[I was googling my way through a progression of Buddhist terms and landed on a listing of Ajahn Sumedho Dhamma talks and some transcripts in the 1980’s. There was one titled “Beyond Belief,” given in1988. The opening paragraphs caught my attention, particularly the statement, “The body is in the mind.”]

“From the appearance of the five khandhas – rupa, vedanā, saññā, sankhara, viññāṇa – and the unquestioned belief that they are oneself – then it always seems that the mind is in the body, doesn’t it?

To most people, if you ask, “Where’s your mind?” they will point to their head, or their hearts. But if you investigate the way things are, following the teachings of the Buddha, then you begin to realise that the body is in the mind.

Mind is really what comes first – the body is just the receptor. It’s a sensitive receptor, like a radio, or radar, or something like that. It’s not a person, it’s not anything other than merely an instrument. When that view of being within the five khandhas is seen through and let go of, then there’s a realisation of what we can call deathlessness.” [Ajahn Sumedho 1988]

[I stumbled over the word: ‘deathlessness,’ so I googled it: ‘Deathlessness refers to a condition where there is no death, because there is also no birth, no coming into existence, nothing made by conditioning, and therefore no time.’ Another one (linked to an article by Ajahn Amaro, which follows) describes ‘deathlessness’ as abiding in the consciousness that is completely beyond conditioned phenomena—neither supporting them nor supported by them.]

“One of the most significant teachings the Buddha gave on the subject of Deathlessness is what you might call the motto of Amaravati. When the monastery first opened, this theme was used by Luang Por Sumedho over and over again: ‘Mindfulness is the path to the deathless. Heedlessness is the path to death. The mindful never die. The heedless are as if dead already.’[Dhp 21] Over and over again, Luang Por Sumedho would use this as a topic. It’s one of the reasons why this monastery is called Amaravati, the Deathless Realm.

When there’s heedlessness, it is as if we are dead. It appears as if there is birth and death because the mind attaches to the born and dying. We don’t create the deathless. It is not something that can be lost or gained, it is awakened to, it is realized. And through its realization it is recognized that birth and death are just appearances, just a seeming. It is like the sun appearing to rise and appearing to set. It only does so because the earth is spinning. If the earth didn’t spin, the sun would appear to sit in the same place all the time. Birth and death appear to be happening, because of the mind’s attachment to sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. Being a good person, a bad person, success and failure, healthy and sick, gaining and losing; because of the mind’s attachment to all these births and deaths, it seems like we are being born and we’re dying.

As Luang Por Sumedho said over and over again: ‘There is nobody being born, nobody dying. It’s just conditions of mind that are changing. There is no person truly being born, no person who really dies.’ Because of the mind’s attachment to the world of perception, thought, feeling, memory, attachment to the four elements of the material world, it seems that way. It is very convincing.

The path of insight, the path of investigation, helps us to examine the nature of experience. What seems to be ‘me being born, moving around in that world out there, and who will die one day,’ when it is examined closely it’s recognized that the world is happening in our field of experience.

As the Buddha said: ‘That whereby one is a perceiver of the world, and a conceiver of the world, that is called “the world” in this Dhamma and discipline. And what is that whereby one is a perceiver of the world, and a conceiver of the world? The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, the mind …’[SN 35.116]

The world is the world of our experience. It’s our mind’s construction of the world. That is what is experienced. And that is born, takes shape and dissolves, moment by moment. The sounds (that we hear), the feelings of the body, moods of irritation, enthusiasm, alertness, sleepiness, comfort, discomfort, these are patterns of consciousness, organic patterns of change, arising, taking shape, dissolving. That is the world. There is no other world we can meaningfully speak about. We can only talk about the world of our own experience. Even if we use machines and devices to measure them, those patterns will still all appear only within the sphere of our perceptions.

When we take a statement like: ‘There is nobody born, there is nobody who dies, only conditions of mind that change,’ it is not to be believed or rejected, but to be picked up and explored. There is hearing (the sounds of our environment), the sound of a plane flying overhead, the sound of a bird. We say the sensation is ‘in my body, in me’; the sound of the plane is ‘outside me’. But they are both experienced in the same place. The bird is in the tree. The plane is high in the sky. But they are both known here in the mind.

The world is in the mind, the world we experience is woven by our mind; it is woven into being – arising, passing away – moment by moment. But that which knows the world, that which is the lokavidū – the knower of the world – what is that? Where is that? It is the most real thing there is, this quality of knowing, yet it has no shape, no form. It is not a person, it does not begin or end, it is not here or there. It is totally real but completely intangible. How mysterious. But when the heart is allowed to embody that quality of knowing, awakened awareness, then that is the realization of the Deathless, the Unborn and Undying itself. That which knows the born and dying is not the born and dying. That which knows inspiration is not inspired. That which knows regret and pain is not pained. That which knows suffering is not suffering. This is why liberation is possible.

When the Buddha said that ‘… the mindful do not die’, he did not mean that the body of a mindful person is never going to stop breathing and rot away. No. The Buddha’s body died, just like anyone else’s. When he said that the mindful never die, it meant that when the mind is awake it is not identified with the born and the dying. It is akāliko, timeless, ajāta, unborn, amara, undying. It is outside of the realm of time, individuality and space; not definable in terms of time, personality, location: ‘There is neither a coming nor a going, nor a standing still. Neither progress, nor degeneration. Neither this world, nor the other world.’[Ud 8.1] It boggles the mind: our familiar perceptions are formed in terms of here and there, inside and outside, mine and yours, progress, degeneration. But this quality of Dhamma itself – of which this awareness, this knowing faculty is the primary attribute – it is indefinable, unlocatable. As Luang Por Chah would ask: ‘If you can’t go forward and you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, where can you go?’ All that can be done is to let go of those habits of identifying with being a person who is here in this place and passing through time. When the mind lets go of time, individuality, location, then that puzzle is solved.”

Excerpts from a Dhamma article by Ajahn Amaro – Mindfulness is the Path to the Deathless, 26th May 2016

Original:https://amaravati.org/dhamma-article-ajahn-amaro-mindfulness-path-deathless/

Ajahn Sumedho, “Beyond Belief” 1988, transcript, original:https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/essay/beyond-belief