A fictional conversation:
Melissa: I’ve been reading the Bāhiya sutta. And, I love where the Buddha says: “So, Bāhiya, here’s how you should practice. In the seen, heard, (intimately) sensed, and cognized, there must be only the seen, heard, sensed, and cognized. Just practice this, Bāhiya.”
Christopher: This could also be translated positively, too, of course, as: “The seen (and so on) must be enough.” Be careful with this passage, though; it is easily misunderstood.
M: How so?
C: When I first studied this sutta, I used to put the emphasis on experiencing the senses as they really are, in themselves. A passage from the Kālakarāma sutta will help put it in perspective, though. There, the Nikāya Buddha says: “Practitioners, when seeing, a Tathāgata does not conceive of a seen; he does not conceive of an unseen; he does not conceive of a ‘possible-to-see’; and, he does not conceive of a seer.” And, likewise for the other five sense-modalities.
Therefore, what the Nikāya Buddha is saying, in the famous Bāhiya passage, is something like this (my words): “Beware of reifying. That is, don’t make ‘things‘ out of what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and cognize. They are interactional. So, be aware of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and cognizing, he says; but don’t attribute to the experience a fixed ‘something’ seen, heard, smelt, tasted, touched, or cognized.”
“And, don’t go the other way,” he says, “and conceive of something not-experienced; nor think of something that it is possible to experience, in what you are seeing now. Don’t, also, conceive of an experiencer – a seer, hearer, smeller, taster, toucher, or thinker; nor its opposite, a something called ‘not-self.’ In short, don’t conceive the seer-seen distinction as anything more than a conventional means of speaking.”
M: I love it. It’s exciting.
C: However, he is not saying that there is a something there to be experienced free of our consciousness.
M: That’s the part that interests me. Can we have a pure sensory experience?
C: I heard someone say, “Drop down beneath your conceptualisations and experience the sound as it really is.” But, this is falling into exactly the practice that the Nikāya Buddha is suggests we not do; that is, when we think that there is a pure way to experience the sound, a way which gives us what is actually there, then this very aspiration is based on conceiving of a ‘heard.’ The Nikāya Buddha’s saying, give up such efforting.
M: What I’m having difficulty with is that: with your approach, it seems to me, I can’t, really, completely, get what’s life is, then. It seems we have to accept living in our conceptualised world. Like, if we are conscious of the whole of life, for example, then we are already – by the nature of being conscious – thinking the whole.
C: We are ‘kinding’ it, yes. Having a ‘kind’ of experience. We’re (almost) always ‘kinding.’ (I know there are some other states, but we’re talking about waking consciousness, right now.)
M: So, the mind’s concept of wholeness is imposing something. I know you agree, because that’s what you said, yesterday. I’ve been contemplating that.
C: I appreciate the difficulty. Although, ‘imposing’ isn’t something we need do. We can use concepts more fluidly, flexibly, like writing on water.
So, if there is a way to interact with the un-shaped kind of reality – what Gendlin calls the ‘big life process’ or ‘the responsive order’ – we do that by an appropriate kind of approach.
M: Appropriate process. In the zig-zag, between the big process and our concepts, right?
C: That’s right. So now, for a little while, let’s talk more precisely about how we experience that big life-process, in waking states – the big reality with which our concepts are interacting.
M: Which we experience through hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and cognizing.
C: Right. We can bring our concepts to the non-conceptual – as long as we don’t fixate, or grasp, or take our cognizing too seriously – we can then draw out from the implicit dynamic wholeness many kinds of experience, endlessly, in different ways.
M: But, they’ll all be the six, right?
C: Yes, but experienced differently.
M You see, I’m not yet deeply confident that there is an implicit wholeness, or non-conceptual something.
C: We’ll get there. We’re going into this. One thing pointing to the hidden wholeness is, when you write a line of poetry…
Say I have an experience, as I am out walking, that gives me these lines: “Wood-chopping nearby./Closing my collar to the wind…” but my poem is incomplete.
I re-invite the experience, in my body, and feel the whole pattern – a dynamic pattern of being – and, there’s a vague sense of something comes, as I hold the memory of that moment. I pay attention to the vague something, and soon the words come: “Red-wattle bird screech.”
But, no. That doesn’t fit the feel of this. So, I go back to the feel of the whole, and soon another sentence comes: “silence after the wattle-bird.” That’s closer, but not quite right. Continuing in this way, I end up with:
Silence after a wattle-bird:
wood-chopping nearby,
I close my collar to the wind.
Can you see how, in the writing, my body is participating in something much bigger than the concepts? This is the kind of thing that Gendlin points to.
Part 2 to come…