intuitive awareness part 3

Ajahn Sumedho

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

We live on a planet that is quite beautiful. Nature is quite beautiful to the eye. Seeing it from sati-sampajañña, I experience joy from that. When we speak from personal habits, then it can get complicated with wanting and not wanting, with guilt or just not even noticing. If you get too involved with what’s in your head, after a while you don’t even notice anything outside. You can be in the most beautiful place in the world and not see it, not notice it. Seeing beauty or sense-pleasures just as experience is seeing something for what it is. It is pleasurable; good food does taste good, and tasting a good, delicious flavour is like this; it’s purely enjoyable. That’s the way it is. You may contemplate, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t’ – then you’re adding more to it. But from sati-sampajañña, it is what it is. It’s experiencing the flow of life from this centre point, from the still point that includes rather than from the point that excludes – the extreme where we want only the beautiful and the good, just to have one banquet after another. When we can’t sustain that delusion, we get depressed. We go to the opposite, wanting to kill or annihilate ourselves in some way.

Just like this weather we’ve been having – it’s the kind that people think England has all the time: cold, wet, damp, drizzly and grey. This is the worldwide perception of England. I decided to open to these conditions with sati-sampajañña. It is what it is, but I’m not creating aversion to it. It’s all right, and isn’t like this very often. I’ve lived in this country for twenty-four years. Some of the most beautiful weather I ever experienced has been here in this country. Perfect days, so beautiful: the greenness, the beautiful flowers and hills. Sati-sampajañña includes the cold, wet, drizzly and grey weather. There’s no aversion created in it. In fact, I find I like it in a way, because I don’t feel compelled to go out in it. I can sit in my kuti (small monastic dwelling) and keep warm. I quite enjoy feeling that I don’t have to go out anywhere just because the weather is so good. I can stay in my room, which I quite like; it has a nice feeling to it. When the weather gets good, I always feel I should be out. These are ways of just noticing that, even with sensory experiences that can be physically unpleasant, like cold and dampness, the suffering is really in the aversion. ‘I don’t like this. I don’t want life to be like this. I want to be where there are blue skies and sunshine all the time.’

With the body-sweeping practice, I found paying attention to neutral sensation very helpful because it was so easily ignored. Years ago, when I first started doing this, I found it difficult because I’d never paid attention to neutral sensations, even though they’re quite obvious. My experience of sensation was always through the extremes of either pleasure or pain. But you can notice how the robe touches the skin, just one hand touching the other, the tongue in the mouth touching the palate or the teeth, or the upper lip resting on the lower – investigate little details of sensation that are there when you open to them. They are there but you don’t notice them unless you’re determined to. If your lips are painful you notice. If you’re getting a lot of pleasure from your lips, you notice. But when it’s neither pleasure nor pain, there’s still sensation but it’s neutral. So, you’re allowing neutrality to be conscious.

Consciousness is like a mirror; it reflects. A mirror reflects but it doesn’t just reflect the beautiful or the ugly. If you really look into a mirror, it’s reflecting whatever: the space, the neutrality, everything that is in front of it. Usually, you can only notice the outstanding things, the extremes of beauty or ugliness. But to awaken to the way it is, you’re not looking at the obvious but recognizing the subtlety behind the extremes of beauty and ugliness. The sound of silence is like a subtlety behind everything that you awaken to, because you usually don’t notice it if you’re seeking the extremes.

When you’re seeking happiness and trying to get away from pain and misery, then you’re caught in always trying to get something or hold on to happiness, like tranquillity. We want samatha and jhānas – steady and absorbed states of mind – because we like tranquillity. We don’t want confusion, chaos or cacophony, abrasive sensory experiences or human contacts. We come into the Temple and sit down, close our eyes and give off the signs: ‘Don’t bother me. Leave me alone. I’m going to get my samādhi.’ That can be the very basis for our practice, ‘Getting my samādhi so I can feel good, because I want that.’ That leads to an extreme again – wanting, always grasping after the ideal of some refined conscious experience. Then there are others who say, ‘You don’t need to do that. Daily life is good enough. Just in-the-marketplace practice, that’s where it’s at – where you’re not doing anything extreme like sitting, closing your eyes, but living life as an ordinary person and being mindful of everything.’ That can be another ideal that we attach to.

These are ideals – positions that we might take. They are the ‘true but not right; right but not true’ predicament that we create with our dualistic mind – not that they’re wrong. In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm there is a slogan: ‘Everyone is equal but some are more equal than others.’ In the conditioned realm, this is how we think. We think all human beings are equal, ideally. All human beings are equal, but with the practicalities of life, some are more equal than others. You won’t find the affluent Western world willing to give up much for the sake of equality in the Third World.

Reflect on the monastic form. It’s a convention and its aim is connected to the world through its alms-mendicancy. We need society, we need the world around us, we need the lay community for our survival. They are a part. Monasticism is not an attack on or a rejection of lay life. If we’re living in the right way, then the lay community bring forth their good qualities: generosity, gratitude and things like this. We can also move towards silence, meditation and reflection – this is encouraged. We can combine both samatha and vipassanā, tranquillity and insight – and the life of solitude with the life in the world. It’s not to reject one and hold on to the other as the ideal, but to recognize this is the way it is; it’s like this. The world we live in, the society we live in – we’re not rejecting it, turning against it or away from it, but including it. We can include it in the silence and the solitude.