I am very happy to be sharing the first chapter of my new, non-fiction book, Awakening: An Insider’s Guide.
Before reading it, I offer some background on the book and how I came to write it in the five minute video below.
CHAPTER ONE: WHY IS MIND-TRAINING THE BUDDHIST PATH?
‘Our consciousness is like vast space, the clouds and winds are like thoughts and emotions. But we should not let our minds be distracted by these thoughts. Remain calm and stay in the underlying clarity from which the thoughts arise.’ [i]
Acharya Zasep Tulku Rinpoche
There are many good reasons to meditate. To manage stress, promote healing and combat depression, to name just a few.Tibetan Buddhists practise mind-training for one reason above all others: to become enlightened.
Like many others in the West, I was drawn to meditation purely as a stress-management tool. Living in London during my early 30s, in a job I found quite stressful, some unknown cause began triggering increasingly angry rashes that would start as scarlet pinpricks on my wrists and ankles, before quickly advancing up my arms and legs. At the worst of times, my entire back was covered in hives. Conventional medicine provided antihistamines, highly effective at stopping the symptoms. Meditation, on the advice of a complementary practitioner, helped relieve me of the cause.
The curious thing was that as I continued my practice I discovered how simply spending ten minutes counting my breath in cycles of four each day seemed to have all kinds of unexpected benefits, quite apart from stopping the rashes. I was more at ease with my life and the way things were. I felt myself becoming more creative. With marginally less “thought pollution” I was better at spotting opportunities outside me, including one that was to lead to achieving my most yearned-for goal, and one which had eluded me for many years – getting my first book publishing contract.
These very practical benefits encouraged me to keep meditating. They also made me question what other wonders might be possible if I continued to meditate? Happy to acknowledge that I was still very much in the beginner’s paddling pool when it came to mind-training, what might be possible if I amped things up a bit? Found a teacher? Developed my practice? Learned to focus on more subtle objects, with greater clarity, for longer? What might I be capable of then?
For that matter, dear reader, what might you be capable of? How much have you explored your own consciousness? And what if your potential for development is spectacularly greater than you have ever fully considered?
Training the body and training the mind
In the West, given our preoccupation with the material world, we have no difficulty accepting that we’re all capable of physical development. For millennia we have admired elite athletes who train to do things that are way beyond ordinary mortals. Not so long ago I heard about a man who, together with his long-suffering wife, slept inside an oxygen-depleted capsule every night, rising at 4 am each morning before undertaking a vigorous workout in his specially-equipped sauna, all to prepare for the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii. How can one fail to be impressed by such steel-willed determination?
In the East, by contrast, there’s a long-established focus on mind-training. Millenia before the ancient Greeks launched the first Olympiad, the ancient Indians were studying and debating methods of inner development. The precise nature of consciousness, methods by which mind can be placed, ascending levels of meditative concentration – all these concepts were refined, practiced and documented.
The heroes of India and the Himalaya regions have traditionally been sages, rishis and yogis who are able to demonstrate extraordinary inner accomplishments. As veils of obscurations in meditators’ minds are removed – the mental equivalent of athletes reshaping their bodies – the potential of the consciousness we all share becomes apparent. Masters of consciousness have the ability to perceive the minds of others, to see the future and the past, to project consciousness outside the body and travel to places on earth and in other realms, to perform miracles such as healing, rain-making and transforming substances, to appear to walk through walls, levitate, or show mastery of the phenomenal world in countless other ways.
These siddhis or “magical powers” have been common to Indian ascetic traditions for millennia. Buddha refers to them in the Samannaphala Sutta (Discourse on the Fruits of the Contemplative Life). He didn’t make a big deal out of them. In Buddhism a far greater accomplishment is held to be the cultivation of compassion to the point that we care for others more than ourselves.
The great lamas of Tibet have traditionally not only possessed siddhis, but have also perfected the mind of infinite altruism. It is these beings who are Buddhists’ heroes. If we are fortunate, we may meet one. If we are very fortunate, we may have one as our teacher. Why wouldn’t we listen to what they have to tell us about the nature of consciousness? Part of the joy, the energy of Buddha Dharma is that, along with the texts and teachings we also have living, breathing manifestations of them among us.
If we were to take up some form of athletic training, and had the chance to sit at the feet of a gold medal winner in our chosen sport, we would eagerly devour any personal advice he or she was willing to share. To learn whatever tips or advice were on offer. To achieve our goals as quickly and easily as possible.
What elite mind-trainers tell us about consciousness
In just the same way, as trainee meditators in the presence of master yogis, we listen to what they have to say about mind-training with the same rapt attention. Having personally sat at exactly such feet and read the teachings of a variety of masters of consciousness for many years, what they have explained about mind and reality are consistent, and may be summarized as follows:
Our minds are not comprised of matter but are formless. They have two particular qualities: clarity, enabling ideas, feelings, perceptions, sensations and other mental phenomena to arise. And knowingness, which is the ability to cognize what arises. Previous moments of mind give rise to future mind moments, so that mind may be seen as a continuum, like a flowing river. The shorthand definition of mind, also called consciousness, is therefore “a formless continuum of clear knowing.”
Caught up in this mind stream, but not intrinsic to it, are imprints of previous thoughts, actions and experiences – what we in the West call conditioning, in Buddhism called karma. Karmas may be positive, negative or neutral, causing us to experience reality in a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral way depending on what conditions are present.
Creating these karmas, our minds are afflicted, to varying extents, by erroneous but habitual ways of thinking termed delusions. Our main delusion is the belief that the world outside us, and we ourselves, exist with a substantiality at odds with that described by Buddhist yogis – and confirmed by quantum science;
On the basis of this flawed operating model, we take actions which result in effects – karma. These karmas multiply as we continue to act, speak and think based on our mistaken view of the way that we and other phenomena exist;
Our experience of reality has much more to do with whatever karma is present in our mind than on our external circumstances. Despite impressions to the contrary, the people, situations and objects to which we attribute our positive or negative feelings are merely contributing factors. The real driver is our karma which compels us to experience things in a particular way. This is why each one of us can have such dramatically different attitudes from other people to the same external phenomena. Our reactions are not arising from the phenemena themselves. They’re coming from the way that our karma is forcing to us to perceive those phenomena.
Simply understanding what’s outlined above is an existential game-changer. If the true causes of our unhappiness are not to be found outside us, but arise within, and if they are not intrinsic to our consciousness, we can remove them. And we can cultivate the true causes of happiness. These practices have immediate, beneficial effects in this lifetime and pave the way to our future nirvana – a mind free from all delusions and karma.
When moved by compassion to help all beings similarly trapped in this misunderstanding about the way that reality is experienced, we create the motivation of bodhichitta, “the mind of enlightenment.”
These are big concepts to take on board. And they may seem daunting when encountered for the first time. Fortunately, Buddhist practices are suitable for all levels of practitioners. If enlightenment or nirvana seem too overwhelming a prospect to begin with, how about putting your toe in the water by cultivating a few causes for happiness, and see how you get on?
Just as I began my meditation practice with nothing more ambitious than trying to count my breaths for ten minutes a day, a practice that I continued for several years before expanding my repertoire, I urge newcomers to keep it simple. Try it out. Put it to the test. Set yourself, I sometimes urge people, the six-week challenge – keep a meditation practice going at least five days a week for six weeks and see how you feel at the end of it. I have yet to meet a disappointed customer!
As someone who places a high value on clarity, I love the fact that for thousands of years, minds far more evolved than ours have addressed the major existential issues, and explained precisely how to deal with them in ways far beyond anything we may have conceived. Just like training the body, mind-training is not a haphazard undertaking. It involves specific processes which deliver specific outcomes. They have worked for countless other people before. They can work for us too. The only question is: to what extent are we willing to try?
Is it really possible, you may be wondering, to attain extraordinary insight through meditation alone? Removing delusions, acquiring wisdom, attaining enlightenment – can all this really be achieved sitting on one’s backside in a quiet room behind a closed door?
As it happens, the Buddhist definition of meditation is quite different from what most people think.
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(Grateful acknowledgment for the Buddha image at the top of this post to Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash)
References
[i] Zasep Tulku Rinpoche, Gelug Mahamudra, Eloquent Speech of Manjushri, Wind Horse Press, Nelson, Canada, 2018, p 163
[ii] Pabongka Rinpoche, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2006, p104
[iii] Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism, Tushita Publications, Melbourne, 1993, p134
[iv] Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism, Tushita Publications, Melbourne, 1993, p 139
[v] Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism, Tushita Publications, Melbourne, 1993, p 81
[vi] Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, Great Treasury of Mahamudra, Tushita Publications, Melbourne, 2009, p 203
A simple explanation to something that can often be confusing, so thank you. I try to meditate daily - but have been becoming lax. Thus I take up the challenge knowing the benefits and look forward to the next instalment. PS: Enjoying Awaken the Kitten Within. A big fan of HHC and mentioned the novel on my own Substack this week. Cheers.
Hi David,
I hope this message finds you happy and healthy.
I may have misunderstood but has this book been published? I can't seem to find it anywhere. I truly love your writing. I think I have all of your books but I can't seem to find this one.