On the Essence of Being

I'm struggling a little bit to find the right title for tonight's talk, but something like "Seeking Essence" or "The Essence of Being" or the "Essential Nature of Being." Something like that. Now, saying that kind of thing to some people will sound very abstract: "What does that mean?" It sounds very abstract. But actually, I mean, in a way it is, and in a way it's really not, and I'm certainly not interested in just talking at an abstract level about abstractions that have nothing to do with our lives, and certainly not about intellectual arguments about abstractions.

Broadly speaking, people could be divided into two camps, grossly oversimplifying: that we have a common sense, intuitive sense, of the 'essence' of ourselves and things. So I say "Rob" or you say "myself," and it's an intuitive, common-sense notion that there's some essence of me here, there's some enduring, independent essence. And that's not even something that we really intellectualize at all. It's just a very common-sense notion. It's not something abstract and intellectual for us. And similarly, when we look at our friend, or someone else we don't like, even, there's a sense of an essence there, and that's very intuitive and common sense.

So there's an obvious sense of essence that almost is with the perception; it's woven into the perception. And there's another group of human beings, which overlaps, of course, where there's more of a kind of intuition or sense of a hidden essence -- as if this that we perceive isn't quite the true reality of things, and there's something we need to kind of get to, something we need to see into, discover, open to: a hidden essence, a more hidden essence to self, to other, to the universe. And for that group, for people with that sense -- that, again, is not intellectual; sometimes it is, but usually not, and oftentimes it's actually accompanied by a very deep, religious kind of feeling. There's a real yearning to discover, a real yearning to know. A person feels very deeply, very deeply in their being, they're seeking after the truth, and feels that current of seeking deeply in their life. Again, not intellectual.

I want to begin with a little historical and cultural context. So rewind the clocks about 2,500, 2,600 years -- about a 300-year span of time, around the time of the Buddha, and a few thousand miles sort of that way. [laughter] And we arrive in India about the time of the Buddha, northern India, which was a very thriving and quite diverse culture. In that culture, there were a lot of people who were not interested in anything spiritually. They just got on with their business, they got on with their life, they got on with whatever -- a lot of people like that. Then perhaps the dominant religious paradigm was the Vedic sort of religion, and that was quite dominant. And there had been, growing up there, starting a few hundred years before the Buddha, the Upanishadic movement -- a sort of group of basically meditators and hermits who took themselves off into the forest and tried to discover the true nature of things.

Out of that Upanishadic movement was actually a collection of movements. What was quite common within it as a sort of philosophy and belief was, "If you can find, if you can see, if you can realize, discover, if you can know your Essence (capital E), your Self" -- what they more often called the Ātman -- "if you can know the Ātman, Self" -- and again, it's given a capital S -- "your Soul, knowing that, realizing that, seeing that will be liberation, liberation from a sense of constriction." More often in that culture, liberation from a sense of death, or liberation from death and the cycle of death and rebirth. Actually, even the notion of death and rebirth wasn't a given in that culture. But for them, there was some sense of death being a real pressing, pressing question, overwhelming question.

So when the Buddha left his palace to seek the end of suffering, his question was, "I want to get beyond death. I want to see through death." And the idea was, if you could know this Self, if you could uncover, discover this Self, capital S, Ātman, you would be liberated from death, from the cycle of saṃsāra. There were different Upanishadic kind of philosophies and teachers and teachings, and so they had different ideas about the nature of that Self that one wants to discover or uncover. For some, it was more sort of here. For some, it was more kind of an individual Soul. For others, it was more a cosmic Self, a cosmic kind of oneness, that we all found the same thing.

In a way, that period of time when the Buddha starved himself and denied his body, part of the theory behind it, part of the ideal behind that was that the body and the bodily needs are kind of obscuring an opening or a seeing of this more insubstantial Self, Ātman, Soul. And part of, one part of the Buddha's incredible, incredibly original genius was actually to be able to step right out of that zeitgeist, right out of that sort of cultural paradigm, and wipe the whole slate clean. It takes incredible power of genius and originality to be able to do that in one's culture, step right out, start from zero, wipe the whole thing clean, and say, "What can I as a human being develop within me in terms of my consciousness, my heart, my seeing, my capacities, that I might understand? What do I know? I know there's suffering, and I have this sense, this intuitive sense that it's possible to be free of suffering. What can I develop so that I can understand that? Let's put aside this question of Self and Essence and everything, and go right back," and have as a paradigm instead what he came to call the Four Noble Truths -- just, "What leads to suffering, and what doesn't lead to suffering? What leads to freedom?"

Interestingly, he didn't wipe the slate clean and arrive back at a kind of nihilistic, "There is no Essence. There is no Soul. There is no cosmic whatever. It's just that we die and then that's it." Now, that as a philosophy was actually quite alive and well in India at the time as well. People just, "This is it, one life. It ends in death, which is extinction. Better enjoy it. Have some fun while you can" -- quite nihilistic, quite hedonistic. And that was quite alive and presumably quite vibrant as a sort of movement. But he didn't go to that extreme, either, and he stayed with this sense of just, "What do I know? Suffering, and the sense that that can end. I can be free of that," and following his own seeing, his own capacity.

Now, those two -- the idea that there is an essence that we can discover, a Self, a True Self, a Soul, etc., and the idea that there's actually nothing, and this is just it, and one dies and that's it, and so you'd better enjoy it -- those are actually alive today, quite healthy and alive in spiritual and non-spiritual circles. The Buddha didn't go back to ignoring the effects of actions on suffering. He didn't go back to this kind of nihilism. He kept that very clear. Certain actions ethically, interpersonally, within myself, lead to suffering, and that's undeniable. He kept that.

Afterwards, after he was awakened, etc., he used to question people who were still in that paradigm of looking for a Self, capital S, Ātman, Soul. He used to say, "Well, out of all your experience, let's take your experience and take anything in your experience, take anything you want that might be the Self, that might be this thing you're looking for, anything," and then say, "Is that permanent or impermanent?" And they would have to say, "Well, it's impermanent. It changes, clearly, because I've seen it change." And then he would ask them, "If something changes, if something's impermanent, is that suffering or not suffering? Is it satisfactory or not satisfactory?" Anything that changes can't bring lasting satisfaction. So the person would say, "It's unsatisfactory." And then he would say, "You're looking for this Self that's ultimately satisfactory, and yet all you can find in the whole totality of your experience is something that changes, therefore isn't satisfactory. So how can you call what is not satisfactory the Self? Is it appropriate to do that?" And they would have to say "no." Sometimes he would go through this with a person, and they would get completely enlightened right then, just very short and sweet. [laughter] But there was a certain view that he was probing with a certain angle.

Fast forward about 1,800 or 1,900 years, and much more this way, western Europe, Florence, nice places, around the fourteenth century, end of the Middle Ages, beginning of the Renaissance -- certain totally, totally unquestioned mindsets and views and assumptions in the culture (I'm a terrible historian, but) slowly or suddenly began to crumble and be replaced. So basically unquestioning belief in God -- the culture moved from a very religious culture, an unquestioningly religious culture, to a much more secular culture, much more emphasis on secular ideals and pursuits and notions and seeing. As significant as that, the rise of the notion of 'the individual.' Wasn't really a very common notion before that in Western culture. Correspondingly, and perhaps to do with the end of the sort of era of bubonic plague, etc., death wasn't such a total force, presence that was staring people in the face with a threat day and night all the time. Death wasn't so prominent.

All this -- huge, massive shift in the cultural zeitgeist, and obviously with great benefits, but some drawbacks too. And one of the drawbacks we suffer from today, which is that over-rise of the individual, and the prominence of "me" and then all the problems that that brings, "me" and the personality and "my personality" and "am I okay?" and "am I good enough?" So nowadays in the West, there's actually a slightly different -- I mean, I'm not saying it's all one or all the other, comparing these two cultures -- there's a slightly different sort of set of assumptions and problems that we deal with. This self that we deal with today is more of the personality. The personality self is mostly the self that every day we struggle with. That's what we have the most dukkha with -- again, not everyone, and I don't want to paint a black-and-white picture here. And we know -- it's not that we have a sense of a self being something that's perfect and radiant and beautiful. This self we feel as a personality is suffering. We feel the contraction of it, we feel the pain of it, we feel the self-judgement of it, we feel the criticism of it, we worry what other people think. All that -- 'neurosis' isn't the right word, but that kind of thing. But we still are caught in identifying with it.

And that shift that actually began in the Renaissance period, the end of the Middle Ages, is actually the air we breathe nowadays. In fact, it's more of an individual culture, more of a secular culture nowadays. So it's even more -- it's the water we swim in and the air we breathe. We bring this to practice, and we bring this to our seeking and to our trying to be free of suffering.

And so, within that, we can hear teachings, and there are a lot of teachings around different modern traditions: "This personality is not your real self, but there is a higher Self, there is a True Self (again, given capital letters, usually), and you can know that, and in knowing that, your life will be much better and freer," etc. And again, this is actually quite common. This is quite common in the culture, either explicitly or implicitly. There's actually a tradition that's becoming very popular, and even popular with a lot of experienced insight meditators right now in these days, and the principal founder of this movement, this tradition, teaching, calls this thing that we're after, the word he gives for it is 'Essence.' And just a quote here:

It can be mistaken for just another substance of the physical organism, such as the blood or the cerebrospinal fluid, for instance. But most commonly it is mistaken for a feeling [an emotion] or a flow of sensations or energy.^[1]

Any long-term meditator will recognize that sort of flow of sensations, the energy, as just some pleasant feelings that flow through the body because the meditation is deepening. And how easily we want to slap something on it and call it something much more ultimate and much more -- I'm not saying it's not significant, but much more significant. Or in an even deeper state of meditation, one can be meditating and everything just begins to fall away, and all that's left is this kind of sense of inner luminosity and stillness. And one feels that one's reached something. It's like, it's very simple: it's just this block of luminous stillness. "This is my true self, my enduring self."

It can be quite tempting to interpret things that way. In this meditation culture, Insight Meditation culture, we really push not to do that. We give a lot of instruction and teaching and encouragement not to do that, but it could be very tempting for someone in a different setting. Or again, you do a lot of mettā, and you feel, "My true essence is love." It may be very beautiful, but is it true?

There was a film. I don't know how many people saw it, The Golden Compass. Did anyone see that? I actually quite enjoyed it. But remember when people got zapped and they died, and all this kind of sparkling dust stuff would be there? [laughter] Nice effect. There's something very intuitive in human beings that wants to kind of, in some human beings, that wants to go towards that. It's like, "Now you die, and that's what gets released, and it kind of dissolves into the ether of things, into the oneness of the other dust, etc."

So we don't, in this particular Insight Meditation tradition, talk too much about meditation experiences or give too much emphasis to meditation experiences. But even within the Buddhist tradition, if one did a lot of concentration practice or a lot of loving-kindness practice, certain experiences might emerge which it could be very tempting to take as "my true nature" or "the true nature of reality."

The problem, or one of the problems with all of them, is that they're all perceptions, they're all experiences that we perceive. And this has problems, because a perception is always impermanent. That's not quite enough, because you might say, "Well, I've glimpsed my true self," or "I've glimpsed. Now I just have to get back to it. At least I've seen it." But there's still another problem, and it has to do with, "Well, if that's what I'm perceiving, what about the perceiver? Where does that fit in?" Someone gave me a book after a talk on self and not-self, and it was a book that I confess to not reading because I probably wouldn't have understood it. It was by Hume, David Hume, the English philosopher, from 1740. Quote from there:

For my part, when I enter [more] intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.^[2]

A few hundred years later, Bertrand Russell (I don't know where I got this from, but anyway), a philosopher in the twentieth century, following on from this, he said:

It does not follow that there is no simple Self; it only follows that we cannot know whether there is or not, and that the Self, except as a bundle of perceptions, cannot enter into any part of our knowledge.^[3]

So the Buddha also was very aware of this. He was very careful in his teaching not to define the self. There's never anywhere in the Buddha's teaching where you find him defining the self -- never. He also, interestingly, didn't say "the self exists," but he didn't also say "the self doesn't exist." So there's something incredibly subtle about the Buddha's angle on all this.

Sometimes people hear some teaching and imagine that what's being suggested is to get rid of the self, to dissolve it, to nuke it, to destroy it, to whatever. And then, quite understandably, the question comes up, "Well, don't I need to have some self before I can get rid of it?" Or this person there who seems to be really struggling, "Don't I need to have some self before I can get rid of it?" Now, in very few instances, a person actually doesn't have a sort of unified sense of self. In some cases, like schizophrenia or psychosis, etc., there isn't a unified sense of self. In most cases where a person says, "I don't have a sense of self," what's actually there is quite an exaggerated sense of self, but it's very, very defined negatively, very, very tightly wrapped up, very, very built up. There's a lot of self, a lot of self-building going on, and it's all negative, a lot of negative self-view.

So a lot of the problem we have around self is around the personality self, and, you know, "I'm a failure," or "I'm an angry person," or "I'm always like this" or whatever. One of the things that mindfulness and retreat can do is actually that the sustained mindfulness shows gaps in that. It shows gaps in that. I cannot be angry all the time. I can't be a failure all the time. It's going to have gaps in it, and it starts puncturing this way we define ourselves around what we view about the personality. So seeing the gaps in things is really, really crucial.

The Buddha, the way he would teach around this is less about "there is a self" or "there isn't a self," as I said. It's more about a training -- a training to learn to see things as "not me or not mine, not self." It's actually a slight shift. It's a mode of seeing that one practises. We touched on it a little bit on this retreat, but not really a lot. It's something that one can develop in practice. It's a way of regarding experience and phenomena, which is different than a view about the self.

If I say, as a personality, that I am an angry person, I'm also overlooking something else. "I am this kind of person. I am that kind of person." I'm overlooking the fact that this angry speech, this angry behaviour, this angry state of mind arises out of a lot of conditions coming together. A lot of things have to be there, inner and outer, for the anger to arise. It's not who I am; it's something that arises from conditions. This is something that we need to, again, practise seeing over and over and over again, because the tendency will be to see in terms of self and defining the self. It's really, really important. If that angry speech came out, what were the conditions in the environment and inwardly, past and present, that brought that to fruition, that caused that to come together, and then, bloop, like that?

Okay, so we could stop there. Unfortunately, there's a quite deep human tendency to keep wanting to go back to a sense of essence. It's possible to say, "Okay," and the Buddha talked about five aggregates that you could take as yourself. He talked about the body, the vedanā, which we talked about, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. You say, "Okay, well, there isn't a self, but what there really is is this flow of a kind of continuum of experience, and that's what the self is. It's a continuum." But you don't find the Buddha saying that either, and that also actually has some problems when we really go into inquiring into it.

So a little bit on this retreat, we've touched on the notion -- I think all of us, at least a little bit -- for instance, when we were talking about aversion: what happens (and people have been reporting this in interviews), what happens to this experience, this emotion, this pain, this whatever it is, when I am able to genuinely relax the aversion? What happens to it? What happens, as John was saying -- very lovely examples in his talk -- when there's more mettā? What happens to the perceptions, to the nature of our experience? What happens when the self-sense dies down? Something correspondingly happens in the way we actually perceive things. Which is the real place, the real point from which we can view reality? How much aversion will reveal the real sort of elements of existence? I can have a lot of aversion, and then this pain in my knee is really built up. I'm struggling with it, and it's really looming large. Less aversion, a little bit less, relaxing it, what happens to it? It just softens a little bit. A bit less, a bit less, a bit less. What happens to it? What happens, as the mettā grows in the heart, to the perception? Things begin getting much more fuzzy, much more open, much less defined, much less prominent. Where's the 'real' point? Where's the point of reality?

Sometimes it's really, really helpful to have a notion of -- I want to stress this -- it's really helpful to have a notion of mindfulness and bare attention being something that we can kind of zero in, let go of a lot of stuff that we add to our experience, and zero in on a kind of basic, raw nature of reality. It's a really, really beautiful and helpful notion. But when we start going into it more, we realize: you can't really find that basic reality. You can't find it. There is no flow of basic elements of experience that you can actually find. When you really start going into it very deeply, you actually realize there isn't even a kind of independently existing time in which things flow in. Time itself begins to also just fall apart as we really let go, really, really let go very deeply in meditation. So the whole nature of defining the self as a flow -- which sounds very nice, you know -- even that's quite questionable.

It would be tempting to feel like maybe the self doesn't have an essence, but we live in a world of experiences and things and situations that have an essence. But what I've just been saying is that the way we see that will vary dependent on the mental factors, and we can't find a place that reveals the 'real' way things are.

We do that with other people too. We say, "He's like this," "She's like that," "That's how they are," and we don't see how much our mood, how much our feelings at the time, colours our sense of essence of the other person. Paradoxically, and John was touching on this in his talk, paradoxically, the less essence I have, the more presence of love and compassion there is. But even more so, the less essence others have, the more, the deeper the love and compassion I can have for them. I partly say that just in case this is beginning to sound abstract and intellectual, and it sounds like this is leading somewhere dry, and partly to say it really isn't.

So as human beings, we have a very, very, very deep-rooted tendency to want to see essence, to want there to be an essence. We have a deep, extremely deep-rooted tendency to perceive essence and to conceive of essence: essence of self, essence of other selves, essence of things. And what we find is, it creeps back into the Dharma. Over 2,500 years, it has crept back into the Dharma in different forms, and three principal ones: one is the notion of Buddha-nature. One is the notion of awareness as essence. And one is the notion of being as essence. And I want to explore these a little bit. Actually, I'm going to cover quite a lot of ground and see what I can do.

It's hard for us as human beings to live on a kind of razor's edge of truth. It's actually quite difficult. There's a saying in the Tibetan tradition. This phrase goes, "To believe that things have a real, independent existence is to be as stupid as cattle." [laughter] Not very flattering! "But to believe that nothing exists at all is even more stupid."^[4] So clearly, we can't say that nothing exists at all; that would be just ridiculous. It's just silly to say that. There's a razor's edge to walk here, but the thing about it is, that razor's edge might feel uncomfortable at first, but as we go deeper into it, it's actually very spacious, and the real comfort, the real freedom is there.

Buddha-nature as a concept (I can only just touch on this briefly), it's come in, and it's a concept that's used quite differently by different teachers at different times, etc. Sometimes, you hear the teaching that "There is something inside you called Buddha-nature that is permanent, eternally blissful, and has an independent existence -- an inherent, independent, enduring existence." And you find those teachings in the Dharma which seem to totally contradict what the Buddha was saying. If you probe deeply enough, you also find the more thorough teachers of that notion of Buddha-nature saying, "We're only saying that to balance a tendency of people saying there's no essence at all, it's a kind of nihilistic thing." There's a razor's edge here.

We hear this teaching of Buddha-nature, and oftentimes you hear it as "your Buddha-nature." And oftentimes it's kind of put out as, like, "I know you feel really bad about yourself, but just think: you have a nice Buddha-nature inside." [laughter] "And it's your Buddha-nature, and you can know your Buddha-nature." [laughter] Now, that actually might be really helpful for some people at times. It might be a little sort of temporary raft. I don't want to be totally derogatory about it. But it can only be temporary. One has to believe in that, and believe in such a thing, and if you don't believe that there's something like this, you might as well say, "We all have Buddha-natures? Well, we all have livers," you know? It's like, "What good is that to me if I'm depressed?" [laughter] So there's an element of belief that's needed, but there's also an element of, I need to perceive this thing eventually.

Go back again, just a step: which self am I? As John was saying in his talk, it works both ways. I think he pointed to causality working both ways: the more mettā he did, the less self. Which self am I? When there's a lot of mettā and I'm a little, very little self, or when there's a medium amount of mettā, or when there's a lot of mettā? Which self am I? How much mettā or how much aversion reveals the real self? So not just the real reality of objects that I perceive, but the real self? How much? Where? There's a continuum there. Where on that continuum? Sort of exactly half? Where's that? Who's going to find that? Am I the self of oneness which I can sometimes experience? John was talking about this feeling of non-separation. Am I the oneness self? Am I a self that's vast and infinite, which one can also experience at times in very deep meditation? Am I that? One can even go beyond that vast, infinite self in very deep meditation. Which one am I out of all that? The more sort of profound understanding of what Buddha-nature means is the actual emptiness of the self, the emptiness of self and the emptiness of the mind. It's actually that sort of emptiness of essence.

There's something very important here, and it has to do with, going back to the Buddha's fundamental question of, "What is helpful and what is not helpful?" Sometimes we actually lose sight of that question nowadays. I think it's really, really important not to lose sight of it. What is helpful and when is it helpful? So we can have all kind of views and all kinds of beliefs and assumptions and ways of seeing, etc. Is it helpful, and when is it helpful?

Some people, and this is quite common nowadays and even in Dharma circles, some people actually have a sort of propensity inside themselves to want the answer to be, an emotional or a cognitive inclination to want the answer to be, "There is no essence." And they want that also to imply that what the path involves is opening to this absence of essence in a way that opens one up to the existential terror of existence, that we're in a very uncertain -- which we are, at a certain level -- in a very uncertain world of kind of things dissolving in quicksand, etc., and that being courageous enough to touch the terror of that is somehow an end point in the path.

Very, very careful here of our modern cultural zeitgeist, our modern cultural paradigm, which is actually extremely secular, and a little bit nihilistic or even a lot nihilistic, in the sense that life is quite meaningless, pretty much there's extinction at death, etc. All of that put together, there's a modern, secular zeitgeist which actually influences us quite a lot, and we're in it, and we don't see that we're seeing out of it. And we actually need to question it. We really need to question it, because that's what we're in right now.

The Buddha does not talk about the end of the path being some kind of openness to terror or something like that. He talks about the end of the path being freedom, being release, a release in freedom, a profound freedom. If you really listen to what he's saying, he's talking about an extremely profound sense of freedom -- the mind, the heart, the consciousness being really released profoundly from even a sense of all this reality of perception, and world, and space, and time, and existence and non-existence, and all these notions that we have about things.

So there's something here. I think the point I really want to make is something about truthfulness, truthfulness and honesty. And am I pre-deciding a question like this: there is essence, there is a soul, or there isn't a soul? Am I pre-deciding that? Am I pre-inclining one way or another? There's something about a real integrity of truthfulness. Am I pre-deciding without either a real meditative depth or even a dedication to finding out for myself?

The other thing that can happen, and again it's relatively common, is that a person reaches a certain point in their practice and then stops questioning all this, just stops questioning. And there are certain places that are quite common to stop questioning. One of them is around the second thing I pointed at. [laughter] It sounds better if I say it in Pali: the second dhamma I pointed at, which actually just translates as 'thing.' [laughter] Anyway, awareness. So we can meditate and we meditate, and meditation is a lot about awareness. We go on about it. You know, probably you're sick of us going on about awareness and paying attention, etc. It can sometimes feel like, after a while, awareness is something that's always there. Two notions of awareness can sort of get solidified around as if they're the kind of essence of things.

I have to move through this quite quickly, but one is that we begin to feel that awareness is like a kind of mirror. And again, this can be very conscious, a deliberate thought, or just an intuitive assumption that we haven't really thought through: what awareness does, it's like a mirror to the world, and the world gets reflected somehow in awareness. But there are real problems in a notion like that. A mirror, again, it can be a useful notion, because we have a sense of something being really steady. So whatever's reflected in the mirror, well, the mirror doesn't care. It just doesn't care.

Going back to this question, very helpful at times, very helpful, you get this sense of something really steady, really not caring what the experience is that's coming up, that's being reflected. Very skilful to use in meditation. Is it ultimately true? No, it can't be ultimately true, and there are a couple of problems with it. One of the problems is what I alluded to earlier, that the notion of a mirror implies the sense of some objective representation of reality. So when we look in the mirror, "Yeah, that's me. Look, I can see everything there, and it's exactly what it looks like." But we've said that perception is shaped. The reality that we see is shaped and coloured and built, etc., by the factors in the mind. There isn't such a thing as an objective reality in that way, or even an awareness that exists kind of independently of that, the way a mirror would stand independently.

But the second, more common way -- this is really common with long-term meditators, quite long-term meditators; I'm talking about views that are actually quite prevalent in our meditation culture. And this is quite a common, lovely experience that can open up in meditation as one gives oneself to the practice over time: awareness begins to open out and become very vast and very spacious and very still and very beautiful. And it feels like everything is happening in that awareness. Everything, like sounds, just arising and disappearing, and sights and body sensations and thoughts, just arising out of that awareness, disappearing back into it, and awareness effortlessly, infinitely, vastly, peacefully holding it all, unmoved, unfazed by anything in it.

Beautiful experience. A lot of freedom in it, a lot of insight in it. And at that point comes a lot of naming. A lot of capital letters goes on as well, in the sense of calling it Consciousness with a capital C, Awareness with a capital A, Cosmic Consciousness (capital C, capital C) [laughter], Big Mind (capital B, capital M), Mind (capital M). It's so striking and beautiful as a meditation experience. A person goes in and out of this, and gets a sense of it more or less or something. I don't want to play this up, either, but just to make a larger point here. Ground of Being, which was actually a phrase that the theologian Paul Tillich coined. It's from a different tradition.

It also seems to have a lot of parallels if you read modern physics, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, and quantum mechanics -- or not so much quantum, but that kind of field theory, etc. There's a notion of a kind of substratum of existence that's pervading the universe, out of which everything arises and then disappears, and everything is of this one energy substance. And the actual meditative experience, beautiful, freeing meditative experience can actually seem like that, look like that, and a person thinks, "This is it. All I have to do now is get to know this, and get to familiarize myself with letting go into that and really knowing it."

But problems with this. Problems with it. One is that it reifies, it solidifies and makes real space, there's a notion of awareness as a space, and also time, as I mentioned earlier just briefly. A lot of this stuff, you could take a whole talk; I'm moving through quite a lot very quickly. Time begins to fall apart when we go really deep in meditation, really start letting go in meditation, letting go of the craving, letting go of the aversion. The actual nature of time itself as something there that things last in begins to fall apart. Space too. Yet that vast awareness kind of keeps those; it reifies those. It's possible in meditation to go beyond that, and if you've gone beyond it, how can you go back and say, "That was my final destination," if I've already gone beyond it?

The third Karmapa, who was, I think, an absolute genius of a teacher in Tibet, one of the early Mahāmudrā teachers in Tibet, he says something funny. He says, "We talk about the ultimate reality being awareness, and we express what's beyond awareness with the word 'awareness,' but we don't really mean 'awareness.' We use the word 'awareness,' but we don't mean 'awareness' when we say 'awareness.'" [laughter] I question why he used the word anyway. But that's actually really important. There are a lot of words that are around in a lot of spiritual traditions, a lot of the mystical traditions in the world, that use language in a way that's actually quite misleading, and some people are aware of it and some people less aware of it. But that sense of a vast awareness out of which everything is arising can also be interpreted as a source, this ground of being out of which everything arises.

But again, an experience one can experience in deep meditation; one can go beyond it, and then the question, "Well, is that the ultimate reality?" Very skilful, very, very helpful, extremely helpful, and can seem in that space that it is the source. Things are just popping out of that like sounds pop out of the silence. If you've been using the listening meditation we've been talking about, they just pop out of the silence and disappear back into it. It's as if the silence is the source of the sound. But actually, when one looks, things arise because of conditions. They can seem to arise out of nothing; they actually arise because of conditions and not from some kind of ground source.

So there's the notion of flow. There's the notion of Buddha-nature. There's the notion of awareness. The last one is the notion of Being (again, capital B), and this is a very vaguely used term. The question with this is: what does it actually mean? And what does it mean when people say, as they quite regularly do, "I just want to be," or "I'm just being"? What does this actually mean, and what is this thing called Being that we can somehow connect with or realize? And the implication there that there's a kind of essence in Being. Again, I know very little about Western philosophy, but you find it in Western philosophy as well.

So Being as a notion, in opposition to what? To doing? Being as opposed to doing? Going back to what I said about the nature of perception very briefly -- and I'm aware I skimmed through it quite quickly -- but how do you know you "be"? Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," but actually, it's "I experience, therefore I am." You know you "be," you know you are, because you experience something. If you don't have an experience, you have no way of knowing that you "be," are ... in it. [laughter] So a sense of being needs a perception. You can't have a sense of being without a perception. Perception is something built, fabricated. It actually takes some work, some doing, to create a perception. We don't passively perceive. We build our experience by selectively attending, and add a little bit of craving, a little bit of aversion, put it all together, mix it up, and we've got this perception that we've built. Perception is a doing. To be is to see, and to see is to do.

Now, one could be listening to this and say, "Why quibble about all this? Why are you being so fussy, so pedantic, so intellectual, and why are you harping on about this?" Why are we harping on as teachers about this? We're not talking or I'm not talking tonight about intellectual theories. That's actually a really major point: I'm not talking about intellectual theories. As meditators, dedicated meditators, we'll go through certain experiences that will be interpreted in certain ways, and if there isn't a wholehearted questioning of that interpreting, if there isn't that integrity fully, then there's going to be a problem there.

Now, more commonly, we interpret the problematic personality as self, as I was saying at the beginning of the talk. The problematic personality gets interpreted -- again, it's an interpretation -- we interpret that as "me" and the essence of "me" intuitively. I wouldn't want to knock deep meditation experiences and say they're irrelevant; I'm not saying that at all tonight. I'm really not saying that. One of the gifts of them is they really puncture our belief in the problematic, constricted personality self being "me," and if they happen enough, they really start uprooting that as a tendency of belief and view. And if one throws away deep experiences too quickly, usually what happens is one just slides back to the default view of "this problematic personality is me." Even without realizing it, one just goes back to that default view.

So why quibble about this? Why go on about it? It's because letting go of essence, letting go of a kind of seeking for it or constriction around it, one way or another, actually leads to freedom. And the more we see through essence, the more we see it for what it is, the more freedom there is, and more and more, depending on how much we see and how deep that seeing is, until it gets to where it's actually an indescribable kind of freedom. It's really a freedom that's indescribable.

The Buddha, he said:

That monk, that person who sees no essence in existence, who sees no essence in being, like one seeking flowers in uḍumbara trees [now, I think that's some certain kind of fig tree that has no flowers] will give up notions of here and there, give up notions of now and then -- like a snake shedding its skin, and that skin withering into dust, one who sees no essence in existence, no essence in being.^[5]

More succinctly, another time he said:

For one who sees, for one who understands, there is no thing.^[6]

There is nothing, there is no thing. At another time he said there comes a point in understanding all this, in understanding how our perception of self, of other, of things is built, how it's dependently arising (through mind factors, etc.), there comes a point when one no longer asks questions about existence -- past existence, future existence, or present existence -- such as "Am I? Do I exist? Or is it?" Now, the "it" could be anything. It could be this emotion, Gaia House, you know? It could be anything, inner or outer. "Is it? Does it exist? Or am I not? Do I not exist? Is it not? Does it not exist? You no longer ask, what is it? Or what am I? Or who am I? One no longer asks, who am I? One no longer asks," he goes on, "why is it? Or why am I? One no longer asks, this thing that it is, or this thing that I am, where has it come from? Where will it go? Where have I come from? Where will it go?'"

Part of the implications of that is that one loses one's attachment to conceiving in terms of the language, let's say, a soul or an essence, or "the journey of my soul," or "my purpose," or "this thing in my life is happening for this purpose; it's God's will" or whatever, or even conceiving in terms of being one with everything, or being a part of everything, even. One's just lost the grip of that attachment to that conceiving.

So for the Buddha there was this, as I said before, there was a radical shift in his view. It sounds so small when we say it, but it's completely radical. Moving from seeking essence, to looking at actions, all kind of actions -- gross actions in the world, ethical actions, internal actions -- and seeing, out of all those actions, which ones lead to suffering and which ones lead to freedom? When I say it like that, it sounds like, "Pff. All right. Okay." Completely radical and completely brilliant. Even more brilliant, even more of a radical genius, the views we have are actions. So to have a certain view or belief in the mind is an action. To have a view of "I am a failure" colours, shapes, builds experience to an extraordinary extent. To have a view operating in the mind of "It is like this," or "This situation is terrible," or "It is X," or whatever -- or even "It is," actually; it's a subtle view, "This is. This exists" -- that also, that view is an action which actually leads to suffering.

So the Buddha's path is about looking at what actions build suffering. What actions build suffering? And also how it is that our experience itself gets built by the subtle inner actions that we do, and learning to let go of that process, learning to let go and understand that process. In so doing, we build less suffering. We build less of an edifice of suffering. And meditatively, just meditatively, we build less experience at times.

Someone questioned at one point Sāriputta, who was one of the Buddha's two chief disciples, and he was said to be foremost in wisdom. He said to Sāriputta, "So if you follow this process to the end, and you just stop building, and you just stop building, and everything just starts crumbling of this edifice of suffering, and meditatively the edifice of experience, and that just starts crumbling, is there anything left after that? Could you say there's anything left?" And he said, "Don't say that, my friend." And then the questioner, he said, "Okay, well, can you say there's nothing left?" And he said, "Don't say that, my friend." And he says, "Well, can you say there's both something left and not something left?" And he said, "Don't say that, my friend." And he said, "Well, can you say there's not not something left and both not something," you know, whatever the fourth bit of the tetralemma would be. [laughter] And he said, "Don't say that, my friend."^[7] There's something totally beyond, that's totally beyond. The Buddha put it very beautifully: "Where all phenomena cease, all manner of speaking ceases."^[8] All ways of using language and talking and conceiving cease. Where all phenomena cease, all manner of speaking ceases.

Now, all that could sound quite destructive and maybe nihilistic, but the curious thing is, and actually the beautiful thing is, I feel very strongly, that as we let go, the more we let go in this practice, and the less we build, in a way, the more this mysterious -- not for everyone, but the more this mysterious kind of, it's like there's a bow, something in the being is bowing. As you're building less, it gets less and less clear exactly what one is bowing to. There's a devotional sense, beautiful. Something is just touched at such a deep level, but you can't put your finger on what it is. Something more and more subtle, more and more refined, less and less built up, less and less fabricated. So there's a real sense of beauty in it, an unfolding, unbinding, and a devotional sense in that, a beautiful sense.

Let's just have a moment of silence together.