The Nature of Mind
During Monday night´s discussion Matt said he hoped our current class would talk about the nature of mind. So I thought I would write something on the topic here, so I will have something to show when the topic comes up. Tibetan Buddhism draws a distinction between mind (sems) and the nature of mind (sems-nyid). I don't know that there is a precise defintion, but the distinction is the difference between what the mind appears to be and what it actually is.
So the distinction is that mind is something other than it appears to be. We are not talking about something behind, above, or separate from the mind, The mind has been misunderstood and we take it to be something other than it actually is. The way this is usually put in Western Buddhism is that we mistake the mind to be a self, or an ego. So seeing the mind's nature means undoing this false identification of the mind with a self.
There are two ways this can be done. The first is the philosophical approach, where we analyze the identification of the mind as a self and show the idea is contradictory. And because there are no contradictions in reality, the identification of the mind with a self is false. This approach is intellectually rigorous and for that reason hard to do. And while one may be convinced intellectually, emotionally we still cling to the idea. The second approach is simply to look directly at the mind, while we maintain an awareness of this sense of self. While this awarness of a self seems fixed and unchangable, it is only a belief, just another thought. And like all thoughts, it comes and goes, even though it may seem stable. Simply resting in the awareness of a sense of self can lead to the understanding that the sense of self is nothing more than a thought, and we misunderstand the mind when we take it to be a self.
When we see mind as it is, that is, the nature of mind, it is clearly present but beyond description, because any description is an object of mind and so something other than mind itself. So the experience is compared to staring at the empty blue sky. It is nothing extraordinary, it is simply seeing how things are and have always been.