The clarity of mind meditation is part of Sutra Mahamudra. And Mahamudra is the heart essence of the Kadampa tradition of Buddhism.
A Kadampa Buddhist is someone who:
takes all of Buddha’s teachings as personal advice and puts them into practice in their daily lives.
Buddha gave 84,000 teachings, so how do we pull that off?! By practicing Lamrim, a cycle of 21 meditations (or 14 meditations in How to Understand the Mind) that covers all the stages of the path to enlightenment. Pretty much all the meditations we will ever learn in Buddhism fit somewhere in the Lamrim cycle!
Also, as Geshe Kelsang explains in Great Treasury of Merit (page 18), Lamrim and Lojong (lit. “training the mind”, a powerful method for developing bodhichitta extracted from Lamrim and given particular emphasis) are both preliminaries for Mahamudra.
Mahamudra, a Sanskrit word, means “great seal”. In Sutra it refers to emptiness, and in Tantra to the union of great bliss and emptiness:
Mahamudra Tantra is defined as a mind of fully qualified clear light that experiences great bliss and realizes emptiness directly. ~ Mahamudra Tantra page 55
All Kadampa Buddhist meditations are explicitly or implicitly aiming at this realization of bliss and emptiness, which, when perfected, becomes omniscient wisdom, enlightened reality. With practice, we can use deeper and deeper levels of awareness to meditate, and the deepest is our very subtle mind which, when manifest, is called clear light. This mind is naturally blissful. Inconceivably blissful. Ridiculously blissful. Think of the most blissful thing you can imagine and then multiply that by infinity. More blissful than that.
Buddha seed
As Buddha said:
If you realize your own mind you will become a Buddha; you should not seek Buddhahood elsewhere. ~ Mahamudra Tantra page 100
If we recognize and realize our own root mind or very subtle mind directly, we will definitely become a Buddha in this life!
There are many reasons for this – one perhaps being that we are not identifying with this potential but instead with a severely circumscribed sense of self. So it’s no wonder we don’t make that great of an effort, meaning we don’t get a taste, meaning we don’t develop an appetite. This meditation on the clarity of the mind luckily can also help with that! (More in a later article.)
Get control
The only hurdle right now is that we cannot access our very subtle mind, it is too deep. It manifests naturally in deep sleep and as we die, and it is even blissful when it does; but we can’t recognize or use it because, let’s face it, we can barely use our grossest levels of mind, our everyday waking consciousness. We find it hard to stay out of trouble even for one day! Because we lack mindfulness and concentration our mind controls us at the moment, not the other way around.
Still, through Buddhism in general we learn to control our gross levels of mind, our more obvious delusions; and through Tantra we learn to manifest our own very subtle mind and use that. Once we can meditate with our clear light mind, we are almost there. We are almost enlightened.
You can read about all of this properly in Mahamudra Tantra, an enlightening book in the real sense of the word.
Also, you can try out this meditation for letting a subtler or deeper level of mind emerge: Absorption of cessation of gross conceptual thoughts.
Sutra Mahamudra
Within Sutra Mahamudra, the meditation on the nature of the mind is the access point to meditation on emptiness. We take it as our object of concentration and mindfulness. It leads us both into emptiness, and one day into the great bliss of our own clear light mind.
Even if you are a beginner, this is where this meditation is headed. Geshe Kelsang said in 2000:
Whenever we train in using our root mind as our object of meditation, it causes our realization of the very subtle mind to ripen. In reality, this is like the preparation for the Highest Yoga Tantra practice of clear light. It is very special.
It’s good to know what Buddha’s mind is and what our mind is capable of. One day, every single one of us will attain enlightenment because everyone has the potential and sooner or later everyone will learn how to do it – and this is how.
I sometimes think that if we are going to get enlightened anyway one day, why not go for it now? Haven’t we been hanging out in samsara way, way, way too long already? What are we waiting for, exactly?
I think that is enough background for now.
Pacifying distractions
These benefits are very precise, describing what we will experience if we meditate on the nature of mind, the first being that it pacifies distractions. And that is even for us modern people who, let’s face it, are a little distracted. I will say just a little more about that in this admittedly long article before you all get distracted.
I sometimes think of distractions as all those thoughts we don’t want to think but can’t help thinking, like thoughts of sadness, or annoyance, or feeling our life is meaningless, or dissatisfaction, or longing, or fear of failure, or … you know the kind of thing. They distract us away from our natural peace of mind – yet we have no choice but to think them because our mind is so out of control. One of the things we learn in meditation is to let the delusions settle or temporarily disappear so that we can then more lastingly transform our mind. Different ways are taught to settle the mind, the most common being some kind of mindfulness of breathing. However, clarity of mind meditation is even more effective. It can take us all the way to enlightenment, but already at a basic beginners’ level it enables us to more easily let go of our distractions.
Have you ever felt that your meditation involves a struggle with your distractions? “I fought the distractions and the distractions won” kind of thing? This meditation helps us adjust our whole relationship with distractions. It no longer need be one of combat. We no longer need to feel besieged or overwhelmed. We no longer have to push our distractions away.
A distraction is defined as:
A deluded mental factor that wanders to any object of delusion.
To know how this meditation works to overcome distractions, we can look more at the object of meditation and how to approach it in a skillful way to reap this benefit. Next installment is here. Your comments are welcome.
Postscript: about the illustrations in this article, an excuse for me to share my pictures of the Denver sky, thanks. We don’t need to fear our delusions and distractions – they are like clouds that cannot pollute, much less destroy, the clear sky of our root mind. We can learn to dissolve away our delusions by always identifying with our clear sky mind.
10 Comments
I love your expression …”Let’s face it”
It means, snap out of it! Facing eternity is the last thing any of us wants to do. Why?
In the year 2000 I was hit by a car and left on the side of the road. In the hospital, while strapped to a board, I contemplated my life as a paraplegic. For seven hours I developed a keen, if not overwhelming, appreciation for my ability to walk. The emergency room was filled with people experiencing personal horrors. It was Christmas and I could sense the fatigue of the nurses and orderlies. Were they appreciating their ability to walk? To go from here to there? Where they in awe? I was overcome with an acute sense of awe. Why? Because up to that point I had not faced such an eventuality. I had not made that great of an effort to contemplate my good fortune, meaning I didn’t have a taste, meaning I had not developed an appetite.
Fortunately, I walked out of the emergency room, banged up and bruised but with a little more clarity of mind. I had a taste, Would I savor it or spit it out?
“Were they in awe” …?! Great comment, thank you for sharing this.
Would you please give us the Clarity of Mind meditation? Thank you!
Hi there, you can find it in the new book The Oral Instructions of Mahamudra. If you haven’t got that book yet, i can’t recommend it highly enough.
I intend to explain more about the meditation object in the next article.
I also outline the meditation in the previous article, and sometime ago i wrote another way of doing it here: http://kadampalife.org/2011/08/07/how-to-meditate-on-the-peaceful-clarity-of-your-own-mind/
Timely article with Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s new book, The Oral Instructions of Mahamudra. One expression in your article, for me, was very powerful: ‘a severely circumscribed sense of self’, (possibly because I wax poetic a lot lately 🙂 Powerful Poetry and Powerful Dharma!
You do indeed 🙂
Just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your extraordinarily inspiring, clear and insightful posts!
Thank you very much for transmiting the blessings of our most beloved Guru.
Love,
Francisco R.
Thank you very much for saying so.
My favorite benefit of this meditation is that it resolves complications that arise when mixing our mind with the Gurus’ mind, and deepens our experience of this profound Union. When the Guru descends to our heart, we may still have an ongoing dialogue, and though we tell ourselves our minds have mixed, we still experience a gap feeling two distinct things – Gurus mind, my mind. Or, we may simply be focussed on the pleasant feelings. That is not enough. If we realize that the conventional nature of our mind is the same as the Gurus’ conventional nature, then we simply need to rest all conceptual dialogue in the tranquil experience of this nature. With repeated association, we automatically know it’s nature, function, and that it is the union of our mind and the Guru – we don’t keep telling ourselves this, we just rest in the non-conceptual experience itself. As we can see from The Oral Instructions of Mahamudra and the six stages in Mahamudra Tantra, this meditation is a special quick path to great bliss. I believe that is because from the very start of this training, we mixed our mind with the Guru, and the deeper understanding that our natures are already the same makes blessed in a special way. Lucky girls and boys indeed!
Nice 🙂