The High Horse

Michael Erlewine -- Archivist Popular Culture

3 min readJun 23, 2024

By Michael Erlewine

The Ven. Thrangu Rinpoche wrote:

“We all strive to find happiness and avoid suffering. In order to do this, we need to be careful about karma as cause and effect, which functions through our bodies, speech, and minds. The most important of these three is our mind, and therefore, we need to know thoroughly the nature of this mind. We need to look to see where it is and recognize the nature of the mind as it is, without altering it. “

“Just resting in meditation within that is enough.

This is how we come to understand the way the mind is.”

The above quote by Thrangu Rinpoche sums up the essence of what I have been taught and done my best to learn over the last 50 or so years.

All of the dharma calisthenics, mantras, practices, etc. all add up to becoming aware and getting to know the actual nature of our mind, the same mind you and I are using right now to read this. How familiar are we with our own mind?

However, looking at the nature of the mind as if we are an outsider (standing outside) is not helpful. The problem is that we are not outsiders and never have been. It’s our own mind and its nature is what we must become aware of and familiar with. And that’s exactly what we are already familiar with, but unfortunately, we are not aware of our own familiarity. We are caught shy of that familiarity, as if it is a stranger, which it is not and never has been.

It seems that we will always be the last to know until we are finally aware of it. What we assume is at distance (and thus not near) is already close at hand.

How do we become aware of what we are not aware of is the perennial spiritual problem. How does the eye see itself? And the answer is that it doesn’t. What then?

As long as we are looking outside ourselves at whatever we imagine is there, by definition, we are missing the boat.

Looking at the “Looking At” itself is required and to do that involves complete immersion on our part in the sea of life, to the exclusion of being a subject looking at an object.

It’s not hard to lay out the equation here that has to be solved, yet solving it is another story. We are loathe to let go of our high perch as a subject and allow, as the poet wrote, the dewdrop to slip into the shining sea. That’s it!

However, full immersion is the only choice, other than to remain as we are now, stuck here in Samsara looking out at nothing. And that gets old.