The previous chapter was a prelude, a warm-up. Here I will teach about shamatha, or calm abiding, in detail. First, I want to address the issue of conceptual mind—the state of mind in which experience is divided into or held as having two parts, subject and object. This holding of duality is what fuels the whole play, the whole drama. (Conceptual mind in Tibetan is called lo; dualistic thinking mind is sem.)
The view held during shamatha practice is a conceptual view. There are a few types of shamatha. One I call “stupidity training,” a training in being dull and absentminded. It is actually not a formal meditation practice, but people do use it, so it needs to be mentioned. As a matter of fact, many people mistake their stupidity training for real shamatha. The genuine training is traditionally described as being of two types: one is supported shamatha with object, while the other is unsupported shamatha without object.
The idea of meditation started to become popular in the West in the sixties. People began to associate a certain mental state with that word. Sometimes it is used to refer to a kind of shutting off, a process of remaining uninvolved and going into your own space, an altered state where you don’t notice anything happening in the outside world. To practice in this way means to distance yourself from experiencing through the senses. You go into a state of oblivion, absentminded and totally dim, just like animals do in hibernation. This process of shutting off from anything and trying to stay like that was sometimes called deep relaxation and even meditation. Many people still do this. One can slip into this when training in shamatha, and many people are in fact fond of it. They like it because it’s peaceful, and it feels like taking a break. Someone who trains like that for years and years will become progressively duller and more stupid. His eyes will become very cloudy. This type of “progress” is dangerous. Please watch out! There’s a big risk in mistaking that state of stupidity training for the training in shamatha.
Just as an experiment, let’s rest in stupidity training for five minutes. We should be familiar with it so that we can identify what it is. Close your eyes. Do not think of anything. It’s just like when you lean back in the sauna after working out—there’s no attempt to know anything. You may even drool. You completely close down but are somewhat relaxed. Mentally there is no activity. Do you recognize this state?
First-class stupidity training for even five minutes will surely put you to sleep. There is a strong link between this state and sleep. Falling asleep is caused by dullness, and to train in shutting down like that pulls us into the absentminded state of sleep.
Shamatha is definitely unlike that. It should have a certain brightness. During shamatha, you are well aware of what is happening all around you. Your attention is focused on nowness, and yet at the same time you are able to notice what is going on around you, both right and left.
Let’s do another five minutes of stupidity training. Do not keep hold of anything; just forget all your worries. Totally shut off into a state of dullness. Don’t try to figure out anything. This is not the time for realization. We are not trying to attain anything from this. Do not maintain any particular thought activity; simply withdraw inside.
Those of you who have gone to the beach know this state. Those of you who have gone trekking in the mountains know this state. It is not something new. You go to the beach, you swim around, then you lie on your back with a towel over your face and do stupidity training. You just kind of pass out there on the beach. After about twenty minutes, you think, “How relaxing!” But that sort of training does not brighten your intelligence; it brings no insight. Without insight, there is nothing to wipe out the seeds for further samsaric existence. So, right now, close your eyes. You have to close your eyes for this practice, but still sit with a straight back.
[A few minutes of stupidity training]
Enough. This is risky. You may fall asleep. The other danger is that tomorrow you might want to repeat this practice. Stupidity training is no good. It may feel cozy, but it’s not Buddhist meditation practice. It is not shamatha and it’s surely not vipashyana. It’s in no way a noble practice.
Shamatha, calm abiding, is completely unlike stupidity training. It is found at many levels of Buddhist practice, as well as in many other spiritual traditions—for instance, the Hindu schools and probably other places as well—but its origin was in the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha taught meditation as shamatha and vipashyana. Buddhist shamatha has two types: one with support and one without support.
The purpose of shamatha is to improve our presence of mind. We all have an innate ability to pay attention, to know. To improve upon this presence, to make it steady instead of being scattered and distracted, we try to remain attentive in a stable way.
In stupidity training, there’s no sense of nowness. The sense of nowness is allowed to fade away. Stupidity training has no sense of being present. We hold nothing in mind, but we are just about to fall asleep. We are dull, absentminded. In shamatha, we focus on nowness, on being here, right now. There is a sense of knowing, of being mindful: that I am here, that all the objects are here, that everything is taking place and I’m aware of this. There is a certain brightness in this state. The brightness is the quality of knowing what is taking place, even though it may not be a state of liberation.
You can say the brightness is liberated when there is a sense of knowing what it is in itself in the present. That happens at the time of vipashyana, or at the time of the view of the Great Perfection, of Dzogchen. Right now, during the straight and honest shamatha of dwelling in nowness, this quality of freedom is not yet there; it is missing. Nevertheless, we need to begin with the type of nowness that is mindful of the present. In order to be here now, we need a certain amount of support to not let the attention drift off or slip away to this and that.
Shamatha has three components: being mindful, alert, and settled. Imagine a shepherd at work. When the sheep are tethered, they remain settled. They have a rope tied around their necks to prevent them from walking too far away. That rope is mindfulness. But there is also the shepherd supervising the whole affair, not paying too much attention to each individual sheep, but looking to see if everything is okay, keeping an eye out in case something goes wrong. Some really stupid sheep may get tangled up in their rope, and if there’s no shepherd there to undo it immediately, they can strangle themselves. Then the shepherd walks over and undoes the rope so the sheep can again roam and graze. That is alertness.
That was the analogy; here comes the meaning. When this attention of ours, this mind, is not following the past and not planning the future but just remaining in nowness, that’s a sense of settling, of staying put. Next, something extra is needed to keep the attention on the present, to prevent the attention from going astray into thinking about the past or the future. The sheep feels a tension at its throat if it walks a little too far away, so it moves back to make the rope more slack. That is the analogy for mindfulness, the method for keeping the attention tethered to the present moment, remaining settled in the present. Third and most important is the sense of alertness, the supervising quality that stays alert to whether this attention remains present or not. Without this, how would one know whether one is being distracted? How would one know whether this mind actually remains settled in nowness? Thus, the most important quality is this sense of overall alertness, the sense of being awake to the whole situation.
This alertness sees the whole picture. In midst of the entire panorama of shamatha, there is something that knows very clearly that you remain settled. You know you are settled, while at the same time you know you are not distracted. You are there together with the sense of abiding, and this knowing also is aware. This whole atmosphere is needed in shamatha practice. Slowly and gradually, the alertness will become more alert, more alert, more alert.
The correct practice of shamatha further and further strengthens this alert quality. It transforms into an increasing sense of being awake. Meanwhile, the mindful quality becomes more and more mindful, so that it requires less and less effort. You are just naturally mindful,