06/18/2026
Dharma nugget for the week. 🌟 What is the ultimate nature of mind?
“Our mind is not an independent entity, but an ever-changing continuum that depends upon many factors, such as its previous moments, its objects and the inner energy winds upon which our minds are mounted. Like everything else, our mind is imputed upon a collection of many factors and therefore lacks inherent existence. A primary mind, or consciousness, for example, has five parts or “mental factors”: feeling, discrimination, intention, contact and attention. Neither the individual mental factors nor the collection of these mental factors is the primary mind itself, because they are mental factors and therefore parts of the primary mind. However, there is no primary mind that is separate from these mental factors. A primary mind is merely imputed upon the mental factors that are its basis of imputation, and therefore it does not exist from its own side.
Having identified the nature of our primary mind, which is an empty like space that perceives or understands objects, we then search for it within its parts—feeling, discrimination, intention, contact and attention—until finally we realize its unfindability.
This unfindability is its ultimate nature, or emptiness. We then think:
All phenomena that appear to my mind are the nature of my mind. My mind is the nature of emptiness.
In this way we feel that everything dissolves into emptiness. We perceive only the emptiness of all phenomena and we meditate on this emptiness. This way of meditating on emptiness is more profound than the meditation on the emptiness of our body. Gradually our experience of emptiness will become clearer and clearer until finally we gain an undefiled wisdom that directly realizes the emptiness of all phenomena.
Excerpt From
How to Transform Your Life
Ven. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche
