How To Lose Your Mind Part 7

Practice Tip: How to Lose Your Mind Part 7

The third section of Gampopa’s text is titled Refining Thatness. Of course, thatness cannot be refined because there is nothing there to be refined. What can be refined is how thatness arises in experience. For this, Gampopa provides four instructions:

1. Groundwork,
2. Main matter,
3. Conclusion, and
4. How experiences arise. 

In the newsletter that went out at the end of March, I discussed the first point: how the groundwork for mahamudra is teacher-union practice, how the principal method in teacher-union practice is prayer, and how the cultivation of faith, devotion, and awe through prayer can lead to the joining of your mind with the mind of buddha, that is, your teacher’s mind. To review this, please go here.

We now turn to the main matter:

Consistently place mind without distraction and rest without affectation.

How do you place your mind this way? The Great Middle Way, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen traditions have countless instructions for this.

Here are a few:

"See the sky," it is said.

How do you see the sky?

Know that.

This instruction is from the Great Middle Way — the Perfection of Wisdom, to be precise. The instruction is to look at the sky, the whole sky, and see it. In the beginning, this is best practiced when there are no clouds in the sky. Later, clouds make no difference.

To see the whole sky, something inside you has to let go. For some people, that happens quite naturally. For others, it can take a while. In either case, how you see shifts. For a moment, or longer, how you experience (i.e., your mind) is undisturbed by possible distractions and you aren’t doing anything to experience things a certain way. This is to “place the mind without distraction and rest without affection.” For some people, the shift is dramatic and they have little difficulty in recognizing it. For others, it is quite subtle. At first they do not recognize it at all. Through repeated practice, perhaps with a little help from a teacher or colleague, they become aware of a difference, and then, usually, they are able to recognize the shift.

Be like a child visiting a cathedral for the first time.

This instruction is from the mahamudra tradition. The word cathedral here refers to a large space with a high vaulted ceiling and an architecture and/or other features that inspire awe — Gothic cathedrals, certainly, as well as a number of mosques, for example. A school gym is not out of the question. Yosemite Valley is a natural cathedral, as are some old forests, so old that the trees are tall and the forest floor is open with little or no undergrowth. When you enter such a space, the mind stops in awe and wonder. There is nothing to understand here. There is just awe and wonder. Bring that feeling to mind and rest. Sooner or later, something lets go inside and you are at rest, undisturbed, and not trying to do anything or experience anything in a special way. 

Don’t mull over the past.

Don’t entertain the future.

Don’t dwell on the present.

This instruction is one of the most common in the mahamudra tradition. The emphasis here is on not falling into distraction. It is a little different from the previous two instructions because, while it tells you what to do, it does so by describing a result. For this reason, people often have more difficulty with it. They try to stop thinking about the past, etc., but quickly end up in the territory of “don’t think of an elephant.” The previous two instructions may be more helpful in learning to recognize the shift. When you are able to drop into that shift at will, then this instruction takes you out of time.

Just as a bird when it flies

Leaves no trace in the sky.

As thoughts come and go,

Leave no trace — just so.

This instruction is from Longchenpa and I have taken the liberty to render it in English verse. At first it may appear to be an invitation to observe the operation of mind — thoughts coming and going without a trace. This can be beneficial, certainly, but you are still left as an observer. What happens if, like the bird, you leave no trace?

Tilopa’s Six Words

Tilopa’s Six Words are among the most famous of all mahamudra instructions. Going back to about the 10th century, they have guided countless practitioners to this empty, clear, immediate knowing.

Milarepa and Lady Paldarboom

This exchange between Milarepa and a noble lady is well worth attention. It points to a knowing that is not disturbed by the coming and going of thoughts or other movements of mind. I commented extensively on Milarepa's Song to Lady Paldarboom in Being Mahamudra 5 and Being Mahamudra 6.

As I wrote above, there are countless such instructions in the Indian and Tibetan traditions of direct awareness practice, and that does not include similar instructions from the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese traditions. How to place the mind is one of the simplest steps in mahamudra practice and, at the same time, one that many people find difficult.

Some common mistakes include:

1. Concentrating in order to exclude thoughts and other distractions. This almost never works because it creates tension and inevitably leads to suppression. Better is to learn to rest and let a deep relaxation pervade you. In that resting, thoughts may arise, but they do so without causing disturbance or distraction.
2. Creating or contriving a way of experience that may be like mahamudra but involves contorting how experience arises. This is the affected mind, the mind of affectation, an artificial peace and clarity dependent on some kind of contortion or contrivance that is not and cannot be self-sustaining.
3. Working at practice instead of letting practice work on you. Once you touch the empty clear knowing that the previous instructions bring out, practice moves from the metaphor of making a journey to the metaphor of a flower opening. How does a flower bloom? On its own time and in its own way. 
   
4. Your mind is how experience arises for you. Other than coming back to empty clear knowing whenever you fall into confusion, distraction, or reaction, there is nothing for you to do. The presence of empty clear knowing does the rest, in its own way, on its own time. It works on you in ways that you are unlikely to notice or be aware of. What it does and how it does it is not your business. Your task is to rest in that empty clear knowing, without distraction, without affectation, without working at something.

Basically, the trick is to throw yourself off a cliff and miss the ground as you come down. That’s all.