Refining Intent into Profound Intent
(Excerpted and adapted from a dharma talk at the DCC on Oct 3, 2021)
To undertake the view, meditation and conduct requires great mental intent. And to practice, discover and keep unfolding the nature of profound intent is the essence of dharma. Our mental intent, or volition, gives meaning and manifestation to why one is practicing, clarifying, refining, studying and hearing the dharma, going on retreats, reading dharma books, or doing a daily practice. Every single activity of body, speech and mind that will manifest in our life is due to mental intent. It’s very powerful, like a tidal undertow. Often not visible to us, yet it is in everything we do and everything that manifests for us. How we experience the world, the container and contained, has to do with invisible and visible mental intent. It’s so important, that from the view of the compassionate awake mind it’s called Dam Chos Gong Pa Yang Zab – the utterly profound enlightened intention of the holy dharma. If you strip everything away about dharma practice, it really is about a continuum of refining our profound intent – like extracting pure gold from its ore – and giving up clinging to meditation moods and states. What the dharma teacher is doing with you is refining one’s mental intent toward an unspeakable, yet transmissible profound intention.
What motivates, what drives us (humans) all day long…? It is micro-moments of mental activity, our intention mind moving hither and thither like waves on a vast ocean. Unlike the wandering waves and currents of an untrained ocean of habit patterns, awakeness is a powerful, far-reaching mental intent, a force that requires no formula, no book; nothing other than the spontaneous compassionate mind abiding in natural pristine splendour. That’s what we’re going for.
The reason we study with dharma teachers and lamas who possess more clarity of profound intent that we do, is to keep raising up and refining our obscured profound intent. Their far-reaching intent should wash through us. And those washings and changes to our conceptual framework – which is how we operate in the world – are, if we allow for it, refined, changed and opened by contact with an accomplished spiritual mentor. That’s what hearing the living, breathing dharma is for. If we allow our concepts, bindings and holdings to open, ideally it will manifest in the quality of the meditation, the contemplations, the books one reads … everything one does.
If I look back at this past lifetime with the extraordinary Namgyal Rinpoche, I can say there’s just one thing I did with Rinpoche. It’s just that. He kept working away at my mental intent. That’s it. Not so much about meditation; just simply refining and extracting mental intent, fully, for the liberation of self and other. Helping it come out from hiding in the bushes. Clear, awake, unobstructed, compassionate mental intent. The meditation. For all minds. To know and fearlessly liberate the minds of all beings. That’s it. Essentially, there isn’t anything else. And such a wonderful thing to be with a being who is residing naturally, effortlessly in that spacious freedom. You hope, trust and make effort to allow those vast enlightened qualities to bathe you and become steady. It was and continues to be of extraordinary benefit for all. The blessings have been unspeakable.
by Lama Mark