THE CHANGING MIND, THE GRASPING MIND
We all have a mind, and we all have limitations in our mind. These have their root in ignorance.
In Dzogchen teachings, when we speak of the mind, we first refer to all the limitations of the changing mind, conceptual mind, or ordinary mind, and how we can free ourselves from them, and then we address the natural mind. All of us— both human beings and other sentient beings—have a mind, and we all have limitations in our mind. The limitations of the mind have their root in ignorance, and it is the same for all beings.
The conceptual or changing mind is the common mind of ordinary experience, the one that constantly deals with thoughts, memories, images, internal dialogues, judgments, meanings, emotions, and fantasies. It is what we normally identify as "I" and "my experience." Its essential dynamic is related to a dual perspective of existence. It considers itself a subject in a world of objects and clings to certain parts of experience while rejecting others. It reacts, and sometimes it does so wildly; but even when it achieves supreme tranquility and subtlety—as in states of intense meditation or concentration—it continues to maintain the attitude of an entity observing its environment and therefore continues to participate in duality.
The conceptual mind is not limited to language and ideas. Language, with its nouns, verbs, subjects, and objects, is necessarily dual, but the conceptual mind is active even before language acquisition. In this sense, animals have conceptual minds, as do babies and those born without the ability to speak. The conceptual mind is the result of habitual karmic tendencies that are present before birth and, therefore, before we develop a sense of self. Its essential characteristic is to instinctively divide experience in a dualistic way, starting with subject and object, with self and non-self.
The Mother Tantra refers to this mind as an "active manifestation of the natural mind." It is that which arises from the movement of karmic prana and manifests in the form of thoughts, concepts, and other mental activities. If the changing mind quiets down completely, it dissolves into the nature of the mind, and only resurfaces when activity itself reconstitutes it.
The activities of the changing mind can be virtuous, non-virtuous, or neutral. The first are those that allow the experience of the nature of the mind to occur; the neutral ones disturb the connection with this nature, and the non-virtuous ones create more disturbances and lead to greater disconnection.
The changing mind works very hard and thereby obtains an ego bound to the duality of subject and object, and also to the experience of suffering. We live in the memories of the past and in fantasies about the future, severed from the direct experience of the beauty and luminosity of life.
The mind is the origin of everything; the mind is the origin of happiness, pain, knowledge, confusion, understanding, misunderstanding. It is the source. Everything we do, whether we do it well or badly—every mistake or success— comes from the mind: the mind is everything. Everything we do is because the mind does it; if we have confusion or behave wrongly, it is because the mind does so. If we act correctly and begin to have positive attitudes and thoughts and obtain positive results, it is due to the mind. So, the mind is the origin of everything.
For example, currently, alternative medicine tries to connect the body with the mind to alleviate physical problems; hence the importance of understanding the mind. What we have developed over centuries in the Tibetan tradition is not a technology but a way of understanding the mind.
There is much to offer in terms of knowledge of the mind; there are many practices, and some seem strange, like the practice of Chöd (offering of the body); during this practice, the person visualizes being invaded by spirits and offers their body for those spirits to feed on. When this is not understood, it seems very strange, even diabolical, but it is not so. The principle behind this practice is very simple: how much attachment have I developed in relation to my body? Attachment to the body is the greatest of our attachments.
One of the main problems lies in the principle of ownership, which is attachment. When we possess something, problems begin. For example, when you rent a house, all the problems that arise are for the landlord; you just pay rent and don't worry about the house: you enjoy it, you live more in the moment. When you say, "I can buy this house now," and you start saving and finally buy it and sign the deed, then you find that the problems that were previously the landlord's are now yours: the floor isn't right, the kitchen needs repairing... Now you have all those problems you didn't have before. You lived in that house for years and were very happy in it, and now, instead, all those problems surface. It's the same house, you're the same person living there; the problem arose out of nowhere. Where did it come from? It's just a mental trick; now the mind thinks: "all this is mine," and that's where the problem lies: the mind no longer has the same capacity to relax as before.
The mind is the source of everything, and we can change our mind; we can change our mental attitude by accessing the Dharma, the teachings, receiving blessings, power, and knowledge, and all that makes our eyes open, and we begin to see a different world. We know when the teachings are working because the problems we had before no longer arise. Things that made us nervous no longer provoke that sensation. Things that were very serious for us and made us angry no longer make us feel that way; we have opened our being and live in a different dimension. The change in mental attitude has changed our lives.
I will give an example of the power of the mind, which becomes evident when we get angry—we all know what it's like to be angry—and we also know that some people get angry more than they should.
First: why do we get angry? No matter our nationality, we all get angry at some point. The expressions of anger can vary according to cultural conditioning: some cry, others laugh; but everyone has some reaction. Some people don't have much anger, and that's good. In Tibetan Buddhism, we differentiate between a healthy absence of anger and the repression of anger. Perhaps many people don't feel anger because they repress it, and perhaps some people don't feel anger because they don't have it. The second case is fine; the first is not. When we get angry, everything in us changes at the biological level: our body feels different; our face turns red; our expression changes, our language changes; or we may use the same language, but our intonation changes; our mental attitude changes, our way of interacting with others changes; everything around us changes: the people we live with change, our family changes. If we are powerful politicians, we change the nation.
The result is that a single anger causes very great effects. Why? Because at that moment, we live in a different dimension. If we want to change the external, if we want to live in peace, if we want to change our way of speaking, if we want to change our behavior, we will have to change our mind. Only then can we change everything else. If we try to change the external without anything changing within ourselves, we will not succeed.
A Tibetan saying goes: "If you want to stop the flow of a stream, you cannot do it from any of its parts; you have to stop it from the origin." Thus, the mind is the origin of everything we experience.
The reason we get angry is that we have a certain perspective. For example, if an intimate friend hurts us and we are mugged on the street, we will obviously get angrier with our friend than with the street mugger, because we think that in friendship, one should not do something that hurts; we expect a superior attitude from our friend, and that is our point of view or our determined perspective. This is what makes us angry: we expect our friend never to do anything that hurts us, but he is a human being.
Expectation is what creates the problem. We live life through our point of view, our frame of reference. Imagine what would happen if you didn't have the point of view you have, imagine what would happen if you didn't have a frame of reference. Can you imagine it? You would be liberated.