Tag: peace

Emptiness of Mind

Let’s continue with our discussions on emptiness today. In the last two sessions, we looked at the emptiness of phenomenon as well as the emptiness of the body. Let’s look at an example that may explain emptiness a little better. Growing up, I used to watch magician shows few times a year. There were these magicians who were also hypnotists that would come to town and perform magic shows. When you go to these shows, almost always they would have at least one hypnotist spell during the show. They would put the whole audience into their spell and then all of a sudden you would think that a piece of wood is a cow or something. Emptiness is just like that. We are the people in the audience. For us, the cow is as real as it comes. It exists and there is no doubt about it. We look at all phenomena just like that. We think they exist and are real. Now if you are the magician, you can see the cow but you know it does not exist at all. So that is the next level of understanding we need to cultivate. Where we can see that cow exists but it does not exist inherently. It is just an imputed existence. Now if you walked into the hall let’s say half an hour after he put his spell on the audience. You would only see that piece of wood and do not see the cow at all. That is true wisdom. We all eventually want to strive for that. Hope all of these make sense and explains the emptiness a little better.

Today, we are going to meditate on the emptiness of the mind. And before we do that, let’s look at what our mind is. We have discussed in the past, three types of mind. Gross mind the waking mind that sees everything that we see in the world. Subtle mind the mind that is active in our dream state. And very subtle mind our peaceful mind that travels from one life to the next.

One way to look at this is that our mind is like a river. It is a consciousness that is flowing from lifetime to lifetime. Have you ever been to a river to hang out? You see these water bubbles when the water touches a rock. Our life is just like that water bubble. When the water bubble bursts, what happens to the water? It just becomes part of the river that’s it. It goes and creates another bubble somewhere else.

Yet another way to look at this is soap bubbles we used to blow when we were young. Let’s say you blow a bubble and I blow a bubble. We both talk about “our” bubbles. All of a sudden the bubble bursts. Where did the bubble go? Can we call the air inside those bubbles my air and your air? Of course not.

Our very subtle mind is just like their bubbles. It is part of a consciousness that is going on from the beginningless time. Life after life without stopping.

So does the mind exist inherently? Let’s go find this inherently existing mind. We know that the mind is a continuum. When we are happy or unhappy we look at that mind as inherently existing. However, we know that our mind changes from moment to moment. If it was inherently existing, it would be solid as a rock if you will. It would not be changing on a moment-to-moment basis. If it was inherently existing, we would be able to find it at any given moment. But the mind changes every moment and we cannot find this unhappy mind or happy mind because it constantly changes. The same logic applies when we look at our feelings. Our feelings are as fleeting as the wind blowing on a stormy day. They keep changing from moment to moment and we cannot find the mind that contains that feeling when we go look for it.

Of all the emptiness teachings, I find the emptiness of the mind probably the most difficult to grasp. So don’t be discouraged if you are struggling with the concept. In time with enough contemplation and example, you will begin to understand the concept.

Emptiness of Body

We started talking about the profound subject of emptiness in the last session. We will continue with that in today’s session. Today, we are going to look at something you may find radical. Since we are talking about there being no inherent existence on its side. How about our body? Our body seems as real as anything we have ever encountered.

Let’s look at the way in which we look at our body. Most of us cling to our body strongly and have our identity tied to our body. When we think of our body, we are vividly thinking of our body and not our arms, legs, etc. We tend to imagine our body independent of parts of our body.

So let’s go and find that vividly existing body that we all identify with. For our body to exist inherently, there are only three possibilities. Our body exists as one of its parts, the collection of its parts or outside of its parts. That’s it there is no fourth possibility. So as long as we agree that there are only three possibilities in which our body can exist inherently, let’s go and find out body.

So let’s look at the first possibility. We can take a look at each of our parts independently.  Let’s start with our legs. Is our leg our body? The easiest way to look at this is to think about what happens if one of our legs needs to be amputated. If we don’t have one of our legs, we will still say that the body without one of our legs is still our body. So obviously our leg is not our body. Hopefully, you are with me so far. This same logic we can apply to our arms. So in that case, we can all agree that our limbs are not our body.

Now take a look at our organs. How about our kidneys? Is the kidney our body? Our friend and fellow meditator Chirag has the first-hand experience on this. A few years ago he went through a kidney transplant. So in his body, he has his sister’s kidney. So Chirag’s body is fine without his original kidney and we still call it Chirag’s body. So we can all agree that our kidney is not our body. With that same logic, each of our organs is transplantable. If each of our organs is transplantable, then we can safely say that our organs are not the body. That leaves our skin. Science tells us that human skin cells are replaced every 28 days. So that means our skin cannot be our body.

So by now we have looked at each part of our body and concluded that we cannot find our body in its individual parts. How about the collection of these parts. I will address this with an example. We went for a Safari a few years ago. My wife really wanted to see a black rhino. We saw a lion and that we know is not a rhino. We saw an elephant and we knew that was not a rhino. We saw a cheetah and no, that is not a rhino. Now can I tell my wife that honey, I know a lion or an elephant or a cheetah in itself is not a rhino but collectively we can call it a rhino. How absurd will that sound? So my point is that a collection of things that are not the body cannot be a body. And we know that each individual part is not the body.

So how about finding this body outside of its parts. Where we even begin to look for it? In a closet? In the car? In some other City? It just does not make sense. So we can surely say that our body does not exist outside of its parts.

So we have looked at the body and could not find it in its parts, collection of its parts, or the outside of its parts. So there is not the inherently existing body. We cling to it anyway. Shantideva, a great Indian scholar once said that at dusk time, when we are walking a pile of stones may look like a human body to us. It is just like that. Because of the darkness of our ignorance, we are clinging to this body as inherently existent. If we truly search for our body in a meditation session, we will realize that it is nothing but the manifestation of the emptiness.

Now some of you may ask but I see this body clearly. Yes, you do. And that is just an imputation. It’s a body because we all decided to call it a body. That does not give it an inherent existence. Meaning it has an imputed or dependent existence.

Hope this makes a little sense. I know it is a lot to unpack. This is a little profound and may take some time to realize. But we will all get there with some examples and meditation.

Mindfulness

We have talked on and off about we need to be mindful and how mindfulness helps us maintain peace within our mind. So today, let’s explore mindfulness a little more in-depth. In the simplest terms, mindfulness is being aware of your mind from moment to moment. If you are aware of your mind, your thoughts will not control you.

Let’s think about this real quick. Did you have a problem today? Did it feel like it was a really big deal and potentially could have a huge impact on life? Now think back 30 days. Do you remember what the problem of the day was on this day last month? Chances are you don’t remember. But we are sure that at the time it felt like a really big deal. What does that mean? It means we are paying inappropriate attention to our uncontrolled thoughts.

My teacher Kadam Lucy points to this study that was done a few years. All the study subjects were asked how many of the thoughts they were in control of daily. What do you think the answer is? I have asked a few people myself and in most cases, they do not know. Well, this scientific study found that 9 out of 10 thoughts people have daily, they were not in control of their thoughts. 9 out of 10! There is also a study that we have on average 6,000 thoughts per day. That means we have 5,400 uncontrolled thoughts per day. No wonder most people are not feeling happy 90% of the time.  

According to Buddha, our uncontrolled mind is the main cause of our suffering. Uncontrolled thoughts usually arise from inappropriate attention. That brings delusions including anxiety, anger, attachment, jealousy, pride, and so on. These delusions keep our minds occupied all day long. The only way out is to get control of these delusions is to tame our minds. The famous Indian scholar Atisha once said that Since you cannot tame the minds of others until you have tamed your own, begin by taming your mind.

So mastering our mind is key to getting control of our thoughts and in essence, mastering our life. With meditation practice, we can begin to get control of our uncontrolled thoughts. There are many meditation techniques we can try. The simplest and most common meditation practice is breathing meditation. This is where we focus our attention on the sensation of our breath. One of the more effective meditation techniques we covered in the past known as MAC technic. M-A-C. Mindfulness is what resists temptations to follow our thoughts, when we lose our attention and start thinking of distracting thoughts, Alertness keeps an eye out for our mind wandering off and brings it back to the object of our meditation, and Concentration is when we focus on meditation so we don’t begin to start wandering around.

Concentration is our ability to control our mind, to direct it at will, to focus, and eventually stay there for as long as we want. It allows us to think the thoughts we want to think as opposed to the thoughts that just show up uncontrollably in our minds.

Concentration makes our minds strong, clear, and relaxed, and we become more productive. It always makes us feel better, far more peaceful. It even makes us more physically comfortable.

Buddha said that there is nothing more powerful in this universe than a fully concentrated mind. The reason our mind lacks power is that it is fractured. It is all over the place. We talk to ourselves, apparently, at a rate of a thousand words a minute.

I hear a lot about I am not able to concentrate or I am not able to meditate and thoughts keep coming. I want to assure you that you are making a progress. Every time you notice that your mind wanders off and you try to bring it back, you are getting better at meditation. No matter how many times you have to bring your mind back (initially, it feels like that’s all we are doing), you are making progress. I can assure you it gets easier with practice. If you develop a regular practice say 10 minutes per day, before you know it, you will be able to focus on peace within you.

Cultivating Compassion

During our Q&A session last week, we discussed how difficult it is to cultivate compassion toward others. As I mentioned, it is a learned skill. So today, let’s talk about how we can develop compassion toward all living beings.

Before we develop compassion towards everyone, we first need to have love towards them. If we have a love for someone in our heart, developing compassion towards them becomes easy. So how do we develop love towards other random people and even people who do not care for us. Well, let’s start with types of love. There are three types of love. Affectionate love, cherishing love, and wishing love.

Here is from the book Universal Compassion: We can understand these by considering the following example. If a mother is reunited with one of her children after a long separation, she is very happy and feels great affection for her. This special feeling of affection is affectionate love. Out of affection, the mother considers her child to be very precious and wants to take special care of her. This special feeling of caring is cherishing love. Because she has affectionate love and cherishing love for her child, if she sees that she is unhappy she immediately wishes to restore her happiness. This wish for others to be happy and to help them to achieve happiness is wishing love.

So let’s break this down. In simplest terms, affectionate love is to like someone. If we are in a family and we have affection towards each other, life would be much smoother. Similarly, if we have affection towards our community, we will try to make sure that everyone in our community is free from suffering. This affectionate love brings harmony and peace in the community. The easiest way to develop affectionate love is to think about how no one wants to suffer. We know that we don’t want to have any suffering in life. Similarly, no one wishes to suffer for themselves. Once we understand that all beings want to be free from suffering, we will develop affectionate love towards them. A warm feeling in our hearts towards them. It is difficult to practice this by trying to show affectionate love towards everyone at once. So one should start by showing affectionate love towards a select few that would be easier – members of your family or close friends. Then expand the circle once you are comfortable.

Cherishing love is to cherish other beings. We touched on this in one of our previous sessions. How so many people are trying to help our day go by smoothly. If we think about how many people were involved in the house we are living in or bringing the water we drink every day or food we eat every day. It is countless number of people. Just imagine how many people are involved in getting this meditation session live to all of us. Someone had to build this microphone, computer, and so on. Once we realize this, we will start cherishing others for all they do. Developing this cherishing love is what helps us develop compassion towards others.

Wishing love is our wish for all living beings to be happy. This is a natural outcome once we develop affectionate love and cherishing love towards others.

A fast-track way to develop compassion towards others is to think about all living beings as our mothers. If we believe that we have had countless lives, then we also must accept that we have had countless mothers. That means any of the living beings could be our mother in our previous lives. One can argue but that does not mean they are our mothers right now. Well, when someone’s mother passes away, she does not stop being their mother. So by that logic, since they were our mothers once, they are still our mothers. If we can begin to bring this point to our hearts, we will naturally develop compassion towards them. If for some reason you are not comfortable thinking about all living beings as your mother, you can think of being a mother to all living beings. The result is the same as you would begin to develop compassion towards them since all mothers have great compassion towards their children.

So as you can see there are a couple of ways we can train our minds to develop compassion. This is a very profound practice. It is certainly not easy but it is a fast-track way to get towards enlightenment. I hope all of us can begin to practice this in small ways in our daily life.

Equalizing Self with Others

Let’s talk about an extension of a topic we have covered earlier. We talked about how one can equalize self with other meaning how we should consider that the happiness of others is as important as our happiness. Today, let’s go one step further. That is called exchanging self with others. To look at this I am going to give you an example of a mountain.

Let’s imagine we are on a mountain top. We can see another mountain top from our vantage point. For us, the mountain top we are standing on is this mountain and the other mountain top is that mountain. Now let’s say we get off the mountain top and climb to the other mountain top that we were seeing. At this time, the mountain top we are on is this mountain, and the original mountain top that we were on previously becomes that mountain top. Everyone with me? So the words “this mountain top” and “that mountain top” are just imputations based on our vantage points at the time. It is not attached to a specific mountain top.

Our attachment to ourselves and our happiness is very similar. We all are on this mountain top where our happiness is more important than everyone else. We see everyone else as that mountain. Meaning their happiness is less important than our happiness. If we think about it, that is how most of us are living our lives. All of our problems come from this basic belief that our happiness is more important than everyone else. Think about it. We get upset when something does not go our way. When someone charges us more than what we think we should be paying. Or when someone says something that offends our ego. Or when someone does something different from what we think is right. All of these scenarios bring up delusions in our minds. Anger, hatred, jealousy, frustration, and so on. All of our delusions have their root in this belief that somehow our happiness is more important than others.

Now, if we get down this “me mountain” and start climbing the “they mountain”; we would cherish their happiness more than our happiness.  Think about this, if we value their happiness more than our happiness, delusions will not arise in our minds. A classic example is a mother’s love for her children. A mother would save her baby over her life. Obviously, she cherishes the happiness of the baby more than herself. So when an infant is hungry in the middle of the night, she is happy to get up and feed the baby. The same mom would get upset when someone else wakes her up in the middle of the night. What does that tell us? It is clear that in both cases the inconvenience is the same. She is up from her sleep. In one case she is happy to do it and in another case her delusions flare-up. In the scenario of feeding the baby, our mom is on “they mountain” – the baby’s happiness is more important than my happiness. In the other scenario, she is on the “me mountain”.

So as you can see, if we try to get off the “me mountain” and get on the “they mountain” a lot of delusions go away. Not only that, there is no friction in our life. Life just becomes smooth. The more formal name for this exchanging self with others.

Another way to look at this is to accept defeat and give them victory. A friend of mine recently said something that caught my eyes. She lives in a small town with her family. On the main street, she was going to a neighborhood shop. After she entered the shop, someone came behind her and was visibly upset. He said thanks a lot for cutting me off back there. She did not realize that she cut this person off. So she apologized to him and said she was sorry that she cut him off. He continued, you should be sorry for driving like a maniac. At this point, most people would have lost their patience and got into an argument. Not my friend. She said I am truly sorry that I did that to you. I could see you are upset and please tell me what I can do to improve your day. At that point, the person calmed down. My friend to her credit did not let the person upset her mental equilibrium. She also turned around the mood of the other person. Accepting defeat and giving them victory. I know it is very difficult if not impossible to practice but please try to do this next time you find yourself in a tough situation. It will brighten everyone’s day.