The essence of direct awareness practices such as mahamudra and dzogchen is to step out of the conceptual mind. To do that, you must be capable of attention that is at a higher level of energy than the conceptual mind.
Take the well known quatrain from The Heart Sutra:
Form is emptiness;
Emptiness is form.
Emptiness is not other than form;
Form is not other than emptiness.
Enigmatic and perplexing from a rational perspective, these four lines point to four levels of energy in ascending order. As the level of energy in attention rises, you move deeper into the mystery of being. In
An Arrow the Heart I offered this interpretation of the quatrain (pg. 58):
Form is emptiness—form is not what it seems.
Emptiness is form—emptiness is not what it seems.
Emptiness is not other than form—opposition is not what it seems.
Form is not other than emptiness—nothing is not what it seems.
In most meditation instruction, little, if any, mention is made of energy. Instead, you generally receive instruction along these lines:
You have ideas about how things (form) are.
Forget those ideas.
You have ideas about what emptiness is.
Forget them. They are just ideas.
You have ideas about opposition, about form versus emptiness.
Forget them.
Nothing left to think about? You probably have ideas about that, too.
Forget them. Let them go. Throw them away.
But it’s not so easy to forget ideas. They are deeply ingrained. They are persistent. They keep coming back.
We have to take another approach. The first step is to stop. The second step is to stay stopped.
It’s not so hard to stop the conceptual mind for a second or two. Zen is particularly good at that.
What is your face before you were born? The mind stops.
The Tibetan tradition is more prosaic. What rests? What moves? Same thing—the mind stops.
The trick is to stay stopped. That is a bit harder. It’s harder because we are not used to being when the mind stops. We tend to panic when faced with nothing that the conceptual mind can grasp. To put this another way, our attention is not at a high enough level to rest in the experience of seeing nothing.
Our task is made harder by the fact that any question or method we use to stop the mind only works a few times. We start having ideas about it. Again, to put it another way, the question loses its ability to generate, even temporarily, a higher level of attention. The conceptual mind is nothing if not resilient and will reassert itself in all sorts of ways.
How do you stay stopped, then? One way is to change how you place attention. In the case of sound, for example, listen to the silence, even when there is a lot of noise. What happens? When I do this, my relationship with the sound changes. I still hear it, but I don’t engage it. I’m not blocking the sound. I do hear it, but in putting attention on the silence, I hear it in a different way. Putting attention on the silence raises the level of energy in attention. The key here is not to say to yourself, “I’m not going to engage the sound.” That kind of direct effort rarely works. Instead, you put your attention on the silence. As you listen to the silence, the silence changes. It moves from being a silence that is in opposition to the sound to a silence that includes the sound. It takes a bit of practice, first to even hear that second silence and then to continue to hear it without trying to block out the sound. It takes a while to build the level of attention needed, but, with a bit of practice, you can.
You are training yourself, your mind, to rest in a silence that includes sound. Your are drawing on the energy of a deeper level of silence.
More difficult is to be able to listen to people talk and rest so deeply that you are not caught by the meaning of what they are saying. That requires a still higher level of energy in attention. In Niguma’s Amulet Mahamudra instruction, there is a sequence of such exercises, each of which builds a higher level of attention. By working through this sequence, you develop higher and higher levels of energy in your attention and that brings about the ability to hear and rest in silence at progressively deeper levels.
You can apply this principle in sitting practice. When thoughts arise, don’t try to block them. That never works. Instead, put your attention on the stillness in mind, not on what is being thought, in the same way that you put attention on the silence, not the noise. Again, there is a stillness that is the opposite of movement, and then a stillness that includes movement. You still experience the movement of thinking, but it is less likely to catch you.
The alertness of calmness is correct;
the alertness of deluded thoughts is wrong.
Crucial here is to understand that
observing has no place in mahamudra or dzogchen. If you are observing thoughts, you are at best like a person standing beside a highway and watching the cars go by—green car, blue car, black SUV, white car, red truck…
There is very little practice here. There is no energy conversion. You are in the conceptual mind and using the conceptual mind.
One way to bring about energy conversion is to pose a question. Who or what is watching? When you ask that question, your attention shifts. You are looking at nothing. Now, rest in the looking while you experience (I won’t say watch) the cars (or thoughts) come and go. This will probably take a bit of practice, but once you are able to do so, you may notice a different quality in your attention, a kind of indefinable steadiness that doesn’t require any effort, a relaxation in your body that makes it possible to feel deeper tensions, a slightly higher level of wakefulness or alertness in your attention—not something that involves any strain, but something that is just there—and an openness or sense of space that you cannot put your finger on or name.
That’s the beginning of energy conversion or energy transformation. Energy conversion takes place when you experience what is arising without reacting to it, without getting caught up in it. Reactions may arise, but they form and dissolve on their own. Energy that ordinarily would have gone into the reactive process now becomes available for attention. That energy is the different quality you experience when you are able to rest in nothing yet are aware of what is arising.
This is the deeper meaning in the second line of Chinul’s couplet:
The calmness of alertness is correct;
the calmness of blankness is wrong.
If energy conversion is so important, why isn’t it talked about? Well, it is, but usually in mythic language. For instance, most of you reading this have probably heard or read about the three kayas, the three bodies of Buddha. The three kayas have many interpretations and one of them is energy conversion. However, they are usually presented in mythical terms, which many people find difficult to understand because the language is often poetic. Two of my teachers, Kalu Rinpoche and Nyishöl Khenpo, taught me about the energy shifts they represent.
Take anger, for instance. The experience of anger is form, vivid, visceral—nirmanakaya (body of expression). When you look at what experiences the anger, or the anger itself, you see nothing. There is nothing there! That’s emptiness, incomprehensible, ineffable, the mystery of being—dharmakaya (body of being). This unknowable stillness (dharmakaya) in your experience of anger (nirmanakaya) is at a higher level of energy. When you include it in your attention, you draw on this higher level of energy, even though you make no explicit effort to do so. As you experience the anger and stillness at the same time, your experience of anger transforms and takes on a different quality—steady, open, relaxed and clear. That is samboghakaya (body of quality). Can you separate these three from each other? No. That aspect is called svabhavikakaya (body of presence).
The same holds for joy and love, or greed or grief, and everything we see, hear, taste, touch or smell. In short, these possibilities are present in everything we experience in life. In essence, the trikaya or three bodies can be interpreted as the basic energy conversion triad: resting in attention to what arises at one level draws energy from a higher level and transforms the experience to a level between the two. This energy conversion is the very essence of mahamudra and dzogchen. It is how the level of energy in your attention increases, and those higher levels of energy make it possible to rest more and more deeply in the experience of mind nature.
Without it, you can sit for a hundred years and nothing will change. Many people do.