Luminosity is Not a Light Show

Teachers do their best to convey what cannot be expressed in words, but the words can still get in the way. References to the luminosity of mind have always puzzled me, but Ken McLeod’s explanation in this class on the Ganges Mahamudra helped me "get" what this points to. Luminosity is not a light show. As Ken put it, "There's a clarity which arises as a knowing," and "It's the knowing quality that's always there in every experience. Scroll down to read or listen to the whole passage.

In Your Mind is Mahamudra: Tilopa’s Meditation Advice, James Low explains luminosity like this:

I have now been talking for about 30 minutes. You now have some sense of how I speak and what I say. You might think, 'Whoa, James is a bit strange.' You think 'He is like this.' That is how you gradually develop an image of who James is. How does your image of James compare with James's own perception of himself? Which is more accurate? Perhaps yours. Maybe I am completely deluded.

We don't know because the content of the mind is shifting and changing. In mahamudra, therefore, we do not focus on trying to correct, shape or organise the content of our experience. Instead, we relax and open to the ground basis of experience: the mind itself, which is simply basic knowing or illuminating. This is the sphere in which the luminosity of inner experience and the ceaseless movement of outer experience are perceived.

I am sitting here. I am aware of a sensation in my throat that you are not aware of. This sensation is mine. The sensation in my body is mine alone. You can't access it directly. Even if you were a doctor, you would still have to ask me how my throat feels. You have your memories, plans, hopes and fears. This is the inner content of the mind. Nowadays, this is often described as 'luminosity' in the translation of Tibetan texts, because it is the arising of an experience within the mind.

From Ganges Mahamudra 2

Ken: What would it be like to have such familiarity with that empty, knowing quality of our experience that we could just experience everything and know that it was all just experience? What would it be like to live that way? This is really what we're pointing to. So we come back here:

Space has no color or shape.
It does not change.

And as I said, and it's a highly non-trivial point, because there is nothing there to change.

It does not take on a color, either black or white.
Likewise, your own mind, in essence, has no color or shape.
It does not change because you do good or evil.

So how many of you have a negative self-image? Hands up. Come on, let's be honest here. About half the class. How many of you have a positive self-image? A few. Okay. So you've got no basis for either of them. Well, there isn't any thing there.

The darkness of a thousand eons cannot dim the brilliant radiance that is the essence of the sun.

"The darkness of a thousand eons cannot dim the brilliant radiance that is the essence of the sun." A thousand eons, that's a very long time.

Let's take a more concrete example. Let's take a tomb, which was constructed a few centuries ago. And there's been absolutely no light in the tomb. And you find yourself—like Indiana Jones through a very intricate set of tunnels—in this room. And there hasn't been any light in this room for centuries. And you turn on your cell phone. You light a match or whatever. How long does it take for that darkness to be dispelled?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Where there's light, there's light. That's it.

Likewise, eons of samsara

For samsara, you can read, "habituated patterned existence." You can say your whole life. Okay.

Cannot dim the sheer clarity that is the essence of your own mind.

Now, the term in Tibetan is ’od gsal (pron: ösel). I can't remember what it is in Sanskrit. It's often translated as clear light. It's also translated as luminosity, or pellucidness, or various obscure words. Clear light, which is a literal translation of the Tibetan ’od gsal, is not inaccurate, but it does have the idea that there's some kind of light. Right?

And so, how many of you seek some kind of brilliant light experience in your meditation? Or you think that's what should happen, like the world should dissolve into light. I had a student who was saying, "You know, I'm just waiting for the blue flash of light. It's like a KMart special."

That's not what sheer clarity refers to.

Once again, look at your mind, or we could say, look at your experience, because they're not different. Now, when you look, as we've discussed earlier, you see nothing. But if I asked you, "Is that an experience of blankness?" what would you say? Anybody? Nava, your turn.

Nava: I'd say no, it's not an experience of blackness.

Ken: Blankness, or blackness. Okay, say more. And I know this is difficult to describe.

Nava: First of all, it changed the course of whatever happened before for me. Something stops, and there is movement.

Ken: So, what knows this? [Pause]

Now, right there, there's something which we can't put into words, but that is what the words "sheer clarity" are pointing to. There's a clarity which arises as a knowing, it arises as experience, but—and I don't know really how to put this into words myself either—but it's not blank.

So, when I ask Nava here, what knows this? And I've asked you this with respect to others. What knows this? Well, there is the experience of knowing. There is the experience of being aware. Everybody with me on that one? Okay.

That's what the sheer clarity—I chose the word "sheer" rather than say "clear light," because when we talk about a sheer cliff, it just goes shoom, and it just drops straight down. And so I used the word "sheer" to get at the nothing-to-it quality. And yet, that knowing's there, even though there's nothing to it. Does this fit with your experience? Yeah.

Now, it's a very subtle thing, and it's always there. Even when you're experiencing really turgid dullness in your meditation, where the mind just seems like completely black, all you have to do is ask, "What knows this?" and it's there.

That's what the sheer clarity is pointing to. And we've been emphasizing up to this point the space-like quality, but there's also this—radiant is almost too strong a word because you have this idea there should be something shining out of it. And as one's relationship deepens—and that can be brought out in various ways—it can, as you know it more and more clearly, have a radiant quality to it. But it's not like bright lights going off and wiping everything out. It's the knowing quality that's always there in every experience. Does that help?

And here is Kalu Rinooche's wonderful explanation:

Another aspect of the nature of mind is its luminosity. Normally we think of this term in a visual sense. We think of a luminous body like the sun or the moon which shines and gives off light. However, this is merely a metaphor to give us some idea of what is being hinted at. To say that the mind is luminous in nature is analogous to saying that space is illuminated. … This is not a visual experience per se, but the ability of mind to know, perceive and experience.

We may utilize a metaphor here. The emptiness of mind is the ocean; the luminosity of mind is the sunlit ocean; and the impeded dynamic quality of mind is the waves of the sunlit ocean. When we take the waves of the sunlit ocean as an event or situation, it is not as though we are trying to separate ocean from waves from sunlight; they are three aspects of a single experience. The unity of these three aspects forms the seed or potential for enlightenment. They are the pure nature of mind; the impurity of obscurations , ignorance and confusion overlays what is inherently the nature of mind itself.

—His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche, recognised as the activity emanation of the great Jamgon Kongtrul, author of The Five Great Treasuries.

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How to Look

From Aspirations for Mahamudra:

Look at objects and there is no object: one sees mind;
Look at mind and there is no mind: it is empty of nature;
Look at both of these and dualistic clinging subsides on its own.
May I know sheer clarity, the way mind is.

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, Part 17, James Low

The passage below starts 3:50 minutes into the audio.

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.

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No Big Deal

In this passage from Buddhahood Without Meditation, Ken is steering people away from treating direct awareness as something to produce, monitor, fine-tune, or possess. The phrase “Direct awareness is no big deal,” from his translation of Revelations of Ever-Present Good, can perhaps be understood as a deliberate antidote to spiritual ambition. Ken’s point is that because it is already here, direct awareness is not something to attain, but we keep trying to achieve it nonetheless.

This passage also helps me understand why Ken McLeod is wary of “observing” in the usual sense. “Be what knows the arising.” The point is not to become a skilful tracker of every thought and feeling. Instead, be awake in whatever is happening. No spacing out. No suppressing. No trying to manipulate experience. The image of standing “like an oak stake in hard ground” carries a strong, resilient simplicity.

Sukhasiddhi’s instruction gathers the whole thing into three lines:

In empty space, free from concept,
Plant the root of mind which is awareness.
Plant the root and relax.

For me, that “relax” is crucial, but relaxing is not drifting off or going blank. It means I have to drop the wishful thinking that understanding will dawn through conceptual clarity. It means I have to stop meddling.

From Buddhahood Without Meditation 6

Ken:

Direct awareness is no big deal and doesn’t need any work. Stop trying to change it or adjust it.

(How many of you spend your meditation practices trying to fine-tune that natural awareness?)

Whenever conceptual thinking arises, don’t look at what arises: be what knows the arising.

Like an oak stake in hard ground, stand firm in awareness that knows, and go deep into the mystery.

Revelations of Ever-Present Good

Now, there are two approaches to this kind of practice. One is look at what arises. And the other is to look at what experiences the arising. Very broadly speaking, some people say that in mahamudra, the emphasis is on looking at what arises. In dzogchen, the emphasis is on looking at what experiences the arising. What’s the difference? Caroline?

Caroline: No difference, because what experiences and the experience, you can’t separate them.

Ken: That’s right. Two different approaches that end up in the same place. So one approach will probably work better for some people, the other approach would work better for others. That’s how it is. And one isn’t particularly better, even though lots of people will stand up on soap boxes and claim that it is.

Ann: Didn’t you recommend that in the case of dullness that looking at what experiences the arising could be helpful?

Ken: Yeah, I did. You can also do it the other way. What is the dullness?

Minor question: what’s the difference between knowing and emptiness?

Student: I really want the answer to that one, because in the Dancer in Pristine Awareness practice, you plant the root of mind in empty space.

Ken:

In empty space, free from concept,
Plant the root of mind which is awareness.
Plant the root and relax.

This is Sukhasiddhi’s very famous pointing-out instruction.

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Getting Black and Blue: Learning to Rest in Awareness

In this passage Ken explains how to build the capacity to rest in being awake—to stay present with whatever arises rather than trying to smooth it out. When he tells the story of The Princess and the Pea, he gives it a depth I’d never encountered before.

Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was a gentle satire, written by an outsider mocking the pretensions of the aristocracy that had once excluded him. Yet when I first heard it, I didn’t think of that at all. I saw myself in the princess—so sensitive, feeling everything so deeply. Ken’s teaching turned that sensitivity inside out: when you truly rest, you start to feel everything that keeps you from resting more deeply. Like the princess, you “get black and blue.” The discomfort isn’t a problem; it’s a gateway to awareness itself.

From Pointing Out Instructions

What has become clear to me over the years is that mahamudra, and all of the direct awareness practices, consist of making lots of relatively subtle effort to bring the mind—or attention, or you, whatever you want to say—into some form of presence and then resting. And the actual power of practice comes through resting, and the more completely you’re able to rest, the deeper and the more powerful your practice becomes. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m setting up a relatively unstructured schedule so that each of you can find, explore your own way of resting deeply. Now this resting doesn’t mean going to sleep. It means being able to rest and be awake but really rest in being awake.

Now how many of you know the story of The Princess and the Pea? Okay, anybody not familiar with that story? Well, it’s a fairy tale, I can’t remember all the details but a prince is looking for a princess to marry, and he’s told by a wise old woman that the only way to find out who a proper princess is, is to put a pea under a hundred mattresses. And so he invites one woman over after another and they sleep on this bed. Eventually one woman says, “I couldn’t sleep at all last night, just black and blue. That was the lumpiest bed I’ve ever had.” And so, this is the true princess because she can feel a pea under a hundred mattresses.

Now there are additional elements to that story but the main point here that I bring it up, is that when you actually rest then you feel all the stuff that prevents you from resting more deeply. And it just brings you right into connection with it. This is often not comfortable. You’re like the princess. You get black and blue.

The mahamudra practice and the direct awareness practice, in general, consists primarily of learning how to rest deeply at first with, and eventually in, one’s internal material. And this is found also in the Theravadan tradition in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and particularly in the Full Awareness of Breathing Sutra in which the breath is used as a way of coming to that deep resting. But one has to be awake in this. That’s very very important. If the mind is drowsy, or dull, or unclear then you’re just sitting in a dull state, and that’s not helpful at all.

So, for this reason often when people are starting this kind of practice they’re encouraged to practice for relatively short periods so that the mind is constantly being woken up, it is fresh and awake. So even if you’re practicing in a group you may start doing this, just resting completely for like literally a minute or two and then relaxing and then resting again for a minute or two [unclear] so that constantly fresh and awake mind and learning how to rest in that. And you may find that it works better for you to practice for half an hour and then go for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes, come back and practice again for half an hour.

This is what I want you to explore. But the quality that I want you to keep exploring is this quality of resting. When you begin to find that quality of resting in sitting meditation, I want you to take that quality of resting into simple activities such as walking. How can you rest in the same way when walking or eating? We won’t have to worry about conversation but eventually you take it into that. And you actually learn to do everything in this clear awake resting mind. And that provides a very, very good basis for the looking quality, which is also what we’re going into with mahamudra.

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