Living in the Truth

A life dedicated to discovering the Truth of things is a life lived beautifully, and leading organically to freedom from suffering. Yet we frequently approach our seeking with hidden attachments to assumptions, preconceptions and views (often about Truth or the ways it is realised) that hinder a really complete, far-reaching, open and radical inquiry. On every level, from the personal to the mystical and ultimate, how can we give free reign to the heart's longing to live the truth?

The theme I'd like to explore a little bit this morning is the truth, truth and our relationship with the truth, aspects of the truth and our relationship with the truth. Probably for the majority of people engaged in this kind of practice, Dharma practice, the orientation, the drive in practice is very much towards the relief of suffering. That's very normal, very understandable, very wise. And, of course, the Buddha very famously said, "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and freedom from suffering." And yet, at times for us, at times in a life of practice and in a retreat, in a course of practice, at times for some people the suffering is actually not so prominent. We're not gripped by the torment of suffering so much. And what can become more important as a drive for a person is the inquiry into truth and a real seeking, a searching for the truth.

Now, actually these are two sides of the same coin. They're two sides of the same coin. And we need to understand that. To go deeply into the truth is to release suffering. The kind of truth that Dharma practice is interested in is the truth that releases suffering. Not interested in any other kind of truth. That's what truth means from a Dharma perspective. And to free oneself from suffering, the more one frees oneself, the more truth becomes available and visible and conscious. So to quote from Jesus, "You'll know the truth and the truth shall set you free." The truth shall set you free. It's possible for us -- and I would actually hope that it's real for us -- that we can have, as human beings, a lifelong passion for truth, a lifelong deep desire to inquire into the truth, that that's something that runs like a deep stream through our life. And it's not just the case that when someone close to us dies or something happens that shocks us that we're suddenly, "Oh, what's it all about?" And it's not hopefully the case that through the busyness and the stresses of life that our passion for truth gets dulled. This lifelong seeking, this lifelong care about this, brings for a person -- can bring, it's one of the factors it can bring -- sense of direction, deep direction, deep meaning, dignity, nobility.

It's interesting, though, talking to a lot of people and listening in different situations to a lot of people, our relationship to truth, even the word truth, and especially if we put a capital T, Truth. For some people, the heart quivers in response, the heart opens and quickens in response to that. They love that. They love the journey of moving towards that. For other people, that word will trigger them the wrong way. And it's understandable. There are both personal and cultural reasons for this. You know, in a way, we're living now with the knowledge of history, so much violence, so much war, so much struggle and strife over people arguing about what the truth is, especially religious truth. So there are real cultural reasons for that, postmodernism, etc. This culture, what's quite popular is, "My truth is my truth, and your truth is your truth, and let's just happily coexist." Or a kind of not wanting to probe too deeply. Very different in the Buddha's time where often other seekers would come and debate with him or his disciples, and very much the sense is, "One of us is wrong here, and it ain't me." There's not this kind of, "It's okay that you believe that. It's okay that I believe this. Let's just be happy friends." There was still friendship there, of course, but there was not this backing off of actually debating something and engaging in that.

Just a little while ago, a few months ago, I remember saying something -- I actually said it as a joke. I said, "There's only one question and there are no answers." I meant it as a joke, and someone present just said, "Exactly." It was a sense that there was a real ... the heart felt much more comfortable with viewing things that way. So I don't want to land too much one way or the other. I really want to just open up this box and have a look. What is our relationship to truth and the whole idea of truth, and how are we approaching this? Remember, though, there may be something to kind of postmodern notions of this truth and that truth, not wanting to settle on one thing. There may be something quite deep to that. But what is the truth that frees the deepest, that frees the most totally? For the Buddha and for the Dharma, that's the most important question. So we can have things that we feel comfortable or not comfortable with, but what frees the deepest? That ends up being the most important question.

In this practice that we do, insight meditation and vipassanā, there's this huge emphasis, of course, on awareness and mindfulness and bringing awareness. In the course of that -- everyone notices this, everyone -- we begin to very naturally notice, we notice what we hadn't noticed before, just because we're paying more attention, the attention is more alive. And we begin to notice what we had otherwise overlooked. So one of the first insights people have is, "Wow, how much thinking is going on, what the mind is doing most of the time." We just begin to notice this. We begin to notice the body sensations, the life of the body, the movement of life in the body and the way that expresses things. We begin to notice our emotions and our emotional life. All this is kind of part of opening to the truth, to truth. Also in the course of this practice we are willing to open to what we had otherwise turned away from -- in other words, suffering, and what's difficult, and what's painful, and what's hard to look at, what the mind, the heart would want to recoil from. There is this encouragement to not turn away, to open. We begin to see, too, how the mind distorts things, distorts with assumptions and conclusions about all kinds of things, about self, about other, about life. All this begins to be revealed in the field of awareness of mindfulness.

Usually when we think of the word truth, we also think in terms of facts, so "this fact is either true or false," and that's understandable. I want to talk about that. But there are other aspects of truth, too, that, in a way, I want to include. So there are facts that one can say "right" or "wrong" or whatever. And there's also something that's a little bit hard to put into words, but a kind of receptivity to wonder, receptivity to the mystery of life and the mystery of being human. It's not something we can put in the categories of right or wrong, or fact or not fact, but there's something in the being that can open to that receptivity, and there is, we could say, a truth in that. So I very much want to include that as well. It seems as if this factual truth and receptive truth are separate at first, but actually, maybe they're not. But there's receptivity to beauty, receptivity to the miracle of being, the miracle of existence, the wonder of being.

[9:14] So one of the first questions in all of this we should always ask in the Dharma and with all this kind of stuff is, "Okay, what obscures this? What obscures my seeing and my knowing and my opening to the truth?" It's always an important question. What gets in the way? As well as what encourages and what feeds it, what gets in the way? What dulls that passion? As a human being, I can have a really deep passion for truth. What might dull that passion? I want to go into this in the talk, but just right away, some things are quite obvious. We're bombarded with advertisements and this kind of consumer culture. We're bombarded with messages telling us to do this, be like this, buy that, don't do this, a certain way of being, and holding some things as important or not. Not to underestimate the power of that influence on us. TV, media -- it's massive, the way we imbibe this and the way it ricochets and reverberates in the being and influences the being. Just driving, or just at home doing some cleaning or whatever, and the radio is on in the background -- we're sort of listening and sort of not, and it's just like a kind of static. It doesn't really matter. But on another level, it's doing something to our capacity to see really clearly, really deeply, really truthfully, to be really present, and, if we're talking in terms of receptivity, it dulls that receptivity, will dull that receptivity. So it doesn't matter, and it matters greatly.

And then we see other aspects -- the way, very easily and very humanly, we can contract around the self-definitions that we have, around the roles that we have -- spouse, partner, mother, father, child, teacher, student, artist, whatever it is, executive director. And so easily we kind of bind ourselves with those definitions, and the seeing as well is bound. The seeing as well is bound. We have to understand this. Sometimes a person feels like I don't have a role and actually is bothered by that, feeling like I'm not important in the word, I don't know who I am. That, too, is a kind of cramping around self-identity which will blind the seeing.

So there's a lot to this. There's a lot to all this. I want to go into it a little bit deeper. One way we can kind of approach this, to sort of divide it up in a little bit more bite-sized chunks, is we could divide -- it's just a convenient division; it doesn't mean too much -- we could divide three kinds of truth that we might open to and investigate and be interested in: (1) what we could call personal truth or personal truths, (2) what we could call universal truths, and (3) what we could call ultimate truths. I'll go into these during the talk.

So personal, universal, and ultimate. By personal I mean what is true of me and kind of for me, in me. So what are my patterns in life, my particular psychological, mental, emotional, perceptual patterns? For instance, do I know myself in relation to certain things like anger? Something happens -- what's my tendency? I bite the other person's head off? I shout, I can't hold it in, I express it? Or I withdraw and I go into a sullen silence? What's my pattern there? Do I communicate? And if I communicate, what's my pattern in communication? Do I tend to internalize anger? Do I tend to blame myself? Or do I tend to blame another? What's my pattern? And to know myself in that way. What are my patterns in relationship, the way I relate, the way I am in love, the way I am in work, in relationship? My personal tendencies of perception, the way I tend to see a certain situation, or my life? Do I tend to see myself as a victim? This is a pattern of perception. Do I tend to see myself as a victim? To know all this. What are my beliefs -- we've touched on this a little bit in the other talks -- about self and about situations?

What are my strengths, spiritually speaking, and what are my weaknesses? This is really important. Oftentimes we just see our weaknesses. What are my strengths, the kind of qualities that I know these are nurtured in me, they're strong, they're capable in me? So strengths and weaknesses. All of this, not easy, and takes a real sincerity. In a way, that sincerity, in that sense of truthfulness, this willingness to look, is really at the basis of the path. There is no path without sincerity, without a fullness of sincerity with ourselves about what goes on for us. So that's really important, this quality of sincerity. But it may be -- and I see this in others and I've certainly seen it in myself in the past -- that within this willingness, we may actually over-balance and over-focus on the negative. In our willingness, out of every good-natured intention, we may over-focus on the negative, on what's wrong with us, on our own pain, etc.

And it can be very easy to come into a view that because something is difficult or painful or negative it's, in a way, a deeper truth, or somehow more true. We assume that a difficult emotion is somehow -- or it's very easy to assume that that's somehow getting at what's deeper in us: it must be deep because it's more painful, it's more difficult, or that these faults are somehow more worthy of attention, somehow more true. It's very easy for us to tip the balance like that. And both in a meditative setting and also in a kind of psychological/psychotherapeutic setting, very, very easy to do that, and to get in a pattern of doing that, set in a way of looking and way of believing and assuming that we're not aware is going on. So to question these assumptions, to question these assumptions.

One pattern which is very, very common, for instance, very common nowadays in the West is the pattern of the inner critic, this harsh self-judge: I'm never good enough, whatever I do. It's almost always haranguing us and beating us up and harassing us in that way, badgering us. Always kind of on top of us. And sometimes we don't actually turn to that with enough kind of strength and inward presence, and really look at it and really start questioning it: is what this inner critic is saying to me, is what it's saying true? Is it true? It's almost like it has so much power, so much clout, and because it's so painful we retreat very quickly from it. We don't hang out long enough to turn towards it and actually even engage in a dialogue with it, probe back at it a little bit: "Is what you're saying true? Is that true?" And we can actually have this dialogue. "What would satisfy you?" Seems this quality is never satisfied. "What would satisfy you?" Maybe you get an answer from it. Not to just take that for granted -- actually say, "Really?" Maybe, maybe in the questioning of the inner critic we actually see that it's not as powerful as it seems and not as substantial as it seems. We need to hang out with it and question it.

Sometimes with this inner critic, it's so -- it seems so long-standing, like it's been around as long as we can remember. It seems like its origins are entirely lost almost in the past, although perhaps we can trace them back to early childhood. But it's very interesting. Maybe when it comes up, this inner critic, some of its origins are in the present, not just in the past. Recently I was talking to someone and there was this presence of the inner critic, very strong, very painful. We were talking, and in the course of the conversation, the person got in touch with what their deepest aspirations were in life, what was most important to them, what they most deeply wanted in life. Somehow, somehow in that aligning, in that re-aligning, in that coming into alignment with what they most deeply cared about, what was the most important thing for their heart, somehow in that the inner critic got very quiet and kind of dissolved. The origins were as much in the present as in the past.

[19:20] Whether or not the inner critic is active and strong for us, we as human beings tell ourselves stories about ourself and about our life. This is all still in the realm of personal truth. The story of my life. Again, really to ask ourselves, is this something that we need to be locked into? Because it's actually not the case that we need to be locked into our personal story. We might even have more choice in what story we tell ourselves about ourself than we might feel. Is the story that I'm telling myself about myself, about my life, is that a healing story? Is it a story of possibility? Or is it a prison? We might have a lot more choice than we think. Is there one story of my life? Is there one story of Rob or whoever, of Justin? Is there one story? When we look into this, we begin to see that the story I tell myself, the way I pick out events from my life and I join those dots like I was talking about in another talk, and I string together a story, that's very dependent on the mood I'm in. It's very dependent on the state of my heart in the time that I'm constructing that story. It's also dependent on my view at that time of what I think and conceive of as significant. I could look back on my life, forty-three years so far, and trace different things depending on what I give importance to. I've been into a lot of different things over the years. One story or a story that's very dependent?

One of the beautiful things about this kind of practice, a practice of mindfulness, is that something can happen when we begin -- like on retreat -- bringing a kind of continuity of mindfulness to our experience. We forget and we come back, we forget and we come back, and the days begin to be filled, a stream or more constant, relatively more constant -- no one can be mindful all the time without breaks -- but more constant mindfulness is running through the day. And in that and through that, something begins to be kind of punctured about the whole construction of personal truth. It's almost as if, because of the continuity of mindfulness and the bare attention, that what seems so central and so significant in my life, the personal/psychological difficulties or truths or way we conceive of things, what seems so central and so true begins to just feel less substantial, less true, even, less significant certainly. Just because of the stream of more constant mindfulness. It's almost like we need to be a little unmindful to kind of glue that construction of the personal story and the personal reality together.

You know, very famous in Japanese Zen, haiku, beautiful art form. So, for instance, I think it's by Bashō, the very famous one:

The old pond

A frog jumps in

Plop

On one level, it's like, pff, boring, you know. [laughs] Nothing there. On another level, it's kind of highlighting what we may feel from one perspective as so central and so important in our lives, a little bit more mindfulness, a little bit more calmness, that begins to recede, and what we had overlooked and considered as just not so important because it didn't have so much to do with me, begins to kind of reveal its significance, and it's a different kind of significance. A person doing walking meditation -- you're right there. You say, "My life, my life is this, and who I am, and what I did, and what I want to do, and these are my struggles, and this is my story," and the foot touches the floor, and those sensations right now, the hand on the floor -- this is my life. It's so simple, so bare, so actual, so alive. This is my life. This step is my life.

So I'm not saying -- and it really would be a mistake to throw out the whole realm of personal truth; that really would be a mistake. And actually, it's interesting, different Saṅghas, different kind of communities, even within this kind of practice, have different tendencies. That's really not so much a tendency that Western insight meditators tend to do too much; we don't tend to throw out the personal very quickly. But it really would be a mistake to throw it out. In this kind of practice, as we begin bringing more bare attention to meet our experience, the personal story can begin to recede a little bit at times, or a lot at times. What begins to reveal itself or to be revealed is more what we could call universal truths. Just through paying attention to the actuality of experience, the bare actuality of experience, not so consumed with the personal. Something -- factors of existence begin to reveal themselves in a very obvious and striking way. Universal truths. We could talk about, or the Buddha talks about three characteristics of existence. They are impermanence, change, death -- that's the first one. Unsatisfactoriness, the unsatisfactoriness or the presence of suffering also -- that's the second one, dukkha. And the third one, this fact that nothing ultimately is me, can be found to be me, or to belong to me ultimately speaking -- it's anattā; nothing belongs to me.

So these, too, these three characteristics of existence as sort of manifestations of universal truth. That, too, there's a willingness we need, because if I just put them out -- especially if they're new to you -- it could feel like, "Well, that's a little bleak. This is what I'm supposed to open to? It sounds pretty dire." And a certain willingness is needed, a certain willingness of the heart. We don't want to hide from the fact of death. It's difficult. Someone just yesterday was saying to me, "I don't want to look at death. I don't want to." There has to be for us as practitioners a willingness. Am I willing to look at that? Change, everything is dying. So the heart has this willingness to look at the difficult aspect of these three characteristics. But actually, to see the three characteristics, as we go deeper with them, it actually is not something that's dire. Sometimes it's taught as if it's something to be scared of or something that's bleak, and we need to just hang out with that bleakness and that sort of tragedy of existence, etc. Actually, as we contemplate them, joy comes. Joy and freedom. They are gateways to joy and to freedom. And contemplated in the right way, that's what they bring.

So I feel, I feel very much that these three characteristics begin to reveal themselves naturally and organically as we're paying bare attention to our experience. But then, I feel, we need to take them up as active, deliberate contemplations, which means actually deliberately tune into the fact of impermanence, death, change. Deliberately tune into the suffering, the unsatisfactoriness of experience. And deliberately tune in, consciously, and sustain this as a meditation, tuning into the fact that we own nothing, ultimately speaking, and we can't find ourselves, ultimately speaking -- things are not me, not mine. And deliberately encourage that as a way of seeing, a way of seeing. Somehow these three characteristics, their possibility opens up much more, immensely it opens up if we can deliberately take them on as practices of ways of seeing. They open up incredibly profound possibilities of freedom.

This is quite interesting, this point right there that I've just made, in terms of deliberately taking something up as a practice, doing a contemplation or doing a meditation. That word, doing something, is also quite a charged word in spiritual circles. There are some who are into doing and consciously into doing this or that practice, and others who are very much non-doing, and speak the language of non-doing, and "I don't want to do." I think I touched on this briefly in another talk, in the talk on the hindrances. But in the context of talking about truth and specifically our relationship with truth, a question: who gravitates to what kind of practice? What kind of personality, we could say, gravitates to what kind of practice and why? For what reasons? So this doing or not doing, meditation as not doing, meditation as doing, practice as non-doing, practice as doing, it's a deeply contested issue for those who are into this kind of thing, but it's also something that -- it's a very deep question. How much of my personal patterns, my personal preferences, my personal preconceptions and reactions are coming into that question and the way I relate to that question? And if I'm coming from my preferences, from my preconceptions, from my reactions, from my likes, my dislikes, my personal patterns, is that a good enough reason for choosing?

[30:58] So to do, not to do in practice, it's a very, very deep question. A person -- I'm not going to go too much into it, but just to say -- a person could say, "Don't do. Just let go of doing." And I hear that, someone hears that and says, "Great. I just won't do. I'll refrain from doing." But in that, without the subtlety, a real depth of subtlety of attention, there's a whole load of doing that's left unchecked, that's just going on and on and on; we're just not aware of it. So I'll say "not do," but actually there's a lot of "do," a lot of "do do" left. [laughter] These questions take an enormous amount of integrity, an enormous amount of care, an enormous amount of sincerity. They're not easy questions. They're very deep questions. We could say ultimately there's nothing to do, and, you know, in truth, ultimately speaking, we could say there's nothing to do, there's nowhere to go. There is a truth expressed there, absolutely. But sometimes people have very little integrity, very little integrity with this, and just jump to "there's nothing to do, there's nowhere to go," and everything else -- you can see in the way they are -- has gone out the window: the sensitivity has gone out the window, the ethics have gone out the window, the care, the kindness, the receptivity. So someone can speak that language of ultimate truth, but the way they're living is lacking in sensitivity and lacking in receptivity and lacking in care and kindness. It just doesn't fly.

So a similar question. This is connected, but it's not quite the same. We could conceive the path in a number of ways. A person could say, "This is the path. Eightfold path. This is it. The Buddha laid it down. Very clear, step by step. This is the practice. And we as practitioners have to follow this path and follow the practice. If you do that and if you do it properly, scrupulously, conscientiously, the result will be awakening. It will be awakening. You follow the steps, and boom, awakening." Other view: "There is no formula. Don't even hope for a formula. Don't go near a formula. There is no cause and effect in this area, in this realm of awakening. There's no cause and effect. Don't trust it. Cause and effect is an illusion. Grace. We wait for grace or it comes with grace. It's spontaneous." Two views.

Question I have is: based on what are we believing one or another? Again, these are deep questions, difficult questions. But you could see: a person who has a little bit of a wanting to control and wanting everything tied up, neatly packaged, and a kind of guarantee of something might gravitate, out of that kind of fear, to the first one. "Just make sure we do this, do this, check off all my boxes, and then one day it will happen." Another person, the personality or culture or upbringing or whatever, feels very boxed in by any sense of that kind of steps or clarity or formula or anything like that; feels "ughhh," like that, and goes for the second one. Of course, it depends what kind of teachers we hear and stuff like that. The question is more: based on what am I landing where? Based on what in myself am I landing where? What are the movements that are pulling me, pushing me one way or another? To open up to that question is then to have integrity and to have this deep care for the truth.

So we talk about personal truth, we talk about universal truth. We can also talk about ultimate truth. Very, very important. And I said in a -- I can't remember which talk -- that this bare attention, sometimes it's very tempting to feel that somehow by giving bare attention to the actuality of my experience that is the kind of ultimate truth of things: just this moment of touch, this moment of bare heat, of bare pressure, whatever, that's the ultimate truth. And it's not. I talked about why not, so I want to kind of move on. Sometimes for some practitioners -- sometimes, sometimes; with practice or even without practice, so either on retreat or off retreat, or a person even without any meditation experience at all -- sometimes there are what we could call changes of perception. Something happens in the being, and something is, you could say, opened or shifted, and the seeing and the heart, something changes, and we look at the world and we look at the self in those moments and it's different. Something has changed quite dramatically in the perception.

Years ago, I was reading a very beautiful journal of this very -- I can't remember his name; he was a Trappist monk, very humble, beautiful person. He kept this journal. One of the days, the entry was -- he had struggled a lot as a monk, and this was twenty or twenty-five years into his life as a monk. He asked this question kind of to himself in his journal. He said, "Why is it that a bird could sing in the tree, and one person just hears a pretty sound, and another person hears the expression of God's love?" Why is that? You could say, "Why is it that at one time for the same person there's that kind of shift?" What's going on?

These kind of changes of perception -- that's just one in a particular tradition or whatever, but sometimes a person, the actual texture of experience -- one's on retreat or whatever, and one goes out and is in the fields, and it's as if everything is expressing a peace, a huge kind of imperturbable peace is running through and containing all things. Or joy -- everything, the growth of the plants, the singing of the birds, the movement of the clouds, the movement of a stream, it's all this joy, this eruption, this fountain of joy. Perception can shift sometimes. And, in a way, one feels in those moments, mystical moments, that one is seeing something truer. One feels one is seeing something truer. Or that everything is kind of held in this boundless compassion -- everything effortlessly held in the compassion of the universe, everything is one. Lots of different kind of flavours. Everything is one. This usual sense of separateness kind of goes for a period, for a time, could be just a moment, and there's a sense of oneness, that the actual truth of things is oneness. Or that the nature of things is that consciousness is actually something boundless, it's infinite and it's containing all things. Love running through, holding all things in the universe. Sometimes it's difficult to hear about this kind of stuff, but it's actually not that uncommon, both for meditators and also for non-meditators. Could just be a one-off; often it is just a one-off. But not that uncommon in human experience for something to shift sometimes in the perception of life and the universe and everything.

[39:45] What I want to say is, partly in relationship to this seeking of ultimate truth, rather than dismissing that -- which is often what we're taught to do, or often the inclination, to dismiss those experiences -- if they're not one-offs, if they seem to be happening more than once, then to actually seek to cultivate them, seek to cultivate that change in perception as much as one can, because something's shifting there in a way that can transform at a very deep level potentially. If there can be this repetition, without grasping, this extension of a change of perception, something can begin to shift in terms of our views and our very deeply taken for granted views of what reality is. But it takes the repetition of this shift in perception. It's one of the approaches; it's not the only approach. One of the approaches. But to shift a view or shifting views ends up being the really key thing, shifting views. Now, this is not an intellectual movement necessarily. It can be partly that. But it's not just a mental movement. It often involves the heart opening. It often involves the heart being very touched. Those experiences that I described -- and I know for some people it's difficult to hear that kind of stuff and we feel like, "Where am I now?" and all that, but -- those kind of experiences, whether it's momentary or for longer or whatever, open the heart. It's almost like they can't help but something opens in the heart. The heart is opening and the seeing is changing. In a way, to open to the truth deeply cannot help but open the heart, cannot help but the heart be opened.

And from the other angle, not to underestimate or to dismiss the power of a kind of religious aspiration or faith, and holding that dearly in the heart, that that and staying closing to that and aligning oneself to that and devotion to that, how that, too, can open the heart and shift the view. Not to dismiss that. So a couple of the popular ways in our circles, sort of Insight Meditation and related tradition circles -- a couple of the most popular shifts of perception that then bring with them this lovely open-heartedness and kind of religious feeling are a kind of sense of awareness, the mystery of awareness and the vastness of awareness, that which knows. A person begins to have an almost devotional sense to that, or a sense of oneness, those too. Beautiful, beautiful senses, lovely things for a human being to begin to get a sense of. In opening to that, in drawing close to that, in tasting that, in opening and closing, getting a sense of that and being interested in that, there will come with it a freedom. A freedom will come with that. A sensitivity will come with that. Compassion also will come with that, with a sense of oneness, with a sense of the mystery of awareness, of that which knows. So all that will come -- freedom, sensitivity, compassion. Yes. And it will transform the being. But it still may not be the ultimate truth. Still may not be that those things, that which knows or the oneness of things, may be the ultimate truth.

Got a very difficult situation here as practitioners. We don't want to discard this too quickly, on the other hand. It may not be the ultimate truth, but we don't want to discard it too quickly. If an experience like that happens, and if I'm able to have it more and more often -- a sense of oneness, a sense of this vastness of awareness -- I don't want to throw it out too quickly because if I do, what happens is I just go back to the normal, conventional ways of seeing, just automatically, because they've got so much momentum of taken-for-granted habit. The heart, because I've discarded it too quickly, the heart isn't changed. The assumptions are not shaken. There's a real dilemma here. It's certainly a dilemma as a teacher, because people come to me and they share these experiences, and I don't want to burst the bubble too quickly. In a way, one has to fall in love with this. You have to fall in love with this. Let it do its work, transform the being. And hopefully, at a certain time, the being matures, the awareness matures and something moves on, hopefully. In the Dzogchen tradition, one of the Tibetan traditions, beautiful, they have this beautiful, very wise saying. It says, "Trust your experience, but keep refining your view." Keep refining your view. In other words, just keep pushing the envelope, keep probing with the questions, but trust your experience, don't throw it out.

Another one of the very popular, in our tradition, sort of Buddhist Dharma in the West, where people move towards in terms of ultimate truth, is -- how to put this? -- one way of practising is very much the cultivation of a very sharp, very focused kind of microscopic awareness, really being able to divide up the moments very sharply and precisely. A very microscopic awareness. Following that practice deeply with a lot of care and conscientiousness ... [audio cuts out briefly] And in some traditions, there's even a word for this: kalāpas. As if that's the ultimate truth of things, that's the nature of physical reality. It seems to relate to quantum physics and all that. And that's the nature of consciousness itself, that it's this very, very, incredibly rapid, momentary existence, coming in and disappearing, coming in and disappearing. A person will say that's the ultimate nature of things.

Practise in another way -- and these coexist within our tradition -- much more relaxed, open awareness, spacious awareness, allowing everything to be in that space, to come and go. One begins, again, following this practice with care, with love, what begins to become prominent in the experience is a sense of awareness as something vast, unchanging, accommodating everything. Beautiful. Objects, sounds, body sensations, thoughts, all experience is born out of that awareness and disappears back into it effortlessly. Even more, the person takes it a little bit deeper, and it's almost like the texture [knocks on something] of experience itself begins to feel the same as the texture of awareness. It's like all things are awareness, all things are the play of awareness, coming out of that awareness, disappearing back. A person says that's the ultimate nature of things. That's the ultimate nature of awareness and the ultimate nature of things.

Which is true? These are arguments that go on. Which is true? A really skilled practitioner -- this is very possible -- can practise enough in one way of practising and another, and actually in the course of one sitting they can go between one sense of things and another sense of things. Very possible. It seems in those experiences that one is in touch with the truth. They have such a sense of convincingness to them, it seems. And I don't want to -- as I said, not to discard this stuff too quickly. They seem true. But there's something here, and it has to do with the nature of perception. To see consciousness as something very rapidly arising and disappearing, it will seem that way when the perception is a certain way, of rapid arising, disappearing. And consciousness will seem another way when the perception is very wide. Consciousness is tied in with perception. These are both perceptions. It can move. What we perceive as reality can move. And something in that moving back and forth -- there's something in the moving that implies something about the truth. There's something here -- we need to question very deeply our assumptions about perception. Even really obvious stuff like that things are impermanent. Are they? Maybe they're not. It seems so obvious everything is impermanent. But if I say they're not impermanent, they must be permanent. But is that the only alternative?

[49:55] Very, very difficult. Nāgārjuna was probably the second most influential figure in the Dharma since the Buddha. The Buddha and then Nāgārjuna -- in many ways, the father of the Mahāyāna. He said the ultimate truth of things -- he has this beautiful, beautiful phrase: "The ultimate truth of things is indivisible, inconceivable, and incommunicable." Indivisible, inconceivable, and incommunicable. We may hear that and the heart may resonate with that. We say, "Well, what am I, how am I going, what am I going to do with language then if it's incommunicable and inconceivable? How" -- and this is a very important question -- "How am I going to move towards the truth if that's the case, the ultimate truth?"

Broadly speaking -- and again, this is making too much of a differentiation -- but broadly speaking, we could say, how am I going to move towards the truth? Two kinds of approaches. One we could call intuitive, intuitively moving towards the truth. You know, sometimes being in the silence here, being on retreat, in the stillness, sometimes at night or early in the morning, everything is still, everything is silent, the house is silent, the fields are silent, the sky is silent. Sometimes a person, listening to that silence, surrendering to that silence, drawing close to that silence, wrapping themselves in silence, something of a sense in and through that silence of something, something timeless, not of time, something that's not of birth and death. It's intuitive, the way it's being sensed. It's beyond concepts. And somehow the being feels as if it's touched, almost through a veil; it's drawing close to something. Very possible, very beautiful movement of consciousness.

In a way, the intuitive is somehow set against what we could call -- I don't know if this is the right word -- the analytical, or moving towards ultimate truth analytically. Sometimes people really do make this a kind of opposition, intuitive versus analytical. I would say be really careful here. Just sharing, for me both have been and are really, really important. Both of them. Oftentimes, the analytical gets a little bit the short end of the stick and a little bit dismissed. I say they're both really important. But I just kind of want to speak up in defence of the analytical a little bit just because in our circles it often gets a bit rejected. It can be very easy to assume that using concepts, it would be impossible to go beyond concepts. It sounds natural enough. How could I possibly go beyond concepts using concepts? But a question. Is that actually true? Is it true? We can assume that if we let go of concepts that there's a kind of purity of approach having let go of concepts. But again, maybe it's just that we're not aware of a subtle level of conceptuality and view operating in consciousness. If that's the case, it might be that that subtle level of conceptuality is only findable through conceptuality. It might be the case. Again, sometimes people reject the more analytical approach because there's a sense that if I use my head, then my heart must close down. If I'm bringing in the analysis, then it somehow must be heartless. And again, I just question whether that's true.

The other thing to say is that if we talk about ultimate truth, it's actually in a very profound sense counterintuitive. The ultimate truth of things is deeply counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive. It's not intuitive. It's something extremely radical. But to me, I really want to say -- in a way I see too much kind of argument about this. They're both really important avenues and vehicles towards the truth, the intuitive and the analytical. It's like having two legs. I want to get from here to there. Why hop? [laughter] I've got two legs. Why can't I just walk? But to say a little bit about the analytical, we want to understand perception. The Buddha said to understand the truth one needs to understand perception. We begin to see that the appearance of things, the appearance of things, all things, internal and external, it depends on how we're looking. It depends on the state of the mind and the heart. When I'm angry, life and things and the world appear a certain way. When there's love there, it appears a certain way. When there's calmness there, it appears a certain way. When there's equanimity, it appears a certain way. When there's joy, when there's whatever ... Depending on the heart and the mind, reality appears a certain way. There's something to this. In a way, it's so obvious, so obvious to us. Something to following that, following it deeply.

What we begin to see as we follow this deeply is that clinging is extremely significant in this. The more we cling, the more we obscure of the truth. Clinging obscures the truth on a gross level and on a subtle level. And as we release clinging, the more we let go and release clinging, in a way, truth at every level becomes clearer. It becomes clearer to us. The release of clinging releases the truth, in a way, to be seen. We begin [audio cuts out] ... see the way the mind constructs and compounds things. That's what the mind does. A function of the mind is to construct and to compound. That's, in a way, a definition of the mind. It constructs and it compounds reality. We begin to see this, and as we let go of clinging, it's almost like the truth begins to shine through. We begin to see that. It begins to dawn, to the degree that we let go of clinging.

When we see this compounding and we begin to not support that building process, not support perceptions with the mind, the perceptions, the world of perception and the mind itself, they begin to fade away. They begin to fade away as we do not support them through assenting to and collaborating in this compounding process. The world and the mind fade away, begin to fade away, because we're not making a thing, we're not making this, we're not making that, we're not making a subject and an object, a mind and a world, a self, a this, a that, a floor, a time, whatever. We begin to see through this -- it happens a little, just a little bit and then more and more -- the self, the world, the mind, awareness, the present moment, things we take so much for granted, are actually maybe not real, not real in the way that they seem to be so obviously. They may be not real in the way that they seem to be.

As a practitioner goes into this, you actually see there's nowhere to stand. You can't stand in awareness. You can't stand in "the now." They are not ultimately real. You can't stand certainly in the self or the mind or the present moment or the world of bare attention. Nowhere to stand. And really begin to get a sense, on a very deep level, what this means when Nāgārjuna says, "Inconceivable is the nature of ultimate truth." There's a beautiful saying of Jesus: "Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man" -- let's say, someone who lives in the truth -- "has nowhere to lay his head." Or the Buddha: "One who dwells nowhere dwells in peace and dwells in freedom." One who dwells nowhere dwells in peace and dwells in freedom. That's a very deep, more mystical meaning of what these sayings say.

So it's not saying that nothing exists at all. It's absolutely not saying that. It's not a kind of nihilism. It's really not a nihilism. This teaching of emptiness is a non-attachment to views. It's what's called in the deeper sense the Middle Way. All things, all things, absolutely all things, are not something and they are not nothing. They're not something and they're not nothing. The depth of this teaching of emptiness and the dependent arising of things, it's the Middle Way. It's inconceivably profound.

[1:00:32] So as human beings and as practitioners, if we want to make this knowing of the truth a priority in our life, if the heart feels like I want to know that, if we prioritize the truth we can understand this, we can know this. We are capable of this as human beings if it's a priority. If it's not a priority, it's not going to happen. But if it's a priority, we can know this. We can understand. The heart, the consciousness can open to this, if we care deeply about the truth, deeply in the fibre of our being if we care about the truth. Sometimes this journey into the depth of truth is not easy. It's not easy. And a person feels -- they grapple with this and they wrestle. "Is it this or is it this? How do I go forward?" One really feels the discomfort of that at times. One is wrestling to the point of tears sometimes. And you know what? That's okay. It's part of the beauty. It's part of the passion. It's part of the care. There's something lovely, absolutely lovely. Why should it always be easy? This is not easy to understand, this stuff. And that's not to always say, of course, that having truth and freedom as a priority will always be a kind of sour-faced struggle; of course not. It's a very beautiful, can be at times a very joyful journey.

But there is a freedom, I would say, very much, in prioritizing this stuff, in prioritizing the truth. It relativizes everything else. We're no longer shackled. If something comes up in the being and I say, "Freedom, truth is what I care about more than anything else," maybe I haven't moved anywhere near it in terms of understanding or drawing close to the truth, but somehow in that asserting of the priority in my life, a lot of shackles go away. It relativizes a lot of concern -- "What do people think of me? Is my job good enough? Is my career move ...? Is my house ...? Money?", all that, it relativizes. There's freedom just in the prioritizing.

I just want to end with actually another saying of Jesus. Sometimes his sayings, it can be very difficult to understand. And obviously different traditions interpret them differently and whatever. It can be very difficult, but to have a certain view or a certain approach and take it in a more mystical way, what it might mean. What if, in this saying of Jesus, we substitute when he says "I" or "me," we substitute that with "truth," the word truth and ultimate truth? So when he talks about me or I, he's meaning the truth, the ultimate truth of things. "Come to me" -- come to the truth -- "all you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you" -- yoke, we get this word, it comes from the word yoga, union -- "Take my yoke upon you" -- in other words, discover the truth, live in the truth, live from that truth. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light." For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Sometimes just hearing it a different way, it's extraordinarily profound and extraordinarily beautiful, I think.

To live in the truth, to live in the truth is to live unburdened, unburdened by life and death. Or you could put it less extreme and say: to the degree that we live in the truth is the degree that we feel ourselves unburdened by life and death. And love, acts of love, acts of generosity manifest naturally, manifest naturally out of that heart that's close to the truth, that's open to the truth, naturally. The more and more we are moving towards the truth, in touch with the truth, the more and more the heart doesn't want to be constrained in self-centredness and non-generosity. Acts of love just naturally come from that. And as I say, as human beings, as practitioners, we can know this. We absolutely can know this. It's there for us.

Let's have a little bit of quiet time together.