Every experience is a magical movement of mind.
Mind is no mind: mind’s nature is empty.
Empty and immediate, mind may arise as anything.
Through careful probing, may I erase any sense of ground.
Commentary
This verse presents the outlook in mahamudra practice mentioned in the
preceding verse, “Confidence in outlook comes through cutting assumptions about the ground.”
What is an experience? It is hard to say. Our life is built out of three kinds of experiences: sensory sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Everything else is a construction. When we look at a car or a flower, for instance, we don’t see a car or a flower. We see shapes and colors. Those shapes and colors elicit feeling tones, which in turn elicit associations and established patterns of perception. Those come together with other mental factors and we have the experience of seeing a car or a flower as an object out there. But the actual experience of seeing? Where it takes place and what it is are mysteries. We experience seeing, but we cannot say what it is.
The building blocks of experience (sensations, feelings, and thoughts) are
carefully categorized in the Abhidharma, but they are not existent entities in themselves. When we probe them carefully, the most we can say is that they are some kind of magical movement of mind.
So, experience is mind. The question naturally arises then, “What is mind?”
When we probe mind by looking at it, we don’t see anything. When we look really carefully, we may actually see nothing, absolutely nothing.
Yet, there is an awareness, a clarity. When the mind moves, a thought, feeling, or sensation appears out of nothing, like a cloud forming in the sky. That cloud can take any combination of color, shape, and form—no restriction, nothing to block it, anything is possible.
The purpose of this examination is to erase any idea that there is any “thing” there and come to understand, albeit conceptually, that experience is utterly and completely groundless.
At any point in this process, if you reach a place where these lines don’t make sense to you, take your understanding or your confusion to someone and sort it out. A capable teacher does not say, “Your understanding is incorrect and this is how you should understand it.” Instead, he or she poses questions to you that help you to probe more deeply or in a different way. These questions are usually intellectually and emotionally challenging. That is the point. They are aimed at dispelling ways that we automatically and habitually embellish our experience with a solidity that it does not have and diminish, dismiss, or deny the validity of what we do experience.