It’s Personal

What is the mind? What is meditation? What is the Great Seal or the Great Perfection? The Buddha knew, Milarepa and the great masters knew and know…which is great for them.

The Buddha taught at length on such topics. One could say the Buddha taught nothing else. But what he and the other masters have written is their understanding and realisation.

We can read what they wrote, but doing so doesn’t make their understanding our understanding. Being able to quote the Buddha or repeat the utterances of your lama concerning the mind doesn’t fundamentally do you any good.

Not only does it not do you any good, but reading the mind instructions, meditation manuals and other such teachings when you have not yet gained your own understanding can further obscure the nature of the mind. It can serve to introduce further ideas and notions that you begin to seek and ‘find’ as you meditate.

That sensation or thought that arose during meditation, which seemed to match what you read, is then seized upon as being ‘it’. That notion then hinders you from actually looking, because you don’t look when you think you have already found what you are looking for.

The fact is, we do not know what we are looking for. That is why we need the lama.

The lama is not there to tell us how it is. Their job is to demonstrate that our current understanding is incorrect. Not how ‘some people’ misunderstand it in some generic fashion, but how one is personally confused.

The lama does this by asking the student questions so that the student can see for themselves when they are unable to answer. These blind spots are precisely what the student must go away and look into if they are to understand the mind.

If they can look properly, what they learn from seeing is their own personal understanding. They know it! They haven’t just heard it said or read it. They have seen it. It is personal.

Drupon Khen Rinpoche