Practice is essential, for it renews the inner life. Discipline, contemplation, and wisdom are the three trainings that will allow an authentic transmutation. “If we haven’t transformed ourselves, how will we help others transform themselves?” asks the Tibetan saint Tsongkhapa.5
Progressively we get accustomed to transforming our perceptions, our ways of thinking, and our behavior. It is a question of bringing about a complete reversal of mental habits by reducing emotions in a gradual process of study, reflection, and meditation—in other words, familiarization. That is how we refine the mind and purify it through a training that actualizes its potential. We learn to master the stream of our consciousness, to control the emotional obscurations, without letting ourselves be dominated by them. That is the path toward realization of the absolute nature. Our practice integrates all the aspects and all the various levels of the Buddha’s teaching.
Faced with the emotional obscurations, we must learn to be constantly vigilant. When one of them presents itself to our mind, we should react as if a thief has gotten into our house, and we should be quick to chase it away. For it is our spiritual realizations that are about to be stolen from us. If the mental poisons can finally be transformed into wisdom, it is because their ultimate nature is endowed with primordial, naturally luminous purity.
Training our emotional life
THE SELF IS THE ROOT of the mental poisons. Our mind fabricates, projects, and attaches concepts to people and things. Egocentric fixation reinforces the qualities or defects that we attribute to others. From this results a solidification of the separation between me and not-me, mine and not-mine. Things we perceive as separate are actually connected, but our “I” separates them. So long as we are in ignorance and have not experienced the absence of reality of the self, our mind believes in its solidity. Realizing the absence of inherent existence of the self is an effective antidote to egocentric fixation, and it is the point of the teachings on the Buddha’s path.
Under the effect of attraction and desire, the mind mixes with and attaches itself to the object of its craving. Desire for possession is very powerful; it crystallizes attachment to the self and to what is “mine.” We feel repulsion for what harms us, and this repulsion will change into hatred, then into a disturbed mind, harmful words, violence. These negative emotions are the cause of bad health. Medical studies have shown that people who, in the language of everyday life, use the words “I,” “me,” or “mine” the most are more subject than others to cardiac diseases. At the root of negative emotions, then, we find the self and a belief in the solidity of things. We have to try to dissipate this belief on ever subtler levels.
Training our emotional life represents a labor of many decades to remedy the negative feelings that have become the normal state of our mind. For we have never tried to learn who we really are. The reification of the self and of phenomena creates a division between subject and object. When we dissipate belief in the reality of the self and the world, we discover that wisdom itself is without any inherent existence. Obviously, that corresponds to an advanced stage on the path.
The Dalai Lama has experienced the words of the Buddha, who invites his disciples to examine the scriptures like a goldsmith testing gold. In his teachings, the Dalai Lama transmits the pure gold of his practice through the overabundance of his heart. He sometimes sheds tears when he describes the power of the mind of Enlightenment, which cherishes others more than itself, or else he bursts out laughing when he mentions human naïveté and shortcomings. His tears and his spontaneous laughter are teachings within the teaching, reminding us of the incarnate dimension of wisdom.
In the mirror of the Dalai Lama’s limitless generosity, we have a chance to evaluate the path of our life. For it is the very parameters of our relationship to the world that the spiritual master calls into question. What reality should we assign to what we take as “reality"? The reasoning of analytic investigation strips the layers away and deconstructs the person who says “I,” “my,” “mine,” or “me,” thereby appropriating the experience of awareness and of the perceptible world. In the land of Descartes, it suddenly seems presumptuous indeed to assert, “I think, therefore I am.”
The teaching of Tibetan masters calls such certainties into question: “Your present face is not you,” Lama Yeshe writes.
Your bones and flesh are not you. Neither your blood, your muscles, nor any other part of your body is the essence of who you are…. Our gross physical body is not the only body we possess…. Within the confines of our ordinary physical form exists a subtler conscious body, so called because it is intimately connected with deep levels of consciousness. It is from these subtler levels that the potential energy of blissful wisdom arises, an energy capable of transforming the quality of our life completely…. [It] represents the essence of who we are and what we can become.6
Through meditative practice, ordinary identity is overcome by the energy of Enlightenment. Access is given to a level of awareness where appearances no longer manifest without the realization of their interdependence, so that “we” becomes more real than “I.” Recognizing that we do not have the cause of our existence inside us and that we depend on others for our survival is the first step that allows us to appreciate the essential generosity of life. Buddhist analysis of reality leads us to understand that everything is connected and that compassion is our true nature.
The Dalai Lama often compares religions to medicine, adding that different treatments are necessary to cure different diseases. But all religions are the same in that they all prescribe altruism. Why? Because loving-kindness represents the fundamental health that corresponds to the true nature of reality. Egocentric attitudes, harmful
