Two nights back I walked some people through a contemplation of present-moment experience. I suggested a way they could have direct contact with their present-moment experiences, relying on an openness that would ground them in their bodily presence throughout the exercise. Then we zig-zagged between this present-moment openness and a series of perspectives.

Firstly, we held up the word ‘change’, to present-moment experience. Then, in order, we presented these words: ‘movement’; ‘arising’ (presenting/appearing); ‘ceasing’ (dissolving/fading); ‘arising and ceasing together’; and, lastly, ‘no arising, no ceasing.’

By this time the mind is very, very quiet, and collected in its presence. I could feel their strong presence in the room. Later when we talked about it, it was clear that in some of us, this presence felt luminous, centred in the heart, and connected to all and everything.

Now, the language that I have used to set this up can be challenged philosophically, but I don’t want to defend it just now. I’ll ask instead that my reader indulge us a little. The finer points will be explored later.

My present point is this. What came into view was a kind of experience where it can be said that there was a suspension of the usual elaborations of experience. In the light of this cessation, one genuinely cannot identify with one’s personality. What could be reborn, then? Only identifications can be reborn. (Remember Guenther’s ‘fictions’?)

A (woman) practitioner is recorded in the Khuddaka Nikāya as saying: “When freedom from old age is found, what use have you for pleasures that quickly grow old? All lives, everywhere, are caught by death and illness. This is freedom from old age, this is freedom from death, this is the state without old age and death, without sorrow, without enmity, without obstacle, without disturbance, without fear, without pain. This state without death has been attained by many: even today it may be attained.” (Therigatha, 511-513. Translated by Rune E.A. Johansson.)

In a sutta on the destruction of craving, the Nikāya Buddha (in the classic authoritative style of ancient India) runs a set of checking questions by his students. The point of these questions – or, how I use these questions – is to get the student to check back with the experience of the luminous, open heart. So, imagine that each of them was answered after a pause in which they resonated the question against the freedom that they had awakened. ‘This way’ is not an abstraction. They have it right there:

“Now, Practitioners, knowing and seeing in this way, would you chase after the past, thinking, ‘Were we in the past? Were we not? What were we? How were we in the past? Having been what, what did we become back then?”

“No, Bhante.” (= Venerable Sir.)

“Practitioners, knowing and seeing in this way, would you run after the future, thinking, ‘Will we be in the future? Will we not be? What will we be? How will we be in the future? Having been what, what will we become in the future’?”

“No, Bhante.”

“Practitioners, knowing and seeing in this way, would you be inwardly perplexed about the immediate present, thinking, ‘Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where is it going?'”

“No, Bhante.”

“Practitioners, knowing and seeing in this way, would you speak thus: ‘The teacher is respected by us. We speak as we do out of respect for the teacher’?”

“No, Bhante.”

“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you speak thus: ‘A recluse says this, and we speak thus at the bidding of the recluse’?”

“No, Bhante.”

“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you dedicate yourself to another teacher?”

“No, Bhante.”

“Knowing and seeing in this way, would you fall back on the observances, the tumultuous debates, and auspicious signs of ordinary recluses and brahmins, taking them as the essence of the matter?”

“No, Bhante.”

“Is it that you speak only of what you have known, seen, and understood for yourselves?”

“Yes, Bhante.”

“Good, Practitioners. So you have been guided by me in this truth, which is visible here and now, timeless, inviting inquiry, carrying forward, to be experienced by the wise for themselves.”

Checking Questions from The Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving (MN38) – Translated by Christopher J. Ash