For a modern explorer, the booming meditation market can be both fascinating and overwhelming. Ancient meditation techniques are being rediscovered and adapted for twenty-first-century learners while new practices are constantly developed by meditation teachers. This vast array of techniques can lead you to a myriad of wondrous inner experiences. Furthermore, each of these practices offers unique keys to the art of meditation. Still, we need to be careful not to get lost in this abundance. Meditation itself should be kept simple. In fact, you can learn how to meditate even without delving into any of these techniques.
Meditation, after all, is not a technique but a certain quality or approach of your mind. While there are numerous meditative practices, there is only one meditative approach. When you become familiar with this approach, you can invoke meditative calm at any given moment, wherever you are. The only tool that you require is your own mind. To return to these basics of meditation, let us start our journey by learning about Tilopa’s six words of advice.
Don’t Meditate
Tilopa was a highly influential Buddhist master who lived in India between the years 988 and 1069. His six well-known instructions on what to do in meditation are an excerpt from a spiritual song called the “Doha Treasure” that Tilopa sang to his student Naropa. These concise instructions are perfect for helping us to be in an authentically meditative state.
Here are Tilopa’s six words of advice, in Ken McLeod’s translation:[1]
Don’t recall. Let go of what has passed.
Don’t imagine. Let go of what may come.
Don’t think. Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t examine. Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t control. Don’t try to make anything happen.
Rest. Relax, right now, and rest.
The first thing we read about the meditative approach is that it involves letting go of the past. Recalling your past can sometimes be meaningful. For instance, therapeutic processes encourage you to revisit past events so that you can come to terms with them and release their burdens. You may also wish to cherish some of the remarkable experiences that inspire you to this day. But from a meditative point of view, the past has already passed. How could busying yourself with what has passed lead you to meditative calm? The fragrance of meditation is therefore past-free.
In any case, the past now exists only as a picture inside your mind. To even know the past, you need to conjure up a picture in your mind. Right now, do you have any evidence to show that you have a past? Of course not. Such evidence requires the existence of an image or picture. But this evidence is just thought. Right now, then, your reality doesn’t have a past.
Then Tilopa points out that meditation also involves letting go of the future. He refers to our thoughts about the future as “imagining.” This is because the future, like the past, exists only in pictures: our pictures of tomorrow, or of ten years from now. These pictures are sometimes worrisome and sometimes motivating. In general, they constitute a healthy part of our functioning. It is good to plan ahead and to try to predict certain events with either anticipation or caution. These predictions, Tilopa remarks, may or may not come true. But when it comes to meditative calm, meditation is not the time to let your imagination run wild. There will be plenty of time to do that later. Now it is time to be future-free.
If you can be without a sense of past or future for even one long moment, you are already steeped in meditation. I will explain later what you should do if thoughts about the past or the future appear to draw your attention during meditation. But if you can see that neither past or future exist right now—or exist only as pictures in your mind—you may realize that letting go of them for a while is a real possibility.
At this point, you might think, okay, I’m willing to let go of what has passed and what may come, but at least I have the present. No. Tilopa is taking away your present too, because he says, “Don’t think. Let go of what is happening now.” Naturally, when you’re busy responding to challenging situations or fulfilling mundane tasks, you cannot avoid considering what is happening. But why would you carry your roles and duties into your meditative calm? In meditation, you have no role to play. You are not needed. We tend to assume that we should carry the burden of the world on our shoulders all the time. For this reason, many of us often struggle to fall asleep: even when we don’t have to, we try to control what is happening. Meditation is the permission that you give yourself to cease functioning as the world’s manager, at least for a little while.
Tilopa’s first three tips are all about time: letting go of thoughts that have anything to do with the past, present, and future. There is no need to keep your mind tethered to the movement of time. Meditation, Tilopa tells us, is immersing oneself in a state of timelessness.
But Tilopa has more to say about the meditative approach. First, he advises us to avoid examining and trying to figure things out. Remember, this is not advice for a good life. Most of the time, we do need to make sense of what is happening in our life. But meditation is not the time to look into anything. Thrangu Rinpoche translates Tilopa’s advice a little differently, as “don’t meditate on anything.”[2] This may sound perplexing: how can Tilopa recommend that in our meditation, we avoid meditating? The original Latin meaning of meditation describes a state of intense contemplation, of “thinking deeply about something.”[3] This may imply that the practice of meditation is always a meditation on a specific object. Indeed, many meditation techniques seek to focus your attention on one thing, such as a mantra (a sacred word or sound) or your breathing process. This focal point can help you to dissolve the familiar state of a scattered mind and to harness the power of your attention.
However, think for a moment of how it feels when you enter meditation with the determination to meditate on something and to work at it. Tilopa is clearly aware of this self-defeating approach. He insists that the actual practice of meditation consists in not trying to do anything. Meditative calm invites you to leave the habit of doing and making effort behind. It offers you instead the opportunity to revel in a state of relaxed openness.
Tilopa’s fifth piece of advice on meditation is to avoid controlling the practice and trying to make something happen. Normally, it is reasonable to try to control our actions and to direct events in our life so that they lead to welcome outcomes—at least as long as we accept that much of what is happening cannot be fully controlled. Moreover, you take certain actions because you hope to achieve specific results. But when you enter meditation with a determined purpose, you inevitably become obsessed with your wish to experience exactly what you have in mind. Instead of relaxed openness, you find yourself continuously analyzing your meditation session and making sure that your practice is just like this or that: “Am I going in the right direction? Am I missing something? Do I understand it correctly?” Thus, in his fourth and fifth instructions, Tilopa shows us that meditation is not a focused activity that is done with the intention of gaining something else as a result. When you act rather than meditate, your mind becomes so concentrated that it is like a fist instead of the open hand that it is meant to be. Can you imagine realizing anything when your mind is like a fist?
The receptive state of the open hand is what meditation feels like. If you stop recalling, imagining, thinking, examining, and controlling, your mind becomes completely loose and sinks into meditative calm. Notice that Tilopa’s first five words of advice are not formulated as things that you should do or focus on, but as things that you should cease to do. When we express the wish to learn to meditate, we usually seek out clear guidelines on how to practice. Tilopa, on the other hand, emphasizes that the essence of meditation lies not in what you do, but in what you don’t do. For this reason, he sometimes refers to his vision of meditation as the “state of nonmeditation.”[4]
Thus, Tilopa’s last piece of advice is not only an additional guideline, but also the natural state that remains after you’ve followed these five forms of letting go. Try to communicate with this for a moment: what would happen if you put aside what has passed, what may come, and what is happening now, and also ceased to figure anything out and to make anything happen? The final outcome is Tilopa’s last advice: “Rest.” In other words, meditation is simply a state of deep restfulness.
Tilopa’s intention behind the word “rest” is profound. He speaks of a deep loosening of the clinging of the mind—releasing your grip, being here, right now, with the mind completely open. Try to feel how burdened a mind can be when it is doing all these activities. It is a mind that clings all day long to what has passed, to what may come, to what is happening now, to figuring something out, and to making something happen. The unfortunate reality is that for most people, this is their persistent state of mind. Approaching your meditation as if it were one more thing to do is thus counterproductive. But if you let yourself rest in meditation, the difference between doing and just being will finally become clearer.
This is the foundation: meditation is actually nonmeditation. Now let’s explore four key principles that will allow us to truly abide in meditative rest.
First Principle: Set Your Intention
Even if we long for the state of meditative calm, the lifelong habit of recalling, imagining, thinking, examining, and controlling often overpowers our good intentions. We have simply become used to contemplating these issues all the time. One of the best ways to prevent this habit from interfering with our nonmeditation is setting an intention just before the practice. A conscious intention can diminish your tendency to produce and hold on to thoughts of this type.
Modern meditations hardly ever use the power of intention. We go into the practice and hope for the best. Sometimes we have a “good” meditation, but too often we spend this precious time being aimlessly distracted. On the other hand, many forms of traditional practice acknowledge the need for this type of preparation. In Buddhism, for instance, meditators often enter into meditation with the declared intention to benefit all sentient beings. In this way, they cultivate bodhicitta, an awakened mind.[5]
A declared intention can give direction to your practice. As soon as you clarify your intent, all your internal forces are gathered into one flow of attention. But don’t confuse intention with a goal-oriented spirit. Bringing a goal-oriented spirit into your practice would imply that you have every intention of remaining busy and focused—in other words, doing meditation. The intention that you express, however, is all about ceasing to try to figure everything out and to make something happen. You declare that you are willing to leave the world behind for a short while and that you are therefore temporarily more interested in being than in doing. This gives a signal to your mind to become aligned with this mode of being.
As soon as you declare why you are going to meditate, you bring totality into the practice. The entire practice becomes instantly colored with your intention. Do not think of your intention as a form of prayer. It is not like asking, “Please God, make it a good meditation!” Setting an intention is not about the hope that the meditation will be good. Intention is not powerless, but rather one of the most powerful things in life.
In general, your meditation could be directed to advancing world peace, or to emanating beauty and purity in the world. You could even meditate with the purpose of enhancing your relationships. But if you wish to tap into the meditative calm that Tilopa offers, the most accurate choice would be to clarify that you intend to abandon your usual focus and the tendency to examine and control. Since you are confident that the world and the endless stream of time can wait for you until you have completed your sitting, you are resolute in your wish to take an internal holiday. All the problems that you are expected to resolve and all the big or small decisions that you are supposed to make can be momentarily withheld. You are not going to waste your meditation on continuing to do what you already do all day long.
Your intention could follow this approach: “In entering this meditation, I’m leaving the world behind. I don’t care what’s going to happen. Right now I’m not going to solve any problems. It’s none of my business. I’m not interested in looking back on memories and regrets, nor am I interested in making future plans. This is the time for deep restfulness. I just am, without focus or aim.” As soon as you utter these simple words and close your eyes, you will notice that suddenly, the meditation is far more awake and energetic.
Second Principle: Understand the Law of Attention
You are sitting for meditation. After clarifying your conscious intention to leave the world behind, you are beginning to ease yourself into a state of natural restfulness. For several long, happy moments, your mind is aligned with your intention. But then, the all-too-familiar stream of thoughts resumes, and you feel that your restless mind won’t allow you to meditate. You may even feel as if you are under attack, as if you are now a victim of your own mind. From this point on, your meditation becomes a wearisome struggle: ironically, you are fighting your way back to inner peace.
After several frustrating experiences, some aspiring meditators begin to refer to their mind as if it were a mere interference or even an enemy. The mind becomes synonymous with inner chaos and conflict. But your mind is neither an interference nor an enemy. In fact, when you understand the second principle, you can easily bring your mind back to its natural, luminous state.
Meditation is the mind’s ability to put itself back into order. Your wonderful, lucid mind has simply become intermixed with certain thoughts and emotions, but it has the power to choose to stop being so. The Law of Attention shows you how your mind can give rise to stress and struggle, but also how it can do the very opposite and bring itself to a state of meditative calm. This can be achieved by making use of a certain power that you have always possessed, but whose significance you have rarely acknowledged: your attention.
Attention is the act of directing your mind to listen, see, or understand. But just before you direct your mind toward something, you choose to do so, because you believe that paying attention to it would be meaningful, relevant, or rewarding to you. This means that there is a gap between you and every thought that you ever have. In this gap, you have the power to choose to give attention to the thought or not.
Think of it this way: before your attention and your thoughts became inseparably intermixed, there was awareness and choice. The fact that a certain thought passes through your mind and your attention becomes so automatically entangled with it is because you are no longer aware of the gap and the choice. In meditation, you can finally recover the power of your attention that has been lost in the endless stream of thoughts.
This is what your meditative practice begins to teach you: that you can easily separate attention from thinking. Mostly, we are unaware of this distinction. Our attention is glued to our thinking, as if it were one process. But in the gap between attention and thinking, our entire freedom lies.
According to the Law of Attention, the very nature of attention is to act as the light that shines on something. When your attention shines on a certain thought, this thought instantly becomes your reality. Then you begin to feel—physically, mentally, and emotionally—according to the reality you created through your attention. Attention is like the food that thoughts require: in the same way that your body needs food and water, thoughts feed on your attention. On the other hand, that which you do not give attention to becomes completely powerless and meaningless.
It is up to you alone: you give the power to thoughts. This implies that there are no powerful thoughts. No one in the world can claim that a certain thought is too powerful and too overwhelming to handle. Thoughts cannot take over you unless you let them do so. All your habitual thoughts are just things that you have decided to attach your attention to.
Your practice becomes taxing only when you are not aware of the Law of Attention and are wasting your precious time on trying to control or push away these thoughts. Any attempt to control these elements will only get you caught up in another conflict. In fact, you cannot control them. The only thing you can control is your attention, which means owning your own mind.
Meditation is the discovery of the power of your attention and your capacity to free it from any kind of dependency on thoughts. So, when you detect a thought, start experiencing the gap between it and attention, and allow yourself to rest in it for a while. While you are absorbed in meditation, you don’t have to give the power of attention to any of your thoughts. In life, you naturally have to choose certain thoughts and emotions to identify with. When you make a decision, you pick one of the options that your thinking has offered you. But what reason would you have to focus on a particular thought while meditating? After all, there is nothing that you are supposed to do or achieve.
During practice, keep your attention unfocused. Unfocused means pure attention. It means that you are fully attentive, but not attentive toward anything in particular. You don’t waste your energy. In this way, your mind returns to its original state of meditative calm.
When Tilopa advises us to stop recalling, imagining, thinking, examining, and controlling, he doesn’t mean that we should busy ourselves with pushing away thoughts about past events, future plans, or present challenges. Remember, this can only end in inner struggle. What Tilopa really means is that you should stop giving attention to all these thoughts. There is absolutely no need to exercise your power of attention. Instead, you choose to rest.
Third Principle: Don’t Silence Your Mind
When we think of meditative calm, we tend to imagine a state in which there is not a single thought interfering with our inner quietude. As a result, meditators often sit for meditation in anticipation of this extraordinary state. They suppose that as long as the current of thoughts persists, meditation is not possible. But this would mean that your meditative calm is forever dependent on the unpredictable fluctuation of your thoughts.
Naturally, sitting and waiting for something to happen cannot lead to restfulness, but only to tension. If you are continuously thinking, “I need to be in a state of peace. I need to have a silent mind,” you are trying to fabricate an unusual state—in other words, you are caught up in “examining” and “controlling.” Even if this state did appear in your meditation, you wouldn’t be able to grasp it. Sooner or later, this state would have to disappear, and the more familiar condition of a mind enwrapped in thoughts would reappear.
It can be inspiring to read about some extraordinary mystics, such as the twentieth-century philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who have claimed to have no thoughts for hours on end.[6] But it can also be frustrating and confusing. Must you reach this unusual state to be able to enjoy meditative calm? Fortunately, the calm for which we aim in meditation is of a different type. In reality, you don’t need to quiet your thoughts down to settle into a state of profound calmness. A fulfilled meditation has nothing to do with how boisterous or relaxed your thoughts are.
Remember, the peace of mind lies in the effortlessness of meditation. This effortlessness also applies to the way you relate to your thoughts. You already know, based on the Law of Attention, that you don’t have to enhance any of your thoughts through the power of attention. You simply rest in the gap between you and your thoughts. This also means that you don’t have to make the effort of reacting to any of them. You can just let them be—and when you let your thoughts be, you finally let yourself be.
A noisy mind is like birds chirping on a tree nearby. Unless you are unusually sensitive, it is difficult to imagine that you would be disturbed by your neighborhood’s chatty birds. In fact, you have probably got used to this background stream of noise to a degree that you are mostly unaware of its existence. Understandably, you are too engrossed in your own world to notice. In the very same way, you can be engrossed in your meditative calm while thoughts pass through your mind. Only if you believe that these mental chirps are significant—only if you choose to give them the power of attention—can these bubbles of thought appear to rob you of your inner quietude.
Struggling to quiet your mind down is as futile as hushing the house sparrows on a nearby tree would be. Neither will listen to you. Fight your mind, and you will end up experiencing a split within yourself. Suddenly you are two: the silencer and the naughty thoughts you observe. This doesn’t make sense. But you will only get caught in this hopeless battle if you believe that the calm you are looking for is one that cannot tolerate or contain the presence of thoughts.
Meditative calm is not the opposite of thoughts. It can accommodate all thoughts in the same way that the cosmic space contains the luminous stars. This is the discovery of your inner space. You don’t tap into this space when all thoughts are gone. You find it at the background of all your thoughts, or just beneath them, or, as instructed in the Buddhist Dzogchen meditation, in the spaces between one thought and another.[7] This is probably the most liberating point: in the effortless peace of nonmeditation, there can be no interference. Nothing can challenge this peace, since everything is welcome and included in it.
You realize how beautiful meditation can be only when meditation is no longer about bringing yourself to a certain condition. Instead, you find peace of mind by not attempting to change anything. You are attentive and aware, free from the need to act or react. You are equally observing all changing states: sometimes your thoughts are talkative, and at other moments, your mind is silent. But you have no preference for one state or another. You are not especially exhilarated when your mind happens to be silent. You are not irritated when a ripple of thought seems to disturb the stillness of your inner pond. In both conditions, you just “relax, right now, and rest.”
Fourth Principle: Meditation is Your Natural State
There is one final, delicate point. It is about how we read and respond to Tilopa’s sixth word of advice:
Rest. Relax, right now, and rest.
When someone advises you to rest and relax, how do you follow this advice? Even sinking into a state of restfulness may sound like an effortful action: currently I am under a lot of stress, but I’d like to move to a relaxed mode of being. There is still a sense of distance, like moving from X to Y. We can imagine it as taking a walk inside ourselves and finally coming to a certain realm. But Tilopa wants us to relax “right now,” not a moment later. How can this relaxation happen in a flash?
Thrangu Rinpoche translates Tilopa’s sixth piece of advice as “Just rest naturally.”[8] “Naturally” is the key. It indicates that the restfulness of meditation is your natural state. Your current stressful condition may be more familiar to you, but it is not your natural state. On the other hand, this state of restfulness already exists within you, even if you have never been aware of its presence. There is no point in striving to create or achieve meditative calm: all you have to do is reveal it and relax into it. More than that, because meditative calm is already there, hidden inside you, any effortful action you make can only lead you away from it.
In Mahayana Buddhism, this natural state is referred to as your “Buddha-nature.”[9] In Vajrayana Buddhism, it is believed that each of us possesses a “very subtle mind,” which is an already perfectly meditative layer of the mind.[10] This underlying reality within you is the reason that you don’t need to try to make anything happen. Instead, you find this restful state beneath your thoughts, or in the spaces between one thought and another. It is always available to you. Meditation is simply the time in which you grow aware of your mind’s true nature.
This is a very subtle secret: beneath the superficial layers of your thoughts, your mind is already calm. In fact, as Tilopa himself says elsewhere, your mind is like space.[11] Since you constantly pay attention to certain thoughts within your mind, you hardly ever notice the space in which these thoughts are contained. But thoughts appear and fluctuate within a certain space. Your attention tends to focus on what stands out in space, in the same way that you mainly notice stars when you look up at the night sky. On the other hand, when you look into the space of your mind, you realize that the thoughts that have kept you so busy are a miniscule percentage of the vast space of your mind. The reason you can “rest naturally” is that your mind has significantly more space than thoughts.
So, when you meditate, you just need to tune into the natural state of your mind. It is as simple as tuning a radio and switching the station just slightly. Think of it as a type of meditation that is already taking place—you just weren’t participating in it. This calm cannot be lost. It doesn’t depend on the absence of thinking, and the presence of thoughts cannot rob you of it. It is not a fabricated pause, a point of relaxation in the midst of your mental noise. It is a recognition of the fundamental calmness of your mind.
When Tilopa prescribes nonmeditation, it is because he doesn’t want you to overlook this natural reality of your mind. For this reason, his first five words of advice are concerned only with what you should stop doing. His last piece of advice points at the restfulness that is uncovered as a result. Although Tilopa was a superb meditation teacher, who taught complex techniques of breathing and visualization, he wanted to make sure that his students would never forget this basic truth of meditation.
You cannot “do” meditation. “Doing” meditation is based on the belief that meditation is an act. In fact, the only thing in the world that you surely cannot do is meditation. It is just not possible, since meditation is by its nature nonaction, the moment when you cease to act. This also implies that even though you can study countless meditation techniques, you cannot learn meditation: meditation itself is the art of unlearning certain mental habits that keep you from experiencing meditative calm.
Even if you can only devote five minutes a day to not recalling, imagining, thinking, examining, or controlling, this should be enough to color your daily experience. The quality of these five minutes, during which you have left the world behind and bathed in your mind’s natural restfulness, will imbue all your activities with meditative calm.
Sources
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Drolma, Lama Palden. “How to Practice Dedicating Merit.” Lion’s Roar, March 10, 2022. https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-dedicating-merit/.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. Total Freedom. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Nyenpa, Sangyes. Tilopa’s Mahamudra Upadesha. Translated by David Molk. Boston: Snow Lion, 2014.
Odzer, Repa Dorje. “Tilopa’s Six Nails” [online]. Tricycle (Spring 2018). Accessed July 19, 2022. https://tricycle.org/magazine/tilopas-six-nails/.
Thrangu, Khenchen. Tilopa’s Wisdom. Boulder, CO: Snow Lion, 2019.
Tricycle. “What is Buddhanature?” Accessed July 19, 2022. https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/what-is-buddhanature/.
Yeshe, Lama. The Bliss of Inner Fire. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 1998.
[1] Repa Dorje Odzer, “Tilopa’s Six Nails.”
[2] Thrangu, Tilopa’s Wisdom, 157.
[3] Lexico, s.v. “Meditate.” https://www.lexico.com/definition/meditate (accessed 10 August 2022).
[4] Nyenpa, Tilopa’s Mahamudra Upadesha, 11.
[5] Drolma, “How to Practice Dedicating Merit.”
[6] Krishnamurti, Total Freedom, 153, 155.
[7] Berzin, “Steps of Dzogchen Meditation.”
[8] Thrangu, Tilopa’s Wisdom, 157.
[9] Tricycle, “What is Buddhanature?”
[10] Yeshe, The Bliss of Inner Fire, 87–88.
[11] Nyenpa, Tilopa’s Mahamudra Upadesha, 3.
