Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy (11 page)

Whatever it is for you at this time, examine this problem in your own mind. Is it really as solid and concrete as you are experiencing it to be? Can this situation exist in the way that it does without depending on its subject (you)? How is it possible to realize that it is not truly there in the way that you are experiencing it? It is important to look closely—nakedly and directly—at how this person or situation lives in you. Bring your focus inward. If you keep your focus steadily and directly on the experience of the famous person or situation as it lives in you, you will find many thoughts and sensations and movements of the mind. Be still; listen to the silence; recognize the spaciousness, and continue to host the experience. What do you discover? You will find the experience cannot maintain itself unless you continue to participate in its creation. If you look closely, as you connect with stillness, silence, and spaciousness, it is possible to become free from the object of ego, free from your famous person or situation, free from your vision. That freedom is the goal expressed by this line
Vision is mind
.

G
UIDED
M
EDITATION
P
RACTICE OF
V
ISION
I
S
M
IND

At this point in your reading, you may wish to work with the guided meditation on the CD accompanying this book, or you may follow the guidance that follows to support you in recognizing that
Vision is mind
.

Sit in a comfortable posture. Draw your attention inward. Feel stillness in your body, silence in your speech, and spaciousness in your mind. Just feel stillness, silence, and spaciousness while you feel connected and present in your body. Allow time for this.

Now invite whatever is bothering you to come to awareness. You may be experiencing a “famous person” who is an object of your fear, aversion, or desire, or there may be a particular situation that is bothering you or blocking the creative flow of your life. As you rest, look at that object formed by your egoistic imagination.

As you bring your vision to mind, you may become aware of many thoughts, or an internal dialogue, or uncomfortable feelings or sensations in your body. Simply say
Vision is mind
to yourself three times to remind yourself of the practice. Look at the vision internally. Look with open awareness—simple, direct, and clear observation. Look nakedly. Look closer and closer. Don’t look with another pain, another thought. Don’t talk with another voice. Just use nonconceptual, direct observation. In this way you are hosting the appearance in the refuge space without further elaboration through thinking or analysis.

Observe nakedly whatever image is present, without concepts, thoughts, or judgments. Just see it. Whatever sensations or feelings are present, simply experience them. Look with open, naked awareness. This is seeing with the wisdom eye.

As you do that, magic happens. The conversation and imagination of ego, the fantasies of ego, stop. You are no longer feeding them or engaging with them. You simply hold the vision that ego has created in pure, open awareness. When you truly see with the wisdom eye, there is nothing solid that can sustain itself. Whatever you experience dissipates. The colors, shapes, or characteristics of your experience dissolve; the image of your famous person or situation dissipates; negativity releases and you cease to feel that anything substantial is there. It is as if you are looking at a slide projected on a wall, and as you walk toward it, getting closer and closer, whatever image you saw from a distance, you can no longer perceive when you are up close. Nothing remains. There is no discrete image; there is only light. That is the realization of the first line:
Vision is mind
. You are free from the imagination of ego. You feel some sense of release.

Only mind remains; the object is no longer there. Therefore, we say,
Vision is mind
. When you look at that vision with that open eye of naked awareness, there is no solid object out there or in here. Simply become the one who is seeing, which is the mind itself.

See nakedly. Observe directly. Rest in open awareness. Trust this experience.

Realizing
Vision is mind
is a very powerful experience. Something you have experienced as solidly existing, creating a problem, or otherwise blocking your creativity, is not substantial. Recognizing this is very simple, and yet it is often difficult to trust the experience. It is simple if you look nakedly and very difficult if you look with a “smart ego.”

W
HEN
T
HERE
I
S
N
O
O
BVIOUS
C
HALLENGE

What if you cannot think of a “famous person” or a specific challenging situation in your life to look at in the meditation? In that case, you may bring your attention to whatever you perceive at this very moment. Perhaps you are aware of sunlight and space and colors and sounds and the feeling of people around you. All that comes to your senses, your sense consciousness, and sense objects are also “vision.” Perhaps you are having very subtle experiences in relation to your perceptions, but you are not conscious of them. Can you see and feel everything around you while experiencing a deep stillness? If so, that is also what
Vision is mind
means. All these visions
are
my mind, and I experience them as such. Meditation begins there. It is not necessary to go out of your way to think about some issues or choose some pain in your life in order to realize
Vision is mind
. But when the pain body is strongly present in your life, something has chosen you. So bring your awareness to what you experience at this very moment. Your experience of your pain body may not be as luminous as the sun or as clear as the cloudless sky or as pleasurable as the feeling of being surrounded by fellow meditators. The pain body does not have that light and luminous quality, but nonetheless, it is your vision. The only way to overcome it is to be conscious of it.

We may know conceptually that things are not as they appear, but we feel this vision’s presence so strongly that it is disturbing. The whole approach of the practice when we say
Vision is mind
is to look at that object, that vision, which is the imagination of ego. It is very important not to look at that object which I am referring to as the pain body with the eyes of ego. That is a common mistake you can make in this practice. If that happens, it doesn’t change anything. You are not realizing
Vision is mind
. It is just another layer of ego. Another pain is looking at the pain.
Why me? Why now? Why am I still feeling this way? What’s wrong with me?
There is a desperate sense of ego looking at the pain, and you experience effort and fear and restlessness—so many mixed emotions. Looking in this way is not going to clear your suffering for sure, and will only create more discomfort. Or we look with the smarter ego:
Oh, I can see that this pain is just my grasping mind. So I’m going to breathe out and let go. I’m letting go now
. Whether we look at pain with obvious pain, or look at pain with a smarter ego, we are not realizing
Vision is mind
. So it is important to look nakedly and directly, with the wisdom eye, or openness. Knowing how to experience and apply that in the practice of meditation is key.

Let’s say you are looking at sense objects and experiences, which are also vision. When there is no particular pain you are facing, you simply look directly at sense experience. Feel the space. It is important to perceive sensory experience and feel the space. When you are meditating according to
dzogchen
, you allow your eyes to remain open. When your eyes are open, you perceive many things, and this can be distracting for some people. Can you be aware of the existence of colorful shapes and sensations, and thoughts and feelings and emotions, in the space of open awareness? If you develop the ability to do so, perhaps you can host your pain with openness. Hosting sensory experience in awareness can be likened to the sky hosting a rainbow. Emotional pain is more like the waves of the ocean, which may appear harder to host in awareness because of the greater movement. But as you become familiar with hosting thoughts and sensations in open awareness, it will become easier to host stronger movements of mind. However, if you are not used to hosting anything, it will be hard to host pain. The hardest is to host your reaction to the challenging object, the famous person, or the famous or challenging situation. Because they appear so convincingly threatening, your own thoughts and feelings and sensations in reaction to them are difficult to host.

In the ordinary moments of everyday life, it is important to be aware of space. When there is no obvious challenge or threat, the seemingly mundane moments are excellent times to become aware of the space of being. But actually, we usually try to be aware of space when it is more difficult, because our need or sense of urgency is greater. When everything is okay, we just have fun in samsara. We can wait for luminosity because things are fine. But when challenged by pain and confusion, we start to look for relief, for light, for joy. There may be times when you can simply close your eyes and feel the presence of joy in your heart. And there are times when, able to experience the presence of joy, you may see the possibility of expanding and pervading and manifesting that joy through action and creativity. But there are many people who close their eyes and feel nothing at all, or feel pain. So there are two categories of experience: times where you feel openness directly, and times where you feel blocked or in pain. When are you more likely to turn toward meditation? When you are in pain. Why is this so? When you are feeling no obvious pain, it is easy to think,
I don’t need to do this practice. I’m fine
. But if you think this way, a deeper joy is hidden from you. You don’t reach this deeper joy, because you don’t go far enough. It is the right time to meditate when you do have joy in your life. Meditation supports the ripening and expansion of positive qualities and actions.

At moments when you do experience pain and suffering, you might turn to meditation to feel relief, but find you are unable to do so because you are trying too hard. You may feel more obscured and more blocked, and the world around you may appear harsh and overwhelming. This can increase a sense of desperation. Seeking, needing, and trying hard to find relief, it may not occur to you to try less, to open more, to feel more, and to be aware more fully. First of all, we are afraid that if we open more when we feel pain, it means that we will feel more pain. We forget that the instruction is to open and
bring attention to the openness itself
. It is important to realize that the mind that is able to be more aware is not the mind that is trying harder. How do I find the open mind? Only with less effort. When I relax effort and resistance, I can find the mind that is there, just present. When you feel through that open mind and see through that open mind with effortless awareness, you will experience the dissolution of the pain body. Only through effortlessness can the clouds of the effortful conceptual mind dissipate. If you have a deeper sense of trust, you will put less effort into resisting pain or creating some alternative state of mind. You will glimpse the openness of mind that is actually present and is the true refuge.

So close your eyes and see that famous person, famous situation, or yourself, the famous meditator who is struggling in this moment. Feel exactly the way you are experiencing this moment. Just be with that. Most important is the way you look at or observe the appearance, the object of your egoistic imagination: Observe directly with naked, pure awareness. Feel the experience intimately, without resisting or maintaining any distance or perspective. Come energetically closer to whatever sensations or feelings you experience. Allow your experience fully and openly. As you do that, awareness is like the sun’s warmth, and the object formed by egoistic imagination is like frost. The moment sunlight touches that frost, it begins to melt and become liquid. Naked awareness is sunshine, warmth, and when that object dissolves, you will feel the energy in your body becoming looser and opening up and flowing. As this happens, your mind becomes clearer. You experience space within—new and fresh and alive in your body and mind and energy field. The key is not to look at your experience through egoistic imagination or elaboration, but experience it directly as it is and as it dissolves. What remains is openness, and the awareness of openness itself.

Many times students have told me, “I was trying to do that, but it became more painful.” That means you are looking through another painful egoistic imagination. Anytime you are experiencing more pain, awareness is not naked or pure. You are experiencing another layer of ego having a subtle communication and dialogue with pain. Nothing has changed. It is most important to recognize deep stillness, silence, and spaciousness as you encounter the challenge.

As we mentioned before, pain is an important doorway to inner refuge. When you are challenged in your life and facing difficulty, don’t run away. You have a great tool to work with pain, a great wisdom eye to look directly; you have an amazing method to deal with suffering.
Vision is mind
is our encouragement to not run away. Your pain can be transformed to bliss.
Vision is mind
is support to encounter the pain body. When you experience the pain body,
Vision is mind
motivates you. You need the protection and support of refuge, and if you use the practice as support, pain transforms to bliss. Pain becomes the true doorway. Without pain, realization might be difficult. There is subtle pain we don’t even recognize as pain, and in fact we call it pleasure. And often with pleasure, we feel we don’t have to look for anything. Self-realization will not occur, because you simply don’t see the need.