Wisdom

The Six Paramitas: Prajña or Wisdom

We dealt a little bit with the idea of shamatha, the idea of making the mind more quiet, more collected and one-pointed. We also dealt with the fact that this helps the mind to see to the bottom of the lake, but that it doesn’t remove the mud; it doesn’t remove all the garbage and all the weeds at the bottom of this lake. 

When I was in Lahoul, outside my cave, there was a flat area sort of like a patio. It was of hardened earth and on the surface were clusters of  pretty little flowers.  When it rained or snowed, it all got very muddy, and I decided to put down some large flat stones. That meant I had to pull out these small flowers.  I decided that the only way to get rid of these delicate weeds  was not just to remove the flowers, but to really get down to the roots, the whole tap-root system so they wouldn’t grow again. I imagined just pull it and then it would come out.  But as I started to trace down the roots of these little flowers – literally the roots went all the way across the patio.  They were spread out and interconnected: a huge underground root system although only a few little clusters of flowers were visible on the surface.

That is such an example of the weeds of our mind.  On the top they look attractive, “Oh, I love chocolates” or “I love new clothes”  So innocent.  But these roots of desires are  deep and thick and they spread out and underlie everything.  This is the problem. These tap-roots of our negativities, our delusion, our ill-will and our greed are so deeply imbedded in our mind that they permeate everything and often we don’t even recognize them for what they really are.   So what’s the point of pulling them out?  We pull out a  bit here and we snip and trim a little bit there, but that doesn’t deal with those very, very deep tap-roots. 

So it seems to me that insight meditation is dealing with the mind on two fronts that ultimately come together as the realisation of  the empty nature of the mind.  First of all, we are dealing with the fact that our mind is permeated by these very deep negative impulses which create so much pain and problems in our lives, for ourselves and for others around us. Then beyond that, the whole question of who experiences this pain and these problems in the first place.   So we will deal with these just in brief although it’s a huge subject. 

So, through the practice of shamatha our mind has quietened down a bit.  Our thought stream usually goes through three stages. First, it’s like a waterfall, just crashing and cascading down. Then, it becomes like a turbulent river, gradually becoming more placid as it goes along.  Eventually the river opens into the ocean. 

So now our mind has got to a point where it is no longer a cascading waterfall.  It’s now more of a calmly flowing river.  At that point in our calm-abiding meditation, we don’t need to go into that ocean of samadhi or deep absorption.  That is not so important here.  We just need to get our mind more quiet; and we need to acquire the ability to concentrate on one point, to have single-pointed concentration: these two are required, but we don’t need to be in the state with no thoughts whatsoever.

Previously when we were developing one-pointed concentration, we ignored the thoughts.  We didn’t give the thoughts any attention.  We were giving attention to the focal point of our concentration, which was the breath.  However now what we do is to take that concentration and apply it to the thoughts themselves.  It is said to be like somebody sitting on the bank and just watching the river going by.  They are not trying to dam up the river or change the river flow in any way, but just watching it; sitting there and looking.  So we are sitting on the banks of our mental river and watching the thoughts flow by.  We are not trying to interfere with the thoughts.  We are not doing anything about the thoughts.  The important thing is not to be fascinated, not to get caught up with the thoughts, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea. Hmm, yeah, right” and next minute, our mind is away, down the river, swept away completely or, “That’s a terrible thought.  How could I think of something like that?  I am supposed to be a Dharma student.  A Dharma student never thinks like that,” and again we get swept away.  So the important thing is not to think like that, just to watch the thoughts flowing as thoughts, not to interfere with them and just to let them go by.

When I was in Lahoul in the Himalayan valley, down below my cave there was a meadow and sometimes, a shepherd would bring his flock across in the summer time for the pasture.  One time I noticed that it was not the regular shepherd but a younger boy tending to the sheep.  Obviously, this boy had never guarded sheep before and he probably realized that he would be beaten up if he lost a single one.  So he was very careful to keep those sheep under his eye.  He kept them very close together.  They were a tight little pack and he took them here and then he took them there.  He made sure they were still kept close together since there were several hundred sheep and he didn’t want to lose any of them.  He kept them moving the whole day. Of course the sheep were very agitated and they hadn’t really gotten much to eat because they were all in such a compressed group. The boy was completely frazzled and they all kind of staggered back down the hill.  The next day, the regular old shepherd came back up again.  What he did was to lead the sheep back to the usual place.  Then he left and moved up to a hillock which overlooked the meadow, and he got out his bottle of beer and he laid down and he just watched. So, the sheep sort of scattered around and they ate, they wandered around a bit and eventually by the afternoon, they were sitting down, perfectly relaxed and had eaten enough.  The shepherd was just lying there all day watching them and in the evening, he rounded them all up and they all walked very quietly and happily back down the hill again.  The point is that the shepherd, while he was watching the sheep, didn’t go to sleep; he was watching.  If anything threatening had come, if a wolf had come, he would be up in a moment.  If any of the sheep had wandered off, he would have gone and brought it back.  He knew what was going on with the sheep but he didn’t interfere.  So the sheep were happy, he was happy and everybody got what they needed and the day passed pleasantly.

 This is a very good example on the dos and don’ts of watching the mind.  If we watch the mind very tensely, keeping all the thoughts together, ready to pounce the minute we forget anything or if any thought wanders off — “every thought, mustn’t miss a thought”– we end up with what is called ‘loong’ which is the imbalance of primal energy or what is called ‘qi’.  The Zen roshi, Suzuki Roshi said that the way to control your cow is to give it a large pasture. When we are trying to develop these qualities of awareness and mindfulness and observing the mind, it’s very important to give the mind a wide pasture, not to keep it too tight. That extreme tenseness is not what we mean.  What we are talking about is allowing our thoughts to come and flow and meanwhile just knowing, just observing, just seeing and if we miss a few, it doesn’t matter.  The shepherd closed his eyes from time to time; I am sure he had forty winks now and again, but basically if the big bad wolf had come along, he would have been up there, do you understand? 

So this is the next stage after we have been practicing with the breathing or with some object in front of ourselves.  When the thoughts have calmed down a little and are not so chaotic, and when our sense of one-pointedness, concentration and awareness have become a little more strong and well-defined, then we turn the attention from the breathing on to the mind itself.  According to Buddhist psychology, we cannot have two thought moments at the same time. Two mental states cannot arise in our consciousness simultaneously. Our mental states are incredibly rapid but nevertheless they are sequential.  So therefore, the more moments of awareness we have, the less moments of discursive thinking.  As our awareness becomes stronger and more constant, it stops jumping back between awareness and discursive moments and becomes just awareness; so then the thoughts begin to slow down, and there are less thoughts…. until finally it appears that the thoughts have completely stopped.  There is no more movement in the mind.   The mind is completely quiet but the awareness is extremely sharp.  When we get to that point, then we start to develop what is called insight. We begin to use this intelligence to look into the mind itself. 

As was said previously, we live from our mind, we only experience anything through our mind.  Yet that mind itself, we don’t know.  We’ve never looked at it.  We say, “I think”, “I remember”, “in my opinion”, “my judgment is”.  We are full of judgments, intentions, ideas, thoughts, fantasies, dreams and memories, but what is a thought?  What does it look like?  Where does it come from?  Where does it stay?  Where does it go?  What does it feel like?  What does it look like?  “I’m angry”, “I’m happy”, “I’m sad”, but what does an emotion look like?  Where is it coming from?  So we use the mind to look at the mind.  It’s like having a big question mark and we are asking the mind, “Where are you?” So we look into the mind and we try to see what is a thought, what does it look like?  What is it?  To experience it, not intellectually.  We could think about a thought but we can actually experience a thought. 

So then we ask, “OK, so there are thoughts”.  And then there are times when there are no thoughts.  Is that the same or different?  And then what about the awareness which is observing the thoughts.  Is that awareness the same as the thoughts or is it different?  And what does that awareness look like?  Can we see the seer?  Can we observe the observer?  And then of course, the questions of questions–  “Who is the observer?”  I am not giving you the answer!  Because we say, “I think”, “I remember”, “I like”, “I do not like”, “I am happy”, “I am sad”, “I am a good person”, “I am a bad person”, who is this ‘I’?  Normally we never ask,  we never look.  That is the crux of it.  It’s the heart of it because we are always clinging to our false identifications and it is these false identifications which are causing us so much confusion and so much misery.    We identify first of all, with the particular body we have, “I am woman”, “I am a man”, “I am white”, “I am black”, “I am brown”, “I am Asian”, “I am European”, “I am American”, “I am African”, “I am beautiful”, “I am ugly”, “I am tall”, “I am thin”, “I am fat”, “this is me” but of course we are not our bodies.  We are connected with our bodies but we are not our bodies.  When we die, we leave behind the body and but the consciousness goes on. So all those memories, all those identifications which are bound up to our physical form are only temporary.   They are not who we really are.  They are the role we are playing at this particular point.  We have all had endless lifetimes, endless different forms, certainly as both male and female, in many different countries under many different guises and each time we thought, “this is me, this is who I am” and then we die,  we abandon that form, and as we take on a new identification again we think, “This is me”, “This is who I am”. And we identify with our thoughts, our opinions and our judgements and we identify with our memories, especially sad ones, especially difficult ones; we cling and we revolve our whole identity around our suffering.  We are such perverse beings but when we look into our mind, we see that memories are just thoughts, that’s all.  Events that we are remembering are over, they were gone years ago.  They are not here,  they are not existing now.  All that we are left with are our thoughts, but when we look into our thoughts, in themselves, they are quite transparent.  It’s not a thing.  So why are we are identifying so closely?  Our opinions change.  Our ideas change.  We hold on so much to one idea and then something happens and our opinion completely changes.

Let’s go back to this whole question of mind.  I will give you an example.  All analogies are imperfect but they give an idea, so don’t push it too hard.  Imagine we are at the movies.  We are in the cinema and there is a big screen and projected on the screen is a film and there is a hero and there is a heroine.  The hero and the heroine meet, ah, yes! But ah no, she’s off somewhere else, oh dear, the villain is getting closer, oh no…..but never mind, the villain gets blown up and hero gets the heroine…  The point is that while we are watching the movie, if it is a sad movie, sob, sob and if it is a happy movie, ha, ha, ha.  We are completely there, we are experiencing their emotions.  We really believe in it; we know it’s just a movie but still we are moved and if it is a sad movie, we come out sort of depressed. It kind of ruins our whole evening. 

Now if instead of looking at that big screen with all that is going on out there in front, we turn our attention behind, and then we would see that actually there is a light radiating out.  What’s really going on is that there is a projector that is shining bright light. This light is shining through separate transparent frames that are moving very fast. This light goes through the frames and turns into coloured light that is projected out onto the screen. Since the frames are moving so fast, it seems to be a moving picture, it’s looks as though it is reality out there.  So that’s the movie we are watching.  It’s actually just a row of small transparent frames moving very rapidly with the light going through them, .  This is really quite a good example of how the mind works: the clear light of our pure awareness shines through the transparent mind moments which are moving so fast that through our sense doors is projected our whole external reality.  Try that one out.  So what we see basically is a reflection of our own mind.  Now it’s not quite as simple as that but it’s close.  We are projecting continually our own reality and that’s why it’s a very messed-up situation, because our minds are messed up.

One time the previous Gyalwa Karmapa was very sick in Delhi and at that time, I went to see His Holiness Sakya Trizin who is the head of the Sakya school, and I said to him, “Oh, isn’t it awful that the Karmapa is so sick?” and he said, “The Karmapa is not sick.  The Karmapa is beyond birth and death. It’s your impure perception that sees the Karmapa as sick”.  So I said, “Well yes, but Your Holiness, Tai Situ Rinpoche who is a very high level Bodhisattva who obviously doesn’t have impure perceptions, was very worried and depressed because the Karmapa was sick”.  And Sakya Trizin replied, “Tai Situ Rinpoche wasn’t depressed or worried.  It was your impure perception that saw him as worried”.  At that point, I just said, “Oh, right, yes.”  We project our own reality. 

There is somewhere in one of the sutras where Ananda, who was the Buddha’s cousin and attendant said to the Buddha, “How is it that all these other Buddhas have beautiful pure Buddha realms where it’s so perfect and lovely, and you have such an awful Buddha realm?” And the Buddha said, “My Buddha realm is completely perfect.  It’s just your impure mind which sees it as awful”.  Our impure perceptions create the reality which we perceive. But of course that’s not saying therefore that this whole external phenomena is purely illusion. It is not exactly an illusion. The Tibetans say it is like an illusion. It is like an illusion because we project and are not conscious that this is our projection. Since are perceptions are ego-distorted and impure we do not see things as they really are – we only perceive our own version based on delusion.

So we have been looking at the mind. We are looking at the flow of thoughts.  Now, while we are observing the thoughts and the awareness is very strong, then the thoughts begin to slow down; it’s like the film, the film begins to go slower and slower and then one recognises the individual frames rather than the projected movie. Likewise if our awareness is clear and steady, the thoughts begin to slow down and can be recognized as thoughts linked together.  And it can happen that when our awareness is very clear, the stream of thoughts parts for a moment and there is a gap between the last thought and the next. When there is a gap, the observer directly merges with that which is underlying the thought, that is the clear light nature of the mind. 

In that moment, that usually lasts just for a short time, there is the direct intuition and realization of the nature of the mind: non-dual, non-conceptual, unconditioned beyond thought.  We can’t think about it but we can experience it.  So in this kind of meditation, the idea is to get as many flashes as we can of these moments of non-dual vision and to prolong those moments. As one mind naturally rests in this unborn awareness more frequently and for longer duration until eventually we would remain in that state of wakefulness the whole time.  It’s a level of awareness which has no boundaries.  There is no self and another.  The sky has no center and the sky has no circumference, it is boundless.  Now the sky is all pervading, not just above us but everywhere. It is space.  Without space, we couldn’t have anything because space is everything.  Everything comprises space with just a few protons and neutrons swirling around. If there is no space, nothing could exist.

When we come into this room we see the people, we see the chairs, we see the microphone on the table but we can only see them because of the space, yet we don’t see the space itself.  Actually most of what is here is space.  Outside and inside it’s all space.  I read somewhere that the actual solidity of  the human body can be reduced and fitted on the head of a pin.  So it is all space and that spaciousness is reflected in the true nature of the mind.  When people talk about their true self, that gives the idea of someone sitting inside us: a bigger, better, more wonderful ME. But that’s not what we are talking about at all.  When we realize the true nature of our being, where is “I”, where is “other”?  In space, I can’t say that this is my bit of space, that is your bit of space.  It is just space.  Where is the boundary?  On the earth we can put up fences but in space, how can you put up fences?  Where does it begin?  Where does it end?  And the true nature of the mind is like that.  It is beginningless and endless and it has no centre and it has no circumference.  It is a boundless interconnection with all beings. 

Now, this cannot be seen, it cannot be thought about conceptually, but it certainly can be experienced and realized: it is the mind of a Buddha.  And this vast, spacious, empty quality of the mind is filled with all the wonderful qualities of wisdom and compassion and purity.  It’s not empty or vacuous.  To compare the nature of mind to the sky is good because it gives us a vast feeling of infinity. But space isn’t conscious, whereas the essential quality of this inner spaciousness is awareness, knowing..   If we did not have this quality of  knowing, we couldn’t exist.  It’s that clear awareness that is behind the working of our senses, allows us to know anything and which illuminates our thinking and our emotions. Behind the movement of the conceptual mind is this vast silent Knowing.  It’s so simple. But we don’t believe it. It is sad indeed that we miss it because we are trying to accomplish something great and wonderful, so we overlook the simplicity in front of us.

There is a story of Patrul Rinpoche who was a great Nyingma Lama about 100 years ago. He had a disciple who was a Khenpo, a professor of philosophy.  This professor was very learned and he was very devoted to Patrul Rinpoche.  Although he a great scholar he had never realized the nature of the mind.  He never had a direct realization.  So he was very upset.  He was sad because he understood that all his learning was up in the head, it was only intellectual.  There was no realization behind it, so it was basically useless. One day, he was visiting Patrul Rinpoche who was living in a little hut somewhere up in the mountain.  In the evening, they were just sitting outside.  Patrul Rinpoche said to him, “Let’s lie down on the ground.” So they lay on the ground and in the distance, a dog barked.  Patrul Rinpoche said, “Did you hear that?” and the Khenpo said, “Yeah, it’s a dog.” And Patrul Rinpoche said, “That’s it!” Then the Khenpo got it.  Do you understand?  The fact that we know that we hear, that we can recognize things, that is the pure awareness right there! But we don’t believe it…..

I’ll tell you another story.  One day, there was in the Buddha’s time, in South India, a kind of sadhu, a yogi meditator and he was meditating under a tree when he had some experience and so he thought, “Oh good.  Now, I am enlightened!”.  And the spirit that was living in the tree, said to him, “No, no, that’s not enlightenment.” And he asked “Really no?” and the tree spirit said, “Nah, it’s not.” So the sadhu enquired, “Well, is there anybody who is enlightened?” and the spirit replied, “Well, it’s going around among the tree spirits, that there is this guy up North whom they call the Buddha.  He’s said to be enlightened.  Go and see him”.  He said, “Right.” So he set off, of course on foot.  In India Sadhus, even nowadays go everywhere on foot.  And eventually after months and months of toil, he got to the town where the Buddha was.  It was very early in the morning and the Buddha was on his alms round.  So he went up to the Buddha and threw himself at the Buddha’s feet and said, “Tell me what I need in order to be enlightened.” And the Buddha replied, “Kindly get off my feet! Hmm, this is not the right time.  I’m on my alms round now.  Please come back later.”  And the sadhu said, “No, no, no, no, you’ve got to tell me, I’m desperate. I’ve got to know.  How do I become enlightened?” And Buddha said, “Really, this is an inappropriate time.  Just come back in an hour.” “No, no, you’ve got to tell me now.  I can’t wait.” So the Buddha said, “

All right. Listen carefully. In the heard, there is only the heard, in the seen there is only the seen, and in the…

The sadhu understood immediately and he rose up into the air.  He bowed to the Buddha and then he self-combusted! 

When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I was working in a library.  At that time, my mind changed for a while.  I was very conscious that when sounds come into the ears, they were merely vibrations hitting on my eardrum, and the things that I saw were just things that were being seen.  My mind was like an empty house in which all the doors and windows were open and the winds were blowing through and there was no one at home.  I was very aware of each of the senses, each working in its own sphere, but they were not me or mine.  Now, this may sound very cold but in fact as I looked into the eyes of the other people around me, I would see how extremely involved they were in what they heard and saw and what they thought, and how there was no inner space. On account of this their minds were so turbulent just as my own mind normally was.  Therefore immense compassion arose because at that time I saw so clearly and understood our predicament at that time. 

So this is genuine compassion which arises from insight.  Normally when we look and when we experience anything, we really believe in what we are seeing and experiencing. We are completely involved.  It’s as if there is no space inside.  But when we develop pure awareness then we are not submerged by our thoughts.  Awareness is always behind the thoughts and feelings.

It is rather like a surfboard. In Malaysia, there is a T-shirt that shows big waves and on the waves is a surfboard. A figure is sitting in meditation on the surfboard and underneath is a slogan, “Riding the waves of life, be mindful, be happy”.  Now this quality of awareness is like a surfboard because usually we are totally submerged in our thoughts and our emotions, tossed up and down by the waves of our conceptual thoughts : now we are up, now we are down, now we are swept this way, now we are swept that way, and we are helpless.  So this quality of awareness is like having a surfboard so that while we are still connected to the waves, we are not submerged in them. As we become more skilful, balanced and poised, then the bigger the waves the better. But at the beginning we start with the little waves.  So that’s why we have retreat situations where we are protected.  We strive for this balance and inner space because normally we are  suffocated by our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions.  So we practise being able to stand back to see the thoughts, the memories, the feelings and emotions as merely thoughts and feeling and emotions, as merely mental states and not as something solid or real, as me and mine – just as mental states.  They come, they stay for a moment and they go.  That’s all that is actually happening, but because we have no space in our mind, we can’t see that.  So these meditations allow us to have the room to see that our thoughts and our feelings are not something solid, not something opaque.  They are empty in their nature like a bubble.  We cannot catch hold of them.  If we look into the thought itself, it evaporates.  Ultimately, this is the most skilful way to deal with emotions because then as any emotion comes up, we look directly into it and in that moment of seeing, it just disappears. 

If we take a negative emotion like anger as an example, then if in the very moment that the thought is incipient within us, there is recognition, then that anger spontaneously transforms into a subtle form of energy which is very clear and sharp.  These poisons of the mind, if taken to their very roots are a source of great wisdom energy.  The problem is that we allow them to develop unrecognised and they emerge in very distorted forms such as greed, anger and jealousy.  But if we can catch them right at that moment when they are emerging into consciousness then they have a vibrancy and a clarity.  It is an extremely clear form of energy.  Therefore in the higher teachings, it is said that the greater our emotional defilements, the greater the wisdom! But until we can catch the thought in its incipient form, in its moment of being born– unless we can do that and transform it in that instant–then of course it’s better to try to deal with the negative emotions in other ways.  But once we can do that, once we have that extremely powerful awareness which sees things very clearly moment to moment to moment, then there is nothing to fear because every thought that turns up is transformed into wisdom energy.

 In the Tibetan texts which says, “Look, where is the mind?  Is it in the stomach? Is it in the foot?  Is it in the heart?  Is it in the shoulder?”  They seem never to ask, “Is it in the head?” Isn’t that interesting? Perhaps it never occurs to them that it’s possible for the mind to be in the head.   I remember my lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche at one time saying how curious it was that Westerners think that the mind is in the head.  He said the brain is in the head but the brain isn’t the mind.   A little while ago, I was reading a book by a famous brain surgeon and he said, “We now know a lot about the brain but we still haven’t found the mind”.  The brain is the computer but it’s not the energy running the computer.  For Westerners who are very head-orientated, when we meditate, it often happens that our meditation stays up in the brain.  Sometimes people get headaches because the meditation is up in the head. 

Now if someone said to me, “I know this morning you came in and you stole my wallet.  You are a thief!”  I would say, “You mean me?” and point to the chest.  I wouldn’t say, “You mean me?” and point to the head.  Now why not?   All our senses are in our head: our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth, our brain, they are all up here.  So why don’t we say “ME” (pointing to the head)?  Even in the west, head-orientated as we are, when we say “I really feel inside me”, we point here at the chest, right?  So the importance of meditation is to bring our practice from the head to the heart because the brain is by its nature dualistic.  So what happens is that when we meditate, we have oneself, the subject of meditation and the object of meditation and they kind of face each other.  Somebody described it as two mountains facing each other and because of this, meditation remains up in the intellect.  It’s still part of our thoughts.  Now when the meditation begins to deepen and the subject and object begin to merge: I am no longer meditating– I am the meditation– then the focus comes into the heart.  When the meditation is in the heart, there is no duality between the subject and the object.  It’s merged and we become the meditation.  Do you understand? Although in the beginning it usually does not happen– it’s very important to try somehow to draw the meditation down into the heart center.  For this reason I think, many of the tantric meditations are centred on the heart chakra because if we are always up in the head.  For Westerners especially and any Asians who have been educated in a Western type of education, we are already too much up in our heads.  When we meditate, we turn it into another intellectual exercise, so it  doesn’t really transform us.  So often during retreat time our thoughts calm down and we are feeling peaceful and centred but when we go out into the world, it all falls apart again!  That’s because we haven’t become one with the meditation.  Do you understand what I am saying?  That inner transformation can only take place when the arena of action is shifted down here in the heart chakra.  Otherwise, there is always a separation.  I only wanted to mention that because it’s an important point.  Sometimes people have been meditating for years and years but it’s still up in the head, so nothing much changes and they feel discouraged. 

So the perfection of wisdom has to do with this quality of emptiness.  Now Buddhists talk about emptiness such a lot.  I am not a philosopher, so I am not going to give you a discourse on Madhyamika.  I just want to talk a little bit about emptiness and what emptiness is not.  When Buddhists say that everything is empty, they are basically talking about two things: one is that nothing exists from its own side; nothing exists in and of itself.  Everything can only appear in relationship with everything else.  It’s fairly obvious.  We cannot think about dark unless we think about light.  We cannot have left unless we have right.  We cannot think except in relative terms.  Western philosophy deals with this too.  So then scholars analyse everything down to its component parts. Take the watch. If I say to you, “What is this?” You will reply, “This is a watch.” Then we can question, “Which part of it is the watch? Is it the front? Is it the back? Is it the hands?  Is it the inside machinery?” and we keep reducing it further and further to find the “watchness” of the watch, but we can never the find the watch in itself.  It’s only a label which we put on as a combination of many, many things.  The thing in itself doesn’t exist. It’s empty of self-existence. We can never ever find the thing in and of itself .  So everything that we see and experience are just conventional labels.  People spend  thirty years studying this approach,  So you are lucky, you got it in just thirty seconds!  

The other meaning of emptiness is what we talked about earlier. This spacious quality of everything which allows itself to be filled – but that which fills it is in itself empty.  And this applies also to the mind. Philosophers and scholars spend many years analyzing external reality and yogis analyze the internal reality.  

During the first lesson from my old yogi teacher, he pointed to a small table and asked me,  “Is that table empty?”  So having done my Buddhist studies, I said “Yes”.  “Do you see it as empty?” I replied “No”. Then he said, “Your mind.  Is your mind empty?”  And I said with a bit more confidence, “Yes”. And he said, “Do you see it as empty?” I answered, “No”.  And he said, “Which do you think would be easier? To see the table as empty or to see your mind as empty?”  So I said, “Oh, definitely, to see the mind as empty”.  He laughed and said, “Ok, then you can stay with us.”  Naturally I enquired, “Well if I said that seeing the emptiness of the table was easier, what would you have done?” The yogi said, “Then I would have told you to go down to Sera”  Sera Monastery is a big monastic college where they study about “what is a watch?” and things like this. 

But the yogic tradition is to study the emptiness of the mind because once we understand the emptiness of the mind, then we understand everything.  When we realise, we do not just think about it but we see directly how the mind works and how the mind projects external reality which becomes very solid to us.  Consider that any physicist will tell you, that this table is basically empty.  It’s basically space with just a few protons and neutrons whizzing around.  We don’t see it like that.  We don’t experience it like that.  We experience the table as something very solid and if I try to lift it up, it’s heavy.  That’s how I experience it but that’s not how a physicist will see it, is it?   So what I am experiencing is what my mind is projecting.  Now if I were to have very different senses and a different kind of mind, I would probably experience this table in a completely different way.   If I was one of those little worms that bore into wood, I would apprehend this in a very dissimilar manner but that would also be real.  It would be real to a woodborer. 

We believe what our senses tell us but, for example, enlightened masters leave their handprints and footprints in solid rocks, we can see them.  Even the present Karmapa as a boy left his handprints and footprints all over rocks near his monastery in Tibet before he left to come to India.  Now, how could he do that?  He could do that because his mind, being more tuned into reality than our minds are, saw that the rock is not as solid as it looks.  But we believe our senses and we have a kind of consensus and conspiracy to see things the way our sense perceptions present them. This is fine because that’s how we function, and there is nothing wrong with it on a relative level. This is how we are equipped to deal with life on a conventional plane. But the problem arises when we think that it is true. The problem comes because we trust that our conditioned thoughts are telling us the truth and we believe implicitly in our very transient identities.  

The problem is not the ego – the problem is our identifying with the ego. The solution is to know it’s just a role we’re playing, like an actor. In order to be convincing, the actor has to play that part as convincingly as possible. He identifies with the role.  But it would be big trouble if he comes off the stage and still thinks that role is who he is.  The term ‘personality’ comes from the Latin word ‘persona’ which was the mask worn on stage by actors to represent the different characters. So the problem is that we never take off our masks even in the privacy of our own bedroom.  We think, “This is who I really am”.

In tantric meditations, one sees oneself as a deity, for example one sees oneself as Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. However when people are doing the meditation, especially foreigners (and maybe even Tibetans), we sit there visualizing ourselves: white, four arms, radiating light. But the inner message is “Now I am Mary Smith and I am pretending to be Chenrezig.”  And we think that this is the reality. “I am Mary Smith. Of course, I am really Mary Smith but now I am going to pretend to be Chenrezig. ”.  We think that that’s the truth. But of course the real truth is that we are actually Chenrezig pretending to be Mary Smith!  Do you understand?  This basic delusion– that we identify with the wrong things, — is at the root of all our problems. 

When we become enlightened, we don’t become some kind of cosmic blob, spaced out in space awareness, it’s not like that.  If you have met any great enlightened masters, you realize that they are vital, more completely present, more vivid than ordinary people: but they know who they are and they know who they are not. They are conscious of this present form they embody, but it is just their present form, it’s not who and what they are. 

Behind that is the vast open spacious awareness which is not only knowing but is the fullness of complete wisdom and compassion.  Wisdom means that we see things as they really are.  We understand things completely clearly without distortions.  So when we are talking about wisdom and emptiness, it’s not something that is cold and remote, it is that open spacious quality where outside and inside contains everything.  The Buddha’s mind is empty and because it is empty it can be full of all the Buddha’s qualities.  We are full of all the Buddha’s qualities.  We have just covered it over for the moment and forgot them.  They are all there waiting for us to discover and the only way to discover them is to look inside and start to strip away the various layers of false veils, the veils which cover what is always there waiting to be found.  

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May All Beings Benefit
Sarva Mangalam