Once you have met the challenges of the first six stages of attentional development, you ascend to the seventh, which is called fully pacified attention. Asanga succinctly characterizes this stage of development with the statement, “Attachment, melancholy, and so on are pacified as they arise.”64 Such experiences may continue to occur from time to time, but they have lost their power to disturb the equilibrium of your mind. Involuntary thoughts continue to course through the mind like a river slowly flowing through a valley, but as your mind settles more and more deeply in its natural state, there is nothing for them to attach to. In the absence of grasping, you are not attached to them, and they have no power in themselves to afflict you.
The power by which the seventh stage is achieved is enthusiasm: the practice itself now fills you with joy. It is this that motivates you to continue in the practice, meeting the increasingly subtle challenges ahead. Having overcome the medium degree of laxity, subtle laxity remains, in which the object of mindfulness appears vividly, but your attention is slightly slack. No one but a highly advanced meditator is even capable of recognizing such a subtle degree of laxity. It is detected only in relation to the exceptionally high degree of vividness of which the trained mind is capable. Subtle excitation also occurs from time to time. As recommended previously, when laxity sets in, you arouse your attention; and when excitation occurs, you loosen up slightly. At the seventh stage, these subtle attentional imbalances are swiftly recognized due to your finely honed faculty of introspection, and they are easily remedied. The Tibetan word gom, usually translated as “meditation,” has the connotation of familiarity, and that is the quality of your experience at the stage of fully pacified attention. You have become highly adept at balancing and refining your attention, and the rest of the journey to the realization of shamatha is all downhill.
Upon reaching the seventh stage of fully pacified attention, the mind has been so refined that your meditation sessions may last for at least two hours with only the slightest interruptions by laxity and excitation. In each of the two shamatha methods introduced thus far—mindfulness of breathing and settling the mind in its natural state—the practices gradually involve doing less and less. When mindfully attending to the breath, there is a great deal you are not doing, but you are still releasing involuntary thoughts when they arise. You do prefer to have a conceptually silent mind, as opposed to having discursive thoughts and images arise one after the other. When settling the mind in its natural state, you are doing even less. Now you don’t even prefer thoughts to be absent. Instead of deliberately letting them go—banishing them from your mind—you let them be, without deliberately influencing them in any way. You simply maintain constant mindfulness of the space of the mind and whatever events occur in that space.
The First Panchen Lama called this practice meditation on the relative nature of the mind,65 and Düdjom Lingpa called it taking appearances and awareness as the path.66 The First Panchen Lama describes this practice as follows:
Whatever sort of thoughts arise, without suppressing them, recognize where they are moving and where they are moving to; and focus while observing the nature of those thoughts. By so doing, eventually their movement ceases and there is stillness. This is like the example of the flight over the ocean of an uncaged bird that has long been kept onboard a ship at sea. Practice in accord with the description in [Saraha’s] Song of Realization: “Like a raven that flies from a ship, circles around in all directions, and alights there again.”67
In ancient times, when Indian mariners sailed far out to sea, they would release a caged raven they had brought onboard and observe its flight. After flying around higher and higher in ever-widening circles, if the raven flew off in one direction, the navigator would know that was the direction of the nearest land. But if there was no land in sight for the raven, as much as it might wish to alight elsewhere, since it could not swim it had no choice but to return to the ship. Likewise, when thoughts arise, let them play out their course, regardless of their nature or duration. In the end, they can only disappear back into the space of awareness from which they initially arose. In this practice it is crucial to observe the movement of thoughts without intervention. This is a vital aspect to the natural healing of the mind that takes place in this process.
The practice of settling the mind in its natural state corresponds closely to the psychological description of mindfulness, explained earlier as “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.”68 This description, as discussed in chapter 4, reflects the contemporary Vipassana tradition’s account of mindfulness as a kind of moment-to-moment “bare attention” or nonconceptual awareness that does not label or categorize experiences. Indian and Tibetan Buddhist contemplatives, however, regard the practice of settling the mind in its natural state as a specific technique for developing shamatha, not contemplative insight, or vipashyana.
Bhante Gunaratana, speaking for the contemporary Vipassana tradition, states that samadhi, or concentration, “could be defined as that faculty of the mind which focuses single-pointedly on one object without interruption.” And he describes mindfulness as the faculty that “notices that…distraction has occurred, and it is mindfulness which redirects the attention.”69 Thus, for Gunaratana, concentration performs the function that we have been calling mindfulness, and mindfulness as he describes it performs the function that we have been calling introspection. It may be helpful to note these terminological differences from one tradition to another, without getting hung up on them. However, it is also worth noting that according to the classic texts cited here, the shamatha practice of bare attention applied to the domain of the mind results only in the temporary alleviation of such mental afflictions as craving and hostility. So there’s no reason to believe that the practice of bare attention alone will irreversibly dispel any affliction of the mind.
According to Buddhist tradition, such liberation is achieved through the practice of vipashyana, or insight meditation, which results in wisdom. Such realization, when fused with the exceptional attentional stability and clarity of shamatha, irreversibly eliminates the ignorance and delusion that lie at the root of suffering. On the other hand, if our practice of vipashyana is not supported by the achievement of shamatha, no realization, awakening, or transformation will last, and we will never rise above the wounds of our human pain. The liberation that results from the unification of shamatha and vipashyana in no way places us outside the reality of change. The Buddha, too, grew old and died. But the freedom gained by the Buddha and all those who have followed his path to liberation to its culmination has irrevocably healed their minds from craving, hostility, and delusion and their resultant suffering. Anything less is unworthy of the name “nirvana.”
Within the Buddhist noble eightfold path, right effort, right concentration, and right mindfulness are ancillary to cultivation of samadhi. Right thought and right view are the essential elements of the eightfold path needed for the cultivation of wisdom. This further indicates that mindfulness alone is insufficient for liberating the mind completely from its afflictive tendencies. To achieve the insight that results in true freedom, one must exercise great clarity of thought, making use of views like the Buddhist ones much as a scientist uses working hypotheses in conducting experiments. The practice of meditation that is unrelated to any view or hypothesis is as limited as scientific research that is conducted without reference to a scientific view of reality.
According to the Mahayana tradition, the practice of settling the mind in its natural state leads to a realization of the relative nature of consciousness and the temporary alleviation of certain hindrances, or obscurations, of the mind. This is why the First Panchen Lama called it meditation on the conventional nature of the mind and cautioned that many contemplatives in Tibet had mistaken meditative experiences from this practice for realization of ultimate truth.
Both the Theravada and the Indo-Tibetan traditions of Buddhism agree that the cultivation of shamatha leads to an experiential realization of the ground state of the psyche. Early Buddhist literature refers to this as the bhavanga, literally, “the ground of becoming,” which supports all kinds of mental activities and sensory perceptions, as the root of a tree sustains the trunk, branches, and leaves. The bhavanga may be characterized as a relative vacuum state of consciousness, voided of all the “kinetic energy” of active thoughts, mental imagery, and sense perceptions. Generally speaking, it is indiscernible while the mind is active, for it normally manifests only in dreamless sleep and during the very last moment of a person’s life. While it is depicted as the natural, unencumbered state of the mind, its innate radiance and purity are present even when the mind is obscured by afflictive thoughts and emotions.70 In contrast to the materialistic view of the mind, Buddhist contemplatives assert that all mental and sensory processes are conditioned by the body and the environment, but they actually emerge from the bhavanga, not the brain.
Theravada commentators insist that the bhavanga is an intermittent phase of consciousness, which is interrupted whenever sensory consciousness or other kinds of cognitive activity arise. So it is not an ongoing repository of memories or any other mental imprints. Despite the fact that the bhavanga is described as the naturally pure and radiant state of awareness that exists whether or not the mind is obscured with defilements, this school—perhaps out of a concern that it be seen as a permanent, independent Self—denies that it is an ever-present substrate.
I believe Dzogchen contemplatives who have achieved shamatha gain access to this same dimension of consciousness, but they interpret it in a somewhat different way. The substrate consciousness (alayavijñana), as they call it, consists of a stream of arising and passing moments of consciousness, so it is not permanent; and it is conditioned by various influences, so it is not independent. But they do regard it as a continuous stream of consciousness from which all mundane cognitive processes arise.
In the natural course of a life, the substrate consciousness is repeatedly experienced in dreamless sleep, and it finally manifests at the moment of death. A contemplative may consciously probe this dimension of consciousness through the practice of shamatha, in which discursive thoughts become dormant and all appearances of oneself, others, one’s body, and one’s environment vanish. At this point, as in the cases of sleeping and dying, the mind is drawn inward and the physical senses become dormant. What remains is a state of radiant, clear consciousness that is the basis for the emergence of all appearances to an individual’s mindstream. All phenomena appearing to sensory and mental perception are imbued with the clarity of this substrate consciousness. Like the reflections of the planets and stars in a pool of limpid, clear water, so do the appearances of the entire phenomenal world appear within this empty, clear substrate consciousness.
The substrate consciousness may be characterized as the relative ground state of the individual mind, in the sense that it entails the lowest state of activity, with the highest potential and degree of freedom that can be achieved by evacuating the mind through the practice of samadhi. For example, once an individual stream of consciousness has been catalyzed from its own substrate in dreamless sleep, it can freely manifest in a vast diversity of dreamscapes and experiences. Such exceptional creativity also is displayed while under deep hypnosis, which also taps into the substrate consciousness. But this potential is most effectively accessed when one lucidly penetrates to the substrate consciousness by means of meditative quiescence. In this case, one is vividly aware of the substrate, in contrast to the dullness that normally characterizes dreamless sleep. Buddhist contemplatives report that such fully conscious realization of the ground state of consciousness opens up a tremendous wellspring of creativity, which is largely obscured in the normal experiences of the substrate while sleeping or dying.
Contemplatives who have realized the substrate consciousness through the practice of shamatha claim that it is imbued with three attributes: bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality. These have led many contemplatives to mistake the substrate consciousness for the ultimate nature of reality, or nirvana. But simply dwelling in this relative vacuum state of consciousness does not liberate the mind of its afflictive tendencies or their resultant suffering. By fathoming the nature of the substrate consciousness, one comes to know the nature of consciousness in its relative ground state. This realization, however, does not illuminate the nature of reality as a whole. It is also important not to confuse this substrate consciousness with a collective unconscious, as conceived by Carl Jung. Buddhist accounts of the substrate consciousness all refer to it as an individual stream of consciousness that carries on from one lifetime to the next.
The Dzogchen tradition draws a distinction between the substrate consciousness and the substrate (alaya), which is described as the objective, empty space of the mind. This vacuum state is immaterial like space, a blank, unthinking void into which all objective appearances of the physical senses and mental perception dissolve when one falls asleep; and it is out of this vacuum that appearances reemerge upon waking.71
At this point in the practice of shamatha, you will have honed your ability to attend to all kinds of mental processes without distraction and without grasping. Even when the mental toxins of craving, anger, and delusion arise, you will be able to observe them without being sucked into them. And insofar as you don’t grasp onto them or identify with them, they become detoxified and can no longer disturb the equilibrium of your mind. To the extent that you are able to release these mental processes into their natural state, they are no longer even experienced as mental afflictions, and you may now begin to explore their more essential nature.
When you experience craving, you may notice the bliss that arises in the anticipation of joy and satisfaction. You are seeing through the afflictions of your psyche and sensing the bliss that is a quality of your substrate consciousness. At all times, when craving arises for anything such as possessions, notoriety, sensual enjoyments, or even for the accomplishment of shamatha, you can attend to the bliss in the craving.
In the heat of anger you may discover luminosity, a second quality of the substrate consciousness. Whenever anger blazes up, you have the opportunity not to be carried away by nor identify with it. Instead, you may attend closely to the luminosity that is manifesting as anger and begin to fathom the deeper nature of consciousness.
Even in delusion there is an aspect of the substrate consciousness: non-conceptuality. So whenever you experience delusion, attend to its deeper, unafflictive nature of nonconceptuality. By carefully attending to the mind with discerning awareness, we can begin to experience three qualities of the substrate consciousness—bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality—as they manifest as anger, craving, and delusion. When you are carried away by or identify with these mental processes, they disrupt the equilibrium of the mind and lead to harmful behavior. But when you attend to them without distraction and without grasping, they become portals to the primary characteristics of the substrate consciousness.