Writing from Deep Mind
Traditionally
Westerners have sought happiness and solutions to problems outside the self,
focusing on the material and physical universe. The mind goes out to make sense
of the world and has gotten extremely good at it. In the East, there is more of
a tendency to look inward to see how the mind works, to investigate the deeper
levels of consciousness to uncover what we can do or stop doing that will allow
us to live a happier and more productive life.
Buddhist psychology describes sem or ordinary mind as being like the
choppy waves on the surface of the ocean. Our minds are constantly busy with thoughts
incessantly tumbling over thoughts, always coming and going, always changing. Below sem is a different type of awareness
and intelligence although it is all part of the same ocean. This deep mind is
called by many names such as pristine awareness and natural mind, and is seen
as the source of creativity, insight and wisdom. These deeper levels are traditionally accessed through meditation.
Meditation
is one of those words like cooking that covers many different activities from
baking to braising to frying to boiling. There are meditations to produce
relaxation, to focus attention, to develop compassion, or to develop clarity
and awareness, to mention just a few. As in cooking, meditation is designed to
create some sort of change through its processes.
In
the most basic meditations, we simply learn to turn the mind that usually goes
outward to look inward instead. Through Shamatha or calm abiding meditation, we
are able to get under the hood of
our own minds, so to speak, to glimpse its inner workings. By taking up
meditation, we don’t lose the ability to navigate and understand the outside world.
Far from it, as we withdraw our projections from the outer sphere, it comes
into clearer focus revealing what is actually there.
In calm abiding meditation one follows the breath, in and out, in
and out. Since you can’t breathe in the past or the future, this teaches you to
keep returning to the present moment. In turn, one develops relaxation, stability and clarity. Once these
qualities have been established through sustained calm abiding meditation,
small gaps begin to appear in the layer of obsessive thoughts, fearfulness, and compulsive ideation
that we take as normal reality. As we learn to rest in these gaps for longer
periods of time, our fears, grasping, and aversions begin to become more and
more transparent and relax their grip on us. In time, our mind learns to relax
into what is often called its natural state, which is open, luminous, and
spontaneously present. In the resultant open space, positive emotions such as
loving kindness and compassion arise spontaneously, and begin to gradually
crowd out negative or counterproductive ones. The luminous aspect of the
natural state brings cognitive insight “like a flash of lightening on a dark
night.” Once the jabbering brain with its constant planning and worrying is
silenced, true wisdom can begin to emerge.