He then made looking for the real me sound like a treasure hunt, and I earnestly searched under rocks and behind trees.
Two years later, I entered the traditional three-year retreat, a period of intense mind training. During this period, we novice monks did many different exercises, each one deepening our understanding of subtler levels of reality. The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, means “to become familiar with”: familiar with how the mind works, how it creates and shapes our perceptions of ourselves and the world, how the outer layers of mind—the constructed labels—function like clothing that identifies our social identities and cloaks our naked, nonfabricated state of original mind, whether that outerwear consists of business suits, jeans, uniforms, or Buddhist robes.
the mind of absolute reality, which is the same as the mind of pure awareness and which expresses the very essence of our true nature.
It is everywhere and nowhere. It’s somewhat like sky—so completely integrated with our existence that we never stop to question its reality or to recognize its qualities.
Yet I had never known a day without people and props that mirrored the stitched-together patchwork that became known to me and to others as Mingyur Rinpoche: unfailingly polite, quick to smile, with a somewhat reserved demeanor, tidy, clean-shaven, wearing rimless glasses with gold frames. Now I wondered how these identities would play out in the Gaya station.
Tibetans have an expression for deliberately increasing the challenges of maintaining a steady mind: adding wood to the fire.
Adding wood to the fire deliberately brings difficult situations to the forefront so that we can work with them directly. We take the very behaviors or circumstances that we think of as problems and turn them into allies.
When I returned to my two seats, I felt much better and decided to try to meditate. I started with a body scan, bringing my awareness to the sensations around my stomach, its bloating, and the nausea. This was very uncomfortable, a little disgusting, and initially made the sensations worse. But as I slowly came to accept these sensations, I experienced my entire body as a guesthouse. I was playing host to these sensations, as well as to feelings of aversion, resistance, and reaction. The more I allowed these guests to inhabit my body, the calmer I became.
We no longer avoid situations that have disturbed us in the past, or that evoke destructive patterns or emotional outbursts. We begin to rely on another aspect of mind that exists beneath our reactivity. We call this “no-self.” It’s the unconditioned awareness that reveals itself with the dissolution of the chattering mind that talks to itself throughout the day. Another way of saying this is that we switch mental gears from normal awareness to meditative awareness.
This clear mind of awareness is always with us, whether we recognize it or not. It coexists with confusion, and with the destructive emotions and cultural conditioning that shape our ways of seeing things. But when our perception shifts to meditative or steady awareness, it is no longer narrowed by memory and expectation; whatever we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear has greater clarity and sharpness, and enlivens our interactions.
2 • Acknowledge the Wave but Stay with the Ocean
but the change from always having an attendant to being totally alone struck me like a thunderbolt.
For the next few hours I became both teacher and student, reviewing lessons as if I were back in monastery kindergarten. Where did this aversion come from? How did it arise? Did it come from my mind, my body, or the outside world?
Saljay Rinpoche said: You do not need to think. Just feel. Feel what is in your body.
Do not run away from these unpleasant feelings. Do not manipulate them into pleasant feelings. Stay with what is, with whatever arises. I was trying…but the newness of everything all at once, and especially the shock of being alone, kept knocking me back.
3 • Born with a Silver Spoon
In the god realm, the dominant emotions are pride and an excessive desire for pleasure and comfort, which can be expressed in many different ways. For example, those who live in the god realm—or who wish to—are often lulled by fantasy and seduced by ease. The form of this realm might be a penthouse, a social media preoccupation, or a slothful outlook.
Chiwa mitakpa! Impermanence and death! Don’t be such an idiot. If you don’t think about impermanence and death, your life will never amount to anything!
The quality of emptiness that we are referring to was never born; likewise, it cannot die. This essential nature of our lives is unborn—like space itself. Space provides no place to abide, no foothold in which to secure our steps.
on. The inherent nature of everything is change. It’s our preoccupation with a problem that nails it in place. Yet leaving it be is easier said than done.
Right here, I thought, right now, is where the suffering arises. Between the sound and the projection, between things as-they-are and things as-we-want-them-to-be. This is what the Buddha taught: To misperceive reality is to suffer.
Ego is not an object; it’s more like a process that follows through on the proclivity for grasping, and for holding on to fixed ideas and identities.
It therefore cannot really die, and cannot be killed or transcended.
We do not need to get rid of the ego—this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self—because it never existed in the first place. The key point is that there is no ego to kill.
With each exhale, the old me dies. With each inhale, a new me is born. Becoming, renewing, dying, rebirth, change.
After a few more minutes, I took my mind off the sensations and just rested with the awareness itself—the alive, sentient quality that registers sensations with a pristine clarity beyond concepts—and I remained like that for another ten or fifteen minutes.
this confused conceptual mind simply does not have the capacity to understand mind beyond concepts.
We can also tell ourselves intellectually, These waves are essentially empty. We can play with the ideas and concepts of emptiness and use intellectual logic to convince ourselves that the wave is not really a monster. But our hearts still feel the threat, and react to protect ourselves from it. This describes the first stage of working with the mind.
We do not try to prolong them, and we do not expect the train to stay in one place. It passes through places just as we pass through the bardos.
With the help of the breathing exercises, the speed of the grasping mind slowed, allowing me to connect with the subtle level of constant change. Every instance that brings attention to change helps us stabilize the understanding of impermanence
Glimpses of pristine awareness can be transformative, but it takes work to stabilize the view. This is why we say, Short moments, many times. Many, many times.
7 • Lessons from Milarepa
Mila’s mother witnessed these humiliations, and when her son became a teenager she encouraged him to learn black magic from a local sorcerer. A year later, during a wedding party attended by the wicked aunt and uncle, a hailstorm conjured by Mila brought down the house, crushing thirty-five revelers.
Their real intention, he explained, was to awaken us to the self-imposed punishment that anger inflicts. When we act out of anger we punish others and ourselves. Our equanimity evaporates. Our hearts shut down.
Anything—including Milarepa’s life story—that demonstrates the constancy of change helps dismantle our attachments to fixity.
With the advent of morning, more chai vendors rushed into the cars at each stop and crowded around the windows.
Until I was willing to fail, really fall on my face, I couldn’t do anything.
In these gaps, we experience pure perception. No time, no direction, no judgment. The clouds of muttering and memory clear, and the sun shines forth.
Everything was there—the friends, the beach, the water—and everything was shimmering and brilliant. I could see, I could hear, but I was not there.
10 • If You See Something, Say Something
Do not push away, do not invite. Work from the middle, and slowly you will transform attachment into an open mind that allows you to make appropriate choices.
People everywhere try so hard to make the world better. Their intentions are admirable, yet they seek to change everything but themselves. To make yourself a better person is to make the world a better place.
Just like us! Continuously longing for what we don’t have. That grass is better than this grass—all day long.
Most of us cannot track the dissolution of the senses as we fall asleep; partway through the process our awareness submits to sleep, just as the sense organs do. To be able to maintain recognition of awareness throughout the process takes a lot of practice and an extraordinarily sensitive mind, one as evolved as that of His Holiness, the Sixteenth Karmapa (Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, 1924–81). When he spoke of awareness, he meant pure, non-dualistic awareness, awareness without an observer.
do not try to interpret or understand their meaning or look for signs and symbols. We work with the direct experience that dreaming offers us to challenge our assumptions and expand our perceptions. A rigid mind demands that everything conforms to its expectations, including our dreams.
Once again, the anxiety of dislocation pushes us away from what is transitory, unknown, and insubstantial and toward familiar images that appear as solid and lasting. We wish to return to what best fits our expectations.
15 • Memento Mori
This I named Mingyur Rinpoche had been stressed out in the Varanasi station. And this I was being asked by Shantideva—as each one of us is being asked: What is there left for fears to terrify? Or, put another way: Who am I?
And yet…this I that cannot be found, that is as essentially transparent and fluid as water, can still get so hurt.
So I feel uptight, so what? I don’t like people looking at me suspiciously, that’s okay. Notice it, don’t pretend, let it be.
If you really aspire to cut your attachments, you can do it no matter what the circumstances—but there will always be something pulling you back in the other direction. It will never be easy, but it can be done.
But the object of perception cannot be separated from the mind that perceives it. We cannot feel our dreams. We cannot feel, taste, or touch emptiness. We cannot know its origin. We cannot actually say emptiness exists. But saying this doesn’t negate it.
Traders and hunters who encountered Milarepa wandering through snowy mountains in winter with no boots or clothes thought him a total madman. In turn Milarepa thought they were insane, for they kept themselves locked in prisons of their own making, even while holding the key to their own liberation.
We do not want to keep any virtue that we may have accumulated for ourselves. For that reason, we give it away to others. I dedicated the merit to family members, to teachers, to the world, to all sentient beings.
allows us to enter the deathless realm, which is the eternal present, unconditioned by past or future. It is beyond time, beyond beginnings and endings. In this state, there is no next stage. We know complete ease with the situation we are in—the new relationship, the new job, whatever—not comparing it with the past or anticipating the future, not imposing expectations, not exaggerating possibilities, not being sneaky or suspicious, not making mountains out of molehills or denying unpleasant moments.
In the years leading up to this retreat, I had felt somewhat stuck. I loved my monasteries and my students, and nothing brought me greater joy than sharing the dharma. Yet I began to feel stifled in my roles as tulku, teacher, rinpoche, and abbot. I had started to resist the limits of my cocooned life.
If we wake up to this reality, we can actively direct what comes next, and not just passively accept false conclusions of what feels inevitable. This is similar to the bardo of becoming.
Don’t conclude that your mind is significantly different from anyone else’s. We all have this monkey mind. Once we put the monkey under the magnifying glass, the mind commonly appears crazier than ever. It’s not. You are just allowing yourself to become acquainted with how crazy it has always been. This is great news.
Once again, it was too much too soon. New clothes, no robes, no money, no lodgings.
What a wonderful change from previous years, especially from when I was a young monk. In the old days, I berated myself quite regularly for any discrepancies between some ideal version of practice and what I was actually able to do. If I can stay with awareness, great. If not, that’s okay too. Don’t create stories around good and bad, about how things should be. Remember: Shadows cannot be separated from light.
What was he teaching? No picking and choosing even at the risk to one’s life? Or did he choose to protect Cunda over himself?
Because of our essentially empty nature, the hurt that we experience is self-inflicted.
The good news about pain is the way it cries out for attention. If you place your mind on your pain, you know just where your mind is. The trick is to stay aware of the mind. Most of the time, when pain asks for attention, we respond by trying to get rid of it. Pain becomes an object outside the mind that needs to be ejected, thrown out. Here’s the curious, counterintuitive aspect about pain: When we meet pain with resistance, the pain does not diminish. Instead we add suffering to the pain. The feeling sensation of pain arises in the body.
For many people, self-pity attaches to sickness like sticky glue, and the voice of the ego asks, Why me? Yet this voice does not reside with the pain in the body but with the mind that identifies with the pain.
The earth element relates to flesh and bones, the densest part of our bodies. When we die, the earth element dissolves into the water element.
25 • Giving Everything Away
was the most delectable meal imaginable. He had hoped to earn enough money to repay his mother for her kindness. He became a wealthy man who dined in fancy restaurants all over the world; but his mother died when he was a teenager.
The deepest bonds of attachment will be found in both aversion and attraction. Every release of whatever we identify as me and mine deals a small death blow to the ego; and every decrease of ego-domination increases access to our own wisdom.
Living in ignorant denial of death is like eating poisoned candy. It tastes so delicious. But slowly, the poison of fear seeps into your bowels and saps the life out of you. It was like that with the rice and dal that I had eaten. It was my first experience of begging for food. I had intended to practice humility. But in order to beg, I’d had to let go of feeling uptight and self-conscious.
Appreciate every meal as an offering, a blessing. A gift from the gods or the universe. And accept the consequences, whatever they are…But
But to work with our attachments on the most subtle level of ego-clinging, we must work with the secret offering. This does not simply readjust values but challenges the very concept of value.
offer the form of my house, which appears to be substantial, but I also apply the wisdom that recognizes emptiness, and I understand that while my house appears substantial, it has no essential identity that makes it a “house.” The same is true with my body. And the same with my robes.
Motivation included purifying the mind of any past disturbances, anything that might cast a shadow on the pure perception of luminous emptiness. It’s not helpful to simply say, Everything is essentially empty, everything is essentially pure. Although that happens to be absolutely true, in order to know this absolute truth from the inside out, we must work with those thorns that cannot be plucked through intellectual reasoning or dharma philosophy.
27 • Awareness Never Dies
I do know that awareness does not die. And yes, my training is strong enough to recognize and stay with the mind of clarity and awareness. I trust my training. I will be okay. And then the fear would return, seeping into every thought, directing every image, foretelling my fate. There was no longer any confusion about my condition. I was dying, fluctuating between fear and confidence. Images of my mother and other family members, friends, and students streamed before me—jumbled and disordered like a shredded photo album.
I wanted these people with me now, to guide and comfort me. I wanted to hold them, to cry out, Please stay with me… but they drifted by like ghosts.
But my attachments were positive: teaching meditation and caring for the little monks. The young monk had struggled with greed and wealth on seeing the gold coin. What difference does that make? To aspire to a mind like Patrul Rinpoche’s, both positive and negative attachments must be abandoned.
Dharmata is sometimes called suchness, or reality. Within this lifetime, the death of the small self awakens us to the suchness of this life, to things-as-they-are: insubstantial, impermanent, and interdependent.
28 • When the Cup Shatters
The dissolution of air did not have the quality of elimination. Instead, it felt more like being filled up. Each inhalation expanded beyond my lungs, transforming matter into air, making the body lighter, more resilient.
Suddenly…boom!…awareness and emptiness became one, indivisible, just as it always is. But the recognition had never been this complete before. The last shred of cohesion slipped away. The entire universe opened up and became totally unified with consciousness. No conceptual mind. I was no longer within the universe. The universe was within me. No me separate from the universe. No direction. No within or without. No perception or nonperception. No self or non-self. No living, no dying. The internal movements of the organs and senses slowed way down, to minimal functioning. I still understood what was going on, but not through commentary or voice or image. That type of cognition no longer presented itself. The clarity and luminosity of awareness—beyond concepts, beyond fixed mind—became the sole vehicle of knowing.
Experiences happened but no longer to a separate me. Perceptions occurred, but with no reference back to anyone. No references at all. No memory. Perceptions, but no perceiver. The me that I had recently been—sick, healthy, beggar, Buddhist—disappeared like clouds that move through a sunlit sky. The top of my head came off; my hearing and my seeing became just hearing, just seeing.
For the next five or six hours, I had no experience of conceptual mind. As a drop of water placed in the ocean becomes indistinct, boundless, unrecognizable, and yet still exists, so my mind merged with space. It was no longer a matter of me seeing trees, as I had become trees. Me and trees were one. Trees were not the object of awareness; they manifested awareness. Stars were not the object of appreciation but appreciation itself. No separate me loved the world. The world was love. My perfect home. Vast and intimate. Every particle was alive with love, fluid, flowing, without barriers. I was an alive particle, no interpretative mind, clarity beyond ideas. Vibrant, energetic, all-seeing. My awareness did not go toward anything, yet everything appeared—as an empty mirror both receives and reflects everything around it. A flower appears in the empty mirror of the mind, and the mind accepts its presence without inviting or rejecting.
Through meditation I had known child luminosity, but never had I known such intense union of child and mother luminosity—emptiness infusing emptiness, the bliss of love and tranquility.
What happened next is hardest to relate: I did not decide to come back.
Maintaining recognition of awareness allowed for this but did not make it happen.
The trees were still green, but shining, pristine, fresh. The hot air felt sweet, the breeze soothed my skin. I stood up to get water from the pump…and…that is my last recollection of being at the Cremation Stupa.
Every form appears and disappears, and moves through and within boundless spaciousness, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, without origin, without destination, spontaneously present. Phenomena within space cannot truly exist separate from space; the duality is not real. All forms arise as magic displays of color and light; a sky of rainbows, there and not there, beyond time, beyond direction, unborn and without end. I love this new world, this alive brilliant state of suchness—the true nature of phenomena, without the clouds of substance and characteristics. This is the bardo of dharmata, the bardo of reality, of suchness. If I am alive, then I am in this second stage within the bardo of this life. I have entered this stage because I did not fully die in the bardo of dying.
In reality we are dying all the time, but our mind is not letting us know this. If we do not let ourselves die, we cannot be reborn. I learned that dying is rebirth. Death is life.
If I ever get enlightened, where will I be? My father had explained: The location where you stay, where you reside, what you see, what you hear, will not be so important anymore.
Enlightenment is the reality that has no time, no location, no direction, no color, no form. It cannot be known that way. Don’t be impatient. But I was impatient. Frustrated with his answer, I explained: If I recognize that my mind and buddha-mind are the same, and I become one with everything, then I can do nothing. No, said my father, when you become one with everything, you can do anything. You are capable of boundless love and compassion, and can manifest in ways that can benefit other beings. Don’t forget: Your human form is—right now, just as you are—a reflection of enlightenment, form-body reflecting emptiness.
I felt like an animated movie character endowed with supernatural strength, imbued with acceptance, spacious awareness, compassion, and emptiness.
An infinite appreciation that came from the center of my being radiated to everyone I had ever known: family and teachers who had nourished and guided me, friends, the Asian man, the doctors and nurses, the cremation wall that had supported my back, the trees that had shaded me.
To you, my beloved Guru Illness of Infinite Compassion, I bow with one hundred thousand prostrations; to you who guided me to the ultimate truth, who clarified my understanding, who unlocked boundless love, I offer gratitude. Forever.
The uncertainty no longer compelled me to scurry toward safety; instead, I wished to rush headlong into the unknown world, to embrace its mysteries and sorrows, to be in love with love, to be welcomed by love, to live with perfect ease in my new home. Now that I had embraced this uncertainty, the roadside seemed as hospitable and safe as the bed in my rooms at the monastery.