Henry Vyner - The Healthy Mind: Mindfulness, True Self, and the Stream of Consciousness

The journey that took me to Asia to do twenty years of research on the nature of the healthy mind with Tibetan lamas began when I started meditating at the age of twelve. At that point, I didnt know what meditation was. I vaguely knew there was a religion called Buddhism, but again, I knew nothing at all about it. Not even the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path. The journey to Asia began when I spontaneously stumbled into doing what I now know to be meditation.

I would go down to the lake near our small horse farm and let my mind run free out in the space over and around the lake. It was just that simple, and I began to do it regularly. The operative phrase here is run free. This was the beginning of my pursuit of the wild stream of consciousness and the natural state of mind it engenders.

I let my stream of consciousness run free because I saw it as a way to be as open and honest as I could possibly be with myself about everything that was going on in my mind. That freedom was for me an antidote to the conformism of the life around me, and I wanted to escape that conformism and be what I thought was real.

At that point, I didnt know it yet, but there were two separate traditions in the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism that had made a related discovery towards the end of the first millennium AD . They had both recognized that the simple act of letting the stream of consciousness run free, absolutely free, was the key to cultivating an enlightened mind.

Those two lineages still exist today, and they are known as the DzogChen and Mahamudra traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. The DzogChen tradition, in particular, developed and championed meditation practices that allow the stream of consciousness to run free and naturally transform itself into the goodness and self-realization of the egoless mind.

The import of this discovery is that it defines the difference between the egoless mind and the egocentric mind, which causes itself to be unhappy, inauthentic and unhealthy by controlling its stream of consciousness.

DzogChen figured out that when you learn how to let your stream of consciousness run free and remain in its natural state, your thoughts and emotions will spontaneously dissolve and transform themselves into moments of the nondual joy, goodness and self-realization of the enlightened mind, a mind that has no ego. This phenomenon is called self-liberation in DzogChen.

Heres an evocative and beautiful passage from a commentary by the twentieth-century DzogChen lama, the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, in which he captures the essence of this view of the naturally enlightened mind:

The wind blows through the sky and flies over continents without settling anywhere. It traverses space and leaves no trace.

Thus should thoughts pass through our mind. In the natural mind, thoughts are freed by themselves, like the wind.

Here is a passage from a fourteenth-century Tibetan lama named Longchenpa, a seminal figure in the DzogChen tradition, in which he explains in more detail the DzogChen position that allowing the stream of consciousness to run free and remain in its natural statewithout repressing, holding on to or modifying anything in the stream of consciousnessis the key to cultivating an enlightened mind:

Let the Mind be at ease without effort.
The ordinary mind, unmodified and natural,
Unstained by the grasping for samsara and nirvana,
attains liberation in its natural state.
Let the Mind be at ease without effort.
The ordinary mind, unmodified and natural,