MIND IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM with OLE NYDAHL, Ph.D.
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MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You describe some extraordinary practices in your book. They would almost seem forbidding to the average Westerner. For example, just to begin the practice of Buddhism one has to perform over a hundred thousand prostrations, and things of this sort. Could you talk a little bit about the purpose of this kind of intense discipline?
NYDAHL: Well, the Buddha taught three different kinds of people. He taught ordinary people who just wanted to get rid of their own problems, who just wanted to live better with less problems. He taught those about cause and effect. Then other people have the need for a rich inner life. They want to feel something, they want something to happen inside. They can't just be satisfied with getting out of trouble; they want something meaningful inside. And those he taught about compassion and wisdom, how to develop these qualities. And finally, then, there was a group of people who weren't able to see the Buddha as a person or a man or something out there, but as a mirror to their own face, something showing their own potential. And those he taught about their own Buddha mind, their timeless Buddha nature, their all-knowing essence, and so on. And for these people who want to go that third way, the very quick, direct way, then one of the practices is the use of the hundred thousand belly-flops, or full prostrations, or what we want to call them, hundred-syllable very long purification mantras, and so on. But it's not something one has to do. Buddhism is easy. If you have confidence there is an absolute goal, if you think there is a way, and if you think there are friends you can trust on the way, you are Buddhist.
MISHLOVE: It's that simple.
NYDAHL: That simple.
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MISHLOVE: When we understand who and what we really are.
NYDAHL: The true essence of everybody's mind is open space. Nobody has ever been able to say, "My mind has a certain weight, color, smell, size, or anything." Awareness is like space -- but not like a black hole, not like a disappearance; like radiant space. We cannot find anything we can call the mind, but there's no ending to the things happening in our mind -- like this situation we're sharing now, you know, and all the things happening everywhere. They appear in the mind. And finally, we are not limited by what we usually consider our personalities. Our personalities are something we can also do, not something we can only do. I mean, the experience that it's not an either/or but a both/and proposition -- that we can be this and that and that; that mind is like clear open space which can contain all things. This is the essential understanding of Buddhism.
MISHLOVE: So this clear, limitless space, kind of like an experience of infinity or something -- this I presume is what's often referred to as nirvana.
NYDAHL: Yes, this timeless awareness, where you see the seer and not just the thing seen, where you see the space where things happen and not just the things happening in that space, that is a timeless state; that is a blowing out of all suffering. That is nirvana.
MISHLOVE: Well, that's probably a good starting point for our discussion. Most of us, we go through our lives from day to day; we experience anger, we experience frustration, we get caught up in our personalities and our particular dramas. And I gather that the disciplines that you go through -- the chanting and the prostrations and the like -- are ways of helping us to kind of disengage from that part of our life a little bit.
NYDAHL: It's true again; again here there are three levels. Like there were three levels of teaching, there are also three levels of meditations that bring this about. For people who are mainly egotists, who mainly think of themselves, there is the ordinary sitting, calming meditation, where you just sit down. This gives you so much distance from the things happening in the mind that after awhile you can decide to take part in the comedies and avoid the tragedies. I mean, as you get space around the things happening, then you aren't caught like a little poor puppy and shaken up right and left by the feelings, but you have a distance.
MISHLOVE: In other words, you might still get angry, but you have enough distance from it so that you don't have to buy into it.
NYDAHL: Yes, sure. And the second level of meditation, for those who develop a rich inner life, for those with compassion and wisdom, has to do with beginning the meditation with the idea, "I'm now meditating to be able to benefit all beings," and ending it with sharing all the good feelings, with really a rich feeling of, "May all beings share this happiness." And for those who want quick enlightenment, who really want to recognize their mind in a very short time, if possible in this life span already, to experience continually this open, clear essence inside -- for those there are methods of visualizing certain forms of energy and light that correspond to our subconscious abilities and potentials and directions, using certain mantras or vibrations to activate it and then dissolve it in light and mix it into ourselves again and again, till he who meditates, the Buddha we meditate on, and the process of meditation become one. And this is a total state, because it uses our feeling, our devotion, our wishes, our fantasy
-- everything is involved in it. And for that reason it's very quick.
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MISHLOVE: And in that timelessness of the mind, is there a sense in which there is unity with all of existence?
NYDAHL: Well, this open, clear space everywhere is the same. And the all-knowingness which is manifested by Buddhas, and which my lama, the Karmapa, showed very clearly, when he sat in Sikkim and told me how my old mother was doing in Copenhagen -- I mean, really telling me that, straight out, right? That's she'd sprained an ankle, and so on, and stuff like that. And then I got a letter a week after, saying that. This proves that space energy, space clarity, at all times, is one thing, and that whenever we open up to it, that's it. That is enlightenment, that is timeless awareness.
MISHLOVE: One of the things that most Westerners are familiar with is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the idea that the Tibetans have a very detailed understanding of what happens to the mind itself in death. Your lama, the Karmapa, was apparently very gifted in helping people actually using this same psychic ability, you might call it, to pass through that transition of death.
NYDAHL: Wonderful to hear you say that. It really touches me. Goose pimples. I really feel good about it. Yes, it's true. We do have something there. There are many, many cultures in the world where Buddhism and other religions, say, live alongside. Buddhism is tolerant. They see religion as a medicine, and some people use that medicine, and some people want to use another medicine. So Buddhism can exist very well alongside other religions. In places like China, places like Japan, and many other places, Buddhism lives alongside other religions. And when it's a question of holiday and marriage and all the different fine celebrations, very often people go to the other religions, because they're good at that. And when people die, they always come straight to us. That's because that's what we know about. Death and rebirth, that's really our thing. And there, not only consciously reborn -- we have got maybe a hundred consciously reborn lamas, with more or less consciousness, with more or less awareness.
MISHLOVE: This is a situation where a lama, such as your teacher, before they die will describe the situation in which they plan to return.
NYDAHL: Every detail about their next life. Everything they write down.
MISHLOVE: So you just have to go look for --
NYDAHL: You open the letter, you say, "Oh, that's where he is." And you go. The last Karmapa who died, the fifteenth Karmapa, who died in 1922, left a detailed letter saying, "On the full moon day of the sixth month in the Mouse year in the family At Thub at the golden river in the town of Denkur, the place where the great archer Denma has once been standing, there I'll take my rebirth in the womb of an earthly goddess, and my name will be Bangjung Dorje." I mean, you can't do it better in a country with no numbers on the houses. So they found the kid, and he remembered all the people he'd been with, the things and everything.
Hannah Nydahl (who died in 2007)
MISHLOVE: So the consciousness of this lama, with whom you studied for many, many years -- it's mind boggling, extraordinary, astounding, from the point of view of our Western, day-to-day life, and what we think of as within the realm of possibility. And now this realm has become your day-to-day reality.
NYDAHL: Sure. But to get back to the bardo again a little bit. I mean, somebody who's enlightened lives like that. When we who are not, when people who do not have much control of their mind, when they die, then something very else is experienced. First there is, while one stops breathing, the energy from outside entering more and more into the center of the energy channel in the body, which is eight fingers behind the original hairline on the top back of the head, to four fingers underneath the center of the body. There's kind of like an energy axis there. And during this time, then one takes three deep breaths, and at that time the outer breath is gone. But there's still an inner breath, certain energies moving inside. We also see in hospitals where they put these electrical things on people's hearts and jump them back into existence again, right? So there's about 20 minutes there, where white energy comes down, red energy goes up, and at that time very clear light is seen. And if that isn't recognized, then there are three to four days of unconsciousness. And then starts the bardo. Then start the psychological transformations, until one is reborn again.
MISHLOVE: As I understand it, the way that process works is that the habitual thoughts that we have cultivated in our mind during our normal life, appear to us in the bardo plane, or the after-death plane as the Tibetans refer to it, as objective parts of outside reality.
NYDAHL: Like in a dream.
MISHLOVE: Like in a dream. So if I'm a very angry person, I might see a lot of demons.
NYDAHL: You won't be happy. If you're very angry you hurt yourself. You will not be happy. If you're loving, if you have good thoughts, this will come as wonderful projections. If you really anger or harm people and so on, you will not be happy.
MISHLOVE: So it would seem, then, that the message of this type of psychology is that for those of us who might have any kind of belief in an afterlife, it's very important for us to discipline our minds now, to create the kind of states of consciousness we might want to have with us if all we had was our consciousness, and not the body.
NYDAHL: That's wonderful, yes. I completely agree. This life offers great opportunities for filling the mind with that which brings happiness, and avoiding that which brings suffering. And it is a moment-to-moment process, it really is. That's true.
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MISHLOVE: One of the other things that struck me in your book is you describe your experiences with the lamas and the wisdom that they seem to impart to you. You mentioned at one point rather casually that about eighty percent of them had tuberculosis.
NYDAHL: That's true. A lot of them had. I mean, they came down, they had nothing. They came over the passes, lots of them wounded, or very hungry.
MISHLOVE: And yet they were able to impart to you extraordinary healing abilities.
NYDAHL: Yes, but that again, that's a karma. You can pass on things, right? You can be able to heal others without choosing or being able to heal yourself. You can easily do that, because again there has to be this ring-and-hook function -- you know, openness of somebody else meeting with your power and your blessing ability. And if you don't think much of yourself, you don't consider your own body at all and you just work with it like that, then you may not do that. You may not do it to yourself. I've seen many, many great, great lamas who'd do all kinds of things, who were very sick themselves. And I saw the Karmapa talk about -- you know, he told us a year and a half before dying when he was going to die, told more or less the date. "Come on the first of September next year," he said. And we came on the first and he died on the fifth. So that was right on the point then. He just used his body as a magnet to suck negativity up from everything. The last year he had, he took every disease around.
MISHLOVE: Now a lot of people are going to have trouble with that notion -- that he would deliberately use his body to suck up negativity.
NYDAHL: Well, you have Jesus in the Christian world. He hanged on the cross.
MISHLOVE: It's the same notion.
NYDAHL: Oh, sure it's the same. It's like you take negativity; you use your body as a tool for taking something negative, and after that there's less of it. It's similar. It's a Bodhisattva idea; it's very similar.
MISHLOVE: Well, I guess when you have a perspective of life, as the lamas do, which totally transcends our secular notion that life ends with death, that all of a sudden one's values towards one's own body would change enormously.
NYDAHL: Sure. I mean, at the best it lasts seventy years, right? And the last twenty, thirty years it's not so useful when one really looks at it. So basically seeing the body as a tool for bringing love and protection and security and material things to others, is the best way.
MISHLOVE: Then is there a sense that, as you say, every experience is meaningful, every experience is an opportunity for sharing love, or for sharing growth -- that in a certain sense it doesn't matter if you're wealthy or you're poor, or you're sick or you're healthy?
NYDAHL: It's true that everything unpleasant that we go through is a liberation of the mind. It's the mind liberating itself of some negative material, and it's actually a purification. And one should always know, when one has troubles, that it's like a zoological garden -- going out, not in. You're seeing the backs of the animals, not the faces. That one's getting rid of something when one has trouble. And at the same time, when something pleasant happens, one should really think, "This is riches. I'll share that with others. I'll really go out and pass it on. I'll give it to others." This way everything becomes meaningful.
Ole Nydahl in Berlin 2007
MISHLOVE: Well, Dr. Ole Nydahl, let me thank you very much for being with me on the program. You certainly shared an eloquent and a profound view of a culture that very few people know well, and that I hope more Westerners get to understand better.
NYDAHL: Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions.
MISHLOVE: Thank you again for being with me.
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