Understanding Self & Mind

Caring is something we and our world urgently need. We know real caring when we experience it, but our way of life-or perhaps our way of relating to our minds-seems to leave us feeling profoundly uncared for. Lacking care ourselves, we begin to lose our ability to care for others. In Caring, Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the deep importance of learning to care. Drawing on his Buddhist background as well as more than fifty years spent working closely with students from around the world, he shows us how caring can bring us face-to-face with human nature's deepest mysteries-and its highest potentials. In reflections that range from the simple and heartfelt to the challenging and profound, Caring shows us how caring can ease our hearts, strengthen our spirits, and transform our sense of what is possible.

In straightforward, non-technical language, Tarthang Tulku guides the reader on an ever-deepening inquiry into the workings of his or her own mind. Accessible to anyone, Revelations of Mind bears repeated reading as it exposes the limits of our current mental operations and shifts our attention to new horizons of understanding and meaning. With the book Revelations of Mind we begin an inquiry into the mystery of mind and how its operations affect our well-being. When we know more about how mind works, we can understand what runs our life. This book also has special relevance for experienced practitioners of meditation. Mind has incredible power and flexibility, but uncared for and unguided it becomes a despot, limiting the ways we can know and respond, and subjecting us to confusion, anxiety, and despair. We need an intelligent, creative, innovative way to study mind, for if we wish to free ourselves of problems, we must become more aware of what mind is and what it needs. In releasing it for publication, the author has said, "Our mind is the creator of all we experience, yet we suffer for we do not understand the creator or the creation. But if we can closely contact the processes by which mind generates experience, we can give ease to our mind and appreciate the true nature of our embodiment. We can make our mind our best friend and our most reliable companion."

How is our experience being produced, moment to moment? Could it ever be different? In a series of short but penetrating essays, Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku examines how language and perception condition our sense of reality, and how 'I', 'me', "mine" and 'mind' both facilitate and limit our understanding of ourselves. A closer look at time and the operations of mind opens up a startling possibility: our ability to contact transformative knowledge may be far greater than we realize. Using simple, accessible language to address complex and challenging themes drawn from years of study with the masters of his tradition, Tarthang Tulku takes readers on a journey to the heart of human experience. This volume is part of the Understanding Self and Mind Series from Dharma Publishing.