Return to Silence

How can I speak to You, when You are not separate from me?
I want to pray to You, but prayer would be distance,
someone smaller praying to someone bigger,
requesting admission into the vast open arms of the Other.
My mistake was to believe I was somewhere else.
It has felt like that until now.
I know the pain of feeling small and separate from You.
The torment of little "me" and all my tiresome stories,
constricting like a boa around the neck of my own fictional self.
"Let this curse be lifted." That would be my prayer,
but I don't know how to pray to You, or if prayer is even possible.
For just now, when I grow very still, very silent, then prayer
seems beside the point. In this stillness, this silence,
You are already here, and the one who would pray to You
is nothing other than You. Prayers are only words, after all,
and in Your presence words fly away. They dissolve
and lose meaning. Where words were, there is only This.
But even "This" is a word, a mistake, a label
with which "I" try to contain "You," the Limitless.
And so the only form of prayer that seems authentic
is to remain silent, to rest in stillness, not asking for anything.
For only then can my prayer be answered.
Only through silence is the one true Word ever spoken.
Only then can I see that "You" and "I" were never two, never apart.
The small, tragic story of "me" is a dream, and I am a dream figure.
You are the One dreaming. Let me awaken within the dream.
The little, separate "me" is a figment, just the boa of mind's habits
constricting around a non-existent center within empty space.
May the snake let go and relax into freedom and peace at last.
Never let me forget that these dream eyes are Your eyes.
This dream body is Your body. These dream feet are Your feet.
But now I am praying to You again, recreating the illusion of distance,
where there is none. You are here, now. It is This. Only This.
Let me return to silence, and hear what You are already saying.

Don't Meditate

Often when I meditate I'm involved in some kind of subtle (or really obvious) form of manipulation. I want to be more settled, more focused on the object of meditation -- less distracted and discursive. I want to be more contented and peaceful, more compassionate, more blissful. I want to have more profound insights into emptiness, a deeper experience of the nature of mind.

Those are all nice things to aspire to, and most of us on the spiritual path (at least the Buddhist one) share those goals. The only problem is that when you're sitting there wishing you were experiencing something other than you are right now, you're not really meditating.

Some Buddhist teacher or other once said that "Hope is poison." By definition, hope involves projecting into the future, wishing for something to be different. When we bring hope into our meditation practice, it can turn meditation into a self-defeating cycle. We sit down with the intention to remain anchored in the present moment, but we end up spending a lot of our time subtly thinking about what we hope to become in the future.

A famous Tibetan Buddhist proverb says: "Abandon all hope of fruition." That might sound like bleak advice, but it's actually very practical. Abandon your hope of becoming something better than you are right now (and your fear of becoming something worse), because that hope (and that fear) keeps you trapped in fantasies about the future.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, who is quite the Twitter aficionado, recently tweeted: "Don't think about NEXT, think about NOW!"

That is a profound meditation instruction, and proof that Twitter isn't all bad. How often, when we meditate, are we thinking about NEXT -- whether it's the next breath, the next hour, the next few years, the next stage on our path, the next item on our spiritual agenda? How often are we really staying with NOW? What makes us think we're going to find enlightenment up ahead somewhere, always lurking in the NEXT moment, the NEXT one, the NEXT one? Isn't it always right here, right now?

"This moment is the perfect teacher," said Pema Chodron. Surprisingly, though, its perfection has nothing to do with whether we like it or not, whether it's pleasant or not, whether we're happy or not, whether we've accomplished the things we think we need to accomplish or become what we think we need to become. Whatever is happening now, in this very moment, is just what it is. When we can open to that and stay present with it, without glomming onto it or trying to manipulate it to become something else, we are seeing its perfection. Whatever arises in this moment is fresh, the essence of realization. It might be fresh like dog poop, but it's fresh.

One way of getting into this space, and one of my favorite meditation instructions of all time, is this: Don't meditate.

Seriously, try it. Sit down on your cushion or your chair and take your meditation posture. Give it your best shot. Do a few minutes of meditating on the breath if it makes you feel better. And then just drop it. Break the cycle. Don't meditate. Don't do anything that looks or feels like meditation. Don't try to hold your mind to an object, don't try to shew away thoughts if they come. Just look at whatever you're experiencing in this moment, with no agenda and no attachment or aversion. Don't think about NEXT. Think about NOW. And don't meditate.

Where else are you hoping to find enlightenment, if not right here, right now? And how much of your so-called meditation practice is actually keeping you from being here now?

In the Mahamudra tradition they say that the highest form of meditation is non-meditation: when you've completely gone beyond the idea that there's a difference between meditating and not meditating. In the state of non-meditation, you're just completely here, completely now. It requires no particular effort, and there's no longer any need to crank it up through some contrived idea of "meditation." At that point, there is something artificial about the whole notion of meditating, because it's a subtle way of trying to manipulate the present moment.

The supreme state of non-meditation. Sounds like something to aspire to. Oh, wait -- there I go again! Drop it. Abandon all hope of fruition. Don't think about NEXT, think about NOW.

Castles in the Air

One Human Journey turns 100....

This marks the 100th post on One Human Journey. As the site approaches its second anniversary, its mission is expanding to include an exciting line-up of guest bloggers who'll be contributing in the coming months. Stay tuned for more.

Also, One Human Journey has a new Facebook fan page where you can stay on top of the latest posts and see what we're reading and liking these days. Check it out.

Cheeseburger.

Chances are, I just evoked an image of a cheeseburger in your mind. Depending on your personal views about cheeseburgers, this mental image might bring along -- in the wake of its appearance in your mind -- a subtle or not-so-subtle reaction of either attraction or repulsion. Maybe you love and crave cheeseburgers, or maybe you are a strict vegan, animal-rights activist and you regard cheeseburgers as the symbol of a dire problem with our society's dietary habits; maybe you even feel slightly judgmental about people who eat them. Whatever your personal reaction, all I had to do to evoke it was say the word: "Cheeseburger." It wasn't difficult at all.

This may not be on the same level of mental espionage practiced by the characters in the movie "Inception" -- but nevertheless, it shows how powerful and instantaneous is our capacity for mentation and conceptuality. In relating to something as simple as the word "cheeseburger," we are immediately caught in a web of memories and associations, opinions and ideas, emotional patterns and judgments that stretches back further than we can see. Within that web are intangible traces of every cheeseburger we've ever seen or tasted, every advertisement for cheeseburgers we've been exposed to, every article we've ever read about the dangers of cheeseburgers, every view we've held about the rights of animals. All of those experiences have conditioned us to have a particular reaction when we are asked to think about a cheeseburger. And all those conditioned reaction patterns are just there in our minds, lying dormant, waiting for some small stimulus -- like the simple word "cheeseburger" -- to bring them to life.

Most of the time we don't relate directly to the things in our world; rather, we relate mainly to our mental image of things. We see things and people and experiences through the filter of our concepts about them. We look at another person and most of what we see is not the mystery of the human presence in front of us, but the cloud of our own ideas and preconceptions about who they are: friend or enemy, desired object or despised one. The more fixed our ideas and images are, the less we are able to allow other people to be anything other than what we think they are, or what we think they ought to be.

Taking Ourselves Too Seriously

The problem is not that we have concepts -- it would be difficult to function in the world without them. It's that we mix up our concepts with the things they refer to; we forget there is a difference between reality and what we think about it. Blurring the objects of our world with the qualities we project onto them, we believe too blindly in the stories we tell ourselves. We think David REALLY IS a jerk because of what he said the other day; we think Susan REALLY IS a dear because she was so kind to us that one time; we think "Inception" REALLY IS a good or bad movie, depending on whether we enjoyed it or not; we think cheeseburgers REALLY ARE, categorically, good or bad, depending on our own habits and views.

As long as we don't examine the contents of our projections too closely, they appear to be very real. Our mental images of things seem sharp and concrete, and our concepts and opinions seem justified and true. But when we actually try (as in Mahamudra meditation) to look at our mental images in detail, to see what they are made of, we learn that they are fuzzy and insubstantial: ghostly holograms in our minds that dissolve when we shine the spotlight of awareness directly at them.

Go ahead: look more closely at that cheeseburger in your mind right now. Try to pin it down, to examine its details, to fix the image and hold onto it. What happens? Try the same thing with your fixed ideas about someone else. What are your concepts about that person actually made of? How solid and reliable are they when you really look at them?

The emotional dramas we enact around these phantom images in our minds are like castles in the air -- built on sheer fancy. The clinging and passion we feel towards what we interpret as friendly and desirable; the aversion and aggression we feel towards what we interpret as hostile or offensive; the indifference we feel towards what we interpret as being of no interest -- all these are tales "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

When we recognize the insubstantiality of our mental images and concepts, we have more breathing room, more space to relate to the world with an open mind and heart. Not confusing external appearances with internal ones, we are less likely to get caught up in taking ourselves and our projections too seriously. And that freedom from the bondage of our own projections -- even if it is only momentary, and we revert right back to our patterns -- is like a breath of fresh air. Once we know what freedom smells like, once we have its scent, then we have a trail to follow.

Everything Is Mind

A friend of mine on Facebook said recently, citing the conventional wisdom, that we shouldn't conceptualize our meditation experience. I had to chuckle, because it seems like that's all I do -- especially in these blog posts. Maybe I should refrain from trying to make sense of my experience and teasing out its meaning, but I can't stop myself. I often find that my most meaningful experiences on the spiritual path come about when I ignore conventional wisdom and do what feels authentic to me. This process of writing -- which, by definition, involves conceptualizing my experience -- has lately become integral to the way I practice contemplation. On the selfish side, it helps me flesh out my own understanding in a way that I'm not able to do on the cushion; and on the altruistic side, friends and even total strangers sometimes write to me saying that reading these contemplations benefits them, which motivates me to keep writing.

Nothing that we study or practice on the spiritual path is useful if we can't find ways to make it relevant to our personal experience. Even the most esoteric, mystical teachings are pointing to something that is alive in our own experience and our own mind -- but it's up to each of us to discover that for ourselves. No one else can do it for us. "Buddhas only point the way," it is often said -- but we each have to walk the path ourselves, in our own way, and join the teachings with our own understanding. This is the importance of contemplation, and it's what the Buddha instructed us to do when he talked about testing and chewing on the teachings before accepting them, the way people in those days would chew on a piece of gold to verify its authenticity.

In ancient India there was a school of Buddhist philosophy called Yogachara, which is usually translated as the "Mind Only" school. More literally, "yoga" means "union" or "inseparability" and "chara" means "practice" or "training." The Yogacharins practiced or trained in seeing the union or inseparability of subject and object -- in other words, the absence of apparent duality between perceiver and perceived.

Wait a minute! What the hell does *that* mean? Nary a paragraph ventured, and we've strayed into high-fallutin' theory and abstract philosophy. Let's look at it in terms of ordinary experience.

The perception of duality pervades everything we experience. We look at a rock, and we think "I'm over here" and "that rock is over there." Ordinarily, we think this is a perfectly acceptable and useful way of looking at our reality -- it's just the way it is, and there is no need to investigate further. But holding this assumption tightly, as we do, creates all sorts of misunderstandings and confusion. Because we think there is some kind of substantially, objectively existing rock out there, we assume that everyone else who sees it must be experiencing the same rock. We are flabbergasted when they describe seeing it differently.

The Yogacharins, however, challenged this very fundamental assumption about reality. They said that the apparent separation between perceiving subject and perceived object, and the supposedly solid, objective existence of something "out there" that's separate from the mind "in here," is actually an illusion. Their claim to fame was for holding the radical view that "Everything is mind."

The Yogacharins were able to get away with making this seemingly ludicrous assertion because they pointed out, and not incorrectly, that all we can ever really know about an object is our own experience of it. In cognitive terms (what we know), we can never really cognize the rock itself -- in other words, the rock can't get up and come into our minds, and we can't go down and put our minds inside the rock. What we actually experience, say the Yogacharins, is a perception of the rock that takes place entirely within the mind. We can never truly experience anything that isn't experienced within the mind.

What we experience within the mind is utterly unique to each of us -- even the person sitting next to us does not see the same rock as we do. Moreover, the rock and the consciousness that perceives it may appear to be more or less constant from one moment to the next, but this is also a misperception. The rock -- conventional wisdom be damned -- is never the same from one instant to the next (we know this to be the case even scientifically, on a sub-molecular level) and the same could be said ten times over of the consciousness that perceives it. Our mind is constantly shifting and changing, and when we try to pinpoint it and solidify it into any one shape in order to look at it, we find it always seems to be hiding just behind our awareness -- in the same way that our eyeballs cannot see themselves.

Please don't bother trying to find her.
She's not there.

-- The Zombies

Now, rocks don't seem to mind much if we see them incorrectly and make false assumptions about their nature. But when we bring this same reifying mindset into our human relationships, it creates total chaos. We see Joe Schmidt as a completely separate entity who is trapped in some kind of fixed, solid existence, stuck forever in his basic and irrevocable Joeness -- and, depending on our outlook, we either love him for being Joe, or hate him for being Joe. (As I know too well from my history of intimate relationships, we can also start out with the former and, before long, end up with the latter.) But our perception of Joe takes place entirely within our own minds, and is clouded by the filters of our own emotional reactions and cognitive distortions. Because we don't see this, we believe that what we perceive about Joe is the way Joe really is, and that everyone -- including Joe himself -- must perceive Joe the same way as we do. It's not difficult to imagine how this assumption gets us in trouble.

Our habitual tendency to perceive our experience in dualistic terms extends even to what unfolds "internally," in our mind and body. When a thought or an emotion arises in the mind, we relate to it as if we -- the perceiving consciousness -- are "over here," and the thought or the emotion -- the perceived object -- is "over there" somewhere, a kind of quasi-external phenomenon that is happening to us. Similarly, when a physical sensation -- pain, for example -- arises in the body, we relate to it as if our experiencing mind, which is naturally "over here," is quite distinct and separate from that spot in our lower back, "down there," that is producing pain. Because we see these objects as separate from the mind that perceives them, we grant them a kind of phantom-like power over us. The emotion becomes a boogeyman that keeps coming back to haunt us, and won't leave us alone; the pain in our back while we're practicing meditation becomes excruciating, and we feel we have to do something about it.

But when we look more closely, in meditation, at the nature of these experiences, our assumptions of duality begin to crumble. When we look directly at the experience of pain in our back, for example, and investigate whether this experience is truly separate from the mind that perceives it, something altogether surprising may happen. The experience itself opens up into something much more relaxed, and the conceptual label of "pain" dissolves, leaving only pure sensation. The baggage of our habitual reactions -- "Oh! This feeling is painful! It's terrible! I've got to do something about it!" -- falls away and we are able, at least for a moment, to relate to our basic human experience in a way that is shockingly free of our ordinary bullshit.

When the current of thoughts is self-liberated
And the essence of Dharma is known
Everything is understood
And apparent phenomena
Are all the books one needs.

-- Sadhana of Mahamudra

Lust in the Dust

In Buddhism's extensive teachings on how to work with the kleshas, or afflictive emotions, anger usually receives the lion's share of attention. This is not without good reason: in a moment of unmanaged anger, we can commit negative actions whose consequences will stay with us for the rest of our lives (and for future lives, too, say Buddhists). A single flash of strong anger, unrecognized and acted upon, can be like a small match that burns down the entire house of our best intentions. Anger and its kissing cousin, hatred, are the root of violence and suffering at every level of society, from personal relationships to wars between nations.

Our emphasis on working with anger means that the other kleshas -- desire and jealousy and willful ignorance and pride and so forth -- sometimes get the short end of the stick. Yet these mind-states can be just as problematic and painful as anger; we can just as easily lock ourselves into a realm of suffering when we get caught up in these emotions and act out on them. And people have different propensities based on their own karmic disposition: some naturally get angry at the drop of a hat, but others more easily get lost in pride or jealousy or some other klesha.

Desire is especially problematic for many people, myself included. In fact, I sometimes think that anger -- destructive as it is -- is relatively easy for us to catch before it can do any harm, but desire can be much more tricky and difficult to see in action. As with anger, unmanaged feelings of desire -- especially if blindly acted upon -- can cause tremendous suffering. Feelings of desire arise in response to an object -- a thing or a person or an experience -- that is perceived as desirable, and the emotion then takes on the particular coloring of lust, greed, clinging, obsession, and so on. When desire spins out of control and becomes our dominant mind-state, we slip into addictions of all kinds and get lost in compulsive poverty-mentality. We feel that we are incomplete unless we have the desired object.

Lust, in particular, is something we work with a lot these days. Surely people have always been afflicted and driven by feelings of lust -- same as it ever was -- but there is also something to be observed about our present-day society's conflicted obsession with sex. We are hypnotized by youth and beauty and virility, and we are manipulated with sexual images to buy cars and shaving cream. We go to the gym to reshape our bodies to make them more desirable to others; we twist and augment our faces through surgery to create the illusion of youth and attractiveness; we take medications to remain sexually active right up to the door of the nursing home, and perhaps beyond. According to the Playboy philosophy of life that is celebrated in our culture, the very point of living is to experience lust and to satisfy our lusts, and the man who dies surrounded by the most hot, surgically augmented babes in bikinis -- human toys -- is the winner.

From the perspective of the Buddhist teachings, lust is like any other emotional state. It is a powerful, vivid arising of raw energy within the mind, and -- depending on what we do with that energy -- it has the potential to give rise to extreme neurosis or extreme wisdom. Lust can be powerful fuel for waking up and recognizing the nature of mind if we relate to its energy directly and fully; but because we don't know how to relate to it properly, it becomes fuel for the fires of delusion and suffering into which we habitually put ourselves. Through analytical meditation and practices like Mahamudra, we can begin to disassemble the experience of lust -- like any other thought or emotion -- and see through its inner workings. This process of insight doesn't necessarily rid us of lust (as if that would even be desirable), but it gives us new perspective and space around the experience so that we can relate more skillfully to lust when it does arise.

When we see an object (or person) that arouses our desire, we form an image of that object in our minds; this image continues to haunt us even when the object itself is no longer in front of us. We perceive this image through a dualistic lens, as if we are over here and the image of the desired object is over there. Because it is perceived as something real and separate, it gains a certain power over us; it has the capacity to torment us because we then feel that we must bring it into ourselves, we must possess it.

What we fail to see, most of the time, is that this image of the desired object is a projection of our own minds. Like any thought, it is a ripple of mind itself -- not something apart from mind -- and it has no substantiality, nothing in it that can be grasped or dispelled. We also overlook the key fact that the desirability we attribute to the perceived object is, yet again, a figment of our own minds. What we perceive as desirable is a projection based on our own habitual patterns (a.k.a. "karma"), but it has no more substantial or objective basis in reality than the image in our imaginations.

Think about it: the image in your mind that evokes such a strong and solid reaction of lust in you might very well evoke a reaction of total disgust and revulsion from the person sitting next to you, if that very same image were to pop into his or her mind. Rationally, we know that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," as the old adage goes; but our emotional experience and the behavior that springs from it usually do not mirror what we know rationally to be the case. At an emotional level, we think that the object itself possesses the characteristics of desirability.

His Holiness the 17th Karmapa touched on this point when he taught in New York City in 2008. The problem, he said, is not that we feel attraction or revulsion towards something — it’s that we go too far, and one-sidedly adopt or reject an entire thing on the basis of one (or a few) attributes — we confuse the attributes with the thing that appears to possess them.

Lust, like any emotion, is a chain reaction. Once we have seen the object and fixed our minds upon it as a desirable thing, then a powerful swell of energy arises in response. This energy is so strong that it causes immediate physical changes in our bodies: we grow flushed and hot, our heart beats faster and our throat tightens, our whole gut seems to clench with the feeling of longing and desire -- and, of course, other body parts also respond as nature intended for them to do. (I read about a scientific study of sexual arousal in male subjects that used sensitive instruments to record changes in blood flow to the reproductive organ in response to various types of arousing images. The study demonstrated that our bodies are much more accurate gauges of lust than our minds. Sometimes our bodies even respond with arousal to things that our conscious minds don't recognize as attractive.) Along with this physical response comes a state of mind that fixates one-pointedly on the perceived object and says, "I must have this, and I cannot rest or be happy until I do."

This raw, vivid energy of lust arising in the mind and body can be extremely uncomfortable, almost unbearable, and our standard reaction is to look for some way to suppress it (stuff it down and pretend it doesn't exist) or to release it (act out on it, merge with the lust-object). But when we take either of these habitual exits away from the uncomfortable feeling of lust, we miss the opportunity to look directly at this powerful manifestation of mind's energy and to glimpse its true nature. By attempting to escape from the rawness of lust through suppressing it or acting out on it, we reinforce our mistaken belief in the solid reality of our thoughts and perceptions; we compound the illusion that the thoughts and feelings experienced in lust are separate from the mind that experiences them. And we strengthen the mental template that programs us to react with lust, in the future, whenever a similar kind of image arises in our minds or appears to us in the external world.

When kleshas get me going
And their heat has got me burning
I try no antidote to set them right.
Like an alchemistic potion turning metal into gold,
What lies in kleshas' power to bestow
Is bliss without contagion, completely undefiled.
Kleshas coming up -- sheer delight!

-- Gyalwa Gotsangpa (1189-1258)

The Vajrayana Buddhist teachings on emotions tell us that the raw, naked energy of a strong emotion such as lust is nothing other than the wisdom of awakened mind itself -- like a powerful wave arising in the ocean of mind. Just as a wave takes its particular shape and form due to conditions such as wind and current, our lusts and desires arise and take their particular shape and form due to conditions within us -- conditions that we ourselves have created, but which we cannot always see. When we fixate on the wave, on our lust and its illusory object, and think that it's solid and real and something has to be done about it, we lose sight of the ocean that is our true being. We actually forget who we are.

Are Your Thoughts Killing You?

That was the question posed, in large block lettering, on a flyer I used to see taped to streetlamp poles and phonebooths all around New York City, advertising some type of mind-control therapy. As a meditator I've frequently wrestled with an overactive mind -- sometimes to the point of exhaustion -- and whenever I saw that flyer I wanted to respond, emphatically: "YES!"

When we begin to practice meditation, most of us are in for a rude awakening. We sit down on our cushion with the hope and intention of experiencing clarity and peace -- and maybe we do find moments of that -- but more often than not, we are confronted with a mind that seems to have a mind of its own, one that has no respect for our hopes or our intentions of being good meditators. If we aren't sliding into dullness and sleepiness, we are wild and agitated, jumping from thought to thought and unable to stay with the object of meditation.

This first, naked experience of mind's habitual wildness can be shocking and disheartening, and many beginning meditators give up at this point. Tenzin Palmo compares this to someone who sits down at the piano for the first time to learn to play and, within minutes, gives up in frustration because they cannot immediately play a Beethoven concerto. Who in their right mind would approach learning to play the piano that way? And yet, so many people do precisely this with meditation.

In his book "Mindfulness in Plain English," Bhante Henepola Gunaratana beautifully captures the feeling of this experience:

Somewhere in this process, you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels, barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you never noticed.

Much of the language we use to talk about meditation can give us the mistaken, even dangerous idea that we are supposed to be aiming for a state of meditation that is thought-free. Thoughts are seen as distractions and detours away from the object of meditation, something to be avoided -- in fact, for many of us, much of the time, thoughts are regarded as the enemy, a nemesis that constantly lurks and springs out of the bushes at every turn to startle us and spoil our feeble attempts to abide peacefully. If we believe we are "supposed" to be meditating without thoughts, but find that the mind is continually thinking in spite of our best intentions, then it becomes easy for us to fall into the trap of adopting an adversarial relationship to our thoughts. But that way madness lies.

We cannot control our mind's tendency to think any more than we can control the sun's tendency to shine. Milarepa, in his song of realization, "The Six Questions," said: "Mind's impulse to sudden thought cannot be stopped by hundreds with spears." Imagine that all the warriors from the movie "300" gathered in a circle around you and threatened to impale you with their spears and swords if you had a single thought -- even then, under penalty of a gruesome and violent death, you still could not suppress your mind's impulse towards thought. In fact, it seems like the more we desire to be thought-free, the more wild and numerous our thoughts become. Our minds, like wild animals, don't like being backed into a corner. If you try to meditate by suppressing your thoughts, it becomes like one of those Whack-a-Mole games at a carnival -- each time one critter pops up and you smash it over the head with the mallet, another one pops up somewhere else.

In a Dharma talk I was listening to recently, Tara Brach pointed out that our mind's strong habitual tendency towards conceptual thought is actually part and parcel of our genetic heritage as human beings. Our vision and our hearing and our sense of smell are pretty pathetic in the animal kingdom, but our ability to think and strategize has enabled our species to dominate life on earth (and, unfortunately, to destroy much of it). From an evolutionary point of view, it's no wonder that our biggest advantage as a species has such a powerful sway on our minds. So why, then, do we torture ourselves, yearning to achieve the impossible, to avoid the unavoidable? Why do we try to meditate without thoughts?

The problem can become even worse if we do experience periods of non-thought in meditation. Such experiences do arise, if only briefly, and they can be blissful and thrilling because they match our idealized concept of what meditation is "supposed" to feel like. But if we latch onto these experiences and try to perpetuate them, or try to resuscitate them after they've passed -- which they invariably do -- then we fall back in the same old trap of not relating naturally to what's happening right now. If thoughts are what is arising in the present moment, then we need to find a way to relate naturally to our thoughts.

In the radical Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions of meditation, thoughts and emotions are viewed as the spontaneous display and movement of wisdom itself. Not only are thoughts or emotions *not* regarded as a problem in meditation -- from a yogi's point of view, they are extremely good news. The more thoughts the merrier. Thoughts and emotions are not separate from mind's innate clarity and luminosity; they are, in fact, its very display and brilliance, and therefore they make mind's luminosity and clarity easier to see.

The problem is not that thoughts arise -- it's how we react to them when they do arise. Normally, we react to our thoughts somewhat hysterically, labeling them as good or bad thoughts and trying to string out and sustain the good ones and suppress or push away the bad ones. But thoughts actually have no substance; they arise spontaneously from the empty nature of mind, and they naturally dissolve back into that same emptiness -- as long as we don't interfere with them. The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says that we are always bothering our thoughts, trying to change them into something they are not, trying to make them permanent and solid through our attachment and aversion. Imagine, he says, how you would feel if there were someone who tried to grab you every time you passed by and wanted to change you and manipulate you and give you a new haircut and a new outfit, and simply wouldn't leave you alone. This is how we relate to our thoughts most of the time.

Thoughts, say the Mahamudra and Dzogchen masters, dissolve naturally in the very same instant they arise -- like drawing on the surface of water -- unless we get involved in trying to adopt or reject them. "Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky," wrote Trungpa Rinpoche in the Sadhana of Mahamudra.

In his commentaries on Dzogchen, the great Dza Patrul Rinpoche said that if you lack this realization of thoughts as being self-arisen and self-liberated, then your meditation practice -- no matter how sincere and diligent -- will be merely the path of delusion. You might have some good experiences and think that your practice is bearing fruit because your mental afflictions are temporarily suppressed, but when you encounter adverse circumstances, "the rotten corpse of your thoughts will rise again."

"A single instant of self-liberated awareness," he writes, "is superior to a thousand experiences of a still mind."

If we really want to get on with this business of liberation and awakening, we need to stop kidding ourselves about our thoughts and emotions. As long as we continue to regard the thoughts that arise in our minds as friends or enemies, as good or bad, and continue trying to adopt the good ones and reject the bad ones -- as if any of them had any real substance to begin with -- then we will keep binding ourselves in the cycle of suffering, like a snake that someone has tied in a knot. Just as the snake naturally and easily frees itself from the knot when left to its own devices, our thoughts and emotions are self-liberated in the very instant they arise -- with just one catch. We have to stop bothering them, and let them be as they are.