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

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

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/

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/

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

These are selected excerpts from “The Island: An Anthology of the Buddha’s Teachings on Nibbana” by Ajahn Pasano and Ajahn Amaro

1. Is Buddhism a negative teaching?

The word: ‘nothingness’ can sound like annihilation, like nihilism. But you can also emphasize the ‘thingness’ so that it becomes ‘no-thingness.’ So Nibbana is not a thing that you can find. It is the place of ‘no-thingness,’ a place of non-possession, a place of non-attachment. It is a place, as Ajahn Chah said, where you experience “the reality of non-grasping.”

In contemplating Buddhist terms, and many of the ways of speech employed in the text, it is important to bear a couple of things in mind. Firstly, it is a feature of the Buddha’s teaching, particularly in the Theravada scriptures, that the Truth and the way leading to it are often indicated by talking about what they are not rather than what they are. This mode of expression has a rough parallel in the classical Indian philosophy of the Upanisads, in what is known as the principle of ‘neti… neti,’ meaning ‘not this… not this,’ – it is the phrase through which the reality of appearances is rejected. In Christian theological language this approach, of referring to what things are not, is called an ‘apophatic method’, it is also known as the via negativa and has been used by a number of eminent Christians over the centuries. The Pali Canon posesses much of the same via negativa flavour and because of this, readers have often mistaken it for a nihilistic view on life. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it’s easy to see how the mistake could be made, particularly if one comes from a culture commited to life-affirmation, such as is commonly found in the West. The story has it that shortly after the Buddha’s enlightenment he was walking along a road through the Magadhan countryside, in the Ganges Valley, on his way to meet up with the five companions with whom he had practised austerities before going off alone, to seek the Truth in his own way. Along the road a wandering ascetic, Upaka by name, saw him approaching and was greatly struck by the Buddha’s appearance. Not only was he a warrior-noble prince with the regal bearing that came from his upbringing, he was also unusually tall, extraordinarily handsome, was dressed in the rag robes of the ascetic wanderers and he shone with a dazzling radiance. Upaka was moved to enquire: “Who are you friend? Your face is so clear and bright, your manner is awesome and serene. Surely you must have discovered some great truth – who is your teacher, friend and what is it that you have discovered?” The newly-awakened Buddha replied: “I am an Alltranscender, an All-knower. I have no teacher. In all the world I alone am fully enlightened. There is none who taught me this – I came to it through my own efforts.” “Do you mean to say that you claim to have won victory over birth and death?” “Indeed, friend I am a Victorious One; and now, in this world of the spiritually blind, I go to Benares to beat the drum of Deathlessness.” “Well, good for you friend,” said Upaka and, shaking his head as he went, he left by a different path.

The Buddha realized from Upaka’s departure that mere declaration of the Truth did not necessarily arouse faith, and was not effective in communicating it to others. So, by the time he reached the Deer Park outside of Benares and had met up with his former companions, he had adopted a much more analytical method (vibhajjavada). He began his first systematic teaching, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (The Discourse on the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Truth), by explaining the raw truth of the spiritual disease (dukkha, ‘unsatisfactoriness, discontent, suffering’) and then worked through the cause of the disease (tanha, ‘craving’), the prognosis (yes, dukkha can indeed cease – nirodha), and finally outlined the medicine (the Noble Eightfold Path – magga).

This via negativa method is most clearly displayed in the Buddha’s second discourse, the Anattalakkhana Sutta (MV 1.6), also given in the Deer Park at Benares and the teaching which caused the five companions all to realize enlightenment, the liberation of the heart from all delusion and defilement. In this discourse the Buddha uses the search for the self (atta in Pali, atman in Skt) as his theme, and by using an analytical method he demonstrates that a ‘self cannot be found in relation to any of the factors of body or mind; he then states: “the wise noble disciple becomes dispassionate towards the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness.”

In this way, he states, the heart is liberated. This explanation implies that once we let go of what we’re not, the nature of what is Real becomes apparent – this was the realization that the Buddha had tried to communicate to Upaka when they met on the high road. And as that Reality is beyond description, it is most appropriate, and least misleading, to let it remain undescribed. This is the essence of the ‘way of negation’ and will be a repetitive theme throughout (this text).

 Secondly, throughout the Buddha’s teaching career of forty-five years, most of his attention was placed on offering descriptions of the path. If the goal was spoken of, it was usually in simple, general terms (e.g. at §1.5). However, one of the effects of having placed so much emphasis on the path, is that the Theravada tradition has tended to speak very little about the nature of the goal – thus often causing that goal, Nibbana, to disappear from view, or become impossibly vague in concept, or even to be denied as being realizable in this day and age. One of the aims of the book “The Island” is to collect many of the passages of the Pali Canon where the Buddha does indeed speak about the nature of the goal, elucidating this profound Truth and encouraging its realization.

2. No-self or not-self?

One of the first stumbling blocks in understanding Buddhism is the teaching on anatta, often translated as no-self. This teaching is a stumbling block for two reasons. First, the idea of there being no self doesn’t fit well with other Buddhist teachings, such as the doctrine of karma and rebirth: If there’s no self, what experiences the results of karma and takes rebirth?

Second, it seems to negate the whole reason for the Buddha’s teachings to begin with: If there’s no self to benefit from the practice, then why bother? Many books try to answer these questions, but if you look at the Pali Canon you won’t find them addressed at all. In fact, the one place where the Buddha was asked point-blank whether or not there was a self, he refused to answer [i.e. §5.14].

When later asked why, he said that to answer either yes, there is a self, or no, there isn’t, would be to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make the path of Buddhist practice impossible. Thus, the question should be put aside. To understand what his silence on this question says about the meaning of anatta, we first have to look at his teachings on how questions should be asked and answered, and how to interpret his answers.

The Buddha divided all questions into four classes: those that deserve a categorical (straight yes or no) answer; those that deserve an analytical answer, defining and qualifying the terms of the question; those that deserve a counter-question, putting the ball back in the questioner’s court; and those that deserve to be put aside. The last class of question consists of those that don’t lead to the end of suffering and stress. The Buddha advised paying no attention to such questions as “Do I exist?” or “Don’t I exist?” for however you answer them, they lead to suffering and stress.

To avoid the suffering implicit in questions of ‘self and ‘other,’ he offered an alternative way of dividing up experience: the four Noble Truths of stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. These truths aren’t assertions; they’re categories of experience. Rather than viewing these categories as pertaining to self or other, he said, we should recognize them simply for what they are, in and of themselves, as they are directly experienced, and then perform the duty appropriate to each. Stress should be comprehended, its cause abandoned, its cessation realized, and the path to its cessation developed. These duties form the context in which the anatta doctrine is best understood.

If you develop the path of virtue, concentration, and discernment to a state of calm well-being and use that calm state to look at experience in terms of the Noble Truths, the questions that occur to the mind are not “Is there a self? What is my self?” but rather “Does holding onto this particular phenomenon cause stress and suffering? Is it really me, myself, or mine? If it’s stressful but not really me or mine, why hold on?” These last questions merit straightforward answers, as they then help you to comprehend stress and to chip away at the attachment and clinging – the residual sense of self-identification – that cause stress, until ultimately all traces of self- identification are gone and all that remains is limitless freedom.

“In this sense, the anatta teaching is not a doctrine of no-self, but a not-self strategy for shedding suffering by letting go of its cause, leading to the highest, undying happiness. At that point, questions of self, no-self, and not-self fall aside. Once there’s the experience of such total freedom, where would there be any concern about what’s experiencing it, or about whether or not it’s a self? ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu, ‘Noble Strategy,’ pp 71-4

This explanation clearly points out that the anatta teaching is simply a means to an end. On a practical level it points to the root delusion, and what to do about it. Here are some of the Buddha’s words which both underscore the necessary process and also point out the joyful result of following that process to its completion.

Contemplation of unattractiveness of the body should be cultivated for the overcoming of sexual desire; loving-kindness should be cultivated for the overcoming of ill will; mindfulness of breathing should be cultivated for the cutting off of discursive thinking; contemplation of impermanence should be cultivated for the dispelling of the conceit ‘I am’ (asmi-mana). For when one perceives impermanence, Meghiya, the perception of not-self is established. With the perception of not-self, the conceit ‘I am’ is eliminated, and that is Nibbana here and now.” ~Ud4.1, A9.3 5.18) “Seclusion is happiness for one content, who knows the Dhamma, who has seen; “Friendship with the world is happiness for those restrained toward al beings; “beings; “Dispassion amidst the world is happiness for those who have let go of sense desires; “But the end of the conceit ‘I am’ that’s the greatest happiness of all.” ~ Ud 2.1

This text ends with a few words on the closely related area of attachment to ‘being’ and ‘non-being.’ The average reader might well believe that such issues are not the burning concerns of an average day, and only of tangential or academic interest. However, there are numerous subtle ways in which our hearts incline towards the longing to be someone, something, and then towards the longing not to be, not to feel, not to experience.

Does this sound at all familiar? Probably thousands of times a day the heart of the average person tilts towards bhava-tanha or vibhava-tanha (the former is defined as the yearning to be, to become; the latter embodying the yearning to switch off, to annihilate experience). It is in the light of this reality that these teachings take on great meaning and practical value – they describe the habits of the heart which are deeply ingrained and which continually drive the wheel of birth and death: enthusiasm and disappointment, the return of the nemesis we have tried to escape, union and bereavement, the results of impulses to “Just get rid of this…” If we use the reflective capacity of the mind, we begin to see how these teachings map the terrain of such habits quite precisely, and point the way to attitudes which will break the imprisoning spell such habits have woven.

This is a free Dhamma publication, available as PDF, ePUB or MOBI:

https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/451-the-island-an-anthology-of-the-buddhas-teachings-on-nibbana