My Spiritual Journey Read online

  Once we have established the conditions for the appearance of the elements of the phenomenal world, we can proceed to an analysis of the mechanisms that create the contrasting states of happiness and suffering in our mind.

  Every living being has a basic aspiration to attain happiness and avoid suffering. How are the happiness and suffering we experience linked to the world outside us? Faced with the external world, we have reactions that are expressed in the form of sensations possessing various characteristics. We then evaluate these sensations and connect the experience of them to ourselves as experiencers.

  Happiness and suffering do not necessarily have an immediate sensory cause. According to science, electrochemical processes inside the brain are the source of all our mental experiences. But physiological functioning does not account for experiences of subtle awareness. Buddhism does not restrict consciousness to the brain. Meditation and contemplation induce subtle, profound states of mind that themselves have the power to modify physiological processes. Indeed, consciousness is linked to our physical body, but it is not limited to it. Consciousness represents a faculty of clarity and luminosity that allows us to perceive and know phenomena by direct apprehension.

  Consciousness produces experiences such as dreams, where we experience happiness and suffering, but these sensations have no substantial object as their basis. We distinguish between waking consciousness, dream consciousness, and the consciousness of profound sleep, which do not depend exclusively on the sense organs. When we are distracted, the eye sees but the consciousness does not register the image. Pure consciousness is the pure faculty of cognition in its essential, naked state.

  Consciousness is, of course, associated with the body, but it is qualitatively different from the coarse physical body, since the causes and conditions that maintain it have their autonomy. Consciousness is not interrupted, even when we faint, and it persists in the states of dream and sleep, where the link with the support of the body is altered. We can go so far as to say that the physical support is not necessary for experiences where the consciousness detaches itself from the body and changes without being connected to it. If consciousness were solely substantial and material, then just as there is a biological continuity between parents and children, so there would be a similarity of experience between them on the conscious level. Obviously, this is not the case.

  If we had to conceive of a beginning to the phenomenon of consciousness, it would be in the form of a first cause, and perhaps we could argue that it arose from transformations in the inanimate world. That is not satisfactory on the logical level, so it is preferable to envisage a continuity of consciousness. Each instant of consciousness stems from a previous instant of consciousness. What we call a person is a concept attached to a stream of consciousness. This stream, just like the person, is without beginning or end. It is a question of an ephemeral continuum that depends on changing causes and conditions.

  Actualizing our potential

  IGNORANCE MAY BE DEFINED AS a mistaken mode of perception that posits belief in the autonomous solidity of the self and of phenomena. Such a mode of perception corresponds to the natural functioning of the mind, reinforced by long-standing habit. Analysis allows us to discover that things have neither reality nor solidity. The perception resulting from the ultimate analysis of things should be cultivated and used as antidote. That is how we will fight the deep-rooted propensity that leads us to believe in the reality of the self and the world.

  Fighting ignorance is also fighting suffering. Ignorance is the source of the mental poisons and obscurations. By developing altruism, love, tenderness, and compassion, we reduce hatred, desire, and pride. But a subtle form of mental obscuration remains that can be overcome by one antidote alone, which is the realization of a complete absence of identity of phenomena and identity of the self. As long as grasping and fixating on the self and on phenomena persist, the cause of suffering cannot be eliminated. To eradicate suffering, we must cultivate stable qualities in the mental continuum that will become second nature. These qualities are born from the correct perception of reality. Wisdom and lasting serenity result from this, for they are linked to consciousness itself.

  The natural luminosity of awareness is the antidote to the mental poisons, which are the effects of mental constructions based on the ephemeral adventitious veils that obscure natural awareness and cause suffering. How, then, can we bring about the absence of suffering?

  Wisdom is the surest antidote that can dissipate our fundamental ignorance. Dharma—that is, the teaching of the Buddha—brings knowledge that is useful to eliminate disturbing emotions and the subtlest forms of ignorance. Dharma leads us beyond suffering to nirvana. The Buddha is called the Bhagavan—in Tibetan, “One who has destroyed the four Maras,”2 which are death, distraction, pride, and the emotional obscurations. The Dharma allows us to conquer the mental factors that act as obstacles to Enlightenment, and it gives us access to nirvana, a state that is beyond the emotional obscurations.

  Aryadeva tells us: “In the beginning, we must abandon all negative actions; in the middle, all attachment to ego; and in the end, all extremes, opinions or concepts.”3 To obtain such a realization, we must unite wisdom with inner accomplishment. Theoretical knowledge and intellectual conviction are not enough. We ourselves must reflect, in life circumstances that are a teaching, in order to validate the doctrine by means of personal experience and authentic familiarization. Meditation is the gradual process that acclimates us to a new vision.

  Study produces certainty only if, through steady practice, we transform our mind and master the inner space of awareness. The case is often cited of a scholar who devoted himself only to study, without cultivating any inner accomplishment, and was reborn as a ghost with the head of a donkey.

  To win the conditions that will allow us to understand the ultimate nature of things—and the immense compassion resulting from that realization—we first use the mind for discursive thinking, then gradually let the continuum of natural luminosity appear on the surface of the mind. There are many methods: Anuyoga, for instance, relies on the breath, the channels, and the essences4 to let primordial wisdom arise; the Kalachakra system actualizes the ultimate nature of the mind by joining bliss and emptiness; and Atiyoga directly apprehends enlightened presence. The point of all these different methods is to dissolve the aggregates into light. In our tradition, that is the rainbow body that the great practitioners manifest when they die.

  Thus, in eastern Tibet, they say that before he died one monk asked that no one touch his corpse for a week and that the door to his room remain closed. After seven days, when they went into the room, his body had completely dissolved. They found only his monastic robes; even his nails and hair had disappeared. This monk was a hermit who lived very simply, without externalizing any signs of realization during his life devoted to contemplation. He had managed, through his practice, to actualize the primordial purity of the mind.

  We are not all called to such an accomplishment. It is better, for our daily practice, to stay at home, keeping our professional and family life while still learning to become better from day to day and adhering to a positive mode of life that will contribute to the good of society, according to the principles of the Dharma. We should choose professions in the areas of education, health, or social services. We should avoid renouncing everything for a solitary retreat. The aim is not to devote ourselves solely to spiritual practice, to lead a life lost in the glaciers. We should progress by degrees, steadily, taking care not to have extreme views, in a spirit of steadfastness and perseverance.

  Practice is essential, for it renews the inner life. Discipline, contemplation, and wisdom are the three trainings that will allow an authentic transmutation. “If we haven’t transformed ourselves, how will we help others transform themselves?” asks the Tibetan saint Tsongkhapa.5

  Progressively we get accustomed to transforming our perceptions, our ways of thinking, and our behavior. It is a question o
f bringing about a complete reversal of mental habits by reducing emotions in a gradual process of study, reflection, and meditation—in other words, familiarization. That is how we refine the mind and purify it through a training that actualizes its potential. We learn to master the stream of our consciousness, to control the emotional obscurations, without letting ourselves be dominated by them. That is the path toward realization of the absolute nature. Our practice integrates all the aspects and all the various levels of the Buddha’s teaching.

  Faced with the emotional obscurations, we must learn to be constantly vigilant. When one of them presents itself to our mind, we should react as if a thief has gotten into our house, and we should be quick to chase it away. For it is our spiritual realizations that are about to be stolen from us. If the mental poisons can finally be transformed into wisdom, it is because their ultimate nature is endowed with primordial, naturally luminous purity.

  Training our emotional life

  THE SELF IS THE ROOT of the mental poisons. Our mind fabricates, projects, and attaches concepts to people and things. Egocentric fixation reinforces the qualities or defects that we attribute to others. From this results a solidification of the separation between me and not-me, mine and not-mine. Things we perceive as separate are actually connected, but our “I” separates them. So long as we are in ignorance and have not experienced the absence of reality of the self, our mind believes in its solidity. Realizing the absence of inherent existence of the self is an effective antidote to egocentric fixation, and it is the point of the teachings on the Buddha’s path.

  Under the effect of attraction and desire, the mind mixes with and attaches itself to the object of its craving. Desire for possession is very powerful; it crystallizes attachment to the self and to what is “mine.” We feel repulsion for what harms us, and this repulsion will change into hatred, then into a disturbed mind, harmful words, violence. These negative emotions are the cause of bad health. Medical studies have shown that people who, in the language of everyday life, use the words “I,” “me,” or “mine” the most are more subject than others to cardiac diseases. At the root of negative emotions, then, we find the self and a belief in the solidity of things. We have to try to dissipate this belief on ever subtler levels.

  Training our emotional life represents a labor of many decades to remedy the negative feelings that have become the normal state of our mind. For we have never tried to learn who we really are. The reification of the self and of phenomena creates a division between subject and object. When we dissipate belief in the reality of the self and the world, we discover that wisdom itself is without any inherent existence. Obviously, that corresponds to an advanced stage on the path.

  The Dalai Lama has experienced the words of the Buddha, who invites his disciples to examine the scriptures like a goldsmith testing gold. In his teachings, the Dalai Lama transmits the pure gold of his practice through the overabundance of his heart. He sometimes sheds tears when he describes the power of the mind of Enlightenment, which cherishes others more than itself, or else he bursts out laughing when he mentions human naïveté and shortcomings. His tears and his spontaneous laughter are teachings within the teaching, reminding us of the incarnate dimension of wisdom.

  In the mirror of the Dalai Lama’s limitless generosity, we have a chance to evaluate the path of our life. For it is the very parameters of our relationship to the world that the spiritual master calls into question. What reality should we assign to what we take as “reality"? The reasoning of analytic investigation strips the layers away and deconstructs the person who says “I,” “my,” “mine,” or “me,” thereby appropriating the experience of awareness and of the perceptible world. In the land of Descartes, it suddenly seems presumptuous indeed to assert, “I think, therefore I am.”

  The teaching of Tibetan masters calls such certainties into question: “Your present face is not you,” Lama Yeshe writes.

  Your bones and flesh are not you. Neither your blood, your muscles, nor any other part of your body is the essence of who you are…. Our gross physical body is not the only body we possess…. Within the confines of our ordinary physical form exists a subtler conscious body, so called because it is intimately connected with deep levels of consciousness. It is from these subtler levels that the potential energy of blissful wisdom arises, an energy capable of transforming the quality of our life completely…. [It] represents the essence of who we are and what we can become.6

  Through meditative practice, ordinary identity is overcome by the energy of Enlightenment. Access is given to a level of awareness where appearances no longer manifest without the realization of their interdependence, so that “we” becomes more real than “I.” Recognizing that we do not have the cause of our existence inside us and that we depend on others for our survival is the first step that allows us to appreciate the essential generosity of life. Buddhist analysis of reality leads us to understand that everything is connected and that compassion is our true nature.

  The Dalai Lama often compares religions to medicine, adding that different treatments are necessary to cure different diseases. But all religions are the same in that they all prescribe altruism. Why? Because loving-kindness represents the fundamental health that corresponds to the true nature of reality. Egocentric attitudes, harmful to ourselves and others, go against the truth of life and human beings. They stem from ignorance and lead to mental deviancies that need to be remedied. Wisdom, perceiving reality as it is, represents the supreme remedy of altruism. It is by following this reasoning that the Dalai Lama can assert: “I call love and compassion a universal religion. That is my religion.”

  Now we can understand that by presenting himself as a human being, the Dalai Lama means that he has effected a process of inner transformation that allows him to recognize the participatory reality of life and to experience its basic goodness. But according to the law of reciprocity associated with the principle of interdependence, we are part of the world as much as the world is part of us.

  Whoever transforms himself, transforms the world.

  4

  Transforming the World

  I Call for a Spiritual Revolution

  We can do without religion, but not without spirituality

  AS A TIBETAN MONK, I was brought up to respect Buddhist principles. My entire way of thinking was shaped by the fact that I am a disciple of the Buddha, but I have wanted to go beyond the borders of my faith to clarify certain universal principles, with the aim of helping everyone find happiness.

  It seems important to me to distinguish between religion and spirituality. Religion implies a system of beliefs based on metaphysical foundations, along with the teaching of dogmas, rituals, or prayers. Spirituality, however, corresponds to the development of human qualities such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, or a sense of responsibility. These inner qualities, which are a source of happiness for oneself and for others, are independent of any religion. That is why I have sometimes stated that one can do without religion, but not without spirituality. And an altruistic motivation is the unifying element of the qualities that I define as spiritual.

  Spiritual revolution and ethical revolution

  SPIRITUALITY, in my view, consists of transforming the mind. The best way to transform it is to get it used to thinking in a more altruistic way. So ethics is the basis for a secular spirituality for everyone, one that is not limited to a group of believers in one religion or another.

  The spiritual revolution that I advocate is not a religious revolution. It corresponds to an ethical reorientation of our attitude, since it is a question of learning to take the aspirations of others into account as much as our own.

  The spiritual revolution I advocate does not depend on external conditions linked to material progress or technology. It is born from within, motivated by the profound desire to transform oneself in order to become a better human being.

  People may object that a spiritual revolution cannot solve t
he problems of the contemporary world. They might add that, on the social level, violence, alcoholism, drugs, or the loss of family values should be dealt with on their own ground through specific measures. But we know that more love and compassion would limit the extent and gravity of these problems. Wouldn’t it be better to approach them and treat them like problems of a spiritual order?

  I am not claiming that such problems will instantly disappear, but I do say that by reducing them to the social sphere and by neglecting their spiritual dimension, we aren’t giving ourselves the means to resolve them in a lasting way. Spirituality, when understood as the development of fundamental human values, has every chance to improve the life of our communities.

  The sickness of duality

  IT IS IMPORTANT TO BECOME AWARE of interdependence by realizing that a phenomenon occurs owing to multiple causes and conditions. Reducing it to one single factor would lead to a fragmentation of reality. Awareness of interdependence eventually brings about a lessening of violence. All the more so because when one places oneself in a wider context, one becomes less vulnerable to external circumstances and acquires a healthier judgment. Nonviolence is not limited to an absence of violence, for it is a matter of an active attitude, motivated by the wish to do others good. It is equivalent to altruism.