How, exactly, to access our inner riches
Awakening: An Insider's Guide - Chapter Nine
‘If you wish to realize the meaning that is beyond intellect, with nothing to be done, root out your limited awareness and settle starkly into pure awareness. Plunge into the waters of this pristine lucidity, unsullied by any stain of conceptual thinking. Settle in mind’s own state in the space that is neither the appearance-making and appearance that have ceased nor the ones about to be established.’[i]
From Maitripa (11th century yogi and teacher)
The traditional Buddhist definition of mind is “a formless continuum of clear knowing.” Our idea of reality arises within this mind and our previous conditioning – importantly, not intrinsic to this mind but carried along in its flow – causes us to project our own ideas onto people and phenomena outside us. In such a way we create our own reality without even being aware how this is playing out.
In meditation we practice using the tools to take conscious charge of a hitherto unconscious process. ‘Mind watching mind’ meditation offers an excellent basis for this. To observe our own mind. To learn to let go of whatever arises within it. To abide instead within the “pure awareness” the “pristine lucidity” referred to by Maitripa in the quote above. Because glimpsing for ourselves our own mind free of cognition really is an extraordinary, “Oh my gosh!” experience. Even the shortest initial view is enough to see for oneself that the natural, or pristine nature of our own mind is one of boundless clarity. And that this consciousness has a peaceful feeling to it which becomes more pervasive the longer we stay with it – what a revelation!
We work towards this by learning be a more effective thought managers.
Thoughts are mind
You are sitting, relaxed and comfortable on your meditation cushion. You intend focusing on mind as the object of meditation. Where to find it?
Unlike the breath or body, mind is a subtle object. As we sit, wishing to observe it, what we are most likely to experience is the arising of thoughts. For a few moments, we may experience a sense of spaciousness and then, before we know it, up pops a thought. Or a whole, interconnected flurry of them like a swarm of bees.
“Get out!” “Go away!” Or the same sentiment, more colourfully expressed, is our likely reaction. “I’m trying to plunge into Maitripa’s pristine lucidity and all I get is this vortex of mundane garbage!”
People often tell me, somewhat despondently, that their minds are just too frenetic to experience inner peace. “My mind is too busy to meditate,” or “I can’t think of nothing.”
This frustration is understandable, but it is founded on a basic misunderstanding. Because unlike with other objects of meditation, it’s okay to have thoughts when you meditate on mind. Because where do thoughts arise from? Mind. What do they consist of? Mind.
Imagine sitting on a bench overlooking the sea. As you watch waves arise from the water, form a crest, then break onto the beach, you are watching the sea. The waves are not separate from the sea. They are part of it - the same stuff. For a few moments they may emerge with certain identifiable elements – height, volume, speed and so on. Then they return, indistinguishable from the rest of the water.
So too with mind. Every thought we’ve ever had arises from mind, abides for a period, and then dissolves back into mind. In the words of The Dalai Lama: ‘Just as waves disappear into water because they are of the nature of water, likewise thoughts naturally subside since they are of the nature of mind. They do not go beyond having a nature of mere clarity and awareness. Therefore when we scrutinise the nature of thoughts, we see that they automatically dissolve. Thus we come to the foundation of thought – mere clarity and awareness itself.’[ii]
Meditation teachers sometimes like to ask, somewhat mischievously: “Where do thoughts come from? Where do they go?” Rather than answer these questions intellectually, we are invited to observe our minds. To check for ourselves if there is any direction or place from which thoughts seem to well up or dissipate. To see for ourselves how thoughts arise, abide and dissolve.
As we do, our real challenge is to restrict ourselves to this activity alone. To be objective, arms-distance observers.
Our tendency is the opposite – to engage with our thoughts. No sooner have we finished with one particular thought – in fact, we may still be very much involved with it – than some other thought or sensation grabs our attention, and we’re away thinking about that. Far from being coolly dispassionate thought-observers, our natural impulse is to participate with every thought that pops into our mind. We are thought huggers. Obsessive compulsive thinkers.
Shifting our perspective towards our own thoughts from automatic engagement to that of observation, marks a major change. We no longer have quite the same relationship with them. They will still come at us, thick and fast, but our stance towards them has changed. We become less inclined to engage. We begin to see them, perhaps for the first time, as not being quite so important or necessary, even superfluous to our experience of wellbeing. Truth be told, we begin to appreciate that we’d be very much happier with far fewer thoughts.
Given that we have spent our entire life, up till now, engaging with our thoughts, thereby fanning the flames of relentless cognitive chatter, the process of stepping back from this is going to take some time. To observe our minds as they are, rather than as we’d like them to be. To see for ourselves that when we don’t fuel thoughts – including the negative ones – with our attention, they can’t survive.
We may think that short meditation sessions of only so many minutes per day will be of little avail when we still spend so many hours of unfettered thinking – but this conclusion would be wrong. Even a very small change to our habit marks a major push-back. A turning point quite out of proportion to the relatively modest length of our sessions.
We are weaning ourselves off the habit. Starting to see through our thoughts to the much more interesting and panoramic place from which they arise. In the words of one Zen master, “Open the front door and the back door of your mind. Allow thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”
Acknowledge, accept, let go
How do we quit the ingrained habit of entertaining our thoughts, of rolling out the tea-trolley, morning, noon and night? The time-honoured technique is to apply a simple, three-step process: acknowledge, accept, let go.
Acknowledge means we don’t ignore thoughts or try to suppress them. Suppression not only leads to harmful, unintended side-effects, it is futile to try because thoughts arise quite naturally. Beating ourselves up because we’re thinking just isn’t helpful. It’s much better for us simply to relax – and acknowledge thoughts as thoughts! And part of mind.
Accept whatever thoughts arise. We don’t criticise ourselves because we keep having dark, malevolent thoughts, any more than we think we’re pretty special if we find ourselves caught up in virtuous fancies. The content of our thoughts is irrelevant. From our perspective as observers, it is just narrative chatter.
Adopting neutrality in our view of thoughts helps strip them of their power. Not good, bad, important or trivial - just thoughts. Putting thoughts in their rightful place as passing clouds of cognition can, in itself, be powerful therapy. Many of us have extremely negative thoughts about ‘me,’ ‘myself,’ and ‘I,’ believing ourselves to be worthless, perhaps, or victims in some way, or very much more deserving than others in a particular respect, or we may have intensely bitter thoughts about the stupidity of others, their selfishness, narcissism, bullying or self-righteousness.
From the perspective of mind watching mind, all such thoughts are simply “meh.” Mere thoughts. Their content immaterial. Certainly no more deserving than any other thought of our attention.
When we let go of a thought we are deliberately choosing not to engage with it. We are developing an enormously important skill, one which strengthens the more we practice. Letting go is the opposite of what we usually do when we have a thought. It goes against our normal conditioning. It puts us in control.
How do we let go? As a conscious act of will. By withdrawing our attention from the thought, or withholding our attention the moment that it arises. The technique is one that gets faster and smoother with practice until you begin to recognise the subtle movement in mind that precedes the emergence of a thought, and withdraw your attention before it manifests as a full-blown concept.
If a metaphor helps, in the initial stages of practice you may like to imagine letting go of the string of a helium balloon when a thought comes up, allowing it to slip gracefully out of view. Or envision your thoughts akin to leaves on the surface of the fast-moving stream that is your mind. Don’t feel the urge to reach out and scoop them up in your hand as we are all in the habit of doing. Just let them ripple on by. One IT friend told me he imagines closing down a virtual computer display the moment a thought appears on it.
The metaphor you use to frame the process that is happening is of much less importance than the process itself. By acknowledging, accepting and letting go of thoughts, we are learning to withdraw our attention from them.
Thoughts can’t survive without our attention
Every thought we’ve ever had, is no longer in our mind. At this particular moment, it isn’t there. No matter how debilitating the thought or how triumphant, how painful or uplifting. Like every other thought we’ve had, it’s in the past.
When we empower thoughts by giving them our attention, two things happen. First, they remain in our mind because we’re the ones holding them there. And second, they are more likely to return. Which is how we create the habit of thinking that particular thought – as well as the pattern of thinking about other things in a similar way.
This habituation to certain ways of thinking is easy to observe in other people, especially some elderly folk who become deeply ingrained in fixed ways of thinking, even when those ways are the cause of so much pain. Why do they make themselves so miserable, we may wonder - even when, on closer inspection, we’re up to exactly the same thing ourselves.
The truth is that we all evolve our own patterns of thinking, karmas, which become more and more deeply ingrained over time. We often do so unwittingly. The great value of mind-watching-mind meditation is that it acts like a mirror, revealing our own consciousness and giving us the capacity to change.
Many of us wouldn’t dream of leaving our homes without checking our appearance briefly in the mirror. What if there is a piece of spinach pasted to a front tooth? A booger dangling from a nostril? A lock of hair sticking out of our head at a ludicrous angle? We’d be oblivious to these all-too-possible presentational lapses without a mirror.
Mind watching mind meditation is the mental equivalent of a mirror, and I often wonder what kind of a world we’d live in if we all went to the same trouble to manage our minds as we do to manage our appearance. If, alongside all the nail bars, hair salons, fashion emporia and make-up counters, there was the same enthusiasm for meditation classes, karmic purifying, virtue accumulation and loving kindness. Whew! In such a world it wouldn’t matter so much even if we did go out with spinach stuck to our front teeth … or all the other stuff!
Because our minds remain unseen, even to ourselves, and are assumed by many people to be unknowable, there’s a massive disparity between the emphasis we place on our body compared to mind, despite the overriding importance of our mind when it comes to our emotional wellbeing.
Our minds are knowable. And while not literally visible, we begin to get a sense of them probably not in our first session of this mind watching mind meditation, our first week or even first month of sessions, but if we stick at it, after a while we begin to see our own habits of thought. The stuff that comes up. The emotions attached. Far from being some arcane black box requiring professional expertise to unlock, we are, each one of us, capable of adopting a more objective stance in relation to our own minds, of recognising how the thoughts that recur are those that we ourselves feed with our attention and of learning to withdraw this attention.
The discovery that thoughts have no inherent permanence can be like having a huge mental burden lifted from us. Many people have some vague, unspoken notion that their mind is a fixed entity which condemns them to be stuck with every hurt and trauma from their past. Some people feel that in some way they are their thoughts, and that their minds are like a massive inventory of every thought, memory and emotion they’ve experienced.
If we have lived for a long time with a particular trauma or grief, we may have come to believe that it is part of who we are. An enduring disfigurement of our personal, emotional landscape, one that will forever prevent us from wholeheartedly engaging with life or enjoying whatever future happiness may be available.
But when we observe our own minds for ourselves we discover that far from being concretised, mind is clear. It is like the sky – not at all a labyrinthine library filled with the glories and horrors of times past. There is nothing at all fixed about mind, rather it’s a vast spaciousness within which thoughts arise. And because the thoughts that we attend to are the self-same thoughts that re-appear, we, ultimately, are the ringmasters of our own reality, with much greater freedom than we may imagine to focus our attention on those aspects of consciousness that best serve us.
Thoughts lead to emotions
It’s a painful paradox , however, that the thoughts we are most likely to empower with our attention are often the ones that cause us pain.
Thoughts lead directly to feelings, as any cognitive therapist will affirm. Positive ideas, interpretations and beliefs lead to joy, enthusiasm and wonder. Negative thoughts and beliefs are the cause of depression, anxiety and a myriad of other unhappy emotional outcomes.
Each one of us tends to have our own particular form of unhappy thinking, our own special corner of the negativity market. I, for example, am a depression specialist. You can put me in the most sublime of circumstances and I can easily find reasons not only to be miserable, but for that misery to prove just how useless I am. I’ve been doing it for so long that I am an expert at this and find it effortless!
I know specialist worriers, stress-heads, guilt-trippers – you name it. We may point to the distant past, especially our parents or upbringing, as the original source of harm. We may be right. But just because we’ve learned a particular practice doesn’t mean we can’t relearn it. Attributing our current unhappiness to conditioning decades ago may have some validity, but it implies that we are incapable of change. That our minds are fixed and set.
If we feel a recurrent form of unhappiness, it’s quite probable that we feed a particular pattern of negative thinking. We habitually engage our mind with a particular idea, or network of ideas that lead to this unhappiness. That feeding, that engagement, is happening right now. And sometimes all it takes is for us to become aware of what we’re doing and that awareness itself is enough for the habit to begin to weaken.
One of the most interesting aspects of this activity is the natural and, in a sense, self-evident way that it unfolds. Much like standing in front of the mirror, catching sight of the spinach on one’s tooth leads quite naturally to the wish to remove it, so too seeing the recurring nature of certain thoughts makes us wish to be free from them. And once we know the gentle technique of ‘Acknowledge,’ ‘Accept,’ ‘Let go,’ and have the confidence to apply it, we are now in a position to effect change.
When the Dalai Lama tells us that “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional,” what he means is that even though each one of us may experience, loss, hardship, grief and ill-health – i.e. pain – whether or not that continues to make us unhappy – i.e. suffer – is something we do have some say over.
The word ‘suffer’ comes from a Latin word meaning ‘to carry.’ We carry pain when we continue to focus our thoughts on the negative. Suffering, you might say, is self-inflicted. No one is forcing us to keep turning our attention to negative thoughts that in turn lead to unhappy feelings. We’re doing that all by ourselves.
Transforming thoughts and emotions
On a personal note, mind-watching-mind has been the single most powerful opponent to depression I have encountered. I already knew about my own habitual pessimism, the needless negativity of my thinking, but because it was so ingrained I would become lost in it until I became submerged in utter despair. Taking up mind-watching-mind practice strengthened my introspective awareness so that I became more aware of my thoughts in real time, even when I wasn’t meditating, and better equipped to deal with them.
Just like a cardio workout at the gym makes us better able to deal with flights of steps and whatever else life throws at us, physically speaking, regular mind-watching-mind meditation makes us more aware of what’s going on in our minds and better able to deal with whatever life throws at us, mentally speaking. Even when we’re not meditating. We start to observe ourselves. To experience more objectivity about what’s going on in our own minds. Instead of saying “I’m depressed,” we may more accurately say, “I am having depression-causing thoughts.” The difference is fundamental. The first statement feels hopeless. The more accurate second statement reveals the tenuous, temporary and fixable source of our unhappiness.
We are not our thoughts. They come and go. We have good ones and not so good ones. To choose to concretise our most negative thoughts and identify with them alone, to define ourselves as being only them, makes no sense at all.
Better, to acknowledge, accept, let go.
This awareness becomes stronger and stronger the more we practice. It’s not an overnight change, but what we’re doing is radical in the truest sense of the word, going to the root of the matter. Accompanied by the new habit of deliberately focusing on taking refuge and bodhichitta, the whole balance of our thoughts begins to shift, because there is nothing more conducive to a happy state of mind than wishing for the happiness of others. Even if this practice may not feel especially authentic to begin with.
I know many people who have found this meditation transformational. And millions of others have walked the same path. Mind-watching-mind meditation offers us the tools to become more effective thought managers. And because thoughts lead to feelings, to become happier, more resilient and fulfilled.
Freeing our mental bandwidth from thought pollution has many other benefits. We live with greater intensity and joy when we experience pleasurable things, free from the pervasive miasma of continuous inner chatter. We are likely to be more creative, better able to find innovative solutions when fresh and unencumbered by the burden of mental clutter. We have a clearer-eyed view of what’s going on around us and the opportunities that may, in the past, have been obscured.
And significantly – all this is only the start. These are only a few of the benefits of being more effective mind managers.
We have still to move onto the truly exciting experience of mind itself!
Non-conceptual versus conceptual experience of mind
How might we describe a subjective experience of mind when our thoughts grow fewer, less “sticky,” and when we’re able to abide in the space between them?
Three particular qualities become apparent: clarity, boundlessness and tranquillity.
Clarity
The clarity of mind, the absence which allows any thought, perception or sensation to arise, is one of the qualities we notice initially. The more our concentration improves and we can cultivate mental and emotional peace – shamatha - the more evident this quality appears. Meditators describe it with words like ‘spaciousness,’ and ‘lucidity.’
As The Dalai Lama says: ‘The conventional nature, abiding condition, or defining characteristic of this phenomenon called “mind” – its lack of form and its ability to allow for an appearance of anything to arise as a cognitive object – is not something to be known through logical reasoning. Rather, we can know it only from the impression we build up through the repeated habit of having our mind be focused on mind – in other words, from direct personal experience.’[iii]
More advanced meditators report that the clarity of mind takes on a luminosity, or radiance as our concentration improves. The more we withdraw from what we perceive and conceive, the greater our awareness of the light within.
Boundlessness
We may also observe the paradoxical quality of the space between thoughts. So fixated by our thoughts, we have a tendency to overlook what happens between them as a blank. Zero. Of no interest at all.
When we recognise that thoughts arise from mind itself and are of the same nature as mind, we begin to see this is a false distinction. What may strike us initially as a void of activity, is actually the field from which all thoughts arise. And given that thoughts lead to actions, and to our whole experience of reality, we might say that the space between thoughts is an infinite expanse of possibility, an ocean of limitless potential.
As B. Alan Wallace observes, ‘The background is relatively constant from one session to the next, but it is not static or immutable. In fact, sometimes it seems pregnant with potential, a field in bloom, or an effervescence about to explode! This space is not an empty nothingness – it’s not flat empty. Such qualifiers point to a paradox: emptiness is full.’[iv]
This ocean of possibility has no beginning and no end. We can observe it for ourselves. To try to define its boundaries would be to impose a meaningless concept on it.
Many of us, coming to meditation with our brain-based model of consciousness, unwittingly think of our mind as being the size of our heads. When I make this point in seminars, participants will often nod with a rueful smile. How liberating to let go of this conception of a football-sized mind, and permit ourselves the idea of a mind the size of the universe. No beginning and no end. Boundless.
And how useful to enhance our awareness of every movement within the mind. To develop the capacity to detect mind movement in its most subtle, earliest moments – and release our attention, instead of engaging. This skill is not only foundational to our development of on-cushion concentration. It is also the basis of our off-cushion mindfulness, an important means by which we become more effective controllers of karma.
Tranquil
As our minds become free from agitation or sleepiness, we also discover a feeling which accompanies this clear boundlessness. It is a sense of peace.
This feeling is captured by Venerable Acharya Zasep Tulku Rinpoche in his book on Gelug Mahamudra:
‘Keep your mind like a clear mirror, only reflecting without reaction. Keep your mind like a hollow bamboo, let water run through freely. Keep your mind like the empty sky, let the clouds pass by, or like birds flying in the sky, with no trail or mark of wings. While you are observing thoughts they will arise and then vanish by themselves. You will begin to experience stillness, a vivid clarity of the mind.’[v]
Mind-watching-mind may seem a cerebral and somewhat austere activity, but it would be a mistake to believe that there is no emotional pay-off. Here it is helpful to recollect how the Buddhist definition of consciousness includes both heart as well as head. The feeling of well-being, of home-coming, of healing is one we experience at a profound level.
The words meditate and medicate both come from the same Latin root, medeor, meaning to heal or to make whole. Holistic wellbeing, of both mind and body, is what happens when our minds naturally settle. At the very least, we feel a deep-down quietness. And the more familiar we become with this practice, and can return to a state of abiding wellbeing, the more deeply we sense that enduring tranquillity.
The observation that, just below the surface of our often agitated minds, lies an ocean of calm, comes as a startling revelation to most of us. And a source of immense comfort. It helps put in context all our ongoing cognitive chatter and the accompanying roller coaster of emotions. Yeah, sure, it’s all there, on the surface. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But it doesn’t even begin to describe our evolving experience of mind as boundlessly oceanic, radiant and tranquil.
You can find a 10 minute, guided “Mind watching mind” meditation in the Free Stuff section of my website: https://davidmichie.com/free-downloads/
[i] Dalai Lama & Berzin, The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra, Snow Lion Publications, 1997, p 303
[ii] Dalai Lama & Berzin, The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra, Snow Lion Publications, 1997, p 139
[iii] Dalai Lama & Berzin, The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra, Snow Lion Publications, 1997, p 141
[iv] B. Alan Wallace, Minding Closely, Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca. New York, 2011, p215
[v] Zasep Tulku Rinpoche, Gelug Mahamudra, Eloquent Speech of Manjushri, Wind Horse Press, Nelson, Canada, 2018, p155
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings never be parted from the happiness that is beyond suffering.
May all beings abide in peace and equanimity, their minds free from attachment, aversion, and free from ignorance.
I loved this article. I received it just as I was recovering from cancer surgery and preparing for chemo. It helped me so much with having very little anxiety!
Thank you!!!
Another informative article. I prefer you, David reading your work. You have a lovely voice and read correctly.