One more post on the nature of mind. And then we’ll move on to the fourth foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of the dharmas which translates to mindfulness of the way things are. After all, the path is not just understanding nature of mind. It’s knowing what to do with it, working with it to free ourselves of our delusions about ourselves and the world and the ways things really are. And, as well, it can be an enormous help to have a little understanding of what the mind is like when we experience it. We are so distracted by things and experiences all the time that when we get a chance to drop in between the gaps in experience, we might allow ourselves to continue dropping and not look for the next experience to take us to the surface again. Distractions and experiences will show up on their own but we might have a glimpse of non-duality/our minds/the ultimate and then because of our understanding and contemplation of nature of mind, we might know the glimpse of mind for what it is.
Our ultimate purpose on the path is not a thing or an achievement but a state of increasing freedom and increasing kindness. Ven. Analayo says, when measuring our progress along the path, it’s helpful to ask am I kinder to myself and to others. The nature of mind is intrinsically kind. Our practice helps us access what is already there - waiting for us to embrace it.
So, below is an excerpt from a book The Heroic Heart: Awakening Unbound Compassion by Jetsunma Tenzin Palma, the British woman turned Tibetan Buddhist Master who spent 12 years in a cave in the Himalayas. She talks and writes often about the nature of mind.
...The mind is empty by nature. What does that mean? The classical description is that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, which means that we cannot find anything existing independently and say that this is the thing itself, whether a table or the mind or anything else. We can never find the actual thing itself. Everything is made up of bits and pieces put together and labeled.
Where is the tableness of a table? It cannot be found. After all, anything can be used as a table if it is slightly flat. We use another object as a table and say, “Now this is a table.” Yesterday maybe it was a box, but today it is a table.
Even though that is a simplistic explanation of a profound understanding, it is an important one, because we do label everything and then believe our label instead of recognizing that this is just a label, just a convenience.
The Buddha said, ”I too, use conceptual language, but I am not fooled by it.”
And that’s the difference: we are fooled by it, and we think that if we give something a name, it exists as a separate, independent entity.
But here we are dealing specifically with the mind, not tables, and so the point is, what is the mind? Why is the mind empty?
First of all, the mind is empty because our thoughts are flowing endlessly, like bubbles swept along in a stream. We cannot pick one up and say, “This is the mind” or even “This is a thought” because the moment we identify it, it is gone. Anyone who has tried looking at the mind can see that when we say, “thinking,” we can never find the thought itself. It is like the frames of a movies moving across the projector so fast that they seem to project out this whole drama. Each individual frame is moving too fast to be identified. By the time, we’ve notice it, it is gone.
The mind’s emptiness also connotes its spacious quality. The mind is empty but also luminous or cognizant. Mind is not something graspable – it is something vast and open, luminous, clear, and knowing. The nature of the mind is compared to the sky. If we look at our mind, we realize that there are two processes going on: There are the thoughts coming up and disappearing, moment to moment, just flowing past. Then there’s awareness – the mindfulness that observe the thoughts. Now that observation is already a step forward. Normally we are just engulfed in the flow of thinking and swept along by our thoughts. But now we are stepping back and observing the thoughts, so there is a space between the observer and the thoughts.
However, that is still a dualistic situation, because there is the observer and the observed. This observing mind is called “mindfulness.” We are now conscious of our mind and in being more conscious, we are no longer so completely enslaved. We can begin to see that all these feelings, these thoughts, these ideas, these beliefs, these memories, prejudices, judgments, and clinging are just thoughts. Merely thoughts.
So here we are, observing the mind. Watching the thoughts as they go past, recognizing that thought moments come and go. In the beginning the stream of thoughts is like a waterfall cascading down. Then it becomes like a fast-flowing river, gradually moving more slowly as the mind quiets down until, eventually it enter the ocean of samadhi.
This is the conventional mind. That mindfulness that watches is also the conventional mind. Think of the clouds in the sky during a rainstorm. The sky is completely covered by clouds; only clouds are visible. Likewise, the nature of the mind is covered by all our conceptual thinking and, therefore, when we look at the mind, all we see are the clouds of conceptual thought.
But those clouds could not exist if it were not for the sky. The clouds come from the sky, and they vanish back into the sky again. But we usually identify with the clouds. When the clouds part, we see the sky. It is rather like flying in a plane through thick clouds until suddenly the plane ascends, and we are above the clouds and there’s this vast blue expanse with the clouds below. Clouds float within this open spaciousness, which is empty. It is empty insofar as we cannot grasp it, it cannot be seen. Yet without space nothing would exist. Space is everywhere. Where is space not?
If we are asked to describe a room, then we will refer to the furniture, decorations, and any people present. But what is really there is space. But we usually don’t notice that. Yet without the space there could be not furnishings, there could be no people. Furnishings and people can only exist because there’s space.
Also the people and the furniture themselves are ultimately space. Every cell in our body is space. If the physical body is reduced infinitely, there are perhaps just vibrations of light. We are all space. There is nowhere that space is not. It is all-encompassing.
Therefore, the nature of the mind is compared to space and is likened to the sky. Mindfulness is a good step in advance of being completely engulfed in our thinking, yet even our mindfulness is based on the sense of my mindfulness. It has not transcended the subject and object duality. There’s mindfulness and something to be mindful of. But the ultimate nature of the mind is like the sky because it cannot be divided. There’s no center, there’s no end.
When we talk about Buddha-nature it could sound like everybody’s got a little Buddha sitting inside them. “This is my Buddha.” “Keep your Buddha to yourself.” “Actually, my Buddha is rather a special Buddha compared to an ordinary person’s Buddha!” It is not like that. It is not like everybody has a little Buddha-nature sitting inside them. That would just be another ego projection.
Buddha-nature is empty. Buddha-nature is like space. We can’t grasp space. We can fight over our particular seat in a room, but we cannot argue about the air. We are all sitting here, breathing in and breathing out the same air. I cannot say, “Excuse me, I don’t want you breathing my air!” Even if we were the bitterest enemies, fighting and shouting at each other, we are actually intimately connected because we are breathing in and breathing out the same air, which descends deep into our lungs.
We cannot own air. Air is something shared by all the beings on this planet, not just human beings. Animals, too, and the trees and the plants are also breathing in and breathing out, helping us to live on this planet. Space has no center, and it has no boundaries; it just is – vast empty space like the true nature of our mind. But, unlike the sky, which is just empty, the nature of the mind is also cognizant. It knows.
The Tibetan word often used to describe one aspect of the true nature of the mind is sal, which is a hard word to translate into English. Sal means “clear” and also “bright,” “luminous.” It also has the connotation of being cognizant. The mind is empty – meaning it is spacious, open, unimpeded, and ungraspable – and at the same time the mind is clear and luminous. The mind is naturally cognizant.
If it weren’t, we could not know anything, we could not be aware – but we all know. The Tibetan term rigpa (or the Sanskrit term vidya) means “to know,” but it is usually translated as “pure awareness” or “primordial awareness.” It is the fact that we know and that knowing is unimpeded, spacious, clear, and luminous – and it is who we are.
But that knowing quality of the mind, which we all possess and is right here all the time, is beyond duality, meaning when we are in a state of rigpa there no sense of “me” and “others.” Such duality just does not exist. It is not that we are spaced out; it is more like we are waking up. The word buddha is from the root buddh, which means “to awaken.” And it is just like that – we suddenly wake up.
We are able to see and hear things because we have awareness. But when we see or hear something, we immediately superimpose on it our ideas and judgments, so that the underlying clarity is obscured. The luminous clarity is always present, but we cover it up with all our dualistic thinking. We don’t allow our mind to remain in its naked awareness, which is its natural state before we cloth it in all our concepts.
Without this underlying awareness we couldn’t exist. But we are so busy thinking, comparing, conceiving, judging, and talking to ourselves that we don’t recognize it.
The aim is to recognize this fundamental quality of the mind. (pp.139-143)
We have all had hints that the fundamental nature of our minds is empty, spacious. We drop into a deeper meditation and our mind stills into a vast silence. We also know logically and intuitively that it is the nature of our mind to know, to be cognizant. Empty and knowing, spacious and cognizant. Out of these qualities arises a third quality - compassion. Our minds are empty, knowing, and naturally compassionate. The fruits of our labors can be measured in our kindness to ourselves and others.
Yet, it is impossible to describe the indescribable. So let these words roll off or sink in. And simply return to the practice of paying attention to the breath or whatever meditation object is chosen.