Between Ikon and Eidos: Image and Hermeneutics in Meditation (Part 4 - The Three Characteristics)

Our larger theme at the moment is ideas and concepts, and particularly the implication of ideas for sensing with soul, how the ideas we have influence -- we talked about how the ideas that we inherit, if you like, often operate unconsciously, and influence or limit or open certain directions of experience and understanding, sensing with soul or not, etc. And we touched on that. So ideas unconsciously have that power. Consciously, too, they have that power, of course. And so, want to be talking about that: what does it mean to incorporate an idea, so that it influences the sensing, or opens the sensing, or makes this or that possible in the sensing, and sensing with soul?

Part of all that I'd like to weave in is just the relationship between ideas and images, between eidos and ikon, the relationship of ideas or the place of ideas in sensing with soul. And some of what I want to weave in over the course of the next few talks is also, what does it mean to meditate on an idea or with an idea? What does that mean? What might that look like for us, and involve for us?

So all of that. And I want to point to, point out certain possibilities, some specific possibilities, and discuss them, if that's possible. In the course of discussing certain possibilities and opening up these specific practices, we'll start with the relatively familiar, what will probably be relatively familiar for many of you. But before we even get going with that, it's important to point out, you know, that when I'm using the word 'idea,' sometimes people very easily take that to mean something only or mostly abstract. So it's a certain thought, and it kind of happens in your head, in a kind of way that's abstract and taken away from the world, particularly the world of perception. Unfortunately, just the way we tend to think about ideas and ideation in our larger culture is not a way that allows them very easily to translate into actual ways of looking, into meditations, into perception, into sensing. But that is what I'm really talking about. I'm not really, per se, that much interested in just ideas that remain purely abstract. What I'm really wanting to point to is that ideas can, or many ideas can, and in our case they should, translate into actual ways of looking that are operating in the moment to open or shape the sensing in particular ways.

So this skill, to be able to translate ideas into the perception, to hold them subtly at the back of the mind, so to speak, so that they become ways of looking, is such an important skill as a human being -- I mean in terms of practice, and what could be possible in practice. And sometimes I think I slightly overestimate just what's involved in making that transition, or just understanding, for people to understand that's what we're talking about. So really right from the start, that's what we're talking about. When we say 'ideas,' it's for the sake of their implementation as in ways of looking, to open up a whole sense of existence, as an actual sense, in the actual senses, yeah? Not abstract.

So it's interesting. I don't know. I was thinking a while ago about the word 'reflection.' That word, it also suggests that through an idea or a concept, the looking, and so what is perceived in the looking, is reflected according to that idea or concept. So we say, "I reflect on an idea," or "I reflect on this or that," and we tend to think of cogitation, mental cogitation. But the idea or the word 'reflection' may have kind of intimations of this idea of 'reflecting.' So how the world is reflected is through an idea or ideas. The idea is part of what forms the way of looking at any time, as I said, and we want to be very agile with that, nimble and facile and dexterous with that. There's a limitation, obviously, to using that word, 'reflection,' because it implies a world that's independently existing, that is then reflected in this way according to this idea, or in that way according to another idea. And our logos, our larger conceptual framework, is more in favour of the create/discover model. But that works, too, this idea of reflecting that way. [6:32]

So when we talk about ideas, concepts, we're talking about something that needs to somehow become a way of looking, needs to be translated, incorporated, literally, into a way of looking. And then that way of looking can refine and deepen, can be refined and be deepened. So this goes for any way of looking. We could take anything as an example. But when we get to talking about meditation on ideas, it's just like any 'way of looking' meditation. They need to be not too clunky, or not gross, or move on from the clunky and gross into the more subtle. It needs to be able to refine, deepen, become more subtle, and in a way, to involve more and more of the being, and the levels of the being, and the levels of perception. That goes for any -- that's the kind of possibility of meditation, to deepen, to refine, etc.

So for example, one could have a practice of, say, giving my aggregates to the divinity, to a god or the gods, or the divine, or the Buddha-nature, or whatever. And that's the practice that one might be doing at some time. And perhaps one is tired at the time one is doing that, so including the tiredness as part of the aggregates that are present. And one gives that to the divine. When the sense of self (the 'I' that is giving in that way, and that is experiencing the tiredness), when the divine, and when the tiredness itself are all somehow or other seen as empty (or more empty, or less substantial, or more transparent, or void, or whatever we want to say), in some way or other, through some way of looking, some other way of looking that's kind of operating at the same time that sees their emptiness -- so there's a larger practice there of giving the aggregates to the divine, or perhaps back to the divine, the divinity, but part of that is that self, divine, and aggregates (including, perhaps, whatever one is struggling with, or whatever one is feeling joy over, or enjoying), all are in some way seen as empty. So in a way, there is a larger way of looking, and another way of looking that's seeing the emptiness, somehow or other, to some level, that's wrapped up in that larger way of looking. Or you could say it's an amalgamation of a few different ways of looking.

But when we do that, for example -- so it's not just giving my aggregates to the divine, the divinity; it's actually gone to another level by virtue of some degree of emptiness perception being involved in the giving, in who's giving, and what's being given, and who it's being given to. Then, when that's the case, then the whole movement, the whole gesture, and the whole sense of that idea (if we call it an idea) of giving my aggregates to the divinity, it deepens. It's deepened by that, and actually becomes much more freeing, and much more beautiful, and will feel more sacred, generally speaking. So the point, really -- I could have picked any example -- is that there's always this kind of possibility of any way of looking, whether it seems obviously to involve an idea or not, to deepen, to refine, to become more subtle, etc., and also to become more comprehensive. So this is possible for most meditations, any way of looking, meditation on an idea, meditation on an image. [10:51]

If we talk about incorporating emptiness into it, then, as I alluded to, there's a kind of spectrum, if you like, of how much emptiness is included, or how deep it goes. And anywhere on that spectrum is available as a sort of variation on the larger way of looking. And similarly, actually, we could say, if the whole thing is seen as image, imaginally, and then the Middle Way of the imaginal is there, and this 'neither real nor not real' that will function in a similar way to the emptiness to allow more beauty, more sacredness, become more freeing, etc., in that example of giving my aggregates to the divinity.

I think I've mentioned this before at some point on a retreat, and I can't remember -- perhaps on the Re-enchanting retreat. Just because I mentioned that example of giving the aggregates to the divinity: if we were meditating with, let's say, receiving, say, love or light or whatever from a divinity, then I would say that, rather than sort of being more interested in more emptiness, incorporating more emptiness into the whole gestalt of the view, it's actually quite important when we receive love from a divinity in the meditation to explore all the positions on the self-spectrum. In other words, a very solid, contracted, reified self-sense -- it's really important that that self-sense (because it's often quite a suffering self-sense) puts itself or feels itself in the stream, and bathed in the stream of the divine light and the divine love. That's very, very useful, to include that more solid self-sense and views. But also the less solid self, senses of self. It's all important. But generally, there's this possibility, in any way of looking, for it to refine and deepen, and kind of open up in that way.

So wrapped up in what we just said is this idea that ideas (when we're talking about ideas) need to come into the way of looking. And for that, they need to be a bit more subtle. They can't be too gross. Or rather, for the way of looking to be agile, and actually to be able to work in the moment, and with different conditions, and to go deep, the way that the idea is incorporated has to be quite subtle. So sometimes, as an example, we could take the whole idea or conceptual framework of dependent origination that the Buddha came up with, with twelve links, or sometimes it's ten links, or sometimes thirteen, or whatever. Let's say twelve links. And that whole conceptual framework is really a network of ideas.

And what I've noticed, teaching this in different situations with people, is that oftentimes, people really seem to enjoy kind of the categorization of their experience. So one way I can do it sometimes with a group of people is to sort of look back on some whole scenario of dukkha that transpired, perhaps in a social situation or work situation, whatever, and kind of use that grid of concepts, and the dependent origination, the twelve links there, and sort of file things, or categorizing: "When that happened, that was a saṅkhāra in the form of a previous belief structure or expectation or conditioning. And when that moment happened, it was the shrinking of the consciousness. And when that moment happened, that was the aversion to the unpleasantness in the contact, etc." So people seem to really quite enjoy kind of doing a bit of a postmortem on some kind of suffering, or even just a categorization of some kind of made-up situation. And there's a way that that's helpful, because it helps digest that conceptual framework and the concepts that make it up, at a certain level.

But that, to me, is not a full enough understanding. We can have a feeling -- I've touched on this before -- we enjoy the feeling, or many of us do, as human beings, when we've sort of fitted this experience to that concept, and we've sort of broken things down, we've found a sort of way that we can file all the words of what we find in the text, and what the Buddha was talking about, and we file it, and "It means this, and that translated as this, and that situation, it meant that thing." There's a kind of relatively neat filing away of all the concepts. And we can sometimes enjoy that and mistake it for the kind of level of understanding that's really going to be liberating, which goes beyond that. So certainly not just postmortems on our suffering that has already transpired; it's not really going to help that much. But nor is this just the satisfaction of neatly putting concepts in boxes, and neatly mapping them to sort of circumscribed experiences or movements of consciousness or whatever in our life. So it can be useful, but actually, again, what we need to do is live an understanding of dependent origination in ways that liberate. And that means, translate that to, actually, not just a way looking -- lots of ways of looking in the moment. There's a whole, as I said, network of concepts there, and all the links, and all the interconnections. Many, many possible ways of looking are available from that classic Buddhist teaching, the Buddha's classic teaching of dependent origination.

And again, if we take that map of dependent origination, that network of concepts, that conceptual framework: what can often happen is that someone even doesn't just stop at a kind of relatively gross, intellectual categorization of what might happen, and they don't just stop, even, with a relatively gross labelling in the present moment of what's going on: "Ah yes, there's aversion here," or whatever. "Ah yes, there's greed here," or something like that. "Ah yes, there's selfing here." You know, that kind of observation will be helpful if I catch it in the moment: "Ah, there's selfing here," or "There's greed or aversion." It may be relatively helpful. There's enough mindfulness there to not get completely sucked into something. It may create a bit of more spaciousness, a bit of a breakup of the momentum of the sort of saṃsāric flow, if you like. But there's the possibility of much more, as I said, subtle wielding of the concepts involved, much more subtly incorporated into ways of looking, in a much more fluid and agile way.

And so someone might take it to another level and, for instance, look at the link between vedanā and taṇhā, vedanā and craving, and have a practice derived from that map of dependent origination, and that particular link between vedanā and craving -- have a practice of stationing the awareness on, let's say, unpleasant vedanā, or pleasant vedanā, whatever, stationing the awareness on the vedanā, and observing, moment to moment, the rapid changing of the vedanā itself, or just being with the vedanā. And in that kind of intensity and acuity of attention on the vedanā, there's a marked stopping down, or a marked slowing down or attenuation, let's say, of how much craving the vedanā then gives rise to, either in aversion, or desire to have more or to hold on to. So it's a very specific way of looking, to stay at the vedanā, focus on the vedanā as they're happening right now, and that very focusing -- even if it doesn't have a contemplation of impermanence, just seeing "pleasant, unpleasant, pleasant, pleasant, pleasant," whatever it is -- that will attenuate the craving that comes out of that. I've talked and written about this in the past. Very skilful practice: stationing the awareness on the vedanā.

Some people, though, take that as the kind of pinnacle of what's possible, as a way of looking that might come out of the map of the twelve links of dependent origination. And there, I would say, well, actually, a lot more is possible, and a lot more subtle than that, and a lot more liberating than that. Some people even would say that that is what the experience of an arahant is, is that vedanā arises (unpleasant or pleasant, whatever), and there's no craving. And this kind of practice that we can do of stationing the focus of attention on the vedanā, and thus the craving being attenuated through the intensity and the steadiness of that gaze on the vedanā, some people would say that's practising the way an arahant would see anyway, the way an arahant would experience anyway. That's practising a state of liberation or arahantship or whatever.

Then what can often happen is quite a lot gets clung to in there, or stopped. One is the view of what awakening is, and the other is just quite what is possible from or through the translation of those concepts in dependent origination that the Buddha outlined into ways of looking. One limits, because one has stopped somewhere, and you say, "That's it. That's kind of what I need to see now. Everything else -- there's not much more there." And one has stopped the possibilities for this translation of concept and idea into a way of looking there. [23:04]

One of the things that I feel is very important, as a general statement, is that all these Dharma categories -- so for example, those twelve links of dependent origination: avijjā, saṅkhāra, viññāṇa (so delusion, fabrications, fabricating forces, consciousness), etc., perception, all the rest of it, craving -- to me, and to many, or at least some Dharma teachers and Buddhist teachers in the history of the wider tradition, they are not truths. They are not ultimate truths. These categories, these Dharma categories (the twelve links there of dependent origination, the three kilesas, or the five aggregates, or awakening, or whatever), they all, first of all, again, we can notice how they've been translated and shifted and given different interpretations in different points in the history of Buddhism, and different locations in the dissemination of Buddhism over the globe. But more importantly, they're also empty. We can realize that they themselves do not have inherent existence. So they are not truths, these twelve links, these five aggregates, etc., these three kilesas. They are not ultimate truths.

Even the Theravādan tradition, Ajaan Mahā Boowa used to say everything that's involved in the Four Noble Truths is a relative truth.^[1] And the twelve links of dependent origination are the Buddha's longhand version of the Second Noble Truth: the causes for the arising of dukkha (craving being the shorthand version, clinging being the shorthand version). But the longhand version is dependent origination in that model. And Ajaan Mahā Boowa said this is all relative truth. When you take the raft of the Four Noble Truths, and that teaching of dependent origination, you go beyond it. To me, there's a whole other level here, way beyond that stationing of the attention at vedanā, where all the links of dependent origination begin to kind of melt through actually contemplating the very mechanism of dependent origination and what it is. It's as if you take that teaching, and you take it at a deeper and deeper and deeper level. I used to say it's like a snake swallowing its own tail. It may be better to say: those concepts melt under the gaze of the understanding of dependent origination, which is the understanding of emptiness. So they're not truths. They're rafts. They're part of the raft, of what the Buddha talked about. They're skilful means. They're relative truths that can be helpful when they are translated into ways of looking.

The worst thing would be to cling to them intellectually as truths and statements about, "This is my philosophical position on what life is," and they haven't actually become really fertile, and really taken this journey into depth and radicality that they can when they're translated into ways of looking that bring levels of freedom, dependent on the levels in which that translation has actually been worked by the practitioner.

So as an example, and I don't know whether I've mentioned this anywhere else in a talk, but the three kilesas were picked up (the three defilements, sometimes they're called^[2]). The Buddha used to say these are three fires.^[3] You have to put them out: greed, aversion, delusion. And in a way, he was responding to the spiritual culture at his time in India, which was dominated by the Vedic teachings and the Brahmanical teachings. And in the Vedic and Brahmanical religions, they used to burn three fires. The idea was to keep them burning. The Buddha came along and said, "You've got to put them out." Now, we could say, "Well, if he happened to be in a different spiritual culture or time where they had, say, four fires, or two fires, would that have shaped his teaching of the Dharma? Would he say there are four or two kilesas?" Because he was really kind of spinning something taken for granted in people's spiritual understanding. He was just spinning it the other way, kind of the way Jesus would do when he says, in different teachings of his, it's kind of, "Hey, think about this." You see the historical conditioning even of the original Buddhist teachings there. [28:36]

So from many angles, we can see these Dharma concepts are not absolute, ultimate truths. They're for the sake of becoming ways of looking. They're optional lenses that we can put down, pick up, and kind of go for a ride on. Sometimes I call them 'avenues,' which is something I'll come to in a minute. So we use them to suggest, or so that they become ways of looking, ways of sensing. And something like the teaching of dependent origination, with those links, as I said, there's a whole plethora of potential ways of looking that can be extracted or constructed from those concepts there, taken at different levels -- many, many, and I've taught about that elsewhere.

So actually, that leads me on to something else. I said I would start with some familiar ideas, and we touched on dependent origination. I didn't really mean to go into that so much. But what about the three characteristics (tilakkhaṇa in Pali, trilakṣaṇa in Sanskrit)? The three characteristics, sometimes called the three marks of existence. It's become quite a common sort of Buddhist category, categories. So dukkha, anicca, and anattā: dukkha meaning 'suffering,' or 'unsatisfactoriness,' really, we could say; *anicca, '*impermanence'; and anattā, usually translated either as 'not-self' or 'not belonging to a self.' Sometimes it's translated as 'there is no self.' And occasionally it's translated to refer to what I would call the 'emptiness of inherent existence of phenomena.'

But the thing that I want to open up -- and some of you will be familiar with me saying this from before -- so there's this relatively familiar Buddhist concept. What I would like to open up is just to point out that we can relate to these three characteristics, three marks, as facts, as realities or truths: "The 'truth' of everything is that it is dukkha." So even if something is pleasant, it's not going to be finally satisfactory, and hence it's unsatisfactory. "The 'truth' of anything at all is that it's impermanent, and it's not-self, etc., doesn't belong to my self." So we can take them as facts, these three characteristics, and make that either just a kind of abstract philosophy, or a kind of attitude to life, or take them as facts, and plug them in as meditations, and go a bit deeper than just a kind of general life attitude. But the point is there, as facts, they're part of what some modern philosophers call the 'facticity' of our existence -- again, the sort of unavoidable, hard realities of our existential predicament: unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and this absence of a kind of self-essence to ourselves.

So one can look at them as facts and part of the facticity of our existential situation. Or one can pick up these three characteristics as ways of looking. And then they have to be meditative lenses, meditative tools, and, it will turn out, meditative avenues. Oftentimes, they are referred to, this anicca, dukkha, and anattā are referred to as three characteristics or three marks (lakkhaṇa, or lakṣaṇa in Sanskrit). But sometimes the Buddha referred to them, or when he was talking about them, he talked more in terms of what I would call a 'way of looking.' So he talks about dukkha-, anicca-, and anattā-saññā: 'perception,' 'perceiving' in those terms.^[4] Or dukkha-, anicca-, or anattā-anupassanā, which means a kind of observing, looking at, contemplating, considering, or viewing.^[5] Passanā, anupassanā, is 'to view,' which would translate very well to 'ways of looking,' 'as a way of looking.'

So anicca as a way of looking. What does that mean? You're probably familiar with my teachings about this. It's like looking, plugged into, focusing on, attentive to, interested primarily in, in that moment, the impermanence of things, and just sustaining that as a lens. All I'm interested in now is the impermanence. And it might be long-scale impermanence (the impermanence of vast stretches of time), or ordinary timescales, or very, very micro timescales. But all I'm wanting to see, over and over, when I've got that way of looking, those lenses on, is impermanence.

Or anattā, just 'not-self, not me, not mine,' and I just sustain that for a period -- half an hour, ten minutes, an hour, whatever it is. And what happens? Where does it take me? It's a way of looking, rather than a truth. So as I employ it as a way of looking, I let it unfold. I don't a priori fix a limit on what I will see, or what that lens will reveal to me.

And similarly with dukkha, it's just 'unsatisfactory.' (There's another way of doing it I'm not going to go into now.) Then the question becomes, "When I look this way, what happens to my experience? What happens to appearances? What happens to perception?" And so what we have here, on the one side, the possibility of taking them as facts, these three characteristics. And then what will happen? Well, I could not plug them in, as I said. I could leave them abstract. Or I could plug them in as a way of looking. But I've decided that they're facts, and I've kind of, in that way, put a limit on them. And so there will be some degree of less fabricating, certainly less clinging, because when I see "things are unsatisfactory," I just let go. I'm going through this very quickly. There's much more, but I've been through it elsewhere so many times, I'm not going to repeat it here. There will be a little less clinging, somewhat less clinging, maybe quite a lot less clinging, and less fabrication of perception.

When I leave them a little more open-ended, and I employ these ways of looking, then there can be actually a lot less fabrication. I really go on a journey with these ways of looking, and I begin to see, really, because I'm set up by adopting what we're calling the 'phenomenological approach,' I'm set up in a different way. I'm actually looking for the effects on perception and the effects on fabrication, remember? So I begin to really clock: "Oh, with these ways of looking, there is less fabrication. What I perceive, what appears, depends on the ways of looking. These ways of looking fabricate much less. How much less?" I just keep going with them. And I will realize -- less so with the anicca, more so with the dukkha, but even more so with the anattā -- they really can take me deep into an unfabricating, and a state of much, much less fabrication. And because I'm connecting fabrication and ways of looking, I start to understand: phenomena are empty. And I develop that skill, and my range with that, etc., with these three ways of looking, and I see more and more: phenomena dependently arise. They're empty of inherent existence.

And what that does is, actually, then you come a little bit full circle in the understanding. I've started with ways of looking as something, "I'm kind of just seeing what will happen, because, yeah, okay, I agree, you can look at things in different ways." Then, because I see their radical and total emptiness, I come back to ways of looking in a way that gives the whole idea and practice of ways of looking a validation at a whole other level. Because things are thoroughly empty, we're left with nothing but ways of looking. They don't exist independent of the way of looking: "I look this way, I see a phenomenon like that. This appears. I look that way, this appears, something different," through all the gradations there. So this whole journey into emptiness liberates and legitimizes and opens up the whole possibility of a mode of conceiving of practice as a playing with ways of looking.

Let's go into this a little more specifically. So either through playing with, or some understanding, in practice, of emptiness, or actually through developing jhāna practice (for instance, just the first three or four jhānas, even just that), if one really gains some mastery in the jhānas, one of the things that you can do is, where there is pain in the body, you can just decide to see it as bliss, or as happiness, or pleasure, and the perception, the appearance, the sensation, the vedanā actually changes. So either with jhāna practice, with what I would call moving towards a kind of mastery of jhāna practice (not everyone will teach this, what I'm talking about now), and/or through some understanding of emptiness, you come to realize just how malleable perception is. That's intimately related with this 'ways of looking' business. So here's this pain in my knee, or my back. This doesn't happen, this is not possible all the time, every time, but just the fact that it's possible quite a lot of the time really can make an impact on the understanding and on the being. We just come to see how malleable the perception of the vedanā is. So dukkha, as in what the Buddha calls dukkha-dukkha, just the dukkha of pain, starts to get relativized: "Is it necessarily that? No. I can look at it and see it, feel it as something different, actually as pleasure, as bliss, as pīti, as whatever."

Further into the understanding of emptiness, one begins to see the emptiness, as I said, of all phenomena -- any thing, even a micro thing, a mental thing, a momentary thing, whatever. One sees the emptiness of all phenomena, and also the emptiness of time. So seeing all that together, understanding it, feeling it, sensing it in one's practice. Where does that leave the notion of, let's say, impermanence, as a truth? Where does it leave that characteristic? If time is empty, and things are empty, can I really talk about the impermanence of things -- even micro things, even a moment of vedanā? It doesn't really stand up as an ultimate truth any more. And what can happen as I take this whole ways of looking, these three characteristics, I take them deeper in practice, is so much fruit can come out of those ways of looking if I really take my time to develop them, the art and everything that they can involve.

But either from the emptiness understanding (the deep emptiness understanding and radical emptiness understanding that can emerge), and/or through what we've been calling 'sensing with soul,' it's quite possible to regard, or the kind of adjudication of something being dukkha, or phenomena being dukkha, we are able to say, and really mean it, and to sense it as perfect. I talked about that when I talked about, for instance, my illness, and my cancer, and possibly dying. And this sensing with soul of the whole situation and all of it as perfect, it came out of the sensing with soul. But we can also arrive at that through emptiness practice, because of the malleability, or as I said, see it as bliss. And some of you who are familiar with Vajrayāna teachings will recognize that: seeing all things as bliss, all phenomena are bliss. And there are different levels and kind of colours of what that means, which I won't go into right now.

But these seeings become possible. And the dukkha of finitude, what I call the dukkha of finitude, things are unsatisfactory because they're just finite and limited, because they're finite in time. So things are dukkha, unsatisfactory, because they're impermanent, but also because they're limited. We feel a thing, we sense a thing (whether it's an outer thing or an inner thing, a subtle thing or a gross thing) as having hard edges, rigid edges, as sharply defined. That's in our habitual perception of things, for the most part. And so there's a dukkha just because things have a finitude in time (they're impermanent), and also just because, well, they can't satisfy, because I'm going to want something different. You know, I'm going to outgrow this thing, whatever, in my desires, whatever. So they're unsatisfactory.

But again, either through sensing with soul, or through a deep emptiness understanding, we begin to see and sense things, or we can possibly see and sense things, as infinite, yes? Remember that soft edge, elastic edge of the way things appear to us when we sense with soul. And because of the whole soulmaking dynamic -- the eros pushing further the image and the logos, the psyche and the logos of this phenomenon, whatever -- it's no longer finite. It's now infinitely expandable, infinitely dimensionalized, etc. Or when we see its emptiness, we see these hard edges that separate it from all else, from us, from other phenomena, etc., they are illusory.

So because a thing then can be seen no longer to have this unsatisfactoriness that comes from finitude, we can also look at it and say, "It's not dukkha. It's perfect. It's bliss. It's divine." And similarly, we can look at something, and of course we can see its impermanence. But again, either through seeing the emptiness, as I said, the emptiness of time, or the emptiness of phenomena, or through seeing it iconically -- you know, sensing it with soul, and then that timeless, eternal, eternality aspect that I talked about -- we could just as well, again, see it as the opposite: it's impermanent, but it's also somehow eternal. And so, just as we can see it as dukkha or completely not dukkha, the opposite of dukkha, we can see it as impermanent or not, or somehow eternal, iconic. These are all ways of looking that become available to us. The very characteristic flips into its opposite.

Or seeing not-self, or 'there is no self,' or whatever, we become free -- having seen the emptiness of all phenomena, and then the emptiness of all self-views, we become free to entertain, to play with, to enter into any self-view. It all becomes available, because they're all empty. It's not like, "This self-view is okay. This self-view of the self as a process is okay, but the self-view of the personality is an illusion," or something like that. Actually any self-view. So again, we can move from anattā to attā, from no-self to self, and we're just playing. The ways of looking are just opening up there. So these lakkhaṇā/lakṣaṇā as doors or gates, rather than truths or goals. They're doors, as I said, to this avenue of less and less fabrication, and to the understanding, the radical understanding of emptiness that comes out of that, and then the liberation that comes out of that. [47:33] What is liberated when I see the deep emptiness of things?

And we can then still use them in their more limited meanings and ways. When I see, when I contemplate the impermanence of things, when I put that lens on and adopt that way of looking, and I also somehow know that time is not real, actually it can go even deeper in terms of its liberative efficacy. Impermanence is not real, and I'm still looking at the impermanence, and it goes to a whole other level. Or I can veer away from the impermanence, just see the eternality, or the total emptiness, or whatever. There are all kinds of possibilities.

One of the possible meanings of lakṣaṇa is 'the act of aiming.' It's the act of the aiming, so it's not the goal of the aiming, or the target. It's the act of aiming. The 'truth,' or the 'goal.' Again, I'm really not into playing that game about etymology, and insisting on this or that, but I view etymology more poetically, and just as something to play with: "Oh, there's that meaning as well." It's possible, in aiming, in the act of aiming, that that aim, that the arrow then takes us somewhere. It goes on a journey, and it emerges even, eventually, in what appears to be the opposite of what I was originally aiming at. And that kind of turning around of original teachings is very common (some of you will know) in Vajrayāna teachings. So by the 'treasure' of the kilesas, or as I went into with the three characteristics here.

Lakṣaṇa, in Sanskrit, can also mean the 'sign' or the 'line' that one draws (in other words, one creates, one draws) on the ground prepared for a sacrifice, or on a sacrificial ground. So again, we can say it's a kind of creation. It's not a reality. It's a creation. It's a way of looking, rather than a facticity. It's a creation to make or discover or to open holiness. And again, I'm not insisting on some historical fact of etymology there. But there is that meaning also. So with these three original characteristics (dukkha, anicca, anattā), it's almost like they can become their opposites. And again, not as truths; just ways of looking.

So when we're talking about 'idea' in the bigger picture, we can also talk about what ideas we have of perception. What are our ideas about perception? How much are our ideas about perception, again, kind of not well-considered, received from the legacy or influence of the dominant culture or the history? What are our ideas, or what are the possible ideas, then, if we get more conscious of it, and till that soil, turn that soil, like I talked about? What are the possible ideas we can have about perception? So again, we can have perception as just, we have the idea (either unconsciously or deliberately, we can go into it), idea of perceiving is, "You just perceive what's factually there. You perceive the truth of reality out there in the world," etc. [51:39]

Remember when I talked about different skilful modes of sensing? There's an overlap here. That's a skilful mode of sensing: I need to do something in the world. I go through it. I just go into a mode sometimes of, "Yeah, it's just fact." It's just a kind of automatic mode. But I could have another idea about perception, which is, again, with the ways of looking, the purpose is to deconstruct. This is what the Buddha was getting at: deconstruct. "You should smash, destroy the aggregates," he says.^[6] Deconstruct them through the way of looking so that there is an opening, eventually, so there's less and less fabrication, and eventually an opening to the Unfabricated. And one goes 'beyond the world,' so to speak -- lokuttara in Pali.

So that's a whole other idea about perception, that perception is a delusory construct, or certainly a problematic construct, and one can break free of it, or see through it, so to speak, and go beyond this world of avijjā and fabricated perception. Or again, touching on what we've already touched on, one could say that perception is in the service of just operating in the world and coping with the world. I kind of just mentioned that. Or the idea about perception is that there's a play that's possible, an art that's possible, and the creation and discovery of all kinds of landscapes and vistas, appearances, perceptions, experiences. "For what? For the sake of soulmaking" would be another view. There are many possible views, ideas, concepts about what perception is, and what it's for, etc.

So one possibility is that it's the playing with perception in the service of creating and discovering what is soulmaking, and opening out the soulmaking. And you know, contrasting what I just said a moment ago about one whole attitude and idea related to perception is that, "It's just reality." It's just a kind of -- one wouldn't use the language, but it's just flatly perceived. "That's what the truth is. That's what the fact is." And one is just coping with that. That's the skilful sensing with soul, versus, actually, and I think I shared it once in a talk, about 'healing the perception of the world.'^[7] That concept of tikkun olam, 'healing of the world' or 'restoration of the world,' can also mean 'restoration of the universe.' We can, we hopefully are engaged in acts, in service, and speech, and behaviour that heals, heals the world.

But there's also the level of healing the perception of the world, redeeming it from soullessness, flatness, lack of divinity, lack of beauty, in the perception. So yes, hopefully we make beautiful things in the world. We offer beautiful things. We speak beautiful things. We sing beautiful things into being. But also, in the eye of the beholder, in the creation and discovery of soulmaking perception, we can create beauty and heal the perception of the world.

This is, I'm pretty sure it's a repeat from some earlier retreat, but we talked about, again, different possible ideas about perception, or ways of, if you like, understanding or conceiving of what perception is. And by that, I also mean feeling what perception is. Again, what I'm talking about is not abstract. One can actually have a sense, a felt sense of and a conception of perception as gift and grace.

By that, I don't just mean the passive receptivity of the sense organs to the impingement of vibrations of air to make sound, or photons or waves of light on the retina, and all that, that simple receptivity. I mean gift and grace in all the fullness and the open-endedness of what that might mean when it's infused with soul: gift and grace. So something we're receiving. As I said, sometimes it feels like the soul has designs for us, or gives us something, and we receive a certain perception from soul. Some experience opens up. Some way of relating to the world is given to us. So there's that real felt sense and conception. Wrapped up with the felt sense of perception is gift and grace. That's possible.

Or one can put the emphasis more on 'my work,' if you like. So gift and grace; a second possibility of a conception and a felt sense of perception is of work. Because of the potential malleability of perception through ways of looking, I can work. I'm in the moment, and practice is possible, work is possible, to fabricate or unfabricate or shape perception of self, other, world, etc. And again, what for? What's the end there? Always back to this question: what's the end? What do you want? And that might vary in different situations. That's part of what a larger view of 'skill' might mean.

So gift and grace as a conception, a felt sense of what perception is; work, perception as work, something that I work at, something that I am working at, something that takes a bit of effort; but also as opportunity, as a third possibility. And 'opportunity' comes etymologically from porta, which means 'door.' So perception as a door, as we said with the three characteristics -- doors to possibilities. Now, that's implicit in the whole idea of working, and maybe even in the idea of gift and grace, because there's an opportunity to know perception as gift and grace. Or as participation in the divine. That's another sense of, perhaps a refinement of, the gift and grace idea: we're participating in the divine through our perception. I've touched on all this before; I'm not sure when. Our participation in the divine, in our existence, is certainly through embodied action. But it's also through our perception and our experience itself.

An ancient teacher from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Maximus the Confessor, his name was, wrote:

God the divine Logos wishes to effect the mystery of His incarnation always and in all things.^[8]

"The divine wishes to effect the mystery of its incarnation always and in all things." We can hear that, and take that word, 'incarnation,' loosely, or with a lot of breadth as to what it might mean. And part of that is we can hear, "The divine wishes to effect the mystery of its appearance, of its appearing always and in all things." Always and in all things. Whatever the perception is, there's this possibility, through our participation, through all this -- either the gift and grace, or the opportunity, or the work of perception -- through our participation, we participate in the divine, which wishes to effect the mystery, to appear, to incarnate, always and in all things.

And in a way, that's, one could say, the whole point of tantric teachings. The whole point of Vajrayāna, from a certain point of view, you could say, is to see appearances as divine, which is how a Buddha sees them; to become a Buddha, which means, partly, to see appearances as divine. It's just, in the Vajrayāna tradition as we've received it, it may be that there are kind of relatively circumscribed or limited and generic kind of options for what that actually is then experienced as, what that divinity, how that divinity is experienced, or the kinds of experience of divinity. And in the work that we're doing, the sensing with soul, we're actually opening up more possibilities, potentially infinite possibilities.

So if we go back to the three characteristics: we can consider them as fact. We can consider them as kind of ways of looking that are in the service of and for the sake of deconstructing, unfabricating. And the question is just, how deep do we go down that avenue? How deep do we go with those ways of looking into deconstruction, into unfabrication? There is the possibility to go very deep with that, or just a kind of very limited depth of unfabricating. And we can go so deep with them that they begin to deconstruct themselves. Impermanence begins to lose its meaning. It begins to be revealed not as an ultimate truth, etc., and the others too. And then they themselves, those three characteristics, are kind of loosened as concepts. And here we have, again, an instance where a journey of deconstruction, a movement of deconstruction, when it goes deep enough, then makes available the opportunity, opportunities for reconstruction, as perceiving of divinity, of sacredness, of bliss, of perfection, of eternality, etc. -- those kind of opposites which are very commonly found in Vajrayāna teachings.

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1. E.g. Ajaan Mahā Boowa, Forest Desānas, tr. Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto (Forest Dhamma), 94, https://www.abhayagiri.org/media/discs/2015WinterRetreat/Sources/Maha_Boowa_Forest_Desanas.pdf, accessed 24 June 2020: "The Four Noble Truths---dukkha, samudaya, nirodha and magga, are also sammati ['convention']." ↩︎

2. MN 14. ↩︎

3. SN 35:28. ↩︎

4. AN 7:46. ↩︎

5. SN 22:40--2. ↩︎

6. SN 23:2. ↩︎

7. Rob Burbea, "The Love and Demands of the Imaginal (Part 2)" (11 Aug. 2015), https://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/31537/, accessed 7 July 2020. ↩︎

8. Maximus the Confessor, To Thalassios: On Various Questions, quoted in Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1987), 39. ↩︎