The Diamond in our Minds

After the Catastrophe—that is the election of Donald Trump on November 8—as I joined most of the rest of the (sane) world in paroxysms of dread and despair, I found myself again and again singing a refrain from a song by Tom Waits:

Always keep a Diamond in your mind;

Always keep a Diamond in your mind;

Wherever you may wander, wherever you may roam,

You’ve got to Always keep a Diamond in your mind…

Somehow, I find this refrain very healing, a kind of mantra, whenever the next horrid headline afflicts me with waves of dread about the future. But what is this “Diamond in your mind”?

In Buddhism, the Diamond Sutra is one of the essential Prajnaparamita sutras of the Pali Canon. In his translation and commentary on this sutra, Thich Nhat Hanh refers to it as “the Diamond that cuts through illusion.” It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain what this is “Diamond” is, for it is inherently paradoxical; it refers to the ultimate insight that “this is because that is,” from which we may logically deduce that neither “this” nor “that” has any intrinsic existence. But this paradoxical way of thinking is likely to be too abstruse to be of much comfort to most of us.

Another way of thinking about the Diamond in our minds is to consider the physical characteristics of diamonds themselves.  They are the hardest known substance; they can cut through anything else. This is why this ultimate insight in the Sutra is compared to a diamond (Vajra). In this sense, it is cutting through all the illusions that keep us bound to Samsara, bound to the wheel of suffering that we create when we assume (1) that things have separate existence from each other, and (2) that we ourselves have a separate identity from others.

The first delusion is relatively easy to penetrate intellectually; we can readily understand, for example, that without topsoil, oxygenated air, solar energy, fresh water, and inherited genetic information, we would not have any flowers, trees, insects, or even people. But the second—the delusion of a separate self—is deeply ingrained in both our biology and our consciousness, and hence we are emotionally attached to it as well.

It is a lot harder, therefore, for us to be able to look at Donald Trump and see ourselves in him, and him in us—to see that there is, in reality, no separation between ourselves and everyone else. Yet we affirm this connection every time we take a breath, exchanging CO2 for oxygen, as trees inhale CO2 and yield oxygen again, and that oxygen in turn is breathed by everyone else—even Donald Trump—becoming incorporated into his metabolism in the same way it was in ours. 

And this delusion of separateness that I share with Trump (though not, I hope, to that extreme!) and everyone else is the source of all the suffering on the planet: our shared ignorance gives rise to greed, which gives rise to hatred, denial, and despair.

But again, because it is so hard emotionally to let go of this delusion of separate self, there are other, more palatable ways of conceptualizing the Diamond that could be shared with those, like my students, who know nothing of arcane Buddhist doctrine, and may inhabit a mindset informed by Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, or indeed no religious affiliation at all.

For example, a Christian may wish to conceptualize the Diamond in his or her mind as the Holy Spirit or Grace—the indwelling of the Divine or Christ Within, a Jew will conceptualize it as JHVH, the One True G-d, while a Muslim will naturally conceive it as Allah.  Whatever religious language they wish to use, the important thing is that the Diamond is, as Stephen Gaskin used to say, “the highest and holiest part of ourselves,” however we label it.

                The important thing about the Diamond metaphor, again, is that diamonds are indestructible. If like me you are a Gaian—that is, if you adhere to both science and the insight of William Blake that “Everything that lives is holy,” you also might consider the fact that diamonds are pure carbon—an opaque, pure black element that is the very basis of organic life, which, when concentrated and reorganized into a tight molecular lattice, turns clear and brilliant, capturing and refracting light. That is an apt metaphor as well—that a Diamond is the stuff of life itself, concentrated into its purest form.

So for practical purposes, we may contemplate the Diamond in our minds as the very essence of who we are, the essence we share with all other living things, and with the entire Cosmos. And in times of political oppression and social disintegration, as we are likely to see in the coming years under this egomaniacal despot, it is very healthy to keep in touch with the Diamond in our minds, however we conceive it.  

 If we practice the Buddhist discipline of Tonglen—giving and taking—we can visualize the Diamond in our minds as that which, 

• on the inbreath, takes in all the darkness--our suffering due to Ignorance, Greed, Hatred, Denial, and Despair--which we feel in ourselves and see all around us, and 
• on the outbreath. transforms it into the radiant, healing energy of Benevolence, Compassion, Shared Joy, and Equanimity, sent out freely to our suffering selves, our loved ones, our acquaintances, those we don't know, our enemies, all people, all of life...