• Introduction
Life is complex and confusing. We are constantly assessing and re-assessing everything, looking for solutions. The Path of the Dhamma as a journey to a goal can look like it is a simple answer to that need. In our longing for simplicity we can be tempted to think that we in some sense are going to travel that Path in some sense, and arrive relatively unscathed. We can also instinctively believe that we ought to understand both the Goal and the Path in terms of what we are now.
The Buddha only promised that he could bring an end to dukkha – not that anything we currently hold dear might survive that process. Vipassana involves a transformation of both the ‘we’ and the ‘what we must do’; a thorough re-configuration of our relationship to karmic activity in order to arrive at the goal. A simplistic approach to the Dhamma as a Path might leave us scratching our heads as the next day dawns.
• Multi-dimensional practice
I have looked at the fundamental wrong view of Religious Universalism, and the ‘Everything is Practice=Nothing is Practice’ view that commonly arises in dependence upon it. As a rejection of a ritualistic or mechanical approach to practice it is quite extreme and mistaken, going as it does from a literalism about effects to a blinded holding to emptiness. I have argued previously how this view frequently lives alongside a common but mistaken re-casting of Pratitya Samuttpada [PS] in terms of twentieth-century scientific notions of causality, when PS is in fact fundamentally different. I have offered instead a model of consequentiality that might be familiar from the statistical (and not causal) approach to the half-lives of radioactive substances, which restores the value and particularity of Buddhist practices.
The Buddha often approaches the challenges of transformation on many fronts at once. These fronts will often cut across body, speech and mind – either explicitly as in the Eight-fold Path, or implicitly, as in the Five Spiritual Faculties. It is not neat and tidy, and there are not any magic keys to be turned just once. You may have realised that WE are not neat and tidy beings either.
Not only this – but practice is often layered, with the layers not being equal in their scope or significance. The elements of the three-fold Path of ethics, meditation and wisdom are broadly sequential, as are those in Listening, Reflecting and Meditating. Ethics is not enough by itself, and has a different scope to meditation, for which it provides a stable basis. If you do not act skilfully, the ensuing angst makes it difficult to have a steady enough mind to investigate the actor. The attempt to turn the Path into ethics-only, or even mindfulness-only, confuses scope with use. For example, we can in principle be mindful of many things – but the use of wisdom is to pinpoint, for the purposes of awakening, what it is most useful to be mindful OF. We can apply ethics to almost anything, but that will not awaken us, nor does our use of ethics need to be that grand. Meditation shows us when our ethical practice is adequate for the purposes of awakening. Interestingly, the correct use is not shown from within the layer, but from the one beyond it.
So we have this picture of useful consequentiality, in which we proceed on a number of fronts at once, and within which we shift gears between layers of practice which do not necessarily correspond or overlap i.e. they have different scopes and uses. Add in the granular notion of lifestyle as explored in a previous post, and we have a useful and organic picture of how we can practice as Buddhists.
• Why is this multi-practice required?
Untidy as it is, we had best proceed thus because it is based in the reality of the human personality in ignorance. As an approach it protects against certain risks, but it is also necessary of itself. I shall explore these two aspects in tandem.
Human beings tend to be impatient and lazy, which makes them also rubbish at transitions, during which they become twitchy and unmindful. The quick fix and the short cut, and all that. If we can simplify things down to one view or approach, and make that a relatively effortless one, most people will likely be all over it. We tend to be one-legged and to simplify, to a fault. It then becomes very hard to see the limitations of what we are doing, as we don’t know what we don’t know (or even THAT we don’t know), because we have given ourselves a very limited schema for assessing what our deficit(s) might be.
• The consequences of anatta
Even if we are only managing it as a working view, anatta implies that we are not a single unitary entity, and therefore our feeling that we are unitary needs to be questioned. The Buddha says that we can be more accurately described as a dynamic bundle of six sense-bases, or more statically as five grasping skandhas of grasping. All of these are inter-dependent elements which come and go, and none of them is fundamental. Our emotional lives, our thought-constructs, our mortal physicality, and so on, are bundled together – so many different modalities in one. The multi-modal practice of the Dharma not only addresses this, but encourages us to unify these different limbs or expressions of the personality. Clinging, for example, has fairly obvious emotional aspects, but deep roots too in the somatic, and connects too with our mortality. It is much conditioned by our history, and is generally protective of the view of continuous self in its nature. So it needs addressing in all these dimensions, and not just in one of them.
A substantial risk if we only address an issue in one way is that our ignorance hides out safely in all the others. I would say that the likelihood of this is 100%. You have to appreciate the parallels and equivalences across the different modes of the personality to know whether something has really changed. The self of ignorance is a shape-shifter, and will make a home of any basis offered or left unexamined, and even manage to trumpet it as progress. You have to do lots of ‘contrast & compare’ to become skilled at assessing progress, and meanwhile a mentor is essential in this. They can see for example that you are over-dependent on cognition, as they no longer take this as a basis for realisation, and know that it is not fundamental.
• Portrait & Landscape
The skill and necessity of triangulation is very helpful and enables surer progress, whilst those who want a simple fence to jump will struggle to do so on their one leg. The former approach bears in mind the reality of anatta in the personality, and aims at relinquishing clinging everywhere. The latter becomes increasingly artificial and constricting, even if it is initially more attractive and communicable.
A way of describing this process of triangulation is by means of the simile of shifting between Portrait and Landscape modes on your camera. In portrait mode you are close up, with much excluded by your particular focus. In landscape mode, you have your most hands-off and panoramic view of the whole of the personality process (or at least, what you can manage to this point).
If you have portrait view only of anxious self-clinging, you may well become wrapped up and unmindful, lost in signs. If alternatively landscape view is well-established, you may naturally focus in on particular aspects of experience as-and-when, BUT the sampajañña context is NOT lost, and wisdom is obtained thereby. Landscape view doesn’t offer the everyday benefits and attractions of portrait view, though it can be far more healing and blissful and stable than anything worldly.
When mindfulness loses Landscape, it tends to decay into karmically-driven purposive attention. However when Landscape is the constant background, there are periods of looking closely which do not decay in this way. Focus (i.e. Portrait) risks a decay into unmindful clinging, though it can initially give some continuity to dispersed or lost mindfulness. Awareness is, you might say, panoramic by nature, and profoundly beneficial for the cultivation of non-clinging.
As an example in practice, imagine meeting an unpleasant emotion in meditation. It might be unacceptable to your self-view and be turned away from, or not even really acknowledged in the first place. But if you have Landscape view, you won’t be able to hide out somewhere else for long, and will turn towards. Out of this sensation might be arising a feeling of worthlessness. In landscape you ask ‘Is that really true, or is this feeling of worthlessness just an active defence against an unwanted sensation?’ and then turn towards, WITHOUT LOSING PERSPECTIVE. You can see the mechanism, the view ‘I am worthless’ protecting you from feeling the unpleasant sensations ‘beneath’ it. Shifting your ground in this way enables you the relief of feeling through and releasing the energy held in those long-ignored sensations, which were functioning as a felt but ignored kernel of self-hood. More energy and less clinging are the resultant of this practice.
• multi-modal softness
If you took a unipolar approach to a feeling of worthlessness, you might try to find reasons why you weren’t really worthless, or alternatively try to pretend that the feeling wasn’t relevant or didn’t matter. These strategies may have some limited success – but the fact that we can recognise that these strategies often don’t work tends to prove my point about the necessity of operating on multiple fronts. It is in fact quite difficult to assess what you know, or what you believe, or what you feel, at any time. It is a portrait activity, on the whole, to try to do so, and subject to the limitations of that. These things arise conditionally for a long time, and their momentary expressions as views and feelings are often no more than the tips of icebergs. They are much more likely to be accurate when assessed with hindsight.
Rather than just having correct cognitions about everything, for example, we should take into account factors from many modalities – how we behave, what we are pre-occupied with, how we are in a crisis, how we are changing broadly, what our life is felt to be for, how we are about death, who or what we cling to, and what we really have faith in.
• mountains, molehills and desert islands
The Fetters, the ties which bind one to samsara, give an impression of one’s changing concerns along the Path. This Path is again not flat or linear, and again does not consist of one universal modality (least of all views and cognition). Its end cannot be seen at the beginning, because of what is untransformed in the realm of the ‘not yet seen’, which is literally blocking your view, though you cannot appreciate that just yet.
What this means is that the molehill in front of you looks like the total journey, but is merely all you can see next. Only once it is climbed can you see the nature of the landscape beyond it. You then need a different vehicle and equipment to move forward over the new terrain. This is not going to be cognitive, and will increasingly require meditation. Later fetters require a thorough exploration of your mind’s possibilities, and so obviously cannot be done ‘in the abstract’.
Vipassana unlike cognition cannot be done ‘in advance’ or ‘in one go’ because you simply don’t have the equipment to know what it is you do not know, and so cannot appreciate the significance of the many other layers of the personality. To say that the personality is all susceptible to cognition is to block your own exit. A lot of it isn’t susceptible (most of it), and does not speak in or respond to that language. The risk in so proceeding is of major rationalisation and compartmentalisation, meanwhile making of one’s practice a nice neat desert-island for the photo-album.