As we develop the ability to focus on the nature of mind itself through our shamatha (calm-abiding or mindfulness) meditation, then the mind naturally begins to slow down. As our concentration becomes stronger, the stream of thoughts becomes slower. It can happen that sometimes the whole thing falls apart and we actually can observe the gap between the past thought and the future thought. There is a distinct gap. In that gap, if we are watching, then we see what is behind the running film of thoughts, which is in fact the nature of the mind.
In the metro stations of the London Underground, a recorded voice says, “Mind the gap,” as each train comes to a stop. This is because there’s a gap between the platform and the train carriage. The whole point of this kind of meditation is to mind the gap between thoughts, so many meditators have taken this as their slogan. Mind the gap. Once we recognize the gap, the practice is to make more frequent gaps and to extend their duration.
This is called resting in the nature of the mind. It is still shamatha meditation, but it has evolved from stabilizing or calming the mind to getting to know our conceptual mind. This is how we recognize that there is something beyond our conceptual thinking. The conceptual mind is all these thoughts racing along, streaming along, but since we can observe them, we now know that we are not the thoughts. The fact that we can step back and look at them proves that they are not who we are.
This is the first step in recognizing that we should not identify so closely with our conceptual thinking. The problem is, when we think something, we tend to believe it is true, and then we identify with it. We believe our memories, ideas, and opinions. This is very dangerous. In the world today, people are killing each other all the time, all based on their beliefs, which are just thoughts. All ideologies are based on thinking, rooted in this deluded conceptual mind, that is permeated with greed and aggression, jealousy, and pride, with an underlying total ignorance of the way things really are. All our actions and words depend on our mind—which is frightening, because our mind is usually a total mess.
Probably the most common thing people discover when they first start meditating is the chaos their mind is in and that they live in that mess. They thought they were nice, sane, normal human beings, but now they see that is just on the surface. If we were living in a house full of trash and muck, we would need to clear it out by deciding what is useful and what is not useful. That is exactly what we need to do with our mind.
Not that there’s anything wrong with thinking. The mind itself is wonderful. There’s nothing wrong with having feelings either. Otherwise, we would be a log of wood, a corpse. Conceptual thought can be an incredible tool. In fact, our particular kind of human intellect is what makes us capable of meditation practice. Thoughts are not the problem. The problem is that we totally identify ourselves with our thoughts and are even controlled by them. Most of our thoughts are a manifestation of the ignorance of our minds; that is all. We have to understand how the mind works, and the first step is cultivating the ability to observe the mind. Once we learn how to observe the mind, which is still shamatha, then we can go on to vipashyana, or insight meditation.
Insight into the Nature of the Mind
Once we have gained stability in our shamatha practice, we turn that clear awareness to the mind itself. What we are trying to do at this stage is recognize the true nature of the mind, and we can do that by paying close attention and investigating something that is constantly being produced by the mind: thoughts. Here, vipashyana means starting to question the mind. We start to question our thoughts. What is a thought? What color is it? What does it look like? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Where does it stay? When we get sensory input from the outside, how does our mind deal with this basic data from our senses?
There’s a whole slew of questions to be asked about thoughts and feelings and their real nature. When we analyze like that, which takes quite some time, we begin to see that the problem with thinking is that it makes everything seem so solid and real. Our ideas about ourselves and our ideas about everything outside of ourselves—other people and objects and things that happened to us—all seem so real. Our thinking mind reifies everything in our experience. In other words, it makes it into a “thing,” something solid and immutable and definitely existing on its own. This is our commonsense way of understanding things.
We believe that, if we were to die, everything else would remain as it appears to us now. We believe that, from our side, we are not really adding anything to what we perceive. We are merely neutral, just noting what actually exists outside of ourselves, just how it appears to us. Normally we don’t understand how much we contribute to our version of reality. There are a few ways we can deal with that. We can go the way of science, such as quantum physics and neuroscience, and try to understand these things from a scientific point of view. Alternatively, we can go the way of Buddhist practice. From the practice point of view, we start to understand reality from the inside out—which isn’t the way it appears to the deluded mind—and to recognize how much we actually are contributing to our version of what appears to be.
When we start to look at thoughts and feelings and to analyze them, we begin to see that our ideas and emotions, and our view of ourselves, are not something solid, static, and tangible. In fact, the more we analyze the mind, the more it keeps disappearing. It is like trying to look at a rainbow. A rainbow looks very solid, but when we go toward it, we can never reach it; it keeps receding. Likewise with our thoughts and our feelings: When we start to analyze them, we can’t catch hold of them; they are not solid at all. In some ways they are like bubbles, bright and shiny, but with a snap of the fingers there is nothing there. This is one of the meanings of shunyata, or emptiness, in Buddhist terminology.
When Geshe Chekawa, author of The Seven-Point Mind Training, says, “reveal the mystery,” he is referring to this empty nature. Empty doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Empty doesn’t mean nothing; that would be nihilism. The idea that things exist solidly, immutably, from their own side, or just how they appear, would be one extreme; the other extreme is that they don’t really exist at all. Buddhism teaches the middle way, between extremes. What this means when we are talking about emptiness—shunyata—is that our thoughts and feelings are not something solid, real, and self-existent. Each one that comes into being is conditioned by what went before it, and it conditions what will come after it. They are all interconnected and preconditioned.
If we look for a thought, we can never catch it; we can never find it. This is why looking at the mind is so important, because by observing the mind we begin to realize thoughts are just like impulses of energy in the mind stream; they are not real of themselves. Our problem is not the thoughts. We can use them—they are very useful—but they are not who we really are. Our problem is that we believe our thoughts and identify with our thoughts. We think, “This is who I am.”
Therefore, this meditation of looking at the thoughts and seeing how they rise and whir around is important because then we recognize that we cannot possibly be those thoughts. After all, the minute we think we are a particular thought, another thought comes along. Yes, there is water, but the river is changing from moment to moment. The sense that there is nothing solid, real, and immutable when it comes to thoughts is what is meant by the “empty nature” of the thoughts. It is obvious if we think about it. Therefore, shunyata, this empty quality, is what is called the mystery. So “reveal the mystery” means that, once we have achieved stability in our meditation, when we look at the mind and we look at the flow of our thoughts and emotions, that will show us the empty, luminous nature of the mind. That is the mystery, the secret.
Adapted from Change Your Mind, Change Your Life © 2026 by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications. www.shambhala.com
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