[From a teaching on Song of Karma Chokyong given by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche in Battle Creek, Michigan in September 2012. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso. Edited by Matt Willis. All rights reserved. The complete teaching is available as an MP3 download from the KPL Bookstore.]
The mind is nothing; it can’t come or go. Nothing can actually happen to the mind itself. It didn’t come from anywhere; it has no origin. It isn’t anywhere now; it has no location. And, it’s not going anywhere; it has no destination.
So, if your mind is nothing to be seen — there is nothing to see other than that which is looking — what is it? What is a mind?
Your mind is awareness-emptiness. What does that mean? It means your mind is nothing more than the capacity to know, the capacity to experience. There is nothing else that constitutes a mind; that’s all it is. Because it is an awareness – capacity to know, experience, think, and so on – that is empty of anything else, we call it awareness-emptiness.
If that is all the mind really is, then everything else we think the mind might be is incorrect. Therefore, it contains nothing called “stillness.” If the mind is just the capacity to know, to experience, there is no such thing as stillness. The mind doesn’t have bits and parts to it, like a stillness part that we want to discover in the middle of it or something. There’s no such thing as stillness.
Now, we have to be a little careful with this. When we begin to practice meditation our minds are so wild that they won’t stay put and we do need to begin by cultivating tranquility. Our minds are a little bit like candle-flames in the wind; they need to be protected from the wind so that the brilliance of the flame can be workable. So we begin to practice. We sit there following our breath, and so on, in order to calm down. But eventually we have to recognize that there is nothing more to the practice of meditation than recognizing the nature of thoughts. Initially we seek calm; we seek some kind of stillness. But that’s merely temporary. Eventually we must understand that there is no such thing as stillness, that the mind just is what it is, and has to recognize itself.
