The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind by B. Alan Wallace Ph.D.
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Near the end of his instructions on shamatha, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey suggested to our class of about a dozen students that we meditate together. We all sat upright on our cushions, intently focusing on the meditative object. We thought it would be a short session, maybe a half hour. But the lama continued to sit, immovable as a rock, as his students began to squirm, our minds wandering and the pains in our knees and backs increasing. Finally, after three hours, he emerged from meditation, a contented smile on his face, and gently commented that this practice requires perseverance.
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James also asserted that geniuses of all kinds excel in their capacity for sustained voluntary attention. Just think of the greatest musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers throughout history—all of them, it seems, have had an extraordinary capacity to focus their attention with a high degree of clarity for long periods of time. A mind settled in such a state of alert equipoise is a fertile ground for the emergence of all kinds of original associations and insights. Might “genius” be a potential we all share—each of us with our own unique capacity for creativity, requiring only the power of sustained attention to unlock it? A focused mind can help bring the creative spark to the surface of consciousness. The mind constantly caught up in one distraction after another, on the other hand, may be forever removed from its creative potential.
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1. Directed attention 2. Continuous attention 3. Resurgent attention 4. Close attention 5. Tamed attention 6. Pacified attention 7. Fully pacified attention 8. Single-pointed attention 9. Attentional balance 10. Shamatha These ten stages are sequential. The stages start with a mind that cannot focus for more than a few seconds and culminates in a state of sublime stability and vividness that can be sustained for hours. One progresses through each stage by rooting out progressively more subtle forms of the two obstacles: mental agitation and dullness. The successful accomplishment of each stage is determined by specific criteria and is accompanied by a clear sign.
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The faculty of mindfulness is crucial in shamatha practice. Mindfulness in this context differs somewhat from the way some contemporary meditation teachers present it. Vipassana teachers, for instance, commonly explain mindfulness as a moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness of whatever arises. In the context of shamatha, however, mindfulness refers to attending continuously to a familiar object, without forgetfulness or distraction.
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One of the first signs of progress in shamatha practice is simply noticing how chaotic our minds are. We try to remain attentive, but we swiftly “lose our minds,” and slip into absentmindedness. People who never sit quietly and try to focus their minds may remain under the illusion that their minds are calm and collected. Only when we try to direct the attention to a single object for minutes on end does it really become apparent how turbulent and fragmented our attention is. From a Buddhist perspective, the untrained mind is afflicted with attention deficits and hyperactivity; it is dysfunctional.
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Like a wild elephant, the untamed mind can inflict enormous damage on ourselves and those around us. In addition to oscillating between an attention deficit (when we’re passive) and hyperactivity (when we’re active), the normal, untrained mind compulsively disgorges a toxic stream of wandering thoughts, then latches on to them obsessively, carried away by one story after another. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders and obsessive/compulsive disorders are not confined to those who are diagnosed as mentally ill; the normal mind is prone to such imbalances, and that’s why normal people experience so much mental distress! Such disturbances are symptoms of an unbalanced mind.
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The Posture It is generally preferable to practice meditation sitting on a cushion with your legs crossed. But if that is uncomfortable, you may either sit on a chair or lie down in the supine position (on your back), your head resting on a pillow. Whatever position you assume, let your back be straight, and settle your body with a sense of relaxation and ease. Your eyes may be closed, hooded (partially closed), or open, as you wish. My own preference when practicing mindfulness of breathing is to close my eyes partially, with just a little light coming in, and I like to meditate in a softly lit room. Wear loose, comfortable clothing that doesn’t restrict your waist or abdomen. If you are sitting, you may rest your hands on your knees or in your lap. Your head may be slightly inclined or directed straight ahead, and your tongue may lightly touch your palate. Now bring your awareness to the tactile sensations throughout your body, from the soles of your feet up to the crown of your head. Note the sensations in your shoulders and neck, and if you detect any tightness there, release it. Likewise, be aware of the muscles of your face—your jaws, temples, and forehead, as well as your eyes—and soften any area that feels constricted. Let your face relax like that of a sleeping baby, and set your entire body at ease. Throughout this session, keep as physically still as you can. Avoid all unnecessary movement, such as scratching and fidgeting. You will find that the stillness of the body helps to settle the mind. If you are sitting, assume a “posture of vigilance”: Slightly raise your sternum so that when you inhale, you feel the sensations of the respiration naturally go to your belly, which expands during the in-breath and retracts during the out-breath. During meditation sessions, breathe as if you were pouring water into a pot, filling it from the bottom up. When the breath is shallow, only the belly will expand. In the course of a deeper inhalation, first the abdomen, then the diaphragm will then expand, and when you inhale yet more deeply, the chest will finally expand after the belly and diaphragm have done so. If you are meditating in the supine position, position yourself so that you can mentally draw a straight line from the point between your heels, to your navel, and to your chin. Let your feet fall to the outside, and stretch your arms out about thirty degrees from your torso, with your palms facing up. Rest your head on a pillow. You may find it helpful to place a cushion under your knees to help relax the back. Vigilance in the supine position is mostly psychological, an attitude that regards this position as a formal meditation posture, and not simply as rest.
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The Practice Be at ease. Be still. Be vigilant. These three qualities of the body are to be maintained throughout all meditation sessions. Once you have settled your body with these three qualities, take three slow, gentle, deep breaths, breathing in and out through the nostrils. Let your awareness permeate your entire body as you do so, noting any sensations that arise in relation to the respiration. Luxuriate in these breaths, as if you were receiving a gentle massage from within. Now settle your respiration in its natural flow. Continue breathing through your nostrils, noting the sensations of the respiration wherever they arise within your body. Observe the entire course of each in- and out-breath, noting whether it is long or short, deep or shallow, slow or fast. Don’t impose any rhythm on your breathing. Attend closely to the respiration, but without willfully influencing it in any way. Don’t even prefer one kind of a breath over another, and don’t assume that rhythmic breathing is necessarily better than irregular breathing. Let the body breathe as if you were fast asleep, but mindfully vigilant. Thoughts are bound to arise involuntarily, and your attention may also be pulled away by noises and other stimuli from your environment. When you note that you have become distracted, instead of tightening up and forcing your attention back to the breath, simply let go of these thoughts and distractions. Especially with each out-breath, relax your body, release extraneous thoughts, and happily let your attention settle back into the body. When you see that your mind has wandered, don’t get upset. Just be happy that you’ve noticed the distraction, and gently return to the breath. Again and again, counteract the agitation and turbulence of the mind by relaxing more deeply, not by contracting your body or mind. If any tension builds up in your shoulders, face, or eyes, release it. With each exhalation, release involuntary thoughts as if they were dry leaves blown away by a soft breeze. Relax deeply through the entire course of the exhalation, and continue to relax as the next breath flows in effortlessly like the tide. Breathe so effortlessly that you feel as if your body were being breathed by your environment. Continue practicing for one twenty-four-minute period, then mindfully emerge from meditation and reengage with the world around you.
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Breathing in long, one knows, “I breathe in long.” Breathing out long, one knows, “I breathe out long.” Breathing in short, one knows, “I breathe in short.” Breathing out short, one knows, “I breathe out short.” One trains thus: “I shall breathe in, experiencing the whole body. I shall breathe out, experiencing the whole body. I shall breathe in,…
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This is a “field approach” to training the attention. Instead of pinpointing the attention on a mental image, a prayer, a mantra, or a specific region of the body, open your awareness to the entire field of sensations throughout the body, especially those related to respiration. The emphasis here is on mental and physical relaxation. If you constrict your mind and your body, shamatha training will aggravate the tension you already have. By settling your awareness in the body, you diffuse the knots in the body and mind. Tightness unravels of its own accord, and this soothes the network of the body. Mindfulness of breathing is universally emphasized for those who are especially prone to compulsive thinking. As the fifth-century Buddhist master Asanga comments, “If involuntary thoughts particularly dominate your behavior, then focus the mind in mindfulness of the exhalation and inhalation of the breath.”5 Since nearly everyone living in the modern world is coping with an overload of thinking, remembering, and planning, this may be just what the doctor ordered: a general prescription for soothing and healing overworked bodies and minds.
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Lying down can also be very useful for meditation if you’re physically tired but not yet ready for bed. In this case, you may not be able to rouse yourself to sit upright in a posture of vigilance, but the prospect of lying down for a while may be inviting. Surrender to your body’s need to rest, and use the supine position to calm the mind as well. This likely will be much more refreshing and soothing than watching television or reading a newspaper. The supine posture may be your only option if you are ill, injured, or frail. It may be especially useful for meditation by those in hospitals, senior care facilities, and hospices.
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The next time you get angry or sad, elated or surprised, note the rhythm of your respiration. Check it out, too, when you’re hard at work, concentrating on the task at hand, or caught in a traffic jam. Compare those breathing patterns with your respiration when you’re calmly sitting at home, listening to music or watching a sunset.
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When we are dreaming, all kinds of mental processes continue, even though our bodies and physical senses are dormant. Our emotional responses to dreams are just as real, and have the same impact on the body and the breath, as our emotions when we are wide awake. The only break we have from such sensory and mental input is when we are in deep, dreamless sleep.
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Creating time to balance your mind requires a measure of loving-kindness for yourself. Thus, to be able to make choices that are truly conducive to your well-being, as opposed to merely providing pleasurable sensations, you may first need to cultivate loving-kindness.
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With all the demands upon our time, the prospect of taking more time from the day to devote to meditation can appear to be just one more burden. But I would claim that the reason so many people find no time to meditate is not that they’re too busy. We’re all doing something each minute of every day, no matter how busy or leisurely our lives may be. How we fill our days is simply a matter of our priorities. It’s only common sense to place a high priority on our survival, making sure that we have sufficient food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, and that our children receive the best education possible. To use an educational metaphor, tasks fulfilling those basic needs are “required courses” of action, and everything else we do consists of “electives.” What elective activities fill the moments of our days depends on our values. Another way of saying this is that, after taking care of our basic needs, the rest of our time is devoted to fulfilling our heart’s desires. We may envision this as the pursuit of happiness, fulfillment, or a meaningful life. However we conceive of the purpose of our lives, it will focus on people, things, circumstances, and other more intangible qualities that bring us satisfaction. You have already been alive and pursuing happiness for decades. Pause for a moment and ask yourself: How much satisfaction has your life brought you thus far?
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Genuine happiness is a symptom of a balanced, healthy mind, just as a sense of physical well-being is a sign of a healthy body. Among modern people, the notion is prevalent that suffering is inherent in life, that it is simply human nature for us to experience frustration, depression, and anxiety. But our mental suffering on many occasions serves no good purpose at all. It is an affliction with no benefit to us. It is just a symptom of an unbalanced mind.
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By looking at what we work for and yearn for—what we spend our time and resources on—we can develop insight into our priorities. The term conation refers to our faculty of desire and volition. Conative balance, a crucial element of mental health, is expressed when our desires are conducive to our own and others’ genuine happiness. Conative imbalances, on the other hand, are ways that our desires lead us away from mental health and into psychological distress. Such imbalances are threefold: conative deficit, conative hyperactivity, and conative dysfunction. A conative deficit occurs when we experience apathy toward greater happiness and its causes. This apathy is normally accompanied by a lack of imagination and a kind of stagnation: we can’t imagine feeling better than we do now, so we don’t try to do anything about it. This robs us of the incentive to achieve greater mental well-being. Conative hyperactivity occurs when obsessive desires obscure the reality of the present. Fantasies about the future—unfulfilled desires—blind us to what is happening here and now. Finally, conative dysfunction is when we do desire things that are destructive to our own or others’ well-being, and don’t desire the things that lead to genuine happiness for both ourselves and others. I include “others” here because we cannot cultivate optimal mental balance in isolation from others. We do not exist independently from others, so our well-being cannot arise independently of others either. To flourish individually, we must consider the well-being of those around us. As the Buddha declared, “One who loves himself will never harm another.”8
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In Buddhism, misguided desires are called craving, which here means an attraction for something whose desirable qualities we exaggerate while ignoring any undesirable qualities. If our craving is strong, we see the very possibility of our own happiness as inherent to the object on which our mind is bent. This disempowers ourselves and empowers the object of our attraction.10 When reality breaks through our fantasies, disillusionment sets in.
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To bring all this back to the central theme of this book, one major impediment to training attention is not finding time to do it. And the reason we don’t find time to meditate is because we are devoting so much time to other priorities. Some of these priorities center on our basic needs, but many are wrapped up in craving in the sense described above. In desiring the symbols of the good life—wealth, transient pleasures, praise, and reputation—we may deprive ourselves of the reality of living well. The reason we don’t devote more time to balancing our minds is that we are betting our lives that we can find the happiness we seek by chasing fleeting pleasures. Psychologists have called this the hedonic treadmill,11 and the first step to escaping from this exhausting grind is to…
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MEDITATION ON LOVING-KINDNESS Begin by resting your body in a comfortable position, sitting either cross-legged or on a chair. Bring your awareness to the physical sensations throughout your body, breathing into any areas that feel tense or constricted. Be still, and adopt a posture of vigilance. Then take three slow, deep breaths, breathing through your nostrils, down into your belly, expanding the diaphragm and finally the chest. Exhale effortlessly, settling your body in its resting state. Attend to the rhythm of your breath for a few moments, letting it flow unconstrained by restless thoughts and emotions. Settle your awareness in a space of relaxation, stillness, and clarity. Now, from within this serenity, arouse your imagination with three questions. The first one is, What would I love to receive from the world in order to have a happy, meaningful, and fulfilling life? Some of these things may be tangible goods, such as food, lodging, clothing, and medical care. But other requisites for your well-being may be intangible, such as harmony in your environment, the warm companionship of others, and wise counsel to guide you on your spiritual journey. Bring clearly to mind the things you desire to meet your basic needs. Then allow the yearning to arise: may these authentic desires be fulfilled! Now pursue this vision for your own happiness more deeply. Clearly see your basic needs being fulfilled, and inquire further into what more you would love to receive from the people around you and from the environment at large. What could they provide you that would help you find the happiness you seek? You may bring to mind both tangible and intangible things, whatever you feel would assist you in fulfilling your heart’s desire. Imagine that the world rises up to meet you, here and now, and provides you with all the external support that is needed to fulfill your aspirations. Each of us is constantly changing from moment to moment, day to day, as our bodies and minds are continually in a state of flux. The next question is, What kind of a person do I want to become? What personal qualities do I want to possess? You are changing all the time whether you choose to or not, so envision the changes you would love to experience in your evolution as a human being. Imagine both short-term and long-term changes. And as you envision the person you would love to evolve into…
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For most people setting out on the path of attentional development, the problem that overwhelms them is excitation. There are many reasons the mind becomes agitated and distracted. Anger and fear certainly have this influence, and simply living in a noisy, hectic environment can easily destabilize the mind. But most commonly, the coherence and continuity of attention is undermined by craving, or misguided desires. The general symptoms of a mind prone to craving are dissatisfaction, restlessness, and anxiety. We can try to stifle these unpleasant feelings by immersing ourselves in work, entertainment, talking, or anything else that masks…
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When coarse excitation takes over the mind, we completely lose touch with our chosen object of attention. It’s as if the mind is abducted against its will, and thrown into the trunk of a distracting thought or sensory stimulus. In the first stage of attentional development, directed attention, the level of excitation is so coarse that you experience virtually no continuity of attention on your chosen object. The mind jumps around from one object to another like a bird flitting from branch to branch, never at rest. Such turbulence is overcome only by persistent skillful practice, cultivating deeper relaxation, a sense of inner ease. Eventually, the mind will begin to calm down and you will experience brief periods of sustained attention, but then you lose it again. In a way, the practice of mindfulness of breathing is easy. It’s not hard to direct your attention to the tactile sensations associated with respiration. At the beginning of the session, you resolve to do just that, yet seconds later your mind is elsewhere. The fact that this is normal doesn’t make it any less weird. It’s as if you repeatedly lose your mind, then regain it for brief periods, only to lose it again and again. We all seem to be suffering from frequent bouts of amnesia! In the second of the nine stages, continuous attention, you experience occasional periods of continuity, but most of the time your mind is still caught up in wandering thoughts and sensory distractions. Don’t be misled by the name of this stage. Continuous attention doesn’t mean that you can maintain unbroken continuity for long stretches,…
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THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING WITH STABILITY Begin this session, as you did before, by settling your body in its rest state, imbued with the three qualities of relaxation, stillness, and vigilance. With your awareness permeating the tactile sensations throughout your body, take three slow, deep breaths, observing the sensations of the breath filling your torso from the belly up to the chest. Then let your respiration return to its natural rhythm and simply be present with the breath for several minutes, breathing as effortlessly as you can. With this preparation, you establish a basis in relaxation. Without losing this sense of ease, now shift your emphasis to the cultivation of attentional stability. This is the ability to sustain the focus of your attention without becoming fragmented or derailed by the force of distracting thoughts and sensations. With this aim, instead of being mindful of the various sensations of respiration throughout your whole body, focus your attention just on the sensations of the expansion and contraction of your abdomen with each in- and out-breath. As you did before, note the duration of each inhalation and exhalation, and observe the duration of the pauses between breaths. Out of sheer habit, unintentional thoughts are bound to cascade through your mind like a waterfall. One way of stemming this relentless stream of ideation is to count the breaths. Try that now, by counting “one” at the beginning of your first inhalation, then attending closely to the sensations of the respiration throughout the rest of the inhalation and the entire exhalation. Count “two” at the beginning of the next breath, and continue in this way for as long as you find it helpful. Let these mental counts be brief, so that your attention to the counting doesn’t override your awareness of the breath itself. The objective of counting the breath is to insert brief reminders into the practice—remembering to remember—so that you don’t get carried away by distracting thoughts. Attending to these mental markers at regular intervals in the course of the respiration is like taking note of milestones on the side of a country road, letting you know by their presence that you are on the right track, or by their absence that you have wandered off your chosen route. This phase of the practice is primarily concerned with mindfulness of breathing, not counting. It’s easy to maintain just enough continuity of attention to keep track of counting, while between counts, the mind wanders off on its own, like a dog without a leash. Let the counting remind you to keep your attention focused on the tactile sensations of the breath, which change from moment to moment. After counting the breath at the beginning of the inhalation, let your mind be as conceptually silent as possible for the remainder of the in-breath. And during the out-breath, release any involuntary thoughts that have cropped up. As mentioned before, arouse your attention (counteracting laxity…
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Meditation is a balancing act between attention and relaxation. Mastering this requires working to counter the natural reflex of trying harder, or clamping down, when you see that your mind has become distracted. Instead, as soon as you see that your mind has wandered, release the effort of clinging to the distracting thought or physical sensation, return to the breath, and relax more deeply. Remember that the main point of such attentional training is not to stop thoughts from arising. Rather, it is first to relax the body and mind, then to cultivate the stability of sustaining attention continuously upon your chosen object. Thoughts are bound to arise. Simply do your best not to be carried away by them. The kind of awareness cultivated here is called bare attention, in which the mind is fully focused on the sensory impressions appearing to it, moment to moment, rather than getting caught up in conceptual and emotional responses to those stimuli. As you attend to the abdominal sensations of breathing, mental images of your body, based on visual memory, are likely to arise together with the bodily sensations themselves. Recognize the difference between the tactile sensations of the breath as they appear to bare attention, as opposed to the mental images of what you think your body looks like, which are superimposed by your conceptual mind. As soon as you note the presence of these mental images, release them and direct your attention solely to the immediate, tactile experiences of breathing.
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One way to cultivate attentional stability is to direct our attention downward to the sensations in the abdomen associated with the in- and out-breath. Mindfulness of the entire body is very helpful for relaxing the mind, but this technique of focusing on the abdomen, which is commonly taught in the Burmese Theravada tradition, can be especially helpful for stabilizing the mind.
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Cognitive imbalances of both types can be remedied by applying to daily life the attention skills we cultivate during meditation. In fact, if we casually let our minds succumb to excitation and laxity throughout the day, there’s little chance that our formal training during twenty-four-minute sessions is going to have much effect. This would be like eating a wholesome breakfast, then snacking on junk food for the rest of the day. However busy we may be, or think we are, no one is paying us enough to have demands on our minds every single moment of the day. Even in the midst of work, we can take off fifteen seconds here and sixty seconds there to balance the attention by quietly focusing on the breath. Our eyes can be open, and we can sit quietly for a few moments, without calling attention to ourselves. We can do this in the workplace, while standing in line at the grocery store, or while waiting at a stoplight. There are many brief occasions from the time we get up in the morning until we fall asleep at night when we can “season our day” with a sprinkling of mindfulness of breathing. And each time we do it, we may immediately feel the soothing effect on our bodies and minds. In this way, we can begin to integrate the quality of awareness that we cultivate during meditation with the awareness that we bring to our activities in the world throughout the day.
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The quality of bare attention we cultivate during mindfulness of the sensations of breathing can be applied to other sensations as well. The next time you sit down for a meal, try this experiment, in which you focus bare attention on each of your five physical senses as they arise in relation to the meal set before you. Let your visual, olfactory, gustatory, auditory, and tactile senses individually experience the food by way of bare attention, with as little conceptual overlay as possible. Begin by directing your mindfulness to the visual appearance of the food—just its colors and shapes. Let go of any conceptual associations you may have regarding these visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments of the food. Your likes and dislikes are not present in the food itself, nor in its colors and shapes. Just be present with the shapes and colors of your meal, focusing on them with bare attention. Now close your eyes for a few moments and focus on the smells of the food. Be totally present with just those fragrances, noting how they change from moment to moment. Recognize the nuances of these aromas with discerning mindfulness, but without mixing your immediate experience with labels and concepts, likes and dislikes. Now take a mouthful of the food and, with your eyes remaining closed, direct your bare attention to the tastes that arise in your mouth. Eat slowly, mindful of the changes in flavors that rise up to meet you. As you chew the food, direct your attention to the sounds of eating. They are never the same from moment to moment, so ride the crest of the wave of the present, clinging to nothing in the past, anticipating nothing in the future. Finally, apply bare attention to the tactile sensations of the food—its warmth or coldness, firmness or fluidity, smoothness or roughness. Release any mental images of what you think the food looks like, and focus solely on the tactile qualities of the food as it is chewed and swallowed.
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Wasn’t that interesting? Normally when we eat, especially if we are simultaneously involved in some other activity, such as engaging in a conversation, our conceptual overlays drown out the sensory qualities of the food we’re eating. We remember only that we liked, disliked, or were indifferent to the meal, but we commonly suffer from a cognitive deficit disorder when it comes to the five kinds of sensory impressions we were receiving from the food. Just as a meal can pass by unnoticed, so can the rest of our lives. All too often, we miss out on what was happening, imagine things that never happened at all, and recall only the assumptions, expectations, and fantasies that we projected onto reality. We can apply such bare attention at any time, taking the “fresh produce” of the world straight from the fields of the senses, without prepackaging raw experience with our old, habitual conceptual wrappings. The challenge here is to distinguish what reality is presenting to our senses from moment to moment from what we are superimposing on the…
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According to Buddhist psychology, in any single moment of awareness, which may be as brief as one millisecond, attention is focused in only one sense field. But during the course of these momentary pulses of consciousness, attention jumps rapidly from one sense field to another, like a chimpanzee on amphetamines. In the blur of these shifts among the sense fields, the mind “makes sense” of the world by superimposing familiar conceptual grids on our perceptions. In this way our experience of the world is structured and appears familiar to us. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it would be very difficult to function in daily life without such conceptual structuring. But problems emerge when we fail to recognize the degree to which we are conceptually adding to reality or subtracting from it through sheer mindlessness. That’s where the cognitive hyperactivity and deficit problems arise. If this theory is valid (and cognitive scientists are exploring these issues today), then from moment to moment there’s really no such thing as mental multitasking. At any given moment, our minds are on one thing only. So the experience of attending to multiple things at once is an illusion. What’s really happening is that the attention is rapidly moving back and forth from one field of experience to another. Recent scientific research indicates that multitasking is in fact not very efficient, for the quality of awareness allotted to each task is diminished. It’s as if we have a finite quantity of attention—like a finite volume of water flowing down a gorge—and as we direct it into smaller tributaries of interest, there’s less attention available for each channel. The practice of focused attention is essentially “non-multitasking.” It’s learning how to channel the stream of awareness where we wish, for as long as we wish, without it compulsively becoming fragmented and thrown into disarray. So when you are next…
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Impediment to mental balance that are especially common in the West are self-judgment, guilt, and low self-esteem. As we practice, we may do so with a certain level of expectation. Then, if we don’t progress as well as we think we should, we may grow impatient with ourselves and feel guilty when we don’t take time to practice. One more failure to add to our list! In attentional training, we are going against the grain of years of habit, let alone eons of biological evolution that have helped us survive and procreate but have done little to prepare us for such serene, focused attention. So it’s no wonder that our minds are so scattered and prone to imbalances of all kinds. But with gentle patience, we can gradually train our minds so that they provide us with an inner sense of well-being, instead of constant anxiety, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. This requires compassion for ourselves and for others. The first step is to begin identifying the real causes of our discontent. Virtually anything may catalyze unhappiness, but its true source is always in the mind. Some people feel desperately miserable even when their outer circumstances are wonderful, while others are happy and contented even in the face of dire adversity. We suffer because our minds are afflicted by various kinds of imbalances, which lead us to seek happiness in all the wrong places. But we can emerge from this hedonic treadmill by identifying what truly ails us and what truly brings us satisfaction. Buddhists refer to this shift in priorities as the arousal of a spirit of emergence, with which we move away from the sources of discontent and set out on the path to genuine happiness. This is the most compassionate thing we can do for ourselves.
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MEDITATION ON COMPASSION Settle your body in its rest state, as described previously, and calm the mind for a few moments with mindfulness of breathing. Begin this session by cultivating compassion for yourself. How long have you struggled to free yourself of anxiety and dissatisfaction? What tendencies of your own mind and behavior have repeatedly gotten in your way? This is not a time for self-judgment, dismay, or apathy. It’s a time for reappraisal. How can we free ourselves of the inner causes of suffering, given that we have so little control over outer circumstances? Let the aspiration arise: May I be free of the true causes of worry and sadness. Envision your mind free of pointless cravings, free of hostility, and free of confusion. Imagine the serenity and joy of a balanced mind, closely in tune with reality. Now direct your attention to a loved one who is suffering from physical or psychological distress. The very term attention is related to the verb “to tend,” as in “to take care of” and “to watch over.” When you attend to someone fully, you are offering yourself to her. This is your most intimate gift—to attend to someone with a loving, compassionate heart. Let this person fill your heart and mind. Attend to this person’s experience, and if you know the causes of her grief or pain, be present with those causes. Imagine shifting your attention into her perspective, experiencing her difficulties. Then return to your own perspective and let the yearning arise, “May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.” Imagine this person finding relief and the freedom that she seeks to lead a happy and meaningful life. Bring to mind another person, one who wishes to be free of suffering but out of delusion causes his own and others’ suffering. Again, imagine taking his perspective and experiencing his difficulties. Then, return to your own perspective, and with an understanding of the consequences of this person’s behavior, wish that he be free of the mental afflictions at the root of his destructive behavior. Let the heartfelt wish arise, “May you have a clear vision of the path to freedom from suffering,” and imagine this person free of the causes of suffering. Now let the scope of your awareness rove through the world, attending to those who suffer, whether from hunger and thirst, from poverty or the miseries of war, from social injustice or the imbalances and afflictions of their own minds. We are all deserving of compassion, especially when we act out of delusion, harming ourselves and others. Let your heart embrace the world with the aspiration, “May we all be free of suffering and its true causes. May we all help ease each others’ pain.”
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When you reach the third stage, resurgent attention, during each practice session your attention is fixed most of the time upon your meditative object. By now, you will have increased the duration of each session beyond the initial twenty-four minutes to perhaps twice that. As your attention gradually stabilizes, you may increase the duration of each session by increments of three minutes. At all times, though, value the quality of your meditation over the quantity of time spent in each session. If you sit for long periods but let your mind rove around unnoticed among distractions or fall into dullness, not only are you wasting your time, but also you are developing bad habits that will only get harder and harder to break.
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The third stage is achieved only when your mind remains focused on the object most of the time in virtually all your sessions. For most people, the primary problem in this phase of practice is still coarse excitation, and it is with the power of mindfulness that you accomplish this third stage. From the beginning of shamatha training, however, some people are more prone to laxity, which manifests in coarse, medium, and subtle degrees. For the moment, we’ll concern ourselves only with coarse laxity, which occurs when your attention mostly disengages from the object and sinks into a spaced-out vacancy. This is like having the reception of a radio station mostly fade out, even without interference from another channel. Abiding in a state of coarse laxity can be very peaceful, with your mind relatively undisturbed by thoughts or emotional upheavals. But if you spend many hours each day in such a state of dullness, Tibetan contemplatives report that this not only has no benefit, it can actually impair your intelligence. The acuity of your mind starts to atrophy, and over the long term, this can do serious damage. During the early 1970s, I knew of one fellow who decided on his own that the whole point of meditation was to stop thinking, and he diligently applied himself to this goal for days on end. Eventually, he reached this goal by becoming vegetative, unable even to feed himself, and he needed to be hospitalized. This might be deemed an extreme case of coarse laxity!
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As you continue in this practice, in order to progress through the stages of attentional development, you need to hone the ability to monitor the quality of your attention. While the main force of your awareness is directed to the meditation object with mindfulness, this needs to be supported with the faculty of introspection, which allows for the quality control of attention, enabling you to swiftly note when the mind has fallen into either excitation or laxity. As soon as you detect either imbalance, take the necessary steps to remedy it. Your first antidote to excitation is to relax more deeply; to counteract laxity, arouse your attention. Throughout all the first three stages, involuntary thoughts flow like a cascading waterfall. But over time, these currents of compulsive ideation carry you away less and less frequently. Coarse excitation gradually subsides, even though thoughts and mental images continue to crop up, as do sounds, smells, and other sensory appearances. Don’t try to block out these distractions. Simply let them go and refocus your attention as single-pointedly as you can on your chosen object of meditation.
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Shamatha meditation can be very helpful even in the midst of a normal, socially active way of life, especially when it is balanced with other kinds of spiritual practice, such as the cultivation of loving-kindness and compassion. Rounded, integrated practice is like maintaining a healthy diet. While a proper diet won’t necessarily heal imbalance and illness, it is still indispensable for maintaining your vitality and resistance to disease. Likewise, a balanced meditative practice in the course of a socially…
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If you are practicing for only a session or two each day, you may not progress beyond the second attentional stage. The reason for this is simple: if you are balancing your attention for an hour or so each day, but letting it become fragmented and distracted for the other fifteen hours of waking time each day, then the attentional coherence cultivated during these brief sessions is overwhelmed by the distractions of the rest of the day. The achievement of the stage of resurgent attention requires a greater commitment to practice. This will entail multiple sessions of meditation each day, practiced within a quiet, contemplative way of life that supports the…
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THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING WITH VIVIDNESS Begin this twenty-four-minute session, as always, by settling your body in its rest state, imbued with the three qualities of relaxation, stillness, and vigilance. Take three slow, deep breaths, breathing down into the abdomen and then into the chest. Let your awareness permeate your body, feeling the sensations of the respiration wherever they arise. Then let your breath flow of its own accord, settling into its natural rhythm. Mentally, the initial emphasis in shamatha practice is on relaxation, which can be induced by attending to the sensations of breathing throughout the body. The second emphasis is on stability of attention, and for this it can be helpful to observe the sensations of breathing in the region of the belly. Then, having established a foundation of relaxation and stability, we shift the emphasis to cultivating vividness of attention. It is crucially important that stability is not gained at the expense of relaxation, and that the increase of vividness does not coincide with the decrease of stability. The relationship among these three qualities can be likened to the roots, trunk, and foliage of a tree. As your practice grows, the roots of relaxation go deeper, the trunk of stability gets stronger, and the foliage of vividness reaches higher. In this practice session, shift the emphasis to vividness. You do this by elevating the focus of attention and directing it to a subtler object. Direct your attention to the tactile sensations of your breath at the apertures of your nostrils or above your upper lip, wherever you feel the in- and out-flow of your breath. Elevating the focus of attention helps to induce vividness, and attending to a subtle object enhances that further. Observe these sensations at the gateway of the respiration, even between breaths. There is an ongoing flow of tactile sensations in the area of the nostrils and upper lip, so sustain your attention there as continuously as possible. If the breath becomes so subtle that you can’t detect the sensations of its flow, quiet your mind and observe more carefully. As you arouse the vividness of attention, eventually the sensations of the breath will become evident again. On the periphery of your…
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The Buddha described the practice of mindfulness of breathing with the following analogy: Just as in the last month of the hot season, when a mass of dust and dirt has swirled up, a great rain cloud out of season disperses it and quells it on the spot, so too concentration by mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, is peaceful and sublime, an ambrosial dwelling, and it disperses and quells on the spot unwholesome states whenever they arise.19 This analogy refers to the healing effect of balanced attention. When awareness is brought to rest on a neutral object, such as the breath, immediately every distressing thought disappears, and the mind becomes peaceful, sublime, and happy. These qualities do not arise from the object of awareness—the breath—but from the nature of the mind in a state of balance. This approach to healing the mind is similar to healing the physical body. The Buddha implied…
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Since coarse excitation is still the predominant problem during the third stage of attentional development, you may find it helpful to continue counting the breaths. Some Theravada teachers, following the fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa, offer two methods involving “quick counting.” In the first of these techniques, you count from one to ten with each full respiration. In the second, with each full breath cycle you count, “one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five, six; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven; …eight; …nine; …ten.”20 Asanga, on the other hand, suggested counting the breaths backward, from ten to one. After that, you may try counting two breaths as one, four as one, and so on, slowing the pace of counting to include ever larger clusters of breaths. However you choose to count the breaths, when your attention stabilizes to such an extent that you no longer experience lapses of attention but remain continuously engaged with each inhalation and exhalation, you can stop counting. That temporary crutch has served its purpose. Asanga commented, though, that the various methods for counting…
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The major challenge at this stage of the practice is to adopt a lifestyle that supports the cultivation of attentional balance, rather than eroding it between sessions. To achieve stage three, the dedicated meditator will need to take up this practice as a serious avocation, spending days or weeks in this practice in the midst of a contemplative way of life in a serene, quiet environment. If we practice only a session or two each day while leading an active life, we may occasionally feel that we’ve reached the sustained attention of the third stage, but we’ll have a hard time stabilizing at that level. The busy-ness of the day intrudes, the mind becomes scattered, and the attentional coherence gained during meditation will likely be lost.
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Henry David Thoreau explained why he withdrew into solitude by Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”22 Solitary meditation doesn’t cause mental imbalances, but uncovers them. Boredom may set in, especially when the mind succumbs to laxity, and restlessness often comes in the wake of excitation. With perseverance you can move beyond these imbalances and begin to discover the well-being that arises from a balanced mind. But this requires courage to face your own inner demons and persist in the practice despite the emotional upheavals that are bound to occur in the course of this training.
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When I lead shamatha seminars, I like to think of them as “expeditions” rather than “retreats.” The word “retreat” has the connotation not only of withdrawal but also of defeat, and that certainly isn’t the spirit of such practice. The word “expedition,” on the other hand, suggests adventure, conquest, and exploration. The Latin roots of the word have to do with extricating yourself, literally “stepping out,” of some situation in which you’ve gotten stuck. In the practice of shamatha, we discover how deeply our minds are trapped in the twin ruts of excitation and laxity. In the Buddhist tradition, a mind trapped in these ruts is said to be dysfunctional, and in order to make it serviceable, it is helpful to step out of our normal activities, seek out a spacious sense of solitude, and explore the frontiers of the mind.
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There are great adventures ahead, but also perils and dead ends. Sometimes the path is clear, but now and then it may seem to disappear altogether. The purpose of relying on those who know this path from their own experience is to save time.
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Six prerequisites for sustained, rigorous training are set forth in many Indian and Tibetan Buddhist meditation manuals.23
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1. A Supportive Environment It’s important to practice in a safe, quiet, and agreeable location, optimally with a few other like-minded people. This should be a place where food, clothing, and other necessities are easily obtained. Finding such an environment sounds simple in principle, but in practice it can be very difficult, especially if you try to devote yourself to practice for months on end.
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2 & 3. Having Few Desires and Being Content The first of these two prerequisites refers to having few desires for things you don’t have, and the second refers to being content with what you do have. Without these two qualities, your mind will never settle down in the practice. You will be constantly thinking of things you want but don’t have, and you will fret that your present circumstances are inadequate in one way or another. This does not mean that you must quell your desire for happiness, but it is necessary to refocus your aspirations on transforming your own mind as the means to genuine well-being. And for this to happen, you must see the limitations of a life driven by such mundane pursuits as wealth, luxury, entertainment, and reputation. All these circumstances can give you is a temporary spurt of pleasure that tapers off as soon as the pleasurable stimulus stops. Mental balance is the gateway to finding genuine happiness, and shamatha is the key that opens that gate.
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4. Having Few Activities While you are devoting yourself to shamatha training, it is important to keep other activities to a minimum, for if your behavior between meditation sessions erodes the coherence of attention that you gained during sessions, then you won’t be able to gain any ground. Given the fast pace of modern life and the general emphasis on keeping busy, it can be difficult to make this shift to simplicity. Our work can be a kind of narcotic, concealing the unrest and turbulence of our minds. And a lifestyle that alternates between hard work and hard play can keep us constantly busy, without ever gaining a clue about the meaning of life or the potentials of human consciousness.
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5. Ethical Discipline A necessary foundation for balancing the mind is ethical discipline, which is far more than merely following social rules or religious commandments from an external source of authority. To live harmoniously with others, we need to practice social ethics, and to live harmoniously within our natural environment, we need to practice environmental ethics. The practice of ethics involves avoiding harm to others by means of our physical, verbal, or mental behavior, and leads to social and environmental flourishing, in which whole communities may live in harmony with each other and with their natural environment.25 A third type of ethical discipline is psychophysical ethics. To promote inner well-being, we need to practice ethical ways of treating our own bodies and minds. This includes taking good care of the body, following a healthy diet, and getting the right kind and amount of physical exercise. It also involves engaging in mental behavior that is conducive to balancing the mind and reducing disturbing mental states such as hatred, greed, confusion, fear, and jealousy. The call to ethical discipline challenges each of us to examine our own behavior carefully, noting both short-term and long-term consequences of our actions. Although an activity may yield immediate pleasure, if over time it results in unrest, conflict, and misery, it warrants the label “unwholesome.” On the other hand, while a behavior may involve difficulties in the short-term, we can regard it as “wholesome” if it eventually leads to contentment, harmony, and genuine happiness for ourselves and others. Environmental, social, and psychophysical ethics all involve living in ways that are conducive to our own and others’ well-being. An ethical way of life supports the cultivation of mental balance, and this in turn further enables us to promote our own and others’ well-being.
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6. Dispensing with Compulsive Thoughts Many of us let compulsive thoughts dominate our minds. These won’t stop overnight, but as we engage in shamatha practice, both during and between sessions, it is important to observe the mind’s activities and restrain it when it falls into thought patterns that aggravate mental disturbances. Otherwise, we’ll be like the cat that thrashes around on the surface of the pond, never free from the turbulence of our own minds. The Indian Buddhist sage Atisha wrote of the importance of these prerequisites:26 As long as the prerequisites for shamatha Are incomplete, meditative stabilization Will not be accomplished, even if you meditate Strenuously for thousands of years. In our material society, even for people who are drawn to nonmaterialistic values, there’s a strong tendency to take our current way of life as the norm, and then to add meditation to fix it, like a Band-Aid applied to a festering wound. My first experience with meditation in the late 1960s is a good example. I went to a teacher who gave me a mantra and told me how to meditate on it, but in these instructions there was no reference to the way I should lead the rest of my life. Even now, decades later, meditation is often taught with little or no reference to any of the above prerequisites. It has been reduced to a kind of first aid to alleviate the symptoms of a dysfunctional life, with all its anxieties, depression, frustration, and emotional vacillations. For a mind that is assaulted with a myriad of mental afflictions such as craving, hostility, and delusion, we need more than a medic. We need long-term, intensive care. That’s what this training is all about.
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We are addicted to pleasurable stimuli, and when we devote ourselves many hours each day to shamatha training, with few distractions between sessions, we begin to have withdrawal symptoms. The mind oscillates between boredom and restlessness, and at times it may descend into depression and self-doubt. At such times, we tend to fixate on ideas and memories that reinforce such gloom and doom, so it’s important to lift ourselves out of these emotional sinkholes by reflecting on other aspects of reality that inspire us. One such practice is the meditative cultivation of empathetic joy. In the practice of loving-kindness and compassion, we cultivate a yearning that others may find happiness and its causes and be free from suffering and its causes. The cultivation of the empathetic joy involves attending closely to something that is already a reality—the joys, successes, and virtues of yourself and others. Empathy is feeling with others, and in this practice we focus not on their sorrows and difficulties, but on their happiness and triumphs. This practice is a direct antidote to feelings of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that may arise in the course of intensive, sustained meditation, or simply in the course of daily living.
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MEDITATION ON EMPATHETIC JOY Find a comfortable position, keeping the spine straight. Settle your body in its rest state, imbued with the three qualities of relaxation, stillness, and vigilance. Bring to mind a person you know well who exudes a sense of good cheer and well-being. Think of this person’s physical presence, words, and actions. As you attend to this person’s joy, open your heart to that joy and take delight in it. This will be easy if you already feel close to this person. Now, bring to mind another individual. Think of someone for whom something wonderful has happened, recently or in the past. Recall the delight of this person and share in the joy. Now direct your attention to someone who inspires you with his or her virtues, such as generosity, kindness, and wisdom. Rejoice in these virtues for this person’s sake, for your own sake, and for all those who are recipients of this virtue. Now direct awareness to your own life. Empathetic joy in our own virtues is important yet often overlooked. Attend to periods in your life that have been a source of inspiration to you and perhaps to others as well. Think of occasions when you embodied your own ideals. Attend to and take delight in your own virtues. There doesn’t need to be any pompousness here, or any sense of pride or arrogance. As you recall the people and circumstances that enabled you to live well and enjoy the sweet fruits of your efforts, you may simultaneously experience a deep sense of gratitude and joy. This prevents you from slipping into a superficial sense of self-congratulation and superiority. Some practices are difficult, but the practice of empathetic joy is easy. Throughout the course of the day, when you see or hear about someone’s virtue or good fortune, empathetically take joy in it. This will raise your own spirits and help you climb out of emotional sinkholes of depression and low self-esteem.
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By maintaining continuity of this training in a retreat setting, you will eventually achieve the fourth of the nine stages of attentional development, called close attention. At this point, due to the power of enhanced mindfulness, you no longer completely forget your chosen object, the tactile sensations of the breath at the nostrils. You may have experienced glimpses of this level of attentional stability intermittently before actually achieving this stage, but now it has become normal. Each of your sessions may now last an hour or longer, and throughout this time, your attention cannot be involuntarily drawn entirely away from the object. You are now free of coarse excitation. It’s as if the attention has acquired a kind of gravity such that it can’t be easily buffeted by gusts of involuntary thoughts and sensory distractions. At this stage it is said that you achieve the power of mindfulness.27 In the Indian and Tibetan Mahayana traditions, mindfulness is defined as the mental faculty of maintaining attention, without forgetfulness or distraction, on a familiar object. Since mindfulness prevents the attention from straying from one’s chosen object, it acts…
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According to one psychological paper on this topic, mindfulness is “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.”31 The authors of this paper propose a two-component model of mindfulness, the first involving the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience, and the second involving an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance. The modern psychological account of mindfulness, which is explicitly based on the descriptions of mindfulness presented in the modern Vipassana (contemplative insight) tradition of Theravada Buddhism, differs significantly from the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist version. The modern Vipassana approach views mindfulness as nondiscriminating, moment-to-moment “bare awareness”; the Indo-Tibetan tradition, however, characterizes mindfulness as bearing in mind the object of attention, the state of not forgetting, not being distracted, and not floating.32 The scholar and teacher Bhante Gunaratana gives a clear description of the Vipassana view of mindfulness in his book Mindfulness in Plain English. There he describes mindfulness as nonconceptual awareness, or “bare attention,” which does not label or categorize experiences. “Mindfulness,” he says, “is present-time awareness…It stays forever in the present…If you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is memory. When you then become aware that you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is mindfulness.”33 While Gunaratana’s description is representative of the current Vipassana tradition as a whole, it is oddly at variance with the Buddha’s own description of mindfulness, or sati: “And what monks, is the faculty of sati? Here, monks, the noble disciple has sati, he is endowed with perfect sati and intellect, he is one who remembers, who recollects what was done and said long before.”34 In contrast to the Vipassana tradition’s…
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Questioned by King Milinda about the characteristics of sati, the monk Nagasena replies that it has both the characteristic of “calling to mind” and the characteristic of “taking hold.” He explained further, Sati, when it arises, calls to mind wholesome and unwholesome tendencies, with faults and faultless, inferior and refined, dark and pure, together with their counterparts.… Sati, when it arises, follows the courses of beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies: these tendencies are beneficial, these unbeneficial; these tendencies are helpful, these unhelpful.35 So, rather than refraining from labeling or categorizing experiences in a nonjudgmental fashion, in the earliest, most authoritative accounts, sati is said to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome, beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies. The contrast between the ancient and modern accounts is striking. With his usual meticulous care, Buddhaghosa, the most authoritative commentator of the Theravada tradition, wrote: [Sati’s] characteristic is not floating; its property is not losing; its manifestation is guarding or the state of…
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Mindfulness is cultivated in the practice of shamatha, and it is applied in the practice of contemplative insight (Pali:…
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As mentioned previously, in the fourth stage of shamatha practice, you achieve the power of mindfulness, and the practice comes into its own. While your attention is no longer prone to coarse excitation, it is still flawed by a medium degree of excitation and coarse laxity. When medium excitation occurs, you don’t completely lose track of your object of attention, but involuntary thoughts occupy the center of attention and the meditative object is displaced to the periphery. To compare this with coarse excitation, let’s again take the analogy of tuning into a radio station. Coarse excitation is like losing your chosen station altogether, as your tuner slips either to another station or into mere static. Medium excitation is like drifting slightly toward another station but not so completely that you can no longer hear your chosen station at all. You still hear it, but it’s muffled by extraneous noise.
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THE PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING WITH THE ACQUIRED SIGN After settling your body and respiration in their natural states, continue focusing your attention on the bare sensations of the breath at the apertures of your nostrils. At this stage in the practice, your respiration will be very calm and the tactile sensations of the breath will be correspondingly very subtle. They may even become so faint that you can’t detect them at all. When that happens, it is important not to assume that there are no sensations, nor should you deliberately breathe more vigorously so that you can pick up those sensations again. Rather, observe more and more closely until you do detect the very subtle sensations of your breath. As discussed previously, this is a unique quality of the breath as a meditation object. In other methods for developing shamatha, the object is bound to become more and more evident as you progress in the practice. But with the technique of mindfulness of breathing, as your practice deepens, the breath becomes more and more subtle, which challenges you to arouse greater and greater vividness of attention. So, rise to this challenge as you simultaneously cultivate a deeper sense of relaxation, stronger stability, and brighter vividness. Allow your respiration, which represents the “air element” of lightness and movement, to carry the healing, balancing, soothing process deeper and deeper. Habitual mental images, arising involuntarily, will be superimposed on your sense impressions, including tactile sensations. In this practice, you are like a chemist separating out the impurities of superimpositions from the pure strain of the tactile sensations of the breath. As superimpositions are released, the sense of your body having definite physical borders fades and you enter deeper and deeper levels of tranquillity. In the phases of mindfulness of breathing thus far, you have been attending in various ways to the tactile sensations of the respiration. However, to continue all the way along the path of shamatha, eventually you must shift your attention from the tactile sensations of breathing to an “acquired sign” (Pali: uggaha-nimitta), a symbol of the air element that appears before the mind’s eye as you progress in shamatha practice. To different people, acquired signs associated with the breath practice may appear like a star, a cluster of gems or pearls, a wreath of flowers, a puff of smoke, a cobweb, a cloud, a lotus flower, a wheel, or the moon or sun. The various appearances of the acquired sign are related to the mental dispositions of individual meditators. If you wish to continue on the path of mindfulness of breathing—which here explicitly turns into “mindfulness with breathing”—as soon as such a sign arises, shift your attention to this sign. This will be your object of attention as you proceed along the rest of the nine stages leading to shamatha. At first your sign will arise only sporadically, so when it disappears, return to the…
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While Buddhaghosa includes certain kinds of tactile sensations among the acquired signs associated with the breath practice, the Indo-Tibetan Mahayana tradition emphasizes that advanced stages along the path to shamatha can be achieved only by focusing on a mental object, not a sensory impression.40 The reason for this is that the development of shamatha entails the cultivation of an exceptionally high degree of attentional vividness. By focusing on an object of any of the physical senses, you can certainly develop stability, but vividness will not be enhanced to its full potential. For this,…
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Shariputra, similarly, a Bodhisattva, a great being, mindfully breathes in and mindfully breathes out. If the inhalation is long, he knows the inhalation is long; if the exhalation is long, he knows the exhalation is long. If the inhalation is short, he knows the inhalation is short; if the exhalation is short, he knows the exhalation is short. Shariputra, thus, a Bodhisattva, a great being, by dwelling with introspection and with mindfulness, eliminates avarice and disappointment towards the world by means of nonobjectification; and he lives observing the body as the body internally.41
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While the modern Vipassana tradition emphasizes that in the practice of mindfulness we must accept our faults without making any attempt to change them,42 this advice is a departure from the Buddha’s teachings and the writings of the great masters of the past. If you don’t balance your attention when it strays into either laxity or excitation, you will only reinforce these mental imbalances, and the quality of your mindfulness will remain flawed indefinitely.
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The term nonobjectification in this passage refers to no longer clinging to outer objects and events as the true sources of our joys and sorrows. Rather, we see that these feelings arise from our own minds, and this insight heals the mental affliction of avarice and the disappointment that results when our desires are obstructed.
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According to Buddhist psychology, when we detect something by way of any of our six senses—vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, or mental perception—there is a very brief moment before the mind projects concepts and labels onto our immediate experience. Discerning this fraction of a second of pure perception, before concepts, classifications, and emotional responses overlay it, requires a high degree of vividness.43 This brief instant is important because it is an opportunity for gaining a clearer perception of the nature of phenomena, including a subtle continuum of mental consciousness out of which all forms of sensory perception and conceptualization emerge.
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A prominent school of Buddhist psychology states that about six hundred pulselike moments of cognition occur per second, and this accords roughly with modern psychology.
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In Buddhism the moments of cognition that don’t knowingly engage with anything are called nonascertaining awareness. Appearances arise to the mind, but we don’t register them, and afterward we have no recollection of having witnessed them. When we listen closely to music, for example, other sensory impressions, such as extraneous sounds, shapes, colors, and bodily sensations, are still being presented to our awareness, but we note only a very small fraction of them. Attention is highly selective.
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Attentional stability is a measure of how many of the ascertained impulses of awareness are focused on our desired object. For example, if we have fifty moments of ascertaining cognition per second and all fifty are focused on the tactile sensations of breathing, this indicates a relatively high degree of stability. A distracted mind, on the other hand, has a high proportion of those fifty ascertaining moments scattered in different fields of perception. Stability is coherence with regard to the chosen object. As we relax and our attention stabilizes, if vividness increases, we may experience a higher density of moments of ascertaining consciousness each second.
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Many meditators emphasize vividness in their practice because they know that this brings them a kind of “high.” But the lasting achievement of vividness has two prerequisites, relaxation and stability. If you want to develop exceptional vividness, first develop relaxation, second develop stability, and then finally increase vividness. Underlying all these aspects of attention must be a foundation of equanimity, without which strong attentional and emotional vacillations will likely persist indefinitely. A general sign of spiritual progress is imperturbability in the face of the vicissitudes of life, and for this, equanimity is the key.
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The cultivation of equanimity serves as an antidote to two of the primary afflictions of the mind: attachment and aversion. Attachment includes clinging to the serenity of shamatha, and aversion can arise by regarding all distractions to your practice, including other people, as disagreeable obstacles to your well-being. The essence of equanimity is impartiality. It is equanimity that allows loving-kindness, compassion, and empathetic joy to expand boundlessly. Normally, these qualities are mixed with attachment, but we grow beyond the mental affliction of attachment as we realize that every sentient being is equally worthy of finding happiness and freedom from suffering.
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In Buddhism, a sense of one’s self as an immutable, unitary, independent “I” is seen as a root cause of suffering. Clinging to this illusory, autonomous ego leads to the conviction that our own well-being is more important than that of other people. Normally, we live within a set of concentric rings of affection, with ourselves at the center. The first ring out from the center includes our loved ones and dear friends, and the next ring is our circle of friendly acquaintances. Farther out there is a very large ring of people toward whom we feel indifferent. The outermost ring includes people we regard as enemies, people who we believe have obstructed or may obstruct our desires for happiness. This way of prioritizing our feelings for others perpetuates self-centeredness. Equanimity overcomes such self-centeredness and its resultant attachment to and aversion for others.
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When I first moved into a meditation hut high in the mountains above Dharamsala, I went to visit the Tibetan recluse Gen Jhampa Wangdü. In the spring of 1959, shortly after the Tibetan uprising against the Communist invasion of Tibet, Jhampa Wangdü fled his homeland and resumed life as a yogi in India. The day I first dropped by his hermitage made a great impression on me. He was not in strict retreat, so I knew I would not be interfering if I came by during the noon hour. I knocked on his door. A small man who looked a bit like the character Yoda from the movie Star Wars opened the door, his face filled with a big, warm smile, as if I were his long-lost son who had finally returned home. He radiated a sense of happiness and kindness. He invited me in and offered me tea. In different circumstances, I might have felt that I was special or that he was especially fond of me. Jhampa Wangdü’s compassion and warmth were genuine, but it became obvious to me that his affection was utterly free of personal attachment. I expect anybody would have been received in the same way. But knowing this did not make this reception any less sweet. It was an experience of unconditional love, the key to happiness in any circumstances. This is how reclusive contemplatives maintain their connection to others despite the isolation and hardships of their lives.
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They aren’t waiting for success, gazing longingly at their calendars, hoping for quick results. The Tibetan verb drupa, commonly translated as “to practice,” also means “to accomplish.” When asked, “What are you doing?” a contemplative might answer, “I am practicing/accomplishing shamatha.” Practice and achievement are one and the same.
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MEDITATION ON EQUANIMITY After settling your body in its ground state and attending to your breath for a few moments, bring to mind a person you know well, whose background and living circumstances are familiar to you but who is neither a friend nor an enemy. Attend to this person. This person, like yourself, is striving for happiness and freedom from pain, fear, and insecurity. Focus on this person and shift your awareness to view the world from her eyes. From this point of view, look back on yourself. Regardless of the distinct defects or excellent qualities this person might have, her yearning for happiness and wish to be free from pain and grief are identical to your own. Even though she is not close to the center of your personal universe, her well-being is no less significant than that of a dear loved one whom you may regard as crucial to your happiness. Now bring to mind a person you feel is crucial to your well-being, a person for whom you have both affection and attachment. Attend closely to this loved one, and shift your awareness to the viewpoint of that person so that you perceive him as a human being like yourself, with both defects and excellent qualities. From this viewpoint, realize that although you are loved by some people, a great number of people feel indifferently toward you, and there also may be some people who don’t like you. This person for whom you feel affection and attachment feels his own desires, hopes, and fears. Now step back and attend to this person from outside. This person is not a true source of your happiness, security, or joy, which can only arise from your own heart and mind. Next bring to mind a person who may be intent on bringing you harm or depriving you of happiness, a person with whom you feel conflict. As before, imagine stepping into this person’s perspective, being this person from the inside, and experiencing her hopes and fears. Fundamentally, this person, like yourself, wishes to find happiness and freedom from suffering. Now, step back and attend to her from outside with the realization that she is not the source of your distress or anxiety. If you feel uneasy or angry in relationship to this person, the source is in your own heart, not in the other person. Realize that there is nothing inherent in the stranger, in the loved one, nor in the foe that makes the other person fall into one category or another. Circumstances change, relationships change, and it is the flux of circumstances that gives rise to the thoughts “this is my enemy” or “this is my loved one.” Expand the field of awareness to embrace everyone in your immediate environment, their hopes, fears, aspirations, and yearnings. Each person is as important as all others. Shifting circumstances bring us together and also cause us to part. Expand your field of awareness out over the whole community, reaching out in all directions, including everyone. Recognize that each person is fundamentally like yourself, and virtually everyone feels…
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Through the skillful, sustained practice of settling the mind in its natural state, eventually you will achieve the fifth attentional stage, called tamed attention. At this point, you find that you can take satisfaction in your practice, even though there is still some resistance to it. You have progressed well on this path, and the results of your efforts are apparent to you. Involuntary thoughts continue to arise, but instead of their tumultuous outpouring like a cascading waterfall, they now flow like a river moving smoothly through a gorge. As you progress from the fourth to the fifth stage of attentional training, you are presented with one of the greatest challenges on the entire path to shamatha. Free of coarse excitation, you must now confront another problem that was lurking in the shadows of your mind all along: coarse laxity. As mentioned earlier, the symptom of this attentional disorder is that your attention succumbs to dullness, which causes it to largely disengage from its meditative object. The Tibetan word for laxity has the connotation of sinking. It’s as if the attention, instead of rising to the object, sinks down from it into the recesses of the mind. The attention fades, as it were, but instead of fading out, it’s more like fading in, stepping onto a slippery slope that leads down to sluggishness, lethargy, and finally sleep.
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True shamatha is imbued not only with a degree of stability far beyond that achieved at this stage of attentional practice but also with an extraordinary vividness that one has hardly…
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you now have the task of recognizing and counteracting a medium degree of laxity. When this degree of laxity sets in, the object of meditation appears, but without much vividness. This is subtly different from coarse laxity, and…
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The way to counteract laxity is to arouse the attention, to take a greater interest in the object of meditation. Tibetan contemplatives liken this to stringing a lute. If the strings are too taut, they may easily break under the strain, but if they are too slack, the instrument is unplayable. Likewise, the task at this point is to determine the proper “pitch” of attention. If you arouse the mind too much in your efforts to…
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Buddhaghosa drew this distinction between mindfulness and introspection: “Mindfulness has the characteristic of remembering. Its function is not to forget. It is manifested as guarding. Introspection has the characteristic of non-confusion. Its function is to investigate. It is manifested as scrutiny.”45 And his contemporary Asanga offers a view that is strikingly similar: “Mindfulness and introspection are taught, for the first prevents the attention from straying from the meditative object, while the second recognizes that the attention is straying.”46 Shantideva’s definition of introspection appears to reflect both these views: “In brief, this alone is the definition of introspection: the repeated examination of the state of one’s body and mind.”47 Throughout Buddhist literature, the training in shamatha is often likened to training a wild elephant, and the two primary instruments for this are the tether of mindfulness and the goad of introspection.
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This phase of the path to shamatha also brings you to a major fork in the road. You may continue in the practice of mindfulness of breathing, which is so strongly recommended for overcoming excitation. Many Buddhist contemplatives have encouraged meditators who are determined to achieve shamatha to continue practicing with just one object. But Padmasambhava, the Indian master instrumental in first bringing Buddhism to Tibet, encouraged the use of multiple methods to counter the tenacious impediments to the achievement of shamatha.49 There are merits to both views. It is very easy to grow bored or dissatisfied with your meditative object in this practice and to then fish around for other more interesting, and hopefully more effective, techniques. You may easily be enticed by highly esoteric, secret practices, thinking that they will be more effective than the one you are engaging in now. Such roving from one meditation object and technique to another, always on the prowl for a greater “bang for your buck,” can undermine any sustained practice of shamatha. Repeatedly experimenting with different techniques can prevent you from achieving expertise in any of them.
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I shall set forth here the option of advancing to another method after you have achieved the fourth stage by mindfulness of breathing. This is the practice of settling the mind in its natural state, a technique that directly prepares you for Mahamudra and Dzogchen practice, two traditions of contemplative practice that are focused on the realization of the nature of consciousness. A comparable practice within the Theravada tradition is called “unfastened mindfulness.”50
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You can begin your shamatha practice with this method and continue with it all the way to the achievement of shamatha. You don’t need to practice mindfulness of breathing first. However, many people find this method difficult, as they are swept away time and again by their thoughts. For them, mindfulness of breathing may be the most effective way to progress along the first four stages on this path.
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While many people practice meditation to achieve “altered states of consciousness,” from a Buddhist perspective, our habitual mindsets, in which we are drawn under the influence of such imbalances as craving, anxiety, stress, and frustration, are already altered states of consciousness. The practice of settling the mind in its natural state is designed to release us from these habitual perturbations of consciousness, letting the mind gradually settle in its ground state. The “natural state” of the mind, according to Buddhist contemplatives, is characterized by the three qualities of bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality. I believe this is one of the most remarkable discoveries ever made concerning the nature of consciousness, and that it calls for collaborative research between cognitive scientists and contemplatives.
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THE PRACTICE: SETTLING THE MIND IN ITS NATURAL STATE Simply hearing your spiritual mentor’s practical instructions and knowing how to explain them to others does not liberate your own mindstream, so you must meditate. Even if you spend your whole life practicing a mere semblance of meditation—meditating in a stupor, cluttering the mind with fantasies, and taking many breaks during your sessions due to being unable to control mental scattering—no good experiences or…
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In solitude sit upright on a comfortable cushion. Gently hold the “vase” breath until the vital energies converge naturally. Let your gaze be vacant. With your body and mind inwardly relaxed, and without allowing the continuum of your consciousness to fade from a state of limpidity and vivid clarity, sustain it naturally and radiantly. Do not clutter your mind with many critical judgments; do not take a shortsighted view of meditation, and avoid great hopes and fears that your meditation will turn out one way and not another. At the beginning have many daily sessions, each of them of brief duration, and focus well in each one. Whenever you meditate, bear in mind the phrase “without distraction and without grasping,” and put this into practice. As you gradually familiarize yourself with the meditation, increase the duration of your sessions. If dullness sets in, arouse your awareness. If there is excessive scattering and excitation, loosen up. Determine in terms of your own experience the optimal degree of mental arousal, as well as the healthiest diet and behavior. Excessive, imprisoning constriction of the mind, loss of clarity due to lassitude, and excessive relaxation resulting in involuntary vocalization and eye-movement are to be avoided. It does only harm to talk a lot about such things as extrasensory perception and miscellaneous dreams or to claim, “I saw a deity. I saw a ghost. I know this. I’ve realized that,” and so on. The presence or absence of any kind of pleasure or displeasure, such as a sensation of motion, is not uniform, for there are great differences in the dispositions and faculties from one individual to another. Due to maintaining the mind in its natural state, there may arise sensations such as physical and mental well-being, a sense of lucid consciousness, the appearance of empty forms, and a non-conceptual sense that nothing can harm the mind, regardless of whether or not thoughts have ceased. Whatever kinds of mental imagery occur—be they gentle or violent, subtle or coarse, of long or short duration, strong or weak, good or bad—observe their nature, and avoid any obsessive evaluation of them as being one thing and not another. Let the heart of your practice be consciousness in its natural state, limpid and vivid. Acting as your own mentor, if you can bring the essential…
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The object of mindfulness in the practice of settling the mind in its natural state is no longer the subtle sensations of the breath at the nostrils, but the space of the mind and whatever events arise within that space. The object of introspection, as in the earlier practice of mindfulness of breathing, is the quality of the attention with which you are observing the mind. At the beginning have many daily sessions, each of them of brief duration, and focus well in each…
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As you venture into this practice, I would encourage you to memorize these quintessential instructions: settle your mind without distraction and without grasping. Practicing “without distraction” means not allowing your mind to be carried away by thoughts and sense impressions. Be present here and now, and when thoughts arise pertaining to the past or future or ruminations about the present, don’t be abducted by them. As you hike on this trail of shamatha, don’t be a hitchhiker, catching a ride with any of the thoughts or images that whiz through your mind. Rather, be like a…
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Here is the challenge at hand: be attentive to everything that comes up in the mind, but don’t grasp onto anything. In this practice, let your mind be like the sky. Whatever moves through it, the sky never reacts. It doesn’t stop anything from moving through it, it doesn’t hold onto anything that’s present, nor does it control anything. The sky doesn’t prefer rainbows to clouds, butterflies to jet…
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When you are settling the mind in its natural state, occasionally falling into distraction or grasping, you experience a semblance of what it is like to fall from the state of pristine awareness (Tibetan: rigpa) into the mind of dualistic grasping. This is not something that occurred long ago in a Buddhist Garden of Eden. It happens each moment that the dualistic mind is activated and we lose sight of our own true nature. Pristine awareness is always present. But it is obscured when we become carried away by the objects that captivate our attention, and to which we respond with craving and aversion. As you gradually familiarize yourself…
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While much can be learned from books about meditation—and this can be enough to get you started—for dedicated, sustained practice there is no substitute for a knowledgeable, experienced teacher.
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It is possible to waste an enormous amount of time in faulty meditative practice, and there is also the possibility of damaging your mind, so it is important to find qualified instructors and to listen closely to their counsel. As the Dalai Lama responded when asked whether it is necessary to have a teacher in order to achieve enlightenment, “No, but it can save you a lot of time!”
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Motionlessly relax your body in whatever way is comfortable, like an unthinking corpse in a charnel ground. Let your voice be silent like a lute with its strings cut. Rest your mind in an unmodified state, like the primordial presence of space…. Remain for a long time in [this way] of resting. This pacifies all illnesses due to disturbances of the elements and unfavorable circumstances, and your body, speech, and mind naturally calm down.
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“Vase breathing” is an energizing and stabilizing breath practice. To practice “gentle vase breathing,” as you inhale, let the sensations of the breath flow down to the bottom of your abdomen, like pouring water into a vase. Then, as you exhale, instead of letting the abdomen retract completely, keep it slightly rounded, with your belly soft. In this way, you maintain a bit of a potbelly, which expands during the in-breath and contracts somewhat during the out-breath, but still retains a fullness. The goal of the vase breath is to converge the vital energies, or pranas, in the central channel in your abdomen and allow them to settle in this region. This is something you can detect from your own direct experience of your body and the movement of energies within it.
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In this practice, it is important that your eyes are open, vacantly resting your gaze in the space in front of you. If you have not meditated with your eyes open, you may find this uncomfortable, but I encourage you to get used to it. Blink as often as you like and don’t strain your eyes in any way. Let them be as relaxed as if you were daydreaming with your eyes open. By leaving the eyes open, while focusing your attention on the domain of mental events, the artificial barrier between “inner” and “outer” begins to dissolve.
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With your body and mind inwardly relaxed, and without allowing the continuum of your consciousness to fade from a state of limpidity and vivid clarity, sustain your awareness naturally and radiantly. On the path of shamatha, while it is crucial to enhance both the stability and vividness of attention, this must not be done at the expense of relaxation.
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He responded, “Between sessions, it is fine to meditate on the value of such practice and to arouse your motivation to engage in it with great diligence. But during your meditation sessions themselves, let go of all such desires. Release your hopes and your fears, and simply devote yourself to the practice, moment by moment.”
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In the practice of mindfulness of breathing, you are faced with the challenge of carefully observing, without controlling, sensations within the body associated with the breathing. Now you face a similar challenge of carefully observing events within the mind without regulating or evaluating them in any way. A Tibetan aphorism states, “Let your mind be a gracious host in the midst of unruly guests.” In the shamatha practice of mindfulness of breathing, you let go of thoughts as soon as you detect them and return your attention to the breath. But now, instead of letting thoughts go, you let them be. Don’t prefer one kind of thought to another. Avoid all kinds of attraction to and repulsion from any mental imagery. Don’t even prefer the absence of thoughts to the presence of thoughts. They are not the problem. Being distracted by and grasping onto thoughts is the problem. Recognize this crucial difference from the preceding practice.
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With mindfulness of breathing, you measured the stability of your attention with respect to a continuous object—sensations of the breath. But when settling the mind in its natural state, thoughts are anything but continuous. They come and go sporadically, so the stability of attention is not in relation to a specific object. It’s a quality of your subjective awareness. Even when thoughts are on the move, because you are not distracted by them and don’t grasp onto them, your awareness remains still. This is called the fusion of stillness and movement.
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During the course of this training, you will experience periods when your mind seems to be empty. Thoughts and mental images seem to have disappeared. This is a time to arouse the vividness of your attention to see if you can detect subtle mental events that have been lurking just beneath the threshold of your awareness. This is one reason for switching to this technique after you have achieved the fourth attentional stage: you are continually challenged to arouse the clarity of attention, but without losing its stability. Watch closely, but continue to breathe normally.
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right. We move now to the Mahayana practice of tonglen, which literally means “giving and taking.” This one method integrates loving-kindness and compassion on a foundation of equanimity, and in so doing, it uplifts the mind that falls into depression and calms the mind that gets caught up in emotional turbulence. Just as mindfulness of a single cycle of respiration—arousing the attention during the in-breath and relaxing during the out-breath—wards off attentional laxity and excitation, so does tonglen counteract emotional imbalances of depression and excitement.
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TONGLEN MEDITATION After settling your body and mind in their natural states, symbolically imagine your own pristine awareness—transcending all distortions and afflictions of the mind—as an orb of radiant white light, about a half inch in diameter, in the center of your chest. Visualize this orb as a fathomless source of loving-kindness and compassion, as a light of unlimited goodness and joy. This is the healing power of awareness. Now bring to mind the difficulties in your life, the kinds of suffering you bear, together with the inner causes of such distress. Imagine these as a dark cloud that obscures your deepest nature and obstructs your pursuit of genuine happiness. With the compassionate yearning, “May I be free of suffering and its causes,” with each in-breath, imagine drawing this darkness into the light at your heart, where it is extinguished without trace. With each breath, imagine this darkness being dispelled, and experience the relief of this burden being lightened. Now bring to mind your vision of your own flourishing as a human being. Imagine the blessings you would love to receive from the world, and imagine the ways in which you would love to become transformed so that you may experience the fulfillment you seek. Then with the aspiration, “May I find happiness and its causes,” with each out-breath, visualize light flowing from the inexhaustible source at your heart, permeating every cell of your body and every facet of your mind. Imagine this light permeating your whole being, fulfilling your heart’s longing with each exhalation. Next, invite into the field of your awareness someone you dearly love. Apply the previous practice to this person, compassionately drawing in the darkness of his suffering and its causes with each in-breath, and lovingly sending forth the light of happiness and its causes with each out-breath. As you do so, imagine this person being freed from suffering and discovering the genuine happiness that he seeks. After dissolving the appearance of your loved one back into the space of your awareness, invoke the memory of someone toward whom you feel relatively indifferent, and practice in the same way with the recognition that this person’s suffering and well-being are just as real and important as those of yourself and your loved ones. In the next phase of this practice, follow the same steps either with a person who has harmed you or those you love, or with someone whom you dislike, perhaps because of her deplorable behavior. With each in-breath, make a special point of drawing in the darkness of the causes of this person’s suffering—such as greed, hostility, and delusion—which may also indirectly harm many other people as well. With each inhalation, imagine this person becoming freed from these harmful tendencies, and with each exhalation, imagine her finding genuine happiness, while cultivating its true causes. Before you bring this meditation to a close, you may open your awareness in all directions,…
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You must still be on guard against the occurrence of medium laxity, in which you are aware of the object of mindfulness, but it is not very vivid. In addition, you are now prone to and need to be able to detect subtle excitation, in which the meditative object remains at the center of attention, but involuntary thoughts emerge at the periphery. Returning to our earlier metaphor of listening to the radio, this is like being tuned to the desired station but faintly hearing another station, or simply static, at the same time. The quality of attention you are seeking here is like a clear channel, unsullied with extraneous noise.
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Throughout the development of shamatha, even at this relatively advanced stage, a myriad of emotions and other mental and physical conditions may arise, many of them very unexpectedly. This practice of settling the mind in its natural state is especially known for unveiling the suppressed and repressed contents of the mind, and these vary widely from one individual to the next. There is no way to predict beforehand what kinds of experiences you may have.
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One of the more common challenges in this practice is the emergence of fear. As you release your grip on the contents of the mind, you are undermining your normal sense of personal identity, which is constantly reinforced by thinking, by recalling and identifying with your personal history, hopes, and plans. Now you are disengaging from these familiar supports for substantiating your ego. As lapses between thoughts occur more and more frequently and for longer periods, your awareness hovers in a kind of empty space, a vacuum devoid of personhood. You may come into the grip of fear as your normal sense of who you are loses its footing. The teacher Gen Lamrimpa warned his students that such dread may well arise during their training. It is crucial, he counseled, not to identify with it, nor to give it any credence. Some kinds of fear are based in reality. They protect us from danger, filling the body with energy so that we can flee or protect ourselves in whatever way necessary. But this kind of dread, with no clear object, has no such basis in reality. There is no danger in the empty, luminous space of awareness. You have nothing to lose but your false sense of an independent, controlling ego. The only thing being threatened is an illusion. If you don’t identify with it, there’s nothing to fear. If you do identify with this fear, it may bring your entire practice to a grinding halt and throw you into deep emotional imbalances. So it is of the utmost importance to observe such fear without distraction and without grasping.
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Another emotional imbalance that may crop up at any time throughout this training is depression, which may be related to a deep-rooted sense of guilt and low self-esteem. When any of these emotions or attitudes arise during meditation sessions, treat them like any other mental event: watch their emergence, see how they linger, then observe them disappear back into the space of the mind. Examine them with discerning intelligence, but without any emotional charge. Rather than identifying with them, or owning them, let them emerge from the space of awareness and dissolve back, without any intervention on your part—even without any preference for…
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THE PRACTICE: SETTLING THE MIND IN ITS NATURAL STATE—PLUMBING THE DEPTHS When you first begin the practice of settling the mind in its natural state, you may have difficulty identifying the intangible domain of the mind. Or even if you do settle your awareness there, after some time your attention may become vague, disoriented, or spaced out. If you have difficulty identifying the domain of the mind or sustaining attention there, consciously bring up a thought such as, “What is the mind?” and attend to it. Don’t think about this question or try to answer it. Just observe the thought itself, watching it emerge in the field of consciousness and then dissolve back into that space. Once it’s gone, keep your focus right where the thought was and see what comes up next. If you slip back into a kind of lax, mindless vacuity, deliberately generate the thought again, and observe it with bare attention. When you become familiar with this practice, you will no longer need to generate such a thought to crystallize your awareness and locate your attention. That will happen by itself as thoughts arise and pass of their own accord. The practice of attending to the space of the mind and whatever events arise there is like taking a naturalist’s field trip into the wilderness of your mind. When you first embark on this inward journey, you may perceive very little. But as you grow more accustomed to the practice, you will begin to identify an increasing quantity and range of mental phenomena. Some of them are discrete, like thoughts and images, while others are nebulous, like emotions and…
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In this practice, the locus of awareness gradually descends from the superficial level of the coarse mental activity that is immediately accessible through introspection down into the inner recesses of the mind that are normally below the threshold of consciousness. You discover in this training that the border between conscious and unconscious mental events shifts in relation to the degrees of relaxation, stability, and vividness of attention. Especially when you engage in this practice for many hours each day, for days, weeks, or months at a time, you dredge the depths…
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What happens here is a kind of luminously clear, discerning, free association of thoughts, mental images, memories, desires, fantasies, and emotions. You are plumbing the depths of your own mind, undistracted by external diversions. Once-hidden phenomena are unmasked through the lack of suppression of whatever comes up. This is potentially an extraordinarily deep kind of therapy, and the more intensively you practice it, the more important it is to proceed under the guidance of an experienced, compassionate teacher. During your meditation sessions, internalize the wisdom of this contemplative tradition and make sure that you implement the core instructions of this practice: whatever arises in the mind, do not be carried away by it, and do not grasp onto or identify with it. Just let it be. Watch thoughts, feelings, or other mental events arise, with discerning intelligence be aware of their nature, and let them slip back into the…
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It is crucial to understand that demons can appear to your mind as a result of correct practice, let alone misguided practice. If you are Tibetan, the demons you encounter may have multiple heads and arms. If you are a Westerner, your demons may arise in forms more widely accepted within our society. As you dredge the depths of your psyche, your own demons will emerge into the light of your consciousness. You can count on it. Düdjom Lingpa’s explanation of demons is that they are externalized projections of afflictive tendencies of the mind, such as hatred, greed, confusion, pride, and jealousy.
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Here is a list of just some of the kinds of meditative experiences cited in this text that may arise during this training, especially when it is pursued in solitude for many hours each day, for months on end:57
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In the Buddhist tradition, the primary purpose of developing shamatha is to apply the enhanced stability and vividness of attention to experiential inquiry into the nature of reality. The term buddha literally means “one who is awake,” and the implication here is that the rest of us are comparatively asleep, moving through life as if in a dream. When you’re dreaming and don’t know it, that’s called a nonlucid dream, but when you recognize that you’re dreaming in the midst of the dream, this is called a lucid dream. The overall aim of Buddhist insight practice is to “wake up” to all states of consciousness, both during the daytime and nighttime, to become lucid at all times.
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Many of us believe that we directly perceive objective, physical phenomena with our five physical senses, that the mental images we perceive via our senses are accurate representations of the objects we perceive. However, neurologist Antonio Damasio refutes this assumption, which is commonly called naïve realism:62 The problem with the term representation is not its ambiguity, since everyone can guess what it means, but the implication that, somehow, the mental image or the neural pattern represents, in mind and in brain, with some degree of fidelity, the object to which the representation refers, as if the structure of the object were replicated in the representation.… When you and I look at an object outside ourselves, we form comparable images in our respective brains. We know this well because you and I can describe the object in very similar ways, down to fine details. But that does not mean that the image we see is the copy of whatever the object outside is like. Whatever it is like, in absolute terms, we do not know.
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This same point was made by the physicist Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”63
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Like a dream, the world of waking experience does not exist independently of our experience of it. The daytime practices in preparation for lucid nighttime dreaming may help begin to wake you up to the nature of your experienced world. The most effective method of learning to achieve lucidity is to develop a “critical-reflective attitude” toward your state of consciousness by asking yourself whether or not you are dreaming while you are awake.
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“WAKING UP” THROUGHOUT THE DAY The lucid dreaming daytime practices consist of (1) doing “state checks,” (2) checking for dreamsigns, and (3) anticipating dreaming lucidly at night.
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So try this right now. Turn your head away for a few seconds, then look at this page again. If the words change (and of course you would need to remember what they were previously to know that), then you are almost certainly dreaming. If they remain the same, you are probably awake. If you do this a second and even a third time, and the words still remain the same, then you can conclude with greater and greater certainty that you are not dreaming. But if they change even once, then you are probably correct to conclude that you are dreaming. This exercise may seem silly since you presumably were already quite confident that you weren’t dreaming. But we commonly have that same confidence when we are dreaming. We take what we experience in the world around us to be objectively real, existing independently of our awareness of it, and we respond to events as if we were awake. By conducting state checks intermittently throughout the course of the day, you can determine whether you are awake or asleep. And as you familiarize yourself with this practice, this habit may carry over into your dream state, and when you apply it then, you will suddenly discover that you are dreaming. This is how you begin to dream lucidly.
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In the practice of shamatha you develop present memory, as in the case of remembering to focus your attention on your chosen object in the ongoing flow of the present moment. You also recall prospectively how to recognize attentional imbalances and remedy them when either laxity or excitation arises. In a similar way, the daytime practice of lucid dreaming includes prospectively remembering to conduct state checks throughout the day. Also, if you at any time experience an exceptionally odd situation, pause and ask yourself, “How odd is it?” While dreaming, we experience many anomalies, such as abrupt transitions of our location and other kinds of discontinuities, such as the words in a book changing, or other weird occurrences and circumstances. But without adopting a “critical-reflective attitude” toward them, we take them in stride, without waking up to the fact that we are dreaming. Adopt such a critical stance at all times, questioning the nature of your present experience; this habit, too, may carry over into the dream state and help you to become lucid.
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Dreamsigns Dreamsigns are out-of-the-ordinary events that often occur in dreams and that, when you notice them, may indicate to you that you are dreaming. In this practice, you monitor your experience for the…
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Individual dreamsigns consist of activities, situations, people, objects, and mental states that you commonly experience in your dreams. In order to identify and watch for these dreamsigns, you will need to pay close attention to your dreams and keep a dream journal, noting the circumstances that are recurrent. Remember these and whenever you experience them, pause for a moment and conduct a state check to see if you might be dreaming. Strong dreamsigns consist of events that, as far as you know, can happen only in a dream. For example, if you are reading a book and it turns into a squid, that’s a strong dreamsign, and if you recognize it as such, you’ve become lucid. Many other “supernatural events” commonly occur in dreams, but if you fail to apply a critical-reflective attitude to these strong dreamsigns, you will continue to take everything you experience as being objectively real. Weak dreamsigns are events that are highly improbable but not completely impossible as far as you know. Seeing an elephant sauntering across your front lawn is one example of a weak dreamsign unless you live in the jungles of Sri Lanka or on a game reservation in Kenya. When you experience anything that’s a bit out of the ordinary, conduct a…
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Anticipation Throughout the course of the day, recall that tonight you will sleep and dream, and repeatedly arouse the strong resolution, “Tonight when I’m dreaming, I will recognize the dream state for what it is.” The stability and vividness of attention that you have cultivated in your shamatha practice, together with the exercise of prospective memory,…
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Once you have met the challenges of the first six stages of attentional development, you ascend to the seventh, which is called fully pacified attention. Asanga succinctly characterizes this stage of development with the statement, “Attachment, melancholy, and so on are pacified as they arise.”64 Such experiences may continue to occur from time to time, but they have lost their power to disturb the equilibrium of your mind. Involuntary thoughts continue to course through the mind like a river slowly flowing through a valley, but as your mind settles more and more deeply in its natural state,…
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The power by which the seventh stage is achieved is enthusiasm: the practice itself now fills you with joy. It is this that motivates you to continue in the practice,…
Location 1849:
Having overcome the medium degree of laxity, subtle laxity remains, in which the object of mindfulness appears vividly, but your attention is slightly slack. No one but a highly advanced meditator is even capable of recognizing such a subtle degree of laxity. It is detected only in relation to the exceptionally high degree of vividness of which the trained mind is capable. Subtle excitation also occurs from time to time. As recommended previously, when laxity sets in, you arouse your attention; and when excitation occurs, you loosen up slightly. At the seventh stage, these subtle attentional imbalances are swiftly recognized due to your finely honed faculty of introspection, and they are easily remedied. The Tibetan word gom, usually translated as “meditation,” has the connotation of familiarity, and that is the…
Location 1856:
Upon reaching the seventh stage of fully pacified attention, the mind has been so refined that your meditation sessions may last for at least two hours with only the slightest interruptions by laxity and excitation. In each of the two shamatha methods introduced thus far—mindfulness of breathing and settling the mind in its natural state—the practices gradually involve doing less and less. When mindfully attending to the breath, there is a great deal you are not doing, but you are still releasing involuntary thoughts when they arise. You do prefer to have a conceptually silent mind, as opposed to having discursive thoughts and images arise one after the other. When settling the mind in its natural state, you are doing even less. Now you don’t even prefer thoughts to be absent. Instead of deliberately letting them…