Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy (4 page)

A man I knew bought a house on a beautiful piece of land, which seemed like a very quiet place to be. But he was obsessed with noise. He said to me, “Can you believe it? I paid all this money for peace and quiet, and I am hearing noise from the road!” He wanted to sue the realtor who sold him this house because it was listed as peaceful. To him that meant that he was not supposed to hear any noise. The moment he moved in, he began listening for noise and put so much effort toward hearing it. Isn’t that what we do all the time? We listen for noise. But do we ever listen to the silence in ourselves? Right now, if you listen, you can hear it. You will discover so much more if you hear that silence. The moment you hear that silence, the power of your internal voices weakens. But if you hate your thoughts and inner dialogue, they will never diminish. Therefore, the second door, the door of speech, is very important. As you hear the silence, you are able to host the chattering mind. As you host without judgment or analysis, the power of your inner voices dissipates.

F
INDING
I
NNER
R
EFUGE
T
HROUGH THE
S
PACIOUSNESS OF
M
IND

The third aspect of refuge is associated with the mind. The principles of body, speech, and mind are interrelated, but the mind is primary. Consider your sense of self. You have some idea of who you are. I’m not talking about the strong voice that says, “I am a professor,” or “I am a mother.” Let’s look at the “three o’clock in the morning” voice. At that time the professor or the mother is sleeping and someone else is there. There is a sense of not knowing who you are rather than asserting that you are somebody. The asserting voice is the ego. It is more active, and so it is not hard to find. If you meet someone and have a ten-minute conversation, you have a good sense of who they think they are. That’s not what is interesting here. More interesting is that they don’t know who they are. There is a pervading dullness—the absence of knowing oneself—called ignorance. Do I know myself in this moment? Or is not-knowing present in me at this moment? You may say, “What do you mean by that? I can understand what you’re saying, but …” That’s a voice. But beyond that voice there is a sense of not knowing. It is not about not knowing the meaning of what I’m saying. I am talking about the root not-knowing—not knowing yourself. This pervades everything happening in your mind, in your speech, and in your activities. What don’t you know? You don’t know yourself. There is a traditional Bön prayer that is sung to one’s teacher: “Bless me to recognize my true face with my own eyes.” Some people might think this refers to their actual face, but this is not what the prayer refers to. It is not referring to appearance or to form. At the gym, people are interested in looking at their own form, face, and muscles. How many mirrors are there? How many mirrors do you have at home? What are you looking at? You are looking at your face, your hair, your body. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply look in a mirror and recognize who you truly are?

We feel uncomfortable whenever we engage in doubt, when we lack confidence or lose our sense of direction. Those are the moments we face challenges. What can we do? I recommend taking the medicine I call spaciousness. How do we take the medicine of spaciousness? As before, draw your attention inside—not to the body, not to the voices, but to the mind itself. Instead of feeling stillness or silence, try to feel the spaciousness. Why is this important? The nature of mind is very spacious. The root texts in the Bön tradition describe the nature of mind as clear and luminous. All pain, confusion, and struggle that you feel are simply because you don’t recognize the mind’s true quality.

As you become still and silent, it is then easier to close your eyes and draw attention to your mind. You can feel space around and within that sense of not knowing. You can discover awareness in that ignorance. You recognize the light within that darkness. You don’t try to renounce ignorance and find awareness. You are finding awareness within that ignorance. You are not living with the effort of trying to renounce that ignorance. Effort is becoming effortless. The mind that was not aware is now conscious of that state, that
base
. The moment you feel that, you feel incredible protection. You feel a sense of security, a sense of peace, a sense of balance. The notion of refuge is about really feeling protection. So the third door to discover inner refuge is the door of the mind, and that door is accessed through spaciousness.

Let’s approach spaciousness from a place of contrast—for example, when we experience anger. When anger manifests, it can be very explosive. You can feel this in your body, your energy (also called wind, or
lung
in Tibetan), or your mind. In a moment of anger, spaciousness is not there. If you are angry with a person, you are focused on what that person did or said. Your attention is extroverted; you are probably not even connected to the person, but to what that person did. You feel vulnerable, and anger feels like your strength, your protection, and it becomes your attempt to get rid of the problem.

The most important thing at this moment is to enter refuge through the door of the mind. What do you do? Draw attention inward. Close your eyes; look inward. Feel the tension in your body and connect with your breath. Become focused on your breathing and emphasize breathing out. Do this for five or ten minutes. As you gradually feel more comfortable, look at the anger directly, not through the lens of thoughts and ideas. Nonconceptually draw open attention to that anger. Host the experience in spaciousness. When you look directly at the anger in this way, the anger cannot remain; it dissolves. But if you are looking at anger with just another form of anger—a disappointed mind or a judgmental mind—then anger won’t disappear. It is important to observe the anger directly, to host the experience of anger in spaciousness without engaging in further thinking.

Many times when I instruct people to observe anger directly, they claim that the anger gets worse. That tells me that they are not observing directly or nakedly. They are not observing with open awareness. Instead, they are looking at anger with another form of anger, perhaps a subtler form. The commenting mind that is looking at the anger is more subtle, and seems smarter than that angry mind. It is convincing you that it is the solution. You may think that your judgment is awareness, but it is not. You are looking through judgmental eyes, not with the eyes of naked awareness. You ask, “How do I know if I am looking through the right or wrong eyes? How do I know if I am making a right or wrong observation?” One way to know is to look at the result. If you are getting angrier or feeling more hopeless, you are looking with the wrong eyes. If you look with the right eyes—observing directly and nakedly—the anger will immediately lose its conviction and solidity. The medicine of stillness, silence, and spaciousness is so powerful that it doesn’t take a long time to dissolve an obscuration, a disturbing emotion such as anger that obscures open awareness. If you look with the right eyes in any given moment, it does not take a long time to discover a clear and open mind. What takes time is for us to become familiar with seeing in this way, hosting our experience in the space of inner refuge and trusting this refuge.

If a light is brought into a dark room, the light is not concerned with how long the room has been dark. It will not comment, “This darkness has been here so long that it will take all weekend to clear it up.” Neither is it true to say, “This darkness seems quite recent. My work will go more quickly.” Light, or awareness, is instantaneous. It instantly dispels darkness or confusion. Desiring light doesn’t help. Longing for light doesn’t shorten its arrival, but it can be helpful if someone tells you that you are going in the right direction or points out that you are going in the wrong direction.

Let’s explore how we observe, and what kind of awareness we are talking about when we refer to
open awareness
. For example, I can look at a flower and simply be there with my perception. I’m not saying anything about the flower, like that it is too red or not fresh enough. I am just experiencing the flower without judgment. As I continue to experience the flower in this way, the liveliness around this flower emerges. When the one who is looking is not engaging the thinking, moving, analyzing mind, he or she can perceive nakedly and directly and discover the perfection or completeness in the moment. This is the experience of
being
the refuge. When you’re connected to stillness, silence, and spaciousness, anything you perceive can be experienced directly and vividly because the judging or moving mind is not occupying the space.

A good example of the awareness I am referring to is an experience in ordinary life that is familiar to most parents. It is the example of a napping child. When you observe your young child sleeping, she is most beautiful. Your sleeping child is lying in such a casual, flexible position. And in the moment in which you gaze upon her, she is still. We love it when young children are still! Their gentle breathing is so quiet and sweet. We love the silence that surrounds this moment, because when they talk it is nonstop. It is so spacious in this moment that you can see your child radiating light. She is so cute that you almost want to wake her up!

The true challenge for any parent is when the child does wake up and is not still and silent, and certainly not that spacious. During these moments, can you go into that same space within yourself in which you saw the child in his or her perfection? In the midst of however noisy they are, can you go back into yourself and connect with the silence around which you experienced your napping child? Can you
be
that silence and experience your child from that place? Maybe your child is going crazy with movement and noise, but it is the same napping child you see. That is the beauty. You see in this crazy, noisy, moving child the perfection that was so obvious in the napping child because the stillness, silence, and spaciousness that were so evident before are still present within you. That is the realization, a small one that is a reflection of a big one. You could be quite sick or dying, and stillness is present. No matter what happens around you, it is not shaking you, because you have recognized stillness, silence, and spaciousness—and you
are
that.

As you continue to turn toward the refuge while you meet the challenges of your life, as you become more and more familiar with the spaciousness, awareness, and warmth of the refuge, you have an experience of
yourself
as the refuge—this is who you essentially are, and you gradually come to experience that everything is fine as it is. In the Bön tradition this is the essence of
dzogchen
, and these are the highest teachings. All is perfected in the moment. Nothing is missing. You glimpse it, taste it, and feel it. The moment you taste it, you recognize that you are fine. This supports you to feel fine in the face of changes, even those changes you fear most, such as loss of a loved one or your own death. You feel supported and unshakable in the refuge. What comes from outside is no longer a big deal. If there is something you need to let go of, you let go. If this is the moment you need to forgive somebody, you are fully able to do so, because you are completely generous. If this is the moment to die, you are ready. Where does this power come from? It comes from the inner refuge. In the boundless space of being, there is no fear and no fault. The space is full, complete, perfected.

Because we face challenges in our life, this motivates us to enter the refuge. Our challenges become the opportunity to connect with the source of being. Once you are in the healing space of refuge, even if difficult emotions and feelings arise, they will process automatically by themselves. They will come but will not shake you; they will dissolve by themselves, because you are holding that space. You
are
that space, that truth. That truth can never be affected by what is false. That truth can never be destroyed.

One of the most challenging things for us is to trust the inner space of being. We usually think of protection in terms of form. We attain security by accumulating money. We achieve power and protection from hostility by accumulating weapons. However, whatever we create and accumulate to feel safe doesn’t really work, because it doesn’t touch our underlying insecurity. We need to find some other solution. Eventually, everything we have created or that we possess, all that we think will secure our happiness, we have to let go of. When we face death, whatever we have accumulated in this life will be of no help. At that point the truest refuge is to discover the inner space of being.

In the Bön and Buddhist traditions we have examples of enlightenment in the form of the Buddhas, and we have living teachers to guide us on our path. We have scriptures and teachings to clarify our confusion, and we have our fellow practitioners, who help and inspire us. These four supports—the teacher, the Buddha, the texts, and the fellow practitioners—are referred to as outer refuge. Although they are important, their true significance is that they point to and represent inner knowing, the inner refuge.

Not many people stop for even a moment to discover stillness, few listen to the silence, and even fewer recognize the truth of emptiness or spaciousness. Yet how simple it is to recognize and benefit from the experience of the inner refuge. You don’t need to read many books about emptiness or engage in philosophical discussions. You can just draw your attention inward. As you rest with your attention drawn inward, you may begin to hear many voices in your head.
I need silence
, you think. Okay, so don’t talk back to the inner dialogue that seems to be running by itself. Begin to listen to the silence around and within those voices. Be aware of space. Perhaps you are having a very strong, active thought.
I am not feeling any space!
Stop. Don’t think further. Feel the spaciousness around and within that very thought. The moment you connect with the space, the thought dissolves. The moment you hear the silence, the voice is gone. The moment you connect with stillness in your body, the tensions begin to release.