Q & A with Robina

QUESTION

Dear Venerable,

Can you please explain about clairvoyance? What is it and how do people get it? How is it possible to see the past or future or people’s minds?

Love,

R

ANSWER

Dear R,

In Buddhism, clairvoyance is the natural potential of all minds, which can be gained by accomplishing single-pointed concentration. We've all had it countless times but have lost it because we haven't progressed far enough on the path.

It’s all there, described in detail in the literature. Lama Yeshe talks about it really nicely in Mahamudra: How to Discover Our True Nature. In fact it was the great Indian yogis, well before the Buddha, who first discovered this capacity of the mind because they’re the ones who developed single-pointed concentration, samadhi.

Many people have some capacity for it in a very random way – probably as a result of some kind of practice in a past life – but it's unstable, very partial, very random, and therefore unreliable. And they think of it as a "gift" (which implies someone gave it to you) and have no clue about how to grow it in this life: they see it as some self-existent thing.

The fact is, when it’s accomplished as a result of a stable practice, it's powerful, crystal clear, stable, and very reliable. 

The job of the mind, or consciousness, is to cognize, and it cognizes according to its level of capacity. Sensory consciousness is very limited in its capacity for cognition: eye consciousness, for example, cognizes only shape and color; ear consciousness, merely sound. Then there’s mental consciousness, and we live at a very gross level of it: conceptuality, thoughts about things. 

Then there are the subtler levels of mental consciousness, which aren’t even posited as existing in neuroscience because they don’t depend upon the brain. 

And the only reason to have clairvoyance is to help others; otherwise it’s useless, just used for ego. In fact, you could say that we can’t really begin to benefit others until we’ve accomplished it, because then we can see the karma of the person and will know well how to help them.

The accomplished yogis all have clairvoyance, just naturally, but they rarely use it in a direct way. But if we trust our spiritual mentors and take their advice, we will know that their advice is based on their profound ability to see our past and our karma.

And, if we really want to benefit others, like the great bodhisattvas, then we will aspire to accomplish it as well.

Love to you,

Robina