How to Lose Your Mind Part 8

 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.

Groundwork for Mahayana Mind-Training

 The first instruction in Mind-Training in Seven Points is:

Do groundwork first.

Tibetan instructions such as "Do groundwork first" can be deceptively concise. 

The Tibetan word for groundwork is ngon 'gro (pron. ngöndro) and in this text it is in the plural — do the different kinds of groundwork first.

In the context of Mahayana mind-training, there are three kinds of groundwork.

• General groundwork for spiritual practice, that is, practices that change your worldview,
• Specific groundwork for Mahayana mind-training, that is, practices that connect you with loving kindness and compassion, and
• Practice-session ground work, that is, what to do to bring emotional energy into practice.

General Groundwork for Spiritual Practice

What follows is a different approach to the general groundwork, that is, the four thoughts that turn the mind. 

Starting on pg. 58 in Wake Up to Your Life, I distinguish four aspects of any practice: purpose, method, effects, and result. Over the years, I have come to appreciate that a great deal of teaching, both oral and written, consists of descriptions of results that are meant to encourage and inspire. However, many people take these descriptions as practice instructions, i.e., method. This confusion is understandable, and it is unfortunate. 

Practice that is based on taking a description of a result as a method of practice is rarely effective. I know far too many people who, unaware of this distinction, have tried to do so for years or even decades without experiencing any result from their efforts. Many of them just came to the conclusion that they don't have the karma to practice effectively. This is very sad. 

I make a point of this distinction because when people do understand clearly what is method and what is result, their practice suddenly becomes effective and they find themselves able to understand and experience matters that they just could not do so before. 

In this spirit, here is a way to develop and deepen your motivation for practice by starting with your own yearning. Please let me know what you think.

Ask yourself, "Why do I practice?" or "Why do I practice mind-training?" If your answer is in words, go deeper. For instance, your answer might be "to attain buddhahood" or "to be able to help others" or "to be free of suffering." Whatever your answer, question it. Why do you want to attain buddhahood? Why do you want to be able to help others? Why do you want to be free of suffering? Go through these steps several times. For every answer you come up with, question it with "Why this?" Keep going until you cannot come up with any words. At that point, you will probably have a visceral feeling that you cannot put into words. 

That feeling, the one you feel viscerally but cannot name, is why you practice. 

Listen to it. Listen to it with your mind, with your heart, and with your body. To listen, you have to grow quiet in mind, heart, and body. When you do, that visceral feeling gradually becomes clearer. It begins to speak to you, but usually not in words. Do this at the beginning of every practice session.

Little by little, you may find that how you view life and practice changes. You may see that you are deeply fortunate to have the opportunity, the time, the inclination, and the wherewithal to spend part of your day practicing. Not many people do. The time you spend listening to yourself deeply becomes very precious.

Over time, and it may be a few days or a few months, as you continue to listen, you may come to appreciate that spiritual practice really is not just vitally important to you. It puts you in touch with something that is more meaningful to you than anything conventional life can offer. You see that everything conventional life can offer is transient, subject to change. Bit by bit, you make practice part of your life. As time passes, it becomes the core of your life, and you are able to practice consistently without struggle.

As your listening grows deeper, you may see that your struggles in life come from you. You cannot control what arises in life, but you might be able to do something about how you react or respond to the ups and downs. It is your life, and you alone are responsible for how you act. This is an inescapable fact, and it changes how you approach your life.

As you continue down this road, other understandings may arise. You see more and more clearly the difference between reacting and responding to the ups and downs of life, and you see that whenever you are carried away by your own feelings, things don't go so well. You begin to seek a different way of living, a way in which you are not ruled by your emotional reactions, a way in which you can see things clearly and not fall into confusion.

This is one way to lay a foundation for spiritual practice — by listening deeply to what your heart tells you about why you practice.

Specific Groundwork for Mahayana Mind Training

The specific groundwork is loving kindness and compassion. Taking and sending enhances and deepens those qualities, but it does not generate them. You have to develop a relationship with these two qualities first 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 pain of the world and 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 go beyond the conceptual mind, know and experience the groundlessness of experience, and thus touch the peace and freedom that lies at the very core of our being.

There are many ways to cultivate loving kindness and compassion and equanimity and joy, that is, the four immeasurables.. 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.

Groundwork for Practice Sessions

As for the groundwork for a practice session, heartfelt prayer is one of the best ways to start. Again, touch into the unnameable feeling of why you practice. Feeling it viscerally, however it is in your body, reach out to what you want to know. Express that longing in a short prayer, and repeat it slowly, perhaps synchronizing it with your breathing. Pray for about 1/3 of your regular practice session.

One prayer that speaks to many people is:

Buddhas and bodhisattvas,

Wherever you may be,

Please help me to find a way.

Whatever your prayer, pray for what is beyond your current capabilities, understanding, or experience. In prayer, you are reaching out to what you do not know. With your reaching out, you start to form a relationship with what you are praying for. Through that relationship, through your own yearning, energy from that higher level of understanding and experience begins to flow into you. In reaching out this way, you raise the level of energy in your system, and that higher level of energy brings non-reactive emotional energy into your formal practice. It makes a difference.

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.

How to Lose Your Mind Part 6

 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

 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.