We continue with the third section of Gampopa’s text How to Lose Your Mind. Of the four topics in this section, we now turn to the third:
For the conclusion, once all that appears is experienced as mind, refine the vitality of awareness.
That is how I originally translated the sentence. Now, however, I am dissatisfied with the translation because the English word “conclusion” is misleading.
The preceeding section, the main matter, is about the ineffable clarity, the empty, clear knowing, or whatever you prefer to call it, that you have touched. As I have said elsewhere, once you have touched that empty, clear knowing, the metaphor of a flower blooming is often more helpful than the metaphor of making a journey from A to B. What is being refined is not the empty, clear knowing, but the vitality of that empty clear knowing, that is, how it arises and plays out in your experience of life.That vitality is like a flower, gradually or suddenly blooming in your life.
In this context, the Tibetan word rjes (pron. jay) is not a conclusion in the sense of wrapping up everything. Rather, it points to possibilities that are open now that the main matter has been engaged.
With this revision, Gampopa’s instruction becomes:
As to what follows, once all that appears is experienced as mind, refine the vitality of awareness.
In that empty, clear knowing, all that arises, that is, sensations, thoughts, and emotions, arise is mind. It is not a case of you knowing that sensations, thoughts, and emotions are mind. Knowing based in a sense of self is inevitably conceptual. Gampopa is referring to a knowing in which sensations, thoughts, and feelings are known directly to be movements in mind. What knows here, indeed, the knowing itself, cannot be put into words. The words, the descriptions, all come later, a clumsy confused echo of the actual experience.
Some teachers have likened the first experience of empty, clear knowing to a bright light being turned when you are in a dark room. At first you are blinded. Then your eyes adjust and you can see everything in the room. In the same way, initially, the clarity, the brightness, or some other quality of mind nature floods everything. As we become accustomed to the shift (and that may take time), bit by bit, sensations, thoughts, and emotions are known to be mind. That, in essence, is what Gampopa means when he says “refine the vitality of awareness.”
There is nothing you can do to make those shifts happen. All you can do is to create the conditions in which they can happen. On this subject, Gampopa does not say anything, possibly because when he wrote this text, he had in mind a retreat context in which he could counsel each retreatant as to a suitable way for him or her to refine the vitality of awareness. No method works for everyone, and one of the more important roles of a teacher is to help you find a way or a path through which your practice deepens.
Almost any practice can be used to refine the vitality of awareness. Vajrayana, for instance, is highly regarded because it offers a large number of energy transformation practices for this refinement in the context of deity practices and their associated completion phase practices. Vajrayana is called the result path because it assumes one has touched clear, empty knowing and is practicing with that understanding as a basis.
The essential point in these energy transformation practices is the mixing of the experiences that arise from doing energy transformation with the empty, clear knowing of mahamudra. That mixing is how the vitality of awareness is refined. If you choose to use energy transformation methods, make sure you know what you are doing. It is best to learn from a person who knows not only how they work, but also how to adapt them to different physiologies and how to remedy problems should they arise.
There are other methods. The 12th century Shangpa master Kyergangpa once wrote that there are three doors to freedom: impermanence, compassion, and faith. Of these, I have become most conversant with compassion and faith.
For impermanence, one of the simplest ways to refine the vitality of awareness is to take in our mortality more and more deeply. One way is to sit in the central dilemma of human existence: I am going to die and I do not and cannot know when. Another is to go through the stages of dying that I described in chapter 4 of Wake Up to Your Life. A third is to sit with the question “What dies?” Any of these three will refine the vitality of awareness.
For compassion, I have relied principally on Mahayan Mind-Training and taking and sending in particular. This has been an inexhaustible well, its cool waters quietly quenching the madness and chaos of emotional reactivity. It takes time for the practice of taking and sending to mature, but the effort is well worth it. As Dezhung Rinpoche, in a more or less off-hand remark, once said to me, “You take heavy black smoke through your nostrils into your heart, and then you breath out silvery moonlight from your heart to the whole world and beyond. Every seven or eight breaths, you remind yourself of what you are doing, taking in the pain and struggles of others and breathing out your own joy and well-being.” He didn’t say anything about visualizing per se, and I think this is important. It’s the felt-sense of taking and sending that counts.
When it comes to taking, it is important not to think about the pain and struggles of others, but to feel their pain and struggles in you as you take them in. For instance, with the six realms, take in the actual feeling of anger, a red hot iron rod burning you from the inside out. For hatred, take in what it is like to be so frozen that you cannot move even a finger without it cracking and breaking. At the other end of the spectrum, take in the raw horror and absolute terror the gods feel when, shortly before their death, they realize that their seemingly endless time in the god realm is done. When you do taking with ordinary situations in life, put yourself in the place of the person you are considering. What would you be experiencing in their position? How would you be reacting? Feel it in your bones, and then take it in from the other.
As for sending, give away what you love and treasure. This is all in your imagination, of course, but feel what it would be like to give away your home, your intelligence, your artistic or musical talents, your spouse, or your children in order to make others happy. Unless you are inhuman or superhuman, you will feel your heart wrenching, and that is the point. Stand in the wrenching, and do the practice.
If you can bring yourself to practice taking and sending this way, you may not enjoy it, but something will change in you. I do not want to describe what those changes are because to do so will only set up expectations, and that will undermine the whole endeavor. The only thing I will say is that the deeper you go in this practice, the less you will feel that you are in any way special.
For devotion, the main practice is prayer. I wrote about prayer in Part 6 of this commentary, in the context of groundwork and teacher-union. Here is one of many places in the spiritual path that you return to what you think you have already done only to do it again. But you don’t do it again, because you are different. The practice of prayer takes on new dimensions, and you discover things in you you did not know were there.
Find a prayer that speaks to you. Quite a few years ago, a friend asked me to write a short prayer in English to replace a long Sanskrit formula that meant little to him because he did not know Sanskrit. The prayer I wrote is:
Buddhas and bodhisattvas,
Wherever you may be,
Please help me to find a way,
It became part of a practice I wrote, The Magic of Faith, and from there, many people have taken it and used it in their own practices. It has also become one of the prayers that I use in my own practice. I usually say it one line at a time, one line on each exhalation. My mind usually quiets down quite quickly, and I find myself feeling a quiet deep faith in buddhas and bodhisattvas, wherever they may be. This faith easily extends to a feeling of devotion to all of my teachers wherever they may be, for most of them are no longer here. With the third line, I am confronted by the brutal fact that, even after all these years of training and practice, I really have no idea where I’m going, what I’m doing, or why. That may seem strange to read, but it is true. This is where faith comes in.
That fact, the fact of mystery, may be brutal and unavoidable, but it does not in any way, deter me from practice. In a strange way, it is the reason I continue to practice, and why I value Gampopa’s text so much. The aim of mahamudra practice is to lose your mind, to lose any sense of being something apart from experience. In this text, Gampopa lays this out more clearly than I have seen in any other mahamudra text I've read. If the aim of practice is to lose your mind, it is only natural that at some point, we will probably have no idea of what we are doing or where we are going, and be completely at peace in that. Life continues to unfold and we are very much part of it, but the great questions, the Great Matter as they say in Zen, are no longer there.
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