Gesar

Those who have understood themselves and life deeply enough don’t need to employ borrowed concepts, so that while apprentices are imitative, masters have the option of using their own words to such an extent that they sound unique.

Tarthang Tulku is not only one who had the good fortune of learning from the greatest Tibetan masters of his generation, but he has also supervised the publication of the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon and even gathered a more bulky collection of ‘Nyingma Treasures’, yet, since many years ago, he has been producing books that embody his understanding without mentioning Buddhism and without the support of Buddhist terminology. He does not employ such Dharma words in the latest of his books, Revelations of Mind.

We are most familiar with the word “revelation” from Judeo Christian literature and from Islam, in the context of which prophets have experienced themselves as channels for higher or divine truth. But this is not the sense we have when reading Revelations of Mind, for rather than perceiving the author as one possessed by a higher intelligence, we perceive him as an inspired but autonomous investigator. And even if we take his “Mind” to be the equivalent of the Judeo-Christian “God,” the relation that he entertains to Mind is not that of slave to master, but one where Mind has become his “best friend and most reliable companion.”

My experience in reading this book was at first mostly frustration, for everything that I read seemed to be an echo of my too well known experience of limitation. He tells us again and again and in many variations, that “within the established structures for thought, communication and action, there is little room to develop another understanding of reality or to generate a new vision.” And even that “philosophers, religious leaders, artists and other creative individuals continue to track along well-worn paths, unable radically to change the patterns of language or the rules that govern the prevailing logic.” Yet, along with the contention that we are blind to our blindness and that our limited mind cannot see its limits, the author, of course, challenges us to perceive and transcend our conventions, to notice and question our assumptions, and especially to question our habitual way of perceiving everything from the perspective of a self who “announces ‘I am’ and claims ownership of everything that can be thought or perceived.”

While it was frustrating to read the first three sections of the book, when the content started to shift in section four, “Ground for Understanding,” it seemed to me that I had just been treated in a way similar to those who in ancient China or Japan sought to be admitted to a monastery and were made to wait to sit for a long time outside (perhaps during an icy night) before being received by the master. In other words: just as frustration is just frustrating while it lasts, but in retrospect may be perceived to have been a stimulus for change, the long waiting before the book’s recommendations seemed to have worked as a suitable rhetoric frame for its careful consideration.

One of the original ideas I have found in Rinpoche’s picture of the samsaric or neurotic condition is that of “customer mind”—an implicit reference to the fact that, in the process of displaying the world and our reflections to ourselves, we indulge in a sort of salesmanship, appropriate to one who has learned to be a buyer or consumer. It may be just a variation on the age-old notion of deception, but an updated variation not only appropriated to a time of consumerism, but striking for its freshness. Through the understanding of such inner events, Revelations of Mind constitutes an elaborate invitation for us to “disactivate” dualistic mind, and it is not an invitation that is so easy to forget simply because the long time that it takes to read the book attentively has the effect of keeping us exposed to its author ’s voice and to his influence; an influence which, in the end, is reassuring, for it tells us that if we don’t insist on holding on to our views and approaches to understanding, we may find a different and more comprehensive kind of understanding. It also kindles in us a focus on understanding through a celebration of the goodness and desirability of understanding, and of its power to solve our problems. In so doing it even invites us to appreciate misunderstanding, after having understood at least that the acknowledgment of misunderstanding constitutes a path.

But how can we take the step from our limited sense of self to the recognition that “we” are simply the play of Mind? The book gives us a practical tip: focusing very narrowly and keenly on the experience of the fleeting present instant, so that its timelessness may take us into the mysterious realm of mind beyond time and space. To quote its own words: “Activated before the point at which recognition takes place and it establishes linear time, understanding offers a ladder into a freely flowing realm of unbounded light.” Beyond this, however, I think that the book also acts upon our minds in a way that it does not claim to do: I suspect that by simply reading attentively and with the right motivation, we may experience a measure of “liberation through hearing.”