Ch. 29 - The Vajra Mind-Slayer: There’s no Resolution in the Mind

There is No Resolution in the Mind

All Mind is a Mandala

Untangle the Knot, Unweave the Web

[This transmission, given on a month long Vipassanā retreat, is for the total surmounting of views. It cuts through mental proliferation, leaving no grounds for self and reifying concepts.]

There is No Resolution in the Mind

The mind cannot grasp the true Dhamma. That is the point. Whether it is the gradual teachings to cessation, or the direct introduction to the basic state of awakening by the teacher, both of these approaches are a mechanism to get beyond mind. Whatever reflections about these things we may make in the mind, these reflections themselves do not in any way equate to awakening. Where we get lost is in trying to seek a resolution within our own minds. There is no resolution in the mind, and trying to find one can drive us to distraction, even madness.

This can even become a real danger, when our own fantasy has become so elaborate and all pervasive that we have lost the boundaries between our inner world of fantasy making and delusional ideas of self, and outer reality. Even though both of them need to be ultimately seen as illusory, the inner world needs to be totally relinquished and eventually brought to cessation while the outer world just needs to be met as it is.

I want to explain it in terms of the Kalachakra, which is a model used in the Tibetan tradition.

What is the Kalachakra? A mandala.

What is a mandala ? It is a model for reality.

Why do we create the mandala? To produce a model of reality that we can concentrate upon.

Why do we do that? Think about it. Do we do it because in that way we get a better understanding of reality? Perhaps, but does it in any way equate to seeing reality as it is?

What is the mahāmudrā? In our misunderstanding we can in some way try to see the union of mahāmudrā or whatever we wish to call it as the union of our mind with the mandala, or the mind with the guru if we are doing guru yoga etc.

Wrong. Why do we build the mandala with sand?

It is built out of sand to remind us that it is only an illusion, so that we can sweep it away to reveal the truth that it was just a fantasy, an illusion, that all models of reality are only an illusion produced by the mind and in no way equate to reality itself. In fact reality itself is nowhere to be found in the mandala.

We may forget this while we are busy building our model or our map of reality, and perhaps this only reveals itself when we destroy or dissolve it (if we have produced it in our mind.) This is why the final act is to destroy what we have spent months or years creating. To reveal it as a fantasy, a false view.

It is an illusion, a mirage and fabrication.

All Mind is a Mandala

The mind, and our inner world is a mandala. Everyone’s is. All of us get lost in it. Some of us weave ourselves so deeply into our inner mandala that even the outer world starts to be lost to us. Awakening is to extract our experience from the mandala and get to a point where the views and ideas that make up our mandala are totally dismantled and removed.

When I look into each person’s mind I can see it in terms of a mandala and see how they see themselves within the world and how they see others and things within the world. They think it is real, but they fail to realise that this is only how they see people, places and self within their own inner world. It is only their mandala, their idea of reality. It’s just an illusion....this is what delusion is, this is the ignorance that is the start of Dependent Origination and the original cause of suffering. And it is what we need to awaken to and go beyond.

I see into people’s mandalas. I can see where they have put themselves, me, friends, family, the Buddha, the Guru, cessation, the clear light, hell, heaven, Brahma, ideas of past and ideas of future. I can see how they go into their mandala looking for cessation, or clear light or Dharmakaya, and so how they can only find these things there as ideas or approximations to reality to which they cling and to which they identify.

But for as long as we look to our mandala for resolution we will not spot reality as it is. For the mandala exists entirely in our mind. It is nothing but our own inner world. And the danger is when this becomes our reality at the expense of losing all connection to the suchness of what is really happening around us all the time.

I can see how every time people receive a teaching they look into their mandala to see where it fits and I can see where they have put themselves in their mandala. Eventually they weave themselves so deeply into this fabrication that they can’t see out of it. This is the extreme of clinging to views, where we begin to lose sight even of the experience we are actually having.

The Buddha, Guru Rinpoche, etc. exist within the mandala as illusion, not reality. The point of the mandala is to realise that it is all an illusion, a fantasy. When many people do Guru Yoga they really believe they are becoming one with Vajrasattva or Guru Rinpoche. They really believe they are unifying with mahāmudrā as the mandala that is the perfect expression of reality. When they dissolve it into emptiness and put it in their heart they see themselves becoming one with it. They fail to see that that is a gesture to show them that it was an illusion created in their mind/ heart, existing only in their mind and has no reality beyond their imagining.

As the Buddha said. “This ego is a conceit...it is an imagining.”

The unawakened see their mandala as their reality, the awakened see it as their fantasy, their delusion, their illusion.

Although we can symbolise cessation, and even find a place for it in the mandala and thereafter see where it fits into our vision of reality, it doesn’t exist there as anything other than an idea in our mind.

The same with the clear light, Brahma, the Guru, the idea of being the Bodhisattva and all the other archetypes of heaven and hell we can dream up.

Of course everyone that ever existed has created their own mandalas and lived in their own fantasy and inner world. This is our prison and our separation. This becomes our subjective reality, this is saṁsāra. Put everyone’s mandala together and you have the collective unconscious. Eventually we lose parts of ourself in areas of this mandala.

Some may believe they have realised cessation. But if they watch, how do they look to cessation, do they advert within their mandala to find it there...or do they see their mandala dissolve into cessation? Why then does their mandala continue to re-arise with such energy?

This false view of enlightenment is very dangerous. This enlightenment in the mind as an idea that, “I am enlightened,” is very dangerous.

Awakening does not exist, belong or fit anywhere within the mandala or our mind, even though we can find a place to put it within our map of reality.

We do not see no-self, or cessation, or even the clear light until we dissolve, break down and get beyond the illusion that is our mind, our fantasy, our mandala, our idea of reality. It can take a very long time to unweave the knotted tapestry we have spent lifetimes weaving.

We should look into all of this. Look at how we might have seen progress upon the path as reorganising or defining the mandala, the repositioning of our relationship to other beings, energies, entities, archetypes, awakening etc. This is all self, ideas of self, clinging to ideas of self. Beyond this is the experience of just being in this world amongst others. No better no worse; just that.

Why do we feel it is necessary to invest in these ideas of self? Of course, seeing ourselves as healed is part of the healing process, but please don’t forget that the actual healing itself is the process of letting go the causes of sickness, so that finally we can arrive at the spaciousness of just being.

See your mandala as a mind game we’ve got lost in and could not find our way out of, as if by playing a fantasy game, you wove yourself into it, got lost in it, became one with it and couldn’t find your way out. This kind of identification and becoming one with it is not the union of awakening. It is the union with delusion. It is where we really, truly get lost.

Untangle the Knot, Unweave the Web

Untangle the knot, unweave the web, and then we should dissolve the mandala and everything we have built into it into emptiness; not the idea of emptiness, but see it really dissolve, fade like a mirage until we cannot find our mandala any more.

Of course, it won’t completely dissolve in one go. But its gradual dissolution is the gradual path out of the bondage of self-clinging and saṁsāra to the liberation of no-self. As we bring the mandala of mind to cessation by gradually seeing its illusory state, so in stages the clear spacious experience of awareness as such reveals itself in stages, until finally there is only that.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as we see this as the path, and the only path. How far we have come along that path is revealed to us only by how far we have begun to lose sight of ourself. There is no other measure than this that can be relied upon. It is not reflected in the idea of self we have come to but how much of that idea we have lost sight of and cannot see within ourselves any more.

Keep this...read over it...sit with it... Of course, all of you will think about it, but watch yourself refer to your mandala mind to see where it fits...and then stop that. Just sit with it. Let it sink in until there is only the snow on the trees and the coolness of the air and the stillness of the day appearing in awareness as such.

May you all finally reach the cool shore of deliverance from the suffering of clinging to the illusory states of mind and their ideas of self and other.