By Victor M Fontane
The Gelug Tradition
Mental activity has two essential natures: a conventional nature and a deepest nature. The Gelug tradition defines conventional nature as “mere clarity and awareness.”
Clarity – the mental activity of giving rise to appearances (appearance-making), namely the mental holograms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations and thoughts, all accompanied by some level of happiness, various emotions, and such basic mental factors as attention and concentration.
Awareness – some type of cognitive engagement. It’s neither separate nor subsequent to appearance-making – it’s not that a thought first arises and then we think it. Awareness is just a subjective way of describing the same mental activity as appearance-making.
Mere – this is all that mental activity is, and excludes there being a separate, findable “me” as the agent or observer of this activity, or a separate, findable “mind,” like some sort of immaterial machine doing it all. Mental activity occurs on the physical basis of a brain and neural system, but that doesn’t mean that mind is equivalent or reducible to something physical.
The deepest nature of mental activity is its “voidness of self-established existence.”
Voidness – the total absence of anything findable on the side of mere clarity and awareness that by its own power establishes that there is such a thing as mental activity, not even these defining characteristics themselves. The only thing we can say that accounts for the fact that conventionally we all agree that we subjectively and individually experience things is mental labeling.
Mental labeling – the fact that we, as a society, have the concept and word “mind,” that we’ve coined as a mental label and designation for the moment-to-moment continuum of mere appearance-making and cognitive engagement that we all experience. Mental labeling isn’t, however, an active practice that just creates anything – it’s simply a way of accounting for the valid conventional existence of things. There is no self-establishing nature on the side of mental activity or of anything else that accounts for its existence – that’s impossible. Voidness is the total absence of that impossible way of establishing the conventional existence of anything.
The Gelug style of mahamudra meditation focuses first on the conventional nature of mental activity, with mindfulness to prevent loss of focus and alertness to detect any such loss. Think of a flashlight, but where we pay no attention to what it’s illuminating (the appearances of sensory objects or thoughts, plus the emotional content accompanying them). Instead, we focus on the activity of the flashlight that is occurring in each moment – making appearances visible. It’s important not to focus on the mental activity as if it were an object, but rather just to be attentively focused while mental activity is occurring. We make sure not to identify “me” with the flashlight, not as the person holding the flashlight or observing what appears. When thoughts arise, we simply notice them, without getting drawn into their storyline; they automatically disappear and our original intention to meditate on the mind itself brings our focus back to the mental activity. Alternatively, we ourselves cut off the thought and consciously bring our attention back.
Once we attain a stilled and settled state of shamatha focused on the conventional nature of mental activity, we then focus on its deepest nature, its voidness of self-established existence. We eventually attain an exceptionally perceptive state of vipashyana joined with shamatha and focused on the voidness of the mind. We continue practice until this joined pair becomes non-conceptual and, through stages, we attain liberation and enlightenment.
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