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.