Index
Stilling the Mind: Shamatha Teachings from Dudjom Lingpa’s Vajra Essence
The practice of Dzogchen brings one into direct contact with reality, unmediated by the individual personality or society.
Düdjom Lingpa was a lay practitioner, married, and the father of eight renowned sons,
the specific approach of taking appearances and awareness as the path, also known as settling the mind in its natural state. In brief, this consists of observing all arising mental phenomena without grasping on to them. Your thoughts, emotions, images, and so forth are observed closely with mindfulness, but you do not encourage, discourage, or involve yourself in any way with the arising mental phenomena.
The true value of the Dharma is as a vehicle to the enlightened state in order to be of greatest benefit in the world.
the transmission of Dzogchen can be mind to mind, it can be symbolic, or it can be verbal.
developing our own discerning wisdom, our own discerning intelligence
The Three Roots are the lama (or spiritual mentor), your yidam (or personal deity—Tara, Padmasambhava, Manjushri, or whomever it may be), and the dakini (the enlightened feminine principle).
What does it mean to grasp at a thought? What is the nature of grasping? The Sanskrit graha means “to hold on to,” “to grasp.” It’s exactly that.
anything believed to exist by itself is a product of reification. This reification is the root of samsara, the cycle of existence.
by designating it as a cup you are not necessarily reifying it by grasping on to it as inherently real. It is possible to use language without being trapped by it, although generally we are unable to avoid it.
William James: “For the moment, what we attend to is reality.”
in the vastness of space attending to it, and remain there with your eyes open—very important, your eyes open—and simply maintain presence in space.
it is important to keep your eyes open and not grasp, not become attached to the phenomena that appear to your visual perception.
So gaze into the space in front of you and notice that there is no big deal here; let this be utterly ordinary. Don’t think you are doing anything special, because you are not. There’s the space in front of you. Just be present with it, that is, attend to it, notice it. Avoid involving yourself with details, such as labeling: “There’s a cushion. It’s on a red rug. The cushion is soft. The rug is hard.” If you slip into grasping like that, you’ve diminished the spaciousness of your meditation.
There is a general rule of thumb when internal distractions arise in your meditation: Should your mind become excited, cast your gaze downward. If the mind loses energy or clarity—becomes dull, lax—then elevate your gaze. This advice also applies to visualization, as when you visualize a deity. In that case, when you feel dull you raise the imagined image, and when excitement disturbs your tranquility you lower it.
So if you are still in the early stages of shamatha you might want to try this out. Choose something you would enjoy looking at for twenty-four minutes. Twenty-four-minute periods, or ghatikas, are recommended when you are just starting out in meditation.
When discursive thoughts arise, let them go and return not only your visual gaze but your attention, your mental awareness, to the object. Continue like that for a week.
you can imagine one quite small, that’s great, but the size of a pea would be sufficient—something fairly small and round. It’s glistening with five colors—white, yellow, red, green, and blue—
This practice of taking the mind as the path is a method for becoming lucid during the waking state with respect to the flow of thoughts. We recognize them for what they are—like becoming lucid in a dream—and in so doing, we break the chain of obsessions, compulsion, and delusion. Here is a direct path to freedom, which leads to greater and greater freedom both while awake and while asleep, and this freedom may lead to the infinitely greater freedom from samsara as a whole.
by not engaging with them, thoughts will usually, over time, thin out.
If you don’t grasp, the mind will self-heal and dissolve into its ground.
If you are grasping, though, you are not doing this practice. Certainly to grasp on to such appearances would be enormously tempting.
In any of these cases if you grasp, you are not doing the practice. The practice is not grasping.
“Settle your mind without distraction, without grasping.” If you are doing that while focusing single-pointedly on the space of the mind and its contents, that’s pretty much it. If you’re letting yourself be carried away, that implies distraction, so do your best to maintain unwavering mindfulness.
when a mental image of delicious food arises, if you get carried away, thinking about enjoying such a treat, you’ve been caught up in distraction and grasping. If you focus on the mental image of the food, and you are holding on to it because you’re attracted to it, that’s grasping. If you are simply mindful of that image, without being drawn to it and without wanting it to go away, you are practicing correctly. When you feel attracted to a thought or image or even an emotion, you might tell yourself, “I’m not distracted; I’m right here, right in the moment. I really like this.” That too is grasping. So just be present, letting your awareness remain as still and as accommodating as space. It is very important to know clearly from moment to moment if you are practicing correctly or incorrectly.
Simply continue practicing.
Having said that, in this practice, like in any other shamatha practice, there is a balance of neither falling into laxity nor being caught up in excitation.
when you’re meditating, you’re doing so with too much desire. When you’re practicing, don’t desire anything at all. Just do the practice—with no hopes and fears.”
“Between sessions, bring to mind all the aspirations and prayers you like. But when you are practicing, just do the practice.”
make sure you also practice when you’re lying down.”
when you’re doing this practice right, without grasping, even if a thousand maras rose up to attack you, whatever your maras are, they could not inflict any injury if you’re not grasping. And even if a thousand buddhas appeared to you, they couldn’t do you any good. They don’t need to. You don’t need anything from those thousands of images of buddhas. Just continue practicing.”
“Doing your best” is not “trying your hardest.” Given the balance of relaxation, stability, and vividness required, trying your hardest is trying way too hard. So in the course of the practice of shamatha, whatever technique you are following, the degree of effort you need to exert to practice correctly tapers off as you approach accomplishment, and then simply vanishes. You will have far greater stability and vividness than you started off with, but the effort to maintain and establish that vivid, steady apprehension vanishes of its own accord. “Such effort”—trying too hard—“makes the dissatisfied mind compulsively strive after mental objects.” You arrive at a point in the practice where, if you keep on exerting effort, keep on applying introspection to try to fix something, you’re actually cluttering up your practice.
you shouldn’t expect your thoughts to vanish. What you could hope for would be to maintain your presence with them, without distraction, without grasping.
On merely hearing about depression, or a blank, nameless dread, or apparitions coming up, or nightmares or insomnias, or crushing boulders, or terrible pain throughout your body, we might smile and say, “Gee, that sounds pretty awful.” When it starts happening to us, however, we may easily grasp at and reify it—not because we want to but because it seems overwhelming. The same goes for the more pleasant kinds of nyam
“from now until your realization of rigpa, everything is nyam.” From the ordinary, or relative, point of view, we must practice in order to purify our minds of our personal, karmic influences, which often find expression as nyam.
with every arising challenge, if it’s insomnia, great! Let your awareness become larger than the mental space occupied by insomnia. If it’s paranoia, let your awareness be larger than the paranoia. If it’s bodily pain, make your awareness bigger than that. Each time you do that you will discover that you are not just surmounting an obstacle, but that a transformation is taking place that was necessary for you to go further in your practice.