Deepening Our Attention and Focus and Finding Wholeness

An Excerpt from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's February 2023 Teachings

This excerpt of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's teachings is from an online dialogue on Training Attention with Meditation. Rinpoche's conversation with contemplative neuroscientists David R. Vago and Amishi Jha was hosted by Alejandro Chaoul-Reich and has been edited for length. You can find out more on cybersangha.net, where there is a rich archive of all the conversations.

A common gift that we have is the ability to put our attention on something that we like. Everybody can do that, addicts can do that. Teenage kids can play a video game for 10 hours straight with an amazing focus of attention. But the ability to focus on something that you don't like but that you need for your growth is harder. It requires more discipline. So both are forms of attention, but sometimes people cannot put their attention where they should put their attention, and they are very good at putting their attention where they should not put their attention, or where it is not necessary for them to put their attention.

Attention and focus are a very important part of one's early development in any of the deeper contemplative traditions including sutra, tantra and dzogchen. There is always this distinction made between focused attention and open attention, or we can also call them zhine and lhatong, or shamatha and vipassana, the focusing of attention on an object versus the focusing of attention on your being.

Many times we talk about attention on what you do, but there is not so much consideration about attention on what you feel or what you're thinking or who you are. It is a key distinction, this other aspect of being aware of yourself and your feelings and your thoughts and your intention in what you are trying to do, as opposed to only being aware of doing something. Very often people will come to recognize only after they've done or said something that they should not have said or done that. They become aware of these things afterwards, right? So in that way, these two kinds of focus are very different.

In our tradition we have what is called the Fivefold Teaching of Dawa Gyaltsen. The first of the five main lines in that text is, Vision is mind. Vision means your outer experience, where you are focusing your mind. This means that in this first cycle of meditation your attention is on the object.

So let's say that the object of attention is a particular problematic person for you. I'm focusing on a problematic person, I'm focusing on a problem, I'm focusing on my pain, I'm focusing on my conflict, I'm focusing on what is not working. In this practice what you are trying to do in saying vision is mind is to investigate and come to recognize that the source of your problem is primarily not out there, rather it's your mind. In this way it becomes clear that the seemingly problematic person or situation is not bad inherently; rather, you are seeing them/it as bad. Our attention at this stage of the practice is very much on the object, and we meditate, meditate, meditate, and at some point we are able to be clear and to recognize that the object is not bad in itself. And you now see that directly and are able to distinguish that. In this way you are able to have more peace with the environment around you.

The second line of this teaching says, mind is empty. So now your attention is no longer on the object; rather, it is on the subject that was centered on the object and creating all of the stories. So here we look inward to see, what is my mind? I am looking at my mind, putting attention on my mind, and like a camera lens I am zooming in closer and closer, and at some point it gets so close that I cannot see any actual images anymore; I see only pixels, dots of light. That's all I see. I don't see any stories or pain. I just see a dot of light. And my mind is empty and luminous. At that point, I have accomplished the turning of my attention back to my mind, and now I'm aware of my mind.

This fivefold teaching continues on for three more cycles of meditation, which I won't go into right now. I've written a whole book on it, though, called Awakening the Luminous Mind, so you can find out more if you want. But these are the first two areas of focus of our attention at this point. The first area of focus is on the object, because that's where the story is projected. And the second area of focus is on the one who is actually creating the story. Focusing our attention in this way is a very important aspect of how we can change or upgrade and prioritize our attention to go to a more introverted, more subtle, more impersonal mode of attention. The value here is in not going outward, because externalizing and concretizing our conflicting stories is not the way that we will come to value and prioritize our attention.

For humanity as a whole, clinging onto who you are not is the nature of samsara. That's how we suffer. And if you are not clinging onto who you are not, then you are not qualified to be in samsara, right? [laughter] The degree of emphasis on that clinging, though, is so strong here in the West, and I think that's because it's a very materialistic culture, no?

I think that in everyone's life, though, we each go through our suffering mode, and we are forced to reflect, and we see the value of reflecting. If we see it enough, then we naturally see the value of letting it go and resting; I think it's a natural process. However, in Buddhism there is a lot of emphasis on that. There are very sophisticated stages of development in it and values in it. There's so much richness in it. But when it is about the peace of no-self, then that stage of awareness is not acknowledged enough in the West. Oh yeah, in Buddhism they talk about no-self, sure. People don't like it. But it is because they don't see the richness and value in that. That's what I feel, and as I said earlier, healing, health and world peace would come about much more in society if there were a little bit more effort to understand what this nonconceptual mind, or being, means, and people were not always identifying with pain.

Every given challenging moment, you just have to be more open to that moment. In the practices that we do, there is what I call taking three precious pills in these moments of real situations in life. The three pills are the white pill, or being more still in your body; the red pill, or being more silent in your speech; and the blue pill, or being more open in your mind. So when you are in a dangerous moment or a riskier moment, take these three pills. There are no harmful side effects [laughter]. But doing so will protect you and it will protect other people too.

When we think of the term rigpa it means seeing or knowing or being aware. Rang rig means self-aware or self-knowing. The question is, what is the self? In the West, the moment that you say self-aware, most of the time, unless the people are into Buddhism or reading that kind of literature, most mainstream psychologists would refer right away to the wrong person. Instead of the self that is beyond the pain identity, they point to the self that is identified with conditions and with pain. Self-awareness, though, really means knowing that you are no one, and you can be anyone. So this idea of self-awareness is really the power of being no one and the ability to be anyone. The true recognition of that power is where big attention or mega awareness lies. But in order to experience that, it requires our attention to all of the conditions; it requires our attention to the object.

A familiar object that is easy to bring our attention to would be what I've called one's famous person. This means that I think about this person a lot; what this person is doing, what they have done, what they are planning to do, and it takes my smile away and my sleep away. That person is one's famous person, right? So if you have people like that in your life, then you have to deal with that. In effect, you are addicted to having attention focused toward those people. You even dream about them.

So how do you take a break from focusing on them? You cannot take a break from them unless you know who it is that is prioritizing and putting that amount of attention there. It is the pain that does it. Joy doesn't do that. Joy feels free. Joy is a little bit more crazy and focuses on, and does, whatever comes in the moment and enjoys it. But the pain is very predictable and focuses on only a few things, and it keeps on focusing on them. There is a lack of awareness.

I am very fascinated with this whole notion of how much our health has to do with our pain identity, what we identify as ourselves. We need to address this more, even though many people will not understand; I can see that. But if we keep talking about it in a little different way, a better way, then at some point they will get it and see that the source of the problem, the pain identity, is what they are identifying with. That identity is possible for everyone to change. They can shift it. So I think it's an incredible topic to talk about.