The Haunted Dominion of Mind

by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

In old Tibet, practitioners went to charnel grounds, haunted places, and so on, in order to reveal how deeply their practice had cut to the core of their fears and attachments. The practice of cutting through our deepest attachments and fears to their core is called nyensa chödpa which means “cutting through the haunted dominion of mind.” It is not that I am encouraging you to go to these haunted places to test yourself, but it’s important for all practitioners to understand the view behind nyensa chödpa, because until we are challenged we don’t know how deep our practice has gone.

Shaken from Within

As the saying goes, “Practice is easy when the sun is on your back and your belly is full.” But when difficult circumstances arise and we are completely shaken from within, when we hit rock bottom, or when something is haunting us and we feel completely vulnerable and exposed to all our neurosis, then it’s a different story.

Challenging circumstances expose to us how much we have learned from the buddhadharma, how much we have learned from our meditation practice and the experience of our mind. But we don’t need to wait for challenging circumstances to uncover our hidden fears and attachments. We don’t need to wait for our bliss bubble to pop, for a dear one to die, or to find out we have a fatal disease. There is plenty of opportunity to practice nyensa chödpa right here in our own minds. There is plenty of opportunity because there is plenty of self-clinging.

The haunted dominion of mind is the dominion of self-clinging. It is the world of self and all the hopes and fears that come with trying to secure it. Our efforts to secure the self give rise to all the negative emotions. If we were not so concerned with cherishing and providing for the self, there would be no reason for attachment. Aggression, too, would have no reason to arise if there were no self to protect. And jealousy, which shows up whenever we think the self is lacking something, would have no impetus to eat away at our inner peace because we would be content with the natural richness and confidence of our own mind. If we had no need to shield all of the embarrassing things about the self that make us so insecure, we would have no cause for arrogance. Finally, if we were not so fixated on the self, we could rely on our innate intelligence rather than let our stupidity escort us through the activities that bring us so much pain time and time again.

So emotions themselves are not the cause of the problem. Yet until we reach down to the very root of our negative emotions, they will be there, standing in line waiting to “save” us from our fundamental insecurities. Unless we let go of grasping to the self with all its egotistical scheming to save itself in the usual manner, we will only continue to enforce a stronger and stronger belief in the solidity of the self. If the aim of practice is to free ourselves from our endless insecurities, then we must cut through self-clinging. Until we do, self-clinging will define our relationship with the world, whether it be the inner world of our own mind or the world outside of us.

From the perspective of the self, the world is either for us or against us. If it is for us, its purpose is to feed our infinite attachments. If it is against us, it is to be rejected and it adds to our infinite paranoia. It is either our friend or our enemy, something to lure in or reject. The stronger we cling to a self, the stronger grows our belief in a solid, objective world that exists separate from us. The more we see it as solid and separate, the more the world haunts us: we are haunted by what we want from the world and we are haunted by our struggle to protect ourselves from it.

The movement of the entire universe

The many problems we see in the world today, and also encounter in our own personal lives, spring from the belief that the enemy or threat is “outside” of us. This split occurs when we forget how deeply connected we are to others and the world around us. To see the connectedness or interdependence of all things is to see in a big way. It reduces the artificial separation we create between the self and everything else.

For instance, when we hold tightly to a self, the natural law of impermanence looms as a threat to our existence. But when we accept that we are part of this natural flow, we begin to see that the entity we cling to as a static, immutable, and independent self is just a continuous stream of experience composed of thoughts, feelings, forms, and perceptions that change from moment to moment. When we accept this, we become part of something much greater—the movement of the entire universe.

What we experience as “my life” results from the interdependent relationship between the outer world – the world of color, shape, smell, taste and touch – and our awareness. We cannot separate awareness –the knower- from that which is known. There is little consistency in what we consider to be self and what we consider to be other. Sometimes we include our emotions as part of the self. Other times our anger or depression seems to haunt or even threaten us. Our thoughts also seem to define who we are as individuals, but so often they agitate or excite us as if they existed as other.

Generally we identify the body with the self, yet when we fall ill we often find ourselves saying, “My stomach is bothering me,” or “My liver is giving me trouble.” If we investigate carefully, we will inevitably conclude that to pinpoint where the self leaves off and the world begins is not really possible. The one thing we can observe is that everything that arises, both what we consider to be the self and what we consider to be other than self, does so through a relationship of interdependence.

All phenomena depend upon “other” in order to arise, express themselves, and fall away. There is nothing that can be found to exist on its own, independent and separate from everything else. That self and other lack clearly defined boundaries does not then mean that we are thrown into a vague state of not knowing who we are and how to relate to the world, or that we lose our discerning intelligence. It simply means that through loosening the clinging we have to our small, constricted notion of self, we begin to relax into the true nature of all phenomena: the nondual state of emptiness, which transcends both self and other.

Conviction

Cultivating a deep conviction in the view of emptiness is what the practice of nyensa chödpa is all about. Nyensa refers to that which haunts us: clinging to the self and all the fears and delusion this produces. Chödpa means, “to cut through.” What is it that cuts through our clinging, fears, and delusion? It is the realization of emptiness, the realization of the truth. When the view of emptiness dawns in our experience, if even only for a moment, self-grasping naturally dissolves. This is when we begin to develop confidence in what is truly possible.

As we approach the haunted dominion with less fear, we may actually find some intelligence in the experience of being haunted: although we continuously try to secure the self, instinctually we know that we cannot. This instinctual knowledge comes from an innate intelligence that sees the dynamic, ungraspable nature of all things. It observes things arise and fall away, both happiness and suffering and the changes of birth, old age, sickness, and death. When we cling to self and other, our mind feels deeply conflicted and fearful because clinging is at odds with our inner intelligence. Of course, we are not clinging because we want to suffer; we are clinging because we want to avoid suffering. But clinging by its nature causes pain. When we let go of grasping and turn toward our innate intelligence, we begin to experience a sense of ease in our minds and we begin to develop a new relationship with that which ordinarily haunts us.

As practitioners interested in going beyond delusion, we may find ourselves intrigued by the haunted dominion of mind. We may find that, rather than trying to avoid pain, we want to move closer to that which haunts us. Emboldened by the experience of emptiness, we can question the solidity or truth of our fears—maybe things don’t exist as they appear. In fact, each time we see through the haunted dominion of mind—when we see its illusory or empty nature—we experience the taste of true liberation. This is why the great yogis of the past practiced in haunted places such as charnel grounds. Places that provoke the hidden aspects of mind are full of possibilities for liberation. In this way, the haunted dominion—whether it is a charnel ground or the dominion of fear that results from our own self-clinging—serves as the very ground of our realization. 
 

What is truly possible

We don’t need to cling to the self to enjoy life. Life is naturally rich and abundant. There is nothing more liberating and enjoyable than experiencing the world around us without grasping. We do not deprive ourselves of experience if we forsake our attachments. Clinging actually inhibits us from enjoying life to its fullest. We consume ourselves trying to arrange the world according to our preferences rather than delighting in the way our experience naturally unfolds.

We can find so much appreciation of life when we are free of the hopes and fears related to self-clinging—even of all the problems we generally try to avoid and dread, such as old age, sickness, and death. The ability to appreciate all aspects of our mind really says something about mind’s magnificent potential. It shows us that the mind is so much greater than the confusions, fears, and unrest that so often haunt us. It show us that our personal suffering and the world of suffering “outside” of us are nothing more than the inner and outer world of our own delusion—samsara.

Nyensa chödpa is cutting through the mind of samsara. What could be much more haunted and fearful than samsara? What could be a greater benefit than getting beyond samsara and our own self-grasping? What could be more meaningful than recognizing that samsara—that which has made us so fearful and shaken—is by nature the nondual nature of emptiness itself? If we do the practice of nyensa chödpa in our everyday life, it is a wonderful way to live this life, and the work we do will measure up in the end.

Excerpt from “Light Comes Through”,Chapter 14