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it. There’s a second map that is designed to give methods that stabilize that awakening up to the point that you have it all the time, 24/7. And there’s a third map which starts when you have awakening all the time, or most of the time, and brings you to full buddhahood.
There are four main areas that we cover in preliminary practices, four things that need to get done. The first thing that needs to get done is something like—we would call them in the West—motivational practices. When you’re caught up in the busy-ness of everyday life, what is it that leads you to set as a priority any kind of spiritual practice, so that you actually set aside not only time to do that, but make it the central focus of your life and living in the world, rather than something that you dabble at or think is a good idea? In Western psychological terms, we call that a “stage of change problem.”
Likewise in the East, there’s a literature in Tibetan Buddhism similar to the stage of change literature in the West. The idea is that spiritual practice is hard. It takes a lot of work and there are many people who are not motivated to do it. So, the motivational practices in Tibetan Buddhism are called lözhi, the four attitudes. They’re done in sequence. And the first thing you do is you look at what’s called precious opportunity, or daljor. It’s a visualization you do in the context of everyday life. You think about other lives that you might’ve been born into other than what you have now.
You think about being born into a life where you lose your mental faculties, let’s say, dementia. Lots of people have that these days. You imagine it as if that were your life; do a quick visualization on that, drop it and come back to right now, to what you have now, how you actually enjoy the full mental capacities and intelligence to do a practice like this. Then, you imagine all the people who go through life-threatening medical illnesses, and you imagine that that’s your lot in life. Then, you drop that, and you come back to what you have now, which is that most of you enjoy reasonable health to support doing this practice. Then, you imagine the context of the culture we live in. You imagine all the people who live in war torn cultures, what it’s like, as if that’s what you were growing up in, where everything is in chaos. And then, you imagine that you live in a culture where things are reasonably safe even after 9/11. Then, you imagine all the people throughout history who lived in times where they didn’t have exposure to spiritual practices, and you imagine, in contrast, how fortunate you are. And each one of these scenes hammers home the point of the preciousness of what you have. You have reasonable health, you have the intelligence, you have the stability of a culture; you have exposure to all the teachings, complete bodies of teachings. You have a community of practitioners that you can do this with, so you don’t have to do it alone, and favorable conditions to practice under. That’s a lot. And after you go through the visualization enough times, you get the point that this is a rare and precious opportunity.
Then, the next thing you do is you imagine impermanence. Nothing lasts. Think of all the material things in your life that wear out. I just came back from India with my brand-new luggage bag. The bag handle lasted basically two flights. [Laughter] Now it’s time for another one. Impermanence. Everything changes. Think of all the relationships in your life that you’ve been through. Nothing lasts. And ultimately, when you go through all the things in life materially, interpersonally, all the things that don’t last, then you come and look at yourself. You look at the aging process, and you actually visualize your own aging, and it culminates with visualizing your own death. You rehearse it. That makes the motivation a little bit more urgent, moves you along a bit, and maybe spiritual practice is something that would be useful because if you do these practices, there is no death. It’s not possible. It’s just the body going. As Rinpoche…
So, the third one is called causes and effects of karma, like a cost benefit analysis. You imagine different wholesome and unwholesome actions that you engage in, behaviors, and then you sort of predict how that’s going to impact you and others over time. Sort of string it out. Predict the future. And then after you see what you can imagine to be the destructive effects of certain courses of actions, it just makes it harder to go there, including all the time that you waste with things that go nowhere. When you finish that, it not only hammers home the point even more clearly that there’s a certain…
And the last is the suffering of the six realms of samsāra. You go through all of the suffering of the hell realms, and all the suffering of the hungry ghost realms, and all the sufferings of the animal realms, and the god realms, and the demigod realms and the human realms. We were talking about the demigod realms—that’s where the movie stars live. Those are our demigods, in their own kind of hell—rich and famous and miserable. So, after you go through these four lözhi or attitudes, the outcome, if you…
The presumption here is that everybody is awake all the time. Awakening isn’t some state you ultimately find. It’s always here. Every moment, it’s here. There are too many clouds, so you don’t see it. The sun always shines, but we don’t see it when it rains. So, when the clouds clear up, we say the sun comes out, but the sun doesn’t come out. The sun is always shining. Awakening doesn’t come out. The brilliant nature of an awakened mind is always shining. You just don’t see it because your mind is full of clouds. So, when you do the guru yoga, it sort of activates that nature. It gets it started again here. You want to clean it up.
Okay. Those are the essential ingredients of preliminary practices. The next series of meditations is to train the mind. Concentrate. The purpose of concentration is to stabilize the mind and free it from its distractibility. You keep bringing the mind back over and over again to some object, and directing the mind back, intensifying on that object, so the mind stays more and more closely engaged with just the intended concentration object and doesn’t go anywhere else. The opposite of concentration is distraction. The extreme opposite of that is what we call in the West Attention Deficit Disorder.
When you get deeply concentrated, all that background noise of thought stops. There’s no thought elaboration. The Tibetan word for concentration is shine [pronounced she-nay], a compound term. Newa means staying, and shiwa means calm. It means, from the mind perspective, the mind stays continuously over time, as long as you want, and completely at any given point of time on the meditation object without going anywhere else. And, it means from the events of the mind, there’s no thought content, absent of any thought. Shine literally means staying-hyphen-calming meditation. We say the mind becomes serviceable. At that level you’re operating out of intention, not attention. Whatever you put your mind on, whatever you intend to put it on, the mind stays on that fully.
AI Summary
Cloudless Mind, Volume 1 by Daniel Brown presents key insights from the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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