Gotama’s pupils are ever awake:
day and night, constantly mindful in the body.
– Dhammapada, verse 299. Translated Christopher J. Ash.
The value of directly knowing oneself experientially, with an attitude of kind curiosity, is inestimable. If you really are dying, it can help in so many ways, to clear the mind of unneeded detritus, and to reveal hidden jewels in your very own mind, even in the midst of crisis.
I would like to give you a few illustrations of how the Sakka-Gotama Buddha process of dependent-arising can work in enquiry. So, I offer a fictional conversation between a therapist and a client. I’ll pretend that the therapist is myself, and that the client is a man called Kent.
Kent: “I’ve been feeling somewhat depressed the last few days.”
Christopher: “Right. That’s welcome. [A pause, while I check.] Is it? Can you to be with it, like you were its friend?”
Kent: “I do try to. I say ‘hello’ to the way it lives in my body, but I slip away really quickly.”
Christopher: “Oh, a part of you doesn’t want to go there? Is that what it’s like?”
Kent: “Something like that, yes. It looks like a non-brainer. Who would want to sit with the ‘bog of eternal stench’?”
Christopher: Wow! That’s a powerful image. Don’t let that one get away. Let’s keep that one nearby. It’s got a lot of energy.”
Kent: (Laughs) “Right. True, it does. (Mind you, you can thank David Bowie’s script writer for that.)”
Christopher: Yeah, great movie. But you’re saying that this fits what you’ve got there, right? Check it. Sit alongside that place and get a feel for ‘the bog.’ Is it really like that? Or, does some other part label it that way?”
Kent: “Hmm. I don’t know. Let me see… (Silence). Well not really, it’s more like… a deep pit of sadness.”
Christopher: “Okay. When you can be empathic with it, it’s more like sadness.”
Kent has some skills, of course. He’s been doing this kind of inner work for a while, and if I say something, he feels into his body, to see how it is from the in there. With newcomers, it might not go quite so quickly. But, let’s have a look at what is happening here, using the terms which the Nikāya Buddha introduced to Sakka, and some more terms from our general inquiry. A feeling of being ‘somewhat depressed’ is made up of much – it’s not a thing.
So, we start with a state of conflict. The ‘conflict’ here is within the person. Depression indicates different sub-personalities with different agendas. Why do I say, ‘parts’?
Well, of course, no-one’s mind is made up of parts. But, these energetic patterns have a coherence to themselves, and they have sufficient differences to other such patterns, so that ‘parts language’ helps to differentiate them. This way we see them more deeply, and also awaken non-identification. So, ‘parts language’ is just a convention to help us explore states of the psyche – attitudes – and their inter-relations. The person has one attitude (sadness), which is being reacted to by another attitude (dislike). Furthermore, the two are inter-dependent.
So, taking into account what the Nikāya Buddha said to Sakka, so far we have met a conflict, which involves rejection of the experience of sadness. There are conflicting self-biases working. We take time, and we find that the one who says ‘bog of stench’ is actually trying to bring some strength in. So, we see preferences working – in the likes and dislikes of the inner actors. “Who would want to sit with the ‘bog of eternal stench’?”
When Kent searches in his body for how this lives there, he finds some aggressive rejection of his sadness. That part’s using his strength. And, it’s glad (delighted, pleased) that it is there fighting for… for what? its way of being Kent – its particular self-bias or seflishness.
When the client accepts the bad feeling without believing the labels given by the disliking process, then it can be seen more clearly as some deep sadness. Sometimes you have to sit with the disliking part for a while before it backs off enough to let you feel into the sadness. After all, it’s what the Tibetans call an ‘inveterate tendency.’ That is, it’s a veteran. It’s been fighting sadness since Kent was a child.
So, notice, too, that Sakka would be gladdened to find that we have come upon at least one ‘longing, hunger, thirst, or desire,’ underlying the depression. There is a way out for sentient beings, then.
We don’t yet know what longing the sadness itself has, but we do know that the strong part has the desire not to feel the deep pit of sadness. And, as we enquire into it, it reveals its desire that the person survive in his work life, his social life, and so on; which it believes that he won’t do, if he succumbs to the ‘eternal bog of stench.’ (There is probably an inner judge somewhere, here, too.)
You can see, in just these few interchanges, an experiential inquiry unfolding that has special skills enfolded into it. It’s ‘skilful,’ in Buddhist terms. (That is, it is yoniso manasikāra, which the Pāli-English Dictionary defines as: fixing one’s attention with a purpose, or thoroughly; proper attention; having thorough method in one’s thought.)
It’s a skilful development of attention, too, because it includes self-compassion, self-empathy, curiosity, and patience. Patience is, in more modern terms, a mode of negative capability. Remember Keats? Not rushing ahead to find where it’s all going — staying here with the thread as it unfolds. Cultivating ‘don’t know’ mind; which at this level is relative, but later can have a profoundly complete presence. And, all this is found by referring back to the body’s experiences; that is, with mindfulness of the body.