‘whereness’ does not apply

Posted on June 13, 2024 by tiramit

Excerpts from “The Island” by Ajahn Pasanno & Ajahn Amaro, chapter titled “The Unconditioned and Non-locality.” This week I’d like to go back to a subject that’s been done before on Dhamma Footsteps, namely: ‘Unsupported consciousness,’ I wrote a number of posts on this subject, back in the day when I was able to write my own posts. Take a look at ‘Unblinking gaze.’ Just key in the title in the Search box here on the front page. On the subject of ‘Atammayatā,’ see the text by Ajahn Amaro from “Small Boat, Great Mountain”, dated January 18 2024 and titled: ‘The place of non-abiding.’ Also, the post, dated January 25 2024: ‘Overlooking this to get to that.’

Consciousness of Nibbāna, although real, is best described as being unlocated — here we begin to say good-bye to the world of geography. Interesting that only what we call physical existence is dependent upon three-dimensional space – all the factors of the mental realm (the nāma-khandhas) are ‘unlocated’; that is to say, the concepts of place and space do not in any true sense apply there. Our thoughts and perceptions are so geared to operate in terms of three-dimensional space as the basic reality, and that view of things seems so obvious to common sense, that it is hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. It is only through meditative insight that we can develop the uncommon sense required to see things differently. A couple of everyday examples might serve to lead us into the subject. Firstly, the word ‘cyber-space’ is used frequently these days; one talks of “visiting such and such a website” and “my e-mail address” but where are these? Abhayagiri Monastery has a web-site but it does not exist anywhere. It has no geographical location. The words ‘visit,’ ‘homepage,’ ‘address’ and suchlike are the easy jargon of Cyberia, and we can be very comfortable using such terms, but the fact is – that just like a thought and, indeed, the mind itself – although they exist, they cannot be said to truly be anywhere. Three-dimensional space does not apply in their context.

The second example comes from a (purportedly) true incident. An American tourist, in Oxford, England, approached a tweed-jacketed and bespectacled professorial type and said: “Excuse me, but I wonder if you could tell me where exactly is the University?”

“Madam,” the professorial type responded, “‘the University’ is not, in reality, anywhere – the University possesses only metaphysical rather than actual existence.”

What he meant, of course, was that ‘the University’ – being comprised of separate, independent colleges and not having a campus – is just a concept agreed upon by a number of humans to have some validity. It might have financial dealings, it might set exams and issue degrees, but physically it does not exist. There are the different colleges that one may attend or visit, but ‘the University’– no. Like a website or a virtual garden in a computer program, or indeed like a mythical country such as Erewhon – all can be said to exist, but whereness does not apply; they are unlocated.

As we cross the border into the realm of the Unconditioned (if such a metaphor is valid), there needs to be a relinquishing of such habitual concepts as self and time and place. The apprehension of Ultimate Truth (paramattha sacca) necessarily involves a radical letting go of all these familiar structures. Here, as a present-day example and to illustrate the centrality of such relinquishment, is the insight which arose for Ajahn Mahā Boowa “in the period of intense practice immediately following Ajahn Mun’s final passing away. It was this thought, which he describes as having arisen on its own (and more that it was heard rather than thought) which led to Ajahn Mahā Boowa’s full enlightenment shortly thereafter.

9.1) “If there is a point or a center of the knower anywhere, that is the essence of a level of being.” ~ Ajahn Mahā Boowa, ‘Straight from the Heart,’ p 171

Secondly, we can take up the Buddha’s own words on the nature of Nibbāna or asaṅkhata-dhamma, the Unconditioned Reality.

9.2) “There is that sphere where there is no earth, no water, no fire nor wind; no sphere of infinity of space, of infinity of consciousness, of nothingness or even of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; there, there is neither this world nor the other world, neither moon nor sun; this sphere I call neither a coming nor a going nor a staying still, neither a dying nor a reappearance; it has no basis, no evolution and no support: this, just this, is the end of dukkha.” ~ Ud 8.1

9.3) “There is the Unborn, Uncreated, Unconditioned and Unformed. If there were not, there would be no escape discerned from that which is born, created, conditioned and formed. But, since there is this Unborn, Uncreated, Unconditioned and Unformed, escape is therefore discerned from that which is born, created, conditioned and formed.” ~ Ud 8.3, Iti 43

It is significant that, when the Buddha makes such statements as these, he uses a different Pali verb ‘to be’ than the usual one. The vast majority of uses of the verb employ the Pali ‘hoti’; this is the ordinary type of being, implying existence in time and space: I am happy; she is a fine horse; the house is small; the days are long. In these passages just quoted, when the Buddha makes his rare but emphatic metaphysical statements, he uses the verb ‘atthi’ instead. It still means ‘to be’ but some Buddhist scholars (notably Peter Harvey) insist that there is a different order of being implied: that it points to a reality which transcends the customary bounds of time, space, duality and individuality.

Some similar areas of Dhamma are examined in ‘The Questions of King Milinda, (100 BC. – 200 AD) It is significant, in the following exchange between the Buddhist monk, Nagasena, and the King, how the element of sīla (morality/integrity) and its role in the realization of Nibbāna, are brought firmly into prominence.

9.7) Nibbāna is neither past nor future nor present; It is neither produced nor not produced nor to be produced, Yet, it exists, and may be realized. ~ Miln 323, (E.W. Burlingame trans.)

9.8) Nibbāna Is Not a Place

“Reverend Nāgasena, is this region in the East, or in the South, or in the West, or in the North, or above or below or across – this region where Nibbāna is located?”

“Great king, the region does not exist, either in the East, or in the South, or in the West, or in the North, or above or below or across, where Nibbāna is located.”

“If, Reverend Nāgasena, there is no place where Nibbāna is located, then there is no Nibbāna; and as for those who have realized Nibbāna, their realization also is vain…” (The King goes on to tell Nāgasena why he thinks this is so.)

Nāgasena replies: “Great king, there is no place where Nibbāna is located. Nevertheless, this Nibbāna really exists; and a man, by ordering his walk aright [practising wisely], by diligent mental effort, realizes Nibbāna… Just as there is such a thing as fire, but no place where it is located – the fact being that a man, by rubbing two sticks together, produces fire – so also, great king, there is such a thing as Nibbāna, but no place where it is located – the fact being that a man, by ordering his walk aright [practising wisely], by diligent mental effort, realizes Nibbāna…”

“But what, Reverend Sir, is the place where a man must stand to order his walk aright [practise wisely] and realize Nibbāna?”

“Sīla, great king, is the place! Abiding steadfast in Sīla, putting forth diligent mental effort – whether … on a mountain-top or in the highest heaven – no matter where a man may stand, by ordering his walk aright [practising wisely], he realizes Nibbāna.”

“Good, Reverend Nāgasena! You have made it plain what Nibbāna is, you have made it plain what the realization of Nibbāna is, you have well-described the Power of Sīla, you have made it plain how a man orders his walk aright [practises wisely], you have demonstrated that Right Effort on the part of those who put forth diligent effort is not barren. It is just as you say most excellent of excellent teachers! I agree absolutely!” ~ Miln 326-328, (E.W. Burlingame trans)

To underscore the quality of placelessness, the non-locality of Dhamma, here we have Ajahn Chah’s final message to Ajahn Sumedho, which was sent by letter (a rare if not unique occurrence) in the summer of 1981. Shortly after this was received at Chithurst Forest Monastery in England, Ajahn Chah suffered the “stroke that left him paralysed and mute for the last ten years of his life.

9.9) “Whenever you have feelings of love or hate for anything whatsoever, these will be your aides and partners in building pāramitā. The Buddha-Dhamma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. This, Sumedho, is your place of non-abiding.” ~ Ajahn Chah

This was by no means the first time that Ajahn Chah had used this expression – on neither moving forwards, backwards nor standing still (e.g. see ‘Food for the Heart – collected teachings of Ajahn Chah,’ p 339) – but it is perhaps significant that these were the words he chose to write as final instructions to one of his closest and most influential disciples.

Another analogy that might be useful when investigating these areas where habitual approaches and language no longer apply is in the nature of the subatomic realm. Scientists have found that “conventional notions of space and time cease to have much relevance below the Planck scale (i.e. distances less than 10-35 m). Such ultramicroscopic examinations of the world leave us, similarly, in a vastly different conceptual landscape, for they too describe an arena of the universe in which the conventional notions of left and right, back and forth, up and down, and even before and after, lose their meaning.

In sum, the mind cannot be said to be truly anywhere. Furthermore, material things, ultimately, cannot be said to be anywhere either. “There is no ‘there’ there,” as Gertrude Stein famously put it. The world of our perceptions is a realm of convenient fictions – there is nothing solid or separate to be found in either the domain of the subject or that of the object, whether it be an act of cognition, an emotion, the song of a bird or this book that you hold in your hands. However, even though all attributes of subject and object might be unlocated and thus ungraspable, with wisdom they can be truly known.

Link to the source of this post:

https://www.abhayagiri.org/media/books/The-Island-Web-2020%20ed..pdf

the way it is part 2

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho
This is the second part of the article; Part 1 was posted on May 30. Look for the link at the end of this post for the source, and also the link to the original Dhamma talk from which the article was derived.
The three characteristics of anicca, dukkha and anattā give us this wonderful information that what all saṅkhāras share – from the best to the worst, from the biggest to the smallest – is that they are impermanent, unsatisfying and not personal, non-self. So contemplate that. Whatever you think you are, however you conceive yourself, that’s a saṅkhāra. Listen to what you think or believe you are. Whether it’s positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. It’s the Buddho, the awakened conscious moment where we’re aware that thoughts about me, what I think, my feelings, my body, my position, my age, my gender, my rights – all these are thoughts that arise and cease, rather than a concept to be grasped and proliferated on.
This is the genius of the Buddha, to give this teaching, which is very direct. It’s not abstruse or secretive. So, when we’re giving this teaching to monks, nuns or lay people, it’s not about a privileged teaching for very specially anointed people with high spiritual qualities. It’s available for everyone, and it’s been available for 2,560 years. But so much of culture and civilization isn’t based on wisdom. It’s based on ideals – how things should be. Ideals are what we consider how life should be, how Amaravati should be, how monastic life should be. We can all figure out how it should be. It should be completely fair. It should be equal, just, completely right. And if we join the ‘cult’ of Theravada Buddhism, then we believe we’re better than other forms of Buddhism and other religions, because we believe in concepts about the ‘best of the Buddha’s teachings’, the ‘pure teaching’, the ‘original teaching’. We can be critical of other forms of Buddhism because they teach in different ways. But all of that is conceptual proliferation. It’s using the thinking mind to make value judgments about yourself, the conditions you’re living under, the state of the political or social system.
All the wars and conflicts that we hear about in the mass media are about conceptual proliferation. Each side thinks they’re right, and the other, because they don’t agree, are wrong; we have a critical mind. Growing up in America, we were brought up to believe that democracy is the very best, and that America stands for ‘pure democracy’. That’s what I was told when I was young. Then you find out all the undemocratic things that go on, and think that it shouldn’t be like that; we shouldn’t be hypocritical but should live up to this idea of democracy. But democracy is an ideal. It’s a beautiful word and can be very inspiring, like socialism. But in America, if you say you’re a socialist, you’re considered a communist and a traitor to democracy. Socialism has a very pejorative connotation in the United States, at least it did when I lived there. But in other countries you can call your system socialism, democratic socialism, communism. They’re all words, but none of them live up to their ideal because they can’t – because life is like this. People are the way they are. We’re not all arahants or perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas. What we feel is like this, which isn’t always right or good but it is the way it is. This way of reflecting helps us to accept life as it flows through us, developing and using wisdom with conscious awareness.
I remember joining peace movements when I was in Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s. I idolized peace and there was a very active peace movement, with quite a number of different organizations in Berkeley at the time. The Atomic Energy Commission had an office in Berkeley, so we would go down and protest, carrying signs saying ‘Peace’ because we considered the Atomic Energy Commission un-peaceful, and we were demanding they become peaceful. But while carrying this sign saying ‘Peace’, I looked at myself and started considering, ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about. I really don’t know what peace is. I have an idea of peace, but I personally am not peaceful.’ Almost all of my mental states seemed un-peaceful.
I had joined two peace movements at that time, and I could see there were a lot of jealousies and conflicts within the groups; all idealistic and high-minded peace-niks, people who were demanding peace from governments, from political institutions, from religion, from their mates, from their partners, from their husbands or wives, all wanting peace. But what is peace? When we understand suffering, we begin to realize peace. Our true nature is basically peaceful. What you aren’t are the un-peaceful conditions that arise and cease. But underlying all these fraught conditions, no matter what they may be, is the true nature of consciousness: peacefulness, awareness, mindfulness. This you can trust. This is your refuge. You can’t take refuge in your personal positions or preferences, because they’ll change. Then there will be conflict because other people have different attachments to different ideas.
Trying to find a concept that we all agree on is impossible because we’re all different on that level of saṅkhāras. Can you really help the way you are? Can you really be somebody else, just make yourself into an enlightened arahant, a Buddha or a bodhisattva because that’s the ideal you hold? Is it possible for any of us to force ourselves to become perfect? It’s impossible because saṅkhāras are not perfect. Their very nature is imperfection, change. Ideals are ideal. You can carry thought to the superlative, the best, the highest possible way you can think, but that’s a thought, and a thought is a saṅkhāra, it’s anicca, dukkha, anattā. It changes; it arises and ceases. You can’t sustain perfect ideals. You can attach to them and then be caught in judgments towards yourself and others, because nobody can live up to the ideal that you may hold to.

We often become disillusioned with political systems, with religion, with meditation. How many of you think you’re not a good meditator because you can’t get samadhi, or you don’t have jhānas? You think you’re not a good meditator because when you sit in the Temple, where others look perfectly composed and in samādhi, your mind is going all over the place, and you think that’s your self. And then you think you’re not a meditator, or you can’t meditate, or you’re not really a Buddhist. You create all kinds of proliferating thoughts about it. The direct path isn’t about getting jhānas and perfect samādhi but in recognizing that the conditions you’re experiencing in the present are the way they are: they’re changing. And your relationship to them is witnessing their changingness and being patient, letting them be what they are – they arise and cease. According to action and speech, we do our best to conform to the vinaya, to the precepts. But there’s no vinaya around emotional habits or mental activity – around memories, thoughts or character tendencies – because these are all changing conditions of different qualities and quantities in all of us.
How many times have I talked like this? But there’s only one important teaching. You can talk about all kinds of things: about personal experiences, views and opinions you have about various other teachers, other religious forms. I can use inspiring words about Theravada Buddhism or the Thai Forest Tradition. I can inspire you with inspirational words, but they’re only words, saṅkhāras. And so this emphasis on the impermanent, unsatisfactoriness of words doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them, but they’re very limited. They are not what you really are. When you grasp or identify with the saṅkhāras that you believe you are, you’re going to be unhappy. Even at their best they’re going to disappoint you.
So where does peace lie anyway? Where is peace right now? Is it here in this temple at Amaravati? Many monks or nuns that I’ve known want peaceful external conditions – no noise, no conflicts – just to live in a state of bliss and peace. We get upset about the nearby Luton Airport when the planes fly overhead, or a dog barks, somebody’s mowing the lawn and it’s disturbing my mettā practice or my peacefulness. We think of peace as controlling everything so that nothing upsets us, nothing distracts us. Well, that’s not the way things are. Having eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body: these are all restless conditions. They’re not peaceful. Eyes are not peaceful. The nose – odours change. Hearing sounds – they’re unpleasant, pleasant, neutral. Sensory experience is not peaceful; its very nature is change, and that’s the way it is. To not want it to be that way is creating suffering around the way things are. Whereas if your true nature is peaceful, then you’re peaceful with the conditions you’re experiencing right now. The way it is right now, at this moment – whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re thinking – is like this. And in this sense of opening, I open my arms wide, embracing the moment rather than trying to control it into perfect thinking and perfect equanimity that I imagine or remember having. I open to it. If there’s conflict, it’s like this. If there’s chaos, it’s like this. If there’s noise, cacophonous sounds, bad odours, ugly things to look at – it’s like this. This you can do anywhere, whether you’re in the monastery, in the middle of London in a traffic jam or at a meeting with others. Meditation isn’t confined to just sitting in the Temple at certain designated times of the day. It’s integrated into the way we move and change in sitting, standing, walking, lying down, inhaling and exhaling. It’s in the movement and change of saṅkhāras – of saṁsāra – the changing conditions that we’re all experiencing through our senses.
What is immutable, unmovable or unchangeable is this awareness, and we begin to see that that’s what our refuge is. It’s not about grasping it. Real meditation is the ultimate letting go of absolutely everything, which is not annihilation. It is relaxing: not trying to get samādhi, not trying to get insight, not trying to get something that you don’t have, or get rid of what you have that you don’t want. As Luang Por Chah said, it’s a relaxed holiday of the heart. Years ago, I asked him if he could define what meditation is in Thai, and he said, Phakphon thang jit-jai, which I translate as ‘a holiday of the heart’. I thought to myself, ‘I’m certainly not on a holiday of the heart. I don’t know what that is. I keep all these rules of the vinaya and try to meditate and get samādhi and jhānas, and try to get enlightened – it’s hard work! It’s taking a lot of effort, and sometimes I just can’t do it.’ Luang Por Chah always had this sense of open relaxation, of being with the moment whatever was happening. His life wasn’t always just praise and flowers and adulation, accolades and so on. He had to put up with a lot of stress, disappointments and changing conditions that are a part of life. That’s the way things are in what we might consider the best monasteries, not to mention any others.
So this afternoon’s reflection is meant to encourage you to trust what you really are – your awareness – and not to try to become like somebody else or some ideal, some imagined nun or monk or enlightened human being. Enlightened masters are inspiring to us all, but you can’t become an enlightened master by grasping a concept. The master is awareness itself that you learn to totally trust and integrate into your life as it happens.
Whether it’s praise or blame, success or failure, happiness or suffering, good or bad fortune – these are all worldly conditions. They’re listed in the scriptures as the ‘eight worldly dhammas’. We all want good fortune. We all want success. We all want praise. We all want happiness. But success, good fortune, happiness and praise are positive words that are desirable. We don’t want to be looked down on, despised. We don’t want to be failures or losers. We don’t want to be blamed for things. We don’t want to get sick, get old and die. There’s so many things that we don’t want, but these unwanted conditions are saṅkhāras. They are worldly dhammas because this moment can only be like this, the way it is.
So I offer this as a reflection. May you all benefit from this. Don’t grasp the teaching but apply it to your own experience of life as you live from moment to moment.

Link to the original article:

https://amaravati.org/the-way-it-is-by-ajahn-sumedho/

Link to the original Dhamma talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihmvg81An0E

[Note about the middle image, a satellite image of a large body of water; the Lambert glacier in Antarctica is the world’s largest glacier. The focal point of this image is an icefall that feeds into the glacier from the vast ice sheet covering the polar plateau. Ice flows like water, albeit much more slowly. Cracks can be seen in this icefall as it bends and twists on its slow-motion descent 1300 feet (400 meters) to the glacier below. USGS]

the way it is

Posted on May 30, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho
For each one of us, the way it is right now is going to be different: with our own moods, memories, thoughts, expectations or whatever. When we try to compare one person with another, we get confused because we’re all different. On the level of saṅkhāras, or conditioned phenomena, everything is different. Nothing can stabilize into a permanent quality or condition; it’s beyond the ability of saṅkhāras which by their very nature are changing. The Buddha taught, ‘Sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā – all conditions are impermanent. This is the way it is. They change. Saṅkhāras are like this. They can be of any quality: low or high, good or bad, right or wrong, material or mental or emotional, and their nature is anicca (impermanent), dukkha (unsatisfactory) and anattā (non-self).
The Buddha laid down this teaching very clearly; it’s very simple and you can reflect on it. It’s not a teaching you grasp or a Buddhist doctrine that you must believe in, because belief just stops you from reflecting. You don’t just say, ‘The Buddha said that, so it’s true.’ Rather, you take what the Buddha said and use it to look in the direction that it’s pointing… it’s like this. This may sound very prosaic and boring, ‘It’s like this’, but it’s using words to open up the mind to the way it is, rather than try to determine whether the way it is right now is right or wrong, good or bad, true or false.
What we call meditation is really mindfulness. There are so many meditation techniques that are available now on the Internet, and various teachers teach different styles because that’s the way teaching is; it depends on words. It isn’t about whether what I’m saying is right or wrong, or about you trying to believe what I’m saying is right, or prove I’m wrong. It’s an invitation, an encouragement to reflect on the reaction that you’re having as individuals at this present moment. Whatever the emotional state or mood that arises – it’s like this. Whether it is right, wrong or a mixture, is not the issue. It is the way it is. When I talk about Dhamma, it’s the reality of the way it is.
Religion is a kind of outer surface of everything. Some people prefer one over another, but that doesn’t make one better than the other. It’s just the way things are. Nobody’s going to demand that we feel the same and agree on the one. That’s what tyranny is: ‘You have to believe what I believe, what I say.’ So much of religious teaching gets blocked off by doctrines, things you have to believe in order to be a functioning member of a particular group. Belief is grasping concepts that you are attracted to, or that you are interested in. Or maybe you’re not interested in it but you’re told that if you don’t believe in a certain way, you’re a sinner, there’s something wrong with you, that you’re an apostate and have to leave the group.
But that’s not reflecting on the way it is; that’s just a form of tyranny where one person determines what a group has to believe in without question. That’s one reason why Christianity broke up into so many different kinds of groups, because people had different takes on the basic teachings and history of the Christian religion. Buddhism also can be caught in just believing in Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Korean Buddhism, Thai Buddhism or Theravada Buddhism. We can all feel that the particular form we’ve chosen is better than the rest. Reflect on that. This feeling of ‘What I have is better than what you have’ is a feeling; words and feelings that arise and cease. That’s the very nature of all languages – it’s all words.
No matter how high-minded or beautiful the word may be, or how mean, low or nasty it might be, the one thing in common that all words have is that they are saṅkhāras, they’re conditioned phenomena. And that’s why I always encourage you to listen to the words that enter your mind without judging them, because if you learn to just sit still in a quiet place for a while, then various thoughts, memories and concepts arise and cease. You’re not trying to control them, reasoning everything out logically or judging if they’re right or wrong, true or false. But it’s like this.

This is reflecting on the nature of words – thoughts as they arise and cease – rather than trying to figure out what kind of thoughts you should think, or are wrong and bad and shouldn’t arise. If you have bad thoughts, you easily assume there’s some evil source in you, some devil trying to tempt you, or that you’re a bad person because a good person wouldn’t have evil thoughts. That’s conceptual proliferation. The mind goes around and around about right and wrong, good and bad.
I assume everybody here wants to be good. In the whole monastic form – in all religious forms – the ambition to be a good person is a common bond we share. But we can’t always have good thoughts. We are living in a community that has a structure to it that we all agree to: to surrender and live within the structure of the vinaya, the precepts. That’s an agreement that’s required to join the community of monks and nuns. All the Vinaya precepts are about right action and right speech, but not about right thought. Thought can be wrong, can be bad, can be evil, as well as good, the best, the highest possible thought you can think of at any moment. But you can’t sustain them. If you observe them, they arise and they cease. When you resist or try to suppress them, then you proliferate around them and blame somebody. Either you blame external sources – some kind of evil force in the universe is tempting you, is one way of expressing that – or think that someone in the sangha is trying to influence you in a negative way, or that you are just a bad person. But whatever take you have in regard to these bad or evil thoughts, it’s still the use of words, proliferating concepts that arise in your consciousness.
Many of the thoughts, emotional reactions and experiences that we have are still coming from the time we were little children, teenagers, young adults and onward. But what or who is it that is aware of thoughts as thoughts? Not the critic. The critic is not who you are. Your position in life isn’t to be stuck in a critical mind – caught always in seeing everything as what’s right and wrong about every condition, every situation – because all conditions, all saṅkhāras, are changing. You can’t sustain them.
Many of us have had insights through various forms of meditation, and then we remember them. For example, you think, ‘Yesterday I sat in the Temple and had the most profound insight into Dhamma.’ That’s a memory. It arises in the present moment. That’s the way memories are: impermanent. The next day you come back and sit in the same place in the Temple, and do the same things that you remember doing the previous day when you had this profound insight, and what happens? Your mind goes all restless, negative. You’re struggling with it; you feel disappointed and want to get up and leave. You’d hoped that the bliss that you experienced on a previous day could be sustained for your whole life. We would like to live in a state of what we call ‘bliss’ forever and ever because we don’t like to suffer.
The very nature of saṅkhāras is dukkha or suffering – unsatisfactoriness – because that’s the way they are. They’re not satisfying. No matter how good or beautiful or right, or the best that you can possibly have, they’re going to change because saṅkhāras are impermanent. That’s the way it is. Whose fault is that? You think, ‘Is it God’s fault? Why didn’t God create permanently blissful saṅkhāras for us, so that once we have this insight, we can stay in that peaceful state forever and ever, beyond death?’ We can imagine bliss as a permanent state. But the thoughts about bliss are still words and concepts that we create in the present moment. So, trying to remember previous insights is suffering.
Fifty-five years ago, before I met Luang Por Chah, I spent the first year as a sāmaṇera (novice monk) in a monastery in Nong Khai, in northeast Thailand. The head monk sent me off to a meditation monastery outside the town, where I spent a year meditating, at first using methods I found blocked me; I just couldn’t get beyond them. Then I’d feel if I wasn’t doing this method then I wasn’t meditating, and feel guilty and try to force myself to do this technique all day. And when you’re with yourself, you have no distractions. I didn’t take any books except one that I was given, The Word of the Buddha, the basic teachings from the suttas and the Tipitaka. That was the only book I allowed myself to read.

In the first three months, after desperately trying to perform this technique and I couldn’t do it), I just gave up. I was in a hut by myself and the people at the monastery were very good to me. The nuns and sāmaṇeras would provide me with food every day, and I also had good support from the lay community. The difficulty that I was experiencing wasn’t due to anything untoward that was happening around me in the monastery. But I was 31 or 32-years-old at the time, and I’d spent a lifetime repressing negative state. My self-image was that I was basically a very good-natured person, because at that time you had to get along in life and be friendly and open, and I considered myself a well-adjusted adult male. But then living alone with nothing to do for 24/7, except this technique, I couldn’t sustain it. The teacher who taught it to me said I had to keep doing this over and over until I got enlightened. Well, it wasn’t working.
There was nothing I could do, so I just learned to sit and watch. So much anger, resentment and fear started arising in consciousness. I looked at it – 32 years of repressed anger and resentment. In anyone’s life, there’s a lot to resent. Life has its qualities of fairness and goodness and also its opposite. But I was told anger was a sin. When I felt angry, I wasn’t angry at anyone in the monastery; it was just old resentment that I would remember from the time I was a child, the time when I was a student, when I was in the military. I decided I wasn’t going to try to stop this anger. I would just let it go, and I did. Anger is also a saṅkhāra. It isn’t permanent, it’s not self, it’s anattā. Resisting anger was a lifetime habit at that time – 30 years of resisting and repressing negative feelings, fear.
I started reviewing this book, The Word of the Buddha, and the Four Noble Truths, the first sermon of the Buddha. I started to contemplate suffering, the First Noble Truth. And I got it: the cause of suffering is trying to get something you can’t have. I began to have an insight into the fact that I didn’t have the bliss that I wanted. This is bhava-taṇhā, this is the desire to get something you remember or conceive of that you don’t have right now. So I started awakening to Dhamma, to the way things are. Bhava-taṇhā is like this. Wanting to get rid of things is vibhava-taṇhā; the desire to get rid of bad thoughts, of what you don’t like, what you don’t want, to kill the defilements. This is resistance, repression.
The teaching on the Four Noble Truths – that there are three kinds of desire, kāma-taṇhā (desire for sense pleasures), bhava-taṇhā, vibhava-taṇhā – really awakened me to reflect on desire. In terms of Dhamma, desire can be divided into these three categories, which are very helpful. See how much of your life here at Amaravati is about vibhava-taṇhā, the desire to get rid of things, or bhava-taṇhā, desiring to get something you want, to become enlightened, to become an arahant. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to become an arahant or get enlightened. It’s not about good and bad anymore. But it is a desire, and desires are saṅkhāras and are impermanent and not self.

Continued next week: June 6 2024

intuitive awareness part 3

Posted on May 23, 2024 by tiramit

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.

Link to the original:

https://media.amaravati.org/dhamma-books?title=Intuitive+Awareness

intuitive awareness part 2

Posted on May 16, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho

Excerpts from “Intuitive Awareness,” by Ajahn Sumedho. This is the second 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.

When you try to conceive of mettā as ‘love’, loving something in terms of liking it, it makes it impossible to sustain when you get to things you can’t stand, people you hate and things like that. Metta is very hard to come to terms with on a conceptual level. To love your enemies, to love people you hate or can’t stand, is an impossible dilemma on the conceptual level. But in terms of sati-sampajañña, it involves acceptance – because it’s about including everything you like and dislike. Mettā is not analytical; it’s not dwelling on why you hate somebody. It’s not trying to figure out why I hate this person, but it includes the whole thing – the feeling, the person, myself – all in the same moment. So, it’s an embracing, a focus that includes and is non-critical. You’re not trying to figure out anything, but just being open, accepting and patient with it.

With food, for instance, we eat here in the dhutaṅga tradition – that is, eating from alms-bowls. I, at least, can no longer convince myself that I’m only eating one meal a day, because of this breakfast we are offered. But, however many meals a day we eat, we are encouraged to use restraint: not because there’s anything wrong with enjoying a meal; it’s not that food is dangerous and that any kind of pleasure you receive from eating will bind you to rebirth again in the saṁsāra-vaṭṭa (the cycle of birth and death) – that’s another view and opinion. It’s a matter of recognizing the simplicity of the life that we have. It simplifies everything. This is why I like this way.

Just notice your attitude towards food. The greed, the aversion or the guilt about eating or enjoying good food – include it all. There’s no attitude that you must have towards food other than an attitude of sati-sampajañña. It’s not making eating into any hassle. When I used to go on fasts, Ajahn Chah would point out that I was making a hassle out of my food. I couldn’t just eat; I was making it more difficult than it needed to be. Then there is the guilt that comes up if you eat too much or you find yourself trying to get the good bits. It gets complicated. I couldn’t just be greedy and shameless, I also had to have a strong sense of guilt around it and hope that nobody would notice. I had to keep it a secret, because I didn’t want to look greedy, I wanted to look as if I weren’t.

I remember that whilst staying with Luang Por Jun, I was trying to be a strict vegetarian, really strict. At his monastery, Wat Bung Khao Luang, they had certain kinds of dishes that didn’t have any fish sauce in them, or any kind of meat or fish. But, as most of you know, in Thailand most of the food has fish sauce or some kind of animal mixtures in it. So, it was difficult because I had very little choice, and people would always have to make special things for me. I always had to be special. It had to be Phra Sumedho’s food and then the rest. That was hard to deal with – to be a foreigner, a phra farang, and then to have a special diet and special privileges. That was hard for me to impose on the group. As I was helping to pass out the food, I’d get very possessive. I felt I had a right to have a lot of the vegetable dishes they did have, because the other monks were eating all the fish, chicken and things like that. I found myself aiming for the vegetarian dishes first so that I could pass them out according to my own needs. It brought up a really childish tendency in me. Then one day another monk saw me doing this, so he grabbed the vegetarian dish first and only gave me a little spoonful. I was so angry when I saw that. I took this fermented fish sauce, this really strong stuff, and when I went past his bowl, I splattered it all over his food! Fortunately, we were forbidden to hit each other. This is an absolute necessity for men – to have rules against physical violence!

“I was trying to live up to an ideal of vegetarian purity, and yet in the process having violent feelings towards other monks. What’s this about? It was a vindictive act to splatter all that strong chilli sauce with rotten fish in it over some monk’s food. It was a violent act in order for me to keep a sense that I’m a pure vegetarian. So, I began to question whether I wanted to make food into such a big deal in my life. Was I wanting to live my life as a vegetarian or what? Was that the main focus that I was aiming at? Just contemplating this, I began to see the suffering I created around my idealism. I noticed Ajahn Chah certainly enjoyed his food and he had a joyful presence. It wasn’t like an ascetic trip where you’re eating nettle soup and rejecting the good bits; that’s the other extreme.

Sati-sampajañña includes, and that’s the attitude of a samaṇa, a contemplative, rather than the ascetic who says, ‘Sensual temptations, the sensual world, sensual pleasures are bad and dangerous. You’ve got to fight against them and resist them at all costs in order to become pure. Once you get rid of sexual desire, greed for food, all these other kinds of greedy sense things – these coarse, gross things – you don’t have any more bad thoughts, you don’t have any more greed, hatred and delusion in your mind. You’re absolutely sterilized from any of those things. They’re eradicated, totally wiped out like toilet cleansers that kill every germ in sight – then you’re pure.’ Then you’ve managed to kill everything – including yourself. Is that the aim? That’s taking asceticism to the position of annihilation, attakilamathānuyoga or self-torture.

Or there is the opposite extreme of kāmasukhallikānuyoga, sensual indulgence, ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. Enjoy life. Life is a banquet and most of the suckers are starving to death.’ This is a quote from a fifty’s movie called Auntie Mame. Auntie Mame managed to really enjoy life, in the movie anyway. She’s not a real woman but a kind of icon of intelligence and beauty, one who just lives life to the hilt and enjoys everything. That’s a very attractive idol: one who thinks this life is meant to be full of pleasure, happiness and love. Grasping that is kāmasukhallikānuyoga.

For the samaṇa, it’s a matter of awakening to these extremes; awareness includes both. It’s not like taking sides – that we’re rejecting or condemning Auntie Mame and ‘Life is a banquet,’ or the extreme ascetic, the life-denying annihilator. But we can see that these are conditions we create in our minds. Always wanting life to be at its best, a party, a banquet, one pleasure after another, or thinking to have any pleasure or enjoyment is wrong and bad, that it’s lesser and dangerous; these are the conditions we create. But the samaṇa life is right now, it’s like this. It’s opening to what we tend not to notice when we’re seeking these two extremes as our goal.

Life is like this. You can’t say it’s a banquet all the time. Breath going in … I wouldn’t describe it as a banquet, or that the sound of silence is life at its best, where it’s just one laugh after another. Most of our experience is neither one extreme nor another; it’s like this. Most of one’s life is not peak moments, either in the heights or the depths, but it’s neither-nor, it’s that which we don’t notice if we’re primed to extremes.

In terms of beauty, for example, I find it helpful to come from sati-sampajañña rather than from personal attachment. With beautiful objects, beautiful things, beautiful people or whatever – coming from personal habits is dangerous because of the desire to possess them, to have them for yourself, or be attracted and get overwhelmed by the desires that arise from seeing beauty through ignorance. With experiencing beauty from sati-sampajañña, one can just be aware of the beauty as beauty. It also includes one’s own tendencies to want to own it, take it, touch it or fear it; it includes that. When you’re letting go of that, then beauty itself is joy.

Part 3, continued next week 23rd May 2024

Link to the original:

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

intuitive awareness 1

Posted on May 9, 2024 by tiramit

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/

noticing the way it is, part 2

Posted on May 2, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho

Excerpts from “Intuitive Awareness,” the. chapter titled: “The End of Suffering is Now,” retitled in this blog: “Noticing the way it is”. This is the second and last part. The original by Ajahn Sumedho, is a free Dhamma publication available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI. Look for the link at the end of this post.

There are different kinds of methods that can be used to learn how to stop the thinking mind. For example, a Zen koan or self-inquiry practice like asking ‘Who am I?’ These are techniques or expedient means that we find in Zen and Advaita Vedanta, and are used to stop the thinking mind. You begin to notice the pure state of attention, where you are not caught in thinking and the assumptions of a self – where there is pure awareness. That’s when you hear the sound of silence, because your mind is in that state of attention. In pure awareness there’s no self, it’s like this. Learn to relax into that, to trust it, but not try and hold on to it. We can even grasp the idea that ‘I’ve got to get the sound of silence and I’ve got to relax into it.’ This is the risky part of any kind of technique or instruction, because it is easy to grasp the idea. Bhāvanā, cultivation of the mind, isn’t about grasping ideas or coming from any position. This paṭipadā, this practice, is one of recognizing and realizing through awakened awareness, through a direct knowing,

Some people find it frightening when the self starts to break up – because it’s like everything you have regarded as solid and real starts falling apart. I remember years ago, long before I was even a Buddhist, feeling threatened by certain radical ideas that tended to challenge the security of the world I lived in. When it seems somebody is threatening or challenging something that you depend upon for a sense that everything’s all right, you can get angry and even violent – because they are threatening ‘my world, my security, my refuge.’ You can see why conservative people get threatened by foreigners, radical ideas or anything that comes in and challenges the status quo – because that’s the world they are depending on to make them feel secure. When they are threatened, they go into panic. The Buddha pointed to the instability and impermanence of conditioned phenomena. This is not just a philosophy that he was expecting us to go along with. We explore and see the nature of the conditioned realm – the physical, the emotional and the mental – in the way we experience it. But your refuge is in this awakened awareness, rather than in trying to find or create a condition that will give us some sense of security. We are not trying to fool ourselves, to create a false sense of security by positive thinking. The refuge is in awakening to reality, because the Unconditioned is reality. This awareness, this awakenedness, is the gate to the Unconditioned. When we awaken, that is the Unconditioned. The conditions are whatever they are — strong or weak, pleasant or painful, whatever.

‘I am an unenlightened person who has to practise meditation hard. I must really work at it, get rid of my defilements and become an enlightened person some time in the future. I hope to attain stream-entry before I die, but if I don’t, I hope that I’ll be reborn in a better realm.’ Thinking like that, we go on creating more and more complications. People ask me, ‘Can we attain stream-entry? Are there any arahants?’ This is because we still think of stream-entry and arahantship as a personal quality. We look at somebody and say, ‘That monk over there is an arahant.’ We think that person is an arahant or stream-enterer. That’s just the way the conditioned mind operates. It can’t help it, it can’t do anything other than that. So, you can’t trust it; you can’t take refuge in your thoughts or your perceptions, but you can take refuge in awareness. That doesn’t seem like anything, it’s like nothing – but it’s everything. All the problems are resolved right there.

Your conditioned mind thinks, ‘Awareness is nothing, it doesn’t amount to anything. It’s not worth anything, you couldn’t sell it.’ This is where we learn to trust in the ability to awaken, because if you think about it, you’ll start doubting it all the time. ‘Am I really awake? Am I awake enough? Maybe I need to be asleep longer so that I can be awake later on. Maybe if I keep practising with ignorance, I’ll get so fed up that I’ll give it up.’ If you start with ignorance, how could you ever end up with wisdom? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s like hitting your head on a wall and thinking that after a while you might give it up if you haven’t damaged your brain. It does feel good when you stop. But instead of looking at it in that way, trust in this simple act of attention. Then explore and have confidence in your ability to use wisdom.

Many of you may think, ‘Oh, I don’t have any wisdom. I’m nobody. I haven’t had any real insight.’ So, you thoroughly convince yourself you can’t do this. That’s the way it seems on the personal level. Maybe you don’t feel you have anything to offer on that level, but that’s another creation. It’s the same as ‘I am an unenlightened person.’ Whatever assumptions you have about yourself, no matter how reasonable they might be – whether you think you are the best or the worst – they are still creations in the present. By believing in those creations, by thinking and holding to them, you’re continually creating yourself as some kind of personality.

This awakenedness is not a creation. It’s the immanent act of attention in the present. That is why developing this exercise of deliberately thinking ‘I am an unenlightened person’ is a skilful means to notice more carefully and continuously what it’s like to be mindful and aware while you are creating yourself as a person. You get this sense that your self-view is definitely a mental object; it comes and goes. You can’t sustain ‘I am an unenlightened person.’ How do you sustain that one, by thinking it all the time? If you went around saying ‘I am an unenlightened person’ all the time they would send you to a mental hospital. It arises and ceases, but the awareness is sustainable. That awareness is not created, it’s not personal, but it is real.

Recognize the ending, when ‘I am an unenlightened person who has got to practise meditation in order to become an enlightened person some time in the future’ stops. Then there is the ringing silence. There’s awareness. Conditions always arise and cease now, in the present. The cessation is now. The ending of the condition is now. The end of the world is now. The end of self is now. The end of suffering is now. You can see the arising, ‘I am,’ then the ending, and what remains when something has begun and ended is awareness. It’s like this. It’s bright, it’s clear, it’s pure, it’s alive. It’s not a trance, not dull, not stupid.

This is an encouragement, an ‘empowerment’ according to modern jargon. Do it! Go for it. Don’t just hang around on the edges thinking, ‘I am an unenlightened person who has to practise really hard in order to become an enlightened person’ and then after a while start grumbling, ‘Oh, I need more time,’ and go into the usual plans and plots, views and opinions. If you start with ignorance you will end up with suffering. In the teachings on dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda) you have ‘avijjā paccayā saṅkhārā.’ Avijjā is ignorance, and that conditions (paccayā) mental formations (saṅkhārā), that then affects everything. As a result, you end up with grief, sorrow, despair and anguish: soka-parideva-dukkha-domanassupāyāsā. So, I’m encouraging you to not start from avijjā but from vijjā, awareness, from paññā, wisdom. Be that wisdom itself rather than a person who isn’t wise, trying to become wise. As long as you hold to the view that ‘I’m not wise yet, but I hope to become wise,’ you’ll end up with grief, sorrow, despair and anguish. It’s that direct. It’s learning to trust in being the wisdom now, being awake.

Even though you may feel inadequate emotionally, doubtful or uncertain, frightened or terrified – these are reactions; emotions are like that. But be the awareness of the emotions: emotion is like this. Emotionally we are conditioned for ignorance. I am emotionally conditioned to be a person, to be Ajahn Sumedho. Someone says, ‘Ajahn Sumedho, you are wonderful!’ and the emotions go ‘Oh?’ Then, ‘Ajahn Sumedho, you are a horrible monk with terrible Vinaya!’ and the emotions go ‘grrrrr’. Emotions are like that. If my security depends on being praised and loved, respected and appreciated, successful and healthy, everything going nicely and everyone living in harmony – the world around me being so utterly sensitive to my needs – then I feel all right when everything seems to be going all right. But then it goes the other way – persecution, abuse, disrobing, blame, criticism – and I think ‘Life is horrible. I can’t stand it anymore! I’m so hurt, so wounded. I’ve tried so hard and nobody appreciates me, nobody loves me.’ That’s the emotional dependency of the person; that’s personal conditioning.

Awareness includes emotions as mental objects or ārammaṇā, rather than subjects. If you don’t know this, you tend to identify with your emotions and they become yourself. You become this emotional thing that is terribly upset because the world is not respecting you enough. Our refuge is in the Deathless reality rather than in the transient and unstable conditions. If you trust in awareness, then the self and your emotions – whatever they might be – can be seen in terms of what they are; not judged, not making any problem out of them, but just noticing: it’s like this.

Link to the original:

https://forestsangha.org/teachings/books/intuitive-awareness?language=English

noticing the way it is

Posted on April 25, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho

Excerpts from “Intuitive Awareness,” the. chapter titled: “The End of Suffering is Now,” retitled in this blog: “Noticing the way it is” This is the first of two parts. The original by Ajahn Sumedho, is a free Dhamma publication available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI. Look for the link at the end of this post.

The term sakkāya-diṭṭhi (personality view’ or the ego) refers to perceptions we hold in regard to our identity with the five khandhas as belonging to ‘this person.’ However, instead of starting with a perception or a conception of anything, the Buddha established a way through awakened attention, where consciousness is with the present moment, beginning to explore sakkāya-diṭṭhi in terms of the perceptions you are attached to and regard as your ‘self.’ I emphasize deliberately conceiving yourself as a person, with the thought: ‘I’m an unenlightened person who has come here to Amaravati in order to practise meditation so that I will become an enlightened person in the future.’ You can have comments about this, form more perceptions about these perceptions, but that’s not the point. This deliberate thinking allows us to listen to ourselves as we think.

When you are caught in the wandering mind, you lose yourself; you just go from one thought to another and get carried away. But deliberate thinking is not like wandering thinking. It’s intentional, for you are choosing whatever you are going to think. The important thing is not the thought, or even the quality of the thought, whether it’s stupid or intelligent, right or wrong. It’s the attention, the ability to observe the thoughts that you are deliberately thinking. What happens to me is that before I start thinking, ‘I am an unenlightened person,’ there is a space. There is an empty pause before you deliberately think. So, notice that. That’s just the way it is; there is no perception in that space, but there is attention to it, there is awareness before ‘I am an unenlightened person’ arises. Thinking about this is not wandering thinking, it’s not judging or analyzing, but just noticing it’s like this. When you deliberately think, you can also use thought to keep pointing to this awareness, noticing the way it is.

With the pronoun ‘I’ in a sentence such as, ‘I am an unenlightened person,’ if you listen to it and the words that follow, you will realize that you are creating this consciousness of yourself through the words you are deliberately thinking. That which is aware of your thinking – what is that? Is it a person who is aware? Or is it pure awareness? Is this awareness personal, or does the person arise in the awareness? This is exploring, investigating, and by doing so you are getting to notice the way it is, the Dhamma, that there is actually no person who is being aware; it’s rather that awareness will include what seems personal.

‘I am an unenlightened person who needs to practise meditation in order to become an enlightened person in the future.’ With thoughts like this, one assumes I am this body, with this past. I am … years old, born in such and such a place, I’ve done all these things and so I have a history to prove that this person exists. I have a passport and a birth certificate, but really there doesn’t seem to be any person in the awareness.

I find the more I am aware, my personal past seems totally unimportant and of no interest whatsoever. It doesn’t mean anything, actually. It’s just a few memories. Yet taking it from the personal view, if I get caught in thinking about myself as a real personality, then suddenly I find my past important. An identity gives me the sense that I am a person. ‘I have a past, I am somebody. I am somebody important; or not terribly important, but at least I feel connected to something in the past. I have a home, I have a heritage.’ Some people talk about losing the sense of their identity because they’re refugees, their parents are dead, they’re of mixed race, or they don’t have any real clear identity of themselves as belonging to something in the past. The sense of a personality depends very much on proving that you are somebody, your education, your race, your accomplishments or lack of accomplishments, whether you are an interesting or uninteresting person, important or unimportant.

In meditation we are not trying to deny personality. We are not trying to convince ourselves that we are non-people, grasping ideas that ‘I have no nationality, I have no gender, I have no social class, I have no race, the pure Dhamma is my true identity.’ That’s still another identity. That’s not it. It’s not about grasping the concepts of no-self. It’s in realizing, in noting through awakened attention the way things really are. In this simple exercise of saying, ‘I am an unenlightened person,’ this process can be quite deliberate.

When I did this exercise, it became clear what awareness is – sati-sampajañña, mindful, apperception. There is awareness, then thinking and perceptions arise. So deliberately thinking ‘I am an unenlightened person’ arises in this awareness. This awareness is not a perception, it’s an apperception; a cognition that includes perception. Perceptions arise and cease. Awareness is not personal, it doesn’t have any Ajahn Sumedho quality to it, it’s not male or female, bhikkhu or sīladharā (nun), or anything like that; it has no quality on the conventional, conditioned level. It is like nothing. This awareness – ‘I am an unenlightened person’ – and then nothing. There’s no person. So, you are exploring, you are investigating these gaps before ‘I’ and after ‘I’. You say ‘I’ – there’s sati-sampajañña, there’s the sound of silence. ‘I am’ arises in this awareness, this consciousness. As you investigate this, you can question.

This awareness is not a creation, whereas ‘I am’ is something I create. What is more real than ‘I am an unenlightened person’ is this awareness, sati-sampajañña. Awareness is continuous, it’s what sustains. The sense of yourself as a person can go any which way. As you think about yourself and who you are, who you should be, who you would like to be, who you do not want to be, how good or bad, wonderful or horrible you are – all this whirls around, it goes all over the place. One moment you can feel, ‘I’m a really wonderful person,’ the next moment you can feel, ‘I am an absolutely hopeless, horrible person.’ But if you take refuge in awareness, then whatever you’re thinking doesn’t make much difference. Your refuge is in this ability to rest in awareness, rather than in the gyrations and fluctuations of the self-view, of your sakkāya-diṭṭhi habits.

Notice how being a person is really like a yo-yo; it goes up and down all the time. With praise you feel you’re wonderful – then you’re a hopeless case, you’re depressed, a victim of circumstances. You win the lottery and you’re elated. Then somebody steals all the money and you’re suicidal. This is because the personality is like that. It’s very dependent. You can be terribly hurt on a personal level. Or you can be exhilarated: people find you just the most wonderful, thrilling, exciting personality and you feel happy.

When I was a young monk, I used to pride myself on how well I kept the Vinaya discipline, that I was really, really good with the Vinaya. I understood it and I was very strict. Then I stayed for a while with another monk on an island called Ko Sichang off the coast of Siraja. Later on, this monk told somebody else that didn’t keep good Vinaya. I wanted to murder him! Even Vinaya can support another form of self-view. As when somebody says, ‘Oh, Ajahn Sumedho is exemplary, a top-notch monk!’ – that feels wonderful. Then, ‘He’s a hopeless case, doesn’t keep good Vinaya,’ – I want to murder him. So, then I begin to question ‘Just how good a monk am I?’ This is how untrustworthy the self is.

In fact, being a person of any kind is an untrustworthy state to put your refuge in, because we can rise to great altruism and then sink to the most depraved depths in just a second. Even holding the view that ‘I am a good monk’ is a pretty dodgy refuge. If that’s all you know, then when someone says that you are not a very good monk, you’re angry, you’re hurt, you’re offended. However, despite all the fluctuations, sati-sampajañña is constant. This is why I see it as a refuge – because it’s not dependent on praise and blame, success and failure.

Continued next week, 2nd May 2024

Link to the original:

https://forestsangha.org/teachings/books/intuitive-awareness?language=English

apperception 2

Posted on April 18, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho

Excerpts from “Intuitive Awareness,” the. chapter titled: “When You’re an Emotional Wreck,” retitled in this blog: “Apperception” (perception of perception). This is the second and last part of the chapter. The original by Ajahn Sumedho, is a free Dhamma publication available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI. Look for the link at the end of this post.

One of the ideals we talk about is the concept of universal compassion. But the words themselves have no ability to feel compassion. We might attach to the most beautiful, perfect ideals, but attachment blinds us. We can talk about how we must all love each other, have compassion for all sentient beings, but not be able to do that in any practical way, to feel it or notice it. Then, going into the heart – where oftentimes it’s amorphous, where it’s not clean, neat and tidy, like the intellect – emotions can be all over the place. The intellect says, ‘Oh, emotional things are so messy. You can’t trust them,’ and feel embarrassed. “ I don’t want to be considered emotional.’ Then someone says, ‘Ajahn Sumedho is very emotional.’ Whoa – I don’t want anyone to think that. So maybe you think of Ajahn Sumedho as mindful, reasonable, intelligent, reasonable, kind. Now, I like that. That’s nice. But, ‘Ajahn Sumedho is emotional’ – it makes me sound like I’m weak and wet, doesn’t it? ‘Ajahn Sumedho is emotional. He cries, he weeps and he’s wet. He’s all over the place. Ugh.’ Emotions are oftentimes simply ignored or rejected and not appreciated. We don’t learn from them, because we’re always rejecting or denying them. At least I found this easy to do myself. Sati-sampajañña is opening and being willing to be a mess. Let a mess be a mess; a mess is like this. Wet, weak, all over the place, being foolish and silly, stupid; sati-sampajañña embraces all that. It’s not passing judgement or trying to control, to pick or choose. It’s simply the act of noticing that whatever emotion is present, this is the way it is, it’s like this.

So, the point that includes – notice it’s the here-and-now, the paccuppanna-dhamma, just switching on this immanent kind of attention. It’s a slight shift. It isn’t very much, just relaxing and opening to the present, listening, being attentive. It’s not going into some kind of real super-duper samādhi at all. It’s just like this. It doesn’t seem like much at all. As you relax, trust and rest in it, you find it sustains itself. It’s natural, you are not creating it. In this openness, in this one point that includes, you can be aware of emotions that you don’t usually bother with, like feeling lonely or sad, or subtleties such as resentment or disappointment. Extreme emotions are quite easy because they force themselves into attention. But as you open, you can be aware of subtle emotions. Not judging this, just embracing it, so that it’s not making a problem about the way it is, it’s just knowing the way it is. At this moment, the vedanā-saññā-saṅkhārā, the feelings, perceptions and mental formations, are like this. Rūpa, the body, is like this.

Notice what it’s like when you open to an emotional feeling or mood without judging it or making any problem out of it. Whether it’s an emotional feeling or physical feeling, whatever its quality, you’re learning to embrace it, to sustain your attention by holding it without trying to get rid of it, change it or think about it. Just totally accept the mood you’re in, the emotional state, or the physical sensations like pain, itching or tension, with this sense of well-being, of embracing. When I do this, I notice the ‘changingness’. When you are willing to let something be the way it is, it changes. Then you begin to recognize or realize non-attachment. In this way, sati-sampajañña is not attaching, it’s embracing. It’s a sense of widening, it includes; it’s not picky-choosy. It’s not saying, ‘I’ll pick only the good things; I won’t pick the bad ones.’ It takes the bad along with the good, the whole thing, the worm and the apple, the snake and the garden. It allows things to be what they are, but it’s not approving. It’s not saying that you have to love worms and want them in your apples, to like them as much as you like apples. It’s not asking you to be silly or ridiculous, but it’s encouraging you to allow things to exist, even the things we don’t want, because if they exist, that’s what they do, they’re existing. The whole thing belongs, the good and the bad. Sati-sampajañña is our ability to realize that, to know in a direct way, and then the processes take care of themselves. It’s not a case of Ajahn Sumedho trying to get his act together, trying to cleanse his mind, free himself from defilements, deal with his immature emotions, straighten out his wrong, crooked views, trying to make himself into a better monk and become enlightened in the future. That doesn’t work, I guarantee — I’ve tried it!

From this perspective, you can use upāya (skilful means) for particular conditions that come up. One could say, ‘Just be mindful of everything.’ That’s true, that’s not wrong. But some things are quite obsessive or threatening to us, so we can develop skilful means with them. I got a lot of encouragement from Ajahn Chah to develop skilful means, and that takes paññā. It’s using paññā to see how I would deal with things, especially difficult emotional states and habits. Don’t be afraid to experiment. See what comes up using catharsis, talking it out with somebody who will listen to you, or thinking it out deliberately.

One of my skilful means was listening to my thoughts as if they were neighbours talking on the other side of the fence. I’m just an innocent bystander listening whilst they carry on these conversations. I’m actually producing all the gossip, opinions and views in my own mind. I’m not involved, not getting interested in the subject matter, but just listening as it goes on and on about what it likes and doesn’t like, and what’s wrong with this person and what’s wrong with that person, and why I like this better than that, and if you want my opinion about this … I just kept listening to these inner voices, these opinionated, arrogant, conceited, foolish voices that go on. Be aware of that which is aware; notice that. The awareness is my refuge, not the gossiping, not the arrogant voices or opinions and views.

We can learn to help each other by just listening. Learning to listen to somebody is about developing relationship rather than preaching and trying to tell somebody how to practise and what to do. Sometimes all we need to do is learn how to listen to somebody else with our own sati-sampajañña, so that they have the opportunity to verbalize their own fears or desires without being condemned or given all kinds of advice. Listening can be a very skilful means. Some kinds of therapy can be considered skilful means that help us deal with problems that are usually emotional, and where we tend to be most blind and undeveloped is in the emotional realm.

Skilful means is learning that you do have the wisdom to do it. If you think that ‘I’m not wise enough to do that,’ don’t believe it. But also, don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s not that one is better than the other, just trust your own experience of suffering. If you find you obsess a lot, suddenly things will fill your consciousness: memories will come up, certain emotions, foolish thoughts or silly things can pursue you. We can say, ‘I don’t want to bother with that stupidity, I’m trying to get my samadhi and be filled with loving-kindness – do all the right things,’ and not see what we are doing. When we think that, we’re trying to make ourselves fit into an image that is unreal. It’s imagined, it’s an idealized image. The Buddha certainly did not expect that. Whatever way it is for you is the way it is. That’s what you learn from, that’s where enlightenment is – right there – when you’re an emotional wreck.

Link to the original:

https://forestsangha.org/teachings/books/intuitive-awareness?language=English

apperception

Posted on April 11, 2024 by tiramit

Ajahn Sumedho

Excerpts from “Intuitive Awareness,” the. chapter titled: “When You’re an Emotional Wreck,” retitled in this blog: “Apperception” (perception of perception). The original by Ajahn Sumedho, is a free Dhamma publication available as PDF, EPUB, MOBI. Look for the link at the end of this post.

We’re in a retreat situation in Amaravati. Everything is under control and perfect for what we regard as a proper, formal retreat. In contrast to this, next week there will be a lot of comings and goings, and things happening that we can’t control. So, just be aware of expectation, and the view about what a proper, formal retreat should be. Whatever views or opinions you may have, just know the way they are. Whatever kind of irritation, frustration or aversion you might feel – you can use all of that for meditation. The important thing is to maintain the awareness that ‘it is the way it is’ rather than making attempts to suppress your feelings, ignore, or get upset and angry about things not going the way you want, and then not taking the opportunity to observe the way it is. If one is upset about the way it is, one can use that as a part of the meditation.

Unwanted things happen in any retreat. Like the window in the Temple: the electric motor that opens and closes it doesn’t work. High-tech! Then the spotlight went out. I notice in my own mind that when things go wrong, things break or things are going in a way that makes me feel frustration or irritation, then I like to use those situations. If the window doesn’t close, and the spotlight doesn’t go on, I can feel a certain way. I’m aware of that feeling of not wanting the spotlight or window to be broken, of wanting to get it fixed right away, ‘We can just get somebody in to do it during the break so it doesn’t interfere with my practice.’ But notice in all of this that mindfulness is the important factor, because concentration can get disrupted. However, mindfulness, if you trust it, opens to the flow of life as an experience, with its pleasure and pain.

Sati-sampajañña, awareness, apperception or intuitive awareness: I keep reiterating this so that you can really appreciate the difference between intuitive awareness and thinking and analysis that comes from trying to get something or get rid of something. If you’re caught in the thinking process, then you’ll end up always with, ‘Well, it should be like this and it shouldn’t be like that,’ and ‘This is right and that is wrong.’ We can even say, ‘The Buddha’s teachings are right,’ and get attached to that idea! The result of that, if we don’t have enough sati-sampajañña along with it, is that we become Buddhists who feel we are right because we’re following the ‘right’ teaching. Thus, as a consequence of attachment and the way we perceive the Buddha’s teachings, we can become self-righteous Buddhists. We can feel that any other form of Buddhism that doesn’t fit into what we consider right is then wrong, or that other religions are wrong. That’s the thinking behind self-righteous views – notice how limiting it is. We can be attached to these thoughts and perceptions, or to negative, inferior perceptions of ourselves, and think that’s right. Apperception means being aware of perceptions – perceptions of myself or that Buddhism is right … and they’re like this. There’s still consciousness, awareness, intelligence. It’s pure, but it’s not ‘my purity’ as a personal achievement, it’s naturally pure.

Notice that this awareness includes the body, the emotions and the intellect. Sati-sampajañña includes everything. It’s not dismissing the physical condition that we’re experiencing; it includes the emotional state and whatever state your body is in, whether it’s healthy or sickly, strong or weak, male or female, young or old – whatever. The quality is not the issue; it’s not saying how your body should be, but the body is included in this moment. Apperception is the ability to embrace that which is, and the body is right now. This is my experience. The body is right here – I can certainly feel it. Awareness includes emotional states, no matter what they are. Whether you’re happy or sad, elated or depressed, confused or clear, confident or doubtful, jealous or frightened, greedy or lustful, awareness includes and notices all those in a way that is not critical.

We’re not saying, ‘You shouldn’t have lustful emotions,’ or anything like that. We’re not making moral judgements, because we’re using sati-sampajañña. If you get caught up in your brain, your intellect, then it says, ‘Oh! You’re having lustful thoughts in the shrine room. You shouldn’t do that. You’re not a very good monk or nun if you do things like that. You’re impure!’ We’re attached to these judgements, this judgemental function we have, but sati-sampajañña includes that; it includes the judgement. It doesn’t judge judgement; it’s noticing the tyrannical, self-righteous superego that says, ‘You shouldn’t be the way you are. You shouldn’t be selfish. You should be compassionate and loving.’ ‘Buddhism is right.’ ‘I’m getting nowhere in my practice.’ Sati-sampajañña embraces that. It’s just noticing the way it is. I can listen to my intellect, my superego, emotional states and the body – but with sati-sampajañña the attitude is one of ‘I know that. I know you.’ It’s patient with all this. It’s not trying to control or make any problem out of it. As we relax and open to these things, we allow them to change on their own, we give them that opportunity. They have their own kammic force. Our refuge is not in thinking or emotions or the physical body, but in this simple ability to listen, to be attentive to this moment.

I always use the practice of listening to the sound of silence – that subtle, continuous inner ringing tone in the background of experience – because every time I open the mind, that’s what I hear. Its presence contains and embraces the body, the emotional quality and the thinking mind all at once. It’s not like A-B-C or anything in tandem or sequence. Just the way it is, as a whole, it includes. It doesn’t pick and choose, ‘I want this but I don’t want that.’ Noticing, trusting and valuing this ability that each one of us has is something to really treasure and cultivate.

You can reflect on intuition as the point that includes or embraces. In addition to the intuitive ability, we have the thinking ability. The thinking ability excludes, like the single-pointedness you get through concentrating on an object. With a single point for concentration, you focus on it in order to exclude distractions. When you’re using intuitive awareness, it includes all that is there. The single point you get through concentration is just a perception. When you take it literally, it means one naturally excludes anything that’s not in that point. That’s the rational, logical way of looking at it. One-pointedness can be seen in terms of the one point that excludes everything, because that’s the logic of thought. Intuition is non-verbal and non-thinking, so the point is everywhere, it includes. This is sati-sampajañña and satipaññā, or mindful wisdom. You can’t do this through thinking or analysis, or by defining or acquiring all the knowledge in the Abhidhamma Piṭaka or the suttas, and so becoming an expert on Buddhism because you might know a lot about it. But you won’t know it. It’s like knowing all about honey without tasting it – chemical formulae, different qualities, which one is rated the highest, the best and the sweetest, which one is considered common and vulgar, lower-realm honey – you might know all that but not know the flavour of any of it. You ca n have pictures and portraits of it, the whole lot. But if you just taste honey, then you are intuitively aware that it tastes like this.

Paññā, or wisdom, comes from intuition, not from analysis. You can know all about Buddhism and still not use any wisdom in your life. I like the word combinations sati-sampajañña and satipaññā (wisdom based on mindfulness). Sati-sampajañña is not something that you acquire through studying, or through trying to pursue it by will alone. It is awakening, learning to trust this awakening, paying attention to life. It’s an immanent act of trust in the unknown, because you can’t get hold of it. People like to ask, ‘Define it for me, describe it to me, tell me if I have it.’ Nobody can tell you, ‘Well, I think you have it, you look like you’re mindful right now.’ A lot of people who look mindful are not necessarily mindful at all. It’s not a matter of someone telling you, or acquiring the right definitions for the words, but in recognising and realizing the reality of it and trusting it .

I used to experiment with this because of my background. I spent many years studying in university and was conditioned by wanting to define and understand everything through the intellect. I was always in a state of doubt. The more I tried to figure everything out, I still wasn’t certain whether I had got it right or not, because the thinking process has no certainty to it. It’s clean and neat and tidy, but it is not liberating in itself. Emotional things are a bit messy. With emotions you can cry, you can feel sad, you can feel sorry, you can feel angry and jealous and all kinds of messy feelings. But a nice intellectual frame of reference is so pleasurable because it’s tidy and neat. It isn’t messy, doesn’t get sticky, wet and soggy, but it doesn’t feel anything either. When you’re caught in the intellect, it sucks you away from your feelings. Your emotional life doesn’t work anymore, so you suppress it because you’re attached to thought, reason and logic. Intellect has its pleasure and its gifts, but also makes you insensitive. Thoughts do not have any sensitive capability. Thoughts are not sensitive conditions.