Nirvana and Transcendence

So, welcome everyone. Can you all hear me? Yeah? Thank you to Steve for inviting me. I know that I know some of you. And many of you I don't know. What I want to talk about tonight, I should say right from the beginning, is very difficult. It's a very difficult subject. So to know right off the bat, we're really jumping in at the deep end. And some of you may be very new to Buddhist teaching and to meditation practice. So I hope that's okay. And I hope that something in what is said -- we'll have some questions later -- something will be helpful, will be useful, at least a pointer, or at least worthy of some reflection.

The Buddha said, "I teach one thing and one thing only: I teach suffering and the end of the suffering, dis-ease and the end of dis-ease." When we read the texts of what the Buddha originally said, it becomes clear there's actually, in some respects, kind of two aspects of that. One is quite clear: the end of suffering. And another seems to be pointing to what the Buddha would call the Unborn, or the Unconditioned, or the Unfabricated, or the Deathless. It seems to be pointing to something transcendent, beyond. And I'll go on to explain what's meant by this. It's actually quite difficult, takes quite a lot of work, if you read the suttas, the collection of suttas, takes quite a lot of work to dismiss that, and to sort of iron it out of the equation.

This is what I want to go into tonight, that side of things. What does this mean? What's he pointing to? What relevance does it have to us, this transcendent, Unfabricated, Deathless? So as I said, this is a very difficult subject. It's also, interestingly, maybe, it's also quite a charged subject -- I find this quite interesting -- maybe more so nowadays than in other centuries. I don't know. Maybe it's always been charged, with different Buddhist traditions.

If we take the Buddha's journey, as a young man, 27, 28, 29 years old, however old he was, and becoming filled with a kind of yearning to seek, and a dissatisfaction. He took a good look around himself, and he said to himself, he saw death. He saw dis-ease, he saw illness, he saw sickness. He saw ageing. He saw all that. And he saw what he had, which was a lot; he grew up very privileged. And he said to himself: "Why should I, who am subject to ageing, subject to illness, and subject to death -- why should I then seek and seek refuge in that which is also subject to illness, subject to ageing, subject to death?"

Right from the start, even before he'd left his palace, that was the question. That was what was grabbing him. Is there something beyond death? Is there something deathless? He said, "It doesn't make sense for me to seek refuge in that which dies. What if I were to seek that which is deathless?" And as he recounts later, he says, "Then, seeking the Unborn, unexcelled rest from the yoke, nibbāna, nirvāṇa, I set out seeking that." And he says, "And then I reached the Unborn, unexcelled rest from the yoke, nibbāna." He says, "I reached the ageing-less, illness-less, deathless, sorrow-less, unexcelled rest from the yoke, nibbāna."^[1] [4:18]

So what's he pointing to? There are quite a number of passages in the texts where he gives a little bit more, at least, what he's pointing to. I'm going to just run through quite a number of quotes here. "Monks" -- he's talking to a bunch of monks:

Monks, that dimension should be known where the eye stops, where vision stops and the perception of form fades. That dimension should be known where the ear stops and the perception of sound fades. [And he goes on:] Where the nose stops and the perception of aroma fades ... where the tongue stops and the perception of flavour fades ... where the body stops and the perception of tactile sensation fades ... where the intellect or the mind stops and the perception of ideas or perception of phenomena fades -- that dimension should be known.^[2]

So we can hear this and think, "What is he talking about? What's he talking about?" Other passages -- some of you, I believe, will know it. He's talking, points to something: consciousness without feature, it's usually translated. Perhaps a better translation is consciousness that is non-manifestative, which is a funny English word. It does not make anything manifest. Usually, consciousness makes something manifest. There's Karen. Consciousness is making Karen manifest. Or this piece of paper -- it's making that manifest. It's making this moment manifest. A 'non-manifestative consciousness.' So it's really at the edge of what language can describe. "Consciousness without feature, non-manifestative, without end, luminous all around." Then he says:

Here, water, earth, fire, and air have no footing. Here, long and short, coarse and fine, fair and foul, name and form, are all brought to an end. [So all notions of comparison or measurement or the way we know things.] With the stopping of the aggregate of consciousness, each is here brought to an end.^[3]

I'm going to come back to this in a few minutes. But as I'm reading these quotes, I just ask you to be aware of your reaction, ask you to be aware of where it's landing. It's fine, whatever it is. Just to notice: what happens inside as you hear these words?

Another one, certainly quite similar:

Consciousness without feature [again, non-manifestative consciousness], without end, luminous all around, does not partake of the solidity of earth, the liquidity of water, the radiance of fire, the windiness of wind, the divinity of devas. [Devas are god-like beings, angelic or god-like beings. And then goes through a whole list of various levels of god. He says, "Does not partake of that level of god or that level," to the highest level of god -- does not partake of that.] Does not partake of the all-ness of the all [of the totality of being, of what we receive through the five senses, or in Buddhism, we talk about six senses, the mind being the sixth sense].^[4]

Does not partake of the six senses. That's where this word 'transcendent' comes in. It's beyond the six senses.

Another passage from a different place. "There" -- he's talking about this:

There, I declare, is no coming, no going, no stopping, no passing away, no arising. It is without foundation. [Here is really interesting:] It continues not. [It doesn't continue. It's not something that continues in time: appavattaṃ. It has no object. Usually, again, consciousness has an object. This is really, as I said, at the edge of what we can understand with the mind.] This indeed is the end of suffering.^[5]

Another one:

Wherein are cut off name and form, sense-reaction, and perceptions of form, leaving no residue at all, therein is cut off the tangle withal.^[6]

It's a bit archaic English. And he reached that. He reached the end of this seeking. He found that. And then, after his enlightenment, he set off to start teaching, and he met a man on the road who asked who he was and where he was going. And he said:

To set rolling the wheel of the Dharma, I go to the city of Kāsi. [And then, beautiful:] In a world become blind, I beat the drum of the Deathless.^[7]

Powerful statement.

All those quotes are from the Pali Canon, the original sort of texts that the Buddha spoke about. But in case one wonders, "Well, that's maybe just a Theravāda thing, or an old school thing," Huang Po -- beautiful, profound, great Zen master -- not quite sure when he lived: "People are afraid to forget their minds." And by 'minds,' he doesn't just mean the thinking.

People are afraid to forget their minds [and this whole -- the six senses], fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma. This real Dharma [this real nature] is without beginning [so, very similar -- without beginning], subject neither to birth nor destruction, neither existing nor not existing, neither impure nor pure, neither clamorous [not making any sound] nor silent, neither old nor young, occupying no space, having neither inside nor outside, size nor form, colour nor sound. It cannot be looked for or sought, comprehended by intellect, explained in words, contacted materially, or reached by meritorious achievement.^[8]

So this word 'transcendence' that's sometimes used, I used it in the title of this talk, it's referring to that. That's what I mean. It's something beyond the six senses. We usually know things through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch, and through the mind. Six senses -- something beyond what we can know with the six senses. Now, again, I'm going to ask: right now, what's the reaction to that? Just to notice inside: what's the reaction to that? How does that grab you, if it grabs you at all? And my guess is that, in this room -- and I have no idea how many people -- in this room, there'll probably be quite a number of reactions. One could be actually complete disinterest: "I've come to the wrong talk." [laughter] Some will hear that, and we think, "That's got nothing to do with me. It doesn't even interest me. It sounds boring. Well, there's nothing there!" Just sounds -- it just doesn't make a connection with the heart. Not at all. And that's, I would say, quite a common reaction to hearing that. Could be -- and again, this is quite common -- could be the opposite. You're actually repulsed by it, horrified by it. It seems so life-denying, so against everything that we find beauty in, everything that we find fulfilment in. So I'm just saying, to notice. Some people, it will bring up fear. Sounds like annihilation. There's a horror of what sounds like a blankness of it.

And for some people the heart rises up. It hears something. The mind can't quite go there, but it senses the possibility of that, the beauty of that. Something rises up. Something starts quivering in the heart at the sense of it, the sense of that beyond. Could be any of those, all of those, one of those, or some others. But I think it's actually really important to examine: what is the reaction when you hear that kind of language, or that kind of teaching, that kind of pointing? Just to examine for ourselves what's actually going on, and have I made up my mind about it beforehand?

As I said, it's quite a charged area. I just ran through -- probably a little laborious to listen to, I'm not sure, but ran through a whole bunch of quotes. Sometimes we hear squallers ... squallers?! [laughter] Scholars making squallers that there's only one instance of it in the suttas. It's absolutely not true. It's really not true. The suttas are peppered with these references. If you hear me or another teacher say, "There is no Unborn. There is no Deathless. The Buddha didn't mean that. He didn't say that," what's the reaction? "Whew!" Is it a relief to hear there's no Unborn? Or if I said there is no Unborn, or some other authority or whatever, would there be disappointment? [14:20] If I said there is something other, there is something other, totally other, not of the world, and not of time, what then? What's the reaction?

There's a lot to this. Sometimes it's a matter of, how do we respond as human beings, and as practitioners, as people interested, spiritually interested -- how do we respond when we don't understand something? This is a really important point. What happens to us when we hear something that we don't understand? Because sometimes, when we hear something we don't understand, it's very easy to just shut off. Or to go into self-judgment, and the inner critic comes: "I'm stupid. I don't understand this." Or we hear it as a goal, and that sounds, "I'll never get there. How can I? Can't even, you know, three breaths in a row. How am I going to do that?"

So this, particularly this way that the inner critic and the self-judgment comes up in relation to what we might hear of -- in this case -- the deep end of the path, or the far end of the path, or the goal, that's actually really important. And I think, for all of us now, living at this time, involved in the Dharma, it's a huge, huge issue. It's a huge issue. How are we going to relate to this inner critic? Are we going to find some wisdom and some compassion, so that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater when we hear about 'the goal of practice'? Because if that inner critic has too much clout, we're actually, in a way, doing a disservice, both to ourselves, at a very deep level, but also to the Dharma. But we have to find a way together, in fact. We have to find a way as a culture. A lot of this inner critic business is cultural. And we kind of block ourselves. We have to find a way to work with it. I'm not going to go into that, because one could spend all evening talking about that. I think it's really, really important.

But here's a question: if I don't conceive of a transcendent Deathless, or however the Buddha would call it, what then is that replaced by, in my life, in my practice, as something I'm aspiring to or moving towards? What's it being replaced by? So some people, the whole notion of awakening or enlightenment is also not on the agenda. Then the question: what's that been replaced by, if awakening and enlightenment isn't on the agenda? Just to open up these questions, not in any judgmental way at all. And another half of that question: what has the notion of a transcendent Deathless been replaced by? And there are many possibilities. Quite common for a person to say, "There is no goal, nothing to get, nowhere to get to." That's quite common, quite popular. "The journey is it. The journey is the goal." Or "This is it," whatever this is. "This moment, this taste, this taste of a strawberry as I'm falling off a cliff," as the Zen story goes, "This is it."

"Being in the present moment": has that replaced, as the sort of object and the point of the path? Or sometimes, a lot more sort of, some might say, down to earth, or a lot more humble: "Just being okay with myself. I just want to be beyond this self-critic, self-judgment." Is that what it's been replaced by?

Or knowing myself on a psychological level, knowing the fullness of myself, and healing my emotional life, opening the heart and healing my emotions. I want to go into some of this, because actually, when we teach the Dharma, and we talk about the Dharma, the range of possibility of what's possible to transform and to open and heal and discover in the Dharma is absolutely enormous. It's huge, the range. And you know, as teachers, we teach all of that. It's all available. It's all beautiful. But the question is, has it kind of nudged out this other aspect of transcendence, of something Deathless?

So a person might think about their practice, reflect on their practice, and say, "I really want to connect to the earth. I really want to connect to nature. That's what my practice is about." Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. "I want to open the heart in wonder, in the diversity, the uniqueness of things. I want to open to interconnectedness in nature, in ourselves, interconnectedness in my [?] life." As I said, all of these are beautiful, and beautiful potential openings of consciousness. But is that the totality, certainly, of what the Buddha was pointing to? And are we missing something if we don't inquire into that too? [19:39]

And as I mentioned, the heart opening -- so lovely, this aspect of the path, that our hearts can heal incredibly deeply, heal deep wounds, and the heart can just open in love and compassion. It might be that we have periods of our practice where that's really what we're working on. If I look back over the years of my practice, there were real chunks of time where it was really about emotional healing, and healing the heart. And that work really needed to be done. That needed to be the kind of primary focus for a stretch of years -- really, years. And that's absolutely fine. There may be periods of different emphasis. But has that, or does that become the totality of the way we're looking at practice, the totality of the point of the path? We could go on with this. What I really want to say is it's all good, and it's all beautiful, and it's all there for exploration, for opening to. Wholeness -- "I want to move into wholeness."

One of the things, one of the aspects of the path that we really emphasize a lot, again, teaching the Dharma, but also just culturally, nowadays, in the Dharma, in the West, is mindfulness. So everyone's heard of mindfulness. No matter what tradition you're from, you've heard of mindfulness. Sometimes, though, that can itself become a kind of goal. You can kind of take that a little bit too far. So those of you who've been to Gaia House -- I'm sure everyone who's been to Gaia House -- well, maybe not everyone, but there's a sign near the place where we wash the dishes after lunch or after tea. And it's by Thích Nhất Hạnh, this beautiful, wonderful Vietnamese Zen master. He says:

While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes. If while washing [the] dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then ... we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.... The fact that [we are] here washing these bowls is a wondrous reality [a miracle of life].... If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are that we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future, and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.^[9]

So we can hear that, and it's very beautiful. We can hear that, but very easily, when we hear that, it's very easy to make that the point of the path, either consciously or unconsciously. And it becomes, the path becomes about things like living life fully. There's another teacher, an Asian teacher who's extremely influential in that he taught a number of now-senior Western Dharma teachers. One of his students back then, who's now a teacher, asked him, "Why do you practise? What's the point of practice?" On two different occasions, this was asked. First time, he said, "See the purple flowers over there by the side of the road? I practise to enjoy them more fully." Another time: "I practise to live life more fully, practise to open to life more fully."

Now, this is important. It's huge. I really don't want to -- we could, again, we could spend loads of talks just talking about that. Most of us, we don't live life fully. We're actually closed. The awareness is closed. We're not that awake. So a huge part of the path is actually waking up to life, opening to the touch of life, and all the beauty of that, and all the beautiful teachings of mindfulness. But it's not the end -- absolutely not the end. And as I said, it would be a disservice to the whole Dharma if it was, if we took it as that.

We might use other language: "I want to be with what is," which is just another way of saying "mindfulness." "I want to be in the now." Again, it's another way of talking about mindfulness. I should also add that mindfulness, this capacity to be in the now and be with what is is absolutely necessary. So sometimes people are interested in something transcendent, but they haven't actually practised basic mindfulness. And then it's just, it's a little unrealistic. So it's absolutely necessary. It's beautiful. But it's not the whole of the path.

We talk a lot about mindfulness, and that's partly why that emphasis comes about in the way people approach practice and approach the goal. The other thing we really put a lot of emphasis on is impermanence, the changing nature of life -- partly because these are very important concepts. They're also relatively easy to understand, whereas something transcendent is not very easy to understand. So everything's impermanent. Anyone who's just opened any book on Dharma is aware of this. Most people would be aware of it anyway. And it seems that the purpose of the path is to be free with that flow and that fluidity, the changing nature of things.

I did a discussion a while ago at a group, and we sort of got onto the subject: what's the point of the path? What is the point of the spiritual path? And it was interesting to see how much that was kind of agreed upon collectively. "The point is to kind of roll with the changing nature of life, to be, to flow." 'Flow' seemed to be a really important word for people: flow, fluidity. And there were quite some strong feelings about that -- and also, interestingly, that the goal of the path is something immanent. 'Immanent' means the opposite of 'transcendent.' 'Immanent' means [knocks on something] tangible, visible, here and now, right there, something you can grasp, in a way.

So this is difficult to get our heads around, as I said. [27:02] For most people, I would guess, for most people, the sense of fulfilment in life, the sense of fulfilment is in life -- what we call Life. And sometimes we give it a capital L. Our sense of fulfilment as beings -- it's in Life. When we say Life, we just mean the totality of all this mysterious, wonderful, beautiful experience. Our sense of fulfilment as beings, and even as spiritual beings, seems to be in Life. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? Does that make sense? Life -- we talk about Life, and sometimes we give it a capital L.

And interestingly, I was talking with -- some of you know -- Martine Batchelor. She had read a book years ago. She said, "Life with a capital L has become the new God." We don't talk about God much any more, but how we say, "Life doesn't da-da-da," "Life is like this. Life, Life, Life," and we give it a capital L. In a way, life -- what is life? Life is the totality of our experience, the totality of what we understand: the self and the world, and our experience. And our sense of fulfilment, our sense of meaning -- it's very hard, I think, for most of us to have a sense of fulfilment and meaning that's not in life, that's not part of life. Or somehow, we might put it in death. But actually, what happens to the heart? Again, for many people, I would guess that it would be hard, hard, difficult for the heartstrings to be pulled and inspired if we say, "It's not in life." When we talk about life, and the coming and going, and the mystery of it, and the wonder, and the vastness of it, the infinity of it, and the beauty of it, and the tragedy of it -- all of that, and we talk about practice in relation to that, then it's much more easy for the heart to be inspired, and the heartstrings to be pulled.

So again, if we talk about something transcendent, it can seem horrifying. It can seem bleak. It can seem meaningless. It can seem frightening. One of my teachers said, "Life is not the point of life." So we talk a lot in the Dharma about intimacy -- intimacy with life, and opening to life. And I said it before, I'll say it again: this is so important for us as human beings, so important. But there seems to be something else, this notion of transcending that. And so we have intimacy and transcendence. Is there a contradiction there? It's not an easy question. We can't just give a glib, you know, facile answer for this. Is there a contradiction? What about that? Is it possible that we, as practitioners -- if we really care about this, is it possible that we could know both, that we could both really know in our hearts, in our beings, in our bodies, in our senses, what it means to really be intimate with life, to really know that, and know something that's transcendent -- and then choose, if there is a choice to be made? The choice is coming from knowing, and not from some maybe hidden, maybe not-so-hidden pre-conclusion, predispositions.

Just to say, actually, between those two, the transcendent is actually much more difficult to realize. It's very difficult. What the Buddha's pointing to is very difficult. Intimacy is difficult. Certainly it's difficult to be intimate. It takes a lot of years of training to open the heart, open the senses, open the being to life. The transcendence is really difficult.

I was talking with a friend who's a long-time practitioner, and we got onto this a little bit. I'm sure I nudged it. And he said, "Well, I don't experience that. I don't -- I have no experience of this Deathless, or this transcendent, or this Unconditioned. Not only that, I can't conceive of it. And not only that, I don't want to make any big deal out of it. I don't want to make a big deal out of it." And he said, "What difference does it make anyway? What difference could it make to my practice, to think in those terms or not to think in those terms?" Didn't seem to make any difference. And he said, "And what's more, might it not be that I then grasp at that as a goal?" So all these are very, you know, real questions that people would have.

But I would say, yes, it really does make a difference. It really, really does make a difference. If my direction in practice, my aspiration in practice is opening to the touch of life, if that's how I'm seeing it, if it's being with what is, if it's being in the now, or whatever language, they're something very different. If it's to roll with the flow of change, if it's to be fluid with the fluid, changing conditions, then yeah, it's something, it's a big difference. [32:39]

One other sort of understanding that people kind of land on or arrive at, an understanding of the Deathless -- and it's quite common these days especially -- is that the Deathless is the true nature of awareness, in that awareness is something vast. It's vast like space. I'll explain this a little bit.

For a dedicated meditator, someone who's really giving themselves to practice, it's quite possible, and not at all out of the scope of possibility, that as the mind settles and the heart opens and the being opens and the consciousness opens, the sense of things begins to change, begins to transform and open up. And instead of the usual sense that human beings have of awareness being somehow in here, and the object being out there, whatever it is, and this awareness knows the object, the sense begins to open up, as we let go in practice, as the mindfulness deepens, as the letting go deepens. The sense sort of, a little bit, goes inside out, you could say. And it seems like, can come to seem, as a very real, tangible experience for people, that awareness is actually something huge, vast. And everything that's happening in our experience, everything -- all the sights, all the sounds, and the tastes, touch, da-da-da -- everything, all of this, this room, and everything, and all the people in it, is actually happening in this vast awareness.

It's a kind of real opening out and reversal of the usual sense. This is a beautiful, beautiful experience for those who are dedicated to practice, who kind of move into this experience. Very beautiful, very imbued with a sense of peace, and a sense of release, of freedom, of heart opening.

Even more, it can seem that the things that seem to arise -- the sounds of the words being spoken, the birds, the sights, all of that -- seem to be actually the same texture as the awareness. So really, all there is, as one deepens in this experience, is awareness, whatever name we give that -- Cosmic Consciousness, whatever. That's all there is, and everything is just the play -- the līḷā -- of this. Very real, a profound, beautiful experience that people kind of can come to.

And so what's quite common is to say, "This is it. This is the Deathless. That big awareness is the Deathless." Everything else seems to be born out of that. The sound arises out of that awareness, disappears back into it. So it's a lovely, lovely sense. Everything is born and dies, and that awareness seems to stay the same -- eternal, constant, totally at peace, totally unfazed and unperturbed by what is arising and passing in it. Really, one is touching into a very mystical experience as this deepens.

However, that experience and that sense of things and the understanding that comes out of that is still reifying -- it's making real -- space, the space in which it happens, and also time. There's still a notion of something lasting in time, and a sense of the present moment. We'll talk about those quotes. This is difficult to understand. Talk about those quotes -- the Buddha's pointing to, and Huang Po as well, something beyond space. It doesn't exist in space. It doesn't exist in time -- not even, so to speak, in the present moment. Doesn't exist in the past or the future or the present. When the Buddha talks about consciousness, anyway, he says consciousness, when examined, is empty. It's void. It's without substance. He said, "Consciousness is like a magician's trick."^[10] He was incredibly specific with his analogies. [37:20]

Basically, like when a magician does things, it looks like something's there. Actually there's nothing there. So he doesn't say it's empty like space, in terms of "Space is empty. Can move my hand in it." It's empty like a magician's trick. It looks like something's there, but it's actually not there. We think, "What on earth does that mean?" Because of course consciousness is in here -- if we're still awake, listening to the talk, and da-da-da. It's empty of inherent existence. It doesn't exist as something that really exists.

The other difficulty with that notion of a vast, beautiful awareness, peaceful awareness, out of which everything arises and passes -- this is another quote by the Buddha. And he said, typically, an uninstructed, run-of-the-mill person -- it's his language -- he says, conceives of things coming out of nibbāna, conceives of nibbāna, nirvāṇa, in different ways. And one of the ways is that: conceives of things coming out. So here we have this vast, peaceful awareness -- conceive of things arising and passing in that awareness. But he said someone who's reached the end of the path and really understood does not conceive of things coming out of nibbāna, does not conceive that way.^[11]

Some of you will know, in the Tibetan tradition, they also talk about the mind being inherently luminous, etc. I don't have time to go into all this tonight, but there's a way that language, for some reason, is used not so precisely there. So I was reading recently, when it says 'luminous,' it doesn't mean 'luminous.' It means 'not inherently existent.' It means it doesn't really exist in the way it seems to exist.

There's a teacher, the Eighth Situpa -- was in the eighteenth century in Tibet, great teacher -- and this, talking still about this notion of awareness being something inherent, permanent, independent, beautiful, peaceful, lasting, which contains everything, of which everything is the play, etc. And he is talking about that, and he said we have to understand, we're expressing what is beyond knower and known, cognizer and cognized, what is beyond that, what is beyond discloser and disclosed -- it's just another way of saying the same thing -- with the words 'awareness' and 'self-cognizance.' He goes on to say, historically, there's what's called three turnings of the wheel of the Dharma. There's the original teachings, and then the Mahāyāna, and later came Vajrayāna teachings. And they historically come after each other. And in the Vajrayāna, again, it talks about a permanence, something permanent, Buddha-nature that's permanent, that's pure, that's bliss, and that inherently exists. And again, he says we're using those terms, but it doesn't really mean that. So this is extremely confusing. Doesn't really mean that. We're just saying that so that one doesn't grasp at there being nothing at all.

Huang Po -- going to go back to Huang Po:

This Pure Mind ... the people of the world do not awake to it [so I'm still talking about, just to question that notion of Cosmic Consciousness, vast awareness, etc., as the Deathless, luminous awareness as the Deathless. This Pure Mind ... the people of the world do not awake to it] regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows, as mind. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of [that truth] ... Realize that, though Real Mind [his words for nibbāna] is expressed in these perceptions, it neither forms part of them nor is separate from them.^[12]

And again, it's questioning -- very much questioning this notion of awareness.

Sometimes, the Buddha, the original Buddha, talks about awareness without an object, awareness with no object. What does that mean? Awareness, consciousness with no object. And he says that's nibbāna: consciousness without features, non-manifestative consciousness. So usually, consciousness makes something manifest. Usually, consciousness is bound up, wrapped up with an object. I am aware of Stefan, and I am aware of the cushion. Consciousness is aware of that. They're bound up together -- subject and object bound up together. Consciousness is bound up with the present moment and the sense of the present moment. What does it mean: consciousness, awareness without an object, unbound from an object or a subject or a present moment? The mind can't go there. Can't go there. And that's what the Buddha's pointing to.

So that's a beautiful, available level in practice: this very open awareness, and that as sort of containing everything, the space in which everything happens, etc. But what would it be for a practitioner not to stop there, to keep questioning, to keep the integrity alive, to keep the passion alive? What would it be not to stop there? Unfortunately, it's actually quite a common place for people to stop, because something's so beautiful about it, so easeful. It has the taste of eternity. It's not quite there. What would it be to keep the questioning alive, and then actually experience the release of awareness, not bound to that, not bound to that perception, not bound to the present moment, not bound to time in that way, or space?

The Buddha said: "Where all phenomena cease, there all manner of speaking ceases."^[13] He's pointing to something you can't -- language can't go there. Where all phenomena cease, there all manner of speaking ceases. This problem with language is a big problem, because at a certain point, as meditation deepens and unfolds, we get to a certain kind of level of experience, and it all begins -- the language all begins kind of sounding the same: spacious, vastness, awareness, emptiness, nothingness, blah blah blah blah. [laughs] I don't really mean "blah blah blah"! But there's a real sense that it's very difficult to use language to kind of tease out the differences in understanding and the difference in levels. So, many great teachers actually pointed to this: Mipham Rinpoche, great Dzogchen master of the, I think, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Atiśa, one of the great, great teachers who took the Dharma to Tibet. At a certain point, it's actually impossible to tell the difference in view, between the profound, ultimate view, and what's much less, because a lot of the language just sounds the same. So you can go on and on with the language, but unless you really understand the depth of that view, it's not the same thing.

Here's another strange thing about language. In giving this talk, in talking tonight, I could choose to say very little. Obviously I haven't. [laughter] It's ten to nine and there's still a bit to go! I could say very little, and just drop a few mysterious, kind of mystical -- people use that word in different ways -- mystical-sounding things, poetic kind of suggestions and allusions. And again, maybe that opens the heart, and there's a real beauty and validity to that. If I say a lot, and I try and be really precise, what's the danger? The heart can close. Does it need to close? No. Doesn't need to close because this is [?], absolutely doesn't. But that's the danger. Danger if I just say very little, and just speak mysteriously and poetically, there are countless misinterpretations that one can land on and take up as the truth. The Buddha talks a lot in negatives when he's talking about nirvāṇa. He talks mostly in negatives: not this, not this, without that, not, not, not. Where does this leave us? Where does this leave us if we want to know that?

And again, as I said at the beginning, people are going to have all different reactions to this. Some will be interested, but not particularly interested in discovering. Some won't even be interested -- the whole range. And that's totally fine for us as human beings, the diversity as human beings. But if we are interested, where does it leave us? What then? What -- gone through all these possibilities -- not that, not this, it's beyond, beyond, beyond, transcendent -- what am I going to do? Where am I going to look? How am I going to discover and uncover this as a practitioner?

One time the Buddha was with a wandering ascetic who asked him, "How? How am I going to know? How am I going to know that?" And he said to him, "By knowing the destruction of fabrications, O Brahmin, be thou a knower of the Unmade, akata. Be, become, be someone who knows the Unmade" -- akata, the Unmade.^[14] So, "By knowing the destruction of fabrications" -- what does this mean? What are fabrications? And what is fabricated? Another word, the Pali word, is saṅkhāra: it means to put together, to compound, or to concoct.

In English, the words 'fabricate,' 'concoct' are actually good, because they have the suggestion of something that's not quite real. They're actually really pointing at something. What is fabricated or concocted, kind of put together in a way that's making something that's not quite real? Well, the answer is, everything. Absolutely everything that we know, that we think of as life -- again, using that word -- the totality of our experience, it's all fabricated: body, feelings, emotions, perceptions, mind stuff, thoughts, and intentions, and moods, consciousness, awareness, all -- it's all fabricated. The six senses themselves, and all the objects of the six senses -- all fabricated. Awareness, consciousness, that which knows, whatever name we want to give it -- fabricated, fabricated, put together in a somewhat unreal way, or at a certain level, an unreal way. What else? Space, time, this moment, the present -- all of that is fabricated. The Buddha says it's like a painter painting a picture: in the same way, we fabricate our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our consciousness, etc., our thoughts. We fabricate our world. We paint, we create -- we create, in a manner of speaking, our world and our reality. [50:27]

He says:

This is called a disciple of the Noble Ones [strong language] who tears down and doesn't build up, who abandons and doesn't cling, who discards and doesn't pull in, who scatters and doesn't pile up. And what does he or she tear down and not build up? Form [body], feeling, perceptions, fabrications [thoughts, volitions, and moods, and mind states], consciousness.^[15]

Tears them all down, abandons and scatters them, and discards them. Strong language. How many of us think of practice in those terms? How many of you actually have even heard this before, if it's not too bold to ask that? It's quite unusual.

Another question -- not an easy question: if I'm interested in knowing the Deathless, am I practising in a way that would open me to that knowing? The Buddha's saying I have to be a destroyer. I have to tear down what's fabricated. If I'm not doing that, if I'm not interested in doing that, if I don't understand how to do that, how am I going to know the Deathless -- if I want to know the Deathless? So how, if one is interested in this, how will we go about that? How do we go about realizing the cessation, the ending of all that is fabricated, including consciousness and awareness, what we usually take to [?] that?

So there are many ways that things get fabricated. And that means that there are many ways to go about this, many avenues. So very briefly -- I'm not doing very well on time -- one avenue of practice is developing the skill to regard everything that comes up, the totality of one's experience, individually, as -- experience by experience -- as not me, not mine, not belonging to me, not who I am. One just develops the skill of regarding experience that way. As one does that -- this is just one avenue, one possibility -- as one does that and develops that skill, basically, the consciousness kind of opens up into a journey. First of all, a great deal of suffering -- a great deal of opening and release and freedom comes into the being, the more one can do that. There's a big release, you know, gradually, of the suffering. But more significantly, for our purposes right now, is that experience itself begins to fade, begins to fade from consciousness. I'm talking about body sensations and sights and sounds and emotions, and the whole realm of experience actually begins to fade, to disappear, to dissolve.

It turns out that the typical view that we have of experience as being me or mine, that view is going on all the time, without us realizing it or with us being conscious of it. That way of relating to things, that sort of default human way of relating to things is actually a builder of experiences. It's a fabricator. When we begin to kind of pull the rug out of that, pull the threads out of that rug, experience itself begins to fade and dissolve. And we're moving towards -- [vibrating noise] It's my mobile phone. [laughs] We're moving towards what's Unfabricated.

The extremely short version, because I'm running out of time: when we first hear that, it doesn't seem that important or that significant. I'm quite aware of this, teaching in this way quite a lot. Doesn't seem like -- "Well, pfft, all right, so what if experience fades?" My experience is, it takes quite some time for most people's minds and hearts to really see the significance of what's going on there; also to see the beauty of it. But when we do, and if we're willing to see for ourselves, going deeper and deeper on this journey, there's something totally and utterly radical about this, completely turning our understanding of reality on its head -- completely on its head.

So the usual things that we take to be real, all of this -- carpet, floor, Rob, this, that, you, me, space, time, everything that I talked about before -- it turns out, it's actually fabricated. It's not quite real. It depends on me looking in a certain way. Even this present moment, which seems completely undeniable, it turns out to depend on me looking with self-view, with clinging. So a practitioner can, with practice, just keep going with this way of practising, and eventually will, if one's really thorough with it, one will let go of all self-identification as me or mine, with any object, but also with awareness. You are not the awareness, you are not the witness. Lets go of that, lets go of any identification with wisdom or the person doing the practice or intention, etc. Eventually comes a kind of, well, complete fading of experience, complete fading of experience and the mind that experiences, an unbinding, an opening into what the Buddha would call the Deathless and consciousness without feature, etc., we talked before. An opening into the Unfabricated, something completely other than the six senses and what we usually deal with in life.

That, as an experience, obviously, is extremely significant. But it's not just the experience. It's the understanding, the understanding of what's happened there, that somehow, one's seen that things are fabricated, put together in a way that's not quite real. And then, obviously, one returns to the world, and the world of interactions, and the world of comings and goings. But one knows it's not quite real. It's empty. [58:28]

Sometimes we hear something like that, and it's possible that the notion of that being something real, and the rest of it being not real, doesn't sit that well in us. It's a little bit discomfiting. The Buddha said:

Whatever has been pondered over as 'truth' by the world [and the world of men and practitioners and all the rest of it; whatever has been pondered over as 'truth'], that has been well-discerned as 'untruth' by the Noble Ones [those who have some degree of realization] as it really is with right wisdom. Whatever has been pondered over as 'untruth' by the world, that has been discerned as 'truth' by the Noble Ones as it really is with right wisdom.^[16]

Another passage:

That which is of a deluding nature is indeed false. And that is the truth: namely, nibbāna, which is of a non-deluding nature. This is the highest truth: namely, the non-delusive nibbāna.^[17]

So sometimes, I think, what's difficult for people -- what the objection is -- is: "Are you talking about a kind of realm somewhere, like a space, like somewhere over there is nibbāna, and it exists for all eternity over there, and somehow we're going to get there?" Well, no. That's not what's being taught. That should be clear from everything.

Sāriputta was one of the chief disciples of the Buddha, one of two chief disciples, and said to be foremost in wisdom. Another monk asked him, "With the remainderless stopping and fading of the six spheres of contact" -- so when all this just dissolves and fades -- "is it the case that there is anything else? Is there anything else?"

And Sāriputta said: "Don't say that, my friend."

And he said, "Okay." [laughs] "With the remainderless stopping and fading of the six sense spheres of contact, is it the case that there is not anything else, that there is nothing?"

And Sāriputta says, "Don't say that, my friend."

And he says, "Is there both not anything else and anything else?"

And he says, "Don't say that either."

And he says, "Is there neither anything else nor not anything else?" [laughter]

He says, "Don't say that."^[18]

It's totally beyond notions of existence and non-existence, partly because it's beyond space and beyond time. If something doesn't exist in the past, doesn't exist in the future, and doesn't exist in the present, when it is going to exist in the way we usually talk about existence? It's not of time. What are the implications? Just finally, what are the implications of all this for practice? To me, they're actually huge. It's an enormous difference and shift. It's very, very radical.

I'll repeat what I said near the beginning of the talk: this does not deny or put down, etc., all the wide aspects of what's involved in practice, all the healing, and the opening to life, and mindfulness, and being with impermanence, and all of that beauty. You could go on and on and on about that. All of that is beautiful, important, necessary, lovely. But this is something else. Just, what happens when we throw that out? And what happens when we don't throw that out?

And if we get even just a glimpse of this, we come back to the world, obviously, but it shines through. Sometimes it shines through all this reality, the sense of that something beyond the world, beyond time, beyond the usual notions -- shines through. It's permeating through. And that changes the relationship with this world, and the things of this world, and the things of time, and also because we understand that they're empty.

There's a lovely poem by Rumi, just to end. So Rumi's a Sufi poet, many of you will know, obviously not from the Buddhist tradition.^[19]

[1:03:40 -- 1:04:47, poem]

Let's have a minute of silence together, then we'll have time for questions if there are any.

---

1. MN 26. ↩︎

2. SN 35:117. ↩︎

3. DN 11. ↩︎

4. MN 49. ↩︎

5. Ud 8:1. ↩︎

6. SN 7:6. ↩︎

7. MN 26. ↩︎

8. Cf. John Blofeld, tr., The Zen Teachings of Huang Po: On the Transmission of the Mind (New York: Grove Press, 1958). ↩︎

9. Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, tr. Mobi Ho (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 3--5. ↩︎

10. SN 22:95. ↩︎

11. MN 1. ↩︎

12. Blofeld, The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, 36--7. ↩︎

13. Sn 5:6. ↩︎

14. Dhp 383. ↩︎

15. SN 22:79. ↩︎

16. Sn 3:12. ↩︎

17. MN 140. ↩︎

18. AN 4:173. ↩︎

19. Rumi, "This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness," The Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks (Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 1997), 21--2. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20200922111241/https://www.soulfularogya.com/world-made-love-emptiness-rumi/, accessed 3 Nov. 2020. ↩︎