This one post is to replace the thirty-eight lost posts, putting them online. I’ve combined them, marking with dates where each post finishes.
10 September: The Unsullied Pool
“There was a clear pool with silvery bright water, to which no shepherds ever came, or she-goats feeding on the mountainside or any other cattle; whose smooth surface neither bird nor beast nor falling bough ever ruffled. Grass grew all around its edge, fed by the water near, and a coppice that would never suffer the sun to warm the spot. Here the youth, worn by the chase and the heat, lies down, attracted thither by the appearance of the place and by the spring.
While he seeks to slake his thirst another thirst springs up, and while he drinks he is smitten by the sight of the beautiful form he sees.”
– From Metamorphosis by Ovid. Translated by Louise Vinge.
Describing the moment when Narcissus falls in love with his image, the poet Ovid comments that: “He loves an unsubstantial hope and thinks that substance which is only shadow.” It has no substance; it’s not what it appears to be. Becoming involved himself in his story, Ovid calls to Narcissus:
“O fondly foolish boy, why vainly seek to clasp a fleeing image? What you seek is nowhere; but turn yourself away, and the object of your love will be no more. That which you behold is but the shadow of a reflected image and has no substance of its own. With you it comes, with you it stays, and it will go with you – if you can go.”
But, he is addicted; and, the object of his love – his own self-image – is dependent on the functioning of his conceit. It is he who gives the image its reality. He only has to take that quarter turn away from his longing, to cut the self-making and other-making process off at the root. Narcissus knows his infatuation is tragic, but he can’t break loose. He laments: “I am charmed and I see; but what I see and what charms me I cannot find – so great a delusion holds my love.”
It’s important to note that the goddess Nemesis, the force of karma, who plays a part in his downfall, isn’t separate from Narcissus’ own processes. The story says she hears the prayer, but it doesn’t say that she casts a spell on him. She seems, from the text, to be in his very own world-making processes. At the very most, she makes it possible for him to meet the clear pool, at a lovely spot in the woods – this bright, clear, still pool of true nature. But it is his own thoughts which bind him in trance, when he arrives there. Nemesis is within this process, but she is not its cause. His own conceit and hankering is his downfall. His passion is fed by conceit and by his thirst for some kind of existence in his five sentient processes – namely, in this case, to feel the sensations that the ordinary person calls ‘love.’
If he could unhook, and include the one who sees, we might recognise that the mind is not content. He might come to recognise that ‘that which knows’ is fully present though appearing as an absence; that it is flexible and malleable, and can be trusted despite its appearance as no-mind. When this occurs, we increasingly withdraw our claims on the world of phenomena. We lose our insatiable thirst for sense-pleasures, and instead dwell in wonder and timeless love.
‘Thirst’ is exactly the word used by the Nikāya Buddha for the root pollutant in the mind, the cause of dukkha. Out of our thirst (tanhā), we have made them our very own sentient processes into possessions. Having attached ourselves to them, we dwell in delusion. Yet, just take that quarter-turn in heedfulness, and the deeper nature of knowledge becomes available. The Nikāya Buddha says:
“Suppose there were a pool of water — sullied, turbid, and muddy. A man with good eyesight standing there on the bank would not see shells, gravel, and pebbles, or shoals of fish swimming about and resting. Why is that? Because of the sullied nature of the water. In the same way, that a monk with a sullied mind would know his own benefit, the benefit of others, the benefit of both; that he would realize a superior human state, a truly noble distinction of knowledge & vision: Such a thing is impossible. Why is that? Because of the sullied nature of his mind.”
“Suppose there were a pool of water — clear, limpid, and unsullied. A man with good eyesight standing there on the bank would see shells, gravel, & pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming about and resting. Why is that? Because of the unsullied nature of the water. In the same way, that a monk with an unsullied mind would know his own benefit, the benefit of others, the benefit of both; that he would realize a superior human state, a truly noble distinction of knowledge & vision: Such a thing is possible. Why is that? Because of the unsullied nature of his mind.”
– Udakarahaka Suttas: A Pool of Water, in the Anguttara Nikāya. (Translated Thanissaro Bhikkhu)
“Each person has his own natural pace. Some of you will die at age fifty, some at age sixty-five, and some at age ninety. So, too, your practices will not be identical. Don’t think or worry about this. Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha.”
– Ajahn Chah, A Still Forest Pool
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11 September: Luminous is This Mind
“Practitioners, luminous is this mind, but it is degraded by incidental pollutants. The uninformed, average person does not understand this as it really is; therefore, I say that for the uninformed, average person there is no development of the mind.”
“Practitioners, luminous is this mind, and it is freed from incidental pollutants. The well-taught, noble learner understands this as it really is; therefore, I say that for the well-taught, noble learner there is development of the mind.”
– From the Anguttara Nikāya. (Translated Christopher J. Ash)
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12 September: To Help Her Own Words She Came Forth
There’s a subtle theme which emerges quietly in the opening paragraph of Ovid’s Narcissus. This theme is of authentic speech. Ovid suggests that, for a long while, the prophecy by Tiresias (that Narcissus would live a long life if he doesn’t know himself) seemed like ‘empty words.’
When we meet Echo, in the story, she is described as a “nymph of strange speech… who could neither hold her peace when others spoke, nor yet begin to speak till others had addressed her.” She is caught in extremes. Her condition had come about because she intuitively used speech to deceive.
“…for often when [Juno, queen of the gods] might have surprised the nymphs in company with her [husband Jupiter] upon the mountain sides, Echo would cunningly hold the goddess in long talk until the nymphs were fled. When [Juno] realised this, she said to [Echo]: “That tongue of thine, by which I have been tricked, shall have its power curtailed and enjoy the briefest use of speech.”
I think I have been like Echo, in that I might not hold my peace, when I need to. I can easily speak beyond what is necessary to communicate. (And, of course, it’s a teacher’s occupational hazard, which doesn’t make it easier to change.) When this is the case, if I look closely, even though my words may be true, my state of mind may not be. I’m in the trance.
Narcissus in us becomes entranced by speech. One thing that I’ve learnt from Focusing and from listening to Eugene Gendlin, as he inquires with others, is to talk in small bites; and to stop to see what the other or others will give back.
Ironically, Echo’s condition after Juno’s curse was closer to this. “Nevertheless she does repeat the last phrases of a speech and returns the words she hears.” I’ve also learnt to speak the other’s words back to them, so that both of us know that we are getting the meaning (or we are not).
If this sounds like psychotherapy, I’m not repentant. Truth is, I grew up in an environment where we were not heard, not listened to and were even told that children should be seen and not heard – and it took me decades into my adult life to learn how to listen. Now I regularly check, to see that I am really getting what others say to me, in all kinds of relationships; and, not just getting what my own inner scripts relay to me. There can be a huge difference.
The moment when Narcissus rejects Echo is poignant, perhaps even the more so coming after the farcical confusion of their error-prone dialogue. Look for the sentence: “and to help her own words she comes forth from the woods that she may throw her arms around the neck she longs to clasp.”
“To help her own words,” reveals a touching experience, because it suggests that she summons the courage to speak through her action, presenting herself in her vulnerability; and it suggests a skill which we learn in Focusing, that the meaning of language is what it does in us, how it changes us. We need to help our own words, by keeping them as experience-near as situations allow. Mindfulness of the body supports this. Narcissus is identified with his gross body. He needs Echo’s subtlety. But she, the intuitive one, needs a body.
By chance the boy, separated from his faithful companions, had cried: “Is anyone here?” and “Here!” cried Echo back. Amazed, he looks around in all directions and with loud voice cries “Come!”; and “Come!” she calls him calling. He looks behind him and, seeing no one coming, calls again: “Why do you run from me?” and hears in answer his own words again. He stands still, deceived by the answering voice, and “Here let us meet,” he cries. Echo, never to answer another sound more gladly, cries: “Let us meet”; and to help her own words she comes forth from the woods that she may throw her arms around the neck she longs to clasp. But he flees at her approach and, fleeing, says: “Hands off! Embrace me not! May I die before I give you power o’er me!” “I give you power o’er me!” she says, and nothing more.
Oh, what a painful echo, when we give away our power over ourselves. Next time, I’ll talk about how phenomena are like echoes, and how our inner Narcissus takes these for real, giving away our power of being real. The Tibetan master contemplative, Longchenpa, says:
Even if you search for the sound of the echo in the without, the within, and the in-between, you will not find it. So also, if you have rationally investigated all that is, be this the without or the within – all that presents itself through the working of mind and mental events – be this on a coarse or subtle level, you will find nothing (of an essence). (Everything) is open like the sky, without any substantiality, and transparently pure. If you understand (everything) in this way, you will not hanker after and hold to anything.
– Longchenpa. Kindly Bent to Ease Us (Part 3): Wonderment. Translated by Herbert Guenther.
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13 September: The Bondage of Conceit
Give up anger and conceit.
Go beyond all bonds.
One is not followed by dukkha who,
possessing no thing, clings not to name and form.
– Dhammapada, verse 221. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
In a way, we can’t know what This is, this big life-process. We know it is, but not totally what or how it is in itself. We know we are it, but not what or how it is. That’s not to say that we can’t experience a lot that flows from it, but we can’t say the whole thing. There is a mystery at the core of the human that we can’t own, possess, grasp or lay claim to as our own – except in the sense that we can feel at one with it. Clinging cuts us off from it. Hence, nothing is worth clinging to, or we lose the wholeness.
Narcissus thought he knew himself, and that was the weakness that made him vulnerable to trance. He conceived of a self as apprehensible – known by the senses, the intellect or by feelings; known as body, as feeling-tones, as perceptions, as mental shaping factors, as discernment, or as all of them. He thought he was in there somewhere.
This is conceit – an overestimation of the self. It was this that Tiresias knew: grasping-style knowing deadens. In fact, death (on the most fundamental plane) is born with that kind of knowing which involves ‘personality belief.’ Both Narcissus’s and Echo’s fading away suggests the fact that the ‘having mode’ (which Fromm named as distinct from the being mode) depletes one’s energies. Nothing worth clinging to as ‘I’ or ‘mine.’ (Buddhadasa)
Clinging to things as ‘I’ or ‘mine’ in any more than a conventional sense cuts us off from living. A householder one day spoke contemptuously to the Nikāya Buddha, calling him an outcast, a low person, a reject. The Buddha listed many qualities and actions that cut oneself off from one’s vitality and inner support: such as delusion, deceit, profligacy, and so on. These make one an ‘outcast,’ he said. Among the things he listed was conceit.
Whoever exalts himself and despises others, smug in his self-conceit, he is to be known as an outcast.
– The Sutta-Nipāta: A New Translation from the Pali Canon, Verse 132. Translated by Saddhatissa
Conceit casts us out of our own heart. And that is a major part of dukkha, to be cast out of one’s own heart.
The Nikāya Buddha’s teaching about conceit is often surprising for modern practitioners; because, he speaks of a triple conceit. He says that it is conceited to think of yourself as better than, worse than, or equal to others.
If you think you’re great, or you’re worse than others, your self-absorption will render you unaware of your harmful behaviour toward yourself, others, and both. Just like Narcissus was unaware. And, even when hating oneself, the universe is all about you, isn’t it?
“Whoever in this world harms living creatures… whoever has no compassion for a living creature, him one should know {to be] an outcast.”
– Sutta-Nipāta, Verse 117. Translated by K.R. Norman
You might think, “Yes, but thinking of yourself as equal to others is good, isn’t it?” There may be a moment for it, in some context– just as there might be for ‘better than’ and ‘worse than’ –but notice that it’s an act of comparing, which means you think you are an object, a measurable something. Do this in the right contexts – that is, in the domain of the senses – but not in the inner life. To do this, you have to be an outsider to yourself, looking back in an assessing way, conceiving yourself. When done without awareness of what you’re doing, this gives birth to a false self. Many of us Westerners want to just be ourselves– to not live by “a pattern made by others,” as Poet Bill Stafford wrote. Yet, “equal to” is a pattern made by the mind, and it, too, casts you out of the uniqueness of your immediate presence, and into the clutches of death.
Attentiveness is the place of the deathless;
inattentiveness is the place of death.
The attentive do not die;
the inattentive are as though dead already.
– Dhammapada, verse 21. Translated by Christophe J. Ash
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14 September: The Dance of Thought
Whoever has gone beyond this dangerous road
– of Saṃsāra, of delusion – so difficult to travel,
Who has overcome it and gone beyond,
the meditator freed from craving and doubt,
without clinging, and liberated,
that one I call a subtle person.
– Dhammapada, verse 414. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
Now, keeping in mind what the Nikāya Buddha said to Sakka – that is, that erroneous conceptions stemming from duality give rise to wilfulness – we can see that the most dangerous erroneous conceptions are those that have to do with our identity. We can also see that this dynamic – of duality, with misconceptions, with wilfulness, with desire, with delight, with conflict – this applies to grasping love as much as it does to our earlier example of anger in the Angry Ape. In fact, Shakespeare doesn’t indicate that the Angry Ape image only applies to times when anger is evident. Grasping love, too, is a kind of conflict. The Ape is simply raging against reality, in conflict with limitation. Narcissism says, “I don’t want life as it is – its sickness, its death, its separation, its contingency, its uncertainty. I don’t want this! I want things my way!” And the root factor in such stubbornness is the false impression that our life can be conceptualized in anything but a provisional kind of way. We mistake concepts – that is, name and form – for life, for This.
The tragedy of both Narcissus and Echo was that they believed in a world existing independently of their conceiving of it. Neither of them was intimate with their own mind’s share in the creation of what they imagined was over there. In Echo’s case, she thought she saw a ravishingly handsome god-like man, worth surrendering herself to. In Narcissus’ case, he saw in his own reflection, a second, a companion who reflected him perfectly.
It makes me smile, despite the tragedy of this pattern all over the world; but, I recognise the pattern in my own life. I’ve often thought that we are all going around with an unconscious assumption that others are doing a version of us. And, we then think that others are doing that version of me worse than I do, better than I do, or just the same as I do. Heedless comparison is the great unconscious conflict maker.
Just to consider Echo, it looked to her that he was over there, just as she imagined perfection would be. She dreams up the shape of her ideal man. She acts as though she has an absolute absence or deficiency here, at her end, and an absolute solution to it over there; and the in-between is a barrier to fulfilment. But, she was projecting her own light ‘over there,’ onto a moon of her heart’s making; her Narcissus. How narcissistic is that!
However, whatever This is, this big going-on, it’s participatory, and more like a river or ocean, than a chess set. Another reason, for not clinging can be found here. That is, what we are experiencing is always ‘otherwise’ than it appears. The appearances are not only changing as we speak, because change is all there is of appearances, but they are changing because we are interacting with them:
But whatever be the phenomenon through which they think of seeking their self-identity, it turns out to be transitory. It becomes false, for what lasts for a moment is deceptive.
– The Sutta-Nipāta: A New Translation from the Pali Canon, verse 757. Translated by Saddhatissa.
Let’s not to fall into a hole, here, though, or get down in the mouth about this impossibility. It’s exactly at this limit that we discover freedom. In the pause, we can take a breath and remember what the Lankavatara Sutra says: “Things are not as they appear to be; but, neither are they otherwise.” Freedom is possible, as long as we conceive of the kind of freedom appropriate to this situation.
Whosoever has been careless and later is not so,
Enlightens this world like the moon set free from clouds.
– Dhammapada, verse 172. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
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14 September: The Process of Thought
For one whose heart is without affliction and perplexity,
who has abandoned good and bad, who is awake, there is no fear.
– Dhammapada, verse 39. Translation Christopher J. Ash
One might say, “But, wait. Narcissus can’t get into a relationship that he doesn’t want. He has a right to say ‘no’ to her possessive love.” Of course, but the unkindness is optional. That comes with ignorance, and the arrogating power of ‘me and mine.’ Without the self-absorption, he might see and relate to things as they is, including the fact of her suffering. Of course, he’d have to feel with her, in com-bodiment (com = with). That’s why it’s called com-passion. Disappointing her can’t be avoided, because she is in a trance; but he can make it easier on both of them, if he has compassion. His conceit makes her passion about him, whereas, in truth, her passion is about her. And, conceit depends on ungrounded thought.
So, what is conceit? Its linguistic root is: ‘conceiving,’ or conception. In particular, in this context, it is conceiving the idea of one’s identity with a thing-self. This is the process of identification. The foundation of conceit is to think that you are to be found in the image-able dimensions of yourself. It has an emotional charge, so I’ve used the word ‘passion,’ above.
“There is a greed that fixes on the individual body-mind. When that greed has completely gone, then, Sir, there will be no more inner poison-drives – without which you are immune from death.”
– The Sutta-Nipāta: A New Translation from the Pāli Canon, verse 1100 – Translated by Saddhatissa.
However, whatever is image-able comes and goes. Body-mind (name and form) are dependently-arisen. There is no substance in such appearances, as contemplative experience can show, and the myth of Narcissus reminds us. If there is only the dimension of occurring, then how could an essential ‘me’ be found therein? However, thought sets itself up as the seer of the seen, the hearer of the heard, and so on. It gives itself a privileged position, as the bystander to all events, inner and outer. It arrogates to itself the functioning of intelligence, which rightly belongs to the whole big happening, the life process. We have to get a balanced relationship of thinking to experiencing, to get free of identification.
There is a problem with the way we think, then; and, especially with the way we think of speech. We need to rethink the function of language. Concepts works well to make grids, for our models and maps. However, reality is not a grid. You aren’t graph paper, as Gendlin reiterates. Alan Watts used to say, “The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly.” That is, thought doesn’t work well to describe the indescribable – and you are that unspeakably wiggly world. Reality is too intimate; you can’t stand back and get an image of it. When Ch’an master Yuanwu says, “Step back,” he’s expecting that imaging making will dissolve, if you take that inclusive, bodily-felt, wide view. He’s hoping you will be able to dissolve the bystander. Thoughts support experience, but experiences always exceed thought. Thought is a servant, but it has arrogated sensing to itself. However, it can only ever be a commander of an imaginary realm. It is always in the position of being derived from primordial experiencing.
Consider these reflections from contemplative Krishnamurti and physicist David Bohm:
KRISHNAMURTI: Why should thought assume that it sees the whole?
DAVID BOHM: Or even that it sees anything.
KRISHNAMURTI: Does it happen, sir, that when there is total perception, that perception having no movement of thought, time, and so on, the mind uses thought only when necessary — and otherwise [perception is] empty?
DAVID BOHM: I wonder if we could put it differently. Such a mind, when it uses thought, realizes that it is thought, it never supposes it’s not thought.
KRISHNAMURTI: That’s right. It realizes that it is thought and nothing else.
DAVID BOHM: If it is only thought, it has only a limited significance and we needn’t consider it that important.
KRISHNAMURTI: That’s right.
DAVID BOHM: I think the danger is that there is the mind which does not realize that this is thought. At some stage the mechanical process starts, which somehow does not acknowledge or does not know that it is mechanical.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti & David Bohm, The Limits of Thought
Krishnamurti and Bohm are using the word ‘mind’ in a bigger sense, here, than just ‘thinking.’ Thought introduces fictional divisions in what is undivided. Many traditions refer to the undivided quality of being (what Krishnamurti here refers to as ‘total perception’) as ‘mind,’ sometimes capitalising it as ‘Mind.’ The point is not the word, but an experience of being aligned with this extraordinary intelligence, or super-thought, the organic order of the whole (Gk: Logos).
The practitioner who delights in attentiveness,
who sees the danger in inattentiveness,
cannot fail, and is indeed intimate with nibbāna.
– Dhammapada, verse 32. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
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15 September: Cheating the King of Death
“Love says: ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says: ‘I am nothing.’ Between the two my life flows.”
– Nisargadatta, I Am That, Talk 57
Let’s take time out to reflect upon the ‘I.’ If Narcissus languishing over the pool could take my teacher’s quarter turn, or Ch’an master Yuanwu’s “step back and turn towards reality,” then the utter openness of This would be all there is for him. His consciousness would be without the small identity. It would be as if he had died. In such a mind, since death ceases, the King of Death is tricked out of his prize.
Trying to give an impression of the cessation of the disharmonious mind is difficult, because the mind of dukkha is our norm; and, also because the mind of freedom is a non-conceptual beingness, which seems pretty abstract or vague to someone who hasn’t glimpsed or tasted it. It’s much easier to describe how the disharmonious mind works, than it is to convey the “hidden mind of freedom.” (Tarthang Tulku)
In the Pāli collection of texts called the Sutta Nipāta, there is a sutta about the causes and ending of violence. It’s called the Disputes and Contention Sutta (Kalahavivāda Sutta), which gives another version of dependent arising, similar to the version that Sakka received. However, in the Disputes and Contention Sutta we have a different element, because there we read a description (in terms of perception) of the extraordinary inner life of the person who has ended conflict. It goes:
‘There is a state where form ceases to exist’, said the Buddha. ‘It is a state without ordinary perception, and without disordered perception, and without no perception, and without any annihilation of perception.’ (Translation, Saddhatissa)
If you remember that perception has to do with knowing that you are experiencing – that it’s a feedback loop – then this is an unusual description. The thing to notice, for beginners particularly, is that the Nikāya Buddha says that this is not a state without perception – “without no perception, and without any annihilation of perception” – however, neither is it a state of ordinary perception.
Maybe it could be said to be more of a feedback loop – one which affirms that no feedback loop can compute this moment, while at the same time affirming that such a ‘moment’ nevertheless is going on. It’s an openness, in which the very lack of self-definition is exactly why it’s so peaceful. It’s a cessation of the magic show of subject-object consciousness.
Your descendants cannot protect you,
nor parents, nor other kin,
when you are assailed by Death.
There is no protection in relatives.
The sage, mastering the situation,
and restrained by virtue,
should quickly clear
the path leading to nibbāna.
– Dhammapada, Verses 288-298. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
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16th September: The Warmth
If all personality structures, all sub-personalities, are versionings of one’s actuality, one’s person, then this is the transformation of the personality’s dependence on versions of self. In my use of the word ‘personality,’ I don’t mean character, which is a more alive, less static, more deeply felt mode of being. Personality is the process of self-presentation to oneself, a cloud of image-able ‘selves.’ And, these depend on perception of sense-forms.
But, if you are awake, and yet not imaging yourself or anything anywhere – if there is just pure aliveness, so to speak – then your experience of yourself is very, very uncommon. Such experiences (and there’s a range of them) radically change one’s sense of what is going on here, in the Kosmos.
Now, this might seem a cognitive move, and it certainly can be. So-called enlightenment can be a dry affair. However, I’m suggesting that it’s possible to feel this with your whole body, to feel your belonging in the universe. And, the ‘cold’ version is penetrative knowing, but the warm version is vast knowing, remember; which is saturated in compassion.
“If … one does not think of harming oneself, does not think of harming others, does not think of harming both; and instead … one thinks of benefiting oneself and benefiting others, benefiting many people out of compassion for the affliction in the world, seeking what is meaningful and of benefit for devas and humans, seeking their ease and happiness; then in this way … one is bright, intelligent, and with vast wisdom.”
– Anguttara Nikāya. Translated by Alālayo.
“So, what of personal life?” you might ask. Something of importance to say, then, is that: when the ordinary consciousness ceases, you don’t cease as a person, of course; even though you might cease to be self-conscious for a time. Someone is present, someone is empty of their usual pattern of self-ing; someone who thereafter enjoys the new view – someone of such and such a name, and such and such a place or clan. As Diamond Sangha founder Aitken Roshi wrote, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps:
When someone speaks of no-self
I vow with all beings
to be sure there is no contradiction –
the speaker is there after all.
I’ve written elsewhere on this, so you might want to read it at this link here, because it helps keep things in perspective, and helps to allay the fears. Nirvana, after all, is human freedom, and isn’t about being non-functional.
An interesting thing that is happening in modern Buddhism, and that I expect we will see develop strongly over the next fifty years (especially given the mindfulness revolution on the U.S.), is that Western Buddhists are finding a personal dimension in the practice. Westerners, naturally, given their extensive research into ego-development, are unpacking that third dimension, the flow of a unique individuality. The outcome will be that we can say that Nisargadatta’s “between the two my life flows” means that: you are nothing, you are everything, and you are a unique individual; and, given your identity with This, you exceed all these perspectives.
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17 September: The Personal Touch
Cut off attachment to yourself,
as you would hand-pluck a lily.
Cultivate the path to peace,
the nibbāna taught by the well-gone.
–Dhammapada, verse 285. (Translated Christopher J. Ash.
It makes sense to not fasten on to oneself. Clinging to oneself diminishes one’s functional intelligence. The infatuated plight of Narcissus is our case in point. Haven’t you encountered someone who hides the truth, lest they feel foolish. It’s called saving face, by which we mean protecting our ego-attachment. So, I’m using the word ‘attachment’ to mean the wilful carrying over into adult life of childhood clinging to objects. Parents were our first objects. Attachment makes perfect survival sense in children.
Does this mean that we adults shouldn’t care for ourselves? Have compassion for ourselves? Forgiveness toward ourselves? Or, protect ourselves?
I’m not saying that. These are fruitful attitudes, in the right contexts. What is done in the spirit of fidelity to truth and equanimity can only be healthy. I’m also not suggesting that you judge yourself, if you find yourself in the throes of clinging love. I am, however, inviting us all into the process of learning about this dynamic, so that we don’t miss what is precious in our life. Mindfulness training will gently reveal that what appears ‘natural’ and ‘yummy,’ is actually a sticky habit. Echo is our other case in point. We need warmth, but not in the deceptive form of attachment. It seems to me that we needn’t be afraid of warmth, or passion. We do need our warmth to be freed of clinging, though.
Recently I was translating a term in the Mindfulness of Breathing Sutta (Ānāpānasati Sutta), and I had some disquieting feelings about the way some other translators (whom I respect) had treated the term. This is in the section of the sutta which is about the relationship of awareness of breathing to the development of the four placements of mindfulness. In my observation Buddhist traditions are making a grave error when they cultivate a suppression of the feeling body. The term in the sutta is an example: The Nikāya Buddha describes his own meditation process, called ‘mindfulness of breathing.’ And, when the meditation practice reaches a state of well-developed calm with clear understanding, he says that then the practitioner is in a particular state of awareness called sādhukaṃ ajjhupekkhitā. It is a state of equanimity, that’s clear from the ‘upekkh’ part of the word. The word ‘sādhuka’ is less problematic, and means: ‘thoroughly, well, or skilfully.’
My difficulty is that meditators encounter two flavours of equanimity; and, it seems to me that it’s possible the more austere, colder kind of equanimity might be more linked with what the Nikāya Buddha called ‘penetrative wisdom.’ The other flavour, a warmer equanimity, in my experience, accompanies ‘vast wisdom,’ which he associated with compassion. So, there is the kind of equanimity that is more associated with words like: disinterest, or indifference. It’s a distancing equanimity. With this, one teacher said your mind becomes like a wall.
Now, my OED says that equanimity is: fairness of judgement, impartiality, equity. Evenness of mind or temper; the quality or condition of being undisturbed by elation, depression, or agitating emotion; unruffled-ness. This is more like composure.
I take the idea of composure as more what upekkha is about. This includes warmth. Indeed, warm equanimity is transformative of our interactional life; which gives it the status of an abode of the gods (a Brahmavihara). A wall is not a good image for this. Therefore, I see the Pali English Dictionary meaning of ajjhupekkhitā, which speaks of seeing with ‘care,’ as helpful.
So, back to the phrase which I was translating. It can be: “watches carefully with equanimity.” Or, “oversees.” Or, “closely looks on with equanimity.” Yet, I personally prefer an interpretation that gives us the result of ‘knowing steadily and intimately’; not only because that is what is needed by our mammalian organism, and because kindness is needed for transformation – but, also because such an approach is consistent with the advice in the Mindfulness Sutta (Satipaṭṭhāna sutta) to know our processes from inside the processes themselves.
So, taking the need for loving awareness, and taking into consideration ‘closely’ and ‘carefully,’ I then Translated by the sentence this way: “Having discerned the abandoning of greed and distress, one sees intimately, and self-possessed.” This applies to seeing one’s own processes, and that of others. Equanimity is compatible with empathy, love, and compassion – in short, with warmth. Intimacy is exactly what freedom from clinging brings.
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18 September: The Bodiless Cave Dweller
“The thought of death prevents me from losing myself in the fictions with which I tend to surround myself in order to escape from Being, so much more so as it reveals the uncanny instability, if not the absurdity, of what we call the world.”– Herbert Guenther, Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Book 1.
To relate to death, we need to become conscious of how we conceive of it, the stories we tell ourselves of what death is. There are our usual patterns of reaction to death, but there are the hidden ones, too. Meditation and mindfulness unfold these. I’m going into this depth of description about the dynamics of thought, because our psychological functioning creates a fictional ‘I,’ and – as it turns out – it is the death of the fiction that we are most preoccupied with, in our unawakened mode of being. This fiction colours our use of the concepts of ‘die,’ ‘dying’ and ‘death.’ The thought of death then frightens us; whereas the mere concept of death needn’t do that, once we dwell in mindfulness of the body. The body provides us with the way out, because it doesn’t have the fictions. It’s perfectly integrated with birth and death.
“There comes the world of fictions, having as the condition for its presence the loss of pure awareness with its proliferation of divisive concepts, and like an echo – there being nothing and yet a presence – it roams about here.”
– Longchenpa. Kindly Bent to Ease Us: Wonderment (Part 3) Translated by Herbert Guenther.
But aren’t death and dying realities, not fictions? Yes, but not ultimate. The reality of death is powerful, especially when you are using concepts freshly, free from the added versions of ‘self’ – using them in a Focusing-style way. And, when that happens, being in touch with the reality of the body’s vulnerability to death (and “all the ills that flesh is heir to” as Hamlet said) is positive. The concepts can support deepening into the heart’s riches.
However, for the undeveloped mind, concepts lack the open power to point back to experiencing; and, they instead, in a closed loop, point to the fictions. Then the language which has to do with death – with a false understanding of ego process – loses its power to open us to the bigger life process. Yet, a significant shift in understanding comes if you can directly see-in your own mental functioning-this sleight of hand of the King of Death. The creation of a thing-self, living behind our processes, is the creation of the kind of death that feels impossible to deal with – the death of a hidden fiction.
I remember being stopped dead in my tracks, when, as a mindfulness practitioner, I first saw this false self-creating happening. I glimpsed a thought; and then I glimpsed a thought about the just-passed thought. This second thought – in an instant – imagined a version of my reality which, if unpacked, would go something like this: “That just-passed thought means there’s a mental ‘me’ in the void back there; which is the thinker of that thought which I just glimpsed. The thought comes from there, from the hidden me.” (That’s too many words, but that’s certainly the drift of the second thought).
Seeing this second thought, I exclaimed to myself. “Oh, dear! I just added a thinker to my thought!” It was a jaw-dropping moment. At that moment, I knew immediately that: if I was attributing an agent- naming it as existing, without any evidence of its actuality -then, there was every chance that there might not be such a ‘me.’ It was a shocking discovery. However, after that, it was easier to catch that particular movement in thought happening, and to confirm the insight. Thereafter, I could be more often intimate with myself imagining a vague, metempirical thinker of the thought, seer of the seen, hearer of the heard, knower of the known. And, so I could directly know that a self-inventing – remember saṅkhāra? – was going on; the fashioning of a version of self, based on conjecture. Gradually, I got used to the dwelling in the openness of no thinker of the thought; that is, no bystander self. Reflective processes happen – they, after all, go with a body – but there is no little man (Latin: homunculus) in the middle of the head doing it.
This time last year, I was facing the possibility of death from a cancer. Instead of letting my mind run amok with a default sense of ‘I,’ telling sentimental (and especially, fearful) stories of loss – narratives about the ‘me’ who would die – instead, I let those ‘death and dying’ words point back to present-moment experiencing. The experience confirmed that knowing that I am not ‘the story that I tell myself of who I am’ has changed how I live with death. Death sting has been reduced. The King of Death is born with the identification with the word ‘I.’ That is a process of making a thing-identity out of a process. Yet, such fashioning can cease. Such an identity is not fixed in our DNA.
Regarding identity, ‘the story I tell myself about who I am‘: to tell a story about myself is not in itself a problem. It may have its uses in a modern world. But when we don’t know that it’s only a story, then we may think it’s a reality. Let’s say, just for our conversation, that I mean the word ‘ego‘ in just that way – mistaken, non-intelligent, story-telling use of the word ‘I,’ as though it’s a fixed thing in a fixed position, beyond my view; and as though it’s not a flow of inter-dependent, sentient processes.
How the ego is formed and maintained is a tricky subject. It’s difficult to see. The story which I am addressing today is that there is a little me behind my processes, who is in charge of me. One reason we seem to require this, in society, is that we can’t countenance a universe without someone in charge. We ae under the delusion that it helps the order of life, to think that there is a me back there, in charge of my processes. To seethes delusion in yourself, you need to develop a subtle process of reflection, of self-remembrance, and a love of truth. That’s the ‘step back,’ which I mentioned recently. I have also said that perception is feedback loops, and now we can add that in such reflexive loops, the ego-making error occurs.
Mind roams about alone, a bodiless cave-dweller.
Those who restrain it, will be released from Māra’s bonds.
–Dhammapada, verse 37. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
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19 September: May All Beings Flourish
Picture: Albion Rose, William Blake
I was pondering, recently, the oft-repeated assertion that what beings want, at root, is happiness. I think that, if this proposition is at all worth keeping, it needs some qualifying. I’d say it differently.
I asked myself if it is true. Is that what I know about human beings, deep down, underneath everything? All beings want happiness? It feels to me that human beings are moved by a kind of optimising thrust; a vitality, the direction of which is that our life would carry forward. (And, of course, in this last sentence, physical life is only the least of what I am talking about.)
And, as best we can know, from studying other living organisms, this applies to the mosquito, the flea, the snake, the crane, the mudlark and wren, yeasts and bacteria, you and me; and all the plants. In short, to all living cells.
The Nikāya Buddha often asserts that a free person has a vast attitude involving their “own benefit, the benefit of others, and the benefit of both.” He, himself, is called: the flourishing one, or the blessed one; or, the fortunate one– all of which indicates he benefitted greatly from waking up.
And, in this context, I want to share this wise passage, which I was reading yesterday, from Eugene T. Gendlin’s Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy:
“One develops when the desire to live and do things stirs deep down, when one’s own hopes and desires stir, when one’s own perceptions and evaluations carry a new sureness, when the capacity to stand one’s ground increases, and when one can consider others and their needs. The last item here is not contradictory to the others. One comes to feel one’s separate existence solidly enough to want to be close to others as they really are. It is development when one is drawn to something that is directly interesting, and when one wants to play. It is development when something stirs inside that has long been immobile and silent, cramped and almost dumb, and when life’s energy flows in a new way.” (p.21-22)
When we are at home in our hearts, without fear, immeasurable states of consciousness arise. One of them is an appreciative and sympathetic joy. It includes joy in the growth of all beings. Hence, my invocation, to invite this dwelling-place of the gods (this brahmavihāra), is: “I take joy in the growth and development of beings. May all beings grow, even in their dying.”
Inviting bodily-felt knowing is the best way to know the hearts of other living beings. It’s ironic, the more intimately, empathetically, and dispassionately one knows oneself, the more you can take joy in others. As I read it, because all beings have an optimising impetus, the flourishing one, once when dwelling at Savatthi, said this:
On traversing all directions with the mind
One finds no one anywhere dearer than oneself.
Likewise everyone holds himself most dear,
Hence one who loves himself should not harm another.
– Itivuttaka. Ud.5.1. Translated by John Ireland.
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20 September: The Water Drop Effect
Don’t underestimate wrong-doing, saying:
“It won’t come back to me” –
Drop by falling drop, a pitcher becomes full.
Likewise, little by little, a fool is filled with harm.
Don’t underestimate doing good, saying:
“It won’t come back to me.”
Drop by falling drop, a pitcher becomes full.
Likewise, little by little, a sage is filled with goodness.
– Dhammapada, verses 121-122. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
When we think of the ‘water drop’ effect of our intentions, it can sharpen our awareness, and undermine our cynicism. Impeccability is worth aspiring to, when it comes to ethics. A friend of mine once said that she couldn’t understand why Buddhists were so hung up about ethics. When I explained that it had to do, not so much with the acquired social customs or rules of our society, but that it had to do with the quality of presence that one is developing through one’s accumulated actions of body, speech and mine– in other words, that actions contribute to the quality of your mind -she paused, then dropped the subject. Days later, she returned to the conversation and said that she got it. I don’t know what was going on in her life, but I was touched by her sincerity in that moment. From this ‘water drop’ point of view, all actions contribute to one’s development.
Our mind is a field in which every kind of seed is sown-seeds of compassion, joy, and hope, seeds of sorrow, fear, and difficulties. Every day our thoughts, words, and deeds plant new seeds in the field of our consciousness, and what these seeds generate becomes the substance of our life.
– Thich Nhat Hanh. Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness
I recognise now that she was expressing the prevailing cynicism. The role of cynicism in a narcissistic society is a large topic. In Australia at present, cynicism prevails everywhere in our culture, and especially in the political sphere. Now, Prime Ministers are regularly dispatched on the whim of opinion polls. By now, it’s very post-modern and a chic way to be, to be cynical.
But it’s not just a local thing -everywhere the ego-system is very cynical about moral development, because it looks upon meanings as only being arbitrarily imposed by culture; and it believes that– hidden in its cave up the back– that it is out of reach of repercussions.
One of the biggest difficulties I’ve had in coming to some peace with myself has been to trust myself, after all my broken words– not just broken promises, but words spoken without heart. These can be words spoken to serve my ego’s ends; or, words spoken without reference to experience; or, words spoken with only reference to others ‘ideas. I noticed a line in Dylan’s Hard Rain, recently: “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.” Little did I know, in the sixties, that words have a power to shape minds– and that they do that, word by word, drop by drop.
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21 September: Turning to the Life of Beings
“Practitioners, if for just the time of a finger-snap a contemplative develops mindfulness of death, she is called a contemplative who has mindfulness of death, one who puts the Teacher’s words into practice, one who responds to his advice, and who does not eat the people’s offerings in vain. How much more so, then, for those who cultivate it!”
– From Anguttara Nikāya (Numerical Discourses of the Buddha). Translated by Christopher J. Ash
The Mindfulness Sutta (Satipaṭṭhāna sutta) begins with orienting the mind. Why are we practising mindfulness? The Buddha of the Mindfulness Sutta suggests we put mindfulness to the fore. But why? To what purpose are we training our attention in these specific ways recommended in the text? He says:
“…for the purification of individuals, for going beyond sorrow and lament, for the disappearance of mental disturbance and dejection, for the study of the right path, for experiencing nibbāna…”
– Mindfulness Sutta. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
In short, for the flourishing of self, of others, and of both. For centuries yogis have oriented themselves in meditation, consciously naming their aspiration each time they turn inward.
Among Longchenpa’s verses he names aspiration and effort as the helmsman guiding us to nibbāna:
Aspiration and perseverance – needed for realizing limpid clearness and consummate perspicacity – are like a true leader: the helmsman, guiding (you) to the island of deliverance where all wholesomeness is found. Not deterred by worldliness, the value in others stands out. Over and over again bring aspiration and perseverance to life straight away.
– Longchenpa. Now That I Come to Die. Dharma Publishing translation.
I found, in my own life – but I’ve also experienced in my work with people over the years – that if we have in mind the benefit of all beings, rather than exclusively focusing on ourselves, then we have greater strength to face the difficult places in ourselves. It has been a source of joy to find the ways to support non-Buddhists to find such aspiration. It isn’t just a cultural move: it’s actually a realistic perspective, because while the details differ individually, our patterns of mind are simply that: patterns of the human being.
How will you re-frame your own case of suffering as an instance of the human condition, and thereby increase your own strength to deal with suffering, and simultaneously support the journey of freedom for all? If we keep the benefit for all beings in mind, our work goes much, much deeper; because, as well as addressing our own personal layers, we penetrate to the universal patterns of humanness.
Both these perspectives are necessary. On the one hand, we only have our own human experience to be acquainted with, to enjoy, appreciate, and to be responsible for. You can’t live another’s life. On the other hand, we are simply manifesting human life. I am ‘I.’ On a given basis of biology and culture, our individuality is in creative flux, our human freedom open to development, and always in the context of community. I am ‘We.’
Then, another good motivation for sharpening one’s depth of participation in life, is that it’s a good way to be ready for death (which is also a part of life). If we think that death is a long way in the future, we are fooling ourselves. It hangs on our next in-breath. It can come to any of us, in a myriad of ways. A schoolchild has cancer. A seemingly healthy teen drops dead from an aneurysm in the brain. Many of us die daily in cars. One of ten perceptions which the Nikāya Buddha recommends is the perception of the vulnerability of the body. I once heard a teacher say that the idea is to live each moment completely, with no energy left out of being here. With nothing left over from our living, we can die feeling complete.
So, remembering the context – our vast and interdependent life, the Being of beings- we turn to becoming thoroughly and honestly acquainted with our own field of awareness, in these four areas:
“What are the four? … the body in the body, feeling-tones in the feeling-tones, the psyche’s states in those same states; and, the dynamics of phenomena in the phenomena themselves.”
– Mindfulness Sutta. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
Fully knowing the arising and fading of the five sentient processes,
one finds happiness and joy. For those who are discerning, this is the deathless.
– Dhammapada, verse 374. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
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22 September: Our Mind is a Field
There’s an interesting story in the last book, Book 5, of the Sutta Nipāta. An afflicted Brahmin yogi called Bāvari, in need of spiritual support, but unable to go to the Buddha himself, sends his students. Apart from the very deep knowledge shared in this book, the dialogues begin with some passages of personal interest to me – given my connection to Douglas Harding’s On Having No Head. The passages are about head-splitting. One Ajita asks:
‘Bāvari asked about heads, Master’… and about how they’re split. Please great teacher, answer this question too.’ (Verse 1025)
And the Buddha says to Ajita:
‘The head’, said the Master, ‘is Not-Understanding. The head is split in pieces and destroyed by Understanding, with its army of powers in support: confidence, mindfulness, meditation, and determination — energy. These are the powers that split heads.’
–The Sutta-Nipāta: A New Translation from the Pali Canon. Translated by Saddhatissa
That’s an amazing statement, to me. Wisdom shatters the head. I’m sure that those who study Douglas’ work would love that. Maybe someday, I’ll come back in these pages to that story, and flesh out how it is relevant to you, as well.
However, that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What brings me to these passages today, in the context of motivation for training in mindfulness (or self-remembrance, if you like), is this: after Bāvari’s disciples ascertain that the Buddha really is a realized person, and before he invites them to ask their questions, to clear up their confusion, the Buddha says:
‘May Bāvari the brahmin and all his followers be happy.’ May you too be happy, young man [Ajita], and may your life be long!
The Pāli word ‘sukkhita’ really doesn’t give much leeway for any other interpretation than: ‘happy, glad, or blest.’ It’s kind of fashionable, these days, to deride people who believe that human happiness is possible. However, in my experience, it takes courage to be happy, and it’s incredibly easy – because habitual – to cultivate unhappy. And, of course, happiness is the result of challenging hard training, so who in easy-street would bother?
Perhaps it’s a matter of what the Buddhist neuro-psychologist Rick Hanson calls the ‘velcro’ effect. He says that, due to evolutionary shaping, we are ‘velcro’ for negative experiences, and ‘teflon’ for positive experiences. This makes it a habit with a millions of years of momentum. This means that it takes a special effort to develop sincere happiness.
I certainly notice that most of what people unwittingly talk about are the very things that water the seeds of dissatisfaction in their consciousness. The ‘seeds’ teaching is one that I picked up forty-five years ago. I wasn’t a great university student, at twenty years old. When I should have been in the university library studying T.S. Eliot, or Wordsworth, or Behaviourism for Psych 101, I was, instead, in the National Library reading D.T. Suzuki’s translation of the Lankavatara Sutra. I don’t regret it, of course. It changed my life. Because what I found in the ‘Lanka’ was, for me, a psychology that I could actually apply! (Studying pigeons pecking disks, in Psych 101, didn’t do it for me, in those days!)
In particular, the Lankavatara Buddha teaches that words don’t point to reality; and that when we cease discriminating, there is a turning about at the seat of consciousness. A revolution. But, in the context of today’s post, the Lanka also taught me the doctrine of ‘seeds.’ The teaching goes like this (as expressed by Thich Nhat Hanh in his similar book: Transformation at the Base: Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness).
Our mind is a field in which every kind of seed is sown-seeds of compassion, joy, and hope, seeds of sorrow, fear, and difficulties. Every day our thoughts, words, and deeds plant new seeds in the field of our consciousness, and what these seeds generate becomes the substance of our life.
– Thich Nhat Hanh.
I think reading the Lankavatara, more than any other Buddhist text in those times, turned me toward mindfulness – not in the precise Mindfulness Sutta sense of the word, but in the sense of opening to fresh, non-conceptual, present-moment experience. I started to, moment by moment, check in to see, ‘Am I in my body, now?’ ‘Am I in the present?’ And, slowly I discovered my bodily-felt life.
Five years later, I did experience a radical turning about, a turning upside down and inside out (with the no-head experience). But it was the Lanka which first pointed me to: now, and now, and now, and now. So, even though my primary texts are now those of the Nikāyas, I still have a great affection for the Lankavatara, a Mahayana text.
Again, in a commentary to his own ‘seeds teaching’ book, the great Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness, Thich Nhat Hanh says:
The practice of mindfulness helps us identify all the seeds in our consciousness and with that knowledge we can choose to water only the ones that are the most beneficial. As we cultivate the seeds of joy and transform seeds of suffering in ourselves, understanding, love, and compassion will flower.
So, yes, mindfulness improves memory, helps you lose weight, decreases mood problems, and so on. Who wouldn’t want these outcomes? To the extent that these changes bring happiness, that’s there, yes.
However, from the point of view of meditative freedom, these are small bickies. More deeply, with patient application, it brings a gladness that you are alive, even though life’s usual difficulties still happen. Through mindfulness the word ‘happiness’ is no longer superficially understood or spoken. It’s realized as a palpable quality of being, deeper than everyday moods. Maybe that’s because it breaks up the dependence on the head, and drops the centre of gravity in your life down into your feeling body!
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23 September: Independent Self, Empty Self
One who doesn’t know good practice – with an unsteady mind
and wavering in composure – their wisdom doesn’t grow to fullness.
–Dhammapada, verse 38. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
There came a time in my twenties when I could see that I am fundamentally one with reality. It was clear to me that I had never been an isolated individual, in the way I had come to believe; in the way that I regularly experienced myself, as a vague, unsupported ego-self. It was clear, too, that one pattern holding me back from fully acknowledging the reality of my at-one-ment with reality, and from living it gracefully, was the fear of separating from the consensus consciousness, from my father’s culture. (Of course, looking back now, I know that I was afraid that if I became independent in the truest sense, I would be more mature than the one whose love I so unconsciously craved. My heart froze at that point.)
There is a type of mind that, in the consensus view, we are supposed to share with the others, and it’s not the hidden mind beauty and freedom; it’s not that intelligence of the universe. Indeed, the consensus culture believes that only mental intelligence is ‘intelligence.’ Emotional, bodily, ecological, or spiritual intelligence – none of these get a look-in. One’s mother and father, one’s family, and teachers, are unwitting agents of this consensus trance.
The belief in mind which organised my father, and which organised the culture he brought me up in, was the fallacious ‘ego in a material body’ belief. And, that, says the taboo, is the full extent of ‘mind.’ There isn’t any other. Furthermore, the idea that one’s truest intelligence is the very intelligence which the universe is, and that one is it’s free functioning – that’s crazy thinking in the consensus view. (Alan Watts called this the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.)
This profound aspect of ‘mind’ can only be known by yourself as an individual. You have to accept a valid kind of separation from your family origins, to arrive at it, though. No-one else can bring this mind into view for you. It comes into view when self-grasping ceases. Hence, in the Mindfulness Sutta (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta) there is a refrain, repeated thirteen times, in which it is said that someone who is mindful: “is one who dwells independent, not clinging to anything in the world.” It is a matter of cultivating radical attention to what is actual, and this is generally not approved by your culture.
To find out the truth – that I had been duped, and that the kind of mind that mum and dad believed in was a fiction – was not only counter-cultural, it was inviting ego-death. That was terrifying, for me. I should say at this point, that this fiction isn’t just a cultural creation, of course. The culture rests on a biological inheritance of ways of organising experience, ways of organising individual and collective energy. Nevertheless, the denial of the perspective that I am speaking of, here, is enshrined in many ways in culture. And it is usually taboo to name the ways. For instance, in my culture (English-speaking culture) people are taught to locate their mind in their head. Though, many prophets (Douglas Harding, Jacques Lacan, Alan Watts – for instance) have challenged that.
It is so radical, to know oneself as a local flow of the whole ocean of life, and to know independently that one’s ‘mind’ has no location, no separate ‘here’ over and against other objects. (By radical, I mean: it goes to the root of reality.) To relax into a way of being that trusts Being-mind is to die to normal consciousness. Normal consciousness ceases. Here, I am nothing; and everything, and feel my presence as a vital, participatory fount of possibility.
A well-applied heart-mind will do a good for you
which no mother, father or other kin can do.
– Dhammapada, verse 43. Translated Christopher J. Ash
Isn’t it obvious that this can’t be taught? There are two things I’d like to say about this. One is, you alone must realise it for yourself. The other is, what is realised is not a something that can be grasped. Indeed, the sense of yourself as one that can grasp implies the kind of separation that you will never be satisfied with. That’s dukkha.
Let me share a little story. I hope that I convey that, despite this radical recognition in my twenties, the maturing of that insight took years, as I worked through layers of error. Some twenty-seven years later, I was in dialogue with Insight teacher Christopher Titmuss. As my teacher’s teacher, I placed myself under him, to learn; but, of course, he expected me to do the inquiry, and not just soak up his concepts.
We were sitting next to each other, and I would look inward into my body, and into present-moment awareness to check my experience, as we enquired. I was disengaging from getting hold of anything. At one point, suddenly, all object-clinging dissolved; there was nothing anywhere. I’d like to tell you what there was which remained, but my saying would no doubt give a wrong impression. Let me say then, that this was not a nihilistic nothing of which I speak, here – it’s more like there were ‘no things,’ anywhere. There was vast immeasurable silence, stillness, and emptiness. Nothing to perch upon.
My mind settled for a moment… no, that’s not the way to say it (that’s the old unit-model, consensus-consciousness way)… it’s more like… a consciousness arose dependent on eyes. Yes, that’s it; and I could see the bookcase on the other side of the room. There was an invitation by the thinking-mind to measure a ‘here,’ a ‘there,’ and an ‘in-between,’ based on that contact.
The root of the English word ‘mind’ is an ancient European root meaning ‘think, remember, intend.’ And, that’s what I experienced: that the thinking mind started up again, ignoring the beauty of the silence, and setting old intentions into train. And, I just said, “No, thanks.”
I turned away from ‘world-making,’ and rested the mind, trusting the emptiness. Everything is empty of separate thing-substance. I turned to Christopher and said, “You don’t have anything to teach, do you.” “No,” he said.
The Nikāya Buddha says:
I am overcomer of all, knower of all, untouched by all,
I am one who has left everything behind,
released in the extinction of thirst.
Having learnt well by my own experience, what would I teach?
– Dhammapada, verse 353. Translated Christopher J. Ash
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24 September: Asking the Open Question
Attention is the state of the deathless; inattention is the state of death.
The attentive do not die; the inattentive are as though dead.
Knowing this, the learned rejoice in attention,
delighting in the field of the noble ones.
– Dhammapada, verses 21-22. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
I’ve said that, to enquire into death, we need the pure strength of our deep kinship with all beings. And, we need a love of truth – the unbiased, dispassion element. What if I apply my love of truth and my willingness to be open and ask questions freshly from experience, to the question of how this year-long project is living in me presently? I asked this, today, with the support of my Focusing partner. I was, in a sense, beginning afresh, to see how writing this blog lives in me now, after three months; and that, during the process, naturally presented itself as a question of how my relationship with death is going.
As regards the project, I found a joy that I am exploring it from the point of view of the practice of ‘Calm and Insight’ meditation (Samatha-Vipassanā), and not from a more exotic point of view. I hadn’t expected that emphasis, when I began the project.
And the next thing which I discovered, in my Focusing session, was that if I wish to attune to my bodily-felt sense about this, then the usual meaning of death isn’t what I’m interested in. It’s surprisingly trivial, for me – whether the body dies or not. Some folk could be shocked at my callousness. “What about the fact that when you die physically, you will lose your loved ones” Yes, but that’s my point: It’s about love, not about physical death per se. That’s a tiny thing, and the body will do it well, if the matters to do with love are taken care of. The body knows how to die.
Of course, when I contact my sense of ‘all about death,’ the body does participate, and feels very alive. I can see, too, that the extent to which I am identified with the body, then the body’s death is a big deal. However, asking these radical questions in an open, ‘don’t-know’ manner, and inviting the felt sense of ‘all about how death lives in me now,’ with the important step of checking in with the body – these very processes break identifications with the body. They are freedom in action. The body, and narratives about the body, and body-identity, are all content, the contained, whereas, when I am enquiring in this way, the total being which I am in that process is not the content – not the contained, but the container. I exceed my content, when I am open. I can (and must) include what implies me, which is infinite.
Regarding old content, my usual, non-informative set of meanings about death are based on my associations with other people’s physical death, and my already formed narratives about my relationship with them. These are finished knowings, and they don’t freshly carry me forward in my life. And, likewise, reports of other people’s experiences of physical near-death experiences only go to show the same kind of territory which I find when I invite my felt-sense of all about how death lives in me. That is, such people always report that the space, the light, the love, the empathy, the compassion, and the life review aspects, that these are the core things about the experience. This is confirmed by my own felt senses, whenever I invite death to come hither. So, I am concentrating my efforts in this weblog on the consciousness aspect of death, not on the physical. Hence, mindfulness of how I am with death plays a big part in the project.
The next thing I find, when I invite ‘all about death,’ is that, unless I assume beforehand that I know what the word means, I have to begin by not knowing anything about it. It’s here that my real exploration begins. Sitting with it in openness, things become clear that only this method – openness, beginner’s mind – can reveal anything new. That is, it is clear that ‘naming’ of things as though I already know them, itself plays a part in the matter of ‘death.’ I can explore with a fresh and tentative kind of naming, which resonates against experience, and this produces one type of understanding. Or, there is the skewering-the-butterfly-to-the-board kind of naming, which only re-affirms old conclusions.
At some ordinary level, if I name people (or things), and associate past experiences (memory) to them, then I can have that kind of experience of their death. That’s a culturally-shaped experience. By naming, I mean, here, I mean weaving them into my narratives of what is, and who we are. Nothing new emerges this way – only variations on the old finished themes. This is dukkha. But, what if I include the physical, but invite the ‘more’? The more than I know about death (and therefore more than I know, so far, about this blog project). What emerges as the essence of the matter, then?
We do use the word ‘death’ (or, actively avoid using it), and so we seem to mean something more by it, than the mere physical death. So, what if I put aside such fears as are based on the fixed-narrative-stye naming. What, then, do I mean by death? What is it, experientially? And, if we can’t experience what the word means for us – other than an ‘over-there-on-someone-else’s-deathbed’ kind of way – then, why do we fear it? It’s obviously not death we fear, but not knowing.
Through exertion, attentiveness, self-restraint and mastery,
the wise may make an island that the flood may not overwhelm.
– Dhammapada, verse 25. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
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25 September: Turning to the Ennobling Questions
I can’t remember when I first realized that there was this process we call death. I vividly remember, though, as a child, walking to Glenbrook Primary School, and several times, I came to the highway, and there – with dried blood around the mouth and covered in flies – would be the corpse of a dog. I was bewildered, because it was weird: how that foul-smelling, ugly thing could have been a vital animal some time, and now was this. It worried me. How does living become not living? I couldn’t get my mind around not being here.
When I was ten, I saw a little three-year-old killed at the local shops, not far from that same highway. I had seen him alive, playing in the dirt with his toy front-end loader. My friend and I had stopped and said hi to him; and then we walked on, to the general store (to collect the deposits on the bottles we’d scavenged along the side of the highway). As we were leaving the store, there was a loud screech of tires, and a bang; and there he was lying dead under a car. In this case, along with everything else, it was the suddenness that shocked me. The contrast between life and death was there in the time it took for a flash of lightning. And, no-one knows when they will die. It was incomprehensible.
And why die? The fact that I’d recently been introduced to the idea that there was a God in the sky who would judge me some day didn’t help the resolution of that one, either. There were some big incomprehensibles around, big impenetrable doubts looming over my world, as I entered puberty.
And, there’s the rub: the not-knowing. As a child I had a lot of questions like that. I asked at five years old, “Who am I?” and got no helpful answer. I wanted it to all make some sense, somehow. And, as my teenage years proceeded, relentlessly heading toward that frightening domain called adulthood, I naturally became depressed about the question: “What happens after death?” I was deep in the resistance to a life that had death in it. (Now, of course, I can appreciate that the more important question is: What happens before death?)
The resolution, though, is not in the direction of trying to answer the ‘What happens after death?’ question. So many of those kind of questions only lead to beliefs, not to transformative insights. Then, when I was nineteen I heard that such insight could occur, such insight as would end the anguish of my search, and yet, that it wouldn’t answer such questions as those. So an ennobling search began.
The Buddha had a student called Malunkyaputta who demanded to be told the answers to several philosophical questions like that. If the Teacher wouldn’t tell him the answers, he’d leave the contemplative community, he said. The Buddha said that he hadn’t answered such questions (and made it clear he wouldn’t), because such questions were not beneficial to the ending of dukkha. It was impractical to pursue such questions. They don’t lead to peace, to nibbāna. Instead they inevitably end up in what he terms, elsewhere, ‘a thicket of views.’
In a sutta called The Noble Search (Ariyapariyesanā Sutta), the Nikāya Buddha describes how before he took up the life of homelessness, he saw that we – we who are ourselves subject to old age, sickness, and death – chase after what is subject to old age, sickness, and death. He saw this as a fruitless, frustrating endeavour. Indeed, he called it the ignoble search. So, he said to himself:
“Suppose that, being myself subject to birth, having understood the danger in what is subject to birth, I seek the unborn supreme security from bondage, Nibbāna. Suppose that, being myself subject to ageing, sickness, death, sorrow, and defilement, having understood the danger in what is subject to ageing, sickness, death, sorrow, and defilement, I seek the unageing, unailing, deathless, sorrowless, and undefiled supreme security from bondage, Nibbāna.”
– Bhikkhu Bodhi, and Bhikkhu Nānamoli, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha
And so was born his noble search, for the un-ageing, the un-ailing, and the deathless – a search which turns toward a life which has death in it.
Nibbāna, by the way, has many, many synonyms. Here are some:
“Bhikkhus, I will teach you the truth and the path leading to the truth…. I will teach you the far shore … the subtle … the very difficult to see … the unaging … the stable … the undisintegrating … the unmanifest … the unproliferated … the peaceful … the deathless … the sublime … the auspicious … the secure …. the destruction of craving … the wonderful … the amazing … the unailing … the unailing state … Nibbāna … the unafflicted … dispassion … purity … freedom … the unadhesive … the island … the shelter … the asylum … the refuge … ”
– The Taintless, from The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi.
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26 September: Dialoguing with the Tradition
“Nikāya Buddha,” I say. What do I mean? Why don’t I just say, “The Buddha said (did/thought)…”? What does this expression “Nikāya Buddha” mean? In what follows, I’ll try not to be too technical, and my account is not meant to be at all representative of scholarly views. It simply gives a rough sketch of what a practitioner is up against, if they begin to think “Buddha said…” The reason that I am writing this, does have to do with how we approach the texts as experiential inquirers, though. It’s not a mere academic point.
Firstly, ‘Nikāya’ refers to five Buddhist volumes written which were written in the Pāli language. These are an important part of the very earliest texts, because they purport to contain the ‘discourses of the Buddha.’ (And, my Dhammapada translations, which I use in this blog, come from the Nikāyas.)
The Nikāyas should, therefore, contain the core teachings attributed to that historical person. His name was (if we accept that he was an actual historical person) Siddhartha; and his clan name Gotama. The period in which he is said to have lived was an oral culture, though; and these Nikāyas were passed on orally for several generations after his death, before they were put into written form probably at some time in the first century CE.
Most of us are used to reading and hearing ‘The Buddha said…,” as though the writer was making a statement of historical fact, but this can never be. Although scholars use the phrase ‘historical Buddha,’ no-one can actually know if there was an historical figure corresponding to the man portrayed in the Nikāyas. It’s reasonable to assume this powerful and perceptive teaching arose because there was a particular individual in a particular milieu, but we have only the Nikāyas as evidence (and the Chinese Agamas, which are very similar); and, as I said, they didn’t come into existence (as written texts) until sometime in the first century CE.
(By the way, it is thought by some scholars that – contrary to popular expectation – oral traditions do well in preserving these kinds of ‘texts,’ because of copying errors commonly made by scribes).
Anyhow, we have no way of knowing for certain that the texts faithfully represent the teachings of a supposed historical person. Again, it’s very likely that they do, or that they at least get in the ballpark on certain features of those supposed teachings – particularly, regarding the core matters such as: the marks of phenomena, the certainty of liberation (i.e. the deathless or nibbāna), the ennobling realities (though even this one has been challenged in recent times).
And, to complicate the matter further, there are Buddhist cultures where the monks and nuns have never read the Pali Nikāyas, having been trained using texts written many hundreds of years later. These later texts – later Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese texts – according to the conventions of those cultures, put their teachings into the mouth of ‘Buddha.’ So, with that move, the range of “Buddha said” is amplified greatly beyond what would be possible if we restricted ourselves to the era in Indian history when the Buddha was born (probably fifth century BCE). And, these speakers genuinely belief that ‘the Buddha’ said their favourite teachings, despite the gap of centuries.
So, as far as I see it: The Nikāya Buddha speaks from the 5th century BCE; the Lankavatara Buddha speaks from the late 4th century CE. The Diamond Sutra is difficult to place, so let’s say that the Diamond Sutra Buddha speaks from somewhere between the Nikāyas and the Lankavatara Sutra. And, there are more – the Uttaratantra Buddha, and the Surangama Sutra Buddha, for example; both obviously much, much later than the Buddha of the Nikāyas (who is also called the historical Buddha, or the Shakyamuni Buddha).
So, what I have decided to do, is to dialogue with the texts, and when I am saying where I learned something, then I can refer to the Nikāya Buddha, the Lankavatara Buddha, the Diamond Sutra Buddha, the Surangama Buddha, and so on; and my reader will not be confused about my Buddha. I learned a lot from my dialogue with the Lankavatara Buddha in the early seventies, and from the Surangama Buddha and the Diamond Sutra Buddha in the mid-seventies! And my learning with the Nikāya Buddha has spanned all my Buddhist life.
One reason why I chose this way of speaking, apart from the problems outlined above, is that I noticed that I would use “Buddha said…” to claim legitimacy for my views, whether the view was soundly based in experience, or not. I’d use the name of the Buddha, but it was to bolster my arguments. This is a kind of seduction, and so, upon discovering this, I abandoned the practice.
Now, instead, I might say: “This is how I’ve understood the teachings; and, these are the set of texts which I hold up against my experience, to see if they can carry forward my life.” That’s why I talk, mostly, about the Nikāya Buddha, because I mainly use those texts. I dialogue with the texts, and don’t claim to know what the historical Buddha said, thought or taught. That would not be a legitimate way for me to speak.
One further issue is whether my experience validates the texts, or the texts validate my experience. I would say it is always the former. In respect of the latter, the texts may agree with my experience, or they question my experience (which I can be grateful for); but they can only validate my experience if I bestow some authority on them which I can’t prove they have. That’s called blind faith, I believe. Anyhow, I think that would be an abdication of my responsibility, if I granted them that power. After all, the Nikāya Buddha has said, in the Devasamyutta section, of the Samyutta Nikāya:
“A person should not give himself away. He should not relinquish himself.”
Nevertheless, my learner’s move is to grant them a provisional authority, and see in what direction my experiences change with that.
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Note: I believe, from what I have heard from a friend, that some academic has somewhere argued for such an approach as this, but I’m unable to direct you to a source for that. Let me know if you know of some theorist who has articulated such an approach, and I’ll post the details here. [Found him: Alasdair MacIntyre]
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27 September: Completely Stilled While in the World
Today, my only gift is these freshly translated verses. Here we have our understanding affirmed: Cheating the King of Death of his prize is difficult work. And sometimes it looks like there will be no enjoyment remaining, after all our labours. However, the verses say, there are very refined enjoyments for one who is willing to change. The seven qualities of the psyche awake are themselves blissful.
Those folk who follow the way,
when it has been well expounded,
will go to the other shore.
To escape the realm of death is very difficult.
Having left behind evil* ways,
one should develop the good in one,
having come from comfort to homelessness,
in an aloneness where it is hard to find enjoyment.
There beyond sense-pleasures,
a wise one should look for enjoyment –
in the absence of things, having
purified himself of the heart’s afflictions.
Those in whom the qualities of the awakened heart
are well-developed – who delight in giving up attachment,
who are without clinging, freed from pollution,
radiant – are completely stilled while in the world.
– Dhammapada, verses 86-89. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
The Mindfulness Sutta lists the qualities of the psyche awake as: the presence of mindfulness; the presence of inquiry; the presence of energy; the presence of joy; the presence of serenity; the presence of self-possession; and the presence of equanimity.
* I’ve retained the word ‘evil,’ even though it gets a lot of bad press from its misuse by fundamentalists. It still has a powerful meaning. We use it when someone has done something incomprehensibly beyond limits. Here, however, we have to get subtler, and look deeply to see the quality of our actions. Think of Narcissus. Falling in love with his own image – you wouldn’t think that ‘evil’ in the ordinary use of the word.
When I look in my Oxford English Dictionary, there I find this compelling phrase about the original meaning of the word ‘evil.’ In respect of its Teutonic and Germanic roots, the OED says, “the primary sense would be either ‘exceeding due measure’ or ‘overstepping proper limits’.” For years, I’ve thought of this as ‘out of harmony with the great Tao.’ It’s action that tears at the fabric of reality, that is out of whack. There we have the quality of mind of a Narcissus, living on the surface of life.
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28 September: The How of the Dialogue
“You, Contemplatives, have been taught by me with this timeless teaching which can be realised and verified, which leads to the goal [of nibbāna], and which can be understood personally by the wise.” – The Nikāya Buddha, in the Majjhima Nikāya.
What grounds our knowledge? What kind of intelligence is it, that understands, realizes, and verifies this ‘doctrine’ of the deathless? By what grounding can it be unpacked and made one’s own? Must it be believed? Or provisionally tried on? What would this mean, to ‘try it on provisionally’? What kind of relationship can we have with statements made from knowledge deeper than our own?
How do we know what actually frightens us about the phenomenon of death? If I say something like: “In close to the core of the human being is the fear of being alone with chaos, and this is at the entrance-way to the deathless,” how will my listener verify this, or enter into a transforming dialogue with it? If it’s not immediately available for verification, how can the statement be used?
This is the Buddhists’ situation, in relation to the Nikāyas, and in relation to our teachers. The Nikāya Buddha says something, and we have to find a way of grounding our inquiry, to find if it is so. (He is aware of this, of course, and occasionally addresses the dilemma with encouraging words.)
Mindfulness is a way of grounding the ennobling search in one’s own experience. Mindfulness of the body, and mindfulness of death, are two very powerful methods of grounding our inquiry in our immediate, individual knowledge. And, what emerges is a growing capacity to become intimate with our living process, as it actually occurs. This has to happen, otherwise all this is empty talk, we’re simply entertaining ourselves with dharma-talk until death. How does this fresh intelligence happen?
I was flabbergasted in the mid-seventies, when I realized that I’d grown up saying ‘mind,’ but that I had no grounded experience of a mind to make practical sense of that word. Not only that, but I’d had twenty years of education, and no-one had suggested how I could investigate the experience toward which the word ‘mind’ pointed. It wasn’t in my culture, to ground words in experience.
I’d use the word regularly, like anyone else, without any understanding of what kind of process it pointed toward – except the vaguely unconscious convention that ‘mind’ equals ‘thoughts. Still today, nobody teaches in our schools that words are primarily for pointing back to experience. (The only person I’ve heard wonder at how extraordinary this is, is well-known neuro-psychologist Daniel Siegel.)
And this matter of how we ground our knowing is very important if we are contemplatives. I don’t just mean Buddhist contemplative, but anyone looking deeply into human life to know its potentials. It is claimed in many Western Buddhist books that in the First Noble Truth, “Buddha said…” that: all human beings experience the suffering of old age, sickness, and death, and this suffering is dukkha. Escape from dukkha means no more human birth, therefore.
How do they know that’s what is meant by the text? Does this make sense? How could the evolution of life-forms be something we must escaping? Personally, this looks ridiculous to me, and yet they are intelligent people. What is happening? They can’t mean that human life is a mistake, a disease? Might not this be a self-hating view? That human life is afflicted with some myopic habits which thwart its carrying forward healthily – that I can get; but this ‘being born is an error’ view? It has more, I imagine, to do with the culture and upbringing of the people who perpetuate the view.
However, if I’m genuine about dialoguing with the texts, I have to do this with the text from the Samyutta Nikāya on which this harmful view is based, and I have to propose an experience-near, verifiable alternative (which I can, and will during the next nine months, my lifespan allowing). The text goes like this:
“Now this, practitioners, is the ennobling truth of dukkha: birth is dukkha, ageing is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha; being yoked with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha; in brief, the five sentient processes subject to clinging are dukkha.”
– From the Samyutta Nikāya. This passage translated by Christopher J. Ash.
On the surface it looks like ‘life is dukkha’; and, that escaping life would naturally be the outcome of ‘the ending of dukkha.’ As I say, though, this is a literalistic error of interpretation, handed on from earlier times. How will we investigate the matter of dukkha and the ending of dukkha? Of course, we can listen to the wise, and think logically; but, crucially, we must include and cultivate the grounding which our bodies provide. Such grounding ultimately carries our knowing forward in fresh and creative, and life-enhancing ways. This is wisdom. Does that feel right for you? How would you ground your agreement or disagreement?
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29 September: Visible Here and Now
“Now this, practitioners, is the ennobling truth of dukkha: birth is dukkha, ageing is dukkha, illness is dukkha, death is dukkha; being yoked with what is displeasing is dukkha; separation from what is pleasing is dukkha; not to get what one wants is dukkha; in brief, the five sentient processes subject to clinging are dukkha.”
– From the Samyutta Nikāya. This passage translated by Christopher J. Ash.
So, on the surface it looks like that Samyutta Nikāya passage is saying: ‘life is dukkha,’ and so escaping life is would naturally be the outcome of ‘the ending of dukkha.’ But, if we are committed to being true to reality, and if our aspiration is to contribute to the happiness and well-being of all beings, then we need to give much more thought to the grounding of our dialogue with the tradition. This is too serious a matter to uncritically take up a life-denying position, saying, “Buddha said that birth, old age and death are suffering, and that his practice puts an end to birth, old age and death. I follow him.”
What are such attitudes grounded in? Most times, they are grounded in a kind of traditional faith. The tradition has given us certain traditional interpretations of the original texts, and we attach ourselves to the words, because they have been spoken by some recluse, or some famous teacher. People are often fearful of deviating from their tradition, and specifically from their teacher’s interpretations.
For the Buddhist, our way forward here is, firstly, to read such passages in the context of the entire body of teachings, allowing all the different parts to cross and inter-affect each other; and secondly, in that process, to mindfully refer back to bodily knowing – our body’s wisdom – as the ground of our interpretative efforts.
When I am in an inquiry with someone, then – at whatever level they wish to enquire – it seems very important for me, during the process, to mindfully track just how the steps that occur in the interaction are grounded (and not grounded). That is, that I can refer to the body’s wisdom during the process. This ‘how’ is very important. Am I grounding my responses in the already accumulated knowledge? This could be either the tradition, which is a pattern made by others; or it could be my own conclusions, from previous experiments. Either way, can I be aware that I am relating to the present inquiry from the known? Is there an openness to the more, the not-yet known? And how will I know this open relating? Is there another kind of knowledge available, another kind of grounding? What is this grounding, to which I refer back, continually?
One might say, “But how can I do this? I don’t have the purified mind of a Buddha, to be able to ground myself in true reality. Surely he knows better.” Trouble is, the ‘he’ – that is, the Buddha of “the Buddha said” is a creation of your own mind. You are already taking responsibility for knowledge, without being conscious in the process. I say that you have your own good-enough starting place for independent inquiry – your bodily wisdom – and if you have confidence in that, you will find it is all that you need for a grounded carrying forward, in dialogue with any tradition.
The following is a conversation which occurs in the Samyutta Nikāya, at the end of The Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving, which is a sutta about the process nature of experience, and dependent arising:
“Practitioners, knowing and seeing this, would you speak thus: ‘The teacher is respected by us. We speak as we do out of respect for the teacher’?”
“No, Sir.”
“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you speak thus: ‘A recluse says this, and we speak as we do at the bidding of the recluse’?”
“No, Sir.”
“Knowing and seeing this, would you look for another teacher?”
“No, Sir.”
“Knowing and seeing this, would you return to the observances, festivals, and rites of ordinary recluses and brahmins, taking these as the core [of the spiritual life]?”
“No, Sir.”
“Don’t you speak of what you yourself have known, seen, and understood for yourself?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Well done, Practitioners. So you have been guided by me in this truth, which is visible here and now, immediately effective, inviting inspection, onward leading, to be personally experienced by the wise.”
– Translated by Christopher J. Ash
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30 September: Note on the Kālakarāma Sutta
Much that I say in these posts is affirmed by the Nikāya Buddha in the Kālakarāma sutta. Hence, because I am stretched to get something more considered written today, I’ll share some comments on it, in case you want to read it. You can find it here.
I cherish it because it is one of those spacious suttas which hints at the flavour of experience of the inner life of liberation. This sutta is a lion’s roar. It’s a sutta that suggests the fruit of the path is the path.
In it the Nikāya Buddha says (though not exactly in these words; I’m summarising):
“I know things, just like anyone knows things, but I don’t cling to what I know. If you cling, you serve what you cling to. I live without conceiving of an isolated reality in the experiencer; nor is there such a reality in the experienced. And, I don’t conceive of an unexperienced. Because of this, you can refer to me as one who is ‘such.’ And that is the supreme kind of person.”
(Not conceiving of a ‘unexperienced’ includes not imagining a separate reality somewhere else that would make this which is experienced what it is.)
This means that the liberated person (Tathāgata) is not limited by, defined by, or identified by anything conceivable. Hence, the concept of suchness:
“Thus, Practitioners, a Tathāgata being ‘such’ in regard to all phenomena seen, heard, sensed and cognized, is ‘such.’”
Each of the statements in this sutta can be resonated against your own bodily feel of the whole of ‘This.’ I hope that, if you do read it, you benefit from my translation. It deserved a quiet corner and an uninterrupted period of time, to savour each phrase, and to let the body read it. I never tire of this meditation.
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1 October: Discerning True Emptiness
“We must risk delight,” wrote the poet Jack Gilbert, quoted in Elisabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic. “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this World.”
I’ve had some positive feedback about what I’m writing about the conventional Buddhist approach; so, I want to expand the problem a little, here. What I’m trying to do, in these early months of my last year, is to introduce in my investigation some process terms – some of them Buddhist, and some from modern disciplines, particularly from process philosophy – which will deepen in use by the time my year has ended.
(For those who aren’t aware, the basis of this blog is to write down what I would want to communicate, out of my forty-six years of Buddhist inquiry, if I only had a year to live. I’m three months into the process. If I had a nine months of life left, I would definitely want to do this, as a kind of gnostic will and testament. I bequeath you a statement of what I’d learnt in my time studying the Dharma, in the hope that it might prove beneficial.)
My mob – usually called Theravadans – are regularly accused of being a negative lot, and not without justification. “Life is suffering, suffering, suffering. Get off the wheel of birth and death. Give up sense-pleasures.” It seems to me that we of the Pāli-based Buddhist schools are rightly accused of being life-deniers, because the majority of traditional teachers in this broad stream of Buddhist thought do, indeed, deny the value of human life; that is, that human life has any value beyond the benefit of having the opportunity to study the Buddhadharma and so to leave life behind.
This ‘negative soteriology’ (that is, that are saved by getting out of life) is not justified by a comprehensive reading of the Pali Nikāyas. You might think that I am over-stating the case, but look at this “Buddha said” passage from a recent book written by two Westerners:
“He [the Nikāya Buddha] said that all human beings experience great pain from old age, sickness, and death, from getting what we do not want and from not getting what we do want. He said that these changing conditions are dukkha, a Pali word usually translated as “suffering” or “dis-ease” or “stress.”
Change– and specifically the changes called birth, sickness and death– are dukkha, or wonkiness? The universe is a kosmic mistake? Because this doesn’t work for me, and because I want to contribute to carrying our understanding forward and finding a fresh way of saying our human dilemma, then I won’t ‘dis’ the authors by naming them. This passage could be from a hundred books that are out there. It represents an active tradition, being perpetuated by Westerners. I once heard an internationally known Western Theravada monk say to his audience, “Would you seriously want to be born back into this life?” He didn’t follow it up with any indication that he was talking in anything other than a literal manner; that is, he was speaking without psychological, experiential, Or philosophical nuance. I think this probably indicates more about the unresolved childhood attachment issues of the monk, than it does about the actual life-processes we call ‘birth, sickness, and death.’
We want, instead, in the “ruthless furnace” of the world’s violent human cultures, a view that helps us realise joyful abiding in this life – to be nibbāna; that is, “completely stilled [parinibbutā] while in the world” – and that contributes to the health of all living beings on this little blue planet. To this end, I want to think some much-needed steps, in these blogs, and I feel it is important to state what I think the Buddhist teaching is not about; that is, what doesn’t work for this Westerner. The old Buddhist interpretations of the Nikāyas don’t work for many of us, especially we who hold the scientific, evolutionary approach as having something valid to say about human life. I am quoting the traditional view to help clear the decks for a more workable way of having the experiences of “dukkha and the end of dukkha.” I want a more workable than the view that says that being born is, by the fact itself, a ‘skew-whiff’ situation. That view, to me, belongs in the dawn of history.
There beyond sense-pleasures,
a wise one should look for enjoyment –
in the absence of things, having
purified himself of the heart’s afflictions.
– Dhammapada, verses 88. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
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2 October: Honouring the Kalakarama Buddha
So, we’re talking about an unhelpful interpretation of dukkha. If we say that the bare fact of biological birth and death, and the illnesses that inevitably accompany human life, that these are dukkha, then this, for a Westerner, would be a confusing teaching, and not easily verified. Furthermore, it would condition the way that we read the Nikāya Buddha’s way out of dukkha. It is this reading that has led some to think that the Nikāya Buddha’s message is life-denying and pessimistic.
The historical Buddha was a human – a person of such-and-such a name, and such-and-such a clan. He had experiencing– a felt life – like you and me. It was this experiencing that he was interested in purifying and liberating from dukkha. If the Nikāya texts are a reliable guide, we can see that his insights at the level of interactional, bodily, experiential space (that is, at the non-conceptual level) were quite extraordinary. They are still powerful. However, his interpretations of this experiences are in symbolic space, the symbol space of his time. That is, they are inevitably framed within the conditions of the concepts available in his time, even where he extended or refreshed that culture (as it appears that he did); and those conditions include the state of scientific knowledge of his time.
A small gap of a several hundred years intervened, before his interpretations were recorded, by people whose experience may or may not have had the same depth. It is these texts that have been handed on (in several language-versions, which have small differences). So, a tradition has been handed on. I think that it is impossible, if we are to take these texts into our bones, for them to remain unchanged by our understanding. The handing-on doesn’t happen that way, and wouldn’t have happened for the historical Buddha, if he were human.
Hence, speaking of the Westerners’ situation, as we express the experiential ‘in-our-marrow’ understanding, we inevitably utter the message in contemporary idiom. This is so for several reasons; including that new meanings emerge of themselves, as a natural process entering our marrow. That’s what understanding is – the change in what is handed on. Secondly, we humans have learnt much about our situation in two-and-a-half thousand years, and so new perspectives from modern disciplines cross with the tradition. I once read an ecologist saying that you can’t place an organism in an environment, without the environment getting into the organism. Understanding the tradition is like that. It penetrates you, and is itself changed by changing you. It is handed on by becoming the way you are, in body, speech and mind.
If we grant that the Nikāya Buddha might be speaking from his non-conceptual knowledge, using old symbols freshly – and perhaps introducing new ones – in the culture of his time, then we might see that the meaning of these texts needs to come in the same way – from our non-conceptual, experiential understanding. It needs to be re-affirmed and renewed in our bodies.
So, having laid this out, I want to go back to the claim that some Buddhist teachers make, that the First Noble Truth of the Buddha is: ‘Old age, sickness, death, and all changing conditions are dukkha,’ and suggest how we can read it differently, in a way that is consistent with a ‘process’ view. An unhelpful interpretation is that the biological facts are dukkha, and that the path of liberation ends the biological dimension. It seems unlikely, to me, that the historical Buddha meant that (but we can’t know, of course).
However, through a conversation with the tradition, we can verify individually, contemplatively, that another possibility, one more helpful to us, is there. The suggestion is that heist talking about a distorted kind of way of experiencing life, which can cease. He is talking about distorted versions of death, sickness and old age. The distortions of unskilful thinking give us the kind of sickness, old age, and death which is in the experience of craving; and, hence, which is subject to cessation while in life; and which is the same as a mindless (delusional)mode of living. The cessation of the delusional way of life is the cessation of that kind of death.
Attentiveness is the place of the deathless;
inattentiveness is the place of death.
The attentive do not die;
the inattentive are as though dead already.
– Dhammapada, verse 21. Translated by Christophe J. Ash
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3 October: The Intricate Mesh
Kent: “Can you personalise this for me? I get a bit lost in the theory around transmission of knowledge. I can’t quite see its relevance, for me.”
Christopher: “Do you have a sense of where you’d like me to say something?”
Kent: “Well… isn’t that just something that academics are concerned with?”
Christopher: “You might be right. Funny though, I think every child forges their own theory of knowledge as they grow. Anyhow, be that as it may… perhaps there is a scholar part of me. I am certainly a thinker, by temperament. However, maybe I can ground this if I explain a little about my own inner search.”
Kent: “That’s what I’m looking for, yes.”
Christopher: “Let’s see… The question is: ‘Why the emphasis on texts, language, and culture?’
“All my adult life I’ve investigated human experiencing. I am interested in this, not only for my own sanity, but to know the causes of human violence; and to participate in a culture of human freedom. This preoccupation obviously, in part, has personal roots, because of my upbringing; but, everywhere I looked, when I was emerging from childhood, I could see violence. In my teachers and my family, in my neighbourhood, in my peers, and in the world at large.
“I saw photographs, when I was just ten years old, of the piles of bodies in concentration camps, being bull-dozed into mass graves. I saw in detail the tortures devised by the Japanese Knights of the Bushido. By the time I entered my teenage years I understood that the violence was all over the world. So, not only have I wanted to know my own mind, and to free my own mind, but I’ve wanted to understand the root of all that.”
Kent: “Whew!”
Christopher: “And my family didn’t have TV, until I was ten. It’s heavier, I think, for children today. I have read that in the U.S, by that age, the average child has seen eight thousand murders, and one hundred thousand other acts of violence. You can’t imagine the shock – the disassociation – that I experienced, when that evidence of the universality of violence confronted me. And, what comes to mind, as I tell you this, is something one of my university professors said – he spoke about the “habit of inattention.” We become habituated to violence, so that we don’t see it, we don’t protest it, we don’t investigate it.”
Kent: “I agree.”
Christopher: “So that’s one thing. That’s something in my past that can explain my preoccupation with how human experiencing works. Now… there’s something else here. You’re asking about culture and language, and about my preoccupation with the relationship to texts. Let’s see…
“I’d have to include, too, a long-buried early childhood anguish over the question: ‘Who is seeing?’ It re-surfaced in my late teens, with altered states of consciousness that were both natural and artificially induced. (I’ve spoken about the experiences on LSD.)”
Kent: “I don’t see the connection.”
Christopher: “I don’t either, yet. Hang on… Maybe it was Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckman’s book called The Social Construction of Reality… it had an impact on me. I read it just at the time that I was leaving university. I also steeped myself in the anti-psychiatry world of Liang and Esterson – Sanity, Madness and the Family, for instance. And, there was the environmental movement beginning, and the anti-nuclear movement, the peace movement.”
Kent: “I haven’t heard of them – Liang and Esterson, I mean.”
Christopher: “That’s okay – they were questioning how minds are shaped in families, and in societies. Also, what was coming into my culture at that time was a moral relativism. In the English Lit department, I was trained in the Leavis world, where moral value, if not certain, was at least assumed to exist, and to be important. By the time I completed my university training, post-modernism was entering the stage. The new rebellion (we were marching in the Moratorium marches against the Vietnam War; I enrolled as a conscientious objector against the war) … the new challenge to the old order suited me, and yet – at the same time, I had found this tradition of spiritual inquiry, which suggested that the root of the problems we opposed, the root human problem was in the ‘mind of man.’ (That’s the way they spoke then). Furthermore, to the Buddha, virtue wasn’t merely culturally implanted in us.
This to me was very empowering. Oh! And, now as I tell you this, I think of how in 1967, I saw an Indian guru who came to town. He gave a talk, and one thing that he said really blew my seventeen-year-old mind: “A field of grass is green because individual blades of grass are green.” That tipped me in a certain direction; that is, into the feeling that one’s own life is a contribution to the whole, no matter how insignificant.
Where I think I’m going with all this is that for more reasons than I can know, there developed a mesh of experiencing in which I have nurtured two primary existential questions: ‘Who is it that sees?’ and ‘What is the basis of a morally right way to live?’ Oh, and, when I say it like that, I remember that Socrates had turned up in my life at age seventeen. He blew me away, too, because he asked very similar questions, and gave his life for that way of life.”
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4 October: Like the Sky, Empty and Signless
Those for whom there is no accumulation,
who have fully understood sustenance,
whose field is the freedom of emptiness and signlessness –
like birds in the sky, it is difficult to track their course.
– Dhammapada, verse 92. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
Kent: “I’m still not sure how this ties in with your emphasis on texts… although, I think I’ve got a vague idea.”
Christopher: “Do you want to say more? If you have a feel of it, there.”
Kent: “Hmmm… okay.” (Pauses) “You came to feel that ideas unavoidably contribute to our experience of the world.”
Christopher: “The world, yes… and the self, and the self in the world. I’d put it differently, though. Our world and concepts are together, not two. Ideas are the world.”
Kent: “Hence, what we think matters.”
Christopher: (Pauses) “Yes. We tend to have a starting point of: My body is a thing inside the container called society. The society is the environment separate and around the body; some of which gets into me, or which I allow in. That’s unit-model thinking. It’s illusory as experience, though. Actually, our bodily functioning already and always has the environment in it – the water, the nutrients, and so on – and, our body has society as a part of its functioning, as intimate as blood and breath. We don’t normally think of our body’s processes as already including society’s concepts; but it is the case. For instance, our experience on several levels is organised by the way we think time, space and knowledge.”
Kent: “That’s Tarthang Tulku’s TSK.”
Christopher: “Yes. Hence, what kind of culture we seed, and water, and tend, matters, because we are made up of culture as much as of water and nutrients. As a child, I had no idea when I saw those photographs – of the naked dead treated like garbage – that culture was in that. My body, though, knew something – it knew that something was amiss.”
Kent: “Out of order.”
Christopher: “In a way… I’m moved, now, by what you’ve said here… I’m thinking that ever since then, I’ve been… I’ve been pressed… pressed from within, to find a non-cultural ground in myself for a moral life.”
Kent: “Is that possible? Sounds like you are saying that you’ve been looking for human nature.”
Christopher: “Maybe you’re right.” (Pause) “I haven’t seen it like that, before. That’s right. And, the anguish of not having contact with the ground which is human nature has been huge. The feel of human nature from within – that’s been the missing object. You’re right. I nearly went mad without it. And, as I’ve realised human nature in myself, my confusion over human violence has subsided. Right.”
Kent: “And, what is the nature of the human?”
Christopher: (Laughs) “What have I discovered? In a sentence?!” (Pause) “I can certainly say that human nature is not any kind of content. That’s where our rebellion was chaotic, in the sixties. We opposed content with content – figuring our content was superior to the content of the masters of war.”
Kent: “But human nature is process. And so you’re emphasising experiencing?”
Christopher: “Thank you again. That helps. Yes, and that’s why I’d like to talk next about a process way of saying the so-called Four Noble Truths. No doubt, many yogis throughout the centuries have approached their experiencing in just this process way, when internalising the teachings for themselves. The philosophy and psychology of the Nikāyas is all about tracking processes. My translation of the Mindfulness Sutta attempts to emphasise that.
“I hope you’ll think it through with me. Like any committed meditator, I’ve spent decades trying to understand what is meant by ‘dukkha and the ending of dukkha.’ I don’t say I’ve grocked it altogether. Or, that my way of thinking is the only one. But what I have understood has worked for me, so I’m sharing it.”
Kent: “Before you die.”
Christopher: “Yeah. I was thinking recently that, for decades now, that when I read of an atrocity somewhere, I don’t wonder, or anguish anymore over why humans do such evil things. I used to despair. Now, I know in myself the root of violence, so the anguish to do with not understanding isn’t here anymore. I still feel the sorrow about the violence, but at least I’m not shutting it out, because now there is understanding present.”
Kent: “And this isn’t the habit of inattention?”
Christopher: “No. My body has led the way. Bodies know so much.”
Kent: “You see the body as the grounding.”
Christopher: “That’s one perspective. It needn’t be the only perspective on grounding, but it brings a lot of wisdom with it.
“So, let’s enlist our bodies in our mindfulness of dukkha. And, then, when we do this, it can be seen, from the experiential point of view, that the first truth needn’t be read in a unit-model ‘first-this-and-then-that’ kind of way. Indeed, these four ennobling propositions can, from a process understanding, be read more fruitfully, if we read them as though they are inside each other.”
Kent: “Do you mind? Something has just come to me – an implication of what you’re saying.”
Christopher” “Sure. Go ahead.”
Kent: I’m not sure yet how to say it, but… If you’re right that traditions are in our flesh – that inevitably we live inside our mental world – then… are you saying that the Buddha’s freedom didn’t deliver us a knowledge about a reality deeper than our concepts?”
Christopher: No, that would be an extreme. I’m saying there’s a middle way between complete arbitrariness in naming what’s going on in reality, where we say, ‘You can say anything about reality, because all viewpoints are right’) …”
Kent: “In other words, because knowledge is purely cultural– the post-modernists. A confusion of indeterminacy.”
Christopher: “Yes. And… at the other extreme, a dogmatism (where we say ‘Our words can say how reality is, and there’s only one way to say it.’)”
Kent: “Knowledge of reality is not only possible, but we have the language for it. The approach of any materialist, for instance.”
Christopher: “Yes. That would be one, but the materialist would be in the same boat with the religious fundamentalists. Both are caught in the structures about reality, without a creative space.”
Kent: “In the same boat…think that sometimes, when biologist friend of mine gets apoplectic about his views of reality.”
Christopher: “Yeah, well… I don’t get apoplectic, but I find myself clinging to my views, too. It’s difficult to get entirely free of clinging. I’d go as far as to say, there may be no person in history who has every achieved that. It’s an ideal.”
Kent: “So, can we know reality?”
Christopher: “I would say you ‘know’ it only in a special case of the word ‘know.’ We know it by being it. You can’t stand outside it and make it into an object to be known; can’t have it with conscious, naming-knowledge.”
Kent: “But if this is so, the mental world would cease.”
Christopher: “And the mental self, too, yes. They are both the product of naming and form.”
Kent: “Scary. Is there anything remaining?”
Christopher: “The concept of remaining or not remaining doesn’t really apply. That’s more naming. This whole thing is about getting the right relationship with naming and form. However, for your present use, in the context that you are meaning…let’s say, the goal of the practice is not a nihilistic outcome. The Nikāya Buddha is careful to make that distinction. Remember all those synonyms of nibbāna?”
Kent: “I only get this logically, at this point. Enough for now, though. Thanks.”
Those whose intoxicants are at an end,
who have fully understood sustenance,
and whose field is emptiness and signlessness–
like birds in the sky, it is difficult to track their course.
– Dhammapada, verse 93. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
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5 October: There’s a Treasure House Right Here – This Very Body
For several years I have been doing a certain practice from a non-Pāli tradition. It’s a practice from the Tibetan Bön tradition of Dzogchen, which I value because it integrates openness-wisdom with unlimited warmth. The practice requires me to bring a warm, open heart to my pain body, pain speech and pain mind. It also integrates emptiness teachings with personal relationships. It’s a joy, and I owe a lot to it. Doing this practice has changed me, undoubtedly.
What I wanted to share from this, though, was just one concept which comes from the ‘body’ verse of its Inner Refuge prayer. (There is a ‘body’ verse, a ‘speech’ verse, and a ‘mind’ verse). The whole ‘body’ verse is this:
The center of the victorious mandala, one’s own body,
The source of all positive qualities without exception,
Is the expanse within the three channels and the five chakras.
I take refuge in this body of emptiness.
– From Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy, by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche,
One’s own body is the source of all of all positive qualities without exception. When I was a Zen student, I would often dwell on a particular section of Hakuin Zenji’s Song of Zazen where he says,
“…offerings, precepts, paramitas,
Nembutsu, atonement, training –
the many other virtues –
all rise within zazen.”
Speaking of atonement, I have seen that when, in self-possession (in samādhi), you touch the presence of the body as the utter openness of Being, it cleanses the heart. These qualities mentioned by Hakuin are all positive and found in meditative contemplation – and there are so many more. Hakuin is affirming our authentic body (called self-nature in his song), and saying that just to be yourself, just this body without elaboration, without being fashioned into something – this is the pure land, this is nibbāna, which one touches in sitting meditation, and in any gathered contemplative state of mind.
How can this be? It will sound outlandish, indeed, if we are brought up to believe that the body is just a material thing, rather than a local representative of Being. Even the idea that the body is a temple, which houses a sacred mind or soul, is already two too many.
When I look into my body (yes, this chronically-ill, ravaged and die-able body) it introduces me to all kinds of marvellous qualities – such as: tranquillity, mindfulness, unconditional love, a mountain-like grounded-ness, luminosity, mirror-like awareness, and that quality of “no something” here (Pali: akiñcana, emptiness). These are some of the positive qualities found through one’s body.
Why don’t we see this, normally? We are creating – with our hungry minds – a material body with its clinging and its identifications. We project divisions into the undivided presence of Being – the division, for instance, of a body and its owner. This becomes elaborated endlessly. Hence, we get the pain body, pain speech, and pain mind that goes with any sub-personality. Traditionally, in Buddhism these have been allocated to six (sometimes five) ‘realms’: hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, jealous gods, and gods. These are broad categories of pain ‘body, speech and mind.’ All our ‘practices’ (tradition says there are 84,000 of them) are simply to clarify the personality, which circulates through these painful states, so that we see the personality is not who we are.
People encircled by thirst run about like captured hares.
Confined by the bonds of their clinging, they suffer, again and again, for a long time.
–Dhammapada, verse 342. Translated Christopher J. Ash
The Dzogchen refuge prayer (mentioned above) and Hakuin’s Song of Zazen – these point to freedom, which is right here. As Hakuin said:
“…with form that is no form
going and coming– never astray,
with thought that is no thought
singing and dancing are the voice of the Law.
Boundless and free is the sky of samādhi,
bright the full moon of wisdom,
truly is anything missing now?
Nirvana is here, before your eyes,
this very place is the Lotus Land,
this very body the Buddha.”
– Song of Zazen
Is it any wonder, then, that the Nikāya Buddha, in the Samyutta Nikāya, praises mindfulness as ‘king in the world.’ It not only frees from bonds of samsāra, but it accesses a treasure-house right where you are now.
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6 October: A Mindful Walking Experiment (Part 1)
These next two posts owe a lot to my exploration of the last forty years of Tarthang Tulku’s Time-Space-Knowledge Vision. I explore our experience of ‘time.’ However, they are a prelude to asking: Can it be that, the word ‘death’ points to experiences which vary according to the situation in which the word is used? It has, therefore, (as Wittgenstein would say) a family of uses. The examination of your experience of ‘time’ is also a prelude to find an experientially grounded, process understanding of ‘karma.’ Karma, I shall later say, is an aspect of the body’s implicit functioning, a part of its organization.
As a pertinent mindful instance of how death means different things at different times, and how there may be a consciously grounded death, let’s look at how we experience time, and see how it changes our appreciation of whatever we mean by ‘death.’ If we use the word ‘death’ without reference to experience of time, what can it mean? I’ll give you an experiment to conduct – a walking meditation. Though, firstly, I have an introduction…
As Nāgārjuna said, in his Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, second to third centuries CE:
A non-static time is not grasped.
Nothing one could grasp as
Stationary time exists.
If time is not grasped, how is it known?
- – Translated by Jay Garfield
Unconsciously we imagine ‘time’ to signify something ‘out there,’ ‘up there’ or ‘behind’ appearances – an objective something essential to the material universe, apparently. Hence, we imprecisely put what we mean by ‘death’ way ahead somewhere, in an inaccessible ‘future.’ That’s convenient for the ego, isn’t it? It has the (dubious) strength of helping us avoid the feeling that death is as close as the activity of one’s cells and their various collective activities; one of which we call ‘breath.’ But, imagine if we felt death to be as close as the in- and out-breath. What kind of life would we live? We might be more alive.
If we want to challenge this habit of placing time out of reach, or to investigate its truth-value, we can learn how to conduct time differently. (The idea of conducting time comes from the TSK vision.) What if the word ‘time’ were used to point to your presenting experience at the behavioural level; rather than having only some unexamined value at the symbolic level. Try it on: Your experience of sitting, standing, walking, lying down – just as it is happening – perhaps that is time. Your life-process unfolding its possibilities – that experience can’t be outside time, can it? Big space allows the unfolding, but time is the unfolding of experience. This level of time is accessible to you; and, here, you’ll find it’s not a vague burden, after all. You know what I mean, by ‘burden’: we never have enough time, or we have too much of it; or, we feel it’s running out, or we feel it’s dragging out; or, it stretches us, or it presses on us; and so on. What if, instead we were conductors, like a maestro attuned to her orchestra?
Mindfulness of walking – walking meditation – is a great way to explore this. Normally when we walk we don’t notice how our reflective process organises the experience in various terms; and ‘time’ is one of them. I am going somewhere, and I’m coming from somewhere; and it apparently ‘takes time’ to go between. What’s the experiential grounding for that? Participate in time, as you walk across the kitchen with the jug, to your cup. As you pour your tea? What is time’s participation in the experience? Is the walker someone separate to time?
And, I suggest that you don’t by-pass the experiential part, by just jumping to the ‘Oh, there’s no such thing as time” conclusion. That’s only leaves you in a confining culture, again. Rather, explore what experiential grounding there can be for the use of the word ‘time.’
If all life long an ignoramus hangs around a learned person,
he’ll no more realize the Dharma than a spoon can taste the soup.
- – Dhammapada, verse 64. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.
That’s very funny. He doesn’t mince words, the Nikāya Buddha. The word which I’ve translated as ignoramus is in Pali ‘bāla,’ meaning ‘childish.’ (It’s still one of the words used today, in Hindi, for a child or a teen.) We can best understand an ignorant person as one who regularly ignores. So, if we attend to words, but ignore the experiences they point toward, we are as children, in the negative sense. So, to come into our own, let’s do a mindfulness experiment.
Try this, and try it in the spirit of beginner’s mind – open, curious, and playful: Find a safe place to walk quietly, and after you get going, notice in a general kind of way, what is happening in and around you. Then shift your attention to how objects ‘move.’ The first kind of obvious movement is the way that objects move from here to there. It may be the leaves in a tree, moving with the breeze. A cat walks. It may be the cars or people passing by. (If you’re indoors, then this ‘movement’ won’t be obvious, but the second kind of ‘movement’ will be more relevant.)
After a time, focus your attention exclusively on the second kind of movement regarding objects; that which happens because you are walking (that’s the old way of saying it, but it will do, for this occasion). Here, the floor or the path passes under you; the furniture or the trees pass by you; something small gets bigger, as you approach; things come into view, and pass out of view. All this is ‘movement,’ and so involves time. Doesn’t this level of experience also have ‘time’ in it, too? Events present themselves and pass. Now, you are more subtly experiencing time’s movement. In a way, you are now reflecting with or via what was wondrous for you at one-year-old. As Jesus says, speaking positively in a well-known text: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Next time, we’ll go more deeply into this experiment in mindful walking.
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8 October: A Mindful Walking Experiment (Part 2)
Because I have taken to heart that I will die, I am naturally more com-bodied – that is, I live more regularly in my felt connection to all of life, where life and I are an undivided flow. And, as a result, the ways in which I dissociate from this com-bodiment present themselves more sharply. One of those ways is to act from a self that I conceive, instead of from the flow.
How deep is the early childhood practice of conceptualising myself as an inner captain of my actions! Of course, re-thinking the body began for me forty years ago, at twenty-five, with the insight that I am not my body. Yet, I am even now in the on-going process of re-conceptualising my body, because I blocked the feel my body at that time, and have been in a process ever since, of revelation. What has presented itself? Intelligence is a bodily felt process. (It’s more basic than emotion and sensation; and certainly more basic than perception or thought.)
This revelation, of course, is not a process which reaches a conclusion. It is not a mere ‘re-framing,’ but an on-going deepening; in which mindfulness of the body is a way to ground myself in the flow of on-going experiencing – where thought is not in the captain’s tower, but is in flow as a part of the crew.
I have seen that the old way of thinking of the body is out of tune with nature, and that we need more helpful concepts. Conceiving of ourselves wrongly may even be at the root of our abuse of nature, let alone the root of our abuse of each other. And, what is amazing to me, though, is that re-thinking the importance of the body in life has changed what death means for me.
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet. We have caused a lot of damage to the Earth. Now it is time for us to take good care of her.”
_ Thich Nhat Hanh said, in Peace is Every Step,
Living this way, I find that the ‘walking body’ gives good care back to the whole person that I am. Walking meditation has been a huge help in grounding myself. Walking meditation has been for me both a peace-making, tranquillity practice, and an insight practice. The insights have revealed how much walking became, at some stage in my life, an activity packaged in dualistic thinking for my mind’s consumption. Extraordinary. The result is that I am meditating in my walking, no matter where I am. During the day, in my house going from room to room, or out shopping. Today, down my stairwell and to the kitchen; to the car; into the art class; from the sink to my art table with water in my hands; into a cafe garden; to my letterbox – it’s endlessly fresh. None of it done before, or ever again. Every step presents itself as a moment of connectedness to the bigger unfolding life. Poet Anthony Machado:
“Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.”
In that spirit, I share this meditation on time, in walking; and hope that you enjoy the wonders of motion, because motion is intrinsic to time. This meditation is meant to allow for the discovery of ‘walking without walking.’ It’s a joy for me to find, even now – decades after learning walking meditation – that such a taken-for-granted activity can be filled with such satisfying measureless presence – just walking a path to the toilet, in the night.
“In daily life, polar knowledge appears to operate without our conscious attention, in much the same way that the nervous system coordinates the underlying motor skills that allow basic activities such as walking or speaking. Satisfied with our ability to accomplish what we want, we have no motive for calling into question the base level knowledge that makes our actions possible.”
– Tarthang Tulku. Love of Knowledge
Part 2 of the walking experiment tomorrow. Hopefully, if you did the first part of the experiment, you are enjoying yourself. If so, in the meantime, continue to become attuned to the place of motion in your sense of time happening as you walk. Remember, if someone said, “How long did it take you to walk that distance?” you’d be able to say something useful. How does that happen?
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9 October: A Review of Intentions
In these exercises, we’re playing with walking, to explore the Time aspect of walking. Time is co-opted by the King of Death, when we are unfamiliar with the reality of time. We are seeing if we can have a sense of time independent of our usual constructions about time.
I introduced two kinds of seeing in which the experience of time plays a part in our experience of ‘walking;’ and, in which the experience of motion plays a part in our experience of time. These facets of time are introductory level, and readily accessible, with a little practice.
Remember, my instruction for the experiments in walking began with a spirit of beginner’s mind, as I said: open, curious, and playful. I suggested you be aware, as you walk, of the movement of objects – both in external space (the bird flies from here to there), and in subjective space (the floor passes under my feet, in the way the telegraph poles pass by my car).
It’s remarkable that, co-ordinated with perceptions of changes in the body’s form – left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg; and more – they help tell us that all is well in the activity; that the walking is carrying our intentions forward. Consider how feedback would come from your body, if suddenly the ground turned to quicksand. The visual might play a small part in the change, but they would be in it. Think of dizziness, as an instance, too; how the movement of objects in the visual field provides part of the feedback.
With the exception of dreams, you can’t say “I am walking,” without these kinds of feedback loops providing characteristics of the sort that we usually connect to the phrase ‘I am walking.’ But, all this became absorbed into being in childhood, and lost to awareness – it becomes implicit – especially with the introduction of a mental ‘me’ (the captain) apparently doing the walking.
An important outcome of walking meditation is that one becomes familiar with the body-environment interaction, as one undivided process. It’s a doorway into experiencing dependent arising.
FURTHER EXPERIMENT
Now, when walking, notice what other distinctions are working, besides here/there, and subjective/external. See if there is something else, in the actual event of walking, that grounds the concept of time as a ‘passage from here to there.’ How does that happen? What about self/not self? Has that concept, too, unconsciously given you a feel for the meaning of the phrase ‘I am walking’? Explore it while walking.
Or, assuming that you agree that ‘time’ is the passage or movement from this to that location, what exactly is the role played by the concept of location in your experience of the time it takes to cross the room. And how many ‘locations’ are there between here and the other side of the room? How many of these locations participate in the feeling of the time it takes to get to the other side of the room? Do you mark the locations mentally, or not? Can you? Or, can you only say anything about the ‘passage across the room,’ retrospectively?
As the walking is happening, where is this event called walking, in terms of time? If you say, “In the present,” then when does that present change to a past? Do you see the change? Can you see the present drop away into a past? Doesn’t such an understanding need memory of some kind (but, not necessarily explicit memory)? So, does ‘now’ and ‘finished’ operate? Is the word ‘movement’ possible without some kind of memory giving feedback?
What exact experiences allow ‘from there’ and ‘to here’ to confirm time? What other distinctions are there, at work? I’m not inviting you to be an analyst. The idea is to contact actual walking, and to use the questions to ground yourself in the walking; so, don’t try too hard to find answers to the questions. Nevertheless, walk fully comprehending what is involved in calling some event ‘walking,’ even though much of it might be out of sight. The activity of walking may be ultimately ungraspable. It might be that you ask some of my questions and you notice that they don’t apply. If so, don’t assume there is no time. It may be that time operates at a level deeper than these questions can address. They are couched in polar terms. Does the actual experience have opposites in it?
You might want to experiment further. If you get the sense that time is in the fabric of your experience, after all, you might want to open up time some more, by letting more time come into the already present time. How?
You might experience time, again, walking across the kitchen with the jug, to your cup, and pouring your tea. But this time, experience it in smaller increments of time – put smaller experiences of time into the bigger passage of time, as you move from here to there. You can do this experiment walking up and down your hall on a rainy day. (This is a TSK exercise.)
Is there any limit to this creation of smaller increments? What happens if you find the limit? What is it like, right there? Let time become more full, via your own non-conceptual felt in-dwelling in time’s movement.
Now, can you get a feel for how mindfulness brings a way of conducting time? Try the experiments, and then imagine what it would be like if these distinctions weren’t at play; or if you were getting the opposite message. (An instance of this is when the car next to you at the traffic lights rolls back, and you suddenly feel as though you are going forward. Or, your train is stationary, but the one next to you moves. For a moment there is not knowing. This is time working.)
Some of you may wish to ask: ‘Which part of all the factors involved is ‘walking’? If it’s all of them, when do you, and can you, experience ‘all of them’ at once? It’s valid to say walking, but maybe ‘walking’ can’t be found anywhere in the factors.)
Just become familiar with the elements of ‘timing’ – that is time as it’s actually, non-verbally, going on in your field of awareness. Others you meet – a cat, a child, a neighbour, or a co-worker – you might notice that, with their approach, you can appreciate more that they are participating in time – experiencing and unfolding time, too, in their field of awareness. Whatever their level of mindful awareness, time is available for them, too.
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10 October: Shadow in the Spiritual Traditions
“There has been a tendency, at least in contemporary Western Buddhism, to conflate awakening with saintliness. The evidence on that is now conclusive—neither meditating, nor being on the path to awakening, nor having an awakening experience or two, nor being officially accredited as having attained enlightenment guarantees moral perfection.”
– Richard P Boyle. Realizing Awakened Consciousness: Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind
A digression here, because someone dear to me has raised an important matter. Upon seeing that some particular spiritual teacher “had his quirks,” this person questioned the value of their own efforts to help other people with their inner life, when “none of these spiritual folk really have it together.”
I know the feeling. But, quirks are one thing, abuse is another. Here are some thoughts on the issue, which I’ll give in three parts. Firstly, there is no perfect human. Then, spirituality is one of a number of lines of development. Then, back to what ‘awakening’ does give us.
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Kent: “Can I ask you about the shadow in spiritual teachers?”
C: Yes?
K: I remember you saying recently that everyone has their shadow – even the most advanced spiritual teachers. Can that be so? Really? It sounds too much to say that.”
C: Thanks for asking. Lovely. Let’s see…. Do you mind saying how this came up?
K: I was reading a review of a biography of a student of a famous spiritual teacher; and what I was reading about the teacher – only in this review, of course; so it’s sketchy – it didn’t square with what I’d heard and read elsewhere, from other sources about that same teacher. It seemed to me that the student was doing a whitewash.
“I’d decided, a couple of years ago, that this teacher couldn’t have understood the Dharma, if he did those things, and so I stopped investigating his teachings.”
C: “My first major disillusionment was when I heard about the disasters of Chogyam Trungpa’s teaching life. I, too, wondered why bother to continue with this practice. I rejected his teachings, at first. The trouble is, that if you reject the teacher altogether, you may miss some gems which could contribute to your development. Anyhow, at the time, I said to myself, it doesn’t matter how the teachers act, I will follow the thread of my own longing for truth.
“Later, I personally experienced the abusive narcissism of one of my own teachers, a world-famous teacher; but by then, I was wiser and I got out of there, as soon as I recognised the situation. I won’t accept it.”
K: Yet, here, in the student’s biography, he obviously thought that the sun shone out of his teacher’s derrière.
The author skipped all that shitty stuff, as though it just didn’t happen. Yet, I know, from really reliable sources that it did happen; and that it tore the community apart. Abuses of power, sexual exploitation of the vulnerable, and physical abuse. All this in a so-called ‘spiritual master’!
C: I’ve thought a lot about this, and I can only share the concepts that I have used to make sense of it. You did hear me rightly. There are examples in the ancient and modern Buddhist world of actions by ‘enlightened ones’ that we would find unacceptable in some way, today. It’s very complex territory. But to simplify, let’s keep it to modern times.
Let’s say that a teacher who has done good things, and has introduced people to very deep experiences of themselves – helped people with their deepest and most meaningful concerns in life – let’s say this person then acts in ways that are plainly harmful.
K: Yes. I heard of another the other day. It seems to happen in only some Buddhist schools.
C: No, it occurs in all; but is more prevalent in some schools, yes.
K: So, it’s disappointing, and makes me wonder about the whole spiritual arena. Is liberation possible?
C: Firstly, There’s a mistaken notion that liberation – or, enlightenment, if you like – means entry into some pure, clean, finally established for all time state of mind. There’s no evidence that this has ever been. It’s a wish. When one awakens (to the end of clinging), one is still a human being, and now you have a perspective and a way of being in the world which will greatly empower you to be present in your humanness. That means that ‘stuff’ still arises, but that you don’t get shaken by it, as you would previously.
K: It’s not over for good?
C: Not that I’ve seen. You have very pure states arise, where there is not a trace of stain to be found; but, then the human body with its history is still here – though the body is altered by awakening, nevertheless shadow stuff will continue to arise. However, now you are better equipped to work with it. It’s all workable (as Trungpa himself said. I like that phrase.)
To be continued…
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11 October: Spiritual Teachers Losing Their Way: Waking Up and Growing Up
Comment from Author: ‘Remorse’ fits best, when I think of the ways that my selfishness has hurt others. The feeling of remorse is for all my hurtful actions from gross to subtle. I express to those whom I have hurt – at any time, in my life – that I know that I did wrong, and I regret my actions which brought you pain. And, to amend the past, I undertake to live with present-moment recollection and compassion. And as well, I undertake to hold no grudge or blame for ways others have hurt me.
The deed is not well-done, which once done one rues;
where a tearful face and plaint are the outcome.
– Dhammapada, verse 67. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
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Dear reader, take heed: As you read the following dialogue, please remember it is addressing the specific bewilderment of Kent, and is not meant to directly address or assuage the pain and anger of the abused people who are implicit in this discussion. That is an important discussion to have, also.
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Christopher: “So, I was saying that it’s all workable. And, that enlightenment includes seeing that our habitual way of working with ‘stuff’ has a totally wrong basis. Our default way of reacting to selfishness is to indulged it, or to suppress it. Neither way takes you to the root of the matter. Once the root is seen in yourself, directly, then the real work begins – after enlightenment.”
Kent: “Oh, don’t tell me!”
C: “Because you thought awakening would end the work or will aspect? Or, that spiritual development was the whole answer?”
K: “Yes to all of those! The will aspect is such a trouble! Though, I’ve been getting the message, don’t worry.”
C: “I want to say that the will aspect changes when, with the turnabout; it more readily serves the bigger life. It changes from efforting to something with more love in it, more flow, and has much more of a feel as though you are simply living the will of the universe – no separation. Everything that is happening is the action of the whole.”
K: “Sounds delicious.”
C: “But, for now, let’s get back to your original thing. We are talking about your shock and dismay at the inconsistency of Dharma teachers breaking their precepts. To give something to your question: I have some comments, for you, directed to understanding just how that harmful behaviour can happen in a person of spiritual depth. I’ve said something about the on-going-ness of the work, but in thinking about squaring these two off – realization and harm-making, in the same person – here’s what I came to, in my study.
“To help me, I took concepts from the Integral community, which grew out of the work of Ken Wilber – several concepts actually, but I won’t have time to go into all of them, now. The relevant one, here, is Lines of Development. Wilber points out that research indicates that we grow as humans in many lines of development. These are different kinds of intelligence.”
K: “Such as?”
C: “I don’t remember his terms, now (it’s years since I read his work) but I can name some that are important for me: sexual intelligence, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, and logical intelligence. These are the most important kinds of developmental lines, to me. I think you could broadly say: there are intelligences associated with the head, heart and belly, and combinations of these.
“There are more: musical intelligence, for example. I think that people differ in bodily co-ordination intelligence, too – you know, some people are brilliant gymnasts. Others can’t put the top on a food jar, but they can write brilliantly, or sing. I suspect we could distinguish another intelligence which I’d call ‘interactional intelligence.’ Felt-sensing is a kind of intelligence. We might, in future, discern a ‘selfing-intelligence,’ also. (I don’t know what we’ll end up calling that.)
“But, I can only give my imprecise and filtered picture. It would be better to read Wilber’s work, which I can’t represent adequately. I only want to point to the principle, because it helps with our understanding.”
K: “And, these ‘lines’ develop differently?”
C: “They don’t develop at the same time, or at the same rate, and they aren’t separate, either. They interact, helping each other. And, their development can be distorted by traumatic experiences. On the other hand, the development of some might accelerated by difficult circumstances. It’s not a simple picture.”
K: “Right. So, and back to the abusive spiritual teacher?”
C: “The territory which meditation teachers learn best – the intelligence which they go deeply into; territory associated with words like soul, spirit, mind, and so on; the luminosity aspect of the human – this, too, is a line of development. In Buddhist terminology, there is a line of development we could call ‘the wisdom line’ – which involves understanding emptiness.
“I’m reminded that I met a man who had gone to study Zen in Japan, and he had a big awakening experience – satori. The roshi in the monastery thought it was great, and gave him a special certificate.”
K: “Your joking?!”
C: “Not at all. He paraded this Westerner before the Japanese monks, to incite them to work harder. Anyhow, my point, here, is this: When our friend was back in Australia, and was dropped back into entirely different situations, he found his enlightenment didn’t give him the skills he needed for dealing with daily life. That is, he found personal relationships, career, and the stresses of everyday life as difficult as they had always been. His satori was effective in the temple, but not in the office. He was devastated. He thought his life would change totally, that his stress would be gone in all situations. This point is related to the whole thing about bodies not being static, but bodies being the kinds of process they are interacting with the situations they are in.
“The point, though, wasn’t that his enlightenment was useless, but that he needed support to integrate the awakening into other growth areas in his life, other lines of development. At that stage, there was no readily accessible theory or practice on this.”
K: So, what I get is that, with the right kind of culture, the person’s realization will spread from the wisdom capacity into other areas of their intelligence in the world.
C: That’s right. And find fulfilment in interaction.
To be continued…
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12 October: More on Shadow in Spiritual Teachers
One must never stop learning, even if one were certain to die tomorrow. – Sakya Pandita (1182-1251)
Christopher: “So, back to your issue. Perhaps all teachers become teachers carrying unconscious, implicit motivations which haven’t been brought sufficiently into bodily awareness. Maybe it is an unrealistic expectation – an ideal, and not about humans – to expect otherwise. For instance, in my own case, I’ve had to encounter how my wish to be a teacher had elements in it of compensation for my sense of inner deficiency, due to my particular karmic inheritance. I wasn’t aware of that, at first.
The deficiency hadn’t shown up fully on my meditation cushion. To some extent I was avoiding it, using meditation to sit on it. The term ‘spiritual by-passing’ refers to this use of meditation to skip over the emotional layers of consciousness. (The term was coined by psychologist John Welwood; and, in the Focusing world, Peter Campbell and Edwin McMahon came up with the term ‘process skipping,’ which I think is a helpful term, too.)”
Kent: “How’d you deal with it?”
C: “Primarily with psychotherapy, Focusing partnerships, Voice Dialogue – all practiced alongside consistent mindfulness and meditation; and a life of vows. And, talking to confidantes. Being married to an astute, caring partner – that helped. And, I was in the Diamond Essence work for more than a decade – that was invaluable, because their work gives very thorough attention to clarification of the personality.
“So, there’s no escaping the humiliation. That’s the nature of it. Basically, you have to become familiar with your specific shadow. And, in the end, it all comes down to becoming vulnerable, seeing into your narcissistic inclinations. The words from my tradition – relinquishment and renunciation – are valuable values.
“The Integral community have saying: there’s waking up, and there’s growing up. To me, these are like the vertical and horizontal axes of purification. You need both to be spacious and to be of optimal benefit in this conflict-torn world. You need both to have vast insight. It could be that many of the abusing teachers have developed penetrative insight only.”
K: “So, you’re saying that realizing emptiness doesn’t solve everything.”
C: “The point is, there’s no impersonal dimension (emptiness) without personal life. Not two, yet not one.”
K: It’s not the first time that I’ve heard it, but it still disturbs me. I came to mindful-awareness training, looking for the one key.”
C: “There is this core matter, yes; but it is found in non-separation from birth-and-death. (Which reminds me, I promised to talk about the case of Pai-chang’s Fox, didn’t I? I should do that soon.)
“This non-evasion of birth and death is another reason why the development of the dwelling places of great love, great compassion, great joy and great equanimity are so important. I take scholar Richard Gombrich’s suggestion that these were more important in the historical Buddha’s practice than is generally recognized.
“On the lines of development thing: I should add that according to Wilber, the research shows that people who meditate and are mindful do learn more quickly in their other lines of development, in case that is a consolation to you. Focusing is a skill that applies in all lines of development, too.”
K: “Why do they have this effect, do you think?”
C: “I don’t know what the Integral people would say, but I think it’s because Presence is basic to all intelligence. If you don’t have presence in a line of development, the luminosity inherent in that intelligence can’t unfold its gifts. It can’t carry forward optimally. Presence makes the implicit possibilities more readily available.”
K: “And, mindfulness and meditation develop presence.”
C: “Also called samādhi-power. But, we’re saying that this is not the whole story – though it is a powerful part of the total culture. So, in summary: you still have to do the work of developing each of your major areas of intelligence, if you want your spiritual depth to have breadth as well.
“I knew a very senior teacher – now passed. He was an old-school type, in the first generation of Western teachers, and he had great depth. However, his female students said he had patriarchal attitudes (which wasn’t surprising, given his generation) and, recognizing that there was something in what they said, he went to therapy late in life. What integrity! I get teary thinking of him.
“Another teacher I knew said publicly that sexual relations with any student was completely out of the question, and he charged us with shouting it publicly if we ever heard anything. On the other hand, I’ve heard of several cases of spiritual teachers who sexually exploited students, and, despite being confronted by the broader Buddhist community, they refused to examine themselves.
“Generally, though, I’d say that an understanding of these issues is definitely growing in Western Buddhist communities, and that in the long run the practice lineages will change to ensure that teacher training helps the process of integration of the spiritual intelligence with other lines of development – in both students and teachers. And, already some communities have developed safeguards regarding sexual ethics.
Thorough teacher training would help greatly, but I don’t know how a uniform quality across the Western Buddhist world can come about. It’s a dog’s breakfast, around here. Yet, a good model for future teacher training – thanks to Jack Kornfield – is the Spirit Rock training.”
K: “I have lots more questions, but maybe that’s enough for now. Thanks.”
C: “There’s so much more to say. I thank you for sharing your feelings about this. The community benefits from our talking openly; and not hushing things up. Which, painful to say, happens in the Buddhist world, too. Lineage-holders get afraid of the damage to the Dharma. But I think the suppression is more damaging – and especially to those seduced and exploited.
“But, I have to bring this to a close, too, don’t I? Thanks, Kent.”
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13 October: The Dying of the Nikāya Buddha
When the flourishing one, the Nikāya Buddha, dies, he is surrounded by his close followers. After the process is completed, Brahma Sahampati utters this verse:
‘All beings in the world, all bodies must break up:
Even the Teacher, peerless in the human world,
The mighty Lord and perfect Buddha has passed away.’
And Sakka, whom we’ve met, ruler of the devas, he says this verse:
‘Impermanent are compounded things, prone to rise and fall,
Having risen, they’re destroyed, their passing is truest bliss.’
As the Nikāya Buddha is dying, he passes through varying degrees of inwardness. He enters meditative states of deep stillness and concentration. He passes into the deepest states of meditative absorption, then returns to the first stage, and then goes back inward a few stages, before dying.
That is, he goes by degrees from sensory awareness to pure cessation (in the cessation of perception and feeling), then he passes back again, from that cessation to sensory awareness. Then he again enters several levels of spacious awareness, though not as far as the first time.
The states are about increasing dimensions of non-identification with phenomena, starting with the body, naturally.
His cousins Anuruddha and Ānanda are by his side. Anuruddha is well attuned to the meditative states that are occurring. After the death is completed he speaks this verse:
‘No breathing in and out – just with steadfast heart
The Sage who’s free from lust has passed away to peace.
With mind unshaken he endured all pains:
By Nibbāna the Illumined’s mind is freed.’
Mindfulness of breathing, too, drops out of sight. Not even the breath is there to support one’s steady inwardness. His steadiness is long-founded upon insight and calm. “No breathing in and out – just with steadfast heart.”
That’s so beautiful. This is a way to go. And Ānanda then says his verse:
Terrible was the quaking, men’s hair stood on end,
When the all-accomplished Buddha passed away.’
(The verses are translated by Maurice Walshe, from The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikāya. (pp. 271-272).)
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14 October: The Wise Cook Takes Note
I’ve just spent two hours writing something, only to realize that I need to contemplate the theme more closely. So, with fatigue upon me, and an early morning appointment, what will I offer you, if I am to go more deeply into the text which was my subject? My solution is to share the text with you, and you might, if you wish, familiarize yourself with it, before I make comment on it tomorrow. It’s a subtle one, reflecting unskilful mindfulness and skilful mindfulness. Not all mindfulness is liberating.
Here’s Thanissaro’s version of the sutta. (SN 47.8) Bhikkhu Bodhi calls it The Cook. The word (nimitta) which Thanissaro translates as ‘theme,’ Bodhi translates as ‘sign.’ So, if you want to understand what Thanissaro means by ‘theme,’ you might try ‘sign.’ The sutta:
Suppose that there is a foolish, inexperienced, unskilful cook who has presented a king or a king’s minister with various kinds of curry: mainly sour, mainly bitter, mainly peppery, mainly sweet, alkaline or non-alkaline, salty or non-salty. He does not take note of [lit: pick up on the theme of] his master, thinking, ‘Today my master likes this curry, or he reaches out for that curry, or he takes a lot of this curry, or he praises that curry’… As a result, he is not rewarded with clothing or wages or gifts. Why is that? Because the foolish, inexperienced, unskilful cook does not pick up on the theme of his own master.
In the same way, there are cases where a foolish, inexperienced, unskilful monk remains focused on the body in & of itself — ardent, alert, & mindful — putting aside greed & distress with reference to the world. As he remains thus focused on the body in & of itself, his mind does not become concentrated, his defilements [Commentary: the five Hindrances] are not abandoned. He does not take note of that fact [does not pick up on that theme]. He remains focused on feelings in & of themselves… the mind in & of itself… mental qualities in & of themselves — ardent, alert, & mindful — putting aside greed & distress with reference to the world. As he remains thus focused on mental qualities in & of themselves, his mind does not become concentrated, his defilements are not abandoned. He does not take note of that fact. As a result, he is not rewarded with a pleasant abiding here & now, nor with mindfulness & alertness. Why is that? Because the foolish, inexperienced, unskilful monk does not take note of his own mind [does not pick up on the theme of his own mind].
Now suppose that there is a wise, experienced, skilful cook who has presented a king or a king’s minister with various kinds of curry… He takes note of his master, thinking, ‘Today my master likes this curry, or he reaches out for that curry, or he takes a lot of this curry or he praises that curry’… As a result, he is rewarded with clothing, wages, & gifts. Why is that? Because the wise, experienced, skilful cook picks up on the theme of his own master.
In the same way, there are cases where a wise, experienced, skilful monk remains focused on the body in & of itself… feelings in & of themselves… the mind in & of itself… mental qualities in & of themselves — ardent, alert, & mindful — putting aside greed & distress with reference to the world. As he remains thus focused on mental qualities in & of themselves, his mind becomes concentrated, his defilements are abandoned. He takes note of that fact. As a result, he is rewarded with a pleasant abiding here & now, together with mindfulness & alertness. Why is that? Because the wise, experienced, skilful monk picks up on the theme of his own mind.
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15 October: Inner Guidance
Caring attention is the deathless; inattention is death.
The attentive do not die; the inattentive are as though dead.
– Dhammapada, verse 21. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
I was studying some suttas with friends, and I found delight in the following distinction, from a sutta called (by Bhikkhu Bodhi) The Cook.
As I read it, it says this: an experienced, skilful, spiritual practitioner, in her practice of the four placements of mindfulness, picks up on the changes that come about through her mindful attunement to her process. It is important this sutta says, to pick up on the ways the practice changes us. It’s important in the Nikāya Budda’s way, to be intimate with what our knowing does in us.
Remember the four placements of mindfulness? (They are more commonly called the four foundations of mindfulness.) These four placements of attention in one’s sentient processes are:
– the sentient body in and of itself,
– the sentience of feeling-tones in and of themselves (pleasant, unpleasant, and neither),
– the sentience of mind-states in and of themselves, and
– the dynamics of the organization of the first three (of one’s body, one’s feeling-tones, and one’s mind-sates), in and of themselves.
There is the raw practice of mindfulness, and there’s the refined practice, which includes appreciation of how the practice changes you. This refinement is recollection. One calls on one’s capacity to abide there a while, and to experience more deeply the changes that come about with the practice of mindfulness. One amplifies the feedback opportunity.
As a result of this taking cognizance of the changes brought about by present-moment awareness, the practitioner experiences a pleasant in-dwelling here and now, with alertness and further mindfulness (as is suggested in the Mindfulness Sutta, the Satipaṭṭhānasutta).
Thanissaro Bhikkhu translates the concept this way: the “wise, experienced, skilful monk picks up on the theme of his own mind.” Another (common) translation of ‘nimitta’ is ‘sign,’ which is not incorrect; but, to me, it tends to suggest something static. The Pali-English Dictionary defines nimitta as: sign, omen, portent, prognostication. That’s quite powerful, really.
In other words, the changes have a message for the practitioner, and if the practitioner pays careful attention to the changes, these changes will guide one, will point the way forward. It is one of the greatest joys, to discover that there is inner guidance. The changes wis you to wis-dom. (That’s truly a transitive verb, even if it is obsolete. A good scrabble word!)
The changes guide you, you the contemplative, to wisdom; which is not a static state, but an on-going wis-dom, an on-going guidance from within.
So, you can see that Thanissaro’s choice of ‘themes’ gives us a feel of: knowing the meaning of the changes (in terms of the ‘direction’ of the practice). This is indicated, in the sutta, by the cook’s attention to the master. So, the wise, experienced, skilful mindfulness practitioner picks up on the optimising thrust within his own processes.
Now, it’s a great topic, but not for today, to ask, ‘Why does that inevitably bring a pleasant in-dwelling here and now?” There is a reason, and it has nothing to do with whether you like the process or not. It has to do with the internal consistency of the liberating process.
The process is on our side. But, we have to ken it – that is, have to make that optimising thrust known to ourselves. This is what that process of picking up on the changes does.
The Nikāya Buddha contrasts this skilful contemplative with someone who has the changes, just the same, as a result of their practice of mindfulness, but she doesn’t find a pleasant in-dwelling; doesn’t find that she becomes concentrated, nor that her defences – sensory craving, ill-will, inertia, restlessness, and debilitating doubt – diminish. Why? The text says that it’s simply that one who is unskilled doesn’t take note of the changes.
Both the skilled contemplative and the unskilled contemplative: remain focused on the body in & of itself — ardent, alert, & mindful — putting aside greed & distress with reference to the world. However, not taking guidance from the changes, the ill-trained person doesn’t experience a pleasant abiding here and now; and the changes don’t contribute to the continuance of mindfulness (that is, of present-moment recollection).
One aspect of this is that if she doesn’t find a pleasant in-dwelling in the here and now, she won’t be inclined to continue with the practice mindfulness or meditation.
So, if we attend to our own present-moment processes with a particular kind of care (one which includes recollecting our deepest values) we will have changes in response to the changes. The act of noting the changes is more than positive – it boosts the process, and naturally slants and inclines the contemplative toward nibbāna.
(This recollective aspect is the single most distinguishing theme of the mindfulness conveyed in the Nikayas, distinguishing it from the ‘bare attention’ kind of mindfulness, prevalent in modern therapeutic mindfulness.)
This conscious surfing of the natural changes brought about by mindfulness, increases alert, mindful awareness, and brings a feeling of well-being. A good beginner’s practice for this kind of noting is Rick Hanson’s Taking in the Good.
The practitioner who delights in caring awareness,
or finds that they fear a lack of care,
moves forward like a fire, burning fetters subtle and gross.
– Dhammapada, verse 31. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
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