Month: September 2016

Some recent questions by email from Kalyanamati prompted this attempt to summarise four weeks of a recent course, on the theme of Awareness & Śunyatā.  Hopefully it answers his questions too!  I also wanted to put in the public domain some original thinking about the relationship between Awareness and Śunyatā, which I think has far-reaching usefulness for practitioners.

Dharmachari Subhuti has come up with the term ‘transcendental object’, to express that which is configured as a worthy focus or goal of Shraddha.  This is a very helpful idea, as it crystallises the need our faith has to explore and prefigure what our faith is in.  The term ‘transcendental object’ is a thus a kind of shorthand or metaphor for the as yet poorly perceived end of one’s longing.  For visualisers who respond to Tibetan iconography, such an object could be a bodhisattva visualised in effective sādhana.  For me it is much better represented by the process and nature of music – for example, Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, or John Sheppard’s ‘In manus tuas’ (all three versions, God bless him!).  Almost incidentally, the very need for the term reminds us we have no choice but to express the non-conceptual goal of Buddhist practice metaphorically, that goal which is so deeply longed for but which minds not versed in the formless realms are not yet subtle enough to rest upon.

Taking this further, we might also say that the transcendental object is always śunyatā, or even that śunyatā is the ultimate transcendental object.  It is śunyatā which ‘shines through’ a bodhisattva, or an ordinary person or a wall…  Śunyatā is however apprehensible more directly if your meditation is deep and stable, whilst still being some kind of subtle object.  There is of course a growing stabilisation of such experiences, but this is not the same as the increasingly thoroughgoing appreciation of śunyatā expressed in such progressions as the Four Śunyatās.  Śunyatā is the object ‘standing in’ for the Unconditioned, until such time as you are ready for that, though it seems increasingly that it is precisely the real thing.

The corollary of all this talk of objects, however subtle, is of course some kind of subject.  Mahayana philosophising tends toward rejoicing in śunyatā as object (as the wish-fulfilling jewel, and so forth), without being quite so enthusiastic about Awareness, its subject-corollary.  As apprehension of śunyatā grows, the subject as Awareness also becomes clearer, more integrated, less dependent on gross conditionality.  One swims in the formless realms as one’s natural home.  The True Nature teachings, while being understood in specific ways in different recensions, all point to this transcendental subject, which provides what seems to be a continuity of Awareness which holds the space of phenomena.  Awareness and Śunyatā are two sides of the same coin, no longer poles apart, but now close.

In order to be free, we must first become what we really are.  We must increasingly reside in and trust our True Nature, which is open, blissful and radiant.  This is not some form of ‘identifying with’ – that language belongs to the tortured conceptual self.  We actually become whole, arrive at something we could not have imagined being so blessed and so available.  We fully allow the ground of our being, and it is completely satisfying.  I mean the word ‘completely’ quite literally.  How can we become enlightened if we are initially divided from ourselves?  Ordinary dividedness leads to the suffering of a stream of self-referential emotions.  Making the transition to our True Nature gives rise to radiant energies, a subset of which are the brahmaviharas (I won’t sully them with the name ‘emotions’; they are much more wholesome than those things).  We feel fully ourselves, and that we have realised what previously was the far object of our Faith.  Śunyatā becomes a constant subtle presence; from the first stirrings before we wake, to our last attentions before we drift off at night.  All our activity flows steadily and joyfully out of it.

Because of the relative stability and peacefulness of this state, and its relative freedom from conditions, one can feel that one has ‘arrived’.  One certainly would be happy to be like this indefinitely.  One may even believe one’s-self to be enlightened.  Indeed, there is confusion in contemporary Buddhist texts about this phase, in which it is sometimes taken to be thus.  It is clear that one is a conduit for tremendous energy, which ‘feels like’ it comes from the Unconditioned.  It is an energy of liberation, perhaps so strong from having been so pent up by the horrid contortions of delusion previously.  Insofar as there is liberation, there is also assimilation, and a new configuration of being.  Once the energy is fully freed, and the re-configuring is mostly complete, energies quieten and give way to Equanimity, and a new phase beckons.  This new phase centres around the growing appreciation of nirōdha and karmic inactivity, leading to nibbāna, and how to live from there – all of this far more tricksy than the śunyatā phase.

I cannot imagine how one would consider moving on from one’s True Nature – it is effectively incomprehensible that one might choose to.  Chuck away the wish-fulfilling jewel, now you have found it?  Are you nuts?  Progression is something that happens to you, once you are sufficiently re-configured.  It might be said to follow on from the ripening into the non-difference of Samsāra and Nibbāna…  This means in practice that everything is here, fully present, and you no longer wish any sort of escape from any detail of this place.  This cannot be made to happen, though no doubt one’s points of resistance are being probed and met, probably meditatively.  One does even this trusting that all will be well, that the outcome will be just more presence, and so it is…  However, the illusion of the continuity of Awareness, the longing to be, is deeply bound up with the roots of suffering – while you attend to the latter, you are quite unwittingly also undermining the former.  In all this loveliness, we foreshadow the acceptance of our own death.

Continuity of Mindfulness is a useful baseline for the serious pursuit of the ending of dukkha, which is nibbāna.  I just want to note down a few points that arose in a recent conversation with friend Tejamitra about the common obstacles to its achievement, so as to provide some guidance to those seeking its establishment.

Mindfulness is intermittent for a number of reasons. This can be to do with wrong views about both the kind of effort involved, and the kind of attention.  The wrong kind of both is apparent in the rather exclusive concentration which grasps at a particular and doesn’t let it go – it is artificially narrow and quite likely to result in strain.  The organism cannot do this for very long, and will begin to associate mindfulness with aversion.  The right kind of awareness is rather like the peripheral attentiveness when you are enjoying reading a book, or on a proper walk in the country.  You are aware of the setup of the body, and something of the environment around you, even though your cognitive activity is crystallised around your reading matter, or on putting one foot in front of the other.  There is always a lot of which we are aware that doesn’t give rise to conscious and verbal cognition.  If we are unmindful, that is ignored and discounted.  If we apply the wrong kind of narrow effort, we only see the book and associated mind-activity.  If we are mindful, we have a continuous apprehension of our body and environment, enough to be getting on with.  The effort, such as it is, is in not going to sleep with regard to that, in resting the gentle hand of attention upon its shoulder, and touching upon it, as opposed to grasping at it.  Phenomena manifest quite naturally from their own side, so to speak, and you don’t have to make some special effort for mindfulness to be naturally and easily established.  It can then become clear that something we are giving that extra concentrated attention (such as the book) to is a sub-activity within the sphere of our mindfulness, but is in itself neither here nor there as regards what mindfulness actually is.

Mindfulness is not therefore cognitive omniscience.  Omniscience is nonsense (which facts would count?), and the cognition of much of what is going on in the environment is not relevant to the ending of suffering.  So how is mindfulness continually relevant to that end?  The Mahasatipatthana Sutta is the great teaching on mindfulness, and it begins with the body.  The body is continuously available, and what’s more is a great sensitive antenna for our relationship with Reality.  The dukkha of which the releasing is nibbāna is expressed directly in the immediate life of the body.  One can without much difficulty express the Path in terms of turning toward and releasing the dukkha that is found there.  By remaining mindful, we meet what arises at source, and take responsibility before it flowers into unhelpful speech and actions.  We can develop confidence in self-reliance, in being with our experience rather than running from it.  We become nourished by the intimacy of it, and cease our anxiety and fretting.  We pacify experiences of dukkha on their own ground, and break the cycle of suffering.  We thereby experience increasingly liberated states of mind and being.  I can say more in future about some of the details of this function of mindfulness, but have sketched out here the way in which mindfulness is often broken by our unwillingness to be with ourselves.

It is worth appreciating that one should be wary of any culture, spiritual or otherwise, which believes that certain experiences (in this case, difficult ones…) should primarily be mediated by someone else, and that you are insufficient to exercise this compassion for yourselves.  Actually one person cannot be fixed by another – no-one else can feel anything on your behalf, and no-one else can hand the insight that you need over to you ready-made.  It is almost taboo in this day and age to say that the Buddha counselled self-reliance; but without it we are left with magic and devotion, and all the consequent hazards of projection.  It is of the nature of awareness to meet and investigate dukkha compassionately (rather than skittering away from it), and by so doing arrive at freedom.  Yes, one often fails to do this as well as one might want to initially; but don’t settle for sympathy & sharing instead as all that is possible.  Serious practice requires a special toughness to swim against the usual habit of running from one’s experience, along with the requisite profound sensitivity to it.  One sets one’s faith on’Yes, I can do this!’, while remaining tender, even ironic, about the ongoing humiliation of practice.  Indeed, if sympathy is all that is offered as Dhamma, it can amount to misdirection.  Kisa Gotami became Enlightened, not because of the Buddha’s sympathy, but because alongside her he directed her to the heart of her suffering.  She was willing in the end to go that far in order to be free.  If you too are willing, you too have the motive for the establishment of mindfulness.