Stabilizing the Mind after It Has Been Grasped

Y esterday, of the two main topics of our text, tranquility and insight, we began to study tranquility, and of the three sections of the presentation of tranquility meditation, we went through the first, which is grasping the mind when it is ungrasped. Today we are going to study the second section, which is stabilizing the mind after it has been grasped. This refers to the stage that comes after you have been practicing tranquility meditation and have been working with your mind for some time, and know, therefore, the basic method. You understand and have experienced the process of tranquility and can rest your mind in a state of tranquility to some degree. At this point, in order to help you progress further, the first thing that is presented is the mahabrahma samadhi of stability. Now normally, when we say mahabrahma, it refers to a god or deva of some kind. Here the term brahma is used to mean purity. So mahabrahma samadhi refers to a samadhi in which your mind’s faculties, having been brought to stability, are heightened and, therefore, experienced in their purity.

The basis of this samadhi is the following visualization. In the center of your body, at the level of the heart, you visualize a four-petaled white lotus, and resting on the center of that lotus flower, you visualize a small sphere of extremely bright white light. It should be no larger than the size of a pea, and it should be visualized as very bright, even brilliant. Now, previously, in the context of grasping the mind through the breathing, you learned how to hold your breath. Here you also hold your breath. Through holding your breath, you think that you cause this tiny brilliant sphere of white light to rise up from the lotus in your heart, upward through your body, from which it emerges, shooting up out of the aperture at the center of the top of your head, and continues to rise until it reaches the highest reaches of space above you. While doing this, you also put more exertion into your physical posture, so that your posture is especially strict, involving even a little tension. You also raise your gaze, so that you are looking upward, and attempt to make your mind very bright, clear, and cheerful.

This meditation is useful if you find that your mind is unclear, torpid or depressed, or when you find yourself uninterested in practice and your mind dull. The mahabrahma samadhi of stability will serve to cheer you up and to clarify, or promote lucidity in, your mind. In the practice of both tranquility and insight, torpor is a problem. But it is especially a problem for practitioners of tranquility, because the practice of tranquility meditation, by its very nature, emphasizes the achievement of stillness, and stillness can, if you are not attentive, produce a state of torpor. This technique is introduced at this point to enable one to maintain stillness while dispelling the torpor that can accompany it. For the proper practice of tranquility meditation, the mind’s lucidity needs to be at full strength. It should not be weakened in anyway by the stillness one is cultivating. So this practice helps within the context of stillness to promote and even increase the mind’s lucidity.

The second meditation in this section of tranquility instruction is called the subterranean samadhi, which is similar in a way to the previous instruction, except that it is a remedy for exactly the opposite problem. Sometimes we find that our minds are unable to come to rest, that we are excited by the thoughts that pass through our minds and cannot let go of them. Generally, this is some kind of pleasant excitement during which you cannot stop yourself from recollecting pleasant things, pleasant memories, and so on. It is like, for example, when you are so excited by something that you cannot go to sleep. This obviously disturbs the practice of meditation.

A second, and in some ways similar state, is one in which you are disturbed by thoughts of intense regret, regretting things you have done or things that have happened in the past that you cannot let go of. In either case, whether it is excitement or regret, it is equally disturbing to the practice of meditation, because it causes the mind to become unstable. This meditation—the subterranean samadhi—is designed to serve as a remedy or antidote for this problem. Here in the center of your body, at the level of the heart, you visualize a lotus flower as before, except that here, because you are visualizing the flower in order to pacify or cool down the mind, instead of visualizing it as white, you visualize it as black. Also, because you are trying to bring your mind’s energy downward, you visualize the lotus flower as facing downward. And then you think that resting on the center of the lotus flower which is facing downward—and, of course, now on the underside— is a tiny sphere of black light, again visualized as no larger than a pea, so that the meditation is sharply focused. Then you think that the sphere of black light descends from where it starts out, down through your body, comes out the bottom, and continues going down very far into and below the ground. Furthermore, while doing this, you think that this sphere of black light is not something physically light, but very heavy, and that its heaviness or weight causes it to descend through and below the earth.

At this point, two techniques have been presented in this section. The first, the mahabrahma samadhi, is presented as a remedy for dullness, and the second, the subterranean samadhi, as a remedy for the wildness of either excitement or regret. The third instruction presented here is simply to apply either one of these as needed, depending upon your experience. Any given person will at different times experience both torpor and wildness of mind. So when your mind is dull, you practice the mahabhrama samadhi, and when your mind is wild, you practice the subterranean samadhi. That you should apply these two meditations as needed constitutes the third instruction in this section.

Many problems can come up in the practice of meditation. By problems here I do not mean final impediments that will destroy the path, but temporary stumbling blocks. Of these, two are the most common: torpor and wildness of mind. These techniques are presented here in order to overcome these two tendencies. You pacify the tendency to torpor by practicing the mahabhrama samadhi; you pacify the tendency to wildness and excitement by practicing the subterranean samadhi. It is necessary to overcome both of these tendencies so that your mind can come to rest naturally.

Next, in the second of the three sections that make up the presentation of tranquility meditation, comes the instruction in the nine methods or stages of bringing the mind to rest. The first of the nine is called placement. Placement here simply means the initial process of bringing the mind to some kind of rest or stability. This is accomplished by applying the methods taught under the category of grasping the mind when it is ungrasped. As you will remember, this process consists of training the sixth consciousness not to follow or be caught by the thoughts that arise within it. These thoughts are of various kinds, but regardless of the thought’s content, it is to be treated in the same way at this stage. Thoughts can be very negative, they can be made up of various kleshas, they can be what we regard as unvirtuous, but one does not follow them in the practice of tranquility. And even if thoughts are virtuous, in the practice of tranquility meditation they are still regarded as a potential source of disturbance. Usually we think that virtuous thoughts are not a problem, but in the practice of tranquility meditation a virtuous thought can be just as disturbing or distracting as an unvirtuous one. So therefore, in this first of the nine stages or nine methods of bringing the mind to rest, you are attempting to maintain a state in which your mind is placed at rest, and yet without impairing the mind’s lucidity. The mind is still and at rest, but not dull, and maintains its brilliant lucidity. Now, at this stage, which is the stage of a beginning practitioner of tranquility meditation, this state will not last very long. Nevertheless, getting your mind to the point at which it comes to rest while maintaining its natural lucidity, for however brief a period, is the first of the nine stages—placement.

When you practice this first discipline, the discipline of placement, repeatedly, eventually there occurs some prolonging of the state of stillness, the state of the mind being at rest. This state of rest, which was previously achieved as the first of the nine stages, when somewhat prolonged, constitutes the second stage, called prolonged placement. It is the same state of rest as experienced in the first stage, but here it is lasting longer. Then, through cultivating the second stage, you reach the third stage, which has two different names. In this text it is called definite placement or certain placement, but in other contexts it is called returning placement. While returning placement is not the term used in this text, it is perhaps the most descriptive term for this stage, and for the following reason. In achieving the third stage you are obviously still practicing the second, which means that you are working with a somewhat prolonged state of stillness. Nevertheless, it is not prolonged indefinitely. At some point thoughts arise. The discipline and practice of the third stage consists of not wandering on the basis of the arising of a thought, not being caught by it, not following it, but instead, recognizing that a thought has arisen. When a thought arises, one recognizes it, thinking, “A thought has arisen; my mind is not at rest,” and on the basis of that recognition, one returns to the state of stillness. That is why the most descriptive term for the third stage is returning placement, although in our text it is called certain or definite placement.

The fourth method of resting the mind, called close placement, refers to resting in the state of stillness to which you have returned when, through applying the mindfulness and alertness enjoined in the third method, you have recognized the arising of a thought and have been able to return to that state of placement or stillness. So, close placement consists of resting in or remaining in placement subsequent to your return to that state. But despite such resting, there will continue to be disturbances of various kinds. Sometimes you might be disturbed by your thoughts; sometimes your mind might become dull or torpid or sleepy; sometimes you may be afflicted by lack of interest in the practice itself. The next two methods, the fifth and the sixth, are both remedies to these problems. Either one can be applied as a remedy. However, they are enumerated separately because they are different techniques or methods. The fifth, which is called taming, is recollection of the qualities or benefits of samadhi. When your mind is torpid or disturbed, when it is difficult to practice, when you find yourself uninterested in practice, the fifth method, taming, is a way of recollecting why you are practicing tranquility meditation and the benefits of doing so. The immediate benefits of tranquility meditation are physical and mental well-being. The ultimate benefit of tranquility meditation is the pacification of kleshas or mental afflictions. Now, we cannot say the eradication of mental afflictions, because tranquility alone is insufficient to eradicate mental afflictions. That is accomplished through insight meditation. The reason tranquility alone cannot eradicate the afflictions is that it does not contain enough discernment, enough prajna. But tranquility does weaken the mental afflictions. Literally the Tibetan term used here, gö nönpa, means “to suppress,” but it is not suppression in the sense of repression of mental afflictions, it is more the idea of debilitating or weakening the mental afflictions. In any case, through the application of the fifth method you promote your enthusiasm for the practice by recollecting its benefits, and to the degree one generates enthusiasm, one’s enthusiasm naturally and spontaneously reduces the amount of effort required to bring the mind to rest. The more enthusiastic you are about the practice, the more effortlessly your mind will come to rest.

For example, in the life of Jetsun Milarepa, soon after he had received his initial instruction from Lord Marpa, he went into retreat in a cave called Tiger Nak at the Southern Cliffs, near Marpa’s residence. While Milarepa was in retreat there, Marpa came to see him and said to Milarepa, “You are practicing very diligently, but why do you not take a break?” And Milarepa said, “I do not need to take a break; practice itself is taking a break.” Milarepa perceived practice as a state of rest or a state of relaxation because of his enthusiasm for it. Because he was so enthusiastic, he perceived diligent practice as effortless. Now, we are not Milarepa, but nevertheless, to the extent that we recollect the benefits of tranquility meditation, to the same extent we will perceive it as effortless.

The sixth method of resting the mind deals in some cases with the same problems and in other cases with similar problems as dealt with by the fifth. In the fifth, the mind is tamed or subdued through the recollection of the benefits of the samadhi of stillness. In the sixth, called pacification, the mind is pacified through recollecting what is wrong with thoughts. Often, when we are overpowered by our thoughts—when we cannot stop thinking—it is because we regard the particular thoughts that we are entertaining as either valuable because they are pleasurable or valuable because they are in some way important. In either case, the problem is that we are attaching some kind of undeserved value and importance to the thoughts. That is why we hold onto them. The sixth method is simply to recollect that in the context of meditation practice, thoughts are completely useless. They serve no function. They are no good whatsoever. They are a complete waste of time. And they impede the practice of dharma. This recollection of what is wrong with thinking will naturally cause you to stop liking thoughts, and when you do not like them, when you do not enjoy thinking, then you will not need to repress your thoughts; you will not need to try consciously to stop thinking, because if you do not like something, you simply will not do it. So the sixth method, called pacification, is to recollect the defects of thinking.

The seventh method of resting the mind is called thorough pacification. Now, sometimes when we practice meditation, there are no problems, and as long as there are no problems, as long as your mind is not distracted or disturbed, you simply continue in the state of placement. But sometimes, of course, there are problems, and here the point is not to attempt to solve these problems—specifically the disturbances caused by thoughts—through force. One is not to attempt to force thoughts not to arise by thinking, “I must not allow my mind to move at all.” Here the method employed involves selecting one thought, or one type of thought, from among the many that might be arising in your mind and rest in that. Thoughts can arise with unlimited variety of content. We have all kinds of thoughts. Especially disturbing thoughts include thoughts of spite, the wish to harm someone, thoughts of jealousy or competitiveness, and thoughts of regret and guilt. Pleasant thoughts include thoughts of excitement, recollection of pleasure, and so forth. In this method you recognize one particular thought that has arisen— and here you are not treating thought as an abstraction or a generality, but you are working with one particular thought—and you rest in that thought. When you rest in that thought, you are not attempting to fight the thought. You are not attempting to get rid of it, stop it or suppress it. You are resting in it, and when you rest in it, the thought dissolves. Now in the text it says that, if through resting in a thought you succeed in thoroughly recognizing its nature, the stuff of which it is made, it will be self-liberated. This method of resting in the thought rather than attempting to suppress it is the seventh technique, thorough pacification.

Through the application of the first seven methods of resting the mind, you achieve the ability to apply the eighth and ninth methods. The eighth is called unification. Unification here refers to the stage at which, through the preceding diligent application of the fifth, sixth, and seventh methods as remedies for problems in meditation, you no longer need to apply force in your meditation practice. You are no longer trying to force anything. Therefore, there is no fluctuation or oscillation between the state of relaxed meditation and the state of forced meditation in response to problems. So the eighth method or stage, unification, really refers to the point when your mind is resting naturally. This in turn leads to the ninth and last stage, called even placement, which is a state in which there is no longer any distraction. The term even or equal here means specifically that your mind is in a state of placement free both of the defects of tension and of excessive, sloppy relaxation. The absence of tension and of the need for force, and the absence of sloppy relaxation or distraction allow the quality of the placement of your mind, of the resting of your mind, to become thoroughly even or equal. These nine methods of resting the mind are presented so that you understand what tranquility meditation is, what the process of bringing the mind to stillness is, and how to proceed or get on with it. Therefore, the presentation of these two topics—the nine methods of resting the mind and the preceding three samadhis practiced as remedies or antidotes for disturbances—make up the second of the three sections here, which is stabilizing the mind after it has been gotten hold of or grasped.

So at this point we have completed the first two of the three sections of the presentation of tranquility meditation—grasping the mind when it is ungrasped and stabilizing it when it has been grasped—and each contains various sections. If you look at your text you will see that these subsections are numbered as teaching sessions and as practice sessions. These are two parallel numbering systems that are nevertheless different from each other. If you have any questions at this point about what we have discussed so far, please feel free to ask them. Question: I have questions concerning Tibetan terminology and its translation. First, what is really meant by thought or namtok. Discursive thought is one type of namtok. Then there is a kind of visual thought that is on the surface of the mind, like daydreaming, for example, when you are thinking about going somewhere. Daydreamy thoughts seem to be very much on the surface of the mind and usually move slowly. Then there is what we call klesha. Is klesha included in namtok? And then there is a kind of visual thought that one becomes aware of, and my suspicion is that this is part of the okju or undercurrent of subtle thoughts, but I’m not sure. This type of thought is visual, though it moves through the mind very, very fast, much too fast to daydream about or speculate about; in fact, it usually moves so fast one cannot even recognize the images as they go though; it is just going through like a high speed train. Again, I suspect that this falls in the category of subtle thought. And then I’m wondering if there is similar subtle discursive thought. By discursive thought I mean that kind of thought that is made up of words, as when you are talking to yourself. So when you are saying, “thought,” I’m wondering if you could be very precise as to what kind of thought you are referring, whether visual thought or discursive, linguistic, verbal thought. And as to these two types of thoughts, do they both occur as coarse thoughts and as subtle thoughts in the undercurrent of thought?

Rinpoche: Well! [laughter] In brief—yes [more laughter]. The answer to this question is found in pramana, the study of valid cognition. There a division of thoughts into images and linguistic thoughts is mentioned. The thoughts that you were describing as visual images are called abstractions. Now, normally we use the word abstraction to mean a linguistic concept of something, but here mental visual images are called abstractions or generalizations because they constitute the sixth consciousness’ replication or replica of sensory information, in the example you gave, of visual images of an eye consciousness.15 So the type of thought that you are describing is categorized as a generalization based on sense information, and in spite of the term dönchi or generalization or abstraction, it is still primarily visual rather than linguistic. It is characterized as a thought and can either have a coarse obvious presence or be a part of the undercurrent of subtle thought.

The second type of thought that you are describing, which is for humans linguistic thought, is said in the literature of valid cognition to have two divisions or two sub-varieties. One is thoughts which are based upon the apprehension of a thing and the linguistic concept of that thing as being inherently connected or as being the same. That is something that humans have because we have language. The other variety of this is called the possibility of confusing a thing and a concept or association with that thing. So to be clear and to be brief the difference between these two is that one is a fully developed linguistic thought and the other is a process of mental association. The latter, the thoughts of association, are found more in animals and in human infants. For example, an animal will not have a linguistic concept for water. It does not think water or have any other linguistic concept for it. However, when it hears water but cannot see it, the animal will have a reaction to that sound through association, and that is the equivalent in an animal of a linguistic concept, according to the study of valid cognition. This is also very prevalent among humans in early infancy.

Among older humans what takes the place of this association is much more linguistically oriented. Most of the linguistic thinking that we do is based upon the full association or full mixing up of a thing and the linguistic concept we use to designate it. Another term for this is the confusion of appearance for its designation, or you could say it the other way around, the confusion of the designation for its appearance. For example, when we use the word water to refer to water, there is no inherent reason why the sound of that particular word should mean that particular thing. Nevertheless, once we have absorbed or imbibed that linguistic concept, we think of them as the same, which they are not. So this type of thought, linguistic thought, can also be both coarse and subtle. It can be fully manifested in the mind or it can be present as part of the undercurrent as well. Now about the term namtok (in Tibetan) or vikulpa (in Sanskrit), the term tokpa, which also means thought, simply refers to a mental event that constitutes some kind of upsurge of the mind’s capacity to conceptualize. The adjective nampar or vi in vikulpa, which means complete, means that the thought is fully developed. Nevertheless, even the undercurrent, as subtle as it is, is still considered to be vikulpa or namtok—fully developed thought— and does not have to be called only tokpa.

Question: So if you catch it at the upsurge, does that mean namtok does not arise? Rinpoche: Well basically tokpa is understood as a cognitive event and namtok means a prominent upsurge of that, and that is why the word for realization is linguistically related to tokpa; it is almost the same, because of the basic idea that tokpa refers to cognition or knowing primarily, and namtok to a full-blown conceptuality.

Question: What is the difference between the self-liberation in the seventh stage and the self-liberation in the mahamudra tradition? Rinpoche: As you mentioned in your question, the term self-liberation is used in both cases, but it has somewhat different meanings. In the case of the seventh of the nine methods of resting the mind, it refers to the fact that without one’s having to get rid of the thought, it simply dissolves naturally of itself. In the context of mahamudra, self-liberation refers to the irrelevance of thought because there is recognition of the mind’s nature.16 We have to stop here. Thrangu Rinpoche and students dedicate the merit.