Training in Awareness

by Khandro Rinpoche

The real intent behind any Dharma practice is to train the mind for the moment of death so that the moment of death can arise with confidence and without regret — regret in the sense of non awareness, or ignorance. As we develop awareness, we get a better understanding of the very subtle thoughts that constantly shift the mind into non awareness.

Lacking awareness, we are unable to understand impermanence and the emptiness of thought, time, and a self — empty in the sense that they cannot be proven to exist. Imposing solidity upon that inherently empty nature, we spend whole lifetimes struggling with ourselves and others. When we look at all the sentient beings living like this, we can truly understand how difficult it is to become free from suffering in the midst of samsara.

The only way to free yourself from ignorance is the path of awareness. Training in awareness begins with you. It would be difficult to go outside of yourself to get this message — or to change the mind of anyone else. You are the one endowed with the qualities, teachings, and practices; you are the one with the genuine desire and ability to bring this to fruition. Therefore, you need to be the first one to transcend ignorance. Then and only then can you benefit others. This is the reason we contemplate impermanence.

Knowing that all sentient beings desire happiness, we are unable to generate happiness because of non awareness. How can we overcome suffering? How can we gain happiness and be the cause of happiness when the basis of our every action is completely contradictory to that? In a single moment, there can be so many stains of ignorance and shades of hesitation. If we're awake enough to recognise these subtle shifts, we will find that the "big things" we think of as the cause of samsara — gross emotions of anger, ignorance, desire, hatred, and so forth — are not really the problem. They are second-or third-hand results of non awareness, which is the core essence of distraction.

Recognising that shift is called training the mind. For this, we emphasise training in meditation. The point of your meditation — or devotion or practice of any kind — is a clean, precise understanding of the subtle shifts of mind that generate the gross emotions of ignorance, desire, or hatred. Recognising this, you will be able to maintain clear awareness.

What matters most in meditation is the quality, not the duration, of your practice. You could spend hours in meditation still enveloped in a contaminated view of something to hold on to, an identity to maintain, and the same habitual grasping. This is just pretence, just the form of meditation, and not the genuine transcendence of mind. If you sit for only five minutes, see if you can remain within mindfulness and compassion completely free from self-grasping for those five minutes.

The path of awareness begins with the Four Reminders. Think carefully about impermanence and the preciousness of human existence, and not just in terms of "Yes, this is true, yes that happens." Otherwise, you'll spend your life saying, "Of course everything is impermanent," and "Yes, he or she is dead," and "Of course I'm not confident that when I breathe out I'll breathe in again." This kind of belief is not what we are talking about; these are just clues or steps to contemplation.

The important thing is to reach a point where our hearts are truly shaken by a genuine sense of fear — fear in the sense that impermanence arises with every moment. This brings a starkly naked awareness of just how silly this great arrogance is that we have about "my" life: my views, my understanding, my hopes and fears. When that shift of the heart actually happens, we will glimpse for the first time the real importance of all the teachings and instructions. And from then on, we will not need anyone else to tell us about the truth of impermanence. This is the kind of confidence we need as an antidote to distraction and all its emotional and conceptual displays.

It is most unlikely that we will ever understand the real intent of Dharma or practice, however, until our mind matures through proper contemplation of the Four Reminders. In the Buddhist tradition, the Four Reminders are contemplated often. You will find some reference to them before every practice session and at the beginning of every single text in all 84,000 tenets and commentaries. The point of contemplating the Four Reminders is to see who and what we are as human beings: we are completely endowed with enlightened potential, and we completely embody impermanence and karma. This is what we can be proud of, and this is what we can be not so proud of — but this is what we are.

It is entirely up to us to work with this — either from the point of view of awareness, which leads to nirvana, or from that of ignorance, which leads to samsara. This is the reasoning behind samsara and nirvana, existence and enlightenment. Because of our inherent buddha nature, the choice is always ours. The only question is whether we choose the path of wisdom or the path of ignorance.

There is no reason for anyone to go willingly into ignorance when there is wisdom. Remaining within wisdom — using any support that best brings this about — is the life of a Buddhist practitioner. If being spiritual and using spiritual terms inspires you, then by all means add the Buddha and all the Buddhist teachings to your life. If it inspires you to simply be who you are and practice as you are without any spiritual terminology, that's fine too. The essential thing is to get down to using your life properly.

Contemplating the preciousness of human life and the impermanence of all things brings us to the next reminder, the suffering of the six realms of existence.