Lojong Slogan 5: Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence

In this weary striving world, rest is hard to come by. A luxury. From time to time we simply flop from exhaustion, but in general we don’t have many chances to slow down or to stop the momentum as our life flies by.

Especially when we think of cultivating kindness, and the activities of a bodhisattva of compassion warrior, we think “Lights, camera, action!” We don’t think “Rest!” But bodhisattva activities are not like regular activities—they come from a place of rest. The previous slogans undermined not only our fixed views of the substantiality of self and other, but also any attempt to hold onto that realization or even onto the realizer. Having broken though such falsely constructed reality, we reach a desolate but beautiful place. It is by acquainting ourselves with this place that we can prepare the ground for truly compassionate action.

The alaya, or essence, is the open unbiased expanse of mind. It is stillness. It can be envisioned as an expanse, or simply as a gap in our ongoing preoccupations, activities, and concerns. When we meditate, we tend to think that we are doing something, but occasionally we forget and find ourselves just simply at rest. And as that quality of rest expands it begins to swallow up the notion of anyone experiencing it.

The possibilty of resting in alaya is always present, and when it seeps into everyday experience, even in the form of a little pause or gap, it lightens the energy, making it much harder to be self-righteous or heavy handed. At the same time there is a bit of an edge, a tinge of fear, in that in this fresh state, habitual patterns have no support. So whatever direction we choose seems to come from a scary kind of no-man’s land.

~Judy Lief

The first six types of consciousness are the sensory perceptions: ...eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind consciousness. The seventh type of consciousness, nuisance mind, is a kind of conglomeration called nyon-yi.

The idea of resting one's mind in the basic alaya is to free oneself from that sevenfold mind and rest in simplicity and in clear and nondiscrimination mind. You begin to feel that sight, smell, sound, and everything else is just a production of home ground, or headquarters. you recognize them and then come back to headquarters, where those productions begin to manifest. You just rest in the needlessness of those productions.

The whole logic to process is based on taking it for granted that you trust yourself already, to begin with. You have some kind of relaxation with yourself. This is the idea of ultimate Bodhicitta. You don't have to run away from yourself all the time in order to get something outside. you can just come home and relax. The idea is to return to home-sweet-home.

~From Training the Mind & Cultivating Loving-Kindness by Chogyam Trungpa

We can learn to let thoughts go and just rest our mind in its natural state, in alaya, which is a word that means the open primordial basis of all phenomena. We can rest in the fundamental openness and enjoy the display of whatever arises without making a big deal.

~From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron

Rest in the Nature of All, the Basis of Everything

This instruction presents the actual method of placing the mind. When there is no involvement with the activity of the seven groups of consciousness, there is still the nature of all phenomena, the natural state, which is the basis of everything. It is pointed out by the term "noble buddha-nature." Let go and rest, without the slightest idea of a nature existing as something, with absolutely no mental clinging, in a state distinguished by nondiscursive clarity and pure simplicity. In summary, for as long as you are able, follow no train of thought, but rest evenly in a state in which mind in itself is clear and free of discursiveness. This is placing meditation. Then, complete the period of practice with the seven-branch prayer as before.

~From The Great Path of Awakening : An Easily Accessible Introduction for Ordinary People by Jamgon Kongtrul, translated by Ken McLeod.

Establish the Nature of the Path in the Sphere of the Foundation of All

Once we have arrived at this point honestly, with insight and intelligence, the nature of the meditative practice shifts. Now we free the mind of the conceptualizations we were using before, free it of any kind of ideation or discursive thought, any conceptual grasping to past, present, or future. The mind relaxes in the nature of non-grasping, and yet we maintain a state of vivid clarity, free of dullness or agitation.

This state is what Chekawa identifies in this next verse. The nature of the path is our own mind and the foundation of all is shunyata, or emptiness. The ontological foundation (or absence thereof) of all phenomena is emptiness of inherent existence; and from emptiness arise myriad phenomena, whether objective, subjective, or transcendent. Having arrived at the awareness of that emptiness, you then abide in it free of conceptualization, with the mind at rest, without tension but with vivid clarity.

When conceptualization eventually starts to creep back in, the author advises us at that very moment to direct our awareness to awareness itself. Look right at the conceptualization, and, as it vanishes, maintain the awareness, once again bringing to mind the experience of emptiness. Abide there, he says, rest in the sphere of reality, and thereby liberate your mind.

He also encourages us to limit this phase of the meditation to relatively brief periods. This avoids that spaced-out, nonconceptual state we have all experienced, where the mind is peaceful but not very clear, with no real vividness or insight. We may also return to the more analytical, investigative meditation, arrive once again at the insight, and then again enter the non-conceptual, non-grasping state of awareness. During one session we may have numerous short periods of this meditative equipoise.

It's time to ask why we should do any of the preceding. Even if the world is illusory in nature, even if objective, subjective, and transcendent phenomena do not exist intrinsically, why should we do any of this? In other words, what's in it for us? The answer is the solution to a fundamental problem.

Our minds are not a blank slate without ideas and assumptions regarding reality, our own existence, the nature of our minds and our environment. On the contrary, we instinctively sense that phenomena, internal and external, exist in their own right. And this causes problems. For example, let us bring to mind someone we really despise. Now see if our mind isn't grasping that person as an entity in his or her own right, intrinsically existent, totally independent, and ultimately responsible for his or her own actions. See if we don't also do the same thing for ourselves. In response to the question, "Who am I?" there naturally arises a sense of "I am," a sense of identification with something that apparently exists intrinsically.

In other words, we are not merely ignorant of the nature of reality but actively, day by day and moment by moment, we are misconstruing the nature of reality. We see things as isolated and intrinsically existing. We reify our own existence and that of friends, loved ones, indifferent people, enemies, the environment itself. And here is the real crux of the matter: this reification is fundamentally out of accord with reality. It creates distortions in the mind and enhances the obscurations that shroud the Buddha nature. In practical terms, it is because of this grasping onto intrinsic reality that a false sense of self arises, as well as the myriad mental distortions that are invariably based on this reification. Jealousy, hatred, resentment, anger, craving, pride, conceit, fear, anxiety - all of these afflictions are based on a misconstruing of reality.

~Excerpted from: The Seven-Point Mind Training(first published as A Passage from Solitude: Training the Mind in a Life Embracing the World), by B. Alan Wallace

Place (your Meditation) on the Nature of the Foundation of All: the Essence (of the Path)

(iv) The space-like meditation

The term 'foundation of all' here is a synonym for emptiness. This instruction is the culmination of prior explanations because, after realizing the emptiness of our ignorant conception that things exist independently, we should maintain all energy and attention on this emptiness - the essence of the path and the very foundation of all. We must not expend our energy on sense objects, dissipating it through the five sensory organs.

By sustaining our mind in emptiness, our understanding will gradually become clearer until, after repeated meditation, we shall attain a non-conceptual, or intuitive, realization. The more powerful the realization of emptiness, the weaker the force of ignorance becomes until it finally ends. The clearer our view of the true way in which things exist, the clearer we see the faults and false nature of ignorance. Finally, we shall kick ignorance away; simultaneously, the production of mundane actions (las; karma) and the corresponding creation of instinctive propensities will weaken until they also cease completely.

Keeping our mind placed on the direct negation of the independent self existence of both the ego and the self-identity of outer phenomena is known as space-like meditative equipoise. The stronger this is, the purer will be our view while we engage in the activities of the post-meditation period.

~Excerpted from Advice from a Spiritual Friend by Geshe Rabten and Geshe Dhargey translated by Brian Beresford

The Nature of the Path Rests in the Alaya

But how are we to rest in emptiness, free from all mental activity? Let us begin by saying that the state of mind of thinking 'I' has no reality whatever. Be that as it may, we do have the feeling of something real and solid which we call 'I', and which is supported by a body with its five sense powers and eight consciousnesses! For example, when the eye apprehends a form, sight occurs by virtue of the eye consciousness. If the form is something pleasant, we think, 'This is good, I like it.' If we see something frightening, a ghost, for instance, or someone with a gun ready to shoot us, we think that we are going to be killed and react with horror. The truth is, however, that these outer events apparently happening 'over there' are in fact occurring 'here', 'within' they are fabricated by our minds.

We cling to the notion that our minds are real entities. When someone helps us, we think, 'That person has been so good to me. I must be kind to him in return and make him my friend for lives and lives to come.' This only goes to show that we do not know about the empty nature of the mind. As for our enemies, we think of how to harm them as much as possible. We think like that simply because we think our anger is a true and permanent reality - while in fact it is nothing at all. We should therefore rest in the empty nature of the mind beyond all mental elaborations, in that state which is free from clinging, a clarity which is beyond all concepts.

~From Enlightened Courage, by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche