The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training
The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training
Preface
All of us have attitudes. Some of them accord with reality and serve us well throughout the course of our lives. Others are out of alignment with reality, and they cause us unnec-essary problems. Tibetan Buddhist practice isn't just sitting in silent meditation; it's developing fresh attitudes that align our minds with reality. Attitudes need adjusting, just like a spinal column that has been knocked out of alignment. Among the many types of practices in Tibetan Buddhism, in this book I will explain a type of mental training Tibet-ans call lojong, which is designed to shift our attitudes so that our minds become pure wellsprings of joy instead of murky pools of problems, anxieties, fleeting pleasures, frus-trations, hopes, and fears. The Tibetan word lojong is made up of two parts: lo means attitude, mind, intelligence, and perspective; and jong means to train, purify, remedy, and clear away. So the word lojong could literally be translated as attitudinal training, but I'll stick with the more common translation of mind-training.
Over the past millennium, Tibetan lamas have devised many lojongs, but the most widely taught and practiced of all lojongs in the Tibetan language was one based on the teachings of an Indian Buddhist sage named Atisha (982-1054), whose life spanned the end of the first millennium of the common era and the beginning of the second. Atisha brought to Tibet an oral tradition of lojong teachings that was based on instructions that had been passed down to him through the lineage of the Indian Buddhist teachers Maitriyogin, Dharmarakshita, and Serlingpa. This oral tradition may represent the earliest such practice that was explicitly called a lojong, and it is probably the most widely practiced in the whole of Tibetan Buddhism. This training was initially given only as an oral instruction for those stu-dents who were deemed sufficiently intelligent and highly enough motivated to make good use of it. Only about a century after Atisha's death was this secret training writ-ten down and made more widely available in monasteries and hermitages, Tibet's unique kinds of attitudinal correc-tion facility. This delay probably accounts for the minor variations in the different versions of the text we have today. For centuries we in the West have wondered whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. If there are highly advanced, intelligent beings out there, what might they have to teach us? What have they learned that we have not? Along similar lines we can ask: is there intelligent life on our planet outside of our Euro-American civilization? Of course that sounds like a dumb question, but it's still worth asking, since there still persists an attitude in our society that we know more about everything than any pre-vious generation and more than any other, "less developed" society today. It takes quite an ethnocentric leap of faith to swallow that, but many people seem to manage it. Indian civilization a thousand years ago, during the time of Atisha, had evolved with very little influence from European civi-lization; and Tibetan civilization, tracing back more than two millennia, was hardly influenced by the West until the mid-twentieth century. Ironically, Tibetans' first major en-counter with Western thought occurred due to the invasion of their homeland by the Chinese Communists in 1949, who forced upon them the economic doctrine of Marxism and scientific materialism. Have Indian and Tibetan civilizations made any great discoveries of their own that we have not, and might they have anything to teach us? I will be tackling these questions throughout this book, drawing on a thousand-year-old set of aphorisms that embody much of the wisdom of ancient India and Tibet. If these aphorisms strike a chord of wis-dom for us living today, whose lives span the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third, that wis-dom will be something that is not uniquely Eastern or Western, and not ancient or modern. It will be a type of wisdom that cuts across such cultural divides and eras, something universal that speaks deeply to and from the hearts and minds of humanity.
Over the past millennium, Tibetan Buddhism has main-tained its vitality from generation to generation by teachers passing on oral commentaries to traditional "root texts" such as the Seven-Point Mind-Training. Root texts preserve the depth and wisdom of the teachings, and the oral com-mentaries link these texts with the experiences and views of practitioners of each generation. In the explanation of the text I offer here, I draw upon the earliest Tibetan com-mentary I have been able to find, composed by Sechil Buwa, who was a direct disciple of Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101-1175), who first wrote down this mind-training. Chekawa Yeshe Dorje had received the transmission of this teaching from Sharawa, and the lineage before him goes back to Langri Thangpa, Potowa, Dromtonpa, and Atisha. I also draw on a very recent commentary entitled Enlightened Courage: An Explanation ofAtisha's Seven Point Mind Train-ing by the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the greatest Tibetan meditation masters of the twentieth century. The teacher from whom I received the oral commentary on this training was a learned, humble, and compassionate Tibetan named Kungo Barshi. I was living in Dharamsala,
India, at the time, in 1973, and there were many erudite lamas from whom I could have sought this instruction. But I was particularly drawn to Kungo Barshi for various rea-sons. At that time, he was the chief instructor in Tibetan medicine at the Tibetan Astro-Medical Institute, and he was renowned for his mastery of many of the fields of traditional Tibetan knowledge. But he was not only an outstanding scholar. As a member of the nobility in Tibet, he had owned several estates and devoted himself to the life of a gentle-man scholar, while his wife largely took over the practical affairs of running their estates. But when the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet and especially targeted the aristocracy for imprisonment and torture, he, his wife, and one of his sons fled to India. Others of his children remained behind, only to be killed by the Chinese, and the son who fled with him into exile also met a tragic end. Adversity mounted upon adversity in Kungo Barshi's life, and yet when he was passing on this teaching to me, he told me, "Personally, I have found the Chinese invasion of Tibet to be a blessing. In Tibet before this cataclysm, I took much for granted, and my spiritual practice was casual. Now that I have been forced into exile and have lost so much, my dedication to practice has grown enormously, and I have found greater contentment than ever before." Rarely have I met anyone whose presence exuded such serenity, quiet good cheer, and wisdom as he did. He was for me a living embodiment of the efficacy of this mind-training, and his inspiration has been with me ever since. As I pass on my own commentary to this text, I address many practical and theoretical issues that uniquely face us in the modern world. This book is based on a series of pub-lic lectures I gave in Santa Barbara, California, during the years 1997-1998. Tapes of those lectures were transcribed and edited by my old and dear friend Lynn Quirolo, to whom I owe a deep debt of gratitude; then I made final revisions to the edited transcripts. I have tried at all times to be faithful to the original teachings I received, while making them thoroughly contemporary to people living in a world so different from that of traditional Tibet. If even a fraction of the wisdom and inspiration of Atisha, Sechil Buwa, Kungo Barshi, and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche is con-veyed to the readers of this book, our efforts will have born good fruit.
The First Point:
The Preliminaries
First, train in the preliminaries.
The goal of Dharma practice is to realize a state of genuine well-being that flows from a wellspring of awareness that is pure and unobscured. The ancient Greeks called such a state eudaimonia, a truth-given joy. The ancient Indians called it mahasukha, great bliss that arises not from pleasurable stimuli, but from the nature of one's own pure awareness itself. This is not simply a happy feeling; it is a state of be-ing that underlies and suffuses all emotional states, that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come our way. It is a way of engaging with life without confusion. The ancient Greeks knew about it. The Indians and Tibetans know about it. Funny that we don't have a word for it in modern En-glish. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we know a lot more about mental disease than we do about mental health. Years ago I asked the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health how the medical profession defined mental health. He replied that they didn't have any widely agreed upon definition, for they didn't have enough data! They have plenty of data on mental disorders, though, and according to conservative estimates, one in five persons, at least in
the United States, will have a serious, diagnosable, and treatable mental disorder some time during their lifetime.1 Even for those of us who are not presently suffering from a diagnosable mental disease, it's high time to ask: what's so great about being normal? When we're normal, we're still subject to a wide range of mental problems, with their resultant distress. Let's now ask the provocative question: how mentally healthy could we possibly we be? Is there a limit? How in touch with reality would we have to be to achieve supreme mental health? A path that has stood the test of centuries is the practice of Dharma. And what is Dharma? One meaning of "Dharma" is simply truth, spe-cifically those truths that, when realized, lead to a state of genuine, lasting happiness that is not contingent upon plea-surable stimuli. In terms of our overall well-being, Dharma includes important truths concerning diet, exercise, and medication, as well as spiritual practice. Indeed, the theories and practices of traditional Tibetan medicine are commonly viewed by its practitioners as integral elements of Dharma.2 In the Tibetan Buddhist context, there are several criteria for discriminating between what is and is not Dharma. One criterion for Dharma is whether or not a theory or practice leads to spiritual awakening. From a traditional viewpoint, another criterion for Dharma is anything that aids spiritual awakening in this life or beyond this life. Using this crite-rion, there are ways of conduct and ways of viewing reality that are beneficial beyond the context of this present life. There is a third very pragmatic criterion for determining what can be considered Dharma that doesn't depend on belief in enlightenment or reincarnation. This criterion of practicing Dharma is engaging with all events in ways that are realistic and conducive to one's own and others' well-being. When things go well, are there ways to experience deeper joy and satisfaction? When things go wrong, is there anything we can do that would still enhance our overall well-being? Ways of bringing forth a sense of fulfillment and meaning during the inevitable ups and downs of life are also considered Dharma.
These three criteria define Dharma but are not exclusive to Buddhism. Dharma can be found in non-Buddhist paths and even outside of religious practice altogether. The test of whether a practice or theory is Dharma is whether it re-sults in benefit throughout the inevitable vicissitudes of life. On the one hand, we may feel Dharma practice seems difficult, time-consuming, and filled with problems. From another perspective, if what we really want is to practice Dharma, we get immediate gratification. Dharma can be practiced anytime: on happy occasions or when we are sick. Just as soon as we want to practice, we can. But if Dharma is practiced only as a means to an end, such as to get more money or have people like us, then we are in a situation of delayed gratification.
What does it mean to "practice Dharma"? It is not one technique, not just meditation. You can develop a reper-toire of Dharma practices for every occasion. When you start to understand the richness and diversity of Dharma practice, you will see that even if you are stressed out, tired, or depressed, you can still practice. Even when you are dying, you can practice Dharma. You can become a skillful chef of Dharma using its rich and varied recipes to make any situation into a source of fulfillment and happiness. When what you really want is to practice Dharma, you find more and more ability to do so in a wider variety of situa-tions. Dharma is like medicine; it is designed to help stop the habitual behaviors and attitudes that impede the ca-pacity of the mind to heal itself. The more you practice Dharma, the more Dharma unveils your natural inborn happiness. The Seven-Point Mind-Training is the essence of Dharma, a concise array of methods to achieve genuine happiness no matter what our circumstances. In its fullest dimension, the Mind-Training is also a complete path to enlightenment. The seven points begin, "First, train in the preliminaries," and lay the foundation for effective Dharma. You don't have to be spiritual or intellectual to practice Dharma effectively. What's needed is to saturate the mind with two challenges: a thorough evaluation of ordinary life and a thorough evaluation of human potential. This First Point, a single line of a text of only about four pages, represents a vast Tibetan Buddhist teaching. In the metaphor of spiritual practice as a journey, the practitioner must find a qualified guide, a reliable vehicle, an accurate map, and the best methods. The "preliminaries" serve as a compass, keeping efforts directed toward the ultimate goal. The preliminaries address unexamined assumptions not easily identified and even more difficult to root out. There-fore, at the beginning of Dharma practice and periodically afterward, returning to the preliminaries keeps spiritual practice well-tuned and prevents wasting time in detours.
"Preliminary" isn't a code word for "skip this and get to the important stuff." The important stuff starts here. This is it, no warm-up. When I went to Dharamsala, India, in 1971 to study meditation, I received teachings from the Tibetan lama Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. He spent weeks discuss-ing the preliminaries and I kept wondering when he was going to get around to meditation. Slowly it dawned on me that he was teaching discursive meditation. Meditation is not only settling your mind and finding stillness, it is also bringing shape and meaning to conceptual thought by refining the way we view the world. It is the quality of practice of the preliminaries that determines over the long run whether what we are practicing is genuine Dharma or a dharma look-alike. The preliminaries are discursive meditations, situated at the very beginning of the Mind-Training to save time. All of my Tibetan teachers have emphasized the prelimi-naries, but none more so than Gyatrul Rinpoche. He was raised and trained in Tibet and has taught Dharma in the West for twenty-five years. He sees his long-term students struggling with the same old stuff and asks us, "Why do I teach you all the advanced practices of Dzogchen and Mahamudra when you are still in kindergarten? Go back and learn your ABC's." He is referring to the preliminaries, especially relevant for Westerners who tend to put a lot of muscle into spiritual practice and later, sometimes years later, wonder why there is so little result. The preliminaries are Dharma insurance to prevent spiritual practice from just being new packaging for old habits. The preliminaries are four traditional discursive medi-tations called "the four thoughts that turn the mind." These meditations turn our minds toward our highest aspirations and progressively reorder priorities. Discursive meditation is thinking deeply about a chosen subject and can be done in spare moments during the day. No special posture is required. Discursive meditation is a very practical way of integrating Dharma practice into everyday life. The Rare and Precious Human Life of Leisure and Opportunity
The first of the four thoughts that turn the mind is: "the precious and rare human life of leisure and opportunity." Each of the terms in this phrase—precious, rare, leisure, and opportunity—is a mnemonic to bring to mind instan-taneously and deeply specific teachings and experience. In the line "precious human life of leisure and opportu-nity," leisure means time. Some people live in situations in which there is no leisure, in which every breath is commit-ted to finding food, keeping warm, or dodging bomb shells. If you live in an area of pestilence, famine or war, you have no leisure. Leisure means having time to breathe the present, and it makes it possible to drench the heart and mind in Dharma. Leisure is an empty vessel that can be filled with the nectar of Dharma. Leisure is one of the greatest benefits of civilization. Without civilization, life is absorbed with growing, killing or protecting the next meal. With civilization, we can ar-range time off, vacations, weekends, a lunch break. We can decide how to use leisure. This first discursive meditation increases appreciation for free time. Unfortunately, in our culture leisure time is often devoted to catching up, getting ahead or battery recharging for a return to work. We have this weird phrase that leisure time is "time to kill." We need to work and we need to sleep, but the critical point here is that leisure should not just be a way to revitalize after a hard day at work. Using leisure time beneficially within a workaholic ethic requires shifting our priorities. This means gradually having work support spiritual practice and en-suring that spiritual practice does not just become a tool for improving work performance. Opportunity is the second quality of this precious human life. Tibetans have a list of ten kinds of opportunities that focus on the ability, desire, open-mindedness, and faith to engage in spiritual practice. Opportunity also includes find-ing the appropriate circumstances for practice, including a spiritual tradition that is compatible with your own aspi-ration and temperament. The benefits of Dharma arise from leisure and opportunity, the fortuitous combination of abil-ity and circumstances. The coming together of these factors, at any time in any human life, is "rare." These factors are "precious" because they are what is necessary to obtain the
jewel of life, genuine happiness, and spiritual awakening, the results of successful spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is not a shortcut to the American Dream nor is it an embellishment to a comfortable life. Dharma addresses the root causes of suffering and requires that we take a hard look at the preconceptions that maintain our worldview and perpetuate our problems. As much as suc-cess seems to be the source of the good things in life, happiness included, success isn't the goal of spiritual prac-tice. Our ideas about success are themselves based on preconceptions and are also part of a self-perpetuating cycle preventing us from achieving the genuine success and happiness that we seek. The Buddhist tradition addresses preconceptions about success head-on with an eight-term differential diagnosis called "the eight mundane concerns," eight orientations toward the pursuit of happiness based on unexamined as-sumptions. Fixation on these concerns subverts our best efforts, leading either to counterfeit success or true frustration.
The eight mundane concerns consist of four pairs of priorities: the pursuit of material acquisitions and the avoid-ance of their loss; the pursuit of stimulus-driven pleasure and the avoidance of discomfort; the pursuit of praise and the avoidance of blame; and the pursuit of good reputation and the avoidance of bad reputation. These eight concerns commonly sum up our motivation for the pursuit of hap-piness, and this is exactly the problem. The eight mundane concerns, not wrong in themselves, underlie our motivation, and it is motivation more than any other single factor that determines the outcome of spiritual practice. There is nothing bad about having material acquisitions— a car, a house; and, conversely, poverty is not necessarily a virtue. There is nothing wrong with enjoying a sunset, a good book, pleasant conversation, or beautiful music. It is not a bad thing to be praised. Being loved and respected by others is not bad either. On the other hand, it is not bad to be rejected by others if you are leading a wholesome and meaningful life. Many accomplished Dharma practitioners are content and happy living in total poverty. Reputation may go up and down, but it is possible for contentment to remain constant. The true source of happiness does not lie in mastery of the eight mundane concerns. Rich, poor, praised, blamed, stimulated, bored, respected, reviled— none of these mundane concerns are in themselves sources of happiness. Nor do they prevent happiness.
The problem is that when we focus on mundane con-cerns as a means to happiness, life becomes a crap shoot. There are no guarantees. If you aspire to material wealth, you may not get it, but if you do, there is no guarantee you will be happy. If you aspire to pleasure, once a stimulus is over, so is satisfaction. There is no lasting happiness in scur-rying after praise. People who are respected and famous tend to have the same personal problems as everyone else. The fatal shortcoming of the eight mundane concerns is that they are counterfeit Dharma, misguided ways of seeking happiness, and by habitually mistaking mundane concerns for genuine Dharma, our efforts to achieve genuine happiness are continually undermined. The First Point of the Mind-Training is to train in the preliminaries in order to be able to differentiate between genuine and counterfeit Dharma. If you bank on achieving genuine happiness and fulfillment by finding the perfect mate, getting a great car, having a big house, the best insurance, a fine reputation, the top job—if these are your focus, wish also for luck in life's lottery. The objective of the First Point is to save time. Don't wait until you are eighty years old to realize the shortcomings of the eight mundane concerns; examine your priorities now. There is no need to reject these mundane concerns altogether. What is necessary is to shift your primary investment elsewhere, to genuine Dharma. Once priorities shift, the mundane concerns serve as supports for Dharma practice. Learning to distinguish between the many types of pseudo-success, the many fac-similes of happiness, and genuine happiness saves time and grief in the long run. The goal of genuine Dharma is to achieve genuine happiness.
We have covered two words, leisure and opportunity, in the first of four preliminary discursive meditations, "pre-cious human life of leisure and opportunity." Leisure and opportunity mean having the time, motivation, and circum-stances to engage in spiritual practice. "Preciousness" refers to our human potential to eliminate the sources of suffering within our own being, to transform the mind so that, no matter what the circumstances, we need never suffer from mental afflictions again. How? By identifying and progres-sively eradicating the full spectrum of the afflictions that are the source of suffering. Buddhism takes a radical view on suffering, presenting the hypothesis that it can be elimi-nated altogether. Suffering is eradicated not by finding psychological anesthetics or disengaging from the world, but by working from within to transform the mind itself. The way to eliminate suffering is to transform the mind. The Seven-Point Mind-Training is a flash card owner's manual on how to transform the mind using the raw material of life. The word "precious" in the first of the four thoughts that turn the mind serves to point out that this human life is not as it first appears; it is a precious and unique opportunity. A human life of leisure and opportunity is "precious" be-cause it is an opportunity to eradicate suffering and achieve genuine happiness. As we witness other people's suffering
and experience our own, freedom from personal suffering and having compassion for others appear to be mutually exclusive. Compassion for others' suffering seems to in-crease our own suffering, making detachment seem like the only reasonable route to one's own individual happiness. But is this really so? In 1992, I went with a group of neuroscientists to the Himalayas to study the effects of meditation. One of our topics of investigation was compassion. We asked an old Tibetan monk, a teacher of many of the other yogis who lived in the mountains, about the relationship between suffering and compassion. It is said in the Buddhist tradition that a bodhisattva, a person who is continuously motivated to help sentient beings achieve spiritual awakening, looks upon all sentient beings as a mother looks upon her child. When a child is hurt, the mother feels compassion and suf-fers. Since the goal of Dharma is to alleviate suffering, the neuroscientists and I asked the yogi about the relationship between suffering and compassion. The old monk explained the relation of compassion and suffering: "Empathetic suffering comes before compassion." The first stage of compassion is empathy. With empathy, there is suffering. But the suffering you feel by empathiz-ing then becomes fuel for the fire of compassion. Empathy combined with what Tibetans call sem-shuk, or "power of the heart," kindles compassion. The power of compassion is beyond personal suffering and focuses on solutions, what can be done. The old yogi explained to the neuroscientists that when compassion arises, suffering is transcended and one attends to how to be of service. Suffering is the fuel of compassion, not its result. The cumulative wisdom of centuries of Dharma practitio-ners states that with this precious human life of leisure and opportunity we have a fathomless capacity for compassion. This same wisdom tradition tells us we have a fathomless capacity for wisdom and power. The human potential for contemplative wisdom, compassion, and power, known to Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim contemplatives, remains virtually unexplored in the mod-ern West. We have a dismissive term for the potential of the mind— "placebo." Western culture associates the power of the mind with the power of a sugar pill. During the past four hundred years, while delighting in its growing scien-tific prowess, the West has neglected the exploration and development of the innate human potential for wisdom and compassion.
In the early 1970s, a friend of mine complained to the Dalai Lama about how difficult it is to become enlightened in such a "degenerate time" as ours. This has been a famil-iar refrain throughout the history of Buddhism, with just about every generation referring to its own era as a degen-erate time. But the Dalai Lama's response cut him short. He told him that the only reason so few people attain en-lightenment these days is that they are not practicing with the same diligence as the great adepts of the past. If people were to practice today with the same dedication as such great contemplatives as the Tibetan yogi Milarepa, they would achieve the same results, regardless of how degenerate their times are. A key element in realizing the potential of our precious human life of leisure and opportunity is faith. Faith is also a prerequisite for a successful career. If you don't have faith in your chosen field, physics for example, it will be diffi-cult to complete a Ph.D. As in many endeavors, in science it is necessary to take many things, such as research out-side your specialty, on well-grounded faith. Well-grounded faith in our potential for wisdom, compassion, and power is an important part of what Buddhists mean by "opportunity."
Another type of faith, blind faith that has no basis in reality, is useless at best. The preciousness of life is having time and circumstances to fulfill what Tsongkhapa, a great fifteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist contemplative, called our "eternal longing." This is a very significant statement because the Buddhist mean-ing of "eternal" includes all previous lifetimes, a very long time. The Seven-Point Mind-Training advises us to recog-nize right at the beginning our opportunity and potential. Also, be effective; don't get sidetracked. In this life, you have a precious opportunity to fulfill your eternal longing to find genuine happiness. Leisure and opportunity are precious and rare. The Bud-dhist meaning of "rare" is based on Buddhist cosmology, which in some respects is similar to modern astronomy concerning the size and age of the cosmos. Western astrono-mers speak of solar systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and galaxy super-clusters. Western astronomers attempt to pin-point the date of the Big Bang, one estimate being thirteen billion years ago. Buddhist cosmology agrees in principle with the theory of the universe oscillating between cycles of Big Bang/development/Big Crunch, another Big Bang/ development /Big Crunch, but it places the history of our present universe at considerably longer than thirteen billion years.
The Buddhist meaning of "rare" is embedded in the Bud-dhist cosmological worldview. Within the vast, oscillating billion-fold world systems inhabited by sentient beings, Buddhists speak of six different modes of sentient life, each with a different range of experience. Some beings have in-credible misery, some incredible bliss. Human beings have the widest spectrum of experience extending from misery to bliss. Hell and heaven, it is all here, giving "rare" a special meaning.
Within this cycle of existence, rebirth after rebirth, ex-tending back through immeasurable time in an infinite cycle of universes, there are rare occasions when we rise to a hu-man rebirth of leisure and opportunity. The Buddha used a metaphor to exemplify the rarity of a precious human life of leisure and opportunity: Imagine a tortoise swimming submerged in a vast ocean and resurfacing only once every one hundred years. The times of human rebirth are similar to the infrequent times the tortoise comes up for air. Now imagine an ox's yoke floating on the same ocean. Consider the tortoise's chances of poking his head through the yoke when he comes up for air every hundred years. This is the meaning of "rarity" in "rare and precious human life of leisure and opportunity." The object of discursive medita-tion on the rare opportunity of a precious human life of leisure and opportunity is to motivate us to use our rare opportunity wisely.
There is another layer of meaning here which addresses basic assumptions about our life. Just as Buddhist cosmol-ogy describes the outer world as infinite in space and time, Buddhists also describe human potential, the inner world, as infinite. Lama Yeshe, a fine Tibetan Buddhist teacher who passed away some years ago, used to tell this parable to his Western students: "You are like beggars living in a shack, ignoring your poverty. Meanwhile, just under the dirt floor, there is a treasure of immeasurable value. You just need to scrape off the dust and you will find it." The treasure is really within your own mind and heart. Teachers, traditions, techniques, all have the single purpose of helping unveil that which is already within you. If you think otherwise, if you believe happiness is "out there" in a religious tradition or "with your teacher" or "in the spiri-tual community," you are missing the point. Dharma consists of methods to unveil what is already within you.
The preliminaries require us to examine our basic as-sumptions about the nature of life and its potential. This examination shifts the focus of attention and shakes loose preconceptions. Buddhists aren't alone in realizing the crucial importance of focus and attention in the quest for well-being and psychological balance. William James, the eminent American psychologist, said at the end of the sci-entifically over-confident nineteenth century, "our belief and attention are the same fact. For the moment, what we attend to is reality..."3 When you begin to attend to facets of reality un-covered by discursive meditation, when you notice, for example, that your opportunity for realizing your innate human potential is very rare and precious, the practice of Dharma begins to flow naturally from your heart. Tibetan lamas emphasize the importance of this life by advising their students, "If you have a precious human life of lei-sure and opportunity, use it well. If you don't have one, get one." Death and Impermanence The second of the four thoughts that turn the mind is dis-cursive meditation on death and impermanence. The first thought is about the preciousness of having a human body, and the second thought is about that body being on loan. The purpose of pondering death and impermanence is to invert the pernicious tendency of the human mind to view things as being more stable than they are. Young people don't take getting old seriously; healthy people don't take illness seriously. The mind has a deep-rooted tendency to interpret whatever is happening in the moment as "this is it." We even grasp onto emotions as enduring even though all experience indicates otherwise. We tend to hold a per-sonal worldview in which death and illness are for other people. You will die, but not me, at least not for a long,
long time. Our unexamined sense of immortality teams up with the eight mundane concerns to shape a working hypoth-esis that death is so far in the future that it is functionally irrelevant. The intention of the second of the four dis-cursive meditations, impermanence, is to counteract this unexamined assumption about our personal immortality. The Buddha taught that everything that is conditioned is impermanent. Even on a subtle level, everything is in flux all the time. All that ascends to a high position will fall to a lower position, all that comes together comes apart, all that is gained will be lost, and all that is created will be destroyed. These are universal truths. Any situation dependent upon conditions will pass. This includes relationships, possessions, and our own bodies. When we overlook our own impermanence, there is a natural tendency to grasp onto the good things that come along. We grasp onto nice people, family, nice material stuff as we try to create a comfortable environment. Then we hold on for dear life. This is called attachment, and once we are set in this pattern of holding on, only one of two things can happen—either the object of attachment will disappear or we will disappear. There is no third possibility. No matter how skilled we are at attachment, a life domi-nated by grasping is still ruled by the law of impermanence. What is the nature of these phenomena that we care so much about? What are these feelings and mental states that propel us through life? The pursuit of happiness and avoid-ance of suffering is the central axis of our lives, and the feelings and behaviors these pursuits generate have a huge impact on our lives. Yet the source of the problem remains elusive. Why? Because we identify with our feelings. We know how we feel by identifying with feelings. The alter-native to identification is observation, attending to mental phenomena rather than grasping onto them. Mindfulness of feelings is a key to understanding subtle impermanence. The practice of observing feelings starts with very sharp attention. What is the nature of feelings? What is involved in the arising of a pleasurable feeling? When the stimulus is withdrawn, what happens to the feeling? Closely observing the feelings that you take so se-riously, that guide your decisions, will radically alter the course of your life, because feelings are ephemeral, or, as the Buddhists say, "subtly impermanent."
Experiment with observing joy or sorrow, feelings that arise every day. When one or the other of these feelings arises, attend to it and see if you can observe whether the mind that experiences the feeling has the same feeling as what it is observing. Is there a correspondence between the feeling tone of the observing awareness and the feeling that is being inspected? Can a mind in a state of equanimity observe misery or joy? This exercise leads to insight into the nature of subtle impermanence. Meditation on the nature of gross and subtle imperma-nence is also strongly emphasized in the Buddhist tradition. Going even deeper into the nature of impermanence, Ti-betans meditate on death. There is a reasonable objection to meditation on death. Since we are alive now, why not attend to being alive and save meditating on death for when we are dying? After all, when your time comes to die, you don't want to be nostalgic about life. The reason for meditating on death is not to spoil happi-ness, but to find it. Human beings tend to get into a lot mischief, and the religions of the world have taken on the responsibility of reforming humans for the better (with mixed results!). Since much of our habitual behavior is not good, we have to be persuaded to improve our behavior. Fear is a very effective method of persuasion. Religious authorities have traditionally attempted to persuade people to be good not only by fear of death but also by fear of the unknown and fear of the very unknown, the afterlife. Religious doctrines on death are purposefully scary. The Buddha taught that the purpose of his teaching on death was not just to scare people into being good but to prepare for death in this lifetime. The teachings were not designed specifically to be frightening, but if there is already fear of death, better to acknowledge that fear, engage with it and move through it so that when death actually arrives, there is no fear. By attending to the preciousness and rarity of our lives, we recognize that life is passing right now. We will never have this day again. This enormous opportunity passes quickly and then comes to a complete stop. When your body is finished, your precious human life is finished. Attend-ing to the preciousness and impermanence of life provides incentive. If there is something worthwhile doing here, do it. There is still more in these first two of the preliminary meditations. Consider again the eight mundane concerns— the acquisition of material belongings and the prevention of material loss, the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of discomfort, praise and blame, and the deeper concerns for good and bad reputation. The mind becomes disgruntled. Buddhists get compound interest on disgruntlement. Bud-dhists get irritated about being irritated and this gets out of hand. It is helpful to have a generally relaxed attitude and be passionate about one thing—spiritual practice.
Meditation on death helps extricate you from small preoc-cupations, the little stuff that gnaws away at your limitless potential. Meditation on death is a wake-up call. Its pur-pose is not to frighten you with what the boogie man will do to you after you are dead, but to get you to look at the opportunities you have right now, realize they are for a limited time only, and take advantage of them. Additionally, make sure what you are practicing is really Dharma and not one of the mundane concerns, which, in the face of death, lose their allure altogether. Buddhist meditation on death has three parts. The first is meditating on the inevitability of our own death. We can say we already know that. Easy. But are we attending to it? If we are not attending to it, we are not factoring it into our decisions. If we are not taking the inevitability of death seriously, then we don't really believe it. However carefully we live, there will come a time when death arrives. Death will step forward. It will happen. It happened to Buddha and Jesus and it happens to presi-dents and kings. Rich or poor, sooner or later you will die and your death will be yours alone. Inevitability is the first of the three parts of the meditation on death.
When I was twenty-three, I was living in India and be-came very ill with hepatitis. In addition to hepatitis, I was suffering from malnutrition, intestinal parasites, and a cat crawled into my sleeping bag and gave me lice. Each day of this illness was like tumbling down the stairs of life, and I was dying. There were a couple of nights when I figured I had a 50% chance of living through to morning. I was so close to death that the monks in my monastery began do-ing a death ritual for me. Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, the Dalai Lama's personal physician at that time, saved my life. My health turned around. I began climbing back up the stairs and knew I was not going to die. What really struck me as I lay on my bed dying was that everything else was just going on more or less normally. If I died, my fellow monks would feel sorry for me and perhaps miss me for a little while, but classes in the monastery would be held the next day. My parents would grieve for a long time. But it would all go on. I came out of that experience with a very clear sense that my life was not so much saved as my death was postponed. Death had just been shoved back. This is true for all of us. The first part of the meditation on death is to become more and more aware of its inevitability. Whatever we iden-tify with, all of it will come to a total halt. In death you lose everything. Your relationships are over, somebody gets all your stuff, and somebody else has to deal with your body. The second part of the meditation on death is that it can arrive any time. Death is unpredictable. It doesn't make an appointment. Tibetans have a list of times when death can arrive—in the womb, at birth, in infancy, childhood, youth, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, old age—any time is perfect for dying. You can die in good health or bad, rich or poor, educated or not. A big one for Westerners is that you can die whether or not your projects are finished. Death can happen any time. What is the basis for confidence that death can come at any time but not for me? Wishful thinking, nothing else. The second part of the meditation on impermanence is realizing death's unpredictability.
The third part of the meditation on death is attending to what is of value in the face of death. Death is part of life, not life's antithesis. With an awareness of death, what is the value of life? This question is the basis upon which Dharma is defined. With an awareness of your own mor-tality, Dharma is that which is of highest value. What is of value—a mind of clarity, a heart of compassion, a sense of wisdom, equanimity, patience and forbearance, serving other people? Meditation on death is the most direct way to check and refine values. The great Tibetan yogi and poet Milarepa is an inspiration as an example of the power of the Dharma to transform our lives. As a young man, Milarepa killed thirty-five people in an act of revenge. Afterward, deep remorse and the desire to die without regret motivated him to immerse himself in Dharma for the rest of his life. Tibetans regard Milarepa as an example of the power of Dharma to trans-form anyone, no matter what his past behavior, into an enlightened being in a single lifetime. The central question about death, raised in all religious traditions, is, Who is it that dies? Jesus speaks of having to "die" to gain everlasting life. Similarly, the Buddha said he had attained the "deathless state," also called the "unborn state." Who is it that is "deathless"? References to a "death-less state" and "everlasting life" in the world's religious traditions bring into question materialistic assumptions taken for granted in the West. Are we inevitably death's victims? Spiritual traditions point to a deeper reality in which the afterlife is malleable. Who is it that dies? Insofar as I identify with this body, then I am going to die. If I identify with my intelligence, my education, talents and accomplishments, desires, imagination, projects, achieve-ments, thoughts, memories, I am going to die. All mental events contingent upon the human nervous system will cease when the nervous system dies. The mind and its intel-ligence, contingent upon the brain, will die when the brain dies.
What is not contingent upon the body may not die. What Buddha referred to as "deathless" is pure awareness—spa-cious, vivid, attentive without grasping or identification— awareness free from identification with the body, and which observes sensations arise and pass, observes mental events and feelings, observes all phenomena arising and passing into space like clouds dissolving into the sky. If I am not identified with body, memories, desires or feelings, who dies? I will give you a brief account of the Tibetan description of the dying process and then some evidence to support it. I was able to confirm the first stage of dying from my own experience when I had hepatitis at age twenty-three. Before this, I thought the perfect death would be to die peacefully during sleep. When I started dying in my sleep, I woke up. It wasn't peaceful. I was awake and entered the first stage of dying as described by Tibetans. The Tibetan Buddhist description of the death process is experiential. Senses gradually shut down and feeling of the body shifts. The first thing that happens is a tremendous sense of heavi-ness. There is a leaden quality to the body as you lose control and can't move. This first stage is called "the collapse of the earth element," the element of solidity. As the death sequence continues, the moisture of the body seems to dry up. This is the collapse of the water element. Heat dissi-pates from the body and you feel cold. This is the collapse of the fire element. Your senses shut down one by one— sight, taste, smell, hearing—and in the deeper stages the tactile sense also stops—you lose the sense of having a body at all. The air element has collapsed when the breath stops. But this is not death yet. In the Tibetan description of death, the power of the elements is lost one by one, first earth, then water, fire, and lastly, air. Death comes after the breath has stopped. Death continues in the progressive withdrawal of life from the physical down into the mental. Gradually, the various mental operations shut down and dissolve into a state of simplicity. Memory, the power of recognition, imagi-nation, and emotions all dissolve. The Tibetan Buddhist account of the death process reports that first you will see a red sheen, then a whitish appearance, then a total black-out. Many people believe the final phase of death is a total obliteration. The Tibetan account is that after a brief phase of obliteration, you emerge into the "clear light of death." The clear light of death is a state in which consciousness has dissolved into its primordial state, a state that is no longer human and is independent of a functioning brain. We don't know whether there is any kind of measurable brain activity during the clear light of death, but this is something that might be researched within the next few years.
When I went to Dharamsala with the neuroscientists in 1992, we were presented with some stunning evidence supporting the Tibetan account of the dying process. His Holiness the Dalai Lama encouraged us to visit a Tibetan contemplative who had died six days before we arrived. The yogi's name was Rato Rinpoche, and he had been born in Tibet, only in the later part of his life escaping to India as a refugee from the Chinese Communist invasion. All of his bodily functions stopped six days before we arrived. In the Tibetan view, Rato Rinpoche had entered into the non-conceptual state of the clear light of death; that is, his aware-ness had withdrawn into its primordial state. For six days his body did not deteriorate. The clear light of death is described as "boundless space," "luminosity," "utter limpidity," and "innate bliss." This pri-mordial state is totally transpersonal and yet it is the very essence of our being. During death, everyone enters into the clear light of death, but only a few recognize it. Failing this recognition, after death most people feel disoriented and seek to be incarnated again from force of habit. For most people, the clear light of death is a brief, unrecog-nized state. Rato Rinpoche recognized the clear light of death and sustained it. In the October heat of 65-70 degrees, six days after clinical death, without breath, his cheeks were rosy and there was warmth around his heart. His Holiness was aware we had high-tech equipment with us and wanted to find out what could be measured in the brain of Rato Rinpoche during the clear light of death. According to everything the neuroscientists knew, a dead body should be decomposing six days after death, and they were a bit intimidated by this phenomenon completely outside their experience. When we saw Rinpoche on the seventh day, his body remained untouched on the bed where he had died, his face still had a bit of pink to it but the warmth at his heart had vanished. We missed the yogi's sustained clear light of death by just a few hours. In the Buddhist contemplative tradition, if one experi-ences the ground state of all other forms of awareness prior to death, then there is a good chance of being able to ascer-tain this "deathless state" during the dying process. This is the final opportunity presented to us in this life for trans-formation. Experiencing while in good health the nature of primordial awareness, which later manifests as the clear light of death, is one of the main goals of Tibetan Buddhist meditation.
There are a lot of obstacles in meditation—knees ache, the back hurts, somebody makes a noise, duties and projects beckon, always something. The one meditation session in which all obstacles vanish is the dying process. There is no pain because your body has shut down and you won't hear noises because the senses have stopped. The great problem of meditation, distraction, is solved when you die because your brain won't support a scattered mind any more. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition claims that it is possible to sus-tain the clear light of death and emerge from it with the clarity and freedom to choose conditions of rebirth. While death is inevitable and unpredictable, it is also mal-leable. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, death is considered the most marvelous opportunity life presents for meditation. You have a choice whether to be prepared for the opportu-nity presented at death or to freak out at death, clinging desperately to all the people and things we have to leave behind.
It is ever so easy to fall into uncritical complacency with regard to death, based on the belief that death is just the cessation of life and therefore nothing to worry about. I have often heard the claim that religious people cling to beliefs in the immortality of the soul or the continuity of individual consciousness after death because they simply cannot cope with the reality of personal annihilation at death. I find this hypothesis dubious at best. Which is more daunting: to consider the Buddhist hypothesis that each of us will experience the ethical consequences of our behav-ior in future lifetimes, or to believe that death will simply terminate our experience forever, with no more problems and no more worries? I think in many cases people cling to the speculative notion of personal extinction at death as an absolute fact because they are intimidated by the thought that they might depart this life and consciously enter a vast unknown. Now that's scary! While many people are committed to the belief that death brings the total cessation of personal existence, many oth-ers claim to be agnostic, quite honestly admitting that they don't know what happens at death and therefore have no views on the matter at all. At first glance, this seems quite a reasonable and intelligent position to take, for, after all, who among us really does know what happens at death? On the other hand, if we examine our working hypotheses regard-ing the significance of death, I think we will all find that we do indeed hold onto beliefs in this regard, whether or not we regard ourselves as agnostic. In our day-to-day lives, do we yearn for any kind of favorable experience or hope to avoid any misfortune after death? If so, do these con-cerns actually influence the way we lead our lives and the kinds of choices we make from day to day? Do we have any plans, hopes, or fears that are not confined to this life alone? If the answer to all these questions is no, then we are basing our lives upon the assumption that we will ex-perience nothing after death. Even if we say we do believe in the continuity of consciousness after death, if all our
desires and concerns are confined within this lifetime, we are still using the working hypothesis that we will experience nothing after death. This assumption is as much a belief as the assertion of the continuity of individual consciousness after death. Adherents of both positions are "believers." The basis of the Buddhist assertion of the conservation of consciousness is the experience of the Buddha himself, corroborated by countless Buddhist contemplatives after him. The insights from such direct experience were then formalized within the context of a coherent, rational account of the nature and causes of consciousness. Many Buddhist and other contemplatives have claimed to know that con-sciousness continues on after death, and many have given clear instructions on how to discover this truth for oneself.4 Many cognitive scientists, on the other hand, also claim to know that consciousness ceases at death. What is the basis of their assertion? Modern science has no means of objec-tively detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in anything—human, animal, plant, or mineral. It has no widely accepted definition of consciousness, nor have cog-nitive scientists discovered either the necessary or sufficient causes that lead to the emergence of consciousness. They are discovering more and more brain correlates to specific states of consciousness, but they have yet to discover what it is about the brain that enables it to produce or even have an influence on conscious states. In short, as the materialist philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett acknowledges, "With consciousness...we are still in a terrible muddle. Conscious-ness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused."5 In the absence of clear scientific evidence, it seems that the basis of the materialist view of consciousness is simply a metaphysical predilection, or an article of faith in the primacy of matter.
With science providing so little actual knowledge about the nature and origins of consciousness, what grounds do we have for the belief in eternal, mindless death? As sooth-ing as this notion may be, it seems to be little more than sheer conjecture at this point. Moreover, it simply ignores the experiences of countless contemplatives throughout the world who have achieved deep states of meditative con-centration and claim to have seen for themselves the exist-ence of their own past lives. Buddhist contemplatives do not regard themselves in "terrible muddle" with regard to consciousness. Perhaps that's because they are part of a rig-orous heritage that has taken the experiential investigation of consciousness very seriously for over two millennia, whereas modern science largely overlooked consciousness until the last decade of the twentieth century. And it still has no rigorous means of investigating consciousness firsthand, which is the only way we even know that conscious-ness exists. No wonder science is still so much in the dark in this regard! When we accept the theory of the continuity of conscious-ness beyond death as a working hypothesis, meditation on death becomes a great remedy for mental afflictions. It is difficult to be arrogant if you are aware you are going to die. Attachments lose their luster in the face of death. The Buddha said awareness of death and impermanence is the most powerful of all discernments to radically reorient one's life on the path of Dharma. The Unsatisfactory Nature of the Cycle of Existence The First Point of the Seven-Point Mind-Training, training in the preliminaries, continues with the third of the "four thoughts that turn the mind"—meditation on the perva-siveness of suffering and discontent in samsara, the Buddhist term for the entire cycle of existence in which we are subject to mental afflictions and their results.
When Buddha attained enlightenment, he doubted any-one would believe what he had discovered about the nature of reality and the human capacity for freedom and spiri-tual awakening. The Buddha left Bodh Gaya, the place of his enlightenment, and headed for Sarnath to seek his five previous companions with whom he had meditated and practiced austerities for six years. The Buddha considered them good candidates to be able to fathom what he would reveal. The Buddha's first teaching was not about bliss. The first thing he taught his previous companions was the reality of suffering. First, recognize the reality of suffering. There are so many happy things to talk about, why talk about suffering? We all believe we know a lot about suffer-ing. In the Buddha's first teaching on suffering and the nature of existence, he lifted the surface layer of our strong habitual tendency to deny suffering. "Recognize suffering," the Buddha said and he proceeded to delineate the subtle levels of suffering. There are different types of suffering. The first suffering, "the suffering of suffering," is blatant suffering, physical or mental. Illness and physical pain are blatant suffering. There are also the mental sufferings of anxiety, fear, and unhappiness. As obvious and omnipresent as blatant suffering is, we tend to deny it. Young people look at middle-aged people and their afflictions and think, "That's their problem." Middle-aged people look at people in nursing homes and think, "This is for old people." We habitually think the bla-tant suffering of sickness and aging is something that happens only to other people. Other people get diseases, lose jobs, and have car accidents. Denial is the soothing and false reassurance that the suffering that afflicts other people won't happen to us. There is a story about an Australian aborigine who was caught for stealing, tried, and convicted. When he heard that the punishment for stealing was hanging, he cried,
"You can't hang me! Hanging is for white people. They're used to it!" Likewise, we tend to think sickness and old age are for people who are used to it. Also included in the "suffering of suffering" is the bla-tant suffering of disappointment. Suffering occurs when we want something very much and don't get it. Suffering also occurs when we have something we really want but lose it. For example, you may be totally in love with your significant other, so happy. Then he or she says, "I don't like you any more. Good-bye," and the result is blatant suf-fering. Blatant suffering includes not wanting something and getting it and also not being able to get rid of something you don't want. The Buddha's first teaching at Sarnath con-cerned the blatant sufferings of sickness, old age, death, and the many varieties of disappointment we tend to think we are magically immune from. But blatant suffering is only the tip of the iceberg of suffering. Recently, members of the Mind and Life Institute had a discussion with the Dalai Lama about potential topics for its next conference with Western scientists. One of the top-ics suggested to His Holiness was to compare Western views and Buddhist views of suffering. Sounds interest-ing, right? But His Holiness's response was that Western cognitive scientists and psychologists generally focus only on blatant suffering, whereas the Buddhist view is that the real problem with suffering is something Westerners don't regard as a problem at all. So he discarded that topic. There are two deeper levels in the Buddhist taxonomy of suffering. The next level after the "suffering of suffer-ing" is the "suffering of change." Our stimulus-driven states of pleasure, happiness, and gratification depend on events working out one way and not another and are considered states of suffering. Things go the way you want or they don't and, either way, you suffer. This is one of the views that have earned Buddhists the "sourpuss" label. How can having things go your way be suffering? Because there is something deeper going on. What the Buddhists are point-ing out is that whether you get something you want and hold onto it; or you get rid of something you don't want; or something you don't want to happen doesn't—all these events are conditioned and subject to change. Buddhists are very interested in sources and not merely effects, and stimulus-driven pleasures are not considered sources of genuine happiness. Does driving a Porsche, getting rid of a nuisance, or enjoying the fact that your home is not burning down, tap into a source of genuine happiness? If something is a genuine source of happiness, then increased dura-tion and frequency of that stimulus should result in more happiness. But how often does that happen, and for how long? The Buddha's teaching was to look deeper, far be-yond the law of diminishing returns, for the genuine source of happiness.
The Buddhist analysis of pleasure appears bleak. The Buddha said that although stimulus-driven pleasures may produce relative well-being, they don't pass the test as genu-ine sources of happiness. For example, the Tibetan monk Palden Gyatso spent thirty-three years in a concentration camp operated by the Chinese Communists. He was starved and tortured for years on end. Imagine that every Tuesday you got tortured but on one Tuesday, the person who tor-tures you doesn't come to work because he is sick. A message arrives in your cell, "I cannot torture you today because I don't feel well." What would you experience? Happiness! In a concentration camp when somebody brings you rotten food that fell in the dirt, what is your response? Happi-ness. Relative to having no food, you are happy. But from a perspective outside the concentration camp, it seems that everything inside is suffering, every moment, including the Tuesday when the torturer was ill because, even on a day when he wasn't tortured, Palden Gyatso still starved. But inside the concentration camp there were good days and bad days. Getting a little bit of garbage for a meal makes it a good day. From outside the concentration camp, we could say that the perspective of the prisoner is limited. The Buddhist teaching is that from the viewpoint of an individual who has gained realization of Ultimate Truth, all of what we experience is suffering. But this is not dis-mal! If a prisoner in a concentration camp thought that everybody in the world was also imprisoned in a concen-tration camp that would be dismal. If the prisoner believes there are people outside who have enough to eat and are not tortured at all, that is an optimistic and inspiring thought. The Buddha taught that we are suffering in a type of concentration camp fenced in by our limited views and mental afflictions. The Buddha taught that from the view-point of one who has experientially realized Ultimate Truth, we are in the ocean of samsara and everything we experience is unsatisfactory. The Buddhist position is that what we experience as plea-sure is merely a relative attenuation of our dissatisfaction. There is nothing wrong with the happiness derived from stimulus-dependent joys, but from the Buddhist perspective, these states of happiness are merely a fleeting attenuation of suffering. When a pleasant stimulus is removed, the mind falls back into its habitual state, a state that is afflicted, and a state that is suffering. The true source of suffering lies deeper in our experience and underneath temporary attenuations.
There are some simple tests for the Buddhist hypothesis. In situations of sensory deprivation, when stimuli are re-moved, boredom, a subtle form of mental suffering, sets in. Without anything to stimulate the mind in a pleasurable fashion, we move beyond boredom to loneliness, uneasi-ness, and unhappiness. Pascal said the primary affliction of modern man is the "inability to sit quietly in one's cham-bers." Being alone for a sustained period is a type of torture called solitary confinement. In a sensory deprivation tank where stimulation comes only from your mind, over time the mind becomes chaotic and breaks down. From the Buddhist perspective, situations of solitary con-finement or sensory deprivation do not create difficulties. Instead, these situations uncover problems that were al-ready there. What happens when we are alone or sensorily deprived is the same as what is happening all the time but is buried under stimulation. Circumstances are not the cause of suffering. The Buddhist view is that suffering is due to underlying afflictions of the mind. We fall into bore-dom, malaise, sadness, anxiety, and depression when stimuli aren't coming in not because we are social animals, not because we have bodies, but because the mind is af-flicted, though not intrinsically or immutably. What appears as suffering when stimulation is removed is the afflicted nature of the mind, what Buddhists call the "suffering of change." With respect to the afflicted nature of the mind, the suffering of change, everything else is a symptom. The Buddha's teaching that stimulus-driven pleasure is simply an attenuation of suffering directs us to look even deeper for the root cause of suffering. Blatant suffering, the "suffering of suffering," is obvious as long as you are not in denial. Understanding the "suf-fering of change" takes some thoughtful investigation. The next level of suffering is the "the pervasive suffering of conditioned existence," or the fundamental suffering of vulnerability, and is deeper still. We are profoundly vulnerable due to the nature of the way we exist. At present there is nothing that makes us immune to the suffering ex- perienced in concentration camps. The layer of skin between the environment and our nervous system is only microme-ters thick. The question as to what protection we can have against the innumerable situations that cause suffering and fear has proven to be a dead end for many great thinkers who argue that this is just the way it is; this is the way we are made; humans suffer because we are human. Another argument is that humans suffer because nature can't be con-trolled. Nor can we control time, so we age, we suffer, we die, no matter what medical treatment we receive. That is the way it is. Suffering is part of reality. As Sigmund Freud observed, "We are so made that we can derive intense en-joyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things...Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience."
The Western philosophic cornerstone "humans suffer be-cause we are human" is, in the Buddhist view, a non-answer stemming from an incomplete analysis. The Buddhist analy-sis of vulnerability results in the extraordinary hypothesis that we suffer because we identify with, or "closely hold onto," the constituents of our personal identity: "This is my body. These are my desires, my thoughts, my ambitions, my fears; this is me." Given that we have a body, thoughts, and feelings, is there an alternative to identifying with them? The Buddhist answer is yes. Realize the nature of your own mind and identity, fathom the nature of your own body, and with the sword of insight, cut the root of suffering. I suspect this is what the Dalai Lama had in mind when he turned down suffering as a topic for an East-West mind science meeting. Blatant suffering? Not so interesting. Stop denying and there it is. Suffering of change? Western science assumes it can't be fixed because the problem is hard-wired. The suffering of vulnerability, what Buddhism considers the key to suffer-ing, is not recognized in the West at all. Why do we have the suffering of vulnerability? Because we grasp onto our body, our identity, our self. Very deep. The key is inside. A person who is liberated, who has freed his or her mind of all mental afflictions, still experiences physical suffer-ing. The difference between us and an arhat, a person who has freed the mind from mental affliction, is that an arhat doesn't identify with pain. Arhats experience physical pain vividly but don't grasp onto it; they can take action to avoid or alleviate pain, but whether they do so or not, the physical pain doesn't come inside. What an arhat does not experi-ence is mental suffering. A buddha, one who is perfectly spiritually awakened, has gone a further step. A buddha has no mental suffering of his or her own, but is vividly and non-dually aware of the suffering of others.
