The Four Foundations of Mindfulness – Citta or Mind
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, USA, Santa Cruz, September 8th 2002, Tape 3 & 4.
Now we are going to deal with mindfulness directed at the mind. Everything which we experience, outwardly or inwardly, with our body or with our emotions or with our thoughts, we can only know and perceive through the mind—yet our mind is the most unknown part of our being. In general our culture is so outwardly directed through what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Everything is pointing us outwards, drawing our attention away. Yet that which perceives through the doors of the senses is unknown. All our happiness, all our sorrows, all our ups and our downs are experienced in the mind. And yet the mind itself, we never question.
When you come to think of it, it’s quite extraordinary. We go to a psychoanalyst and talk and talk about our early childhood and all our memories and our feelings. But do we ever stop to ask ourselves what is a memory? A memory is just a thought. What is a thought? And who thinks? If we say, “Well, I think” obviously the next question is: “Who am I?” And this is the whole point.
So this level of mindfulness is really the crucial one. Instead of directing our attention outwards, we turn that beam of awareness inwards. We look at the mind itself with our mind. A simple analogy is supposing you are in a movie house and there is a big screen where a movie is being shown. And if it is a good movie we are totally absorbed in it. If it’s a drama, our hearts are beating; if it is a tragedy, out come the tissues. If it is a comedy, we are laughing and light-hearted, and if it is a romance, ahh… But if it is a good movie we are engrossed, and what is more we are not just watching that movie on the screen but we are actually playing the starring role! We’re right in the centre of that movie we are watching.
But supposing instead of being so entranced by that movie out there, we turn round and look at what’s actually going on. There is a projector with a light and that light is beaming through these little transparent frames which are moving so fast that as the light shines through these frames onto the blank screen, it projects what looks like something real and moving. We are completely sucked in. That is a close analogy to what is going on inside our minds. The clear light nature of the mind is beaming through these transparent thought-moments which are moving so fast that it projects through our sense doors our outer reality. And we believe in it. That’s why we all have our own version of what’s going on. There is a measure of consensus but nonetheless something that moves one person incredibly, may leave another cold. Not everybody agrees on everything, otherwise we’d all be living in the same place, doing same thing, but we all have our own version of what is reality, what is actually happening. We are all playing and living and starring in our own movie. As someone pointed out, we are not only the stars but also the critic.
So in order that we don’t go out and throw ourselves under a train if the movie has a tragic ending, we need to understand that it is just a movie. So also we have to realise our so-called reality is just our version of the movie. But how do we do that? We start by diverting the attention from outside and turning it inwards. Now the first thing we see when we look inward is the stream of thoughts compared to a waterfall. When a waterfall is tumbling down we don’t see the individual drops, it’s moving so fast that it just seems like one solid sheet. However it comprises little drops, drop after drop after drop, millions and millions of drops. And that’s like the stream of consciousness: we feel, we think, we remember, we have emotions. These thoughts seem real, so solid and yet actually they’re just moment after moment flashes of consciousness, just mental states going so fast that they almost seem like something we could catch hold of.
Now, as our awareness becomes stronger and more clear, the mind begins to relax and becomes, instead of rushing waterfall, more like a slow flowing river. It’s as if those little frames of the movie begin to slow down. Then between one frame and the next there is a brief interval and the clear light shines through. Likewise if we are really watching the stream of thoughts as they go pass, it can happen that between the past thought and the next for a moment there is a gap, and if our awareness is very clear, at that moment the observer and the observed become one and we realise the Nature of the Mind. Do you understand? Because the Nature of the Mind is always there. If it were not, we couldn’t hear, we couldn’t see.
That pure awareness is it. People think about Ultimate Reality as if it were vast and glorious Technicolor! Lights and trumpets and angels raining down roses! But it is nothing like that. It is so simple that we could miss it if we are not very conscious. Since it is always here, it’s so close that we can’t see it, it’s like our eyes that cannot see themselves. So we have to become very clear and aware, so that in the moment when the stream of thoughts falls apart for a brief time, we are present. When the ego-driven dualistic mind revolving around me and mine just drops away, the mind enters into a completely different level of awareness. Non-dualistic because there is no subject and no object dichotomy, there is no one looking and nothing to look at. There is no ego.
The Nature of the Mind is like the sky, without a centre or circumference. It’s not my nature versus your nature—the Nature of the Mind is just the Nature of the Mind, beyond boundaries. This pure awareness interconnects us with everything. The sense of ego, the sense of me and mine and dualistic thinking is what alienates and separates us. So once we get a profound experience or even a glimpse of this Nature of the Mind—always present but normally unrecognised—then we understand what these thoughts really are and how they are not me, they are not mine. Then we can realise that we are projecting this movie and it is just a movie. So we can then go back to watching the movie, nothing wrong with the movie, but we no longer mistake it for reality.
The tradition analogy is that we are all asleep. We are dreaming. The word Buddha means “awakened one”. So suddenly, we wake up and then we realise that we were just dreaming. Then we fall back to sleep again but still there is that awareness that we are dreaming. That faint recollection that there is another state which is awake. That’s why this initial breakthrough is so important. It is a crucial point because for the first time one actually experiences and realises that we are asleep. It’s not just something people tell us or something we read about in a book and so we believe. We suddenly wake up if only for a moment, but now we know.
Now the point is, sometimes this experience is so simple and brief that one almost misses it. Sometimes it is extremely powerful and long-lasting so one thinks one is Enlightened. If we assume our Enlightenment that could really be an obstacle because, as my Lama once remarked, once we have realised the Nature of the Mind then we can start to meditate. It’s not the end, it’s the beginning of real meditation. The beginning of the real work on the mind, because now we know what we have to work with. In works on spiritual practice in the Tibetan tradition, the first chapter is what to do before realising the Nature of the Mind, and the next twenty chapters explain on what to do after this.
Earlier they asked, “What is Enlightenment?” I am sure there are many definitions. Enlightenment is synonymous with Buddhahood: the culmination of perfect wisdom with infinite compassion. To me, Enlightenment is to be continually in this state of primordial awareness without effort.
So how do we learn to look at the mind? The way to look at the mind is just to look at it. When one sits first in the Mahamudra tradition, we could start by observing the breath to quieten down the mind. It is hard to look at the mind while the thoughts are chaotic and racing along like crazy. So focusing on the breath has two aspects: First, it can make the mind more quiet and at the same time it increases the level of attention. We are trying to calm the mind down so it is flowing more slowly, and at the same time we are developing the ability to concentrate.
Then we turn the spotlight of attention onto the mind itself and observe the flow of thoughts, just like we sit back and watch a television program. Traditionally said to be like someone on the bank of the river watching the river flow by. Now we do not dive in and start swimming along with the river. We stay on the bank, it’s only the river that moves.
At a certain point we start to question, “What is a thought? What does it look like? Where does it come from? Where does it stay? Where does it go? What shape is it? Where is it? How is it?” So one could bring up a thought and examine it. For example, supposing one was feeling upset about something, then one can bring up that feeling of anger, remember what it was that made you so mad and then look at the feeling. How does it feel? Where is that feeling? What does an angry thought look like? When you are not angry anymore, where has it gone to? What actually is it? Really question the mind to death.
Question, not just intellectually but as though there is a big question mark in our mind, just looking. This is not an intellectual analysis. It is not so concerned with the intellect, it’s to do with really looking with our whole being. Otherwise, if we just use the intellect, then we end up in endless internal discussions and debate— just making more and more thoughts. That’s not the point. The point is to understand what is a thought and for that we have to really observe, really look.
Then, like looking at those translucent frames in the movie, we begin to understand that these thoughts which seem so solid, so real with the emotions that drive us—are just momentary mental states, quite transparent and empty: they arise and then just dissolve into nothing. They are empty in their nature because they don’t have any inherent existence—and yet they rule our lives. Our likes, our dislikes, our prejudices, our memories, our opinions, our judgements, our criticisms, it’s all so real. We know that people will die for their beliefs. They will kill for their beliefs. Yet belief is just a thought. And what is a thought?
Then sometimes the mind completely quietens down, becomes very peaceful and spacious, without thoughts. One maintains awareness, one doesn’t space out. The mind has calmed down and is very quiet. Sometimes the mind is moving, very busy, sometimes the mind is very quiet but there is that awareness which sees the quietness, which sees the busyness. So the next question would be, is the mind which is quiet with no thoughts, and the mind which is busy with lots of thoughts and the awareness which knows them both, all the same or are they different? Is the awareness different from the thoughts or the same? Is the awareness different from the silence of the mind or the same? So we look.
We look and we try to understand what is going on inside since our mental world drives our whole life. Meditation is not just sitting there blissed out, meditation can be hard work. Meditation is a way to come back to our fundamental nature from which really we never have departed but only failed to recognise. Since we don’t recognise the non-conceptual, we get so caught up in concepts.
Suzuki Roshi said that the best way to control your cow was to give her a wide pasture. I often use that quotation as an example of how to really look at the mind, because this is very important. When I was living in the cave in Lahaul, below me in the summer there was a pasture and sometimes the shepherd would come from the villages below with the flock of sheep and goats. At one time instead of the usual old shepherd there was a young boy, who came up to take care of the sheep. Obviously this poor young boy has been told if he lost a single sheep he would be thrashed to within an inch of his life, so he was very, very nervous of all those sheep. So he kept them very tightly packed together and he moved them here, then he moved them there, then he moved them back here, all day in a tight little pack, they were just being moved around. Of course, since they were so packed together, they didn’t have a chance to eat and the boy was running around bringing back immediately any sheep who dared stray off. He was racing around, keeping everything in order and at the end of the day he staggered down the hill completely exhausted with those poor sheep who were also very weary and probably hungry because they hadn’t had much opportunity to eat.
The next day the old shepherd came back and he brought the sheep back to the same meadow. Then he went up on a nearby hillock, got out his bottle of beer, lay down and just watched the sheep as they scattered around on this pasture and they were munching away and by the early afternoon they just lay down. In the evening he gathered them up and they all went happily down the road. Now the point was, he didn’t go to sleep, he was watching those sheep. He was always watching those sheep. If any had strayed too far, he would have run and brought it back. If wolves had come, he would have been up instantly, but provided the sheep were just wandering around happily chewing away, he left them alone.
This is a clear analogy of how to watch the mind. If when we are observing the mind we sit with the strong determination to watch every single thought—pouncing on every little thought and making sure it’s all in order, then what happens is the mind becomes very tense and rigid. This is tiring. We tell ourselves we have got to be mindful and focused. But in this type of meditation that’s not it at all. What we have to do is relax. Just relax and let the thoughts wander off—but watch. Just see what happens and if we keep observing quietly, after a while of itself the mind begins to quieten down. Then as I said, at a certain point the whole thing falls apart and the observer and the observed become one and we realise the Nature of the Mind. Simple.
So in our tradition during the day it is also possible to be conscious of what is going on inside. Of course a perfect master will be effortlessly aware at all times. For the rest of us we can start by making a commitment to try being conscious of the mind at least three times every hour. Three times during every hour just look at the mind. In this moment what is the mind doing? It is not a question of judging or commenting on the content. Just watch, what is going on?
Then we can recognise if the thoughts are negative, such as excessive ego-grasping and selfishness, or thoughts of aggression or anger or resentment, or if there are thoughts of greed or meanness and desire, or envy, jealousy, competition, pride. We can recognise that’s what’s going on in the mind. We don’t have to judge. We don’t need to suppress, but we have to recognise these thoughts, accept them and let them go. The problem is that normally we are unconscious of what’s going on in our mind so we are swept along and are putting more and more fuel onto the flames, instead of saying, “Wait a minute, I know that thoughts of resentment and anger and envy make me miserable and create disharmony. This never worked in the past, this is not going to work in the future and it’s not working now, so lets change the channel. We’ve been through this movie too many times. We’ve already watched this program which is very tedious and boring. Since it didn’t bring us joy in the past and it’s not going to work in the future, lets change the channel.” But we cannot do that unless we are conscious that’s what’s happening.
Somebody recently told me that when she is angry with somebody she would bring that person to mind and then transform them in her mind into her teacher. So then the feelings of anger she has towards that person would immediately turn into thoughts of devotion and gratitude because now she is thinking it’s the teacher. This is skilful because anyone who annoys us is our teacher of patience! So we can learn to train and tame our mind, and stop fuelling our negative emotions.
But first we have to recognise what is really happening because a lot of thoughts and feelings we justify to ourselves and we don’t call them by their true name. We give them nice sounding epithets for what is really going on underneath. So the first thing is utter honesty at least with ourselves. Let’s not fool ourselves. We should really know what is going on inside us. What our real intention is, not the nice sound labels we put on top of it. If it’s greed, call it greed. Don’t call it being a connoisseur.
Somebody gets the promotion we wanted and our first thought is, “Well, he deserved it, he worked hard and good for him!” If our thoughts are positive thoughts we should acknowledge that, we should again recognise what is positive, accept that and encourage it. We are brought up in a culture which is very strange. His Holiness Dalai Lama finds the West a big enigma because while on the one hand we appear to have great confidence and a strong sense of the individual, at the same time people often have such a sense of guilt and low self-esteem. It’s such a contradiction.
When the Tibetans fled from their country after the Communist invasion, they left everything behind. When one listens to their escape stories, often out of a hundred people trying to escape maybe just a few got out. They lost families, they lost friends, they were travelling for months with the Communists pursuing. They had to travel at night by back routes since the main roads were guarded so they couldn’t get through: they had to find ways across the passes that had never been used before. They all they had horror stories. When they arrived in India—this is back in the early 60s—they had absolutely nothing. Aristocrats and high lamas were working on the roads, hitting stones to make little pebbles for the roads. They were living in tents made out of flour sacks. They had lost everything but they were so cheerful. They smiled and they laughed. As they were banging the stones they were reciting the mantras. They had nothing and they had everything because they had a great feeling about themselves. So although outwardly they were so poor, inwardly they were strong and cheerful. You’d go by and they would say, “Come in and have tea.” They would run out and buy biscuits. Maybe it was their whole day’s salary that they would use to buy some biscuits to offer. They were strong because they believed in themselves. They had this great inner confidence and sense of self worth. Not in the sense of arrogance but quiet inner strength. That’s why everyone was completely blown away when the Tibetan refugees first arrived. They couldn’t believe that people who had suffered so much could yet be so cheerful and resilient.
One time when His Holiness the Dalai Lama held a conference of top scientists, Nobel Prize winners and experts in their field, somehow they got onto the subject about low self-esteem, which His Holiness finds really puzzling. And so somebody said, “Okay, who here sometimes feels low self-esteem?” And everyone put their hands up. His Holiness couldn’t believe it. These were specialists who were top of their field and yet to themselves they felt worthless. And why is this? I don’t know why but perhaps one of factors is that our Judea-Christian culture emphasises so much the fact that we are sinners and guilty, and that we are worthless unless we are saved by something above ourselves. We were in a church the other day and across the wall in big mosaic letters, it said “The Kingdom of God is within you”. But people keep forgetting this and so we think the Kingdom of God is something out there and someone has got to come and save us. Therefore this creates a sense that we are worthless in ourselves. If we think about all the bad things in ourselves then this is a virtuous thing to do. But if we think about any of the good things that is spiritual pride. So there is this lack of balance.
Now, in Buddhism, we also recall all the mistakes we have made or all our character flaws. We are all dominated by the five poisons of our ego-clinging delusion, which creates our greedy, grasping mind and our angry resentful mind along with envy and jealousy and pride. Now pride doesn’t just mean that we feel better than other people, it also means if we feel worse than other people or feel just as good as anybody else. In other word, pride means evaluating ourselves in comparison with others; higher, lower or just the same. It’s still pride because it is all centred on me, compared to anyone else.
So we all have these poison to a certain extent. We make mistakes, and when we make mistakes then we feel regret and we promise to really try not to do like that again; we’re really sorry because these wrong doings hurt ourselves and hurt others. So we try to purify. But after this we think of the good and rejoice in the goodness: the goodness in ourselves and the goodness in others. “Okay, I am often angry, but still I am pretty generous!” or whatever. Therefore not only to strive to remove the negative from our mind stream but also to encourage and cultivate the good. We are not just pulling out weeds but we are also cultivating the good plants. And we can use those weeds, in fact, as fertilisers for the good plants. So it is very important when we look at the mind to recognise the goodness there. The goodness in our own mind and the goodness in the mind of others. You know, nowadays the society is becoming very negative. People are very worried and paranoid. Every time you pick up the newspaper it gets worse and worse so people are very frightened. So at this time it is extremely important to remember the goodness: the goodness in our own hearts and the goodness in the hearts of almost everybody else.
Yesterday we were at a meeting and somebody said that she was a sort of parole officer and dealing everyday with murderers and rapists and people who had committed very violent crimes. She said when they came in she would tell them, “Please leave your ‘attitude’ in the waiting room. You can put that on again when you go. In this room, just be here with me.” This way she relates to them just as people. Of course they are people just like anyone else; they still want to be happy. In the past they made a mistake and they have problems, but they are human beings, so she loves them and she relates to them as that. Naturally they open up because they are people who have feelings. After all it doesn’t matter what we’ve done, we are still a person with hopes and fears, problems and good points like anyone else. We shouldn’t demonise either ourselves or others.
So when we look at the mind, when we use mindfulness to become aware of our thoughts, we shouldn’t just focus on our negativities, we should also observe and recognise what is good within us and encourage that. If we are generous then encourage ourselves to be more generous. If we are the kind of person who is happy at someone else’s success then think of more and more people that we applaud. Whatever are our strong qualities we try to make them even stronger. Where we have qualities that are weak, we encourage them to grow. We can all do this and this is what our daily life is for: transforming the heart.
It is not that practice is when we are sitting on our cushion and the rest of the day is so much worldly activity. In fact everything we do can be a practice: everyone we meet is a practice; every word we speak is a practice—if one does it with awareness. We learn how to open the heart so it embraces everyone. In the Six Paramitas there is a lot of talk about patience and tolerance. We need to learn how to skilfully deal with difficult people and difficult situations. To learn how to cope with irritations gracefully and benefit from our problems is a way of strengthening the character, strengthening the mind so that whether fortuitous things happen or miserable things happen, we have the equanimity to deal with them all.
Practice is not just to make us feel comfortable, practice is to transform the heart and sometimes that transformation is painful because as we look at the mind, we begin to see aspects of ourselves which we don’t want to acknowledge. Some people feel themselves to be worms so then they need to encouragement to appreciate that they have good qualities. Sometimes people suppress their negative qualities and have this vision of themselves as being perfectly satisfactory, and then when they start to meditate all this other stuff comes out, so then they are devastated and they can’t deal with it. But it’s all there, good points, bad points, it’s all empty in its nature. It’s not solid, it’s not real. So we shouldn’t concretise our thoughts and our feelings. As we look into the mind we see its naturally transparent nature and we release into that spaciousness. Sometimes it’s like we are in the middle of an ocean and we are tossed up and we are tossed down in this ocean of samsara. So this quality of awareness is what gives us balance to ride the waves.
In Malaysia I saw this T-shirt which shows big waves, and on the waves is a surfboard and sitting on the surfboard is a figure sitting in meditation, and the slogan says, ‘Riding the waves of life, be mindful, be happy”. A surfer can’t be thinking of the past wave or caught up in memories. Nor thinking of a future wave and making plans for next week. The surfer is present in this wave that is here right now, balanced and focused, completely with what’s happening right now. Now when we are leaning to surf, we need to start with little waves but as we gain experience, we look for the big waves—that’s more challenging and more fun.
Likewise in meditation, we start in a nice quiet atmosphere, so that we can learn how to be inwardly centred, but then we need to go out and discover that we can survive happily and benefit others. After that the bigger the challenges, the more one is able to stay poised. It’s no good if we can only remain calm in a peaceful environment but the minute we are in the midst of the crowd, we fall flat on our face and are submerged under the wave again. So we need to cultivate this quality of observing the mind. In our tradition it is said that we should observe the mind without distraction.
In the beginning it is a little difficult just observing the mind, but as often as we remember we should bring the mind back into the present. In this moment what is the body doing? What sensations are we experiencing? What is the mind doing? Even if it is only a few seconds, when we are conscious we are here. If it helps, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out and know that. It’s so simple. The actual practice is very simple, the problem is usually we don’t do it.
In order to generate a transformation we have to work at it. Earlier I said if we want to be a great musician we practise. Likewise, if we want to transform the heart, we need to practise: there is no shortcut. Walking up the mountain is a heavy slog. There are no cable cars. We have to walk up step by step by step. And nobody can walk the mountain for us. Certainly we can have a guide; guides are very helpful if we are going up a mountain. But the guide can’t walk it for us and just looking at pictures of the view in National Geographic is not the same. It is easy to sit at home and read about others’ adventures and mountain climbs but it’s very different from climbing ourselves and for each one the experiences are different.
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May All Beings Benefit
Sarva Mangalam