for a few minutes. Now bring both views together and hold them at the same time. You may experience a shift, a few moments, or longer, in which there is no thought, just knowing and experience together. Rest there.

The third point is about the nature of compassion we cultivate in Buddhist practice. In our daily lives, if a person who is clearly in pain asks for help, we usually try to do something. We see a person who, like us, is struggling in the world, and we do what we can. Now, what do you do if you are dreaming, and you know that you are dreaming, and a person in your dream who is clearly in pain asks for help? Some people say they would try to help. Other people say that there would be no point, because the person is not real. He or she is only a figment of the dream.

When we see the person as like us, a person in the world, experience arises in one conceptual frame. When we see the person as a figment of our dream, we bring another conceptual frame to our experience. Use the exercise in the second point above to elicit a shift in awareness and experience. In that way of knowing, the sense of self is not present in the usual way. Nor is the sense of other. The compassion that arises has a different quality because it is not based in a sense of I and other. Do taking and sending from there. Then the compassion you cultivate in tonglen practice is not based in a conceptual frame.

The next point is about effort. Even though this woman had been given incorrect instruction in taking and sending, she had worked at it for a long time. Was all that time and effort a waste ? Perhaps not. When she happened across the correct instruction, she could move into it quickly and effectively, possibly because of the effort she had already made.

Finally, and this is probably the most difficult point, in today’s world, you probably need to check on the instructions you are receiving. From basic meditation to taking and sending to meditation on emptiness to vajrayana practice, I have come across mistaken, misleading, and incompetent instruction over and over again. Find the best teachers you can (and the best is often not the most famous, the most well-known, the most articulate, or the most successful). Talk with other students and see how they are. Do your research here. It may save you years of problems. It may save your life.

That being said, practice rarely proceeds linearly. We may spend years at practice, struggling with feelings of futility, incompetence, or inability. Then, seemingly out of the blue, something happens. It may be an internal shift. Or it may be something we hear or see for the first time. Suddenly a way becomes clear. That’s how it is.