Here are instructions from three teachers on how to look at mind. This is gold.
From How to Look at the Mind, Donna McLaughlin
Be with the spaciousness of the sky.
Can you find where the sky begins or ends?
If anything appears in the sky leave it alone the way the sky does.
If something appears in the sky, does it leave a solid imprint on the sky?
Do the appearances leave a solid imprint?
Do the objects do anything to the sky to change it or affect it?
Rest like the sky, open to whatever appears.
From The View and Practice of Trekchö, James Low
The mind and the content of the mind are not things to be put on different shelves. When you have the mind, you have the content of the mind. Thoughts and feelings are not the problem. They're not something to be got rid of. They are how the mind shows itself. So what is the mind? Then we have to look again and again.
Where do we look? We look at the thought, we look at the feeling, at the sensation. But when I say we look at it, again it's not looking at it like something there. It's looking at it by being present with it.
So we're sitting in the practice. Something is occurring. We're there. What are we there as? We're aware. What is this awareness? It's not consciousness making sense of something, interpreting it, telling a narrative, a cognitive analysis of it. It's just registering or showing the way the mirror shows the reflection of what's inside it.
Awareness shows the content, but the awareness is not a thing. You can't pull it out from the thought. You can pull attention out from the thought.
If you keep getting caught up in thoughts, you can gently grasp your attention and bring it back. In Tibetan it's called dremba, which means like a memory or recollection. In Pali and Sanskrit it's sati.
Sati is the basis for the modern notion of mindfulness. When you're mindful, it means you have a recollection, a re-collecting of yourself moment by moment in the face of the tendency to merge in whatever is occurring. So the Satipatthana Sutra is describing how through attention to the body and the breath and so on, again and again there is the risk of being caught up, merged in what is going on.
And you call yourself back to where you always have been.
From Ganges Mahamudra 2, Ken McLeod
What Tilopa moves to now is: how do you cultivate? How do you create the conditions in your own life so that that possibility grows, evolves, and becomes more and more how you experience things. He says:
Stop all physical activity.
Stop running around.
Sit naturally at ease.
And people would work very, very hard at training their bodies, so they could sit absolutely at ease. It’s not that easy, for many people, you know. You can’t just sit and just let the body be quiet. We always have to be doing something.
Do not talk or speak: let sound be empty, like an echo.Now, when people say something, we think, “Oh, what did they say?” But when we hear an echo, we don’t pay any attention, it’s just, “Oh, that was …,” like that. So, the way to relate here is to learn to relate to all sound as an echo. So it doesn’t stimulate a reaction in you.
Do not think about anything: look beyond experience.
That’s basically what I’ve been trying to show you how to do most of this evening. And the versification here is rather arbitrary, one could move lines around, because Tilopa now shifts again. When you do these three things: you stop all physical activity, you sit naturally at ease, you stop talking and just let sound be empty, like an echo, you stop thinking about things. Thoughts may come, but you stop thinking about things. And you look beyond experience, that looking quality which we’ve been engaging again and again tonight.
And going a little further, you can say, you learn how to rest, and in that resting you look. And as you develop that ability to look, then you learn how to rest in the looking. So, you look in the resting, and rest in the looking. That’s probably one of the best formulations of mahamudra practice I’ve found yet. It comes from a book called Clarifying the Natural State. Look in the resting, rest in the looking.
When you do this, then you’ll start to experience things like this:
Your body has no core, hollow like a bamboo.
Now, this isn’t a statement of fact, it’s a description of experience. And so you sit, and now you experience, “Oh, my body’s there, but there’s nothing to it.” And that is how you experience the body when the mind rests.
Your mind is beyond thought, open like space.
And several of you touched into that this evening. So, when you start to experience things that way:
Let go of control and rest right there.
That’s the hard part for a lot of us. Because, “Oh, I want to hold on to this.” Well, sorry, but you just started trying to control your experience. Or “I want to go a little deeper.” Uh, you just tried to control your experience.
So what this kind of meditation consists of is moving in and resting. And all the stuff: “I want this! I want that! I want more of this!” and things like that. You gotta just keep letting that go, as it arises.
Let go of control and rest right there.
Mind without reference is mahamudra.And we could equally say, experience without reference is mahamudra.
Instill this deeply and supreme awakening results.