Transcription
What did the Buddha mean when he said that the world is 'like an illusion or a magic show' and that 'only nirvana is real'? This talk explores some of the Buddha's teaching of Dependent Arising, and how, through right practice, the illusion may be untangled, revealing the true nature of things, of mind, and of Nirvana.
What I want to go into a little bit in the talk today is something quite amazing, quite amazing and quite profound, and a little bit difficult, a little bit complicated. And in a way, I also want to expand on and elaborate on some of the themes and strands that have come up in the talks through the retreat. What I'm also talking about is something that's not quite linear. I'm describing, I'm going into a process that's not quite linear. So in planning the talk, I realized that what I'm doing is actually kind of spiralling around something versus going through it. So it might sound, I don't know, a little bit difficult. Bear in mind that it's being taped. You can always revisit that.
Just to start with what's actually a very obvious statement, a really obvious statement: all suffering, all difficulty that we experience in life is in relationship to experience. At one level, it's completely obvious: all suffering, any difficulty is in relationship to experience. It's in relationship to experience -- the experience that we have, experience that we don't have, that we want, that we did have, that we didn't have, that we think we might have. All suffering is in relationship to experience.
Incredibly obvious on one level. There's something in that that's immensely important, and it points to something extremely profound. Might there be something fundamental to all experience that we need to understand? All suffering is in relationship to experience.
So there's a word in the Indian spiritual traditions, māyā. This spiritual concept existed, pre-existed, I'm pretty sure, before the Buddha, and it really translates as "illusion." We get our word "magic" from it. And the idea that was around was that this world of appearances and experiences is illusory. It's an illusion. So this was quite a popular notion. It's an illusion. And before the Buddha, the idea was that if we could transcend the illusion of all this appearance, that in that transcending, we would know freedom, we would be freed from saṃsāra. That was a very popular notion, and it still is today in a lot of circles, and actually the Buddha used it as well. He picked up on that word, and he used it with slightly different connotations. So there's a passage. He's talking to a bunch of monks:
Suppose, monks, a magician or a magician's apprentice should hold a magic show at the four crossroads, and a keen-sighted man should see it, ponder over it, and reflect on it radically. Even as he sees it, ponders over it, and reflects on it radically, he would find it empty. He would find it hollow. He would find it void of essence. What essence, monks, could there be in a magic show?
Even so, monks, whatever consciousness, be it past, future, or present, in oneself or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, a monk [a practitioner] sees it, ponders over it, and reflects on it radically, and even as he sees it, ponders over it, and reflects on it radically, he would find it empty. He would find it hollow. He would find it void of essence. What essence, monks, could there be in consciousness?
[And he goes on, and he says:] Forms, body and other forms, are like a mass of foam, feeling, vedanā, like a bubble, perception is like a mirage, and mental formations like a plantain tree. [A plantain tree is a tree that looks like a palm tree, but you just keep peeling off the leaves and there's nothing inside.] Consciousness is a magic show, a juggler's trick entire.[1]
So, going through all that, he's basically outlined the whole of what we might call our self (form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness), but also the whole, the totality of our experience, and using different similes and different words, he said the whole show, this whole show of self and the world is illusory, using different similes. It's saying something quite strong. It's a very, very strong statement.
Sometimes we can see this, and we can see it at a grosser level. So this word, papañca, for those of you that were around at the beginning of the retreat and the talk on thought, we have this papañca where the mind just grabs hold of something, one little thing, and then starts shaking it up and making something really complicated about it, proliferating, complicating. And when we step out of that papañca, when it calms down, and we look back, and we say, "What on earth was all that about?" It just seems like a huge storm of complexity, and we're so convinced of something. We believed something, and then afterwards, we just say, "God, it was all an illusion. It was all just a storm in a teacup." It's obvious later; when you're in the middle of it, it's sometimes hard to see. That's mostly how we use the word papañca. It's a kind of extreme end of what papañca means. But the word papañca -- and I alluded to it very briefly in that talk -- at its kind of more subtle level means "to make manifold," which means to make many, to make many forms.
So this papañca is somehow creating many forms in the world, many forms in our experience, many things. This is very, very important for the Buddha in terms of his deep teaching. We need to understand this process. What it comes down to is understanding perception. We need to understand the way we see and the way we have experience -- all experience; all, all, all, experience. Something needs to be understood there at a very radical, deep level, the way we see the world and the way we have experience, and understand how our experience is something that the mind builds, the mind kind of fabricates it. And in fabricating, the word "fabricating" implies, even in English it implies something of an illusion: it's a fabrication, like it's a lie.
We need to understand that. And the Buddha also points to the possibility of not engaging in that process of building fabrications and illusions, and actually tasting what is completely beyond that process of perception, completely beyond what we usually mean when we say "experience." Completely beyond. So both understanding it, and tasting what's beyond.
Again, a statement like that is going to land in a lot of different places, and that's usual, and that's normal, and that's completely okay. From a Dharma perspective, from a deep Dharma perspective, it's important to point out that whatever difficulty or suffering we have in life, whatever difficulty or suffering we have, fundamentally it arises from a misunderstanding of our experience. So sometimes we say, "I could have a little bit more love. I could be a bit more kind to myself. I could be this or that." All true at a certain level, but fundamentally, all difficulty, all problem, all sense of suffering arises from misunderstanding the nature of experience, misunderstanding what's real and what isn't quite real in the way that we think it is or feel it is.
So this word nibbāna actually means "unbinding." And we say, "Oh, I'm not really interested in nibbāna," but remember, whatever suffering, fundamentally it arises from that misconception, misunderstanding of reality. And to nibbāna, we could say, is to unbind the way we've bound that sense of reality together, that sense of appearance together. And to some degree or other, letting go of suffering is unbinding. So māyā, this word māyā in Sanskrit, the word mā, the root of māyā, the word mā actually means "to measure." There could be a connection there. Dharmically, there is. I don't know if linguistically there is. Mā is "to measure." We get our word "magic" from māyā. We get, perhaps, I don't know, perhaps we get "magnitude" and "magnify" from mā.
We can see, when we think about measuring, measuring and comparing, and how much this is part of our life as human beings, and we can see that if I compare and I measure this self in relationship to other selves, there is suffering involved in that. And we all know the pain of this. We all know how painful it is: "Do I measure up? Am I good enough? Am I worse than? Will I be okay? Do you think I'm okay?" Suffering, pain, pain. At that level, it's quite obvious. And if it's not obvious, it soon will be. Even if we measure up very well -- "Look at me. I compare very well" -- sooner or later, someone arrives that doesn't agree with that assessment, and they say, "Actually, you're a bit of a bozo or a nincompoop" or whatever it is and then the whole thing just falls apart.
We're addicted to measuring self with other. But this measuring of the self with other is actually only part of our addiction to measuring, you could say. It's only part of it, and this measuring is actually part, it's one part of the perceptual process. It's one part of how we create experience anyway. It's one part of what's going on when we experience anything at all, inner or outer. Measuring is part of that. What could possibly be the relation, measuring and māyā, measuring and illusion?
There's a statement that Sāriputta, one of the foremost, the wisest of the Buddha's disciples, said. One time he said, "Kilesas [which means greed, aversion, delusion] are makers of measurement and makers of signs."[2] This is difficult to understand. "Signs" means "appearances" -- appearances outside, the clock is a sign, the bell is a sign, all this is sign; outer signs, and inner signs even in terms of meditation experiences. So he's saying greed, aversion, and delusion are makers of measurement and makers of signs. There's something very, very profound in this statement.
So let's take that apart a little bit. Delusion. If this is an illusion, and if I believe that illusion, that's what I might call delusion. That's what might be called delusion, the believing of the illusion, avijjā in Pali. If I believe all this world of appearances, well, some of this world of experience, I'm going to want more, I'm going to be invested in. There's a measurement. Once I believe it, I start measuring: "I like this. I want more of it. How long is it going to go on for? I don't like that." There's a measuring that comes with avijjā, with believing it. The avijjā feeds the measurement. We can see, too, when there's greed and aversion present, greed and aversion together -- we could call them "clinging": movement towards, "greed," and pushing away, "aversion"; together, "clinging." When there's clinging, I've got a pain in my knee, aversion, and then I start to measure: is it getting more or less? Is it hanging out? Is it going to be longer or less? There's a kind of measuring that comes with clinging. Clinging feeds measurement, we could say. Clinging feeds measurement. Measurement also feeds clinging. Once I start discriminating between these things -- "This is better. That's worse. This is more of what I want. That's less. This will go on longer," etc. -- once there's measuring come in, the clinging gets fed, so that the feeding is running both ways. Mutually dependent.
Now, this could really be a stretch in language, but clinging, pushing away or pulling towards, repelling or bringing towards myself, mā, māyā, is it possible we get the word "magnet" -- I don't know, maybe it's a stretch. Dharmically, it's important: these things are connected. I don't know if they are linguistically, but they're connected. So there's greed and aversion as clinging, and delusion. I'll fill that out a bit more.
Delusion, really, we could say, is an attachment to conceiving of a self and things in the world. Here's Rob, and here's the microphone, and here's the floor, and here's Gavin, and here's a self and a world of things, and attachment to conceiving the self and the world of things as existing in a real way, as if they have some independent existence, independent of the way the mind looks at them. That attachment to that conceiving is what delusion is fundamentally.
Now, there's another word in Pali and Sanskrit called māna, related to the word māyā. Same root, mā, and it means exactly that: it means "conceiving." I don't know, in English, "imagining"? So something's going on here. All these four factors are, you could say, coming together and feeding each other. The world of appearance, māyā, the delusion, māna, the conceiving of things and this world of appearance, the believing that it has an independent reality, then the clinging and the measurement. They're all mutually feeding. This teaching of dependent origination, dependent arising that the Buddha talks about, it's not a process that's happening first this and then this and then this. This is why it's so radical, one of the reasons why it's so radical. These things are mutually feeding each other, not in time. So you could take those four things, and you could, a bit like a cube, you could look at it any way and see that any one feeds all the other three. And any piece of this square feeds all the others.
For example, when I conceive in a certain way, I'm invested in clinging, invested in measuring. The more I conceive and the more I cling, the more I measure. The more I measure, it might be feeding this whole appearance more. When I cling more to the pain in the knee, it actually gets, it feels more substantial, more vivid. This is really worth reflecting on, taking this apart and seeing how any angle, any corner will feed any of the others.
This measuring piece is interesting. For instance, let's take pleasure and pain. We think of pleasure and pain; we don't usually see that pleasure and pain are in a relationship to each other in a way that's mutually dependent in the same way that left and right are. So where there's left, there's immediately right. The concept left implies right, and the concept right implies left. When there's left, there is right, and when there is right, there is left. When there is pain, there is pleasure. When there is pleasure, there is pain. They coexist and they depend on each other as a duality for their existence.
If I don't see that, and I conceive of them -- which is very normal -- I conceive of them as having separate existences, independent existences, that conceiving causes me to invest more, to measure more, to cling more, which feeds the whole substantiality of this. This is what I'm wanting to go into. But the measuring, the measuring is part of delineating and demarcating how the mind divides reality into things. It measures between things through ignorance, and it's one part of our perceptual process. It's one part of what goes on.
So through this mutual reinforcing -- this is happening all the time. Through this mutual reinforcing, the veil of illusion is actually being woven thicker through the clinging, through the conceiving, through the measuring. The veil of seeming reality is getting woven thicker. Now, this is not an abstract theory. I don't know, again, how it sounds and how it lands in different places. The amazing thing is that we can actually see this, and we need to really see this. It's not something abstract, and it's not a theory. We could say the root of it all, the root of it all is conceiving. But that doesn't still mean that it's the one that's first in time; it's, in a way, the most fundamental.
So the Buddha said, "One who has practised well is rich in wisdom and has escaped beyond the conceivings or the proclaimings, the deemings of the mistaken mind." The mind says this is this, and that's that, and this is how it is, and one rich in wisdom has escaped beyond the conceivings and the proclamations of the mistaken mind. So it's easy, if we say conceiving is the problem, it's easy to blame language or blame thought, but the problem is actually much, much deeper than that. Sheep have this problem. Slugs have this problem. It's something that's way, way deeper than thought or language, way more rooted in consciousness.
There's a very odd passage. It's from Mahākaccāyana, one of the foremost disciples of the Buddha and he said, strange language:
If certain conditions come together, it is possible that one will delineate a delineation of contact.
It's a deliberately odd phrase, "delineate a delineation of contact." "Contact" means here's the eye and the consciousness, and it meets the form, and I see something, and that's contact.
It's possible that one will delineate a delineation of contact. When there's a delineation of contact, it's possible that one will delineate a delineation of unpleasant, pleasant, neutral [or vedanā, which we talked about earlier in the retreat]. When there's a delineation of vedanā, it's possible that one will delineate a delineation of perception [etc., until you've got the whole mess of suffering, papañca and suffering].[3]
And then he says if those conditions are not there, it's actually not possible that one would delineate a delineation of contact, etc., and one would not arrive at the suffering. Strange way of putting it. And putting it like that, "It is possible that one will delineate a delineation," it's pointing to exactly this artificial delineation process that the mind -- meaning the pre-conscious mind, the pre-conceptual mind, pre-thinking mind -- is creating between things, saying "This is this. This is that. That's tomorrow. This is yesterday. This is now," and creating this division. And there's something it does in singling out things and events and saying "That's that, and something else is something else." Something is artificial going on in the mind to do that.
There's another difficult passage. I know this is quite difficult to understand. There's another difficult passage where Mahākaccāyana has taken it through in a certain kind of "This, then this, then this," but remember, it's not a linear order in time. In another passage, the Buddha traces the same process, but reverse order of causality, just to show it's not "This, then this, then this." And he says, "Dukkha, this suffering, comes from measuring and craving," to paraphrase. We hold this better, worse, more, less, etc. Measuring and craving gives rise to dukkha. Where does that come from? It comes from the feeling, the sense that things are appealing or unappealing, that this is nice and this is not nice. Where does the sense even of things feeling nice or not nice come from? It's a very fundamental question. Why is it we even experience things that way? He said this craving and measuring comes both from the sense that things are appealing or unappealing, and also from the sense of seeing existence and non-existence with respect to things.[4]
So this is what I was talking about, this delusion, seeing existence and non-existence. We say it exists, and then it's gone out of existence, or it doesn't exist -- this delusion of the real existence of things. So seeing existence and this sense of appealing and unappealing gives rise to measuring and craving, which gives rise to suffering. Both of them come from contact. Contact, he says, comes from name and form. It's complex language; I know that. "Name and form" means the movements of the mind to shape our perception of the world and perception of pleasant and unpleasant, the movements of the mind to shape the perception.
This is actually a dialogue that he's having very early on in his teaching career. It sounds quite abstract now, but one really gets the sense of the incredible freshness and radicality of what he was teaching. So a seeker comes to him, and he asks all these questions, and he keeps tracing back, "Well, what does that give rise to? What does that give rise to? Where does that come from?" And he said all of this comes from the way the mind shapes perception and the sense of pleasant and unpleasant and neutral. And so this seeker asks, "For one arriving at what does all this disappear? For one arriving at what does pleasure and pain disappear?" And he says -- this is lovely -- "Tell me this. My heart is set on knowing how they disappear."
And the Buddha says something. He says, "One not percipient of perceptions (in other words, one not perceiving), not percipient of aberrant perceptions (in other words, not hallucinating), not unpercipient (not in a coma or totally conscious), not percipient of what's disappeared (not remembering or having a memory of that), for one arriving at this, form disappears, for papañca and all the complications that come out of papañca (this making manifold, making complex) have their cause in perception." And he goes on to say the sage, the wise one, ponders dependencies, reflects on this mutual dependence of all this, of all these factors, and on knowing them, on understanding them, is released, is unbound, is freed, enlightened.
So two things that are really important there. One is: possible to go beyond perception, beyond this whole process, and also that, in so doing, we need to really reflect on the way this is all getting built up in this radical kind of mutually feeding, mutually dependent way.
How are we going to do that? People would ask the Buddha several times, "What a tangle, what a mess, what a mess we find ourselves in. Who's going to untangle this tangle?" That was the question people were asking: we are in a tangle. Who will untangle the tangle? The Buddha gives several answers. How can we begin to, if it's even possible, move beyond perception, or untangle this mutual, complex kind of spaghetti web of mutually reinforcing process that isn't even happening in time?
So we've mentioned in a couple of the talks this teaching of the three characteristics, and it's one of the possible approaches that we might untangle some of this through. So to say again, these three characteristics, anicca (impermanence), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anattā (not-self, not me, not mine). They are not ends, they are not arrival points so much, like, "Oh I've seen that things are impermanent. Job done. I've seen that there's no self. Job done," or whatever. Rather, they are beginnings of an avenue, or avenues, beginnings of avenues. They are tools and ways of seeing, ways of kind of having a lens to look at experience, and that lens takes the consciousness on a journey that untangles all this. It untangles it, if we use that lens and we take that journey.
Why do they do that? Why would it be the case that sitting down and walking and just consistently seeing things as impermanent or suffering or not-self would untangle things, untangle the whole nature of perception? It's interesting. Why would it do that? One of the reasons is because when we contemplate things in this way, as anicca, dukkha, anattā, there is, hopefully, with practice, there comes with that less clinging. If I see that things are impermanent, I let go. Why cling? If I see all things in terms of impermanent, unsatisfactory, not-self, there's a kind of equality coming into the seeing, so I'm less invested in measuring one thing better or worse or different, "I like it. I don't like it. My favourite," and it's just equal. All things are equal in being anicca, anattā, dukkha. There's an equality and a quietening of the measuring mind.
You could, to put it more poetically, you could say there's a kind of holy disinterest that comes into one's being in relationship to all experience. Just, everything's just impermanent. One becomes, in a very alive and beautiful way, disinterested. Holy disinterest. It's all dukkha, it's all anattā, it's all impermanent. Just disinterested. Holy disinterest. There's a real beauty in that. As we do that, we cling less, the suffering begins to drain out of experience. If one stays on that avenue, stays true to that practice, stays with it and keeps at it, something else begins to happen as it deepens. That is that experience itself begins to fade. It begins to dissolve. It begins to blur. It begins to kind of open up, become less substantial, dissolve a little bit. Very, very odd phenomenon at first, seemingly.
So to do this, to reflect all things are impermanent, all things are dukkha, all things are unsatisfactory, when we hear that at first, we could think, "How horrific to just sit there reflecting on that in relation to experience. It will make everything seem so kind of blah or grey or bleak or empty." And it might seem that way from the outside, but actually it's not. When we do this, something very beautiful begins to open in the being, very beautiful. It's like another quality begins to shine through experience. It's not so dependent on whether I like it or I don't or whatever. Something else begins to show itself, not at all blah, bleak, or grey.
So there's a beautiful and very famous passage from the Third Zen Patriarch, and it's the beginning of a very long poem. Mostly we only hear the beginning, but I'm going to read the beginning. There are different ways of practising, say this one, dukkha, practising seeing things as unsatisfactory. One way is just that: to see things, all things as unsatisfactory, and just letting go. They're all unsatisfactory. Another way is to actually be aware of this pushing away what I don't like and pulling towards me what I do like, and feeling that, and learning to relax it, and learning to just let that go.
This is called Faith in Mind, and it says -- many of you will have heard this before:
The Supreme Way is not difficult for one who has no preferences. When love and hate are both absent [we could say, when for and against are both absent, when love and hate are both absent] everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction between things, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.[5]
Beautiful, and it's pointing to something. So we can take that stanza on as a practice. What would it be in the sitting, in the walking, whenever, in the standing meditation, sit, stand, walk, sitting there with an alive presence? It takes a certain amount of alive presence. You're present in the moment, and the attitude towards all experience, all experiences, no preference, no preference, don't pick and choose, just equal. And the emphasis in that moment, at that time, is not so much on mindfulness but on no preferences, no preferences, no preferences. Anything, anything, anything, inner and outer, no preferences, no preferences. It's a practice. It needs a certain level, a base level of aliveness and presence; otherwise we're just kind of deluding ourselves, sitting in front of the TV, "No preferences!" [laughter] So a certain amount is required.
If we do any of these practices, what we will find, if we just plug away at them for a little bit and get used to them as practices, what we will find is the suffering gets less. The suffering begins to go out of the experiences. And if we find that, keep at it, keep on with it! It's showing that we're on the right track. When the suffering goes, it shows we're on the right track.
What, too, though, is happening to the whole, as we do whichever one we choose -- impermanent, unsatisfactory, anattā, not-self, or the no preferences, whichever approach we take -- what happens eventually to the magnitudes, what happens to the sense of the solidity of experience to consciousness? What happens to that? This is an exploration, and it's very radical. It's very counterintuitive, the whole thing.
So there's impermanence. There's dukkha, which we can do a number of ways. There's this anattā, anattā practice. There's another sutta where the Buddha starts by telling a kind of mythological story. And the story is that the gods, the devas and the demons are doing battle, mega battle, war of the worlds kind of scenario -- the gods, the good guys, and the demons, the bad guys. And eventually the devas, the gods win, and they capture the king of the demons, Vepacitti his name is. They capture him, and they bring him back to Sakka, the ruler of the gods, and they imprison him. But the nature of his imprisonment is incredibly subtle. If the king of the demons, Vepacitti, while he is there in front of the king of the gods, if he has the thought that the demons are good and the gods are bad, and he wants to go back to the land of the demons, if he has that thought, he feels himself imprisoned, wrapped and bound by bonds, and feeling very uncomfortable physically. If he has the opposite thought, that actually it's right, the gods are the good guys and I'd rather stay here, he actually perceives himself to feel released from that prison and lots of bliss.[6]
So his actual imprisonment is dependent on how he's thinking about the situation. [laughter] There's a lot to that. I read it at first, and I was like, "Hmm?" There's a lot to that. But then the Buddha goes on to say, if you think that's subtle, if you think that kind of imprisonment is subtle, the imprisonment of Māra -- in other words, the imprisonment of life and death and saṃsāra -- is even more subtle than that. Anytime we think "I am," any time we conceive "I am this," "I am that," "I will be this," "I will be that," "I don't want to be," any time any of that, any time we conceive "my true nature is to have a form, is beyond form," any time we conceive of the self in any way, he said these are construings, imaginings, perturbations, agitations, palpitations, throbbings. You know the heart when it's palpitating? To say "I am," we're so used to it, we don't realize, it's like having a minor heart seizure thingy. [laughs] We're so used to it that we don't realize. The Buddha says it's a palpitation, it's a perturbation, it's an agitation, it's a construing, it's a complication, it's a conceiving, and should be abandoned, he said. It should be abandoned. And he said you should reflect, you should think to yourself, "We will dwell with an awareness free of these construings."
Again, all these are practices. It's a practice to contemplate things as impermanent, you know, in a continuous way; to practise seeing things as dukkha; practise no preferences; practise seeing things as not me, not mine. It's a real practice. We can develop those avenues of practice. When we do, what happens? A calmness. The being opens in a kind of calmness. Something opens up in the whole texture of experience. Things begin to become, or appear, less substantial. They fade more and more and more and more. The perception of things fades more and more.
So in this sense, the original teachings of the Buddha are actually using dualities, particular dualities -- a duality of suffering and not suffering, and what are unskilful ways of thinking and looking, and what are skilful ways of thinking and looking -- using those dualities to eventually go beyond perception and beyond any sense of duality. Using duality to go beyond duality. The Buddha says, "There is this, practitioner, there is what is inferior in terms of states of mind, what is superior in terms of states of mind, and there is complete escape from this entire field of cognition," complete escape from the entire field of perceiving, cognition, knowing, all that. Complete escape. So there is better and worse, and there's the complete escape. So using duality to go beyond duality.
And we touched on this in some of the other talks. One of the things that made the Buddha such a genius was the way he would pick up certain concepts and use them, use those concepts as rafts to go beyond concepts. This idea, I think I mentioned it in another talk, using a certain amount of conceptuality, like a snake, eventually that snake eats its own tail, and the conceptuality that you're actually using begins to eats itself and dissolve itself. Using concepts to go beyond concepts. And the question for us is, which concepts lead to freedom, and which concepts just lead to more suffering and more imprisonment and more complication? That's a gazillion dollar question: which concepts is it helpful to pick up, and which concepts do we actually want to shun, really want to not go near because they bind us and they will hurt, eventually they will hurt?
So the Buddha uses this analogy of a raft. The teachings, the teachings of dependent origination, any of the teachings, are a raft to take us to the other shore. We use that raft. We don't abandon the raft on this side of the shore, or in midstream, but once we've gone beyond all of this, understood all of this, you can abandon it.
Let's fill this out a little bit more, particularly the piece about anattā. Any self-view, the Buddha's pointing at -- "I am," any self-view. Certainly when there's a self-view in terms of personality and the big "I am this or that personality," but even any very subtle self-view. So about the most subtle self-view I could have is just that there is a subject devoid of personality. It's just a subject, a knowing, an awareness, and that which is known. Do you see that that's the most subtle kind of, most refined kind of way you could conceive of self and the world? We usually conceive of it much more complicated and more built up than that -- me and my personality, and my history, and my story, and my difficulties, and my hopes. That's all the self. Well, that can all get really quiet. If I'm still conceiving in terms of subject and objects, awareness and objects of awareness, that's a very subtle conception of self. Once I even have that much, and the sense of different objects being pleasant or unpleasant, then there's going to be the investment of the subject, the investment: "How will experience be? How will objects be for this subject? How will the world of experience be for this self?" There's automatically, because of that duality, a sense of investment.
That investment feeds the measuring process. So measuring is going on. Sometimes we're very conscious there's measurement -- we're really saying, "What shall I choose here, this one or that one? Which is going to give me the most, or avoid the most unpleasant?" Most of the measuring is going on much more subtly. But it's the investment in a self-sense. When there's a self-sense, there will be an investment in objects. It brings with it the measuring, brings with it the pushing away of what I don't like, the pulling towards what I do like, clinging, brings with it all this papañca, and brings with it dukkha. When there's the investment of the self, it brings with it dukkha.
And it also brings with it the arising of the world, the arising of the world of appearance and experiences. I can see in practice, when I keep letting go of identification and ownership, I keep letting go, this world of appearances fades, begins to fade, fade, fade, fade. So I need the self-sense to create, to build the world of experiences. We begin to see in practising this way, to understand how our world, the world that we take so for granted, this world of things and selves and others and space and time, how it's actually fabricated by this measuring and conceiving. It's actually built. It's fabricated -- including the sense of time. This is where it gets really mind-boggling, in a way.
I begin to see: when I really let go of the sense of self and the identification, even the sense of time begins to fade -- past, future, and present. Why is that? This self, I may have something for this subject that I like, and then I'm invested: how will the next moment be? Want to keep it? How long can I keep it? I'm invested in time, and the investment in time and measuring actually builds the sense of time to consciousness. Or I don't want it: how long is it going to last? Will it go away? What's the next moment got in store for me? Time-sense is being built as well.
So, if we're faithful to these practices, all this can actually unfold in our practice. In our practice, we can begin to see this begin to unravel. Conceiving in self, but also conceiving in things, believing in things, and in particular in the dualities of things -- so subject, object, yes; pleasant and unpleasant, like I talked about before; now and then, then in the future or then in the past -- these are all dualities, this and that. When I conceive in that way, and I believe in that way, measurement comes. And that measurement is exacerbated by this identification with the self-sense because of the investment that the self-sense will have, and that draws it out. It draws all of these dualities out. It separates them. It demarcates them. It brings them out. It makes them prominent to consciousness. It gives substance to what otherwise has no substance.
Nothing, nothing whatsoever has any substance other than what's given to it by us through conceiving and delusion and measurement and clinging. The mind builds reality. It makes it prominent to consciousness, to perception, and then we react, we cling. The whole thing just kind of loops around on itself, in this almost unentangleable way. And we suffer, we suffer because of that.
So again, just to really reinforce this point: all of it is mutually dependent. It's not this first, going on to this. It's not a linear process in time. That could be frustrating, that it just feels like a mass of spaghetti that's unentangleable. But because everything is feeding everything else, it's also then the case that there are many strands of spaghetti we can start nibbling on, so to speak. You can actually approach this from any angle, from many different angles. So I can approach it from the clinging angle. I could approach it from the measuring angle. I could approach it from the conceiving angle. I can approach it from the self angle. There's a problem in it being complicated to the point of unentangleability, but there's also opportunity there. We can actually find our way into this unbinding and into the truth of this through many different approaches.
As if that wasn't enough [laughs], the knower, the mind, the awareness, that which knows, that, too, is built in the process. That, too, is built in the same process. It's very tempting to feel like, "Well, there is a mind that's doing all this," or "There is something that's aware of that. We can at least say that." But that, too, is built in the process. There's nothing outside of this dependent arising. The mind, objects, and time, the sense of time as something real, all of that is built together. They build and they reinforce each other. It's said, I don't know where this is from, it's said that unless your jaw is hanging down almost to the floor, you haven't really understood dependent origination. [laughs] There is something completely and utterly radical about this stuff. The mind conceptually actually can't really fully approach it. That doesn't mean it's not possible to penetrate it and untangle it and experience that unbinding through practice. But there's a limit to how far the conceptual mind can go in understanding it.
The world and the mind are empty. They're empty because they depend on this building process. We could ask -- I can build a lot, and we see when we've got really a lot of papañca, we made a whole big issue about something, and we're really seeing the situation in a certain way, and you've had something with your partner or with your friend or whatever it is, building this storm up and you're really building it, the self is coming in, a big self-sense really building it a lot, on one extreme. I can build less than that. Just calm down a little bit, and build less, build less. In practice, build less, build less, build less. It's all built. As I build less, the world of experience appears less solid, and fades more and more. Where on that continuum of building is the point that reveals the real world? Which stance? There's no place to stand that reveals the real world. There's no amount of self-sense that reveals the real object. There's no amount of clinging or not clinging that reveals the real object, the real world, the real way things are. Things are empty, they are fabricated, more or less or less. We might ask, is it possible? The Buddha says it's possible to actually go completely beyond fabricating.
So this we need to understand. And he says, if we don't understand this, we travel in saṃsāra, endlessly in this round, endlessly. And he says people who don't understand, their endless travelling in saṃsāra is only a journey of ignorance. In other words, ignorance, this misunderstanding of reality is what's feeding all of this and making it seem so real. And if we don't understand, we cannot get away from the round, which he says the round, saṃsāra, is a thisness and an otherwiseness. In other words, we have this experience, "It's this thing, and a thing that's not this thing." It's a duality: this and that. Endless stream of this and that, this and that, and we can't get away in our life from this and that, the thises that we like and thises that we don't like, and thats that we like and don't like. And we suffer, and we're trapped in a world of this and that, of this and that, if we don't understand.
And so understanding is the most important thing. But he also points: it's possible to go beyond. He says in one dialogue with someone, he said, "Knowing the destruction of all that is fabricated, if you know the destruction of all that is fabricated" -- all this is fabricated; everything is fabricated -- "you know the Unmade."[7] You know what is Unmade. If we know the destruction of the fabricated, we then know the Unmade, what is not fabricated. Is there something that is not fabricated, that is not built in this process?
Another instance, he says, "Where name and form" -- in other words, where the movements of the perceiving mind and the perception of form -- "where the movements of the perceiving mind and the perception of form are completely cut off, it is there that the tangle gets untangled, the tangle gets snapped," is what he says.[8] Where the movements of the perceiving mind and the perception of form are completely cut off, that is where the tangle gets snapped.
Someone asked Sāriputta, "When that happens, when the consciousness goes that deep in its untangling, its journey of untangling, could you say there's something left then?", and he said, "Don't say that. Don't say there's something left." "All right, could you say there's nothing left?" He said, "Don't say that either." "Could you say there's both something left and not something left?" "Don't say that." "Could you say there's neither something left nor not something left?" "Don't say that either. What's left is beyond notions of being and not being, beyond notions of existing and not existing."[9]
So there's a word that we use, "immeasurable." And we use it -- in the Dharma, it's used in a number of different contexts. We talk about the brahmavihāras, loving-kindness and compassion and joy and equanimity, being immeasurable in their extent, a heart that's opened immeasurably to include all. Or sometimes, this sense of consciousness in what's called infinite consciousness can actually open so that that sense of consciousness, too, also becomes immeasurable, wide, infinitely wide. That sense of infinite consciousness can be either with nothing arising in that consciousness in terms of the sense doors, or we're still hearing a little bit, and sounds, etc., but consciousness infinitely wide, infinitely expansive.
But there's another way of using this word, "immeasurable," and it points to what's beyond this building process -- nibbāna, what's beyond this building process. And it's really, we could say, beyond measure in the sense of being beyond any dimensionality. It's not of space; it doesn't have dimensions in space. It's not of time; it doesn't exist in time, in the past or in the future or in the present. Beyond space, beyond time. It's the mind that creates measure. This building process, this building, measuring, and measuring space and time as well as something, aspects of our experience that get built through measuring.
So sometimes in talking about nibbāna, in talking about the Unfabricated, the Buddha on a couple of occasions talks about "consciousness or knowing without feature," in other words not knowing anything; it's not knowing anything in the usual sense, but without limit. Anantam is the Pali. Anantam, without limit, but it's a different kind of limit than the infinite expanse.
So what's really important here is to see that all this is actually a continuum of understanding. We can build things, measure things, cling, fabricate, believe in reality a lot, really extreme, a lot of papañca, a lot of storm, everything seems so real, and we're feeding that process. And we can do that less and less and less. There's a continuum of fading. As we let go more, as we see into this process, there's a real continuum of the fading. It's possible to go beyond all building. But what's important to see is that there's a real continuum. It's a continuum, and we can move, we do move on that continuum. Practice allows us a greater range of moving on that continuum. Especially when we pick up working with the three characteristics and these kinds of things that I was talking about, then we can move more on that continuum. Things fade more. What's more important is the understanding that things are being built. Things are being built all the time. Even when it feels like I'm just sitting here, innocently being, things are being built. And in being built they are empty. They are empty. There's no real way things are.
What's really, really important, that I hope that you take, is that we can actually practise this. This is the amazing thing: we can practise in ways that build less. One way of conceiving of practice that would actually include the whole of the Dharma -- so what is Dharma practice? To understand how we build suffering and experience. To understand both how suffering and, more deeply, how experience itself is built, and to learn to let go of that building process. To understand the way we build suffering, experience, and let go of that. To put the Dharma like that, actually, that would in a way cover all the teachings on generosity, and ethics, and samādhi, and loving-kindness. All of it would fit in there. You can sum up the whole of Dharma teachings that way: understanding how we build suffering and experience, and through that understanding, learning to not.
We can practise this, and we can get better and better and better, and more and more skilled in the art of not building. In that process, understanding the fabricated nature. When one sees that this is fabricated -- freedom, freedom. As I said at the beginning, we suffer because we misunderstand what's real and what's not real. When we begin to see that the things that we suffer over are not real in the way that they seem to be -- freedom, unbinding.
Just to finish. From that beautiful poem, from "Faith in Heart." I just want to read a few stanzas just to finish, very briefly. These are much later in the poem, and it's basically about what we've been talking about:
The duality of all things
Issues from false discriminations.
A dream, an illusion, a flower in the sky
How could they be worth grasping?
Gain and loss, right and wrong
Discard them all at once.
If the eyes do not close in sleep,
All dreams will naturally cease.
If the mind makes no discriminations,
All things are of one suchness.
To understand the essence of one suchness
is to be released from all entanglements.
And to this ultimate finality
no laws or descriptions
no rules nor measures apply.
Let's just have a minute of silence together.
