Tag Archives: anicca

consciousness and non-duality

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Excerpts from a talk by Rupert Spira, titled, “Non-duality and the Nature of Consciousness.” [YouTube: starts at 28.32]

When we dream at night, our mind imagines a whole world within itself. However, it cannot perceive the dream world directly – in order to do this, the dreamer’s mind must localise itself within its own dream as a separate subject of experience. From the perspective of the character in the dream, the dreamed world is outside of her own mind. The name that she gives to the stuff out of which this world outside of herself is made, is ‘matter’. Everything inside herself, her thoughts, images, feelings, perceptions and so on, she refers to as ‘mind’. Everything in her experience seems to corroborate this view. When she closes her eyes the world she sees, that is, the dreamed world – although, she doesn’t know that it is a dreamed world – disappears and when she opens them again, it reappears. She reasonably concludes from this that whatever it is that is seeing or knowing the world, is located behind her eyes, in her brain. From this basic assumption she builds a model of consciousness located in, limited to, and derived from the brain.

The dreamed character would never question her model of reality, but for two experiences; suffering on the inside and conflict on the outside. Little does she realise that both experiences, the suffering and the conflict, are the inevitable consequence of her belief that the consciousness she essentially is, is limited by the body contained within it. Of course, when the dreamer wakes up, she realises that the dreamed world was simply how the content of her own mind appeared to itself from the localised perspective of the dreamed character that she seemed to be within her own dream.

Now, consider the possibility that what appears to us as our environment in the waking state is in fact a dream state for universal consciousness – it is how universal consciousness appears to us from our limited and localised perspectives. You could say, the same pattern we observe in dreams is taking place in the waking state one level up, so to speak, where universal consciousness is dreaming or imagining the universe within itself and simultaneously localising itself in the form of each of our minds. From this perspective it perceives its own activity as the universe as we know it. In other words, the universe as we know it results from the interaction of two segments of reality; the universal and the individual, just as the dreamed world comes into apparent existence when the dreamer’s mind interacts with a part of itself, namely the dreamed character.

Why is it necessary for the universal consciousness to overlook or forget, or ignore itself in order to bring forth manifestation within it? Why cannot universal consciousness simply perceive the world directly? Because to do so would require viewing the world, indeed viewing the universe from every possible point of view within it, which would result in innumerable images superimposed one on top of the other. To see an object, it is necessary to do so from the localised perspective of a single subject. As such, consciousness localises itself in order to actualise what lies in potential within it, in form. It gives birth to existence within itself in the form of the subject-object relationship. However, this comes at a price, consciousness brings forth manifestation within itself by overlooking or forgetting itself by collapsing or contracting into an apparently separate subject of experience and in doing so it loses touch with its innate peace and joy. It sacrifices itself for the sake of its creation.

Just as a mother sacrifices herself to bring forth her child, consciousness pays for itself with its own innate peace and happiness. It is for this reason the longing for happiness, peace and love, burns in the heart of all people. What we really seek is not an experience to be added to us, what we really seek is to be divested of all that makes us feel we are temporary, finite selves, separate from one another, separate from nature, separate from God and returned to our natural condition.

Does a tree in the forest exist if no-one is perceiving it? This question cannot be satisfactorily answered because it is founded on a false premise, namely that the tree exists as such when it is being perceived. Suspend the idea that the tree has its own stand-alone existence and consider the possibility that what we perceive as a tree is simply the way a particular segment of the activity of universal consciousness appears when it interacts with another segment of itself, namely the finite mind. In other words, the world as we see it is the result of an interaction between infinite consciousness and the finite mind.

We half-create the world in the sense that we impose the limitations of perception on its reality. We half-perceive it in the sense that its reality exists independently of each of our minds and precedes its being perceived by us. So, what we see when we look at the world is its pre-existing reality, infinite consciousness modulated by our finite mind. The world as such owes its reality to infinite consciousness. It borrows its appearance from the finite mind.

It is what William Blake, in the 19th Century meant when he said: “… ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five…” (71) Every object is an immense world of delight that is of the nature of pure consciousness, which is peace and joy itself, filtered through, or enclosed by our faculties of perception. It is perception that reduces the infinite to the finite, or more accurately, makes what is truly infinite from the localised perspective of each of our minds appear as the finite.

William Blake, on another occasion said: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” The narrow chinks of our cavern are the limited faculties of our senses. Our senses as such, are not a clear window on to reality, they mediate reality through their own limitations, conferring on to reality the limitations that properly belong to the human mind, rendering reality in a way that is consistent with the limitations of that mind, divested of the limits that sense perception confers on reality. Reality shines as it is, infinite and in human experience the infinite shines in the form of peace, joy, love and beauty.
[YouTube: ends at 40:00]

“… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

:[Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth, July 13, 1798]

Image source: https://unsplash.com/@jeremybishop

consciousness is

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Excerpts from a talk by Rupert Spira, titled: “Non-duality and the nature of consciousness.” [YouTube: starts at 3:43] Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRUgkSJZ-8M

Consciousness is that which knows or is aware of our experience. So, whatever we are experiencing, we are aware of it; our thoughts, sensations in the body, the sound of somebody talking, or the view of our room seen from where we are sitting. Whatever it is that knows our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions is not itself a thought, feeling, sensation or perception. It is consciousness or awareness – I use the words consciousness and awareness synonymously.

Most people completely ignore consciousness in favour of the content of their experience, thoughts, feelings, sensations, activities, relationships and so on. And yet, without consciousness there would be no experience. Consciousness is that which makes all experience possible but is not itself, an experience. All experiences appear and disappear but consciousness remains consistently present. The consciousness or awareness with which we are aware of our current experience is the same awareness with which we were aware of our experience when we were two-year-old children.

Consciousness is the changeless factor in all changing experience, it is never aged or modified or tarnished by experience. The reason why experience is felt as one smooth, continuous flow, rather than a series of disconnected experiences, is because they are unified by the presence of consciousness, just as a movie is not experienced as a series of intermittent images on account of the screen from which it derives its seeming continuity. In other words, what we consider to be continuity in time, is in fact the ever presence of consciousness.

Consider the space within which all experience arises, try to find an edge to the field of awareness within which your experience takes place. We believe that awareness has a border or an edge only because we believe it to be contained within the body, and our feelings simply conform to and substantiate that belief. But if we stay close to the evidence of experience, the body and world are experienced as a flow of sensations and perceptions all contained within awareness.

Everything appears in awareness which is not limited to the individual mind, or the sum total of all minds, human or otherwise. Indeed, the individual mind is one such mind in the infinite field of universal awareness. Whilst awareness is the innermost aspect of our self, at the same time it has no personal qualities. It is the essence of our self but sharing none of the limitations of our objective experience, it is impersonal and infinite, imminent and transcendent.

Awareness is self-aware just as the sun is self-luminous, consciousness knows itself just by being itself, just as the sun illuminates itself just by being itself. Consciousness never ceases to be aware of itself but its awareness of itself is so thoroughly mixed with content of experience, that it ceases to know itself as it essentially is and knows itself in a modified form. The primary and essential nature of our self, pure consciousness, becomes mixed with and seemingly qualified by the content of experience. The infinite becomes or seems to become the finite, the eternal appears as time.

If we pose the question, what is consciousness and resist the temptation to answer that question with a word, our attention is gently invited away from its contents and in most cases gradually, occasionally suddenly, it sinks back into its source the presence of awareness from which it arises. This sinking of the mind into the heart of awareness is the essence of meditation… the highest form of prayer.  [ends at 24:39] Continues next week 26 May 2023.

image source: https://unsplash.com/@turner_imagery

infinite consciousness and the finite mind

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Excerpts from a talk by Rupert Spira, titled “What is Reality?”

As a person, you have emerged from the universe, your body has been born from the earth so whatever you are as a person essentially must be the same as the universe from which you emerged. For the same reason… what a wave essentially is must be the same as what the ocean essentially is, because it is an emergence of that ocean. The reality of yourself and the reality of the world must be the same, the question then is what is that reality?

That reality is that which truly is. An illusion is not something that does not exist, it is something that does exist, but is not what it appears to be. Unlike, or instance, a square circle – not only does a square circle not exist, it doesn’t even appear as an illusion. What, then is an illusion? A landscape in a movie is an illusion, it does exist as something that is obviously there, but it is obviously not a real landscape. All illusions have a realty to them, and there must be something about the landscape in the movie that is real.

ln order to find out what is real we need to somehow penetrate through the illusion and touch its reality. We go up to the landscape in the movie, touch its reality, and we find the screen. We do exactly the same with this experience we are having, sitting together in this room. It is undoubtedly real, all experience is real, there is no such thing as an unreal experience. So, what is real about our current experience of the world? It could be an illusion, which doesn’t mean to say it’s not real, and doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist. It just means it may not be what it appears to be.

The way the world appears to be is directly correlated with our sense perceptions, our minds have the capacity of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling and reality appears to us in the form of sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells. There is a direct correlation between the perceiving apparatus and the world as it appears to be in accordance with the limitations of the apparatus through which it is perceived. So, do these sights, sounds, etc., we see out there, do they have their own standalone reality or do our minds confer upon them their appearance? For instance, what would the thing in itself be if we were to remove everything from it that our minds project on to it; the sights, sounds, tastes, textures, smells and concepts, perceiving and thinking, what would be left of reality? There would be no forms because these forms are what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. What would remain would be undoubtedly present, without any form it would be being itself – some would say, God’s being. When you go directly to that being in yourself you find the awareness that shines in each of us, the knowledge that ‘I am.’

The experience that I am is not mediated through thought or perception; I know that I am, I am not imagining it. So, is the ‘I’ that knows that I am, the same ‘I’ that knows I am, or is your being known by something other than itself? Are there two ‘I’s in you, one that is and the other that knows you are? It’s the same ‘I’, there is only one ‘I’ in you. Your being knows itself; it is self-aware. Here you could say that the Ultimate Reality of the universe is aware being, which is consciousness, and what we perceive as the world is the activity of reality, called Reality Consciousness, that moves or vibrates within itself, and that movement or vibration of consciousness, appears when viewed through our sense faculties as the physical world. When you fall asleep at night the activity of your own mind appears as a physical world from the perspective of a separate subject of experience in that world. So, what appears to us as a physical world is the activity of a universal mind or consciousness, whose nature is consciousness, not matter. It only appears as physical matter when perceived through the sense perceptions of a separate subject of experience within that world. There’s a beautiful line from Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” dated July 13, 1798

“ [from line 106]…all that we behold from this green earth; of all the mighty world of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, and what perceive; well pleased to recognise in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts…”

This stunning realisation that, of this green earth, what we perceive is half created by us, half perceived by us. What he’s saying is that the reality of the world precedes the finite mind and is independent of it., and the mind creates its appearance but perceives its reality.  Our sense faculties, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling create the way the word appears, the way reality appears to us. We perceive the reality of the world, we don’t create it, it’s already there.

To put it into more contemporary language, the world as we experience it is very close to quantum physics and I don’t want to go too far in this direction because I’m not a scientist. The world as we perceive it results from an interaction of infinite consciousness and a finite mind – a finite mind being a localization of infinite consciousness.

When we conceptualize independently existing selves and things, there is a separating-out… but it’s not what it seems. There’s something about this in Ian McGilchrist’s book “The Matter with Things.” He says: “Relationship precedes relata.” By this, he means relationship precedes things. What it means is that normally we think there are things – things come first, and then there are relationships between things. He’s suggesting it’s the other way round, there is relationship between the whole infinite consciousness and the finite mind and it is the interaction between these two that creates the appearance of things. So, things come about as a result of this interaction, rather than the relationship being created by the things. But don’t think Reality is just a dead, inert being or consciousness, it moves, it is moved but the whole cannot see itself … let me try to demonstrate first why the whole cannot see itself.

Look at this glass I’m holding, you see this glass from a single point of view and therefore see it as a single glass. If you were to take a snapshot of your view of the glass, then change your seat and go to the other side of the room, take another snapshot of the glass and superimpose the two images, like transparencies, one on top of the other, you’d now have two glasses looking roughly the same but it would begin to look blurred. Now, say you did that four times, eight times, 16 times, 32 times and you superimposed all the images on top of each other, it would begin to look like a Cubist painting, the integrity of the glass would begin to disintegrate, you’d see all different angles of the glass. Now keep on doing that, 64 times, 128 times, 200, 400, and so on from different points of view in space. The image would get darker and darker until it would be utter darkness and that’s why the whole cannot perceive reality, it cannot perceive the world directly – there’s no form.

From the point of view of the whole, consciousness has no view of the world directly, it cannot perceive itself directly, it just knows its own being but that being doesn’t appear in any form. In order for its movement to be perceived or known, it must be perceived or known through a localised perspective. That’s what each of our minds are; a localized point of view within consciousness, from which it is able to perceive its own movement, its own activity as an apparently physical world. The activity of consciousness is there prior to the finite mind but the finite mind lends the world its appearance. Hence the world that we experience is an interaction between these two segments of reality. It’s the same realty; infinite consciousness and the finite mind but they have to seem to separate in order to bring something into existence.

Image: Rupert Spira’s Open Bowl, 2007, a stoneware piece with embossed text under white titanium glaze. Acquired by Friends of the V&A in 2013.

Link to the Rupert Spira talk:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyyojKcGDNY&t=1417s

About Rupert Spira, Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Spira

death and life in buddhism

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Excerpts from: Care of the Dying – Buddhism HSE: Samye Ling, “Buddhism and Death” by Ken Holmes: “Kusala and Akusala” by Buddhistdoor Global BDG and: Abhidhamma in daily life, Chapter 10, “The First Citta in Life” by Nina Van Gorkom.

Buddhist teaching views life and death as a continuum, believing that consciousness (the spirit) continues after death and may be reborn. Death can be an opportunity for liberation from the cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Since Buddhism’s earliest days, Buddhist monks have gone to funeral grounds to meditate and contemplate death. This may seem macabre, to a modern Western mind, but for monks it is an invaluable and time-saving device. Most people have to wait decades – until parents or spouses die – to go through the unique learning cycle afforded by observing death at close hand; to see the biological shell as a guest-house in which the travelling consciousness sojourns but briefly, soon to go on to another place. This almost endless, age-old journey will involve staying in hundreds, thousands, of such temporary residences until liberating truths finally release the weary traveller.
Observing this ephemeral fragility of life can lead to an awakened appreciation of every precious moment of life. Each hour, each day, becomes a fresh opportunity for working for the long-term spiritual well-being rather than inconsequential material pleasure. On a deeper level, death is not only a physical reality but also a powerful metaphor for the psychological death of ego which must occur before the mind is liberated into limitless wisdom.

We are born in planes of existence where we can experience objects through the sense-organs. During previous lives as well as the present life we experienced colour, sound and other sense-objects. We were clinging to these objects in the past and we are clinging to them at present again and again, so that attachment has become a deep-rooted tendency. Attachment does not arise with each moment of consciousness, citta, but the tendency to attachment is “carried on” from one moment to the next moment, from life to life.

Cittas (moments of consciousness) arise and fall away and succeed one another, thus each citta conditions the next one. The last citta of the previous life (dying-consciousness) was succeeded by the first citta of this life. That is why tendencies one had in the past can continue by way of accumulation from one citta to the next one and from past lives to the present life. Since people accumulated different tendencies in past lives they are born with different tendencies and inclinations.

Since the first citta of a lifespan performs the function of rebirth there is only one patisandhi-citta in a life. There is no self which transmigrates from one life to the next life; there is only nama (mind) and rupa (body) rising and falling away. The present life is different from the past life but there is continuity in so far as the present life is conditioned by the past. Since the patisandhi-citta succeeds the last citta of the previous life the accumulated tendencies of past lives go on to the patisandhi-citta. Thus, inclinations one has in the present life are conditioned by the past.

There are many different types of citta and they can be classified by way of four groups: kusala cittas (wholesome cittas) akusala cittas (unwholesome cittas) vipakacittas (cittas which are result) kiriyacittas (cittas which are neither cause nor result). We may not know that both in a sense-door process (body) and in a mind-door process (mind) there are akusala cittas or kusala cittas arising. Because of our accumulated ignorance we do not clearly know our akusala cittas and kusala cittas and we do not recognize our more subtle defilements.

In Buddhism, all moral good and moral evil can be traced to six radical roots. All moral evil spring from the three radical roots of lobha (greed, covetousness), dosa (hatred, aversion) and moha (ignorance, delusion, mental confusion). All defilements and all unwholesome mental dispositions that manifest themselves either mentally, vocally or physically come into being. On the contrary, all moral good can be traced to three radical roots of alobha (non-greed, non-covetousness), adosa (non-hatred, non-aversion) and amoha (non-delusion, absence of ignorance). In other words, generosity, compassionate love and wisdom.

A mind obsessed with greed, malice and delusion is in bondage. It fails to see things in their proper pespective, and prevents one from acting properly. Thus it is called akusla or unskillful.

When kusala qualities are dominant, we experience mental health (arogya), mental purity (anavajjata), dexterity (cheka), mental felicity (sukha-vipaka). Such a mind is healthy and skillful.

It is said that kusala leads to Nibbana, the ultimate goal in Buddhism for nibbana means the complete elimination of all traces of self-eccentricity and ego-centric impulses. The more selfless acts (kusala) are done, the more selfless we become, and the closer we come to the realization of nibbana.

Hence, we must be mindful at all times for kusala and akusala thoughts and actions take us to opposite directions. We are the architects of our own fate. We are our own creators and destroyers.  We build our own heavens and hells.

https://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/parinirvana-day-authors

Image source: Parinirvana Buddha

all the myriad things

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“The doing is done but there is no doer. The principle of doerless doing must be taken up and utilized in our daily lives. Whether we’re eating, sitting, laying down, walking, using, seeking, whatever we’re doing we must have enough truth-discerning awareness to prevent the arising of ‘I’ – the feeling that ‘I’ am the doer. ‘I’ am the eater, the walker, the sitter, the sleeper, or the user. We must make the mind constantly empty of ego, so that emptiness is the natural state and we abide with the awareness that there is nothing worth having or being.” [Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, “Heartwood from the Bo Tree”]

Emptiness means that there is no feeling of ‘self’ or ‘belonging to self’, there is no feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, which are the creations of craving and grasping. Being void of these things is ‘being empty’. What is it that is empty? It is the mind that is empty, emptied of the feelings of ‘self’, and of ‘belonging to self’, both in their crude and subtle forms. If the mind is empty to the degree of being free of even the most refined sense of self it is said that the mind is itself emptiness. This agrees with the teaching that mind is emptiness, emptiness is mind; emptiness is Buddha, Buddha is emptiness, emptiness is Dhamma, Dhamma is emptiness. There is only one thing… all the myriad things that we are acquainted with are nothing but emptiness.

The characteristic of all things is emptiness. This phrase ‘all things’ must be understood correctly as encompassing every single thing from a speck of dust up to Nibbana. It must be well understood that in a speck of dust there is emptiness or absence of self, absence of a permanent, independent entity. The mind and heart, thoughts and feelings, each thing is characterized by emptiness, absence of a permanent, independent entity.

The Buddhist Teachings, the study and practice of Dhamma have the characteristic of an absence of a permanent, independent entity. All the way through to the final Path Realizations, their Fruits and Nibbana itself, have this same characteristic, it’s just that we don’t see it. Even a sparrow flying to-and-fro has the characteristic of emptiness but we don’t see it. All things display the characteristic of emptiness, it’s just that we don’t see it.

The word ’empty’ also refers to the characteristic of the mind that is free from all grasping and clinging. Although the mind is empty of self, it doesn’t realize that it is empty, because ordinarily, it is constantly enveloped and disturbed by the conceptual thought that feeds on sense contact.

As a result, the mind is neither aware of its own emptiness nor the emptiness in all things. But whenever the mind completely throws off that which is enveloping it, the grasping and clinging of delusion and ignorance, and detaches from it completely, then the mind, through its non-clinging has the characteristic of emptiness.

Because all things do truly have the characteristic of being empty of a self, no permanent, independent entity to be grasped at or clung to, we are able to see the truth of emptiness. Thus, the mind seeing emptiness in all things collapses into itself, leaving only emptiness. It becomes emptiness and sees everything as emptiness. Material objects, people, animals, time and space, every sort of dhamma melts into emptiness through knowing this truth. The word empty is the remainderless extinction of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, the utter destruction of self.

So, how should we practice during those times when the mind is free of association with sense objects? Maybe we are doing some kind of work alone and unconcerned, performing our daily tasks or of practicing formal meditation. There is nothing arising from sense-contact. We may be reading a book or even thinking about something, as long as the mind is undisturbed by sense-contact. At such times our practice must be the study and clarification of the way in which things are empty and the way in which to make the mind empty and free of delusion. Think about it, study it for yourself, enquire from others, and discuss it regularly. Keep doing it.

Excerpts from three talks given by Ajahn Buddhadasa to a Dhamma study group in Siriraj Hospital, Bangkok in 1961 and 1962.

Dhammafootsteps, Postcards# 375,374, 373, 372

Image by Bella White, source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/body-of-water-and-seashore-during-sunset-635426/

soaring summits of silence

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Excerpts from the Introduction to: “Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond,” by Ajahn Brahm

During meditation we should not develop a mind that accumulates and holds on to things. Instead, we should develop a mind that is willing to let go, to give up all the burdens we carry like so many heavy suitcases. In meditation unload as much baggage as you can. Think of duties and achievements as heavy weights pressing upon you. Abandon them freely without looking back. This attitude of mind that inclines to giving up will lead you into deep meditation.

Meditators are like birds that soar through the sky and rise to the peaks. It is on such summits of perception that meditators will understand, from their own direct experience, what we call “mind” and the nature of what we call “self,’ “God,” “the world,” “the universe,” the whole lot. It’s there that they become enlightened – not in the realms of thought, but on the soaring summits of silence within their mind.

“Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond” is a guided tour through the world of timeless Buddhist rapture. It describes how meditation literally implodes into the supreme bliss of the jhānas and how such states of letting go lift the veil of our fives senses, to reveal the awesome world of the mind, the magic inner garden where enlightenment is reached.

In the Mahāsaccaka sutta (MN 36) the Buddha relates, “I considered:… ‘Could that [jhāna] be the path to enlightenment?’ Then following on that memory, came the realization, ‘That is the path to enlightenment.’”

Image: detail of a photo by Simon Berger (Unsplash)

disembodied beauty

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Excerpts from Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator’s Handbook by Ajahn Brahm.

[Note: The following is the beginning of the meditational guide that takes the reader to the jhānas, the higher states of bliss. Ajahn Brahm explains that even though the jhānas may seem distant and unreachable, for some meditators, discussing such sublime states can create inspiration, as well as map out the territory ahead. Some readers may have already gotten close enough to be able to understand this discussion from their own experience, and it may help them to make that last leap into the jhānas – eventually the seeds that are planted in this kind of discussion will someday bear fruit.]

It would be marvellous for each one of us if we could abandon all inner speech and abide in silent awareness of the present moment long enough to realize how delightful it is. Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity than thinking. When one realizes that, silence becomes more attractive and important. The mind inclines toward it, seeks it out constantly, to the point where it engages in the thinking process only if it is really necessary, only if there is some point to it.

Once we have realized that most of our thinking gets us nowhere, we gladly and easily spend much time in inner quiet. Turn the awareness onto the breath and follow that breath from moment to moment without interruption. Notice the arising of inner speech and the mind’s tendency to go off into the past or future. Come back to the breath, and see how your attention expands to take in every single moment of the breath.

You know the inbreath at the very first moment, when the first sensation of inbreathing arises. Then you observe as those sensations develop gradually through the whole course of one inbreath, not missing even a moment of the in-breath. When that in-breath finishes, you know that moment. You see in your mind that last movement of the in-breath. You then see the next moment as a pause between breaths, and then many more moments of pause until the out-breath begins. You see the first moment of out-breathing and each subsequent sensation as the out-breath evolves, until the out-breath disappears when its function is complete. All this is done in silence and in the present moment.

You can attain this degree of stillness by letting go of everything in the entire universe except for this momentary experience of the breath happening silently. Actually “you” do not reach this stage, the mind does. This is where the doer, the major part of one’s ego, starts to disappear. One finds that progress happens effortlessly at this stage of meditation. We just have to get out of the way, let go, and watch it all happen. The mind will automatically incline toward this very simple, peaceful, and delicious unity of being alone with one thing, just being with the breath in each and every moment. This is the unity of mind, the unity in the moment, the unity in stillness.

The Beautiful Breath

This is what I call the “springboard” of meditation, because from it one may dive into the blissful states. When we simply maintain this unity of consciousness by not interfering, the breath will begin to disappear. The breath appears to fade away as the mind focuses instead on what is at the center of the experience of breath, which is awesome peace, freedom, and bliss.

When the breath disappears, all that is left is “the beautiful.” Disembodied beauty becomes the sole object of the mind. The mind is now taking the mind as its own object of contemplation. We are no longer aware of the breath, body, thought, sound, or outside world. All that we are aware of is beauty, peace, bliss, light, or whatever our perception will later call it. We are experiencing only beauty, continuously, effortlessly, with nothing being beautiful! We have long ago let go of chatter, let go of descriptions and assessments. Here the mind is so still that it cannot say anything. One is just beginning to experience the first flowering of bliss in the mind. That bliss will develop, grow, and become very firm and strong. And then one may enter into the jhānas.

The book has been extensively discussed in dhammafootsteps, Click on the link below for a more detailed presentation

silent present-moment awareness of the breath

Photo by Simon Berger

there’s no need to be busy

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Excerpts from “The Path to Peace: A Buddhist Guide to Cultivating Loving-Kindness” by Ayya Khema

There’s no need to be busy. We should of course fulfill our obligations and responsibilities. The Buddha always gave guidelines in that direction. But to be overly busy cannot possibly bring peacefulness. It cannot bring contentment. It cannot bring a heart full of love; it cannot bring a heart that can actually bring the mind to meditation. So, we should check our activities and see which ones are totally unnecessary. And we should see whether, with the activities that we do, we are not only trying to escape our own suffering (dukkha) but also trying to prove something to ourselves and others—that we are somebody. The more we try to prove that we are somebody, the less we have a chance to become nobody. And that’s what nirvana is all about. It doesn’t sound appealing to some people, because they haven’t had enough dukkha yet. When we’ve had enough dukkha with the somebody, we can actually appreciate the fact that there’s only one way to get out of dukkha, and that’s being nobody.

We have the wealth of absolute truth, of immeasurable love and compassion—the whole wealth of the universe within us. It’s just waiting to be discovered. But within the hustle and bustle of morning-to-evening activity, we’ll never manage to find it. It’s like a golden treasure that is lying within us, that we can actually touch upon through the quiet mind. Anyone can do it, but they’ve got to become quiet. And we’ve got to stop trying to be something special. Only then can we get at it, and then, having found it, we can share it. That’s what the Buddha did. He shared it for forty-five years. With a few thousand people. And today we’re sharing it with five hundred million. That’s the value of enlightenment.

So, we have that treasure. But if we really get busy, we have no way of unlocking that treasure chest. Unlocking it takes time, and it takes the quiet mind, the contented mind, the satisfied mind. It needs the mind which knows that there is something to be found far beyond anything at all that we can ever find in the world. And then we will make an attempt at checking out what is really necessary to do.

Whatever we do out of compassion is well done. And this should be our checkpoint: what am I doing out of compassion, and what am I doing in order to assert that I am really here and to let as many people know about it as possible, and what am I doing in order to get out of my dukkha to keep busy? But whatever I do out of compassion, that is what we should pursue.

Ayya Khema (1923–1997) was an international Buddhist teacher, and the first Western woman to become a Theravada Buddhist nun. An advocate of Buddhist women’s rights, in 1987 she helped coordinate the first conference for the Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women in Bodh Gaya, India.

selflessness

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Excerpts from “A Path With Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life” by Jack Kornfield (1993)

When Buddhists speak of emptiness and of no self, what do they mean? Emptiness does not mean that things don’t exist, nor does “no self” mean that we don’t exist. Emptiness refers to the underlying nonseparation of life and the fertile ground of energy that gives rise to all forms of life. Our world and sense of self is a play of patterns.

Any identity we can grasp is transient, tentative. When we are silent and attentive, we can sense directly how we can never truly possess anything in the world. Clearly, we do not possess outer things. We are in some relationship with our cars, our home, our family, our jobs, but whatever that relationship is, it is “ours” only for a short time. In the end, things, people, or tasks die or change or we lose them. Nothing is exempt.

We encounter another aspect of the emptiness of self when we notice how everything arises out of nothing, comes out of the void, returns to the void, goes back to nothing. All our words of the past day have disappeared. Similarly, where has the past week or the past month or our childhood gone? They arose, did a little dance, and now they’ve vanished, along with the twentieth century, the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, the ancient Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, and so forth. All experience arises in the present, does its dance, and disappears. Experience comes into being only tentatively, for a little time in a certain form; then that form ends and a new form replaces it moment by moment.

As we open and empty ourselves, we come to experience an interconnectedness, the realization that all things are joined and conditioned in an interdependent arising. Each experience and event contains all others. The teacher depends on the student, the airplane depends on the sky.

When a bell rings, is it the bell we hear, the air, the sound on our cars, or is it our brain that rings? It is all of these things. As the Taoists say, “The between is ringing.” The sound of the bell is here to he heard everywhere—in the eyes of every person we meet, in every tree and insect, in every breath we take…

When we truly sense this interconnectedness and the emptiness out of which all beings arise, we find liberation and a spacious joy. Discovering emptiness brings a lightness of heart, flexibility, and an ease that rests in all things. The more solidly we grasp our identity, the more solid our problems become. Once I asked a delightful old Sri Lankan meditation master to teach me the essence of Buddhism. He just laughed and said three times, “No self, no problem.”

Jack Kornfield was trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma, and India, and holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He is a psychotherapist and founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and the Spirit Rock Center. His books include Seeking the Heart of Wisdom and Still Forest Pool.

Image: Giant Buddha statue under construction at the Khai Nguyen Pagoda in Son Tay, on the outskirts of Hanoi, Vietnam, on May 18, 2019

perception & reaction

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Essentially what counts about our life is our kamma (karma), that is, our actions of body, speech or mind. And kamma means you have a choice: you can act wisely now rather than react compulsively. Reactions are generated by contact – that is something touches the heart. When we notice or are struck by something – it could be something seen, remembered, tasted, imagined – then something vibrates and there’s perception. Perception is the solidification of the immediate impression arising in consciousness; the light goes on, there is meaning, true or false. Then comes the reaction, the volitional quality, or cetanā – and when the mind engages with that, there is kamma.

Training is about putting a micro-pause or attentiveness, between the perception and the reaction, or, between the mental reaction and any engagement with it. And it’s also good to challenge perceptions before they land, or as they arise. So, you establish the perception of impermanence: ‘This is going to change.’ And the perception of the unattractive: ‘This too loses flavour and breaks down.’ Then there are perceptions based on goodwill: ‘Just like me, they are enriched by kindness.’ And when we practice recollection, we establish perceptions based upon awakening: ‘Freedom from suffering is possible.’ In this way, you’re changing your life right now in terms of how and when the mind jumps.

Notice: What are the most habitual jumps? Habitual reactions are about how we repeatedly jump; the ingrained impressions and reactions that become ‘myself’. ‘I’m always like this, I see things this way, I tend to mistrust, or be apprehensive, or urgent, or dismissive, or…’  Then pause; wait a minute. Check. Do you have to jump, right now? Come out of the obsessive rut.

Ajahn Sucitto

Image by Penn B: Coastal view, Phuket Island