Into the Heart of Life (19 page)

Genuine compassion 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 is 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.

And so we practice. We practice being able to stand back to see the thoughts, memories, feelings, and emotions as merely thoughts, memories, and feelings, as merely mental states, and not something solid or real. “Me” and “mine” are just mental states. Mental states 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. Meditation allows 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 skillful way to deal with emotions because then as any emotion comes up, we can look directly into it, and in that moment of seeing, it just disappears. Take a negative emotion like anger as an example. In the very moment that the angry thought is incipient within us, if 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 unrecognized 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.

It is said in the higher teachings that the greater our emotional defilements, the greater our 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 is better to try to deal with 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.

As it says in the Tibetan texts, “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 in these texts, “Is it in the head?” Isn’t that interesting? Perhaps it never occurred to them that it is possible for the mind to be in the head. At one time, I remember my lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, 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. Not long ago, I was reading a book by a famous brain surgeon, who said, “We now know a lot about the brain but we still haven’t found the mind.” The brain is the computer, but it is not the energy running the computer. When Westerners, who are very head-oriented, meditate, it often happens that meditation stays up in the head. Sometimes people get headaches because of it.

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 my chest. I wouldn’t say, “You mean me?” and point to my head. Now why not? Our senses are in our head—our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth. So why don’t we point at our head as we say “me”?

When we begin to meditate, there is oneself, the subject, and there is the object of meditation. Someone described it as two mountains facing each other, and that is why meditation remains a matter of the intellect. It is still part of our thoughts. Now when the meditation begins to deepen and the subject and object begin to merge, when I am no longer meditating—when I am the meditation—then the focus comes into the heart. When the meditation is in the heart, there is no duality between subject and object. They merge; we become the meditation. Meditation brings our practice from the head to the heart.

Although in the beginning it usually does not happen, it is very important that we try somehow to draw the meditation down into the heart center. It is for this reason that many of the tantric meditations are centered on the heart chakra. For Westerners especially, and Asians who have been educated in Western situations, we are already too much up in our heads. When we meditate, we turn it into another intellectual exercise and it doesn’t really transform us. Often during our retreat time our thoughts calm down; we become peaceful and centered. But when we go out into the world, it all falls apart again! And that is because we haven’t become one with the meditation. Inner transformation can only take place when the arena of action is shifted down to the heart chakra. Otherwise, there is always a separation. I want to emphasize that because it is an important point. Some people have been meditating for years and years but it is still up in the head. Nothing much has changed and they feel discouraged.

The perfection of wisdom has to do with this quality of emptiness. Now Buddhists talk about emptiness a lot. I am not a philosopher, so I am not going to give you a discourse on Madhyamika. But 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. There are scholars in the Buddhist tradition who analyze 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?” We keep inquiring to find the “watchness” of the watch, but we can never the find the watch in itself. It is only a label which we give to a combination of many, many things. The thing in itself doesn’t exist. It is empty of self-existence. We can never ever find the thing in and of itself. Everything that we see and experience is just a conventional label. People spend thirty years studying this approach. You are lucky—you got it in just a few sentences!

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

During my first meditation lesson from my old yogi teacher, he pointed to a small table and asked, “Is that table empty?”

“Yes,” I said. I had done my Buddhist studies.

“Do you see it as empty?”

“No,” I replied.

“Your mind,” he said. “Is your mind empty?”

“Yes,” I said, with a bit more confidence.

“Do you see it as empty?”

“No.”

“Which do you think would be easier, to see the table as empty, or to see your mind as empty?” the old yogi asked.

“Oh, definitely, to see the mind as empty,” I said.

He laughed and said, “Okay, then you can stay with us!”

Naturally I had a question of my own. “Well, if I had said that seeing the emptiness of the table was easier, what would you have done?”

“Then I would have told you to go down to Sera Monastery,” the yogi replied. Sera Monastery is a big monastic college where they study and debate topics such as the emptiness of the table.

But in the yogic tradition we study the emptiness of the mind because once we understand the emptiness of the mind, then we understand everything. When we realize the nature of mind, we do not just think about it but rather see directly how the mind works, and how it projects external reality.

Consider how any physicist will tell you that this table is basically empty. It is basically space with just a few protons and neutrons whizzing around. But we don’t see it like that. We don’t experience it like that. We experience the table as something very solid. It would be heavy for me to lift. While that may be how I would experience it, that is not how a physicist would see the matter, is it? So what I am experiencing is what my mind projects. 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 woodworm.

We believe what our senses tell us, but then there are also phenomena which directly contradict our understanding of the world. For instance, there are enlightened masters who leave their handprints and footprints in solid rock. 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 for India. Now how could he do that? He could do that because his mind, being more tuned into reality than our own, 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 this is 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.

We believe implicitly in our very transient identities. The problem is not the ego—the problem is our identification with the ego. The solution is to know that we are just playing a role, like an actor. In order to be convincing, the actor has to play the part as persuasively as possible. An actor identifies with the role. But what big trouble if this actor comes off the stage and still thinks that the role is who he or she is! The term “personality” comes from the Latin word
persona,
which was the mask worn on stage by actors to represent the different characters. Our 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, with four arms, and radiating light. But the inner thought is “I am Mary Smith and now I am pretending to be Chenrezig.” And we think that this is the reality. We think that that’s the truth. But of course the real truth is that we are actually Chenrezig pretending to be Mary Smith! 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 is not like that. If you have ever met any great enlightened masters, you realize that they are more vital, more completely present, more vivid than ordinary people. They know who they are and who they are not. They are conscious of this present form they embody, but it is just their present form. It is not who and what they are.

Behind all that we identify with is the vast open spacious awareness which is not only knowing but is in itself the fullness of complete wisdom and compassion. Wisdom means that we see things as they really are. We understand things clearly, without distortions. When we are looking at wisdom and emptiness, it is not at something that is cold and remote. This open spacious awareness 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 them over for the moment in our forgetfulness. The only way to discover them is to look inside and begin to strip away the false veils, the veils which cover what is always present and waiting to be found.