The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training

Meditative quiescence

Faith brings one type of stability. The second type of stabil-ity is meditative quiescence, which is the primary meaning of "stability" in the aphorism: "Once you have achieved stability, reveal the mystery." Once the mind is stabilized and finely tuned, the mysterious nature of phenomena, both the objective world and the mind, can be investigated and revealed.17 It is remarkable that training the attention, a prerequisite for spiritual maturation in Buddhism, is virtually neglected in the modern West. The West has very noble religious, sci-entific, and philosophical traditions, but one element that has been extraordinarily absent for at least a thousand years is a well-developed, systematic means of training the attention.

If the instrument used in probing reality is mechanical, a telescope for example, it needs to be in excellent working condition. Similarly, if the mind itself is to be the tool for probing reality, the mind should be in excellent working order. This is what is meant by "stability." Buddhists con-sider the mind to be in good working order when the mind is balanced and attention is refined.

Techniques for developing the mind's stability have been created and tested in the Buddhist tradition for 2500 years. These techniques address the basic problem of our minds, lack of balance. The Sanskrit word klesha, meaning "men-tal affliction," has the connotation of the mind being twisted or distorted. What the Buddhist tradition is telling us, in plain English, is that our minds are normally screwed up! And it's because our minds are screwed up that we experi-ence so much distress in our day-to-day lives. We get wound up about things we are attached to, things we want and are not getting, and things we fear losing. We get twisted about things we don't like, events we didn't want to happen, and about not getting things we do want. The tendency of the mind to become unbalanced and warped is due to such mental afflictions as attachment, anger, and delusion.

The marvelous scientific technology developed in the West over the last four hundred years doesn't help much in exploring the mind directly, in discovering the inner causes of well-being and suffering, or discovering the es-sential nature of consciousness itself. The only instrument available for probing the nature of consciousness directly is the mind itself. But as we quickly discover from experi-ence in meditation, our minds are distractible, they get fuzzy, and they fade out. The Second Point of the Mind-Training tells us to refine the mind into a reliable tool by train-ing in stability and vividness, then use the mind to reveal the mystery—the ultimate nature of objective phenomena and mind itself. Training the attention has two aspects, mindf ulness and introspection. Mindfulness is the ability to attend to a chosen object with continuity and without distraction. Mindful-ness is different from concentration. Concentration entails condensing the attention to a narrow focus. Mindfulness is a state of stable attention that may be wide open and spacious or tightly focused, as one desires.

Introspection, sometimes called meta-cognition, observes what is happening in the mind, it discerns the quality of the attention. When you are angry, the faculty of introspec-tion observes the anger. When practicing meditative quiescence, if distraction or excitation arises, or the mind starts to fade into laxity, introspection observes these changes. Introspection is the ability to observe the state of one's mind from moment to moment. How is the mind operating? Is it like a car with smoke billowing out from under the hood, or is it cruising smoothly? Do virtues such as compassion and generosity arise easily or do they require a lot of effort? In cultivating sustained attention, if you haven't developed your ability for introspection, then you are not going to notice when you are meditating poorly, and this means you will develop habits of lousy medita-tion. Habits, good and bad, are hard to break. It is possible to develop a sloppy, lethargic meditation practice with the mind running amuck. To recognize this, and be in a position to remedy it, introspection is crucial. Compulsive ideation is the mind frothing at the mouth. Stating out loud whatever comes to mind without any so-cial filter could lead to a visit to a mental hospital. But if you can keep the same compulsive thoughts to yourself, this is considered normal. Introspection is the key for harnessing the mind so it can be useful, rather than com-pulsively spewing random imagery, memories, and ideas. When with introspection you note that the mind is rambling, just draw it back, again and again. If you attend to what is happening in your mind when it is happening, you won't get carried away on the many express trains of imagery and conversation that pass through. The technique is to remain still while your mind is in action. This is very dif-ferent from the mind burbling on and you burbling along with it. If you notice your meditation fading, from laxity to lethargy to sluggishness to drowsiness, then arouse yourself, even take a break to go out and splash cold water in your face.

Introspection, discerning how the mind is functioning from moment to moment, is crucial in meditation. It is also very important for mental health. In the Tibetan Buddhist approach, the relationship between spiritual awakening and mental health is seamless. Sound mental health is a require-ment for spiritual awakening. If you are not in good mental health, even though you may think you are taking a fast track to enlightenment by practicing very diligently, you can wind up exacerbating your own mental problems. The importance of introspection is also recognized in the West. A friend of mine named David Galin, a psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist, comments: "It is more dam-aging for a person's integration to be out of touch with the dimensions of personal reality through loss of self-moni-toring than to be out of touch with the externals through sensory loss or paralysis."18 Dr. Galin is saying that a deficit in introspection is worse than any sensory impairment. Sen-sory impairment does not preclude being an integrated, men-tally healthy individual, but a deficiency of self-monitoring, or introspection, does. Astonishingly, many modern philosophers of mind claim that meta-cognition, the mind's ability to self-monitor, is impossible, it can't be done at all. However, people in the health professions recognize that not only is meta-cogni-tion possible, it is absolutely essential for mental health. When the answer to the question, Is the mind healthy and balanced? is no, it is best to pause. Developing the skill of introspection, increasing the ability to check up on one's state of mind, is a specific goal of meditative stabilization.

William James, one of my intellectual heroes, wrote about the importance of attentional stability in education: The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will ... An education which would improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical direction for bringing it about.19 James explored the relationship between sustained, vol-untary attention, and ethics, mental health, and genius. He wondered if there was a way to improve attention and eventually concluded that he just didn't know. However, simply raising the idea of training the attention made William James exceptional for late nineteenth-century Boston. Had William James lived in Tibet, he would have encountered techniques for training attention everywhere. The Seven-Point Mind-Training, in agreement with con-templative traditions around the world, tells us that the attention can be trained to exceptional degrees and with remarkable results. The Second Point of the Mind-Training implies that not only can attention be stabilized, but that the potential of the human mind is so great that it can be used as an instrument for investigating the ultimate nature of reality.

More than a century ago, James reported on research indi cating that it is possible to focus the attention continuously on an unchanging object for only two to three seconds,20 and this continues to be the position of cognitive scientists today. Without further investigation of basic assumptions, one could get the impression that two to three seconds is the hard-wired upper limit of the brain's capacity for attention. ,.L Since our experiential reality is heavily conditioned by what we attend to, as James pointed out, if we had some control over attention, we would implicitly have some con-trol over our experienced reality. The skill of directing and sustaining attention is more than a marvelous ability; it is the cornerstone of understanding and choosing the reality we wish to experience. The focus of the Second Point of the Mind-Training, once again, is training in stability in order to "reveal the mystery" of the ultimate nature of reality, our own and that of other phenomena. Buddhism offers many methods of training attentional stability that can be categorized into two basic approaches: control and release. The control approach entails being able to focus and sustain attention on a chosen object at will. The goal of the control model is to become master of one's mind. A Tibetan metaphor for the untrained mind is an el-ephant in rut, rampaging through experience, driven by its own afflictions and causing havoc. In the control model, the out-of-control elephant of the mind is gradually brought to heel. The criterion for success in the control model of training the attention is straightforward. To assess stability of attention, observe whether the chosen object is held in the attention or not. To assess vividness of attention, observe whether the object is clear or not.

The second approach to meditative stabilization is the release model. Let's take the analogy of a polluted river. The previous model of control is like taking active steps to purify the water in the river by filtration and so on. On the other hand, it is known that even if a river is dead due to excessive, prolonged pollution, if one just stops pouring in more pollutants, the purifying elements in the river itself will begin to reassert themselves. Over time, by releasing the river from continued pollution, it purifies itself. The release model when applied to the mind-stream is similar. Instead of applying specific antidotes to all the toxins in the mind, one simply tries to stop polluting one's mind-stream with grasping onto afflictive thoughts and emotions. This can be done quite simply by maintaining one's aware-ness without distraction and without mental grasping. In this way, even when mental toxins arise, the mind does not cling to them, and they are swept away effortlessly. In the release model, there is no object upon which to focus the attention. Meditative stability in the release model utilizes awareness itself without reference to any specific object. The release model is a "field stability," maintaining aware-ness in the field of the mind without latching onto any object. The technical term for the release model is "settling the mind in its natural state." The control approach to meditative stabilization is most familiar to Westerners and is most easily understood since science is largely based on a control model. The scientific revolution in the West was motivated in part by a religious belief that the mind of God was inscribed in the laws of nature. Deciphering nature's laws was a way to understand the mind of God. But there was another motivation fueling the scientific revolution—the desire to control nature. In some respects, desire for control over nature is positive. When it rains, we like to have a roof that doesn't leak; when it is cold, we like to keep warm; we like being able to pre-vent and control disease. Where the control model has failed in science is in its lack of balance. We have learned a great deal about the external world, learned to control it to an impressive extent, yet this ability is not balanced by a cor-responding knowledge and ability to control our own minds. Without the counter-balance of control over our own minds, our tremendous technological power will remain on a trajectory toward disaster.

In Buddhism, the control model is applied first to one's own mind with a motivation to help others. A secondary concern is controlling the external world. There are many control model types of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism and here I will now lead you through one practice that is ide-ally suited to balancing the endemic malady of the Western mind—compulsive ideation. This training in breath aware-ness can be practiced for an entire meditation session as is often done in the Zen and Theravada Buddhist traditions. Or, as in the Tibetan tradition, breath awareness can be used to calm and stabilize the mind in preparation for other meditations. The Buddha said of this practice, "Monks, this concen-tration through mindfulness of breathing, being cultivated and practiced, tends to the peaceful, the sublime, the sweet and happy: at once it causes every evil thought to disap-pear and calms the mind."21 This remarkable claim, based upon the Buddha's own experience and corroborated by thousands of contemplatives after him, speaks volumes about the nature of the mind. The breath itself is not a plea-surable object, nor is it a virtuous one. It is simply neutral, like a stream of pure water uncolored by any additives. Yet when the attention is focused on the breath, by the simple fact of the mind abiding in a state of clear awareness, dis-engaged from perceptual and conceptual stimuli that arouse either craving or aversion, a sense of sweetness and joy be-gins to bubble up and afflictive thoughts disappear. The mind is indeed being controlled, but, like the polluted river that quickly purifies itself when toxins are no longer introduced into it, the mind quickly reasserts its intrinsic equilibrium, joy, and serenity. This is one of the most as-tounding and significant discoveries about the mind that anyone has ever made, and it deserves special attention in our society. How remarkable that happiness can be found without pleasurable sensory and intellectual stimuli, and that the mind can be calmed without drugs.

The Practice of Mindfulness of Breathing

Relaxation. When you first sit down to meditate, the mind tends to be rambunctious. The first goal is to somewhat subdue the mind, keeping the body as still as possible. Sit comfortably so that your spine is erect and your abdomen can expand freely during the in-breath. You can sit either on a chair with your feet flat on the ground or on a cushion on the floor. Hands can be in your lap or on your knees. Let your breath move easily. In this meditation, your eyes are open and your gaze is cast down resting in the space in front of you. Let your gaze be vacant without focusing on any visual image. Let the muscles of your face and around the eyes relax. Sit quite erect, and let your shoulders and arms relax.

Three calming breaths. To complete this initial relaxation process, take three slow deep breaths. Breathe first into the abdomen, then expand the diaphragm, and finally breathe up into the chest. Breathe out slowly and gently through the nostrils. Counting the breaths. Breathe into the abdomen so that the abdomen expands during the in-breath and contracts gently during out-breath. Focus on the sensation of the pas-sage of air around the nostrils or upper lip. At the end of an exhalation, just before inhalation, mentally count "1." Af-ter the second exhalation, count "2" and continue counting. The counting is a cue, not a focus of attention. The attention remains on the breath and the sensation of air around the nostrils or upper lip.

An alternative technique while attending to the breath is to bring awareness into the field of the body as a whole. This field includes the tactile sensations of the entire body, where you feel your buttocks against the chair or the ground, your feet, legs, thighs, torso, shoulders, neck, and head. Bring your awareness into the field of tactile sensa-tions, and briefly at the end of the first exhalation and just before you inhale, count "1" mentally. During the entire course of the inhalation and exhalation, simply be present, resting your awareness in your body and on the sensation of breath. Introspection. Add introspection to breath awareness. Introspection is an intermittent, inwardly directed cross-current during mindfulness, which is maintained as constantly as possible. See if you can discern from moment to mo-ment what is going on in your mind: what is the quality of attention? Other than mindfulness of the breath, what is going on?

Remain relaxed, and in this way count the breaths 1 to 21. If you don't make it to 21 with continuity, start again at 1. Stabilizing the attention by focusing on the breath is an example of the control model meditation practice. The attention is engaged by holding onto an object, and when that object is lost, the attention must be redirected again, over and over. The control model of training the mind is practiced widely in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions. Stabilizing the attention using a mental image. In Tibetan Buddhist practice, breath awareness is frequently used in preparation for other ways of stabilizing the mind. Tibetan Buddhists often train the attention by creating a mental image and attending to it with continuity and clarity. To practice this technique, also a control model, first become familiar with your chosen image by concentrating on a physical representation of that image. Then mentally recreate the image and attend to it.

A metaphor for the mind when you first try to stabilize the attention is a bucking bronco—climb on and two to three seconds later you are thrown off. Focus again and get thrown again. With persistence, continuity develops. The wild stallion can be trained. When you first try stabilizing the attention, it seems that mental agitation is worse than before you made any effort at all. But the mind was always scattered. You were just not aware of it. If you acknowledge that one of the goals of meditating is to witness the condition of the mind and re-alize that stability develops gradually, you will not be disappointed.

The control model, fastening your mind onto a chosen object, a mental image, or your breath, has been practiced in the Buddhist tradition for more than 2500 years. Many people using this technique have been monks and nuns. When you live as a monk, as I did for fourteen years, espe-cially in retreat, you can actually control your mind to a considerable extent. During a solitary retreat, you have a lot of control over your environment. You know exactly how much rice you have left. Apart from the rats, nobody takes your food. Living in a monastery, the control model also can work well. Mastery of the control model is a matter of technique and practice.

A common aphorism in the cloistered environment is: "Noise is a thorn to the meditator." Gen Lamrimpa, a highly accomplished Tibetan meditator, once told me that if he heard a jarring sound while in deep samadhi, like cans bang-ing, the first time it happened it would shock him but he could settle back again. But another loud noise would shat-ter his meditation. He said that when his meditation was shattered by noise, he would diffuse his awareness and start all over again. The cumulative wisdom of centuries of clois-tered contemplative practice is that noise disrupts meditation.22 The cloistered environment stands in stark contrast to the uncontrolled environment of everyday active life in the modern world. When I was a graduate student living in a family housing unit at Stanford University, I meditated early in the morning. At about 7:00 outside our window, a group of little girls would begin shrieking and driving their plas-tic tractors and tricycles across the bricks. I was meditating and these girls were disturbing my peace. I got to feeling pretty sorry for myself so I phoned my lama, Gyatrul Rinpoche, and asked for advice. He gave me a one-liner, "Just view it." This was not just Rinpoche's way of telling me to quit whining, but a reminder of the more encom-passing teaching to embrace obstacles in practice. And carry on. We can't always control our environment, but we can embrace it, the good, the bad, and the loud, and integrate it into Dharma practice.

Release Model

The main practice of the release model is called "settling the mind in its natural state."23 "Natural state," note care-fully, does not refer to the mind's customary state. There is nothing natural about our ordinary state of mind. The typical state of the mind is distracted, carried away by one thought after another. In this state, when the mind focuses, it is grasping, identified with thoughts, memories, hopes, fears, and emotions. This usual state of our mind is like roaming the six realms of samsara, from anguish to bliss and every-thing in between. The practice of "settling the mind in its natural state" is a very simple and direct practice to begin to break free from the bondage of this compulsive cycle.

The quintessence of the release model for training the attention is to let awareness come to rest without distrac-tion and without grasping. "Without distraction" means not being carried away by whatever drifts through the space of the mind. "Without grasping" means not identifying with or mentally grasping onto any of the events or emotions that come along. Let events arise, play themselves out, and vanish without intervention. The release model is quite different from the control model that fixes mindfulness with continuity on an object, the breath, or a mental image. In the control model, mind-fulness is like a rope that is tied to an object. In the release model of "settling the mind in its natural state," the rope is released and mindfulness settles into the space of mental events. The practice of mindfulness of breathing releases the mind from attractive and unattractive perceptual and conceptual stimuli that arouse craving and aversion; and in so doing, the mind already begins to heal naturally. But in that practice, there is still grasping onto an object, so in that technique, practiced as a means of cultivating quiescence, delusion is not counteracted. In this practice of "settling the mind in its natural state," one releases grasping of all kinds, onto neutral sensations as well as onto negative and positive thoughts and emotions. The self-healing of the mind goes deeper. In releasing all such dualistic fixation

on mental and sensory objects, primordial awareness be-gins to shine through the veils of obscuration with greater and greater brilliance. To practice settling the mind in its natural state, sit with your eyes open, your gaze resting in the space in front of you, without being focused on any object, and draw your attention into the field of the mind. The gaze is important. Disengage the attention from external objects and pay at-tention to your mind. Shapes and colors arise in the field of vision, sounds in the field of hearing, and there is also a field of experience that is accessible only to the mind— thoughts, imagery, feelings, memories, and imagination. Let your awareness come to rest within its own domain, within the field of the mind, without extending itself out to the various sense fields. See if you can draw your awareness into the field in which these mental events emerge, play themselves out, and vanish. Let your body be as still as a mountain and let your awareness be as open and friction-free as space. Let the breath be natural and unforced. Bring your awareness into the field of the mind and at-tend closely. Allow the natural limpidity and luminosity of your own awareness to emerge, shining a bright light in the space of your own mind. Let your awareness hover right in the immediacy of the present, without slipping into thoughts concerning the past or speculation about the fu-ture. For all manner of mental events that arise, including emotions that we so easily identify with, see if you can let your awareness remain at rest, non-interactive, and non-judgmental, keeping awareness in a state of stillness like empty space. Observe whatever arises. Observe the nature of each of the phenomena—emotions, imagery, memories, thoughts—without grasping onto their referents. Attend fully to the very nature of the mental phenomena without giving any effort to creating, sustaining, or stopping these

events. Let them be, arising, playing themselves out, and dissolving of their own accord. See if you can perceive the origin, duration, and mode of disappearance of mental events without conceptual elaboration. The crucial point is to perceive the mental events without grasping or identi-fying with them any more than space identifies with the birds and insects that fly through it. Let your awareness be completely at rest even when your mind is in motion. The pragmatic benefits of developing attention, cultivat-ing the ability to direct attention at will and focus on what is constructive and helpful, are easily appreciated. A few years ago, I heard a woman diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer speak about the devastating effect she expe-rienced upon reading about her prognosis in a magazine. She said she couldn't get the statistics out of her mind. All hope she had of overcoming her disease by positive think-ing, diet, and behavior had vanished. This is a classic and tragic example of being tortured by one's own mind. Her final comment was, "I wish I knew how to meditate," and my immediate, silent response was, "I wish you had started earlier." A Buddhist aphorism is, "Your mind can be your greatest friend or your greatest enemy." Unfortunately, in her case, it was an enemy.

I'll use an analogy to compare the release model of set-tling the mind in its natural state to the control model of meditation. If seismologists could figure out a way to re-lease tectonic tension through a lot of little earthquakes and thus prevent a large sudden one, we would all be grateful. That would be good control. The control model in science has proved beneficial for controlling certain natural disas-ters, epidemics for example. Descartes expressed this model for science when he predicted that by knowing the forces and the actions of material bodies, we could "make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature."24 But the release model is equally valuable. Recall Henry David Thoreau's famous statement, "In wildness is the preservation of the world,"25 and John Muir's remark, "In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unre-deemed wilderness."26 Nature, powerful, majestic and beautiful, works well all by itself; don't try to fix it. The preservation of wildness is analogous to the release model. How impoverished we would become if we tried to con-trol everything and how vulnerable we would be if we had only wildness.

Both the control and release models develop attention. The control model utilizes grasping; the release model en-tails letting go from the core of awareness. In the release model, thoughts, ideation, imagery, memories, are not a problem to be controlled or snuffed out. The gushing fountain of thought is not the problem. The problem is grasping. This is a more subtle practice than the control model. Is it really possible to attend to something without latching onto it? Settling the mind in its natural state re-quires a light touch, like a bee just barely touching the flower while it drinks its nectar. The bee does not control the flower. The great benefit of the release model is that it is an ideal practice for an actively engaged life in which there is little control over the environment.

One of the metaphors Tibetans use for the technique of practicing "without distraction and without grasping" is of an unhurried grandpa at a park watching other people's children play. The mothers hover over the kids. The grandpa watches closely but does not intervene. Not intervening while observing vigilantly is the crux of the practice. An excellent word for this quality of awareness is "limpidity." Limpidity has the dual connotation of complete transpar-ency, like air or glass, and also luminosity or brightness. Limpidity describes a pool of water in the desert emerging from a spring in the fine sand, the bright sun shining through the water. The pool is limpid, completely trans-parent and luminous. Anything that appears in the water, even a speck of dust, becomes brightly illuminated. This is the defining characteristic of the natural state of aware-ness—it is limpid, clear and luminous and, like space itself, not the least bit sticky.

There are profound reasons for engaging in attentional practices. Buddhists regard ignorance as the root of suffer-ing, and ignorance has two parts. One type of ignorance is failure to attend to our actual nature, the nature of our own awareness. Not attending to who we actually are is a form of ignorance. A second kind of ignorance is identifying with things that we are not. We mistake as "I" and "mine" things that in fact do not have a self in them, cannot be an "1" or "mine." These two errors are the essence of ignorance, the root of samsara, the source of suffering.

Buddhism offers a working hypothesis: the myriad of thoughts and emotions that arise in the mind, the entire array of mental phenomena that we habitually identify with so strongly, is not our true identity. Identifying with these phenomena is what is meant by ignorance. In the quies-cence meditation practices I have described, identification is arrested and replaced by a limpid, vigilant awareness, and the habitual tendency to grasp onto "I" and "mine" is arrested. Dismantling ignorance by overcoming the identification habit with awareness—is this all there is to spiritual prac-tice? No, this is not enough. There is a complementary practice that I will mention briefly here and describe in more detail later. The corollary practice to attending vigilantly without identification to our own body, feelings, and mind is attending frequently and closely to the minds, bodies, feelings, and experiences of others. This is the basis of compassion. What we attend to becomes our experienced reality, and as we attend to the situations of other people, this will expand the scope of our own reality. As we start to diminish our fixation on our own concerns and attend more to other people, balance is achieved. It is said that the awareness of a buddha is completely even, like the ocean, taking in equally the joys and sorrows of all people, friends, loved ones, relatives, and those never met. This is the meaning of a statement made by so many of the world's great spiritual teachers, "Love your enemy." It doesn't mean love the person you hate. You can't do that. Love those who hate you.

Meditative quiescence, with its two qualities, stability and vividness, is attainable. You can get there. There are many plateaus of development, but once true quiescence is achieved, the mind can be focused on a chosen topic effort-lessly, without distraction, for at least four hours. Once quiescence is attained, you can create a mental image and sustain it with a clarity virtually equivalent to seeing it with your eyes. At this stage of attainment, the attention remains in the mental realm, not seeping out into the physical senses. In the deepest stage of quiescence training, the senses go dormant while the mind continues in a high state of stable vigilance. Buddhist descriptions of attaining meditative stabiliza-tion are very precise. The achievement of quiescence entails an experience of bliss throughout the body and mind, an extraordinary lightness, as well as a dexterity of the mind. When mental and physical bliss subside a bit, there is a state of clear, serene awareness. Buddhists say that the qui-escent mind is attentive, aware, and in excellent working condition. From the Buddhist perspective the undisci-plined mind, prone to laxity, excitation, and distraction, is dysfunctional.

The Tibetan lama Geshe Rabten, under whom I trained for years in India and Switzerland, said that before his mo-nastic training his mind was like a stag with a great rack of antlers trying to make its way through a dense forest. He would struggle, get stuck, struggle again, one hindrance after another. Over the course of his formal twenty-four-year monastic training, he said his mind became progressively less like an entangled deer and more like a monkey gliding through the jungle from one vine to another. When this buoyancy and malleability arise, the mind is ready for anything. It slips skillfully through previous hindrances. Tibetan contemplatives report that a finely honed mind can probe the nature of awareness directly; you recognize it. As you probe deeper, you see for yourself that this phe-nomenon of consciousness is not reducible, not a mere epiphenomenon of matter. Consciousness has the nature of luminosity, emptiness, and cognizance. The cumulative experiential finding of the Buddhist contemplative tradi-tion is that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of reality that maintains its own unbroken continuum.

Achieving quiescence does not take the same amount of time for everyone. Tibetans describe a superior, middling, and inferior ability for quiescence. A person of superior abilities, after becoming well-grounded in the preliminar-ies, might require three months of intensive effort under skillful guidance. For people of middling abilities, six months is average. For people of inferior abilities, about one year of intensive effort is necessary. If quiescence isn't achieved in one year, Buddhist contemplatives recom-mend returning to the preliminary practices, with a special emphasis on the cultivation of compassion. The achievement of attentional stability has a parallel in the evolution of Western science. The breakthroughs in science in the seventeenth century were possible only in dependence upon developments in technology. Using a telescope that had been invented in the early seventeenth century, Galileo discovered spots on the sun, craters on the moon, and moons orbiting Jupiter (contradicting the Aris-totelian cosmology of his day that the sun had no flaws, the moon had no pits, and no celestial bodies had moons). Relying on the astronomical data of Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer who developed technology to precisely measure the movements of the planets, Kepler was able to discover that the planets travel in elliptical orbits, not perfect circles as Aristotle and Europeans after him had believed for centuries.

In astronomy, as in other sciences, breakthroughs are of-ten the result of the refinement of tools of observation and measurement. The Seven-Point Mind-Training states that the basic tool of discovery is our own mind, finely honed by training in attentional stability. The discovery to be made by our minds, the "mystery revealed," is the essential na-ture of awareness itself. The mystery remains a mystery only as long as it is veiled, obscured by ignorance. The same mystery addressed by the Mind-Training re-ceives a very different approach by modern science, which views consciousness simply as an epiphenomenon of matter. The materialism of science leads to the assump-tion that mental states are by-products of the brain, and therefore knowledge of neurophysiology should lead to understanding feelings, experiences, subjective states, and consciousness itself. What scientists investigate are corre-lates between brain and mind functions, but this knowledge should not be equated with understanding consciousness itself. Upon careful examination, it doesn't even shed any light on the nature of the actual phenomenon of conscious-ness. While it is commonly assumed that these brain correlates produce their corresponding consciousness states, this conclusion is not demanded by the empirical scientific data. On the contrary, as William James pointed out more than a century ago, evidence for mind/brain corre-lations may indeed imply that the brain produces mental events, or that it has the lesser role of simply releasing or permitting them, or that it merely transmits them, as light hits a prism, thereby transmitting a spectrum of colors. But with their bias toward materialism, most cognitive scien-tists simply assume that the first hypothesis is correct, despite the lack of compelling scientific evidence.

The centuries-long Buddhist tradition of investigating the nature of consciousness is summed up in a statement from The Cloud of Jewels Sutra: All phenomena are preceded by the mind. When the mind is comprehended, all phenomena are comprehended.... By bring-ing the mind under control, all things are brought under con-trol.27 These words present us with a challenge, not a dogma. The extraordinary hypothesis of Buddhism is that the refined mind can fathom the nature of reality and consciousness itself, with the most extraordinary results. Regard all events as if they were dreams.

As we engage with this practice, we move beyond medita-tive quiescence to contemplative insight into the nature of our experienced world. What the Mind-Training refers to with the simple mnemonic, "Regard all events as if they were dreams," shakes the very foundations of our existence. Niels Bohr's comment about quantum mechanics—"Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."28—is equally true of these teachings. For example, after Geshe Rabten completed his twenty-four years of formal monastic train-ing, he spent years in solitary meditative retreat in the mountains above Dharamsala. Much of this time he spent meditating on the true nature of the phenomenal world, and when I asked him about his experiences, he replied, "If I should tell others about what I have seen, they would think I am crazy!" Those who study the Buddhist theory concerning the dreamlike nature of reality and are not shocked cannot possibly have understood it.

Buddhist practices for the cultivation of contemplative insight into the nature of reality are designed to overcome our fundamental ignorance about the nature of our own identities and reality as a whole. And this insight, when unified with the stability and vividness of meditative qui-escence, is said to bring one to nirvana, an irreversible state of freedom from all mental afflictions and their resultant suffering. Some Western Buddhists, however, have recently called this claim into question, stating that Buddhist accounts of irreversible spiritual awakening, or enlightenment, are misleading.29 This conclusion is based on the personal ex-periences of a number of Western meditation teachers who have dedicated as much as forty years to their spiritual prac-tice. Those interviewed concurred that their realizations and awakenings do not last. They pass, and those meditators have found that they invariably return to the world of change, and this brings with it the wounds of pain.

As long as we are embodied, we are certainly immersed in a world in which all conditioned phenomena are in a state of flux. This includes, of course, our own bodies and minds. But the important question is: does our engagement with the ever-changing world necessarily trigger our own mental afflictions of attachment, anger, and delusion? The Buddhist assertion is that these mental toxins are respon-sible for all the mental suffering and fear we experience, and when the mind is purified of these afflictions, all men-tal distress vanishes and even physical pain is experienced in such a way that the mind remains tranquil. So when the Buddhist assertion of the possibility of nirvana is refuted, what exactly is being called into question? Are mental af-flictions, as understood in Buddhism, not really at the root of suffering? Or if they are, is there no possibility of being forever healed from these afflictions? In other words, if we accept the premise that we suffer because our minds are distorted by these afflictions, are we intrinsically screwed up, or only habitually screwed up?

The observation that many senior Western Buddhist meditators have not achieved any lasting state of libera-tion should lead us to question not only the authenticity of traditional accounts of achieving nirvana, but also the nature of our own spiritual practice. I have heard many Western Buddhists' reports of their deep insights into the nature of reality through the practice of insight meditation, but I have never heard any of them report that they have accomplished quiescence as it is described in authoritative Indian Bud-dhist treatises on this practice. On the other hand, I have heard one Tibetan contemplative, Lobsang Tenzin, give a personal account of his fifteen years of intensive, continu-ous meditation in solitude, resulting in what he called "a state of immutable bliss that was constant, carrying through both during and between his formal meditation sessions." I have never heard of any Western Buddhist who has dedi-cated him- or herself to such awesome practice under such adverse circumstances. But if, through diligent practice, one person can achieve a state of permanent liberation, this holds out the possibility for others who have not yet risen to that level of insight. The Buddha himself made it very clear that the achieve-ment of nirvana depends upon the union of both quiescence and insight, for without the stabilizing influence of quies-cence, all insights will be fleeting, and their transformative

and liberating effects will not last.30 However, a recent school of Buddhist meditation, originating in Burma, has proposed that achievement of the high degree of attentional stability of genuine quiescence, or meditative stabilization, is not necessary for the realization of nirvana. It is enough, they claim, to realize the ultimate nature of reality, or nir-vana, with the support of mere "momentary stabilization." Many Western Buddhists have followed this advice, and even the most senior of them, it seems, have not achieved any lasting state of liberation. The very notion that a mo-mentary glimpse of the actual nature of reality, or even many of them, should be enough to permanently overcome the fundamental affliction of delusion seems dubious. As an analogy, if a person is suffering from acute paranoia, a mere glimpse of the groundlessness of his fear will not likely heal him forever. Why then should anyone expect that a mere glimpse into the true nature of reality as a whole will forever overcome our delusions, which are far more deeply rooted than any psychosis? If we are to exercise healthy skepticism, we should be just as skeptical of our own spiritual understanding and practice as we are of the reports of enlightenment of those who have preceded us. Otherwise, instead of ascending to the heights of Buddhist contemplative realization, we are prone to slip back to the commonplace Freudian assump-tions that humans are inevitably subject to suffering due to "the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society."31 The Buddha claimed to have made an extraordinary discovery, and his findings have purportedly been corroborated by many later generations of Asian contemplatives. If we are to make this discovery for ourselves, let us bear in mind the observation of the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who refers to "the illusions of knowledge" as the principal obstacles to discovery. The great discoverers of the past, he declares, "had to battle against the current 'facts' and dog-mas of the learned."32 The Buddha encouraged his followers to be skeptical of his teachings and test them both ratio-nally and experientially. The dogma of our society is that to be human is to be intrinsically subject to mental afflic-tion and suffering. Maybe the time has come to wage a sus-tained battle against that dogma.

If all we are after is a temporary alleviation of our men-tal afflictions and the resultant suffering, there are a great number of avenues we can pursue. And if Buddhist medita-tion is presented as just one more way to achieve a transient easing of our distress, with no hope of a complete and irre-versible cure from all mental afflictions, then it is reduced to the status of one more matrix of psychological techniques. But this was not what the Buddha himself was pursuing in his quest for enlightenment, and it is not what he claimed to offer to the world. Within Buddhism, there are various ways to set out on the path of contemplative insight. In this Seven-Point Mind-Training, we are first encouraged to "regard all events as if they were dreams." To explain this aphorism, I will draw from the teachings of the Dzogchen (Great Perfection) and Mahamudra (Great Seal) contemplative traditions of Ti-betan Buddhism. When you first encounter such teachings, if you don't sense that they challenge the foundations of your worldview, or that there never was any foundation at all, then you are not getting it. The Seven-Point Mind-Train-ing makes very strong statements about the nature of real-ity. If these statements are wrong, they are enormous mistakes. If they are correct, they are profound solutions. When, in an earlier story I told about Gyatrul Rinpoche, a lama in the Dzogchen tradition, and his advice to me to "just view it," this was a loaded statement. The meaning is "apply your understanding of Dzogchen, the Great Perfec-tion, to all that you experience." We all embrace a view of reality, sometimes without ever consciously choosing it. A common view of Western culture is that reality is the world just as it appears to us. If I look at Jack sitting ten feet away from me, his body looks like a big chunk of matter existing totally separate from me. I am here and he is there and there is a vacuity between us. The environment I experience also seems to be totally out there and independent of anything I think, say, or perceive. From what I can tell from appear-ances, if I were to drop dead, that reality would not change at all.

Appearances suggest that perceived phenomena exist in-dependently of perceptions. Most of us, by default, live by this philosophic view. Appearances inform us that subject and object are separate and therefore, when people treat us badly, we target them as radically separate from ourselves and retaliate. From the history of scientific discovery, we might antici-pate that there are deeper realities than appearances would lead us to believe. Some of the views of twentieth-century quantum mechanics run profoundly counter to many of the assumptions of classical physics. The Seven-Point Mind-Training likewise presents a working hypothesis radically counter to ordinary subject-object experience. The injunction to "regard all events as if they were dreams" encourages us not to view things as if they were real, as if they existed objectively from their own side. We assume that reality neatly corresponds exactly to how it appears. The Mind-Training points to something deeper.

The Buddhist criterion for reality is that any hypothesized entity must be verified by critical analysis or careful observation. If probing into the nature of something causes it to disappear, this implies it wasn't real in the first place. There are ten classic Buddhist metaphors for the nature of phenomena. One metaphor is a mirage. A desert road that looks wet, if investigated, will be found to be dry. A mi-rage suggests a reality that isn't there. A second metaphor is a rainbow. A rainbow is not really an illusion, but the more closely you inspect it, the more it fades from sight. Although it appears to exist objectively, out there in the sky, upon careful examination we find this isn't so. What about reality as a whole? Will reality disappear as we investigate deeper and deeper? The easy answer is of course not. I look at Jack, who seems to be here. When I shake him by the shoulder, he tells me to stop. Is that adequate proof that Jack is here?

Try the same proof in a dream. If I were dreaming and said, "Jack, are you really there?" he could say, "Yes." I could do a reality check by touching his shoulder, and I would feel something firm. But this is a dream and feeling some-thing tangible in a dream doesn't mean that there is matter there. In a dream, Jack could appear, I could even touch him on the shoulder, but he would not exist independently from my dream. Let's move from Buddhist analysis to philosophical re-alism. Realism assumes that there is a real, physical world out there, atoms, planets, and stars, from quarks to super clusters of galaxies. Almost all scientists until the end of the nineteenth century accepted the assumption that the phenomena known to science are "out there, existing in-dependently in the objective world." There were a few doubters, but scientific realism, the belief in reality being "out there" waiting to be discovered, was the working as-sumption of science. Realism has theological underpinnings: in the beginning, God created the world and human be-ings were created on the sixth day to discover what God

had already made. The theological premise of scientific real-ism is that the world is out there waiting to be discovered. Then came quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Scientists, working under the reductionist premise that to understand something it is necessary to reduce it to its ba-sic components, started probing into what they thought would be the ultimate nuggets of physical reality, the final indestructible ball bearings of the Reality Machine, what is really there. Reductionism, the sensible assumption that has propelled most of science, is not unique to the West. The Vaibhashika school of Buddhist philosophy states that only fundamental constituents are real and the rest of phenom-ena are simply subjectively biased configurations. At the turn of the century, physicists were astonished to find that the fundamental components of physical reality seemed to depend on the mode of questioning and method of mea-surement. The fundamental constituents of reality "out there" did not seem to exist independently of systems of measurement. As physicist Bernard d'Espagnat recently commented,

It seems we are forced (by physics, not philosophy!) to acknowl-edge that we cannot know mind-independent reality as it is. In other words, the world described by science must be consid-ered as being a picture of mind-independent reality, not as it really is, but as it is seen through the selective and deforming lens of our own sensory and mental structures?3 The unexpected findings in physics undermined the philosophical stances of scientific realism and reductionism. Empirical results began to accumulate from the double-slit experiment, the delayed-choice experiment, and a variety of other experiments indicating that some of the deepest assumptions underlying Western science up to the twentieth century were just wrong.

Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, adversaries on many is-sues in physics, made similar statements about the defining role theory plays in science. When quantum mechanics was in its early stages of development, Einstein remarked to a young Werner Heisenberg, "on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe."34 Einstein was pointing out that it is the conceptual framework that makes data in-telligible and determines what emerges into experience. Similarly, Niels Bohr wrote, "we must remember ... all new experience makes its appearance within the frame of our customary points of view and forms of perception."35 A more radical view of physics asserts that in order for phenomena to shift from a state of being merely possible to being tangibly real, consciousness is instrumental. Aware-ness of an event is the actual trigger that makes potentia transform into physical reality. This is a minority view in physics today, but a minority view held by some very bril-liant people. A more conservative view is that the world consists of elementary particles that do not exist indepen-dently of measurement, and the measuring device chosen determines the kind of phenomena that emerge from a potential state to an actual state. Whether a photon is a particle or a wave is determined by what the instrument measures. Reality doesn't exist independently of the system of measurement and interpretation. Another theory in physics concerning the relationship of subject to object states that we co-create the universe by posing questions. Specific questions are posed through spe-cific systems of observation, measurement, and experiment. Setting up an experiment is a physical enactment of a ques-tion which evokes a reality that otherwise would not exist.

Hilary Putnam, a philosopher at Harvard, has stated a similar idea in philosophical terms. He suggests that hu-man beings are like characters in a novel of which we are also the authors. We are writing a novel that does not exist independently of its authors. An analogous Buddhist idea is "creating karma” referring to the process of engaging conceptually and creatively with the world we experience. There is significant common ground between Buddhist contemplative wisdom and twentieth-century empirical sci-ence. Since 1987, a series of dialogues has been in progress between Western scientists and the Dalai Lama in the Mind and Life Conferences. Niels Bohr advised his scientific peers when they encountered the implications of quantum phys-ics, "Be prepared for a big surprise," but most of science continues rolling along in the rut of scientific materialism as if the most profound discoveries of quantum mechanics had no broader implications. The empirical discoveries that imply our interdependence with the nature of reality do not just apply to tiny particles; they affect all of reality. The implications of these discoveries, however, have been some-what contained, like an earthquake held temporarily in check. The nature of our interdependence with reality may seem like a head trip for people who can do the math. How do these radical statements touch experience? Physicist Nick Herbert wrote:

The source of all quantum paradoxes appears to lie in the fact that human perceptions create a world of unique actualities— our experience is inevitably 'classical'—while quantum reality is simply not that way at all... Since physics assures us that our lives are embedded in a thoroughly quantum world, is it so obvious that our experience must remain forever classical?36 Research in quantum mechanics discovers a reality in-consistent with gross appearances. Physical reality appears like it's made up of tiny, hard, objective, independent granules of stuff, but physics says this isn't the case. Yet even the physicist who does the research, or a philosopher of physics who understands the implications of the research, experiences life—home, job, family—in an ordi-nary, non-quantum way. In experience, nothing has shifted. Is disassociating the understanding of quantum physics from the experience of everyday life necessary? If our understanding can dive into the depths of the quantum mechanical view of the nature of reality, does our everyday experience have to be left wading around in a pre-quantum view of the world? How can experience and understand-ing be reconciled? Generally speaking, physicists don't seem to have much interest in integrating the insights of quantum mechanics into daily life. But integrating insight into experience is exactly what Buddhist contemplative practice is all about. Gaining insight and saturating every aspect of existence with that insight is the specialty of generations of Buddhist contemplatives. How deeply the insights of quantum physicists and those of Buddhist contemplatives actually coincide remains to be seen. It certainly deserves careful investigation.

Buddhists, like physicists, probe reality. Buddhists send an analytic probe right into the nature of experience and mind itself. Does an observed phenomenon exist purely objectively and independently of the perception of it? By penetrating analysis, it can be discovered that it does not; instead, there is a subjective component to phenomena without which phenomena don't exist at all. For example, a room appears to be totally "out there." On probing, we find that the room as we perceive it is contingent upon our visual faculties. Likewise, sounds that we hear are depen-dent on our ability to hear. At this point we are involved in a psychological truism. Keep on probing. There is light; photons exist. Sound waves really ripple through various media at finite speeds. A sound wave as described in phys-ics appears to your conceptual mind but what you actually hear is quite different. You may have felt a shock wave from a jet breaking the sound barrier, but you have never per-ceived a sound wave move through the air, just as you have never seen a photon zipping along at 186,000 miles per sec-ond. Light waves and sound waves as they are theorized in physics are concepts that are created within the context of a conceptual framework. The Middle Way philosophy of Buddhism makes this point: investigate anything—mind, matter, cosmos, space, time—probe its objectivity, as something that exists with-out any trace of subjective influence, neither conceptual nor perceptual, and the result will be that you find nothing. Using the stabilized mind to probe the nature of phenom-ena leads to the discovery that everything is interdependent. In other words, the way phenomena appear is not at all the way they actually exist.

The Mind-Training says, "Regard all events as if they were dreams." How do dreams appear? The most produc-tive method to explore dreams is by being aware of dreaming while dreaming. Start by reflecting on how things appear in dreams. Let's take as a working hypothesis, as Buddhists do, that dreams emerge from your unique psyche and past and are not part of a big generic dream that belongs to everybody. In Buddhist theory, dreams are a flower-ing of mental propensities, or seeds, an idea that corre-sponds roughly to the Western theory of the contents of the subconscious. Suppose I dream that I am speaking be-fore a group of people. From a waking perspective, I would say that the people in this dream don't exist independently from the dream. Yet when I am dreaming, people appear to be just as objective and separate from me as people seem during the waking state. In a dream, if somebody insults me, I get angry just as though this person exists objectively. In non-lucid dreams, demarcations between subjects and objects appear very real. When I get happy in a dream, that happiness is not significantly different from the happiness I experience in the waking state. If someone punches me in a dream, it seems very real. While there seems to be an ob-jective environment, in a dream objects and environments actually exist in relationship to me, the dreamer. Dream and dreamer are interdependent. In the Buddhist analysis, there is an analogy between the non-lucid dream state and our usual waking state. What we assume to be absolutely real in a dream and in the wak-ing state is not as it appears. The Buddhist analysis of our deluded waking state goes deep into the analogy between waking and dreaming. From the perspective of the waking state, it is easy to agree that what appears real and concrete in the dream is illusory, despite the fact that from within the dream it can be proved to be "real." In my dream, I can touch Jack or ask him if he is real and he will say yes. Within the context of a dream, that is good proof. From the per-spective of the waking state, I see that objects in the dream have no objective existence, but are dependent on me, the dreamer. Within a dream you can be absolutely positive you are not dreaming. The exception to the delusion of mistaking the dream-state to be real is to be aware, within the dream, that you are dreaming.

From the relative state of being awake, it is possible to reflect upon the dream-state as being a state of delusion. The Buddhists push past the state of relative wakefulness to actual wakefulness. The word "buddha" means "one who is awake." From the perspective of a buddha, the nor-mal "awake" state is a relative dream state and, additionally, the dream is deluded. Those of us who have not yet be-come buddhas can begin to appreciate the relationship between dream and dreamer by practicing lucid dreaming. The daytime practice of dream yoga is what the Mind-Training refers to as regarding all phenomena as if they were dreams. No leap of faith is required to immerse yourself in the radical and intuitively sound hypothesis that phenomena have a dreamlike quality. This hypothesis is not unique to Buddhism and is found in a number of other contemplative traditions. Working with the dream-state analogy, imagine the relative perspective of a more awakened state (a buddha-like state), and realize that right now you are dreaming. The daytime practice of dream yoga entails pondering, "In this waking state, relatively speak-ing, I am fast asleep. Apparent reality is a dream and all of my assumptions about absolute demarcations, subject/ object, self/other are profoundly mistaken." A proficient lucid dreamer has dreams that are completely clear and, while dreaming, is aware that objects and individuals in the dream are nothing more than appearances of the mind. Absolute demarcations vanish. The environment in a dream and the persona of yourself in a dream are expressions of your own mind. The dream analogy to the ordinary waking state is a practice, not a philosophy.

The purpose of the Seven-Point Mind-Training is to pro-vide sufficient wisdom and practice, synthesized in one teaching, to achieve spiritual awakening. Buddhists do not assume that humans are hard-wired to perceive and respond to reality in fixed ways. Instead, the Buddhist hypothesis is that the mind is malleable and what is required to change perception and response is consistent behavior. When you wake up in the morning, note that the wak-ing state has a dreamlike quality and reflect that, from an enlightened perspective, the waking state itself is a dream. In our dreamlike ordinary waking perspective, the distinc-tion between subject and object is exaggerated. This means that sentient beings whom I experience as "other" are not absolutely other. "Otherness" is a convention. The sense of absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity is part of the dream. The daytime practice of dream yoga, "regard all events as if they were dreams," is to sustain the sense that, from an awakened perspective, this relative waking state is a sleeping state.

There is also a nighttime practice of dream yoga, and some people are fortunate in having a natural knack for it. There are several techniques to develop the ability to dream lucidly. The best one for people with active minds is to settle the mind in its natural state while falling asleep. Visualiza-tion techniques tend to lead to insomnia from the effort required to maintain a visual image. Settling the mind in its natural state rests the mind in its own natural limpidity, not trying to do something, not intervening. Lying on your right side, called the lion's posture, is most effective for in-ducing lucid dreaming. Lying on the left side or on the back is not as effective, and the worst position is lying prone. The optimal mental state in which to induce lucid dream-ing is to maintain limpid, fully conscious awareness and observe yourself falling asleep. Dr. Stephen LaBerge, who has done extensive research into lucid dreaming, confirms what Buddhists have said for over a thousand years: it is possible to enter the dream state with complete conscious-ness, possible to maintain lucidity throughout the course of a dream, possible to emerge from a lucid dream back into deep sleep, and possible to maintain limpid awareness and eventually emerge into the waking state.

To begin the practice of dream yoga, start by noticing early morning dreams when sleep tends to be lighter and of higher frequency. Emerge from sleep holding the story line of a dream; then, maintaining the thread of the story, reenter the sleep-state right into a lucid dream. As you are preparing to sleep by settling the mind in the natural state, do so with the aspiration to recognize the next dream as a dream. Buddhists and lucid dream researchers agree that such intention to recognize a dream as a dream is very helpful. The aphorism "Regard all phenomenon as if they were dreams" is a statement regarding the nature of reality. To awaken, practice yoga in the dream, both the waking dream and the sleeping dream.

We imagine that, from the perspective of a buddha, the ordinary waking state is dreamlike. There is another per-spective from which this is true—the deathbed. When we know full well that we are about to die, and reflect back on our life with all its experience, joys and sorrows, anxiety, all the stuff we are attached to, life may appear as having no more substance than a dream. Whether our time is long or short, this is a profoundly authentic perspective on the nature of a life. Life is a flash of lightning in the dark of night. It is a brief time of tremendous potential. The death-bed view of life has a direct practical benefit in day-to-day relationships. Atisha, who was a monk, gave this pithy counsel to distressed married couples: Your spouse is go-ing to be dead soon. You are going to be dead soon. Be nice to each other.

The Seven-Point Mind-Training packs the profound teachings and techniques of Buddhism into aphoristic state-ments. The Mind-Training is constructed of steps of insight, one after another. The lines of the Mind-Training encode practices that have tremendous practical application. The challenge is to awaken. Examine the unborn nature of awareness. Direct the mind right into the nature of awareness itself and examine that which is "unborn." "Unborn" awareness is primordial awareness. As long as you are alive, you can practice breath aware-ness. At any time and in any circumstances, as long as you breathe, you can practice breath awareness. In the Buddhist tradition, during the gradual sequence of dying, the mind continues through a number of experiences after the breath has stopped. After breath has ceased, even though the senses have shut down, and for all practical purposes you have lost your body, you can still observe the mind. After the breath stops, you can still meditate. As the dying pro-cess progresses, eventually you lose your mind also. The "mind" you will lose is the mind that is conditioned by life, the mind filled with memories, experiences, hopes, desires, emotions, conceptual faculties of recognition, and imagination, the same mind trained in meditation.

What is left after losing breath, body, and mind is what the Buddhists call "unborn awareness," or "the clear light of death." Unborn awareness is awareness in its primor-dial state, unstructured by experience or by a human brain and nervous system. The primordial nature of awareness is not structured by a sense of subject versus object. Un-born awareness is also not conditioned by being a good or bad person or even by being human. For centuries, contemplatives who have maintained continuity of aware-ness throughout death and subsequent reincarnation have described the details of the death experience, including the nature of unborn awareness. All of us will have the same opportunity as con-templatives to experience primordial awareness at death. We have no choice. We will lose our breath, our bodies, and our minds, and primordial awareness is what will be left. We will have an opportunity to ascertain the unobscured, unborn nature of awareness when we die; but whether we will be able to make use of this opportunity is another question. If we are offered a meal but don't know how to open our mouth, we cannot eat. Death offers us primordial awareness on a plate. Will we be prepared to take the opportunity of ascertaining it, tapping into this wellspring of wisdom, compassion, and power? Whether or not unborn awareness is ascertained during death is con-tingent upon whether it has been ascertained during life. The way to ascertain unborn awareness during life is to practice.