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.
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