Ajahn Amaro

Let go of attachment to the body, to personality, to feelings of “I am.” By letting go of self, by not creating an identification, an individuality, an “I,” we are not creating bondage to the feeling of self. Let go of the sense of location. Let go of the feeling of place, recognizing, awakening to the fact that awareness is unlocated. Non-locality is the nature of the mind. It does not exist fixed in any one place. Space does not apply in the realm of the mind, the nāma khandhā. Here, there, everywhere, nowhere— “where” does not apply. Let go of self, let go of place, and let go of time. In the Bhaddekaratta Sutta (M 131) the Buddha describes the ideal abiding, the ideal solitude. One who is wise lets go of thoughts of the past, lets go of thoughts about the future, and lets go of creations about the self here in the present moment. This is the ideal solitude, the ideal abiding, the ideal security of the here and now, of the paccuppanna dhamma, the ever-present dhamma.

When the heart rests in this quality—this awareness, vijjā, this knowing, attentive to the present reality—there is letting go of time. A conditioned mind habituated to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, to four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock, tends to see the past as solid reality stretching off into the infinite behind us. It creates the future, stretching off endlessly ahead of us. Dates that are still to come seem like real days, real months, real years, while the present seems like an insignificant little sliver, squashed between the vast and incalculable past and future, back to the Big Bang and beyond, off into the infinite possibilities of what is to come. This little sliver, this tiny unimportant moment between a vast past and a vast future, may seem insignificant, nothing very much. But this is simply our conditioned perception of time.

When there is wisdom, we bring attention moment by moment to the felt experience of this life. There is a watching, a contemplating of how the world is formed, how life is experienced and shaped. We see the past is a memory, constructed here and now. The future is an imagined fantasy. Future and past—these words refer to formless potentialities, concepts that are generated and fabricated here and now. The image of the past, the memory of the past arises here and now. The imagined future is here and now. And the closer we look, the closer it is seen that the present is actually an infinite plain of being—the future and the past are insignificant little threads dangling in the breeze like broken spider webs, nothing very much at all. The absolute reality of Dhamma, the very fabric of nature, is here and now. Dhamma is sandiṭṭhiko, apparent here and now, akāliko, timeless, paccuppanna, ever-present.

This present is where time and timelessness meet. When we gather together to chant, to meditate, that is linear time intersecting with the infinity of the akāliko dhamma, the timeless reality, sandiṭṭhiko, apparent here and now, paccuppanna, ever-present. Moment by moment, day by day, the timeless meets with the time-bound, with the attributes of the seeming self—this body, this personality, this name, this role in society. Who am I? What is the room I live in? My role as a retreatant, as a monastic, as a listener, as a speaker… is what? Those personal qualities meet the fundamentally non-personal. The role of space, me sitting in my spot here on the central cushion, you in your spot, your mat, your place; this is the reality of three-dimensional location meeting the non-locality, the unlocated quality of mind. This is the task: to attend to this meeting point of self and not-self, time and timelessness, place and placelessness. This is the mysterious Middle Way where we respect both those realities. If there is clinging to the unconditioned or the formless, there is a loss of harmony, a loss of attunement to the realm of form. If there is clinging to the realm of form, identity and time and place, there is a loss of attunement to the timeless reality. The Middle Way is to attend to both; to the meeting point, the mysterious balancing point of the conditioned and the unconditioned, the created and the uncreated.

The word the Buddha coined to refer to himself is Tathāgata. It is composed of two parts: “tatha” or “tath” which means “such” or “thus”, and “gata” or “āgata” which mean, respectively, “to go” or “to come.” The two halves together make Tathāgata, but as you can see, there is an inherent ambiguity in the word. For millennia there has been a debate over whether the Buddha meant “tath-āgata” (come to suchness, come to thusness, one who is totally immanent) or “tathā-gata” (one who is gone to suchness, utterly gone, transcendent). Is the Buddha principle totally here or totally gone? Is it immanence, embedded, embodied in the living world, the sense world; or is it totally transcendent, beyond, utterly unentangled? In Pali, the “a” at the beginning of a word means it is negative, so gata means to go, āgata means to come. What did the Buddha mean? Why did he choose this word to refer to himself? Did the Buddha mean totally “here” or totally “gone”?

The Buddha was very fond of wordplay and double meanings. It seems that he coined this word deliberately because of its ambiguity. It means both totally here and totally gone; utterly immanent, fully attuned to the sense world, to earth, water, fire and wind; but giving them no footing—utterly transcendent, unentangled. So, the Buddha principle participates fully and harmoniously in the sense world, attuned to earth, water, fire and wind; to conditionality; to sights, sounds, smells, taste, touch, thought, emotion. It is completely attuned, heartfully in harmony with all things, and yet is completely transcendent of all things; simultaneously utterly unentangled, without conflict, without confusion, without division—totally here, totally gone, heartfully participating and totally equanimous, unidentified, unattached. To the thinking mind, this can seem bewildering, but the heart knows that Middle Way, that point of intersection. So, we train ourselves to trust that. This is the occupation for the practitioner, the saint, one given to sanctus, peace. “Something given and taken”; we give our attention to this moment and we receive the gift of this moment, the gift of Dhamma—letting go of self, giving our attention, receiving the presence of the reality of the Dhamma itself. We receive that presence “in a lifetime’s death, in love, ardour, selflessness and self-surrender.”

When the left and right eyes operate in a balanced way, they give us a sense of the three-dimensional world. So too, the eye which sees the conditioned and the eye which sees the unconditioned together give us a realistic orientation in the world of form and the world of the formless. Sustaining and maintaining a respect for both realities is what orients the heart, helps us to know and sustain that Middle Way, being that middleness itself. The thinking mind can flounder and become bewildered. But we don’t have to figure it out. Balancing on a bicycle or a tightrope is not a conceptual activity; it is a whole-body learning. Finding the Middle Way is not a conceptual learning; it is a whole-body, a whole-being learning, a whole-being training.

When we find that point of balance, when that Middle Way is embodied, present, known, this is the great delight of the heart. There is a quality of freedom and spaciousness. We can really enjoy our life. In the verses of Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of the Ch’an Buddhist school of China, it is said:

In this moment there is no thing that comes to be,
in this moment there is no thing that ceases to be,
thus in this moment
there is no birth and death to be brought to an end.
Therefore this moment is absolute peace;
and though it is just this moment,
there is no limit to this moment
and herein is eternal delight.

Excerpts from an article by Ajahn Amaro, source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-020-01531-2

Ajahn Amaro

The world is constructed and patterned by our own conditioning; the world that we experience is built up, formed and framed by the experiences of a lifetime. If we are willing to consider the possibility that the world we experience is in fact fabricated, formed by the patterns of consciousness within our minds, we will see that this is indeed true. Being able to experience the world in this way changes our relationship to it. If the world is in our mind, there isn’t really an “out there”. It’s all “in here”. It’s all known here. It’s all patterns of mental events taking place and forming within awareness. When we are able to shift perception in this way, we are able to move the flow of our thoughts and events from “out in the world”, and recognize that it all happens in here.

There is a quality of integration, a sense of wholeness, which comes with opening the mind in this way. This integration can be particularly apparent in walking meditation. There can be the feeling that “I” am walking and the world around me includes trees, birds, grass and the sky, and at night the stars and planets. But then we recollect that the world is in the mind, that it all happens here. There is no “there”. It’s all “here”. It is all known within the same sphere of consciousness, of awareness.

When you shift the perception in this way, notice how it affects you. We are able to recognize the fact that when we close our eyes, the visual world vanishes. When we open our eyes, the visual world reappears. We directly know the fact that our experience of the world is fabricated by our senses—the world that we know is all happening here, within this mind. It is known here. Through being able to see that, what we experience is a continuous flowing process, a single integrated process. This makes it easier to abide in the quality of knowing, awakened awareness. The heart receives and knows that flow of perception and experience. And along with attending to the different patterns of perception, thought, feeling, of movement, flow and change, there is also a wonderful quality of stillness.

Luang Por Chah would say that the mind is like still, flowing water. It flows insofar as its perceptions, thoughts and moods, its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thinking and emotions, all come and go and change. There is a continuous flow. But there is also stillness. There is that which is aware of all the mental activity of perception, of thought, of feeling—and that awareness is not going anywhere. That awareness is outside of the world of space and time. That awareness is perfectly still. It is not something which is subject to movement or change. It is the ever-present quality of knowing – the one who knows”, that which is aware.

So, your mind is like still, flowing water. There is stillness and there is movement; the two interpenetrate and permeate each other completely and without conflict. There is movement, like the body moving up and down on the walking meditation path, but that which knows the movement isn’t going anywhere. That which knows the movement is outside the realm of time and space. It is ever-present, yet it is not caught up in the movement. While you are walking, at the same time as there is the perception of the body moving, the body is walking up and down, but that which knows the body is always here. Just as in your entire life, everything you have ever known or experienced has happened through your mind—it has only ever happened here.

Throughout your life, you will always be “here”. When you were driving in your car last week, or even when you were a little baby in your hometown and didn’t think in words, you have always been “here”; there was always a “here-ness”, wherever you were. So, we bring our attention to this quality to which Ajahn Chah was referring, this quality of stillness in the still flowing water of life, this quality that is always happening “here”. This knowing quality is free from bondage to the realm of time and space. It is unlocated.

Buddhist teachings refer a lot to anicca, dukkha, anattā, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self, and how to use them as reflections to loosen the habits of attachment and identification. Those habits can be quite subtle, pervasive and strong.

The feeling of self is a particularly strong habit. So, in our practice, we emphasize the importance of clearly seeing the self-creating habits of the mind and learning how to loosen the grip on those habits; how to let them go completely and free the heart from self-view. But those bonds can be invisible as well as strong. Even when the self-creating habit is seen clearly, and even when there is a letting go of it, there can still unbeknownst to us, be a strong bondage.

Be aware that the idea: “It’s all happening here,” is not understood as everything is happening in “my” mind, the mind is creating the feeling of locatedness. The mind is attached to the notion that it is happening “here”, at this spot. It’s an attachment to the feeling of place or the feeling of location that the mind creates—the sense of “here-ness”, in this spot, this geographical centre where things are felt.

Look closely at that feeling of locatedness and the sense of things happening here, and bring to mind the word “here” or say to yourself, “It’s all happening here”. By bringing attention to it, the contrived here-ness can fall away together with a whole extra layer of letting go. Awakened awareness, knowing, is free from bondage to the realm of time and space as well. It is timeless and unlocated.

I find it is also helpful to recollect that Dhamma is essentially unlocated in the world of three-dimensional space. Location is a useful tool in the physical world but in the world of mind, location, place does not apply. Three-dimensional space only refers to the physical world, to the rūpa-khandha. Mind, the nāma-khandhā, does not have any relationship to three-dimensional space, because mind has no material substance. Mind has no physical form; therefore, three-dimensional space has no fundamental relationship to the mind.

Ask the question: “Where is the mind?” This illuminates the presumption: “It is here”. For in the clear light of awakened awareness, the wisdom faculty recognizes that even any kind of ‘hereness’ is not it either. It is important to look at all the different habits of attachment and identification, even if they are very, very subtle.

Though we may have no sense of self, it can be that that “no sense of self” is being experienced here. And that “hereness” is also to be let go of in the practice of liberation. Dhamma is absolutely real, but it’s completely unlocated. You cannot say that the Dhamma is any “where”. You might say, “But it’s everywhere!” But by looking at that whole dimension of experience it can be recognized that “whereness” does not apply. Allow that recognition to have its effect upon the citta.

Excerpted from The Breakthrough by Ajahn Amaro, Amaravati Publications, 2016.

Ajahn Amaro

With RESPECT & GRATITUDE, this text was edited from a much larger text to fit into the Dhamma Footsteps blog format.

Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-021-01737-y

There is a wonderful book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by the scientist Robert Sapolsky. The thesis of it is that if you are a zebra, you are on the menu for the average lion out on the savannah. When you see a lion coming towards you, you need stress and you need to get stressed fast. Zebras need to be afraid. They need to move quickly. They get as much sugar into the system as possible, get the heart beating rapidly and pump the whole system with adrenalin, so they can move as quickly as possible. Within a couple of minutes, either they will have got away or they will have been caught and killed. So, they only need to stay stressed for a couple of minutes.

We human beings however, can keep it going for a couple of months or years, so we get ulcers. The stress reaction is sustained through our papañca, through our conceptual thought and our capacity to remember and imagine. We start incessantly imagining, can’t let go of painful things in the past, or what might happen in the future. We create ongoing anxiety, maintain the stress reaction hour after hour, day after day, week after week. We make ourselves ill with anxiety, restlessness, rage, rapacity and depression.

So, if you want to avoid ulcers you need to work on papañca. Papañca (conceptual proliferation) is the habit of buying into our thoughts, believing in them and creating images of past and future, and going off and inhabiting them — building castles in the air and going to live there.

 We find ourselves in the situation: “me here and the world out there.” There is a state of tension between the two, either tension with something I want which I haven’t got, or something I’m afraid is going to get me and want to get away from. There is a duality. And that subject-object duality is rigidly fixed into place, and the dukkha arising from that. This whole process, from the beginning with the simple perception through to the end with “me here” and “the world out there”, happens very quickly. So, learning to track this process and seeing how it begins requires the development of mindfulness and wisdom. The mind has to be trained not to follow the habitual pathways of papañca.

When you see the mind has wandered off into some kind of conceptual labyrinth, into trains of thought and association, take the trouble to follow it back. This is the practice of following the string of thoughts and associations back to its origin. It might not seem a terribly fruitful exercise, but in my experience, it is very revealing. Over and over again we realize that the mind gets caught up in excitements or fantasies, fears and anxieties, or gets lost in rewriting the past, and that all this is completely void of substance.

We also go back and revisit mistakes we made, glorious moments, or things which were memorable or painful — we re-inhabit them and bring them to life. Whenever we are aware that the mind is caught up in a proliferation, we need to take the trouble to catch that process like netting a butterfly. Catch that thought. Actually, a butterfly is a very appropriate symbol, since the Greek word “psyche” means not just “the mind” but “butterfly”. So, a psychologist is someone who studies this very butterfly nature.

So, catch that particular fluttering piece of papañca, and follow the sequence of thoughts and associations back to where they came from. Every time we will notice that it was started by just a random thought that popped into the mind — there was a smell from the kitchen which triggered the memory of a particular food, or the sight of somebody’s shawl triggered the memory of Aunt Matilda’s dress. Following it back, we realize that it was just a smell, just a sound, just a random memory. That is all. When we get to the source, the origin, it is utterly unburdensome, uncomplicated.

The further you trace it back to the source, the less there is a sense of a “me here” and “the world out there” – a solidly, definitely divided experience. There is just hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. “In the heard there is only the heard, in the hearing there is only the hearing.” The same with seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. There is no sense of self embedded within that. It is just the world as it is experienced.

We tend to think, “I am in here, the world is out there, and I am perceiving the world.” But I find it extremely helpful to keep recognizing that we don’t experience the world — we experience our mind’s representation of the world. This is something that the Buddha pointed to (e.g., at S 2.26, S 35.116): “That in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world — this is called “the world” in the Noble One’s discipline. And what is it in the world though which one does that? It is with the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body and the mind.” That is “the world” in terms of the Buddha’s teaching. Obviously, we can talk about this planet as being the world, or the stars and galaxies and space being the world. But it is important to recognize that when we are trying to live in a reflective way, develop the qualities of wisdom and understanding and free the heart, the most helpful way of understanding the world is just exactly as I have been describing — the world is sights, sounds, smells, taste, touch, thought. That is the world because that is the world as we know it.

I’m not saying that the whole world is an illusion conjured up by us as individuals. There is a substrate. There is a basis on which our perceptions are formed. But what we know about the world is constructed from the information that our senses weave together. That is the coordinating capacity of the mind. The mind is the sixth sense which draws the first five senses together and coordinates them. The world the mind creates is the world that we know. The world is put together by our minds. These perceptions are all we can know. All we have ever known has been through the agency of this mind. We create a world where things have colors — this is black, that is brown — but these are constructed realities, fabricated perceptions. They don’t have any intrinsic existence. “Personhood,” “individuality”, our name is a construct, as is our notion of individuality. We construct these things and live with them for useful reasons. But the more we take them to be absolute truths, then the more we are stuck in sīlabbata parāmāsa, attachment to conventions.

When we recognize that the world is created through our thoughts and perceptions, that we build this world, that it is a caused, dependent thing, we can also see that it arises and therefore ceases. It is a process that is known through our awareness, and it is in this awareness that “the world ends”.

Once the world is known for what it is, once we have seen the comings and goings of the world — the world is caused, the world arises, the world ceases — the heart is able to be freed from identification with the world, the heart is liberated from the world.

Ajahn Amaro
Excerpts from a longer article titled: “Puncture Your Papañca”: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-021-01746-x

The article was transcribed from a talk titled: “Conceptual Proliferation (Papañca)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzUPNw8YTCY

Ajahn Chah
[Excerpts from a longer Dhamma talk titled: The Path to Peace]
It is the mind which gives orders to the body. The body has to depend on the mind before it can function. However, the mind itself is constantly subject to different objects contacting and conditioning it before it can have any effect on the body. As you turn attention inwards and reflect on the Dhamma, the wisdom faculty gradually matures, and eventually, you are left contemplating the mind and mind-objects, which means that you start to experience the body, rūpadhamma, as arūpadhamma, formless. Through your insight, you’re no longer uncertain in your understanding of the body and the way it is. The mind experiences the body’s physical characteristics as arūpadhamma or formless objects, which come into contact with the mind. Ultimately, you’re contemplating just the mind and mind-objects—those objects which come into your consciousness. Now, examining the true nature of the mind, you can observe that in its natural state, it has no preoccupations or issues prevailing upon it. It’s like a piece of cloth or a flag that has been tied to the end of a pole—as long as it’s on its own and undisturbed, nothing will happen to it. A leaf on a tree is another example. Ordinarily, it remains quiet and unperturbed. If it moves or flutters, this must be due to the wind, an external force. Normally, nothing much happens to leaves—they remain still. They don’t go looking to get involved with anything or anybody. When they start to move, it must be due to the influence of something external, such as the wind, which makes them swing back and forth. It’s a natural state. The mind is the same. In it, there exists no loving or hating, nor does it seek to blame other people. It is independent, existing in a state of purity that is truly clear, radiant and untarnished. In its pure state, the mind is peaceful, without happiness or suffering—indeed, not experiencing any feeling at all. This is the true state of the mind. The purpose of practice, then, is to seek inwardly, searching and investigating until you reach the original mind; also known as the Pure Mind, the mind without attachment.”

The Pure Mind doesn’t get affected by mind-objects. In other words, it doesn’t chase after the different kinds of pleasant and unpleasant mind-objects. Rather, the mind is in a state of continuous knowing and wakefulness, thoroughly mindful of all its experiencing. When the mind is like this, no pleasant or unpleasant mind-objects it experiences will be able to disturb it. The mind doesn’t become anything. In other words, nothing can shake it. Why? Because there is awareness. The mind knows itself as pure. It has evolved its own true independence, has reached its original state. How is it able to bring this original state into existence? Through the faculty of mindfulness wisely reflecting and seeing that all things are merely conditions arising out of the influence of elements, without any individual being controlling them.”

“This is how it is with the happiness and suffering we experience. When these mental states arise, they’re just happiness and suffering. There’s no owner of the happiness. The mind is not the owner of the suffering—mental states do not belong to the mind. Look at it for yourself. In reality, these are not affairs of the mind, they’re separate and distinct. Happiness is just the state of happiness; suffering is just the state of suffering.”

You are merely the knower of these things. In the past, because the roots of greed, hatred, and delusion already existed in the mind, whenever you caught sight of the slightest pleasant or unpleasant mind-object, the mind would react immediately—you would take hold of it and have to experience either happiness or suffering. You would be continuously indulging in states of happiness and suffering. That’s the way it is as long as the mind doesn’t know itself—as long as it’s not bright and illuminated. The mind is not free. It is influenced by whatever mind-objects it experiences. In other words, it is without a refuge, unable to truly depend on itself. You receive a pleasant mental impression and get into a good mood. The mind forgets itself. In contrast, the original mind is beyond good and bad. This is the original nature of the mind. If you feel happy over experiencing a pleasant mind-object, that is delusion. If you feel unhappy over experiencing an unpleasant mind-object, that is delusion. Unpleasant mind-objects make you suffer and pleasant ones make you happy—this is the world. Mind-objects come with the world. They are the world. They give rise to happiness and suffering, good and evil, and everything that is subject to impermanence and uncertainty.

As you reflect like this, penetrating deeper and deeper inwards, the mind becomes progressively more refined, going beyond the coarser defilements. The more firmly the mind is concentrated, the more resolute in the practice it becomes. The more you contemplate, the more confident you become. The mind becomes truly stable – to the point where it can’t be swayed by anything at all. You are absolutely confident that no single mind-object has the power to shake it. Mind-objects are mind-objects; the mind is the mind. The mind experiences good and bad mental states, happiness and suffering, because it is deluded by mind-objects. If it isn’t deluded by mind-objects, there’s no suffering. The undeluded mind can’t be shaken. This phenomenon is a state of awareness, where all things and phenomena are viewed entirely as dhātu (natural elements) arising and passing away – just that much. It might be possible to have this experience and yet still be unable to fully let go. Whether you can or can’t let go, don’t let this bother you. Before anything else, you must at least develop and sustain this level of awareness or fixed determination in the mind. You have to keep applying the pressure and destroying defilements through determined effort, penetrating deeper and deeper into the practice.

Having discerned the Dhamma in this way, the mind will withdraw to a less intense level of practice, which the Buddha and subsequent Buddhist scriptures describe as the Gotrabhū citta. The Gotrabhū citta refers to the mind which has experienced going beyond the boundaries of the ordinary human mind. It is the mind of the puthujjana (ordinary unenlightened individual) breaking through into the realm of the ariyan (Noble One) – however, this phenomenon still takes place within the mind of the ordinary unenlightened individual like ourselves. The Gotrabhū puggala is someone, who, having progressed in their practice until they gain temporary experience of Nibbāna (enlightenment), withdraws from it and continues practising on another level, because they have not yet completely cut off all defilements. It’s like someone who is in the middle of stepping across a stream, with one foot on the near bank, and the other on the far side. They know for sure that there are two sides to the stream, but are unable to cross over it completely and so step back. The understanding that there exist two sides to the stream is similar to that of the Gotrabhū puggala or the Gotrabhū citta. It means that you know the way to go beyond the defilements, but are still unable to go there, and so step back. Once you know for yourself that this state truly exists, this knowledge remains with you constantly as you continue to practise meditation and develop your pāramī. You are both certain of the goal and the most direct way to reach it.

Editor’s note: I found a section of this talk in the website “Path and Press: an existential approach to the Buddha’s Teaching.” From here I found a reference to the original source: “The Path to Peace. Here are the links”

https://pathpress.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/ajahn-chah-and-the-original-mind/

https://www.ajahnchah.org/book/Path_Peace.php#foot6828