First published 12 December, 2015: Delhi Everything is new in this house, familiar things from the old house still wrapped up in boxes bearing the company’s logo. Now browsing around the rooms and the cupboards here and there, looking for something I need. Moving around the guys who work for the shipping company without getting in their way, looking on shelves, looking and looking for this thing and not finding it. Finding other things, but the thing I’m looking for remains unfound. I go into the bedroom, open a cupboard door. Door latch goes click, look inside; things I recognize everywhere but not what I’m looking for… wait a minute, what am I looking for? Pause for a moment and realize I’ve forgotten what it was.
Close the door: click, and go away. The act of closing that door, the click sound, seems to bring closure to the search – there’s a sense I discovered it’s not in that cupboard so I can take that off the list and check out other places. But… wait a minute, that’s not it. No, what I discovered was that I’d forgotten what it was I was looking for… when that cupboard door is opened, a strange vacuum sucks away the identity of things in the mind. It comes as a shock. I’m focused on the empty space where it used to be… insisting on something that’s not there, non-objects. Seeing the awareness of seeking, as if there were two minds: the seeing mind sees the mind that seeks; a restless, searching for things-that-got-lost mind. Then this seeking mind notices that it’s been seen, and there’s a shift, the awareness of non-objects… awareness of ‘awareness’ itself. The motionless space surrounding everything.
No idea what I’m looking for, trying this and that to figure out how I will ever recognize it if I don’t know what it is. All memorable characteristics and every single thing about it gone. Reluctant to give up the search, I’m there in the midst of the most remote possibility sometime after that, noticing some familiarity shouting out at me… why is that object seeming to seek my attention? Pick it up and remember the thing; seeking seen in a created world of being lost.
I know that nothing has ever been real Without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things And they come toward me, to meet and be met. [Rilke, ‘Love Poems to God’]
First published November 9, 2012: Chiang Mai: A very nice short flight here to Chiang Mai from Bangkok yesterday, 1 hour 10 minutes. They serve a small meal; it was like going upstairs to have lunch in the clouds, then it’s time to come down again. During the flight I was able to have a discussion with somebody I met there about Christianity and Buddhism – is there ‘something’ there (God) or is there not anything? And ‘not anything’ implies something that cannot be verbalised.
It is a bit like tight-rope walking for me as a Western Buddhist and now 30 years in Asia but still subject to the conditioning of the Church and childhood memories of it in the West. With my Christian companion here, there is agreement on many things. The main thing we agree about is that human beings may experience a certain kind of realization that there is no ‘self’, no identity, nothing there; nothing in the mind/body organism, it’s a construct. There’s a feeling of ‘lack’, and the shock that comes with this discovery causes dismay, distress, etc. Christians say the realization of emptiness is the absence of God, and this knowledge facilitates the entry of God, the creator of everything. This is what fills the emptiness; a significant turning point for all Christians.
Buddhists encounter this feeling of ‘lack’ in the same way but will not ‘fill’ it with anything, rather, they contemplate the emptiness of it in depth; examine the associated emotional reactions with mindfulness and come to see that, this is how it is.Śūnyatā, the emptiness, the lack of ‘self’ is everywhere and in all things. The understanding that everything is without ‘self’ helps Buddhists to contemplate the constructed nature of the mind. It’s possible to see the whole picture; how everything works and where we go from here. It’s an open-ended, investigative approach that may lead to an understanding of the non-duality of the observed world and the observer of it, together as a oneness. What the Christians call God must be inside this, because it is all-inclusive. There cannot be anything outside of it.
Christians will depend on the attachment to a belief in God for guidance and that’s how they see the world; they might say that ‘emptiness’ for the Buddhist is the Buddhist sense of God? And Buddhists could consider it this way, but the Buddha didn’t see any point in going further with that because the important thing is to make sure you are seeing reality correctly; not caught in wishful thinking. Necessary because working only with belief and faith and no pragmatic teachings means there are all kinds of things that can go wrong with it. Christians are focused on this, what it is believed to be; Buddhists say conceptualizing a God leads to attachment, tanha; the desire for, and attachment to, ideas and ideals, views, opinions, theories, conceptions and beliefs. [Dhamma-taṇhā, Walpole Rahula].
If I say the word ‘God’ to myself, something comes into my mind, the word ‘God’ has an immediate emotive effect. Certain assumptions arise and the mind is already closed around it; it’s a ‘special’ thing [Ajahn Jagaro]. When Christians talk about God, what they’re referring to (I think) is the God they are creating in their own minds – their loving devotion to a personal god: a deity who can be related to as a person, but God is beyond everything that is conceived or thought about. There is no adequate analogy, words cannot describe it. It cannot even be imagined because it is beyond space and time. Buddhists stay separate from the God concept because to become involved with it means making assumptions about a kind of consciousness that is totally different from ordinary mind states. This is not to say there is no God, for me, at this time, it is impossible to express in words what God could be. Then there’s a stewardess announcement: The plane is starting its descent, please put your fold-away table up, arm rest down, and chair forward. A small clutter of prepositions, and I get lost in the directions for a moment. Then we’re on firm ground again.
First published May 3, 2017: New Delhi: House agent came to the door, saying they are going to demolish the building, and when would be a good time for the architect to come to see the house – it was said like how we decide to delete a message on the phone. We knew about the plan and are prepared, but the emphatic bluntness of it… what’s gone is gone, the forever turning wheel. “Don’t let the sun go down on me.” My world is tipping over, mind driven by some kind of energy, a curiosity and desire to get involved with it. Words come out grouped in chunks, searching for a connection as if they had a volition of their own.
The characteristic mind reaction when confronted with an immutable truth; when I understood that my PHN headache is a permanent condition. As Jude says, the mind is creative no matter what the stimuli. Imagination let loose like a racehorse, goes careering off then is yanked back unwillingly and all kinds of fearful things arise, created by the struggle. How to have mindfulness so I can catch that creative awareness before I get hijacked by how bad it seems.
World-wide monitoring of events, immediate media coverage, on the spot reporting in a here-and-now performance starring ‘he’ who is about to be demolished: boom, crash, bang! It’s finished before it began, the whole scene gets folded into itself and packed away, gone – like it never happened, no evidence remains. Grab the bags and let’s get out of here. ‘I’ become ‘him’ over there, third person singular, object pronoun, making an escape out the window into the garden before the walls cave in. Away in the car through a swirling cloud of masonry brick dust, and onto the long straight road to the airport.
Check-in for the overnight flight to Bangkok, thinking of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow … I’d like it if the whole thing could be put on fast-forward so I can get it over and done with, but it hasn’t even started yet. I’m here on the plane and in my mind, are pictures of a house falling down around my ears.
The flight is a directionless experience. Look out the window, total darkness, no sense of moving forward, we could be flying sideways. When I try to think of it, there’s the image of a journey that leads from here to there, the route we take is an elevated highway in the sky, we’re in a long silver night coach with the moon and stars and stewardesses with the drinks trolley. Occasional air turbulence suggests small bumps on an otherwise very smooth road surface – sufficient to tip me over and fall asleep, with not even the sense that we’re going anywhere… just the noise of the engines and hiss of the air.
The present moment is not an absolute. It’s something that we’re [unconsciously] fabricating, and the goal of the practice is to learn how to fabricate it in a new [nirvanic] direction…. The present is here to be used, and the teachings are here to teach us how to use it wisely” [Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Use of the Present,” 2016-11-28]
First published August 19, 2017: Delhi: It’s as if a note was tied around its tiny leg bringing us the news; we’re moving from here at the end of September. After that, three months in temporary accommodation, then we’re leaving India for good.
There it is again, the tiny bird in the bush outside, and I’m inside the room, trying to get a clear photo of it through the window glass. There were three of them there, the other two out of sight right now. They move so fast, quicker than thinking. It’s the Purple Sunbird, olive green as youngsters and these are so small, almost not there at all. I blink my eyes and they disappear… the quickening. See one for an instant then it’s gone – takes my breath away.
Even now, it all seems to be coming an end – a cancellation of everything that remains, no time to settle, before we’re gone. The disappearance of the past, a new direction, and return to Bangkok – return to “GO”… time is just slippin’ away.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that we came to this house, characteristics of the shift from house A to house B. At the edge of my vision, household items look at me as I pass… poised in a choreography of dance steps, ready for their next move. The great leap… percussive landing, clatter, scrape,bump and hastily take up their positions in new rooms and the packaging is tidied away
In the morning, we wake up in somebody else’s house… a familiarity of objects out of context in these new surroundings. I’m in someone else’s life – stepped out of my own life, into theirs. Same world, just a different angle on how it’s seen, felt and understood– same sensory awareness mechanism creates the kaleidoscope of different coloured lights.
Where am I? Maybe I’ll find myself in the Lost and Found Department. Searching among the ghosts there, for a Self gone missing – but if it can’t be found, any one will do. I can bear with the tendency for “self” to think it’s different from all the other “selves” going around thinking they’re different too.
Who am I? The world is how I/you perceive it, he/she, perceives it. We/you and they see and look into each other’s eyes. A window opens into another realm inhabited by him, her and them. The sense of their presence inter-lacing with the presence of others before them and as yet nothing of our own. Generations and generations of karma in an arrangement of cause and conditions and interconnected lives
I remember coming here with the house agent. Walking up the path, open the door… ghosts of previous tenants rush away to their hiding places in a whisper of movement. For me there’s only the dust of empty houses I’ve viewed everywhere in the city – looking for somewhere to sit in a room with no furniture. Leaning thus, in a doorframe, and maybe this will do. Maybe here we can invent a life we’ll be happy with. Awareness takes it all in, puts it away in a new folder. A new reference point: ‘this’ is where the heart is, home is where I hang my hat.
Death is drawn to sound like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer, comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless, comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat. Nevertheless its footsteps sound and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree. [Excerpt from Pablo Neruda, “Death Alone”]
First published September 28, 2014 Chiang Mai: I’ve been without my computer for about two weeks now. When I tell people this they’re shocked; but how are you able to… I mean, survive without the internet? This is it exactly, no words to describe it; grief, loss, mourning. It’s like somebody died and the world just moves on regardless. The empty space in the middle of the desk where the computer used to be is gradually becoming a convenient place to put things; a cup of coffee, a book, odds and ends – it’s returning to the original ‘desktop’ state (no metaphor intended). I write with a pen on lined paper in an actual ‘notebook’. Back to the basics… oil lamps and candles, I want to live in a cottage in the forest, grow vegetables, chop wood. But instead of that I’m in Chiang Mai City and have convinced myself that walking two miles every day (there and back) to a nice Internet cafe is good exercise.
Heavy urban traffic, often no pavement at all and obstructions like a temporary structure, fried chicken vendor/street food cooking place set up in the pedestrian area – getting the customers’ attention – I have to negotiate with the environment to get through. Cooking smells and traffic hazards, locked-in loving-kindness in conscious mind is necessary. Mindfulness is necessary in order to not be flattened by a passing cement truck. This is the developing world, Asian cultural behaviour just allows it to happen, everything in close proximity to everything else. Take a photo of the hundreds of cables slung between poles I think are phone lines. Connectedness, the true meaning of the term, extended family; people have to have contact with each other all the time. There’s no such thing as overcrowding, it has always, always been like this.
In pre-modern times perception was more associated with the narrative, the story by-word-of-mouth about how it all came to be like this. Now it’s a different kind of reality, a reality without a myth – or a myth that evolved over time to include the social order mechanism, television, and now it disincludes the Godman, the DIY awakening factor – don’t be too concerned about that folks, the Centre of Worship is doing it on your behalf. Not so, here in Asia, that uneasy feeling in the core of my being cannot be filled with some kind of truly invasive commercial product. It’s not a ‘hunger’ aroused by created opportunities we are encouraged to keep seeking. It’s a received knowing that extends through all and everything, a kind of interconnectedness that’s always there, an awareness of the uncountable cells in an organism and multiple organisms within organisms – all of it.
Out of the street and into the cool interior of the Internet cafe. Nice people say hello as I find my place. Log in and download the text file I sent from my phone earlier in the day. Having no computer at home means I have to write my posts using the phone keyboard one-fingeredly and awkward, but learning how to develop skills in defeating the spellchecker that goes around changing all the words unasked-for. Something interesting arises in the engagement with it; having to invent solutions to problems I’m not immediately familiar with. Intuitive reaching must be something I have learned through living with local people in Asian countries for more than thirty years; trying to understand the world as seen through their eyes.
An aloneness, maybe… it motivates this reaching out. ‘The internet is an extended sense organ’, all known bloggers in the world scattered around in their geographical locations, but really all contained in conscious awareness – we couldn’t be anywhere else! I can’t see you, or hear you. I can’t touch you and will never ‘meet’ you in the normal sense of the word, I just know you’re there, or here inside me, or where we all are… curious how it’s the awareness of loving-kindness that activates it.
I am infinite like space, and the natural world is like a jar I am like the ocean, and the multiplicity of objects is comparable to a wave I am like the mother of pearl, and the imagined world is like the silver … I am in all beings, and all beings are in me. To know this is knowledge, and then there is neither renunciation, acceptance, or cessation of it.’ [Ashtavakra Gita 6.1 – 6.4]
First published March 4, 2016: Watering the plants upstairs on the roof terrace and there’s this small one looking so simple and symmetrical, extraordinary. I take a photo of it and zoom into the wonderful experience of a life form in a different kind of temporality. It’s springtime here and the analogy of everything waking up applies, except that there’s no snow in winter, really no winter, and there never was any time before this, or anywhere in the future when things were or will be asleep. Everything is awake, the sense of an eye like a camera aperture so widely open the edges creak with the strain of it trying to open wider. It’s an endless cycle of birth/rebirth, the seed contained in the fruit that falls from the tree and from there another tree grows which creates another seed. No beginning/no end, all forms intertwined with each other to the extent that they are inseparable, bound together in timelessness. The inclination is to think what was it like before this, when things were separate and the mind tries to pull it all apart. What was it like before all this, before the Big Bang?
Another kind of reality. What happened before we came here? We were in another house in New Delhi. It had a roof terrace and seeds were planted in flowerpots there; we carried the pots and everything from there to here and these seeds are now sprouting on this roof terrace. It makes no difference to the plants if they’re moved, so long as they have the same conditions, the cycle continues; seed/ plant/ flower spinning in their own arising and falling away, an enfolding and unfolding sequence of patterns in movement, and I come along, view it from this entry-point in time and space – ‘here-and-now’… but it’s always here-and-now!
There’s the urge to create a highly esteemed object that could fill this perceived space, in this seemingly incomplete world: the sense of a vacant place we need to fill with something held in high holiness, and that will make it whole… what is it? Christians call it God, Hindus call it Brahman and Buddhists have no name for it, because everything is integrated, nothing exists outside of this – really nothing, not even the word ‘nothing’. Subject/object together in a oneness of contemplation, in conscious awareness and the path taken leads us into a realm so fragile and subtle you can never be absolutely sure you’re not just seeing it the way you want it to be, and not really how it actually is. Better not to call it anything, acknowledge its presence, awareness is all-inclusive, mindfulness, take care, and see how that goes.
The sensitivity of the mind, not held by the limitations of the body, always looking for more than what there is, searching beyond the present instance; using one thing as a springboard to get to the next, everything is driven on and on, and present time is not here at all. There’s the sense of a game, an energy, a curiosity – a desire to get involved with ‘it’. The object is the desired state. It belongs to ‘me,’ the act of possessing it requires that there has to be an ‘I’ to whom it belongs. Everything I have, everything I want, all of this is ‘mine.’ Even my enemy is mine. Thus, indirectly creating an identity that is always somehow incomplete unfulfilled, searching for the truth in this and unable to see that it’s the searching that maintains the state of being lost. It’s the seeking that causes it to be formed, reformed and transformed: the world is seen, sounds are heard, food is tasted, words are spoken, things are done, but there is no do-er.
“Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still – for if we listen they are saying, “We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever” – imagine, then, that they should say this and fall silent, listening to the very voice of him who made them and not to that of his creation; so that we should hear not his word through the tongues of men, nor the voice of angels, nor the clouds’ thunder, nor any symbol, but the very Self which in these things we love, and go beyond ourselves to attain a flash of that eternal wisdom which abides above all things: And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy; so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination which leaves us breathless: Would this not be what is bidden in the scripture, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” [Saint Augustine]
September 2, 2017: Delhi:This is the last whole month in the house, everything now coming to an end at the end of September. Goodbye this room, floor, ceiling, these walls, aperture of window looking out on to small garden, and beyond to the park where these exceptionally tall trees have given us so much shade from direct sunlight. Goodbye trees, goodbye everything deeply green, tree roots and wide leaves in this warm humidity, growing even as we speak.
And always a rustling of the wind, I follow the movement of large branches lowering, rising, and see how the whole mass of foliage shifts in accord with the continuity of movement… the air displacement itself a manifestation of the wind. Where’d it go… have you seen the wind?A wind narrative that never comes to an end, a wind becoming animate intelligence, an unseen form, disconnected from everything. A wind that’s present in all places at the same time, a wind that enters into and out of all things as if it were something autonomous, an invisible entity rising and falling away, form and formlessness in a causality of change and movement.
There’ve been times when it was at its peak and I’d watch from the shelter of this window… sudden velocity of wind strikes the pane of glass against its frame, Bang! I fall back in a moment of shock and fear, as if it were a living thing! The whole garden in a massive transition of wind becoming foliage; metaphor becomes reality, magician, voodooist, witch, wizard of a wind in a nightmare of dancing trees, wild and waving, with a sudden pliability hard to believe.
Everything out there and in here gives form to the insane energy of a wind that enters everywhere and into every single thing. Blows out gusts, sucks in voids, spins it in a vortex and swooping down as if inquisitive about something, filling up all the spaces below there, then suddenly out and up, high in the sky where only birds engage with it.
The sudden sound of it when a huge broken-off bough appears, as if it were something alive, tumbles through the foliage in a rush of leaves whispering in thousands of voices that seems to crash like waves upon a beach, and rises up again in a great sigh of leaf-whispering. Waves upon waves of masses of clustered notes break upon the shore, becoming less and less in an ordered succession of movements.
Goodbye the wind that quietly gusts its way through the mind, my awareness of it rises as it rises, I’m more alert when it’s loud, and when it’s quiet again I feel more at ease. But only for a moment, another small wave of it becomes a parallel thought flow to a story in the mind; it never rests… swooping shadows plunging deep into patterns of foliage over and over.
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” [Alan W. Watts]
Fragments of a thought pieced together from associated thoughts, memories of a past time brought into present time, together with things thought about in future time. Words can snatch at things, pin them down and they say what they are. Any ‘new’ experience is assimilated and the actuality of it is filtered, obscured, cloaked.
Then pause for a moment, and everything stops, just the circumstance itself – there is only one moment, only one, going on all the time. I wake up to it every now and then, there and then, here and now in this place and time, but it is always now, the present now, the forever ‘now.’
“Time is in the mind; space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect Is also a way of thinking. In reality, all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.” [Nisargadatta]
I write it in my notebook, in the time taken to do that the thinking sequence seems to have jumped from the thing I’m thinking about, to the next, and then there’s a space … the smallest instant before it becomes something else. In the interval the mind is engaged in ‘thinking it’, everything moves on and I can never seem to catch up. Language is an overlay placed on reality, gives everything an identity, duality, ‘me’ and ‘you.’ Language tells the story, creates a fiction I get lost in. Nothing is what I think it is.
The present moment feels like it’s an immediate event occurring ‘now’, but there’s also a feeling that it comes from some timeless place. What we have is applied time, an agreed-upon measurement that we all apply. Who‘s to say? Maybe this is something that has not happened yet… it happens later, gets reflected upon and what I think is ‘now’ is actually a moment of hindsight that had its origin in future time.
How can I be sure things are what I think they are when I’ve only just started feeling my way through something not experienced yet? Consciousness, the vast present time – the continuing ‘now’ phenomenon enfolding and unfolding, transforming from the future into past in one continuous surging-through movement that cannot be explained. What a strange mystery it is; future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, ‘now’ falls back into yesterday, something ‘remembered.’
Mind creates a structure to explain time; otherwise, how could we understand the enigma of how the past is ‘gone’ and the future is not here yet? Hovering on the brink of the smallest pause before it gets there, the empty space of not-knowing what it is, and held like this for an instant…
“There exists only the present instant… a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.” [Meister Eckhart1260 – 1328]
In terms of this moment, right now, this is consciousness. We are reading words on a page – pure consciousness before you start thinking. Just make a note of this: consciousness is like this. I am reading, I am with this present moment, being present, being here now. I’m taking the word consciousness and making a mental note: ‘consciousness is like this.’ It’s where thought, feeling and emotion arise. When we are unconscious, we don’t feel, we don’t think. Consciousness, then, is like the field that allows thought, memory, emotion and feeling to appear and disappear.
Consciousness is not personal. For something to become personal you have to make a claim to it: ‘I am a conscious person.’ But there’s just awareness, this entrance into noting the present, and at this moment consciousness is like this. Then one can notice the sound of silence, the sense of sustaining, being able to rest in a natural state of consciousness that is non-personal and non-attached. Noting this is like informing or educating oneself to the way it is. When we are born, consciousness within this separate form starts operating. A new-born baby is conscious, yet it doesn’t have a concept of itself being male or female or anything like that. Those are conditions we acquire after birth.
This is a conscious realm. We might think of a universal consciousness, and consciousness as it is used in the five khandhas: rūpa (form), vedanā (feeling), saññā (perception), saṅkhārā (mental formations), and viññāṇa sense-consciousness). But there is also this consciousness which is unattached, unlimited, Deathless. In two places in the Tipiṭaka, there is reference to viññāṇaṁ anidassanaṁ anantaṁ sabbato pabhaṁ – a mouthful of words that point to this state of natural consciousness, this reality. For myself, I find it very useful to clearly note: ‘Consciousness is like this.’ If I start thinking about it, then I want to define it: ‘Is there an immortal consciousness?’ Or we want to make it into a metaphysical doctrine or just deny it, saying, ‘Consciousness is anicca, dukkha, anattā.’ We want to pin it down or define it either as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self, or raise it up as something we hold to as a metaphysical position. But we are not interested in proclaiming metaphysical doctrines, or in limiting ourselves to an interpretation that we may have acquired through this tradition. Instead, we are trying to explore consciousness in terms of experience. This is Ajahn Chah’s pen paccattaṁ – that is, ‘something that you realize for yourself.’ What I am saying now is an exploration. I’m not trying to convince you or convert you to ‘my viewpoint.’
Consciousness is like this. Right now, there is definitely consciousness. There is alertness and awareness. Then conditions arise and cease. If you sustain and rest in consciousness, unattached, not trying to do anything, find anything or become anything, but just relax and trust, then things arise. Suddenly you may be aware of a physical feeling, a memory or an emotion. That memory or sensation becomes conscious, then it ceases. Consciousness is like a vehicle; it’s the way things are.
Is consciousness something to do with the brain? We tend to think of it as some kind of mental state that depends on the brain. The attitude of Western scientists is that consciousness is in the brain. But the more you explore it with sati-sampajañña, you see that the brain, the nervous system, the whole psychophysical formation arises in this consciousness; it is imbued with this consciousness. That is why we can be aware of the body and reflect on the four postures – sitting, standing, walking and lying down. Being aware of the body’s posture as it is being experienced now, you are not limited to something that is in the brain, but the body is in consciousness. You are aware of the whole body in the position it’s in at this moment.
This consciousness is not personal. It’s not consciousness in my head and then consciousness in your head. Each of us has our own conscious experience going on. But is this consciousness the thing that unites us? Is it our ‘oneness’? I’m just questioning; there are different ways of looking at it. When we let go of the differences – ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho and you are this person’ – when we let go of these identities and attachments, then consciousness is still functioning. It’s pure. It has no quality of being personal, and no condition of being male or female. You can’t put a quality into it. It’s like this.
When we begin to recognize that which binds us together, that our common ground is consciousness, then we see this is universal. When we spread mettā to a billion Chinese over in China, maybe it’s not just sentimentality and nice thoughts, maybe there is power there. I don’t know myself; I am questioning. I am not going to limit myself to a particular viewpoint that has been conditioned by my cultural background, because most of that is pretty flawed anyway. I do not find my cultural conditioning very dependable. Sometimes Theravada Buddhism can come across as annihilationism. You get into this ‘no soul, no God, no self’ fixation, this attachment to a view. Or are the Buddha’s teachings there to be investigated and explored? We are not trying to confirm somebody’s view about the Pali Canon, but rather we use the Pali Canon to explore our own experience. It’s a different way of looking at it. If we investigate this a lot, we begin to see the difference between pure consciousness and when self arises. It’s not hazy or fuzzy, ‘Is there Self now?’ It’s a clear knowing. So, then the self arises. I start thinking about myself, my feelings, my memories, my past, my fears and desires, and the whole world arises around ‘Ajahn Sumedho.’ It takes off into orbit – my views, my feelings and my opinions. I can get caught into that world, that view of ‘me’ that arises in consciousness. But if I know that, then my refuge is no longer in being a person, I’m not taking refuge in being a personality or my views and opinions. Then I can let go; the world of Ajahn Sumedho ends. When the world ends, what remains is the anidassana viññāṇa – this primal, non-discriminative consciousness. It’s still operating. It doesn’t mean Ajahn Sumedho dies and the world ends, or that I’m unconscious. Talking about the end of the world, I remember somebody getting very frightened by this, saying, ‘Buddhists are just practising meditation to see the end of the world. They really want to destroy the world. They hate the world and they want to see it end’ – this kind of panic reaction. To us the world is seen in physical terms – this planet, the world of continents and oceans, North Pole and South Pole. But in Buddha-Dhamma, the ‘world’ is the world we create in consciousness. That’s why we can be living in different worlds. The world of Ajahn Sumedho is not going to be the same as the world you create, but that world arises and ceases. That which is aware of the world arising and ceasing transcends the world. It’s lokuttara, transcendent, rather than lokiya, worldly. When we are born into physical birth, we have consciousness within a separate form. This point of consciousness starts operating, and then we acquire the sense of ourselves through our mothers and fathers and cultural background. We acquire different values or sense of ourself as a person that’s based on avijjā, not on Dhamma – based on views, opinions and preferences that cultures have. That’s why there can be endless problems around different cultural attitudes. As with living in a multicultural community like this monastery is, it’s easy to misunderstand each other because we’re conditioned in different ways of looking at ourselves and the world around us. But remember that cultural conditioning comes out of avijjā, ignorance of Dhamma. So, what we are doing now is informing consciousness with paññā – which is a universal wisdom rather than a cultural philosophy.
Continued same time next week Editor’s note: I’m away from my desk until 14 August, visiting family in Scotland. I’ve set it up so the posts will continue on the usual dates, hopefully.
Selected excerpts from, “Kamma and the end of Kamma: by Ajahn Sucitto” Editor’s note: You have reached the end of the text. Please let me know how you feel about reading these words over the weeks and months that have passed. Thank you. All that remains now is Ajahn’s final meditation guidance.
Meditation
Come into embodied awareness, centring on the upright axis of the body as it breathes in and breathes out. By connecting your attention to the rhythm, speed and time span of the breath, come into embodied time.
As awareness gets centred in your bodily presence, widen its span. Extend awareness through the body to its edges. These will be defined by the contact with the ground beneath you, the clothes that wrap you, the space above your head, or the air that meets your skin. Establish that wide focus, referring to these contact points, until the wide focus becomes sustainable. You may also find it helpful to connect to your breathing and imagine that flow extending slowly in all directions as you breathe out, and being drawn in from the space around you as you breathe in. As your embodied awareness gradually unfolds, linger in it and savour it. At some point it will settle into the uncontracted state – the norm of meditation.
Contemplate and be aware of – but not involved with – the changing energies within that field of embodied awareness. From time to time, you might benefit from lingering in the centre of that field, taking in the quality of ease or stability. When awareness does feels settled and full, linger in it and bring it to the felt edge of your body. It will extend beyond those edges, permeating that wide area.
Disturbances will arise. These may be a reaction to a sound, or connected to an unpleasant physical feeling Feel your awareness ripple or contract at the edge of that disturbance. Maybe things start to speed up, or there are pushes to overcome or get away from the source of the disturbance. Acknowledge what is going on, and relax the responses that are attempting to deal with the disturbance. Instead, just be with, but not in, the disturbance – as if you are sitting, standing or walking beside it. Relax the edge of resistance to the disturbance, so that your awareness spreads over it – and while encompassing the disturbance, touches into a space beyond it. Contemplate the effect of that. How, for example, does this affect the sense of your body?
From time to time, mental disturbances will occur. These may be linked to something sensory, such as a sound in the next room. Or they may be purely mental – thoughts about things you have to do, or a happy memory, or a doubt, or a plan, or an intriguing puzzle that seems to ask you to get involved with it. While resisting the urge to go into any of these impressions, acknowledge the rippling or agitating effect, and how its speed and energy contrasts with the more agreeable calm state. But don’t react or be in a hurry to change anything. Instead, soften your attitude to the agitation and its energy. Put aside comparing it with what you’d prefer to be experiencing. Find the edge of the agitation, meet it and widen your awareness over it and beyond. It’s like drawing a blanket over your body and smoothing it out over a very large bed that you’re lying on. Where is the edge of that bed? Can you smooth and spread your awareness until there are no hard edges or boundaries?
If such a practice seems manageable and helpful, you can subsequently bring to mind the notion of your self. That is, the conglomerate of your concerns, plans, duties, ideas and memories. Don’t focus or go into any one of these, but as if you’re listening to a gathering of people conversing, and occasionally laughing or arguing, widen your awareness to include it all. It might be helpful to summarise this totality or field as: ‘a business meeting’; or ‘a critical audience commenting on the show’; or ‘a noisy classroom’; or ‘a city street in the middle of the day’; or ‘a farmyard’; or ‘an open beach with the occasional gull’ – and so on. Extend your awareness over that total field of self and, without losing touch with it, find the quiet place beyond its edges. Contemplate the effect of that. What attitudes, for example, arise in the uncontracted state?
As you find a way of being with, but not in, yourself, ask if there’s anything you wish you would be. Be accurate, and acknowledge it – whether it’s ‘more vigorous’, ‘unburdened’, ‘admired’, ‘effective’ or ‘compassionate’, for example. (Of course, there may be a mixture, but select one that sums them all up, or seems to have the priority.) What ripple or effect does that send across the field of self? There may be a bodily change – such as a flush in the chest or face. The mental aspect may sharpen or unify. How would you name that firmed-up effect? ‘Vibrant?’ ‘Wider?’ ‘Richer?’ ‘Lighter?’ Give attention to that effect – not the details of the wish – and widen as before, until your awareness rests in an extended and inclusive state. Stay with that, letting the details of the wish fade, but attuning to the tone and the breadth of awareness.
As another exercise, imagine what you feel you can’t be. You might, for example, compare your current condition with a better one. Or you might compare yourself with another who you see as ‘better’ or more advantaged than yourself. Once you get the sense of how that affects your field of self in terms of mental or bodily effects, extend your awareness over it and beyond. Regard the field of self with that uncontracted awareness: is there an attitude that arises, by itself? And how does that affect the self?
Eventually the impression of the other and the ripple of your response to them may merge. Extend awareness over that, letting all of this soften –and even fade.
When you feel it’s time to leave the meditation, wait; sense the energy of that intention. Widen your awareness over that arising intention. Contemplate and open to the sense of ‘end of that’ or ‘and now, I’m going to …’ Let those impressions be felt within awareness, so that they don’t dominate it. Then incline to the centre of the embodied state, and the flow of breathing. When you can keep your intention within that uncontracted norm, gradually open to the space around you, the sounds and eventually the visual field.
As a reminder, the exercises around the sense of self may well be the most stirring – so fully establish the practice with reference to the body over a few meditation periods before going further (if you choose to do so). Also bear in mind that the accuracy of how you report on your wishes, your feeling of incapacity, or your responses to another, is not meant to be clinical or an ultimate statement of who you are. That ‘felt sense’ is just an impression in the present; your practice is not about analysing it – or adjusting it. Relate to it (even picture it) as if it were a creature emerging out of the field of awareness – to be given open regard. It will appreciate that – and may respond, or change. Be the awareness of all of that.
As you learn from any of these exercises, you can practise with the self/other comparisons that arise in the day-to-day presence of other people’s appearance or behaviour.
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Glossary
In the list below, the English words used to render Buddhist terminology are followed by their Pali equivalents and alternative English renditions.
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