In Mahamudra, the pointing-out instruction (Tibetan: *ngo sprod*) is the teacher’s direct introduction of the student to the nature of mind itself. Rather than being a mere explanation or philosophical teaching, it is an experiential guidance in which the teacher points the student’s attention away from mental objects and toward awareness as such. In that moment, the mind’s empty, luminous, cognizant quality is revealed as the student’s own present awareness, unobstructed and beyond conceptual elaboration. This may be supported by words, meditative guidance, or other skillful means, but its essence is a direct transmission that allows the student to recognize the space-like, knowing nature that has always been there.

This introduction is crucial because it establishes the true foundation of Mahamudra practice. Without a clear recognition of the nature of mind, practitioners may only refine techniques or cultivate temporary states—such as calm, clarity, or bliss—without touching the underlying awareness in which these arise. The pointing-out instruction differentiates genuine recognition from subtle forms of imagination or fabrication, ensuring that practice is grounded in actual awareness rather than in constructed experiences. In this way, it prevents deviation from the intended path and orients the practitioner toward what Mahamudra regards as the heart of the matter.

Once there has been even a brief, authentic glimpse of this luminous emptiness, the student gains an inner reference point. All subsequent Mahamudra practice then consists in returning to, stabilizing, and deepening that initial recognition, rather than searching for something new. Techniques such as resting the mind, observing thoughts, or cultivating devotion are transformed: they no longer serve merely as preparatory exercises, but become means for allowing the natural state to reveal itself more continuously. This is what allows the transition from effortful meditation to what is sometimes described as “non-meditation,” an effortless resting in the way awareness already is.

Within the living Mahamudra lineages, this direct introduction is regarded as indispensable. It is the pivot that turns doctrinal understanding into direct realization and links the practitioner’s experience to the realization of past masters through an unbroken transmission. By cutting through habitual patterns of conceptualization and revealing the awakened state as already present, the pointing-out instruction makes it possible for the path to unfold as a process of recognizing, again and again, what has never been absent.