Look at objects and there is no object: one sees mind;
Look at mind and there is no mind: it is empty of nature;
Look at both of these and dualistic clinging subsides on its own.
May I know sheer clarity, the way mind is.
Commentary
In this verse we put into practice what was described in the first two lines of
verse 9 in the outlook section:
Every experience is a magical movement of mind.
Mind is no mind: mind’s nature is empty
In the outlook section, we sought to understand conceptually what experience is, what mind is, and how they are related. In this section, we are not seeking to understand, we are seeking to know directly, using the skills and abilities we have developed. We can understand how a guitar makes a sound and how those sounds can be put together to make music. It is quite another matter to develop the dexterity and strength in our fingers and the coordination required and make actual music.
Begin by taking a visual object—a flower, a stone, a piece of chalk. It doesn’t
matter what. Look at it. Just rest quietly, looking at it. At some point, you realize that you are experiencing seeing a flower, say. Now you start to probe. What is this experience? Here it is crucial that you look. Don’t fall into explanations. Don’t try to understand anything. Look right at the flower, rest in the experience of seeing the flower, and ask, “What is this?”
In the beginning, every time you ask the question, all kinds of thoughts, explanations, and ideas may come flooding up. As you continue, to look, you
may feel frustrated, angry, impatient, foolish, incompetent… The list goes on.
Explanations and ideas are forms of thinking and are distractions. Quietly come back to looking at the flower and the distractions will subside on their own. Frustration, anger, impatience, and so on are all reactive feelings. Let them be there. You don’t need to do anything with them. Let them thrash around as you come back to the flower and the question, “What is this?” and rest there, looking.
More ideas, more feelings arise. Keep going. Keep resting attention on the flower and looking. Through experiencing the coming and going of thoughts and feelings without doing anything with them, you are building capacity. As capacity increases, you are more able to rest in the looking and look in the resting, at least for the flower. At some point, something shifts, and you realize that you are not looking at a flower, you are looking at your mind, that what you are “seeing” is an arising in your mind. This is not something you make happen. It happens when you have enough capacity to rest in the looking and look in the resting and you have sufficient skills in letting thoughts and other movements in mind come and go on their own without doing anything with them. The kind of knowing that arises is not intellectual at all. You may express it in words, as I have here, but it is not a thought any more than the sensation of a splash of cold water in your face is a thought.
Continue to practice with other objects until that shift becomes somewhat
accessible and familiar. Here you are building stability, which is helpful.
Then pose the question, “What is mind?” or “What is my mind?” and look.
Again, don’t fall for explanations or theories. Let any feelings of frustration,
irritation, confusion, and what have you just be there, and rest in the looking.
Whenever you do fall into distraction, return, rest, and then look. As before, look in the resting and rest in the looking. Again, like the bird-watcher, just look. Don’t try to see what you may have been told. Don’t try to see emptiness. Don’t try to give rise to clarity. Just rest and look, and look and rest. At some point, a shift takes place and you are looking at nothing. Not only are you looking at nothing, you are actually seeing nothing. There is nothing there, absolutely and irrefutably nothing there. What that shift is like varies from person to person, anything from, “Yeah, I kind of suspected that,” to “What! What the hell just happened?” You have touched emptiness. Again, keep practicing this way until that shift also becomes accessible and familiar.
Now it is back to The Heart Sutra:
Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.
Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness.
Go back to the flower and look at it. The flower is an object that, ordinarily, is
held to be “out there.” At the same time, and I do mean at the same time (and that is another skill to develop), look at what experiences seeing the flower, something that is ordinarily held to be “in here.” Look at both what is seen and what sees, and rest. Again, rest in the looking and look in the resting. Again, at some point, a shift takes place. For most people, this shift comes more easily than the other two, but there is still a lot of variation. In that shift, any sense of “out there” and “in here” have dissolved. Usually, a vivid clarity permeates everything you experience and everything you experience is experience (form) and emptiness. They cannot be separated as this or that, just as a rainbow cannot be separated from the sky in which it appears.
That is how mind is, and that is what you aspire to in every reading of this
prayer.