Ajahn Sumedho

Excerpts from “Intuitive Awareness,” by Ajahn Sumedho. This is the first part of the first chapter with the same title. The book is a free Dhamma publication available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI. Look for the link at the end of this post.

In terms of applying the expressions used by the Buddha for practical purposes, I have found it very helpful to contemplate the difference between analytical thinking and intuitive awareness. In analytical thinking, we use the mind to analyze, reason, criticize, to have ideas, perceptions, views and opinions. Intuitive awareness is non-critical; it can include criticism. It’s not that criticism isn’t allowed, but the critical mind is seen as an object. With the tendency to criticize or compare, to hold one view saying ‘this is better than that’, ‘this is right and that is wrong’, criticism of yourself or others or whatever – all of this can be justified and valid at the level of critical thinking. But we’re not interested in developing our critical faculty, because usually in countries like this it’s highly developed already. Instead, we are learning to trust in intuitive awareness, sati-sampajañña.

Sampajañña is a word that is translated into English as ‘clear-comprehension’, which is rather vague. Even though it says ‘clear’, it doesn’t give a sense of the broadness of that clarity. When you have clear definitions of everything, you think you have clear comprehension. We don’t like confusion. We don’t like to feel foggy, confused or uncertain. We really dislike these kinds of mind-states, so we spend a lot of time trying to have clear comprehension and certainty. But sampajañña includes fogginess, includes confusion; it includes uncertainty and insecurity. It’s a clear comprehension or the apperception of confusion – recognizing it’s like this. Uncertainty and insecurity are like this. So, it’s a clear comprehension or apprehension of even the most vague, amorphous or nebulous mental conditions.

Some people find this approach frustrating because it’s easier to be told exactly what to do, to have a more methodical approach. But many of us have done that – and even though it can be very skilful, it can also become addictive. We never get to the root of the cause, which is, ‘I am this person who needs something in order to become enlightened.’ This intuitive approach does not exclude methodical meditations. It’s not that I’m against the methods of meditation that exist in our tradition of Theravada Buddhism – not at all – but in saying this I am trying to put them into perspective. If you do go to different meditation retreats, courses or whatever, intuitive awareness will help you do the method practised there in a much more skilful way than if you just start from faith in a method. This encourages you to question, to really look into and see beyond the ignorant perceptions you have of yourself, whatever they might be. If you think you’re the best, greatest, God’s gift to the world, or you think you’re the absolute bottom of the stack; if you don’t know who you are and what you want; if sometimes you think you’re superior but sometimes you feel that you’re inferior – these things change.

The personality view, along with attachment to rituals and techniques and doubt are the first three fetters that hide the Path and keep us from seeing the way of non-suffering.1 Trying to figure out how to be aware is an impossible task – ‘What is he talking about, anyway? Wake up, be aware?’ – you just go around in circles. Intuitive awareness is frustrating to an analytical person whose faith is in thought, reason and logic. Awareness is right now. It’s not a matter of thinking about it, but instead being aware of thinking about it. How do you do that?

My insight came when I was a samanera, a novice monk. ‘How do you stop thinking? Just stop thinking. Well, how do you stop? Just stop. How do you just stop?’ The mind would always come back with, ‘How? How can you do it?’ wanting to figure it out rather than trusting in the immanence of it. Trusting is relaxing into it; it’s just attentiveness, which is an act of faith; it’s a trustingness, saddhā. It gives us perspective on anything we want to do, including other styles of meditation. Even training the physical body with these various mindful practices – yoga, tai chi, qigong and things like that – can fit well into the intuitive approach. Ultimately, when we develop these techniques, it ends up that one has to trust in the mindfulness rather than in just ‘me and my wilful efforts.’

I remember when I started practising hatha yoga years ago, I’d see pictures of yogis doing all these fantastic postures and I wanted to do them – the really impressive ones. I had a big ego and didn’t want to do the boring kinds of things that you start out with, but aimed at the fantastic. Of course, you’re going to damage yourself trying to make your body do what you want before it’s ready – so that’s pretty dangerous! Intuition is also knowing the limits of your own body, what it can take. It’s not just wilfully making it do this and do that according to your ideas or ideals of what you want it to do. As many of you know, you can damage the body quite badly through tyrannically forcing it to do something. Yet mindfulness and clear comprehension, sati-sampajañña, includes the body and its limitations; its disabilities and its sicknesses as well as its health and pleasures.

Us Theravada Buddhists, especially the celibate monastic community, can easily see sensual pleasure as something we shouldn’t enjoy. The Western mind will also easily see it in terms of denying pleasure, happiness and joy. We say the body is foul, loathsome, filled with excrement, pus and slime and things like that; we do these asubha practices. Our line is that if you’re a monk, you should never look at a woman – keep your eyes down – and you shouldn’t indulge in the pleasures of beauty, of anything. In Thailand I remember hearing that I shouldn’t even look at a flower, because its beauty would capture me and make me think worldly thoughts. Moreover, because I’m from a Christian background, (which has a strong puritanical ethic to it) it’s easy to assume that sense-pleasure is bad and that it’s dangerous, and that you’ve got to try to deny it and avoid it at all costs. But then that’s another opinion and view that comes out of an analytical mind.

From my cultural background, the logic in seeing the foulness and loathsomeness of the body, as in the asubha practices, fits in with being repelled – you see the body as something absolutely disgusting. Sometimes you can even look at yourself when you’re fairly healthy and you feel disgusted – at least I can. It’s a natural way to feel about yourself if you identify with the body and you dwell on its less appealing aspects. But the word ‘loathsome’ is not a very good translation for the Pali word asubha. To me, ‘loathsome’ is feeling really repelled and averse. If something is loathsome, it’s dirty and foul, bad and nasty; you just develop aversion and want to get rid of it. But asubha means ‘non-beautiful.’ Subha is beautiful; asubha is non-beautiful. That puts it in a better context of looking at what is not beautiful and noticing it. Usually, we don’t notice. In the worldly life, we tend to give our attention to the beautiful, and the non-beautiful we either ignore, reject or don’t pay any attention to. We dismiss it because it’s just not very attractive. The vowel ‘a’ in asubha is a negation, so noticing the ‘non-beautiful’ is for me a better way of understanding asubha practice.

Some of you have seen autopsies (Theravada monks and nuns attend autopsies as part of their training). I don’t find that these lead to depression or aversion. Contemplating a dead human body at an autopsy when they’re cutting it up, if you’ve never seen it before, can be pretty shocking. The smells and the appearance – you can feel averse to it at first. But if you can stay beyond the initial reaction of shock and aversion, and with sati-sampajañña be open to all of this experience, then what I find is a sense of dispassion, which is a cool feeling. It’s very clear, very cool and very pleasant to be dispassionate. It’s not dispassion through dullness or through intellectual cynicism. It’s just a feeling of non-aversion. Dispassion arises when we no longer see the human body in such a standard way, as being either attractive and beautiful or ugly and foul. Instead, it’s being able to relate to it, whether it’s our own body, somebody else’s or a corpse, in terms of sati-sampajañña – and that opens the way to the experience of dispassion, virāga.

Lust, on the other hand, is a lack of discrimination. The experience of sexual lust is a strong passion that takes you over and you lose your discriminative abilities. The more you absorb into it, the less discriminatory you get. It’s interesting that critical people, the dosacarita or anger/aversion types, usually like the asubha practices. They like very methodical meditations: ‘You do this and then you do that, stage one, stage two,’ intellectually very well presented in a nice little outline. If you’re critical, it’s easy to see the body as foul and disgusting. A kāmarāgacarita, a lustful, greedy type person, they like loving-kindness, mettā meditation.

So, these are upāya, or skilful means, to get perspective. If one is a lustful type, then the asubha practices can be very balancing. They can be skilfully used for developing a more discriminative awareness of the unpleasantness, of the non-beautiful. For the dosacarita there is mettā meditation, which is a willingness to accept what you don’t like without indulging in being critical, rejecting and averse to it. It can be done in a stylized way, but basically, it’s sati-sampajañña, which accepts, includes. Mettā is inclusive, and much more intuitive than conceptual thinking.

Continued next week, 16th May 2024.

Link to the original:

https://amaravati.org/dhamma-books/intuitive-awareness/