Who Are You? From "In Love with the World" by Mingyur Rinpoche

IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov, offers a rare and intimate account of a world-renowned Buddhist monk's near-death experience and the transformative wisdom that emerged from it.

At thirty-six years old, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was a rising star among his generation of Tibetan masters when one night he left his monastery in India to begin a wandering retreat. He wanted to strip away his titles and public identity to explore the deepest aspects of his being, but he soon discovered he was unprepared for the harsh realities beyond the monastery walls. His adventurous journey took a startling turn when he became gravely ill from food poisoning. A lifetime of meditation practice had prepared him to face death, and now he had the opportunity to test the strength of his training.

In this powerful and unusually candid memoir, the Buddhist master reveals the invaluable lessons from his near-death experience and teaches how to work with fear through the meditation practices that sustained him. Below you can read the first chapter of the book and sense the depth of these teachings.

Who Are You?

Are you Mingyur Rinpoche?

My father asked me this question shortly after I began studying with him at nine years old. It felt so gratifying to know the right answer that I proudly declared: Yes, I am.

Then he asked: Can you show me something specific that makes you Mingyur Rinpoche?

I looked down at the front of my body to my feet. I looked at my hands. I thought about my name. I thought about who I was in relation to my parents and older brothers. I couldn't come up with an answer. My father then made the search for my true self seem like a treasure hunt, and I genuinely looked everywhere, even under stones and behind trees. At eleven, I began my studies at Sherab Ling, a monastery in northern India, where I brought this search inward through meditation. Two years later, I entered the traditional three-year retreat, a period of intensive mental training.

During that time, we young monks did various exercises, each one deepening our understanding of the subtler levels of reality. The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, means "to familiarize oneself with": developing familiarity with how the mind works, how it creates and shapes our perceptions of ourselves and the world, understanding how the outer layers of the mind, the constructed labels, function like clothes that characterize our social identity and conceal the naked, unfabricated state of our original mind, whether those clothes are suits, jeans, uniforms, or Buddhist robes.

By the time I entered that retreat, I understood that the value of labels shifts according to circumstances and social consensus. I had already concluded that I was not my name, my title, or my status; my essential self could not be defined by social position or designation. Yet these same designations, empty of essential meaning, had defined my days: I am a monk; a son, a brother, and an uncle; a Buddhist; a meditation teacher; a tulku, an abbot, and a writer; a Tibetan Nepali; a human being. Which of these identities describes my essential self?

Making this list is a simple exercise. There is only one problem: the inevitable conclusion contradicts every assumption we hold so dear, as I was about to learn once again. I wanted to go beyond the relative self, the self that identifies with these labels. I knew that although social categories play a dominant role in our personal history, they coexist with a larger reality beyond the labels.

We rarely recognize that our social identity is shaped and limited by context, and that these outer layers of ourselves exist within an unlimited reality. Habitual patterns obscure this unlimited reality, but it is always there, ready to be unveiled.

When we are not reduced by the habitual patterns that define how we see ourselves and behave in the world, we have access to the vast qualities of mind that do not depend on circumstances or concepts and are always present; this is why we call it fundamental, or absolute mind, the mind of absolute reality, which is the same mind of pure mindfulness that expresses the very essence of our true nature. Unlike the intellectual and conceptual mind and the boundless love of an open heart, this essence of reality is not associated with any location or any kind of materiality. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is like the sky, so completely woven into our existence that we never pause to question its reality or recognize its qualities. Because pure mindfulness is as present in our lives as the air we breathe, we can access it anywhere, at any time.

I had developed some capacity to hold both the relative and absolute perspectives at once. Yet I had never lived a day without people and supports that mirrored the patchwork that had become known to me and others as Mingyur Rinpoche: unfailingly polite, quick to smile, reserved in manner, neat, clean-shaven, wearing frameless glasses with a gold frame. Now I wondered how these identities would play out at Gaya station. I had been there many times, but always with at least one attendant. In other words, I had never been without some reference point of social position and had never been challenged to rely solely on my own inner resources.

Tibetans have an expression for the practice of intentionally increasing challenges to keep the mind stable: throwing more wood on the fire. Generally, people spend their lives being very careful about experiences that typically provoke anger, anxiety, or fear, and they try to avoid them by saying things like: I can't watch horror movies. I can't handle large crowds. I'm terrified of heights, or flying, or dogs, or the dark. But the causes that trigger these responses don't disappear; and when we find ourselves in these situations, our reactions can be overwhelming. Using our inner resources to work with these issues is our only true protection, because external circumstances change all the time and therefore cannot be relied upon.

Throwing wood on the fire deliberately brings difficult situations to the surface so we can work with them directly. We take the behaviors or circumstances we think are the problem and transform them into allies. For example, when I was about three or four years old, I took a bus pilgrimage to major Buddhist sites in India with my mother and grandparents. I got very carsick on that first bus ride. After that, every time I came near a bus, I felt afraid and nauseous and inevitably got sick again. By the time I was twelve, after a year living at Sherab Ling monastery in northern India, I was heading home to see my family. The attendant who was going with me planned our trip by bus to Delhi, a journey that would take all night, and then we would fly from Delhi to Kathmandu.

I was eager to see my parents, but for several weeks I was very anxious about the bus ride. I insisted that the attendant buy two seats so I could lie down, thinking that would calm my stomach. But early in the journey, I discovered that lying down made me feel worse. My attendant begged me to eat something or drink juice, but my stomach was too bloated to swallow anything. When the bus stopped partway, I refused to get up and get out. I didn't want to move and didn't for many hours. Finally, I got off the bus to use the bathroom and have some juice.

When I returned to my two seats on the bus, I felt much better and decided to try meditating. I began by examining the body, bringing my awareness to the sensations around my stomach, the bloating and nausea. It was very uncomfortable, somewhat repulsive, and at first it made those sensations worse. But as I slowly came to accept these sensations, I felt as if my whole body were a guest house. It was as if I were the host of these sensations, as well as the sensations of aversion, resistance, and reaction. The more I allowed these guests to dwell in my body, the calmer I became. Soon I fell asleep and woke in Delhi.

This experience did not resolve all my anxieties about riding buses; the fear returned with subsequent trips, though with a diminished effect. The big difference was that after that journey, bus rides were welcome. I hadn't planned this kind of trip with the same intentional deliberation as I had planned this wandering retreat, but I felt grateful for the challenge of working with my mind to overcome adversity.

When we throw wood on the fire instead of trying to smother the flames of our fears, we add more fuel and in the process gain confidence in our ability to work with whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. We stop avoiding situations that have disturbed us in the past or that evoke destructive patterns or emotional explosions. We begin to trust another aspect of the mind that lies beneath our reactivity. We call this aspect "non-self." It is the unconditioned mindfulness that reveals itself with the dissolution of the chattering mind, the one that talks to itself all day long. Another way to say this is that we shift the mental gear from ordinary consciousness to meditative consciousness.

The ordinary consciousness that guides our daily activities is actually quite confused. We generally spend our days with minds full of ideas about what we want and how things should be, and with reactive responses to what we like and dislike. It is as if we were wearing different pairs of glasses without knowing it, with no idea that these filters obscure and distort our perceptions. For example, if we suffer from motion sickness, the spare glasses are the feelings of disgust at the smell of vomit and the shame we feel at causing repulsion in others. The fact that someone might notice only increases our physical discomfort.

Let's say we look at a mountain with ordinary consciousness. Our mind turns outward and follows our eyes toward the mountain, and perhaps we remember the last time we saw this mountain or any other, who we were with at the time, whether the weather or time of day was better in the previous experience or now, or whether we are hungry or happy. Or notice the times we use ordinary consciousness to grab our keys and phone before leaving home. Notice that this process often includes anxiety about being late or which route to take to get to our appointment, or we might even fantasize about returning home before we've even left.

With meditative consciousness, we try to remove these filters and reduce projections. We turn inward and recognize mindfulness as a quality of the mind itself. When we look at the mountain, there is less mental traffic between us and the mountain, fewer concepts and ideas. We see things about the mountain we hadn't seen before: the way the ridges are outlined by the shape of the trees, the changes in vegetation, or the sky that surrounds the mountain. The clear mind of this mindfulness is always with us, whether we recognize it or not. It coexists with the confusion and destructive emotions and cultural conditioning that shape how we see things. But when our perception shifts to meditative consciousness or stable mindfulness, it is no longer reduced by memory and expectation; everything we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear has greater clarity and sharpness, and it enlivens our interactions.

Shortly after I began studying with my father, I received teachings from him on meditative consciousness. One day I was on the roof of my house, just looking around in a distracted and casual way, and I noticed that on top of Shivapuri, the mountain behind Nagi Gompa, there were workers repairing a trail that crosses one side of the mountain. About six people were using shovels, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows to level the path, remove earth and fallen stones. I sat and watched the work from the roof. Then the thought came to me: I should be meditating.

Following my father's instructions, I turned my mind back on itself without moving my eyes. I continued to see the people working, to hear the sound of pickaxes breaking stones, to see the wheelbarrow dumping earth to the side. But suddenly I also saw the beautiful blue sky and clouds passing overhead, and I saw leaves moving in the wind, felt the breeze on my skin, and heard birds singing. Before, with ordinary consciousness, my focus was narrow and I didn't feel or see anything except the workers on the road. Meditative consciousness, also called stable mindfulness, introduces us to looking at the nature of mindfulness itself.

Once we become familiar with stable mindfulness, we still frequently move between this state and ordinary consciousness. Despite the difference between them, both types of consciousness exist within a dualistic construct: there is something observing and something being observed, the experience of mindfulness recognizing itself. When this duality is eliminated, we enter what we call pure mindfulness, or non-dual.

Non-duality is the essential quality of mindfulness, but when we speak of three types, ordinary, meditative, and pure, we are speaking of a gradual experiential process that moves from dualistic states to non-dualistic ones, from a very confused mind to a mind that is increasingly freed from habitual reactivity and preconceived ideas about how things should be. These categories of mindfulness are not sharply delineated, and our recognition of pure mindfulness also has many gradations. We can have glimpses or flashes with varying degrees of depth or clarity. I knew something of pure mindfulness. Part of my intention for this retreat was to deepen how I relate to this aspect of reality, and I hoped to do this by stepping out of my normal life.

Who was about to enter Gaya railway station in the middle of the night? My brown robes, yellow shirt, and shaved head identified me as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a lama by profession, a perfect disguise for the messy mixture of curiosity, anxiety, and confidence that accompanied each beat of my heart, which in many ways was still seeking the answer to my father's question: Who is Mingyur Rinpoche?

I had acquired the ability to recognize mindfulness within the monastic environment and temples, and on my meditation mat, always in my comfort zone, and always near disciples and attendants. Although I had meditated my whole life and spent many years in Buddhist monasteries, I was now beginning a different kind of retreat. My titles and designations would be thrown into the fire. I would burn away the protections and common external social strategies to be free, not from life, but for life, to live each day with fresh engagement with whatever arose. I would not simply return to the rewarding paths I knew so well. I suspected that these roles had become deeply ingrained and I couldn't work with them until some degree of rupture brought them to the surface.

I set out alone to intentionally seek this rupture through what I thought was an ego-suicide mission. I wanted to explore the depths of who I really was in the world, anonymous and alone. I wanted to test my own capacities in new and challenging situations. If I can really break with my established routines, find my own limit and keep going, let's see what happens to my recognition of mindfulness, see what happens to the virtues of patience and discipline when no one is watching, when no one knows who I am; when perhaps I don't even know who I am.

The taxi made a long, shrill noise until it stopped. It was time to find out. I paid the driver and got out of the taxi. As if to affirm that all worldly refuge is as fleeting as smoke, I stood in front of the station and turned, watching the taxi disappear.

Mingyur will be in Brazil (São Paulo and Rio) in August and this is a great opportunity to learn from a great teacher. More information and registration here.