A mindful presence develops so that we know what the body actually feels like, how the sensations truly are, how thoughts and feelings really are. Through training in this way, we become more and more mindful.
The fourth application is sometimes called the application of mindfulness of samadhi. This means that the awareness of everything else needs to be allowed to remain as it naturally is. It settles into itself. It is aware, undistracted. While being allowed to be that way, it notices the body, the sensations, and the mental activity. All of that is being hosted by the mindfulness of samadhi. We can call this mental stability. There is complete harmony between all the different events here, between body, sensations, and mental events. We are simply letting everything be, and as this awareness becomes increasingly settled, subtle, and refined, it can grow further. That is the point. If all goes well, then it can be rigpa—the possibility is there. For that to happen, however, the attachment or clinging to meditation must be relinquished. This is called “undistracted while not meditating.”
STUDENT: How do we not get carried away?
RINPOCHE: The main problem in most cases is not the lack of theory about how to do things, either on the material level or the mental level. Rather, it is that one forgets how to deal with a particular problem the moment it arises. Our sense of being mindful and alert is forgotten; it gets lost. Due to habit, we lose it; we somehow lose control. We are no longer in charge of the emotions in which we are involved, and at that point the real problem begins.
Centuries ago, many human problems had causes consisting in a lack of expertise—curing diseases, for example. There was not much education in human society, and not many proper laws. Also, there was not much understanding of human psychology. The situation now is different, of course. Our current problems are due to a scarcity of the ability to not be carried away by our own tendencies. It is almost involuntary. We almost seem to be enslaved by the habit of being carried away.
Actually, I think we have more problems than people did six hundred years ago, although our problems are not due to a lack of education. We are very well educated—you could say we are almost too well educated. We have the wrong way of being educated. It is an incomplete education, because there is no inner education.
This problem happens a lot. Circumstances arise, and somehow the intelligence seems to get switched off and one loses control of oneself. It is like being a smoker. You know smoking is no good for your health, but, being addicted, you just cannot give it up. If you didn’t know that smoking was bad for health, then it would be a different matter, but that is not the case. Nowadays you’re educated about the hazards of smoking—that all the black stuff goes into your lungs, that your teeth get yellow and your fingertips discolored, that you have bad breath all the time. When you try to kiss your girlfriend or boyfriend, they are disgusted. And if you don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend, it makes it more difficult to get one. You know all this, and still you continue smoking many cigarettes.
It is precisely this addicted attitude that we deal with through meditation practice. Meditation practice is simply about how to release habitual attitudes; it’s not about anything else. And this is done through shamatha and vipashyana. Really, there is no other way to address this problem than by learning how to naturally release or liberate the addicted conceptual attitude.
Shamatha without support is a superb way to exactly identify my particular addiction. “What is it that carries my attention away repeatedly? When a certain thought or emotion comes, I am sucked into it right away. Now I notice, I see exactly what is going on.” That is the function or the effect of training in shamatha without support. And it is the vipashyana, free of concepts, that actually cures it, like taking the medicine that heals that problem. If you don’t know your particular health problem, it doesn’t help to take just any kind of medicine. Once you diagnose the disease, you can obtain the exact cure and be free of it.
If the problem is a mental addiction, then no material substance can really cure it. Likewise, nobody’s help from outside can “do it for you.” Rather, this addicted mental attitude needs to cure itself through knowing how. Certain physical substances can cure a material problem like a physical disorder. This is because material substance can influence material substance. But that which is immaterial or insubstantial—which mind surely is—cannot really be influenced by material substance. The mind needs to cure itself. This is a very important point. Through the practice of shamatha without support, we become aware of exactly what our problem is.
Imagine that a wild elephant is to be tamed by an elephant tamer, but the elephant tamer is also a little wild and also needs to be tamed. In fact, you need to be a little wild to even want to deal with a wild elephant, or you may get stepped on and squashed. But what happens if this wild, slightly too energetic elephant tamer gets into your home and starts to move things around? Maybe he’ll smash things; maybe he will rob you or beat you up. He needs some taming as well. Shamatha is the method of taming the conceptual mind; it is the elephant tamer. But who will tame the elephant tamer?
That method is called vipashyana, egoless vipashyana. Within the method of egoless vipashyana you find Mahamudra, you find Dzogchen, and you find the great Middle Way.
The wild elephant is our rampant emotions, our tendency to get attached, get angry, get closed-minded. The elephant tamer is our ability to be mindful and alert, to tell ourselves, “I’m not going to get involved in these strong emotions. I’m going to be quiet and calm; I will stay collected; I’m going to be mindful; I’m going to be alert. Now I’m quiet; now I’m peaceful; now I’m at ease.” That is the tamer.
But this tamer himself also needs to tamed. What can do that? The elephant tamer continues thinking in a dualistic way: “I must remain mindful; I shouldn’t be distracted. Who knows, maybe the elephant will get wild again. I’d better watch out. I must be mindful, I must be alert,” and so on. If this attentiveness of the elephant tamer is not allowed to be naturally liberated, dissolved, then one is still stuck in that dualistic way. The watcher has not dissolved. He is still watching.
The previous chapter was a prelude, a warm-up. Here I will teach about shamatha, or calm abiding, in detail. First, I want to address the issue of conceptual mind—the state of mind in which experience is divided into or held as having two parts, subject and object. This holding of duality is what fuels the whole play, the whole drama. (Conceptual mind in Tibetan is called lo; dualistic thinking mind is sem.)
The view held during shamatha practice is a conceptual view. There are a few types of shamatha. One I call “stupidity training,” a training in being dull and absentminded. It is actually not a formal meditation practice, but people do use it, so it needs to be mentioned. As a matter of fact, many people mistake their stupidity training for real shamatha. The genuine training is traditionally described as being of two types: one is supported shamatha with object, while the other is unsupported shamatha without object.
The idea of meditation started to become popular in the West in the sixties. People began to associate a certain mental state with that word. Sometimes it is used to refer to a kind of shutting off, a process of remaining uninvolved and going into your own space, an altered state where you don’t notice anything happening in the outside world. To practice in this way means to distance yourself from experiencing through the senses. You go into a state of oblivion, absentminded and totally dim, just like animals do in hibernation. This process of shutting off from anything and trying to stay like that was sometimes called deep relaxation and even meditation. Many people still do this. One can slip into this when training in shamatha, and many people are in fact fond of it. They like it because it’s peaceful,
