Verse 22 of the 37 Verses of a Bodhisattva encourages us not to hold onto the mind. It reads:
Whatever arises in experience is your own mind.
Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitations.
Know that and don’t entertain
subject-object fixations; this is the practice of a bodhisattva.
Listen, this is a hard one. Verse 22 centers around the Buddhist concept of emptiness, and that takes a lifetime or more to understand. Here’s the other issue: as a person of Christian faith, this is where my path diverges. I actually do believe there is “something” inherently present in natural phenomena. I also believe in the soul. (Can’t call this Soul Ninja for nothing!) So, some of this goes a bit too far for me to follow. It also may be that I don’t understand it!
Here’s what I think we can take away from this for our daily lives: we live as if our thoughts are reality, and they aren’t. They are our experience of reality. And that is a very, very different thing. Whatever arises in our minds is our experience. That’s it. Our experience is not a definitive “thing” that has essence. It is a collection of emotions and physical sensations and impressions that connect to our personal memory and history and our worldview and assumptions. Wow, isn’t that messy?!
So it’s wise for us to step back from all of that in meditation and realize we are not usually dealing with reality. We are dealing with our experience of things, and most of those things are equally messy…and also shifting!
A big part of this teaching is the concept of dependent arising. In short, this means everything is connected, and reality does not ever arise independently, on its own. It only can happen in relation to everything else. So we cannot be so rigid in our views of what really IS. Reality happens within a confluence of factors, most of which are in motion. Good luck figuring out where to point!
Don’t hold onto the mind. Because even the mind is something we can only experience! Instead, realize you can see beyond limitations. You can look beyond your experience and perhaps for a fleeting moment, see things as is…before they shift and change again.
