2009-12-29 · New Year Retreat 2009 · 1h 02m
Emptiness and Insight Meditation
Transcript
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Quite famously, I think on more than one occasion, the Buddha said, "I teach one thing, only one thing. I teach suffering and the end of suffering."[1] And so, obviously he didn't just say that and keep quiet; we have a whole shelf-load of stuff. [laughs] He went into that question. We're human beings, we suffer, we feel suffering, and we feel the distress of that. And with interest, going into that and trying to understand it. And so we might look at this, what the Buddha called dukkha in Pali, the unnecessary suffering that we experience, and in a way, create for ourselves as human beings.
We might say, okay, that's there. We feel that there. What actually is the problem? What actually is the problem here? And we might look at our lives, pay attention to our lives, over decades, even, and say, "Yes, I can see, there are patterns I notice of behaviour, or psychological patterns." I might even see, "Oh, yeah, they have their roots in my childhood or past or something or other. That's where the suffering comes from." May be true. I may look at my life and realize at a certain point, "You know what? I realize I don't really understand where happiness comes from. I realize that I'm kind of chasing ghosts. I'm looking in the wrong place for happiness." True, to a certain extent. I may look at myself and realize, again, one of my patterns may be unkindness to myself. And how much suffering is caused by this self-judgementalism, self-criticism, unkindness. True -- a cause of suffering there.
I might feel the root of the problem is that we are not really in the present moment: "We're not in the present moment with enough openness and awareness. That's the problem. That's the root of it." True, to a certain extent. Or again, I might feel, I might think, "The problem, the root problem, is that actually that we cling as human beings to what is impermanent. Things come, things go. We want them to stay, or we get upset that they're not changing quickly enough, they're not leaving quickly enough. That's the root."
Now, all of them are true to a certain degree. It's very important to be aware of these causes of suffering. But on the occasions when the Buddha really went into this, said, "We have this suffering. What's at the root of it? What's really at the core, at the root?", he said delusion is at the root, or sometimes translated as ignorance -- the Pali word avijjā, delusion.
What does that mean? What did the Buddha mean when he said 'delusion'? This, he said, is the root factor of all our unnecessary suffering in existence. So 'delusion' means not recognizing something. We don't recognize something about reality. Our actual sense of things is wrong. We're missing something. We're not recognizing something about the self, and we're not recognizing something about the world. And on that non-recognition rests all the other suffering. But actually, it's more ingrained than that, even. It's not just that we're not recognizing something, we're actively mistaking, we're actively superimposing a mistake in our very seeing, in our very experiencing of existence, of reality, self, the world, etc.
What are we doing there? This is technical language now: we're wrongly superimposing what's called 'inherent existence.' It sounds like a technical mouthful. I'm going to try and explain what that means. What that means is, when we see something or hear something or experience something, we experience it as having a kind of what they call 'self-existence' or some kind of 'essential nature': it really is a carpet, it really is a building, a whatever, as if both the self and things have a kind of independent existence. They exist as what they are. Inherently it is what it is, whatever we're talking about. It just is what it is, by itself. In the Tibetan tradition, they say "from its own side." It doesn't need me to do anything to give it that kind of essential essence. It's really what it is.
We feel things, intuitively we feel things, we sense things to have a kind of substantiality, naturally, a kind of solidity, naturally, by themselves. We reify things. So for example, I could give countless examples, but let's talk about a retreat. We feel like, "I am on retreat. I am in a retreat." Where is the retreat? We're here. We're -- I don't know -- eating, and sitting around, and walking, and sleeping, and going to the toilet. All that stuff's part of our normal life. We're meditating maybe a bit more than usual. Where's the retreat in that? Can I find what the retreat is? I can't find the essence of the retreat. And yet, so easily, especially at the beginning, it feels like, "Whoa, I'm really trapped in this retreat." It has such a sense of solidity! "Oh, my goodness, like a prison." Or for some people, "I love retreat. I love retreat. Working, working, working other weeks of the year -- when can I get back on retreat?" Where's the retreat? Life goes on. We breathe, we eat, we sleep. And yet, things seem to have a solid, independent, substantial kind of inherent existence of their own.
Now, we do this with the self -- this self here, and other selves. We feel like, "I am Rob. That's my essence. This is Paul." Every time I see -- it's Paul. There's some essence in there that's Paul, or Gavin, or whoever. We also do it with phenomena. 'Phenomena' means 'things,' any things -- outer things like retreats and carpets and whatever, and inner things like emotions, feelings, sensations, etc. All phenomena, so-called inner, so-called outer. We have a sense of them, intuitively, as being substantially existent, really what they are. Out of that comes all the problems -- all the greed, all the fear, all the anger and aversion, all the pride, all the acting in ways that hurt ourselves and hurt others. Not leading to happiness. Not leading to happiness, not leading to freedom. Out of that, in short, comes suffering, out of that basic, fundamental delusion, fundamental superimposed mistake that's wrapped up very deeply with the way we see and feel and intuitively sense the world.
So if we consider -- let's start with our experience of ourselves. We feel this self as somehow independent. I feel I am me, no matter what happens. Stuff is happening around me or to me, but I am me. My me-ness has an independent existence. It feels that way. It's not like some kind of intellectual idea; I feel that in my bones.
That's interesting, as I say that much -- and I don't know how obvious it is; it may take some meditative sort of stillness and actually to be with that sense of me, and one actually sits and one feels a sense of me, and then one feels the independence of it. It may take that. It may be that someone is just quite introspective in their life anyway, and they feel that seeming independence of the self.
But like I say, we do it with situations, we do it with emotions, and we do it with sensations. Everything, everything. We do it with objects too. So we could have, I don't know, a modern physicist here, and would come and say, "This chair is not really a chair. What it really is ultimately is a bunch of subatomic particles." I don't know where they're up to now -- is it bosons or whatever? "It's a bunch of those things whirling around, and that's what it really is ultimately."
Teachings of emptiness -- so the lack of this inherent existence is what we call 'emptiness,' and that's what I'm talking about tonight -- teachings of emptiness say it's not even that, ultimately. It's not like you can come down to some fundamental basic thing or reality that is what makes things up. Or even some Buddhist schools will say, "What we come down to is just moments of experience -- a moment of this sensation, a moment of that sensation, a moment of this. That's the fundamental building blocks of our existence." Teachings of emptiness say, uh-uh, can't stop there. Can't stop there.
So I don't know how that sounds. I hope that was relatively clear. But interesting just to pause right now and consider some of the reactions that we might have or that actually people do have to that kind of thing. First thing that I notice, the more I talk to people about this stuff and hear back from them, is that it's very rare to realize how significant that is. It's very rare to realize that the problem lies in this feeling of essence in things. It's very rare to feel that that is the problem, and somehow seeing through that would liberate me to an extraordinary degree. That's one possible reaction: we just don't consider it that significant.
Another possible reaction is that what I've just said, and it's a relatively clumsy way of trying to say it, is that, "Well, okay, but basically that sounds like you're going to be talking about some kind of abstract philosophy stuff. Of course it's a chair. I'm sitting on a chair. I experience things. I know I experience the retreat. I experience pain. I experience this. The rest is just kind of abstract words or philosophy. And what on earth does it have to do with me and my problems, me and my self-criticism, me and my fear, me and my irritability at whoever or whatever, me and my tiredness? What does it have to do with that? Because I experience that." And certainly a person might feel, in hearing something like this, what on earth might that have to do with love? So if there's no essence in things, how could we possibly love anything or anyone? It seems like -- just irrelevant.
Another possible reaction is, on hearing this, that there's fear come up, the sense that if there's no essence then there's no ground and no substance to anything -- or, even more, that things then seem kind of bleak: "Well, does that mean kind of nothing exists, and there's a kind of nihilism? Everything's meaningless, nothing matters?" That's a very common reaction.
So all of those are possible as reactions, and it can be, even as a person begins to explore emptiness meditatively, that there's fear. But as it deepens, it brings joy. It absolutely brings joy, and it brings freedom. And that's where it's going. I think it's totally justified to say the most important thing that we can understand as human beings is emptiness. It's the most important thing. Hands down, no competition. The most important thing we can understand about existence is emptiness, is the lack of inherent existence. It's the most important thing. Maybe that sounds like just an opinion right now; I don't know, but.
Just to get a little taste: there are many levels of understanding of emptiness. On the sort of simpler level, emptiness and impermanence are very related. So we could say, if there's no real essence here, no fixed essence, it means actually I'm free, I'm not stuck the way I feel I am. There's no fixed essence. I'm free to grow. I'm free to move towards awakening. Awakening might be possible. There's potential here. There's possibility. And that very non-fixedness is a kind of freedom itself. Fixedness is lack of freedom. It's stasis. It's imprisonment.
We could say that understanding emptiness and practising with emptiness is probably the most powerful tool we will have as meditators. It's the most powerful tool in terms of freedom. But it's only one tool among many. In other words, we have mettā practice, we have practising generosity, mindfulness -- many, many tools. I'm absolutely not saying that any time we're having difficulty, we should always try and see emptiness and try and work with emptiness. I'm not saying that. It's not the only tool. It's one among many. But it is the most powerful tool.
If we kind of take an overview of the Dharma scene, you have different traditions, and different ways of teaching, and different approaches. In the Insight Meditation tradition, what we tend to emphasize is being with our experience, really learning to be with and to meet what is happening in the present moment. And this is so beautiful and so priceless. Being in the here and now, being right here, right now with what is going on, with a very simple attention, and meeting it, learning how to do that -- how beautiful, how precious. We don't tend to talk about emptiness early on, really.
In other traditions -- I'm thinking perhaps of certain Tibetan traditions, or others too -- you might show up at a retreat centre, or a series of classes, and almost right at the beginning they will say, "Where we're headed is awakening, and you can't awaken until you understand emptiness. You need to understand emptiness." Right from the beginning, you get that message, and it's loud and clear. It's like setting your direction. Now, like everything, things have their positive and their negative. The positive of the Insight Meditation tradition is that we really learn how to be grounded and meet our difficulties and actually connect with our difficulties in a very real, honest, direct way, a very helpful way. The downside of that is that it's almost like we then might get a little stuck there, and need convincing that emptiness is actually something important to understand.
It's a fundamental Dharma tenet that there's no awakening, there's no liberation, ultimately speaking, without understanding this emptiness, this lack of inherent existence of all phenomena. That's fundamental. But tonight, rather than make it sort of "Over there, in the end, whenever, if ever I get anywhere near ultimate awakening," I want to bring it here and now, and also talk about emptiness as part of a way of practice, as ways of meeting our experience that take away some of the unnecessary suffering or a lot of the unnecessary suffering. So when we talk about meditation, that's a big part of what we're doing: we're learning to meet our experience and drain away some of the unnecessary suffering. That's really part of the function of mindfulness. So practising with emptiness is just that, sort of ramped up a bit.
Now, the whole subject of emptiness is extremely difficult in all its depth. It's very, very deep, and profound, and difficult to understand. But tonight, what I want to do is kind of introduce it and hopefully show how it's possible to begin. It's very possible to begin right here, right now, at the beginning stages of a retreat. Perfectly possible and perfectly helpful. So hopefully I can communicate some of that. So, very, very difficult to understand at the deep end; not so difficult to understand at the easier end. Not so difficult.
We actually have intimations of emptiness all the time in our life. So we live in a world of conventions. Money -- if I take out a piece of paper and it's whatever it is, a £20 note, it's a piece of paper with some squiggles on it and stuff. It's just by convention, by agreement, that we've agreed that it comes to mean something. And when they change the currency or change the print or whatever, it will come to be worth nothing. It's a convention. It's empty in itself of meaning anything. We give it that meaning. Or time. So it's 7:51. It's not really 7:51. It's not really Tuesday, or December, or any of that. It's just a human convention that we agree on, and we can get tight around it. This isn't really Devon. It's not really England. [laughter] You might think, "Yeah, I know it's England, because it's raining all the time." [laughter] But it's not really. England, Wales, it's just names. It's just lines in the sand, or actually more and more in the water now. It's just a convention that we agree on, and then we fall into the trap and get so upset about it. All that's just convention.
So it's not so far away, some levels of emptiness. Or we can see in our life, outside, we're in a relationship with someone, or a friendship, a work relationship. Something happens. We get angry. We feel angry at this person. And then, afterwards, we might notice, "Gosh, when I was in that anger, I was perceiving them a certain way. I could feel their wickedness" or whatever. What's happened? The perception has been coloured by the state of the mind. It's empty. They're not really wicked. It's just that we're seeing it a certain way.
So a non-meditator can see all that. Just having a certain amount of curiosity, reflectiveness, thoughtfulness, it's possible. And these are the places where we get stuck. And so bringing that curiosity, even non-meditative curiosity, inquiry, is really, really important to begin breaking up the shackles of what seemed so solid and so substantial and so real, inherently real.
When we talk about emptiness, we can come at it from many different angles, and in a way, that word 'emptiness' has lots of different -- what could you say? -- aspects of meaning. So we can talk about emptiness means the inseparability of things. We can talk about that emptiness means the infinite nature of things, that things are really infinite and not actually confined and limited. We can talk about that things are actually just mind, they're just mind-created. We can talk about things not really having a true beginning or a true ending or true boundaries. We can talk about things being constructed or fabricated. All of these are kind of aspects of the meaning of this word 'emptiness.' There are many more as well.
Tonight I want to bring out two, if I have time. I want to bring out two. One is the last one that I mentioned: emptiness as the meaning of constructing and fabricating and building a reality. Emptiness as constructing and fabricating and building a reality. The second one, if I have time, means emptiness as things actually being unfindable in their essence. We'll see what we get to.
This first one, the constructed nature of things, there's a reason I'm picking that one. It's because my sense is, teaching and talking to people, that's actually the most natural evolution for an insight meditator. There are many ways to approach it, but for the kinds of practices we're doing, that might be the one that's easiest to see in terms of understanding emptiness.
Now, sometimes when people talk about emptiness, they do talk about chairs and tables, and actually deconstructing the sense of reality in them. Very interesting, and can be really helpful, but can also seem a little abstract to some people. I actually like it, but it can seem a little abstract. It can seem a little philosophical. It seems to me that the best way into practising with emptiness is to go via where we're suffering, funnily enough. So where we actually feel some difficulty and some contraction and some pain, and right there with that dukkha is where the emptiness will be easiest to see. It will also feel the most relevant, more relevant than talking about "is a table really a table?" It will feel more relevant because I care about it. But funnily enough, it's also easier to see. Also, when we begin practising with emptiness -- I'm going to explain what that means tonight -- we begin to get a little bit of confidence, because we're letting go of suffering in the process, rather than just talking about "does the table exist or not?" That can feel like, "What difference does it make to me?" We begin to get a little bit of confidence and trust in the letting go that it brings.
So sometimes people say emptiness means -- and you may have heard this -- things are dependent on causes and conditions. For instance, a bowl or a vase, it's dependent on the clay, and it's dependent on the paint on the side of it, and it's dependent on the potter that made it, and it's dependent on their food and their mother and where the clay came from and all that. All these conditions come together to make the vase, and that's what emptiness means. That's okay, but if I happen to own, let's say, this really precious Ming dynasty vase, and it's really, really expensive, and then I begin to reflect on those kind of cause and conditions -- "And the clay came from this very special mine in Sichuan province in China or whatever. And the clay maker was a seventh-generation apprentice of a master, da-da-da-da-da" -- and all these conditions had to come together, it might be that all these conditions actually lead to even more attachment. "Look how precious my vase is! It depends on all these things." So I don't know that that in itself would cut my attachment. The dependency we want to see is the dependency on the mind. It's the way the mind builds our reality. That's the one that we can see as insight meditators perhaps most deeply, and it's the one that will be most helpful.
So the question is -- and I'm going to come back to this in a second -- but the question is for us, then, what is being built? What is being built by the mind? What is being built here? I'm going to come back to that. That's actually part of a bigger question, and a bigger question is: whenever there's any sense of suffering, whenever there's any problem, any sense of problem, I might ask myself, any time, how is it that extra or unnecessary suffering, problem, is being created here by the mind? I feel a problem. I feel a difficulty in the body, in the emotions, in a relationship, in a situation. How is it that extra or unnecessary suffering is being created by the mind?
There's no judgement in that. We can assume that until we're completely awakened, the mind is doing that. Any difficulty, and it's creating extra difficulty. So what this means -- this is a slightly larger point now -- what it means is that any time we have difficulty or suffering, we want some investigation to be there. It's not just a matter of being with it and bearing it. Actually, something is happening that we're making it worse for ourselves. We can pretty much, without judgment, guarantee that. Any time we're having a problem, we're doing something to make it unnecessarily worse than it needs to be. The question is, can I expose that? Can I see that and let it go?
So for instance, I might be reacting in a certain way, or interpreting in a certain way, or having a certain attitude to whatever difficulty, bringing my story and my history in in an unhelpful way. All of this creates extra levels of suffering on what might just be a bit of restlessness, a bit of pain in the body, a bit of sadness or whatever. I'm adding that extra building on. In a way, that's the golden Dharma question: how am I adding extra suffering? As that question gets deeper, and I learn to keep going with it, and learn to investigate more and more with it, I get to a level of, "What is the mind building at all? What's being built here?", as I said earlier. So this is what I want to get into, and in a way, again, I'm talking about what we can use now. I don't have to necessarily wait. And if you want to, you can use it on the retreat. Even using some of this stuff a little bit will bring a little bit of freedom. So to the degree that we can get used to seeing and practising this way will bring freedom. Okay, five possibilities.
(1) First one is probably the most complex. I'm not sure why I put it first, but I did. It comes out of mindfulness. So mindfulness, as insight meditators, that's our core practice. So what does that mean, mindfulness? We could say it means this meeting of experience. What's going on in the moment? And am I able to meet it with a very simple, open attentiveness? Can I be present with it? Can I be with what is? We talk about bringing a bare attention, a simple attention, to meet the experience as it is. When I do that, the more and more I get used to doing that, I'm familiar with doing that, I begin to notice a few things.
First, it's kind of a relief to experience it at that level rather than all the complexity. But the more I do it, I begin to notice something. So I might have, for instance, an emotion going on, anxiety or anger or sadness or whatever. I might have a state of mind like dullness or restlessness or whatever. I might have a body feeling going on -- some contraction, or some heaviness, or stuckness, or pain, or itchiness or whatever. When I sustain that mindfulness, that simple attention, I begin to see, over time, I begin to see that the thing I am looking at is less solid than it first appeared. It's almost like the mindfulness exposes gaps in things.
So for instance, I might have, as I say, some sense of heaviness in the body, or contraction, and I look at it, and I actually see, "Well, yeah, there's a bit there, and there's a bit there, and there's a bit there," and I begin to see it's not quite as dense and uniform and solid as it feels. Or sadness, let's say -- I look at it, I look at it really closely. I see a moment of sadness, a moment of sadness, a gap, a moment of sadness, a moment of happiness (where did that come from?), a moment of sadness, a moment of something else, a gap. It's actually got holes in it, and the bare attention, the mindfulness, begins to expose that.
Looking at this, and being interested in this, one begins to see: the mind joins those dots and creates something. Did you ever, when you were a kid, have those drawing books, dot-to-dot? Do you know what I mean? They have these dots, and they have numbers, and you're supposed to connect the dots and you create something. The mind is doing that with experience. The mind is doing that with experience all the time, and we begin to expose that process. It's building. It's constructing. It's fabricating. So we do it with inner experience, and we do it with outer experience.
I can't remember when it was -- I think it was last year, I was teaching a retreat here, and it was unbelievable weather, windy and rainy. I think it was in August, but it was quite cold as well, so it was quite intense weather. And one of the retreatants, it was actually a retreat on equanimity, and one of the retreatants one day went outside for a walking meditation outside in the weather, and she went out with a question as she stepped through the door. It was, "What's actually so terrible here?" Because first reaction when you look outside is, "This is terrible weather, terrible weather." "What's actually so terrible here?" was her question, and taking that question with her as a kind of inquiry with the mindfulness, and realizing the question kind of opened up the experience. The attention and the question opened up the experience to begin to see this dot-to-dot, this building of the terribleness of the weather and how it felt.
That much okay? I'm going to add one more level to what I've just said, which is maybe a little harder to understand, before I move on to the second one. So what we've got, whether it's inner experience or outer experience, is a sense of a whole thing -- this whole bodily experience, or this whole emotion, or this whole weather trip, or whatever it is. We've got a whole that we see is actually constructed by the mind dependent on its parts. The mind has somehow falsely created a sense of a whole out of these dots, out of these parts, okay? That much we've said so far.
But what that means is the whole, we say, is empty. The whole lacks inherent existence. But let's not stop there. Let's keep going. This sense of a whole, then, a whole feeling of anxiety, or a whole feeling of tiredness, or a whole feeling of body feeling yucky, or a whole feeling of weather, the wholeness of it, then -- I don't know what the words are, really -- it kind of retroactively feeds back on the dots, making the dots feel much more solid and burdened, because they're representative parts of this big whole that's oppressing me. So the whole is not really real, but also the sense of the parts is being kind of unrealistically fed, built. Let's go round again, and what you've got is that whole being built by unrealistic parts. Emptiness leaning on emptiness leaning on emptiness. The mind is building something here, and then we feel burdened, stagger under the weight of that experience, and it seems so real.
So what we see is it's dependent on the mind. We see: this experience, this tiredness, this whatever it is, restlessness, this pain, this sadness, this whatever, it's dependent on the mind somehow gluing it together and giving it a solidity and substantiality which it doesn't have. It doesn't have its own independent reality. Now, I can say that, and hopefully you followed and say, "Okay, I get that." Not enough. We need to contemplate it over and over, and repeat, and see it, see it, see it again and again. Okay, first one.
(2) Second one, second possibility. As I said, the self, the sense of self is also something we give this kind of inherent existence to, solidity to. What if we notice a similar thing with the sense of self? We feel or we say to ourselves, we say to others, "I am like this. I am this kind of person. I am neurotic. I am messed up. I am an angry kind of person. I am a very fearful person. I am weak. I am, I am, I am. I am X. I am Y." And we believe that, and again, we contract our sense of self and our sense of existence around that.
Again, beauty of being on retreat: with time just given to mindfulness and the sustaining of mindfulness, we begin to expose the gaps in that statement. It's not true because it has gaps in it. It has gaps in it. I'm not always weak. I'm not always angry. I'm not always fearful. I'm not always tired. I'm not always neurotic. I'm not always fantastic, if you have that ... [laughs] Most people don't!
Under certain conditions there might be anger. Under certain conditions there might be weakness. Under certain conditions, etc., but only sometimes. And again, I solidify a reality. So seeing in this way over and over again, exposing the gaps, begins to loosen the self-definition. Breathe -- I can breathe in there. Doing that is quite an easy way to go in. It's quite a helpful way to go in, because it's not then that I get afraid that there's no reality anywhere or something like that. I don't automatically go with that kind of contemplation to, "Well, who am I then?" I'm just letting go of unhelpful definitions, and I feel fine. I feel happy, open. I don't have a sense of I'm not then existing. So it's a very kind of gradual way of going in. This is a gradual kind of descent into the depths of and the fullness of what emptiness means. Not jumping right to "nothing has any inherent existence at all."
(3) Third possibility. When that mindfulness, over time, usually on retreat -- but doesn't have to be; none of this has to be on retreat. None of this has to be on retreat. It can be also in your everyday life. As that mindfulness refines and gets a little more steady, I begin to see that everything is changing. Everything, everything, everything is changing. Everything is impermanent. Everything in particular that I might feel like calling my self -- my thoughts, my moods, my emotions, my feelings, my body, my whatever it is -- is changing. The sense, the intuitive sense of the self, is of something kind of solid and permanent and steady. It doesn't matter -- it's just steady. But I can't find anything at all that corresponds to that steadiness, that steady intuitive sense. All I will find is impermanent things.
With all of these, again, we have to repeat them and stay with that seeing, stay with this sense of "All I can see is impermanent things. It cannot be my self." Stay there as a meditative reflection. See what happens. See where it goes. See where consciousness opens to.
(4) Fourth possibility. Let's say one is sitting and, again, one is experiencing something difficult in the body, like a pain, or like fear, and the emotions. One actually wants to witness what's going on with the whole process of how the mind builds something. It's possible to actually get a sense of -- let's take pain -- some sensation somewhere, and then the mind having this label, 'pain,' that it very quickly slaps onto the experience. It's almost like they're two separate events: sensation and labelling. And the putting of the label on the sensation ends up solidifying the very sensation into pain. In other words, the automatic labelling that we do to everything is not a neutral event mentally; it's part of this building. So if you have pain -- we'll talk about pain in the instructions -- if you have pain, if you have fear, see what that mental labelling is doing in terms of solidifying the experience and making it more problematic. Again, the question is: is it really this, is it really pain, or is it really fear, independent of the mind making it that somehow?
(5) Last one, fifth one. This is a little bit of a game that you can play with your imagination, but just to give a bit of a sense of something: you can actually take something -- could be a chair, could be a tree fallen over, something -- and play with the sense of imagining it changing slowly. When does it become not what we're calling it? A chair thrown in a fire and burning, at what point does it not become, is it no longer a chair? A tree fallen over in a forest and slowly decaying. At what point is it no longer a tree, and become earth or humus or whatever you call it? Or just take your hand, like just slowly, the fingers start shrivelling or contracting, or something changes shape -- at what point is it no longer a hand? We begin to get a sense of the mind ascribing a reality there. And it feels independent, and then we fall for it.
Okay, so those five are very, very possible, and I have a feeling they come naturally out of the process of mindfulness and insight meditation that we're doing. Most of them, except the first one, which tends to go a little bit deeper if you take the fullness of it, most of them are not going to completely cut this belief in inherent existence or the solidity of self. But they're going to start really loosening it. They don't uproot it, but they really start loosening it. And that's really okay that it's not completely uprooted. It needs practice and it needs repetition, but something begins to get loosened if we can repeat that way.
I'm in a hopeless situation with my timing of the talk, but what I want to say, anyway, is you can draw a line under the talk so far. That's it, okay? So in terms of this retreat, if you want to explore some of that stuff, you will find that it's actually a lot more accessible than you might think. Don't think you have to be so advanced. You'll find it's a lot more accessible. And feel very free. It's possible. And you can call it with that.
But because I have a little more time ... I have to think what I want to say. I want to a little bit fill out where this might go with more practice.
So you can just sit back and listen. It might seem in what I've said so far, it might seem in all we've said so far, that actually the dots, for the most part in what I've said, the dots are still there, the basic building blocks. You say, "Okay, I understand the mind builds stuff, but the basic building blocks are still there." It might seem that that's true. For instance, there is still this moment of sensation in the rain, or this moment of this pain, this moment of whatever it is. But as I said at the beginning, that's not the complete story.
Some say the problem is with language, the problem is with words. It's the words that distort and give this inherent existence to things. Some say it's the thinking mind, and what you need to do is stop thinking and just experience. But the implication there is that there is this kind of basic way things are, this basic, raw reality, this basic experience that we can get to, just this moment, just how it is. And we talk this way all the time as teachers, because it's very helpful, but it's actually not really true. It's not really true in a deeper analysis. There's no pure experience. There's no raw data of the senses. There's no pre-conceptual experience. It doesn't exist. I cannot find it. Our experience, as I said at the beginning, has already got delusion in it. Our seeing, our hearing, our whatever, it has already got the delusion of feeling things as inherently existent, even that moment of experience. There's a wonderful Dzogchen teacher -- he died about 100 years ago -- called Mipham Rinpoche. Dzogchen is a tradition of Tibetan meditation and teachings. Mipham Rinpoche, he says:
If you do not know the true nature of all things [meaning their emptiness], however much you meditate you are still meditating on ordinary concepts. What's the use? It won't be a path leading to deep freedom. The habits of beginningless delusion produce clinging to mistaken notions about the nature of things. Without endeavouring to investigate with a hundred methods of reasoning, it is difficult to achieve realization. Here in the darkness of existence to which sentient beings are well habituated, it is difficult to obtain a glimpse of reality. Sudden, relatively spontaneous seeing of the truth is extremely rare. Most practitioners need to perfect their understanding of the profound view of emptiness.[2]
How am I going to get beyond that? How could our practice take us even beyond the sense of there being either atoms or subatomic particles or fundamental building blocks of experience, etc.? How, possibly, might I go beyond that? There are actually many ways of doing it as practice deepens. One of the ways -- and again, I'm talking about it tonight because it's probably the way that most insight practitioners will find the easiest as their practice develops -- is to look more into this building process at a very subtle level. As our mindfulness deepens, as we get more comfortable with mindfulness, and comfortable with sustaining mindfulness and being in the present, we can switch, or gradually transition, the emphasis of our practice from being present to letting go. So it's not so much, "Can I be in the moment? Can I be in the moment?", but actually, "Can I let go in relationship to what's happening in the present moment, let go of the usual habitual tussle with experience?" I'm usually pushing away what I don't like, pulling towards me and trying to keep what I do like, constantly, even at a very, very subtle level.
So one potential development of practice is I begin more finding my way into just letting go and letting go, and letting go of this pushing and pulling and tussling, and letting go, letting go. Beautiful way of practising, beautiful way of practice deepening. As I do that, I begin to notice two things. One is, the more I let go, the less suffering. The less I tussle with experience, the less suffering comes in experience. But I begin to notice something perhaps even more significant. The more I let go, the more something like a pain in the knee or the back, or the more the unpleasantness of the wind and the rain and the cold, the more that actual experience begins to kind of blur, fade, dissolve into non-existence by virtue of my letting go.
At first when we practise mindfulness, it's almost like the world and experience becomes more and more vivid, the grass seems greener, colours are more intense, etc. We're drawing closer to so-called reality. As we go deeper and we let go more, actually what happens is things begin to kind of dissolve. The more I let go, the more the very solidity of pain begins opening out, dissolving, blurring, fading. Things begin, experiences begin, to lose their substantiality by virtue of my letting go. They actually seem less solid and less substantial. Sometimes that can feel a little disconcerting. Appearances turn out to be dependent on my tussling with them, dependent on my clinging, my pushing away, pulling. The actual solidity and kind of vividness and definition of appearances depend on my struggling with them.
This is completely and utterly counterintuitive, completely backwards from the way we feel the world to be. That experience of being with the pain, and letting go, and letting go of the aversion, and actually seeing the pain fade, that's not rare. It's not a rare experience for insight meditators. Plenty of people have had that experience -- maybe once or twice; maybe many times. What's actually rare is taking the insight from it, realizing what it means, realizing its implications and the radical profundity of what it implies about reality. That's actually very rare. The more I tussle with experience, the more defined and solid perceptions and experience becomes, and the more defined and solid the self-sense becomes. Both of them are being built dependent on my tussling, dependent on the mind. There's a spectrum: a lot of tussling, a lot of story, a lot of agitation, a lot of aversion, a lot of clinging, a lot of tying myself in knots -- self appears very solid, very substantial; world, the world of things, the world of problems, the world of this experience appears very solid, very substantial.
Think about when you're really having some difficulty with something, something is really a hassle, really a problem, and we're bringing in our history and everything. The whole problem seems so solid, and the self seems so solid. We're learning in meditation to let go at one level, and let go at a deeper level, and let go at a deeper level. There's a spectrum there. Very, very solid when there's a lot of struggling. Less solid, less solid, less solid, disappears, fades, insubstantial, not there, nothing. Spectrum of self and appearances. Neither the things nor the self have an independent reality. It's the mind that gives it that, injects it with that, constructs it that way.
Now, this we can take incredibly deep. This spectrum goes incredibly deep, so that not just self and appearances, but even things like space and time also turn out to be built and constructed by the same process of clinging -- very, very subtle clinging; extremely subtle but available to be seen with practice and meditation.
Also, awareness. Something that might be the last kind of fortress of what appears to have its own kind of reality, awareness, the sense of awareness. Whatever else we might say about this -- it's kind of a dream, or it's an illusion or whatever -- there must be awareness. There must be awareness to dream or whatever. But even that turns out not to have inherent existence. There's a kind of magic in all this.
So, we say something like this, and I know it's a long talk, etc., and I know that it lands in very different places. But I don't know if you can get a sense of the magic that's going on here. The whole show is like a magical illusion -- Buddha's analogy. It's like waving a wand, abracadabra, here it all is, and it seems so real, and we fall for it and we suffer. The whole show, a world, a self, experience, time, the present moment, awareness -- it's all a magic show. Seeing that is what's available to us in the depths of this practice.
There's a very famous quote some of you may know from a Zen master, Dōgen, who lived centuries ago. It's a beautiful quote. He says:
To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.[3]
It's beautiful. We could substitute some other words there. We might just as fully and accurately say, "To study the Buddha way is to study the world. To study the world is to forget the world. To study perception is to forget perception, to see through perception. To study anything is to forget that thing, is to see through that thing, ultimately. To study awareness is to forget awareness. To study time, to study the present moment, is to forget the present moment, ultimately."
I need to finish. But to return to something I touched on earlier: what's very interesting to me is the different emotional reactions that we can have as human beings and that people do have to all this. Some people, they hear this, and even though they don't fully understand it, something in the heart leaps up. It jumps up. They get excited. There's a joy there. It's like they can smell something, the aroma of freedom and wonder. Some people -- I think they're in the minority. Many people might be a little turned off. And I don't know; again, this is going to be landing in very different places. For a lot of people, it brings up fear. And as we actually practise with all this stuff, for a lot of people, at certain stages of the practice, there can come some fear. But as I said earlier, we're only moving through the fear. It's leading to freedom. All this is leading to freedom. No matter what level we take it at, it brings freedom.
Some people, when they teach about emptiness, it's almost as if they're saying what emptiness is is a teaching about disappointment. So you might believe something nice about life, or something mystical, or you might believe in the wonder of life, or something really beautiful at the core of life, or God, or the divine, or whatever, and emptiness is saying, "There's nothing like that, and it's disappointing, and emptiness is about 'you better get used to that disappointment, sonny.'" [laughter] I think that's completely and utterly mistaken! Sorry, I just have to say it. It's wrong. The emptiness does not bring disappointment. As I say, you might move through a period of disappointment, but actually it brings completely the opposite: such a fullness of wonder, such a fullness of preciousness, of devotion, of amazement, of freedom, of joy, of peace.
Sometimes people hear this kind of stuff and again, even though they don't completely understand it, they understand the implications, that that means we have to let go of everything, and even that can feel some sadness, a letting go of what we're used to clinging to, even though we know it's not even helping me. There's some sadness. As one of my teachers many years ago used to say, "The taste of emptiness is joy." The taste of emptiness is joy. And that's where it's going. Even in the five ways I described, we begin to see how things open up, and there's a little bit more spaciousness in there. Joy comes.
Sorry, I mistimed it, but ... are you tired? [laughter] I will, in one minute, summarize what I was going to finish with. Emptiness does not mean meaningless in terms of ethics. Practising with emptiness does not mean that nothing matters, I can do what I want. It actually brings a real care. We understand: there's a very real relationship between love and emptiness, very real, and we see it. I can't explain now, because people have wanted me to finish. It brings compassion. We wouldn't feel that way -- maybe it's not obvious, but it brings compassion. It brings certainly an equanimity to compassion, that we don't get too sucked into the suffering of compassion. But we let go of the self-interest being the priority. "Me, number one, me, my, me, my," that goes away from our life, more and more. I'm not the priority any more. That opens love. It opens up service. So to the degree that we are able to understand emptiness and practise with it is the degree that the heart is opened in its capacity to serve life and serve the world. It's the opposite of what perhaps we might expect.
All right. What I was trying to do tonight was be hopefully clear, I hope [laughs]; hopefully give you a little bit of a sense of how possible this is to begin walking down that road, and a sense that even walking down that road a little bit is really worth it and really helpful and brings some freedom. And a sense that emptiness is not something to be afraid of. It's something that brings beauty and freedom and joy.
Let's have a couple of quiet moments together.
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