Category: Notes toward Practice

From self to śunyatā

An experience of śunyatā that is quite common is its manifestation as the core of our being. It is apparent, usually within meditation initially, that our very deepest nature is open, free and pure – that all the conditioned elements of the personality are held within this spacious and compassionate presence. It is quite incontrovertible that this is what we most truly are, at this point. It is our true nature.

This is not the only way we can experience śunyatā, but it is very useful for the purpose of contrasting it with our ordinary experience of ourselves. There is something of a journey, from a narrow, pain-filled and judgmental sense of self, complicated and tetchy, to this relatively free state. I will explore some elements of this journey here, particularly in terms of the energetic transformation involved (which is in itself an unusual way of looking at it). This will I hope lead to a usable model for the resolution of dukkha within the fluid realms of Formless Practice.

If we only occasionally touch on śunyatā in the way described above, or are otherwise too busy, such experiences of śunyatā may seem rather disconnected from the narrative thread of before and after. While our experience remains thus linear, these illuminations will seem as though we are being blessed by a random grace. They seem to have nothing to do with us, but are very welcome all the same.

At some point, the frequency of their arisings, or the deepening longing for śunyatā within, will demand some kind of integration from us. Our wish for this integration will cause us to question our baseline state(s), and encourage a process of turning towards what might be in the way of that. This will lead us to explore what had been previously compartmentalised or locked away in the body, for the purpose of our current convenience or comfort. I have discussed this process of turning toward dukkha in depth on previous occasions, and do not wish to cover this same ground again here, or at least in the same way.

 

The energetic nature of dukkha

If suffering that is buried in the body is seen as an energetic phenomenon, as a nexus of energy that has been turned away from, rather than reified as some kind of separate thing that we ‘have’, we can appreciate the process of integration differently. For starters, this new approach does better justice to our general meditative experience of dukkha as having a location, though not a sharply boundaried one; and to our sense that it is alive with quickly-changing sensations, rather than being a unitary lump. We can notice how meeting and resolving dukkha results in a clearer psyche, with more energy available to flow, especially the first few days after resolution; a more pervasive experience of freedom and wholeness, quite literally. Whatever the historical conditions that led to what seemed initially to be an intractable dukkha-knot, it is quite clearly gone now, even if our history is nominally the same as it ever was.

We thus see how dukkha is assimilated by śunyatā/awareness; though the energetic and free nature of the latter was much more obvious to us initially, we now also see that dukkha is made of energy too. We generally have far fewer nouns with which we reify or limit our experience of positive states. We do tend however to reify difficult experiences, as part of the process of disidentifying from and ‘protecting ourselves’ against them in the ordinary deluded way, and this makes them rather lumpy and ‘not-us’. Seeing both dukkha and śunyatā as on an energetic continuum means that they can no longer be seen as poles apart, that they are indeed intimately related. This being so, we cannot persist quite so wilfully with trying to get ‘somewhere else’ apart and away from our dukkha to the land of milk and śunyatā. Dukkha therefore becomes much more our relevant and immediate problem.

 

Dukkha and the formation of personality

So we have drawn some basic conclusions about the relationship of dukkha to śunyatā at the direct experience level. What conclusions follow from a broader examination of how śunyatā is assimilated within nāma-rupa? Where does it fit in there? Well, we can track elements of this process of assimilation which are quite universal, and express these too in specifically energetic terms, and so have a better understanding of the broad processes of the self.

Broadly speaking, the personality often takes the forms it does as a defence against turning towards. It crystallises or sets so as to bury unfelt discomfort in the body – we might be said to be the shape of our avoidances. This constellation of avoidances (avijja) limits and traps the self in a very ordinary experience of space-time. In acceding to this process, we lose our relationship with the freedom of śunyatā; so for such a convenient payoff (i.e. relative sense of control, relative freedom from immediate discomfort) there is in the end this spiritually unacceptable consequence. Thus we have our third kind of dukkha – feeling trapped in a spiritually unbearable way, knowing obscurely that our soul is divided, our energies tied to a post, and hopeless about finding our missing pieces. This awareness of sankhāra-dukkha will be a fundamental motive for the serious practitioner, and drive them on.

 

Coming into meditative relationship with dukkha

One can usefully envisage the transition between you as you usually experience yourself, and the dukkha locked away, as consisting of a defensive layer which has experiential characteristics. One might also see the dukkha as the last aspect of the disruptive layer on the way through to śunyatā, and therefore as the gateway to it (which is of course no more than a traditional exposition of dharma).

A dynamic metaphor which shows the two ways of relating to this defensive layer might be helpful. Imagine effervescent water in a tall clear glass. The surface of the water is quite disturbed, and fragments the light and all the images that are reflected on the surface of the water. This is like the ordinary experience of the discursive mind. However, if we look from the side, we see what is going on more clearly. We see clear trails of bubbles emanating from particular points deep in the glass where it meets the water. The bubbles are like endless strings of thoughts which disturb the surface of the water, and represent that little bit of personality excitement as we try to insist that we exist and are separate. However, tracing the bubbles down into the depths of our somatic experience will show us where the dukkha is buried. This simple process represents the application of the four satipatthānas in meditation, by means of which we can find the sources of our suffering. The bubbles of our thoughts and feelings are not the fundamental dukkha, but the reactivity of our personality, as we try to separate from what is in fact ineluctably close at hand. It is the energetic expression of our defensiveness, perhaps a shriek or perhaps a drawn-out whimper, but it is not the end-point. That would be to touch the glass at the point the bubbles emanate from. This is what will bring that stream to an end.

The energised bubbles of the water represent the somewhat blind and automatic defensive response of the self. It is disruptive, and seeks to turn you away from seeing what is really going on. It is genuinely quite or even very uncomfortable, takes many and various forms, and yet is not in itself the end-point. Seeing it as a defensive and transitional layer is very helpful for disidentification in Formless Practice, and therefore for moving through and beyond it rather than turning back. The ordinary self knows nothing of śunyatā, being only able to conceive of it as some kind of annihilation – hence the defensive and avoidant response. Awareness though is of the nature of śunyatā and is doubt-free, and thus will feel into whatever is hidden, or sore, or unacknowledged. So you have a basic tension here. Entering mindfully and compassionately into the disruptive layer means that you will be less side-tracked and put off, and resolve dukkha much more sweetly. You are also in so doing aligning yourself with śunyatā/awareness, which cannot be over-valued.

 

Reading the Disruptive Layer aright

Until you get used to enough of a range of such experience to be comfortable with the process, you will tend to feel that the disruptive layer is scary and ‘wrong’, and that you are under threat. It is usually energetically active, and you are alerted at a neurological level, sensing threat (quite genuinely – the ordinary ‘you’ IS under threat). There is a feeling of turning into the stream and going against the current. Misread, one will be turned round and thrown back upon one’s ordinary understanding, perhaps feeling obscurely defeated. Read correctly, you appreciate that as a serious practitioner you head for the difficulty, not away – you take the disruptive layer as a positive if uncomfortable sign. You read it in the opposite way to the ordinary self, which will want to run for cover.

So, it is usually rather like this – except when it isn’t! In the same way that we have ‘fight, flight or play dead’, the disruptive layer can manifest energetically, or as emotional stasis and deadness. I would generally suggest that this latter is a more severe or profound response, and can happen when you bump into something too soon, or into something which the self is unable to manage or manipulate. One can feel empty, rudderless, and actively seek over-stimulation to ‘make’ yourself feel ‘alive’ or at least normal. I suggest it is the more severe, because with energetic forms of disruption you at least have a sense of yourself that is half-familiar as you turn into the gale. You know who you are, even while you are railing against existence. Being becalmed in this way doesn’t even allow you that luxury. Buckle up though – if you can skilfully manage this kind of calm transition, you are pretty much unstoppable. You are anyways as a serious practitioner going to come across periods of negotiating such transitions. It is important in Formless Practice to be able to be with everything.

 

Orienting to the Disruptive Layer

The usefulness of talking about this layer is to clarify its nature as a transition. If one can recognise it, there is hope of disidentification, and you can navigate the choppy waters more skilfully. Which is to say, without feeling fundamentally threatened. This enables a moving through into the realms of śunyatā, which is what this transitions to. The disruptive layer is not in itself that useful or requiring of any special acceptance in its own terms. It is much more like an electric field or no-man’s land that you pass through on the way to a deeper and much more genuine somatic mindfulness. It is that space that is relatively speaking the end-point, and much more deserving of our attention in itself. This is the realm in which the self is quiet or attenuated, and there we have a much better chance of seeing how things really are.

Because you have been corralled within these electric fences for much of your life, these layers can feel like the old enemy you’ve never had the courage to meet, but always slunk away from. Bumping into the fence repeatedly, feeling the shocks, turning back to old patterns of life.

Seeing the transitional and defensive nature of this layer makes disidentification easier, alerting you to the fact that you are heading toward the realms of peace and stillness that you treasure. Notice how different this is from seeing this layer as a fearsome boundary of your being…  Awareness is leading you on through these phases, and their manifestation is evidence that there must be love of wholeness sufficient to bring about just such an exploration. In the end, the self is hoist by its own petard – it kicks up too much of a fuss for its own good. The qualitative experience of the defensive layer gives the game away. The mindful meditator is alerted by the dust-devils that the self kicks up, and holding firm makes use of them as a string of lights to guide her on her way.

Even positive transitions, from a skilful to a more skilful state, have this disruptive layer in between, at least while the transition is unfamiliar. Entering into the first jhana, or making the transition to the second or third jhanas, can require a negotiation of energetic discomfiture and resistance, until you get the hang of what is happening.

 

The importance of View and Review

In jhana, as elsewhere, one needs to have confidence in the place at which you will arrive, so to speak, otherwise you can lose your bearings while in the disruptive layer, and fall back. You are training in the recognition of the self’s unhelpful defensiveness, as it is experienced energetically. The purpose of the defensive layer is to protect the comfortable sense of self, and turn you away from a deeper experience which will be difficult and indeed undermine that limited sense of self. The usefulness of orienting in the middle of challenging meditative experience suggests there is a great value in evoking and reviewing one’s deepest meditation experience at other times – perhaps writing about them, communicating with others who can hear you, or some other form of expression. Śunyatā is subtle in its embodiment even though profound and releasing (we are much more viscerally alerted by dukkha), and not so easily remembered as the electric torment of the passage to it. Here it is though, beyond the roiling surf, past the torments and fears, in its way constantly known because constantly oriented to even in times of darkness.

As the truth and inherent stability of these states of being are established in your minds, you can see clearly how self resists the assimilation of śunyatā, in quite a blind or automatic way. There’s no blame to the self, because it knows not what is beyond itself; there’s no castigation at all, because the process is not much better than instinctive.

 

Shield emotions – the sand in the ointment

When we buried unbearable experience in the past, we may well have done it under pressure from a relatively more superficial emotion or response, perhaps induced to do so by our dependence on significant others. This common phenomenon is important in our understanding of some of the turmoil of the disruptive layer, as it largely consists of what I am calling shield emotions (and their corollaries). Which is to say that the basic dukkha we need to come at is often shielded by other responses, which can seem part of our current response, but are in fact part of what is being uncovered and released. They are like the lid on the pirate’s treasure-chest on the sea-bed, marked with a skull & crossbones, seeming like a threat, but hiding pieces-of-eight.

It is important in Formless Practice to include and take a stance beyond ALL aspects of the disruptive process. This happens to be a broader point about Formless Practice, but has a particular relevance here. Note how you are pushing, how you might be in a reactive cycle, how you are bargaining, how you are feeling judgemental about yourself and other, all these things – and relax around them in non-fixing mode. This will enable a moving into the original dukkha, and the resolution thereof. It might be apposite to give some examples.

 

Three examples

Experiences of inappropriate boundary-invasion can give rise to fear and loss of confidence. So as we come into disruption, and closer to the dukkha of when our basic sense of safety was threatened, we may experience lots of fear and lose confidence in our practice. This is a secondary response which can turn us back. Or we can see those responses as part of the funeral ceremony which buried the original dukkha, and be willing to re-experience them without believing in them. When the dukkha is met and released, the fear can transform into vulnerability, a characteristic of śunyatā.

We may have had an excruciating experience of being shamed by others, and feel that something about us has been forced out of sight, even though we had no sense of wrong-doing. So in disruption the sense of shame might convince us that we are going to a wrong place, even though we end up here because of relaxed and effective practice. Compassionately holding the feelings of unlovability enables a meeting with the fundamental dukkha, and a releasing of the shield emotions too as a great ease with our being, the basis for delighting in solitude (we don’t have a simple term for this, though it is symbolised by Vajrapani’s Royal Ease).

We may have been severely chastised for a behaviour or a non-behaviour, and made to feel selfish, worthless or otherwise thoughtless about others. So in disruption, we may feel guilty and bad, a selfish woman to be doing all this ‘personal’ practice. Not letting this be a show-stopper, but investigating the delicious taste of guilt and uselessness, we move into the primal dukkha. We release it into the purity of motive, called in Christianity the Sacred Heart, in which our non-violent and loving essence is directly apparent to us.

 

Always include

It is useful to reflect on our various reactions before practice in a disruption phase, so as to sit prepared with a skilful view. Otherwise the primal nature of the sensations and emotions involved may quickly drag us down, creating a vortex in combination with our old reactive thoughts. Also after practice, reflect on what may have not been included in mindfulness – what if anything was effectively driving you on by its being unacknowledged, as it were standing behind your shoulder. Shield emotions and their progeny are the servants of Mara, and shifty about being seen. Complete inclusion is the gateway to Equanimity, out of the disruptive layer into the deep waters of real life.

 

P.S.
In all this, I am aware that by introducing this notion of a transitional disruptive layer, that I am also introducing a stratification into Formless Practice. This is untraditional, I appreciate, as Formless Practice is completely level about whatever is arising, eschewing all signs. I do this mainly as an aid to equanimity within the most turbulent reaches of our experience, and hope that clarifying experience in this way proves useful enough for it to only to need be taken up temporarily. Once stability in śunyatā is normalised, the disruptive layer is much less problematic, as the landscape of the mind is become discernible.

In the abhidhamma and commentaries ‘Path & Fruit’ (magga-phala) are mind-moments that are micro-seconds apart, and are only to be found in this close union.  They are the markers of the Aryan Path, and associated with the four stages of true insight.  But we do not, whatever their significance, see them referred to as being moments apart in the Nikayas.  Clearly, though, the Buddha frequently refers to the four great stages of the path, and to the abandonment or eradication of particular fetters at each of the stages of the Path.  This gives at first sight credence to this abhidhamma notion that the stages of insight are achieved in a binary fashion – either you have become such-and-such over a very short time-period, or not. Though this way of looking at the issue is comfortable and convenient to the ordinary mind, I would suggest that a more subtle notion of what is going on on the insight path is a more accurate description and has more use.

 

A binary notion of attainment assumes a unitary entity that can function in a thoroughly or substantially coherent way.  This is far from what it is like to be a human being.  It also fails to explain why there would be a number of stages on the Path.  A plurality of stages suggests a learning process of some sort, a journey.  Arriving at peak A, we are able to see where peak B is relatively speaking, and can ascertain the direction of travel.  But there again, if one has arrived at the irreversible first stage of Insight, is it nibbāna that one has seen, or something less?  If the latter, then how is it irreversible?  This is a taste of the uncertainties that this topic can give rise to.

 

I was stimulated to return to this topic here by considering why it is that the Buddha spent at least two periods of seven days (surely a mythic number…) tasting the bliss of deliverance after his Enlightenment.  Knowing that nibbāna is not about anything we would ordinarily call pleasure or bliss suggested to me that these seven-day periods indicated a useful or necessary process that required some time, and were about something rather less obvious than rejoicing in victory over Mara.  At the same time, this process would not be to call in question the central liberating insight of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, as a particular moment in which he had an irreversible appreciation of nibbāna.  So what might actually be happening in these subsequent periods, then?

 

I am coming to the fairly firm conviction that Path & Fruit are indeed not interlocked mind-moments, but refer to and represent the process of transformation on the Insight path far more generally.  The path-moment is the establishment in a particular experience, and indeed probably momentary, of an appreciation of nibbāna.  The Fruit of that is found much later on, in the completion of the process of re-alignment and assimilation of that path-moment in the messy personality (nama-rupa), which isn’t of the nature to call into question the path-moment, but still requires time and process to align to it.  The personality in this respect only is rather like a passive-aggressive that refuses to answer ‘yes’ to what it knows to be true, when push comes to shove.  But the clarity of real insight means there is, when the question is asked, in the end no other answer in town.  Indeed, that genuine lack of any other answer is a marker for it having been a path-moment.  So there can be dismay, and resistance, and a not knowing how to live this new way of being hereafter, and then a gradual accommodation. A spiritual maturation process, which results in less dukkha, and so is acceptable even to the discomfited personality.  Because of the contingent nature of what it is to be human, and the inter-dependent layers of our delusion, we go through a number of fairly predictable stages before we are completely free.

 

Early on the insight path, the identification with personality is still substantial.  One largely tries to assimilate what has been seen with substantial aspects of the personality which are still taken for granted or ignored, and are themselves deluded.   This is amplified by the fact that the consequences of insight are also felt in the personality (where else?), and seen in terms of it; and thus we can begin to mistake the secondary consequences for the primary insight, because they are more obvious at first.  A liberating insight may give rise to bliss, and we identify the bliss as the insight, and start striving for the bliss… that sort of thing.  This is quite a problem early on, and I guess is what gives rise to the seven lifetimes issue.  Late on the path, substantial disidentification is normalised or baseline, and it is the subtlety of what is left that is problematic.  All through though, is the same interplay between the conditioned personality and the appreciation of unconditioned nibbāna.  This process, it seems to me, would continue after Enlightenment, at least in terms of an increasingly profound assimilation of an insight that is now in its way complete, and constantly available.

 

This model that I am proposing has some explanatory usefulness.  The process of deepening and establishing an insight within the functioning of the personality is focused on the path-moment, and that moment can be repeated in deep practice.  For example, one might be exploring the experience that ‘Yes! There is in all of this no aspect which counts as an enduring or unchanging me’, by a process of meditative exploration and constant review.  At a certain point the work is done – one no longer has sufficient interest to pursue the question, and anyways has looked everywhere available.  There is no more than the background level of bliss or freedom to be found in exploring the issue any more, and it is now part of the landscape.  The fruit has been eaten.  Time to move on…

 

If even Enlightened ones undergo processes of assimilation, you might ask ‘What is special about Enlightenment?’  What is final or complete about it?   It seems to me that its distinctive characteristic follows from what I said about early and late stages.  For a long time, we tend to review and explore experience on the deluded basis of what is as yet unexamined.  To some extent we are still identified with personality, and are using the increasing pacification of personality as a springboard for Insight.  That is, profound states of consciousness, redolent of peace, of stillness, of minimal pure functioning.  However, even the profoundest pacification is not release, but just a deeper layer or manifestation of the pacification that has gone before.  To know how this is is so, and to release even that which is pacified, is the fundamental Enlightenment insight.  This insight would depend on assimilating the meditative ‘non-experience’ of cessation or nirōdha, which can be part of one’s meditative practice and experience for quite some time before one appreciates this implication, and releases the personality completely.

 

If Enlightenment is the path-moment of such a release, this complete collapse of duality leaves no basis for doubt, for it is like coming out of the other side of a forest.  There are no trees left to obstruct the view of nibbāna.  But, the personality in its prehistoric way still has some adaptation to do.  From this point on, there is nothing that the personality can offer which calls into question what is seen and known.  Indeed, the personality cannot ‘know’ Enlightenment, and cannot really do anything but express it incidentally, as the personality is limited and partial by nature.  And thus we have a description of Enlightenment ‘with remainder’, as it is called.  It also works quite well with the descriptions of the transmutation of the Relative Alaya into the Absolute Alaya.  There might still be seeds there, but they are karmically ‘denatured’.

 

I appreciate this is only a sketch – but I hope it is food for thought.  It is a way of understanding a traditional idea, that of Path & Fruit, in a way that is reverential about the mysterious interplay of nama-rupa and nibbāna, and does justice to some primary aspects of the deepening experience of Insight.  This embracing of the conditioned in the crucible of the unconditioned seems to me to be the crux of any Buddhist metaphysics, the compassionate fruit of which is liberation in, not from, this saha-world.

 

* T S Eliot : East Coker, Four Quartets

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.