Practising with the Three Characteristics

I would like to fill out a little bit and develop what we started this morning, the three approaches and practices that I offered this morning in the guided meditation. When we, as meditators, as practitioners, bring mindfulness to experience, bare attention to the flow of our experience, often, sometimes, to some degree, there's a lessening, a letting go of the story and a letting go of the kind of building up of the sorts of concepts that tend to create more problems. Okay? And with that, some degree of letting go just comes automatically with mindfulness and with bare attention. Often, sometimes, not always, and I'm sure we all know this as meditators, mindfulness alone cannot do it. But some degree of letting go, from mindfulness and bare attention. When we are in samādhi, to whatever degree, when the samādhi deepens, there's also at that time a non-feeding and a non-building of suffering, of problems, as well; non-feeding, non-building of self-sense; non-feeding, non-building also of world-sense, of experience-sense. Everything kind of fades.

Now, I've thrown this out a couple of times, but as one way you can kind of sum up what insight meditation is -- it's just one way, but I find it quite helpful -- is we're practising, practising ways of seeing that lead to letting go and freedom. Okay? That's kind of what insight meditation is. It's a collection, a whole collection, of different ways of seeing that bring some degree of freedom and letting go. What that means is that insight is not just a result. In other words, I can sit here and be mindful, and suddenly I have an insight. It pops into consciousness -- wonderful, but that's not the only, that's not the total meaning of insight. Insight then is a deliberate practising of the kind of implications of that result, what it means, deliberate practising of a way of seeing. So, here's a result -- let's say I notice that when I let go of my aversion, the suffering decreases. Okay, that's an insight. Maybe that's the first time I've seen that. Whoa, a fresh insight! Great. But then I need to practise that over and over. I need to consolidate that insight. I'm practising a way of seeing, of "Can I relax this aversion?", over and over. And that becomes a way of practising, a way of seeing, a way of practising insight. And that itself leads to new results. And then I can take those new results as a new way of seeing, and I can go further. And I get some new results and I can go further, further, further.

Let's review, briefly, what we did this morning. Actually, I'll review it in kind of summary, then I'll say some general stuff, and then I'll come back in more detail to each of the three approaches. So it's a lot about kind of meditation practice tonight, the kind of nuts and bolts really.

(1) The first one was contemplating change, contemplating impermanence. The Pali word is anicca. I'll say more about that later.

(2) The second one is -- actually, we have two ways of doing the second one. I'm actually going to expand it now to three. I don't want to overcomplicate things and confuse you guys. This all comes under what I would call dukkha, the second characteristic. So these three -- (1) impermanence, rather anicca, (2) dukkha, (3) anattā -- are called the three characteristics. Dukkha is what I'm calling the second one. And again, remember, these are not results. So it's not only that I see that there is dukkha. I'm wanting to understand something and use it as a way of seeing. So dukkha has three subtly different ways of doing it.

(2.1) The first one comes out of the contemplation of impermanence. Okay? If I see that things, everything is impermanent, everything, shut my eyes -- we did this one -- shut my eyes, and I pay attention, and I see that everything is impermanent, and I focus on that impermanence, pretty soon it should become obvious to me that if everything's impermanent, everything is incapable of providing me with lasting satisfaction. Is that logical enough? This one is a subtle shift of directly going into a mode of seeing everything as 'unsatisfactory,' dukkha. It's unsatisfactory. And that brings a letting go. In other words, or rather, if I see things as unsatisfactory, then I don't hold on to them. I just let them go. I let them come and let them go because nothing, nothing for me there. There's nothing for me there. So that's the first way of doing dukkha.

(2.2) Second way is, as we talked about this morning -- this first way we didn't really do this morning -- the second way is to sense the relationship with the experience and to relax it. So, basically, is there aversion, pushing away of experience, or grasping, holding on, pulling towards? And to do that over and over: sensing the relationship and relaxing it over and over, sensing the relationship and relaxing it.

(2.3) The third way of doing the second practice -- again, they're just shades of difference -- is emphasizing the quality of letting be, letting things be, letting it be, letting them be. Or you could say, emphasizing allowing, really emphasizing allowing, allowing this experience, allowing, allowing.

(3) The third practice, we call anattā practice. And the literal translation of that is, attā means 'self.' Anattā is a negation. So really, the best translation is 'not-self.' We're learning to regard phenomena as 'not-self,' as 'not me, not mine.' Okay? I'll come back to all these later in the talk.

Really important to see we're putting, we're prioritizing a certain lens, a certain way of looking at experience. It's very easy, with our history of insight meditation particularly, to prioritize a kind of precision of mindfulness, like I really want to be clear where this sensation ends, and exactly what the texture of the experience is, or be very fine with the attention. That's not the priority when you're doing these three, these three characteristics practices. The priority is looking with a certain lens at the experience, either the lens of anicca, or dukkha, or anattā. It's a lot of information tonight, but I think it's important because it's going to be very helpful.

Bear in mind, and practise with -- and I said a lot of this already this morning -- that the mind has this amazing capacity of being able to focus in and make experience microscopic. I can look at this sensation in my knee, and I can really go into it in a very narrow, focused way. The mind can be microscopic, but it can also be very spacious, and both of those are possible. I can open up the awareness to the whole body, and beyond to much bigger space, to include sound, etc. I will learn different things in both of those modalities, and they're really useful for the meditator to be able to move between them.

Okay. So I've been emphasizing the need to really support the insight practices with samādhi, and I'm going to reiterate that. I tossed out, you know, 50/50, kind of 50 per cent, 50/50. That's just a figure, but basically, most people -- not everyone, but most people need more, much more samādhi than one might initially think for the insight to go deep. Most people err on the side of not enough samādhi. There are a few people who just tend to kind of wallow in samādhi and not do enough investigation, but that's actually rare. But it does -- it definitely happens. So think about, really think about balancing, on the one hand, samādhi and mettā practices, on the other hand, the insight practice. Really think -- 50/50 is just a figure, but really think about balancing them.

[9:34] Do you need to do them in a particular order? No, absolutely not. It's not the case, as you usually hear, that you need to sit down and get your samādhi together and get a little bit calm, and then you're ready to do your insight practice. That's usually how it's presented. It's actually not necessarily the case. You could do it the other way around. You could do a whole sitting of samādhi. Fine. You could spend a whole day doing samādhi if you want. You could do a whole sitting of just insight practice, or you could split a sitting in half and start either with the samādhi or the mettā, or the insight. So there's a real fluidity here. There's a lot of possibility. It's more that over the course of this retreat -- and I would even say over the course of your life -- I would say that a practitioner really wants to think about balancing the development of these two, samādhi and insight, and really that there's a lifelong deepening and developing of both of them.

Sometimes we're sitting or we're walking or we're standing in meditation, and as Rose was asking the other day about the subtle body energies, something feels blocked, or there's some perceived problem. We're suffering over something. Something feels difficult. And I might try and settle the mind in samādhi, but actually it's just like banging my head against the wall. Maybe, at that point, what's really helpful is to use one of the insight practices. Here's this block. Here's this difficulty. Contemplate the impermanence of it. Really look at it, and see the impermanence. Relax the relationship with it. See it as, you know, not-self, whatever. And what can happen, because these are ways of letting go, is the thing itself begins, the consciousness itself begins to have a little more space in it. The thing becomes eased. And then what might become, after a little bit, might be the case, is that one feels more spaciousness, more peace, more well-being in the whole kind of inner environment. At that point, if you want, you can continue doing the insight practice, or you can kind of filter out that sense of well-being, focus in on the sense of well-being, and kind of lean, incline more towards a samādhi practice.

I was saying to someone this morning, developing, at a certain point in the development of meditation, it's a bit like you're an opportunist meditator, and you just, you're aware of the thermals, like a buzzard, sometimes you see around here. You're just aware of the thermals. Well, here's the possibility of some samādhi. Okay, I'll just groove with that for a while, or whatever else. And there's the sense of it can be quite fluid and open.

Part of what I just said, an implication there is, are we practising with our difficulties? This is really, really important. In other words, these three characteristics practices, they're especially helpful when there's difficulty. Okay? One actually wants to use it over the whole range, over the whole range of experience, and make sure that one's covering the whole range. When things feel good, start contemplating the impermanence of that and/or the other characteristics. When things feel just normal -- here I am with a normal sensation in my knee -- three characteristics. When things feel difficult, definitely, because they're ways of letting go of suffering. They're ways that bring freedom.

But oftentimes, a person doesn't feel good in a sitting or a walking or, you know, you feel sad, or you feel tired, or angry, or irritated, or blocked in some way, or there's pain in the body, or you feel depressed, or the mind feels scattered. All of that can be, should be taken up, then, as an object for the insight meditation. Really, really important. And even the one of scatteredness -- it's interesting. You think, "Well, I need to have some degree of samādhi to meditate." And that's true, but scatteredness, as well, kind of has a certain feeling to it in the body. So if the mind is scattered, and I just come into the body and feel the sense of that scatteredness, and then contemplate that. Usually when the mind is scattered, the body also feels agitated, not very settled and comfortable. Tune into that discomfort in the body, and contemplate it with the lenses of the three characteristics.

The three characteristics, as lenses, should lead to a decrease, a dying down of the suffering. That's their purpose. Sometimes we give too much authority to impatience, or fear. How much authority do we give these, these forces in our life? Tiredness, blocks, resistance, irritation, judgmentalism. It's almost like they have too much authority. We need to really be using the practices when those things are around. That doesn't mean to judge them. It means to not just bow down to them when they're there.

Just to throw out a little bit. When there's tiredness, the impermanence practice in particular can be very, very helpful, especially seeing quite fast impermanence. If you can tune into that, it very much energizes the mind, the consciousness -- as does spaciousness of awareness. When we get tired, when we get sleepy, the mind kind of huddles in on itself to go to sleep. That's what we do at night, we huddle in like that. And when we feel tired in meditation, that's what the mind is doing as well. It's contracting. It's shutting the world out: "I'll just shrink down here and shut everything else out and go to sleep." So opening up to a more spacious awareness can be very helpful. And the practice of letting go of our relation with -- particularly letting go of aversion is very helpful with tiredness, because oftentimes aversion is a big part of the constellation of tiredness. I won't say much more about that.

But remember, these practices that we're doing with emptiness and with not-self, etc., they are just a range of tools among a broader range of tools. That means it might be that you're actually going through something difficult emotionally. Some grief or something comes up, and it may be that you want to revert to more of a sort of simple insight meditation practice -- in other words, just holding it, just being with it, being present to it, bringing in a kind of kind mindfulness. Maybe that's the right approach. Or maybe you can just, in a gentle way, keep going, and contemplate the grief itself as impermanent, etc. You have to play with this. It's not like a right and a wrong answer.

Now, it's interesting with the three characteristics. They're not -- how to say this? They're not all the same thing. It can sometimes seem like, "Well, they're all just ... It's all kind of the same." Careful of that. Don't jump to that. They're very connected. They're definitely connected. Sometimes I say it's a bit like they're three sides of the same triangle, that we're kind of looking at from different angles, perhaps. It might be -- and a couple of people said this to me today already -- "Oh, I already do that anyway for one of them. That's my basic practice," which is wonderful. It's great, but remember, these are developable to very, very deep degrees as practices. In other words, each one is a kind of avenue. Each one is a kind of avenue into -- well, basically all the way to freedom, to realization. And as avenues, they kind of unfold. So you take a certain practice, like, let's say, 'relaxing the relationship with,' and it has a way of unfolding. As does the anattā -- has a slightly different way of unfolding into depth, and into different -- well, a very similar realization -- into depth and into subtlety.

So I don't know. Today, it's just been a few hours, but did you notice if there was one that was your favourite? Was there one that you liked more than others, or that seemed to work better than others? [laughter] Good, okay. Careful with this. You want to go with your favourite, okay? Develop your favourite. Careful of the language of should: "Oh, I should get this one together because of my personality, this, and da-da-da-da-da." But 'favourite' meaning which is the one -- and it may not be one. It may be a couple. It may be that they're all three equal. It doesn't matter. But is there one that kind of feels like, when you do it, it brings the most freedom? Like, when you do it, you really sense, "Ah, there's letting go here. I can feel it happening, and there's a peace that comes here." And you sense that when you do it. That's the one that you want to develop. You'll get to them all, everyone will get to them all, but that's the one that particularly you'll want to develop. Eventually it does get to this sense, like they're all kind of three sides of the same triangle. And eventually, when you get really practised with this, it's really humming, it's almost like phenomena just arising very quickly, and you're just kind of seeing them immediately as all three characteristics, and just all three apply, and there's just an instant, instantaneous letting go, letting go, letting go, letting go. But obviously, that takes developing it.

[19:53] All right. Let's go into each of these in a little bit more detail.

(1) Impermanence, anicca. We can notice this at different kind of rates of change -- put it that way. There's probably a more poetic way of saying it, but different rates of change:

(1.1) Meaning one can contemplate death -- I mean, that's the major anicca, isn't it? It's like, well, we're going to die. And actually that's part of this practice.

(1.2) You could also contemplate anicca on the level of, more like everyday kind of, what mood are you in now? How do you feel right now? How does that compare with lunchtime? Same, different? How did that compare with breakfast time? There's a kind of everyday roll and a wave to things, and just reflecting on that is also very helpful.

(1.3) More for our purposes now, a kind of quicker moment-to-moment sense of change is probably more helpful. But careful with this -- don't put too much pressure on experience to see the fastest possible rate of change. So you might have read certain writings and teachings that the meditator is supposed to see X thousand moments in a second or something. And you think, "Goodness, how?" And it's certainly possible. It's certainly possible that the mind can develop such a sharpness. But that's actually not the point, okay? It's not the point.

Sometimes you will come across teachings, Buddhist teachings, that kind of very strongly suggest, or downright, outright say it, that that is the point. I would say, just let the change and the fluctuation appear to you as it naturally appears to you. Don't force it to be faster or more kind of, you know, this very fast flickering. And just tune into that change, and then maybe it refines and gets faster and more subtle and more quick, and, you know, maybe not, and okay if not, really okay if not. The point of it is letting go, okay? The point is not to see this incredibly fine rate of change.

There is a teaching that's not anything that the Buddha said, but it's somewhere in the commentaries, in the Abhidhamma -- it exists to this day in Buddhist circles -- that what we're trying to do is get so sharp with our attention that you see these subatomic particles of moments of sensation, and they're called kalāpas. And the meditator kind of tries and huffs and puffs as hard as they can, and -- sorry, I shouldn't say that -- but gets down to this very, very sharp sense of things. And the implication is that that's the ultimate truth of things: you've got down to kind of the basic building blocks of experience. The whole teaching of emptiness, the whole reason why Nāgārjuna bothered to write all those amazing works and treatises was exactly to say that's not the case, that there isn't, there are not fundamental building blocks. That's a myth, a non-existent. They are empty. So just let the change appear to you as it appears, and trust that, because it's about letting go rather than about seeing some kind of ultimate subdivision of things.

If I'm approaching it through impermanence, as I said before, because things are impermanent, they're unsatisfactory. Now, also from the point of view of the lens of impermanence, because things are impermanent, they're also anattā. They're not-self. Why is that? If I look inside and all I see is changing things, my sense and my sense of self is of something more static, more permanent. And how can these things that I see be me? Because my sense of self is permanent, static, fixed, and all I see is change. So what I see can't be me. Do you get that? It also can't be mine, because when I see it changing so much, I realize I don't have control over it. And as the Buddha said, if the body or the feelings or the mind or consciousness, if that were you, if that were my self, I would be able to say, "Don't change! Don't get old, body! Don't change my mood out of this nice mood that I'm in!"^[1] There would be a control, but I can't do that. It's not mine. I'm not the possessor, the controller of this. I am to some extent, but not completely.

I just want to touch on something briefly. It's important. Sometimes you will also hear people talking about emptiness and kind of saying, "To say something is empty means that it just exists for a moment, and it's just fleeting. Everything is very fleeting." That's equating emptiness with impermanence. Okay? It's just taking, you're taking a description of impermanence and saying that's what emptiness means. Do you follow? That's not what emptiness means. Okay? It's important to see that. You will come across this quite a lot. We're going to fill this out, why that's not the case, much more in the retreat. But just to say right now, it harks back to the first talk I did and the general talk on emptiness. Emptiness really means this thing is dependent on the point of view of the mind. It's dependent on -- not that it's changing; it's dependent on the point of view. So those silly examples I gave about Scotland and whatever, that was a very gross way of saying that Scotland is an artificial construct, a concept. It's empty of inherent existence. Now, we can take a lot of those same arguments and make them much, much more subtle and kind of penetrative. There's something about depending on the mind -- means empty -- and also realizing the way the mind builds and fabricates experience. We're going to talk a lot more about that on the retreat. The mind builds and shapes perception and experience.

So impermanence is very, very useful, but it doesn't actually bring the same degree of release and realization and understanding as a full understanding of emptiness. It's not as complete, as powerful. But for many people, it's a very important stepping-stone on the way, a very important stepping-stone. So not to dismiss it at all.

(2) Okay. Second one, dukkha. We divided this into three:

(2.1) The first one I already talked about: things are fleeting, things don't last, things are unsatisfactory because of that, they can't satisfy me. Watch out. So one way you can do it is just kind of seeing through a lens of "This thing's unsatisfactory. That thing's unsatisfactory. It's unsatisfactory. It's all unsatisfactory." Careful that this doesn't mean the same to the mind as having aversion to it. It doesn't mean -- to label something as 'unsatisfactory' doesn't mean to be averse to it. It just means, "Can't do it for me. Can't do it for me, therefore I let go." Okay? Aversion can creep in, and be careful.

(2.2) Second approach. (I'm aware it's a lot of info. I hope it's okay. Yeah? Is it okay? Yeah.) Second approach. Experience can be divided into pleasant experience and unpleasant experience and experience that's neither particularly pleasant nor unpleasant. There's a word for that. It's called vedanā, and it refers to, it means 'experience' or 'sensation' or 'feeling,' and it's whether experience or sensation or feeling is pleasant or unpleasant or in between. What happens is when there's pleasant experience, we want more of it. We want to keep hold of it. That's just a normal reaction. When there's unpleasant experience, we're aversive. We want to get rid of it -- normal reaction. What we want to do, in the second practice, is become sensitive to the texture of experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and see if we can be sensitive to the pushing away of the unpleasant and the pulling towards us of the pleasant. Sensitive to the push-pull that the mind does, and then really seeing, realize that the suffering comes from the pushing and the pulling. Okay, this is a really important insight: the suffering comes from the pushing and the pulling. Something we have to see and realize over and over, really get that clear. It's not so much in the object in the experience. It's in the relationship. So that's a very important thing that we want to consolidate as an insight. If one's doing this kind of practice and feeling the relationship and relaxing it -- so one feels the relationship, and there's a bit of aversion, let's say, and one relaxes that aversion -- there's a letting go. That letting go can often allow a calming of the consciousness and of the experience, because the pushing away is a kind of agitating. Do you see that? I'm struggling with experience; when I let go of the relationship, a calmness can come into the experience.

So that's very nice, and you should let yourself enjoy it when that happens. Let yourself enjoy it. But, in a way, more importantly is that the calmness that's allowed because of that, actually allows the mind to become more, to see more subtly and more sensitively, and pick up on -- because of the more subtlety and more sensitivity -- pick up on subtler levels of pushing and pulling and aversion and craving. Do you see? And then you do the same thing again with that more subtle level. And you let go, and maybe it happens again. Maybe you let go again, and it gets even calmer, maybe. And in the even more calmness, you're even more subtly aware and sensitive, and pick up on an even more subtle level of aversion and clinging, and you can let go of that. Do you understand? So the whole thing has this really powerful potential of getting deeper and deeper, and more and more subtle. It's a very, very deep practice, very, very powerful practice. And one just does that over and over and over. Again, you're prioritizing this lens, either 'unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory,' or feeling the aversion, the clinging, relaxing it, relaxing it, relaxing it.

(2.3) Or as I said, it has a third possibility, which is just emphasizing the allowing, over and over, allowing, allowing, letting be, allowing.

Okay. When we let go in this way, we notice -- I touched on this last night -- what do we notice happens to the self-sense? Did anyone notice this today? The self-sense gets lighter, gets less solid, less heavy, less built-up. Did anyone notice this? Yes? Good, great! Why? Because the self-sense is a dependent arising. Self-sense is a dependent arising. It depends on this push and pull. To the degree that I push and pull and struggle with experience, that will be the degree of the solidity and the kind of built-up-ness of the self-sense. Okay?

Which self-sense is the real self-sense? [laughs] Anybody? Which one is the real one?

Yogi: None of them.

Yogi 2: All of them. [laughter]

Rob: We've got "None of them," "All of them." Both are right. There's a spectrum of the degree of built-up-ness of self-sense, depending on how much I push and pull. There isn't a real self-sense. It's a dependent arising. The self-sense lacks inherent existence. Do you see how all this is? Okay. So that's a very important insight, as I said, to practise and to consolidate. These kind of things, you can see them once, and it's not going to make any difference to your life. You have to see them thousands of times, over and over. See this, see this, see this until it's known here, really known in the belly, in the heart. You know that about the self. It's a dependent arising. It's empty of inherent existence.

The second thing that happens, when we let go in that way, is that it becomes easier to see that experience, that phenomena are not-self. You might have noticed that as well today. It becomes easier to see things as kind of just happening. Did anyone get that? Yeah? Good, good. So that's another fruit of that particular practice.

(3) Let's talk about this third one, which is the anattā one, seeing anattā. One can take this up as a direct, like directly go to this. You don't have to go through impermanence or via the letting go, etc. You can directly, with practice, for some people, begin contemplating things as 'just happening, not-self.' Interestingly, the Buddha, in his initial teaching, you know, the discourses that have come through the Pali Canon, he tended to avoid the whole question of the actual nature of the self. That's not quite true to say that; rather say it this way: that when people asked him, "Is there a self, or is there not a self?", he often wouldn't give them an answer. He would back away from the question, "Is there a self, or is there not a self?"^[2] And he had a few ways of going about this teaching of self, but one of them, one of them has to do with dependent arising. The other one has more to do with a kind of 'strategy,' as one of my teachers used to call it, a strategy of meditation, which is exactly what we're doing with this practice.^[3] A strategy, a lens -- learn to see, to practise seeing things as 'not-self, not me, not mine.'

With that, to realize that to identify with something is to suffer. Okay, so there's an insight there: when I identify with something, there's some degree of suffering there. Sometimes we don't feel it in the moment, but it's actually still there in the moment, because identifying is a form of clinging. When I identify, it's another form of grasping hold of something, and I actually feel that as a disturbance, if I'm sensitive enough. But oftentimes we don't pick up on the suffering of identifying until later. We identify with "Hey, aren't I wonderful?", and then someone comes along and says, "Actually, I think you're a schmuck," and our identity is causing us a problem then. So suffering comes from identifying. But more importantly, we're practising, as the Buddha says, regarding things as 'not me, not mine.' We're practising this lens of, "Can I just see everything as 'not me, not mine'?" And that's kind of the initial way into this that we're doing.

Now, usually, of the three, this is the most difficult one, or the most hard for people to get. But as I said, people have their favourites. And so, go with your favourite, and it might be, if this is the one that's your ticket, go, go, absolutely go for it. Don't worry that it's often the most difficult one. To be clear, what we're doing here -- and there's quite a lot to say about this one -- later on in the week, we will introduce a practice (I said this yesterday) where we're actually looking for the self. We're looking for the self, which seems so obvious. We actually find that we can't find it. I look everywhere where it could possibly be, every way that it could possibly be, and I can't find it. This practice is different. We're not looking for the self; we're looking at phenomena, at experience, and we're not identifying with that. Okay? Do you get the difference there? One is looking for a self somewhere, and one is looking at experience and not identifying with it.

Usually, human beings -- or actually, unenlightened consciousnesses -- when they regard experience, there is a taking it to be me or mine. When we regard phenomena in the world, certain phenomena, we take it to be me or mine: "This is me, or it's mine, my emotional life, my thoughts, my consciousness," etc. We typically regard things as me or mine. Now, we could be doing that in a very conscious way: "I believe that I am my mind," you know, and I'm very clear, and I'm talking to someone. Or "I believe that I am consciousness" or something. Or I could be doing it, more typically, in a very unconscious way. I'm typically unconsciously taking things to be me or mine, and doing this over and over, all the time, all the time. So there's this constant identifying with this or that, constantly picking up things and identifying with them. What we're doing in this anattā practice is kind of unhooking that identification. It's like a hook, when I say, "This is me," and "That's me," and "That's mine," and it's like hooking everything, and we're just taking that hook out, letting the thing be, without saying "me, mine, me, mine."

[38:56] So it might be that this was your favourite. It might be that it was a little more difficult to get into it. Actually, how was it for people?

Yogi 3: Wonderful.

Rob: Good, great. I will say this though. At first, just a sustained mindfulness, anyone sustaining mindfulness long enough, it will eventually, they will eventually have a sense at some time that things, the experience in some moment is 'not me, not mine.' It will eventually -- it's almost like mindfulness just kind of creates a sense of space around experience or phenomena, and it just naturally appears as 'just happening.' That's very normal to a sustained mindfulness. Samādhi really helps, okay? The more samādhi, the easier it is to see things as 'not me, not mine.' The more mettā, the easier it is to see things as 'not me, not mine.' And with all that, just naturally, a sense of 'just happening' might spontaneously occur at one time, and then you can deliberately cultivate it and develop that particular way of seeing, and seeing things as 'not me, not mine.'

And similar to what I said before, if at times you're trying to do this anattā one and it's not happening, it's not happening, well, perhaps try relaxing the push and pull to things. And what that does -- or contemplating the impermanence -- and what that does is create more space in the consciousness, and a kind of lightness there. And then seeing the anattā, seeing that things are 'not me, not mine' will be much easier. Some people, when they develop this practice, they like to actually label phenomena as they're coming up. Very, very lightly, say, "not-self, not-self." It's just the faintest whisper in the back of the mind: "not-self" or "not me, not mine." Very faint whisper. You want this labelling to be very light, not cumbersome, so it's very agile, and you can use it quickly and very, very delicately. So it's really just a whisper.

I was once speaking -- this was a while ago -- speaking to someone. There's a stock phrase the Buddha uses, to regard things, he says you should regard things: "This is not me. This is not my self. This is not who I am."^[4] And this meditator had read that and was trying to use that in meditation, sort of clunking things with "This is not me. This is not ..." [laughs] It's too, it's way too cumbersome and clunky. So you want something very, very light, if you're going to use a label at all.

Yogi 4: How would that differ from this Mahāsi practice, then?

Rob: How does it differ from Mahāsi? Because the label is specifically saying 'not me, not mine,' that's all. It's not labelling 'throbbing' or 'pulsing.' You're only interested in the particular lens of seeing anattā, and so seeing everything as 'not me, not mine.' Or you could -- even shorter label would be 'not-self.' So it's one label that can follow this right through, if you're going to use a label. You don't have to use a label with it. What we really want is the seeing, the consciousness to shift into another mode of seeing. Usual mode of seeing is to identify with everything: "It's me. It's mine." We don't even realize it's going on. What we want is just to nurture, to encourage a shift to a different mode of seeing. If the label helps that -- the labelling 'not-self' -- great. If you don't need the label, let it go.

It's interesting as well to watch and to kind of inquire, "What am I identifying with at any moment?" Or "What is being identified with at any moment?" -- put it that way. What is being identified with and how? What's the form of identification? Is it as me or as mine? This is very interesting to explore. We can identify [external things], certainly -- usually not as 'me,' I hope. We don't say, "I am the clock." Some people do, and then we call social services, but ... [laughter] But there's definitely identifying with the external as 'mine,' okay? Clothes -- so, interesting. Practise this: your clothes are draped over your chair in your room. Look at them. Stare at them for a little while in a relaxed way. "Are they mine? Are they mine?" Your car -- you can't do that on ... Well, some people can do that on retreat. You'd be sitting out in the parking lot. You're at home -- so this can be a very relaxed kind of meditation. Your TV, your stereo, whatever it is -- you can even do this with your partner, loved one, spouse, okay? It doesn't lead to a lack of love. It actually just opens up something, can open up something in a relationship.

But practise this, you know, looking at something that we typically take as 'mine,' and getting the sense that, "Sure, it's mine. Of course it's mine. Of course you're my wife, of course, da-da-da. But you're also not mine. Of course those are my clothes hanging over the chair. But they're not mine as well." There's a sense of being able to see both ways, a sense of the grip of ownership, of the belief in ownership loosening. And there's a freedom with that. There's a freedom, and that's what we're interested in, is getting the sense, over and over, the taste of the freedom that comes with it.

Of course we take as me, both me and mine, body and mind. These are the principal things that usually we take as me and mine: body and mind. So let's look at this. Body. Ramana Maharshi was a great, one of the great Indian sort of Hindu sages of the last century, and he said -- I think it was him that said it: "Trying to find happiness while identifying with the body is like trying to cross a river on the back of an alligator."^[5] [laughter] Very lovely. [laughs] Again, we want to learn to not necessarily identify with the body. Can we practise that, so we're actually able to not identify with the body? Look at your body -- I almost did it this morning; we didn't have time. What is it to just look at your hand and sustain that looking for a while? Or look at your foot, or look at, you know, your calf or something, and just look. And again, if you just sustain a relaxed mindfulness, after a while you get the sense of, "Yeah, it's me. But it's also, it's kind of not me."

It's particularly interesting to do this with body parts that we don't usually look at, because our body has lots of those, areas that you don't usually pay much attention to. And now we've all got single rooms here. [laughter] Perfectly valid practice to spend some time looking at parts of your body that you don't actually look at. And it's interesting, because we habituate a sense of me and mine with the parts that we usually look at. When you start looking, you know, open between your -- unless you've got, like, athlete's foot, and you're always looking -- it's like, look in there, and you suddenly get the sense, "God, I've never even seen that part before! Look at that. Isn't it a funny little thing?" And play with all this stuff. Learn to see things two ways. Learn to see things two ways, and feel the freedom of that. Feel the freedom.

Now, the Buddha said, given we can identify with the body and mind, he actually said it makes more sense to identify with your body, because if you look at the mind, God, it doesn't stay still for half a second, you know. It's all over the place. What's there to identify in there? And the body appears to stay still.^[6] Even more than that, oftentimes it's the mind that causes us so much trouble, especially for untrained mind, causes so much difficulty in the heart and the mind. To identify with it is very much painful. So if we take Ramana Maharshi's analogy about the alligator, you could say, "Well, to identify with the mind would be like trying to cross that same river placing yourself in the jaws of that alligator, when the alligator hadn't been fed for three days." [laughter] It's really going to be a problem identifying with the mind.

Okay. So we can divide the typical things we identify with into two: body and mind. We can also divide them into five. Actually, you can divide it many ways. We could divide into five, and this is very common in the Buddha's teaching, and dividing what we typically identify with into what's called the five skandhas in Sanskrit or khandhas in Pali. In Pali it's khandhas, I think. Just briefly explain what that means. (1) Body is the first one. (2) Vedanā, which I've already talked about, the kind of sensations and the fact of their pleasantness or unpleasantness, is the second one. And that means sensations at any of the sense doors, so sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts and mental images. (3) Perceptions are the third one, or discriminations. (4) The fourth one is what's called mental formations, or sometimes also called compounding factors, and sometimes also called volitional formations. This is a tricky one. It basically includes a lot of stuff, includes everything that's not in the other four. [laughs] It's a kind of catch-all. But there are different reasons why they're given different names, and we'll probably get into it at different points in the retreat.

Yogi 5: What's that last one?

Rob: The fourth one is, let's just call it 'mental formations' for now. Okay? (5) And the fifth one is consciousness, but I'm going to use the word 'knowing.' It's knowing, knowing this and knowing that. Okay? Knowing objects.

Now, sometimes you hear this teaching talked about as if the Buddha was kind of defining what a human being is: "A human being is these five components kind of stuck together, functioning together." Actually, it's not that. It's a description of the totality of our experience. The totality of our experience can be surmised, if that's the right word, surmised in the five, the five khandhas. So it's a way of breaking down experience. It's also the possible and probable things we will tend to identify with -- this is included in the five khandhas. Again, it's not ultimately real; it's just a helpful way of breaking down our reality in order to practise an approach, practise with.

[50:57] So one can go about practising all these three characteristics in relationship to different khandhas deliberately: let me deliberately practise with vedanā, let me deliberately practise with the body, etc. With the anattā practice, again, to be aware, to beware -- beware, be aware -- if aversion is creeping in the back door, and we're kind of clubbing things over the head with this 'not me, not mine, not-self.' To say something is not-self implies that, actually, it can be there. It can be there. If I don't like it, it's okay. It can be there, because it's not-self. It's not me. It's not mine. It's not a problem. It's not my problem. So careful if the ... [laughs] How's that funny?

Yogi 6: You sounded like, sort of like a sketch comedy show or something. [laughter]

Rob: [laughs] Okay. Um, where was I ...? [laughter]

Yogi 6: Sorry. [laughter]

Rob: Yeah, just watch out that aversion is not coming in the back door. It should function as something that allows, allows a letting be of things, okay? Another problem, difficulty that people often run into with this kind of practice, is what I call the 'kink in the carpet' phenomenon, the 'kink in the carpet' scenario. It's a bit like when you've got a carpet, a wall-to-wall carpet that your workman has put in, and it's got a kink in it. Is that the right word? It's got a little kink. And so you stamp on the kink, but it just reappears over there. [laughs] And so you stamp over there, and it reappears over there. Very easy to get into that relationship with this practice. What a person's gotten into when that happens is they're trying to get rid of the sense of self, which is not what we're trying to do here. Okay? It's a subtle difference, but it makes a big difference to whether you feel enormously frustrated by this or actually quite freed by it. So what we're doing, again, is we're seeing this moment of phenomena as not-self. It's not that we're trying to find and then squash the self-sense. Okay? Does it make sense?

Yogi 7: I'm slightly lost.

Rob: Slightly lost? No, please say, if you're not ... I mean, it's fine. Okay. We're not trying to get rid of self-sense. We're trying to regard a phenomenon in this moment as not-self. They're subtly different things, but importantly different for this practice.

I was working with someone a few weeks or months ago, on a personal retreat, and she was getting into this in a very, very nice way, and then she said, "Well, what about memory?", which I thought was a really interesting question. What about memories? I can see that they're not me. I don't have a memory and think, "That's me, the memory itself." But it's hard to say they're not mine, because who else's are they? This is important. What we're saying: 'not mine' means not owned by something separate and solid and independently existent. Okay? It's quite subtle. Or having this sense of it as there's nothing here that exists independently and solidly by itself that owns this memory.

So again, we're practising a way of seeing. And this one in particular, as I said, it's a more subtle practice, I think, this anattā. And it will evolve. It will evolve, this practice. If that piece, what I just said about memory, feels like, "Oh, that's a hard distinction to make," it will evolve, particularly being influenced by other practices that we'll introduce and that we're talking about. And particularly the one where we actually go looking for a self and can't find it -- that starts to make this practice, the anattā practice, a lot easier. Samādhi influences it, the contemplation of dependent arising -- all this will make the anattā practice easier and fuller.

Okay. What happens as a meditator begins this journey with the anattā practice in particular -- yeah, in particular the anattā practice, but also the letting go of the relationship practice, but particularly anattā -- is that (how to put it?) your range of skill develops. It expands slowly. What do I mean by that? It's a lot easier ... If I said to you, "Let go of your identification with consciousness right now," that would probably be quite difficult for you to do ... [laughs] in this moment. It's a lot easier to do that with body sensations. That's why we did that in the meditation today. What happens is we build up our range of what we can let go of. So body and body sensations are usually easier to work with at first. Then, perhaps, maybe something like the vedanā, the pleasant or the unpleasant. Thoughts -- thoughts are actually more difficult to see as 'not me, not mine' than body sensations, for most people. Again, all this is very individual, and you'll have to play with it. Emotions -- that's an interesting one. Is that hard to disidentify with, harder than thoughts? Don't know. You'll have to see. Intentions, the subtle moving -- you know, if I want to move my hand or move my foot to take a first step in walking meditation, can I see that as 'not me, not mine'? It takes practice because it's quite subtle. Perceptions -- can I disidentify with perceptions? All this, you're building up, you're slowly expanding your range based on kind of getting a smaller range firm and established in your ability to let go of it first. So I get able to let go of body sensations, and then I start expanding it to other things.

Yogi 8: When do I know that you're ready to go onto the next ...?

Rob: That you can do it most of the time.

Yogi 8: But it doesn't maintain. You know, I can't kind of maintain [?], like, "Right, I've completely let go of body sensations," but you know, and then move on, kind of [?] that meditation, to emotions or whatever. [?]

Rob: How about if you can let go of the body sensations most of the time, you try to do so? Then try and find something more subtle to let go of. That work, like that? Yeah? And there may be times where actually, in the moment, you're actually, I'm letting go of body sensations and thoughts, and the sort of range in that moment is actually expanding, expanding, expanding, until eventually you can even let go of everything, of identifying with everything in that moment. Yeah?

Yogi 8: Yeah. Does that identification change? You know, like, you let go of it one second, and then the next it's kind of returned ...

Rob: Yes, that's true. What to say about that? There's a way that it can become more constant. It will become more constant as time goes on. Yeah, yeah. So just keep practising with it.

Eventually we get to what I just asked Richard: awareness. Can I let go of being identified with watching an experience, being the one who experiences, being the consciousness? That's a very subtle level of disidentification. Really possible for a meditator, but you have to -- I've never met anyone who doesn't work up to it. I've never met anyone who doesn't work up to it. Even more subtle perhaps than that, the intention to pay attention to something. Very, very subtle. The intention to pay attention to an object.

Yogi 9: [?] sense of anattā ... [?] And then that's going to reduce ... [?] Does the intention reduce?

Rob: Certain intentions will reduce, but certain intentions are still going to be there, and even more subtle intentions. Yeah, yeah.

So that's a very rough map. I mean, I traced an order. But as I said, it's going to be very individual. And it's just, one has to -- the general principle applies that you get good at a certain area of letting go and establishing that, and then you expand it, and you expand it. It's a gradual practice.

When we let go -- and I touched on this yesterday -- say I'm letting go of my identification with body sensations, and I let go of identification with thoughts, and I let go of identification with emotions, etc. It's quite a lovely degree of freedom will come in there. It will feel very spacious and free. Almost without a doubt, you can assume that the identification will have gone to awareness. Okay? Now, again, it can do that in a very conscious way: you might believe a teaching or doctrine, Buddhist or otherwise, that you are awareness, you are the Witness -- capital W -- "be the knowing," or you know, you hear these other teachings. Or it may just be that without even realizing it, the identification has gone to awareness. That's a subtle form of identification. But that's also -- is that not ...?

Yogi 10: I don't know what you mean, it's "gone to awareness."

Rob: Identification moves between different things. So we identify with the body. And in the moment we're identified with the body, we're actually, funnily enough, not identified with the mind. It moves around very quickly. And a more subtle -- I was going to say "hiding place"; it's not really the right word -- a more subtle residing place for identification is to identify with awareness. There's still an identification there. And that can also, one can practise to be able to disidentify with awareness. Extremely powerful, when you get to that point, extremely powerful point in the meditation. No one's at that place right now, but I would just say some words. You can do that in a very relaxed way, and sometimes relaxing into it is actually what helps it. Other times being more intense helps it.

Yogi 11: Is that another way of framing jhāna practice?

Rob: No.

Yogi 11: [?] ... increase their subtle ... [?]

Rob: It increases subtle identification? That's interesting. I'd have to think about that. I view jhāna practice as -- or one way of viewing it is actually you're building less of a sense of both the self and the world and experience. And in that, there will be less identification, but it won't ... It's more like you would identify to a more subtle sense of the body or a more subtle sense of the mind, rather than the whole of the sense of the body. That's a good question. [laughter] It's good.

One way to think about it, you can -- I don't want to say too much about this now because, as I said, no one is at that point right now, but it's definitely possible for a meditator. Part of the clue is thinking of consciousness as 'knowing, knowing,' rather than some entity called 'consciousness.' Towards the end of the retreat, we're going to talk a lot about the actual nature of consciousness itself, and that consciousness is also empty of inherent existence. But that helps a little bit.

[1:03:08] So a meditator can develop this skill, this capacity to just let go of identification, let go of identification, let go of identification, have nothing, be nothing. And actually, in that moment, practise having nothing and owning nothing and being nothing. And it's interesting, you know, if you think about some of the teachings of Jesus, particularly on the Sermon on the Mount, some of what may be deeper, mystical meanings -- he says:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.^[7]

Really beautiful. What does it mean to be poor in spirit? I have nothing. I own nothing. None of this is mine. None of this is mine. And practising that, what opens up for the meditator? The kingdom of heaven opens up, gradually.

All right. We're almost done. [laughs] I want to talk a little bit about -- that was outlining the practice. But just to finish on a more general note, it's something about philosophical precision, a little bit. When I use this practice of anattā -- and this morning in the guided meditation, we were using the sound, and you listened to the beautiful birdsong. And it's like it just arises out of nothing and disappears back into nothing, into silence. And then another sound arises. Sometimes you get that sense with body sensations and with thoughts. There's enough spaciousness in the awareness. They're just kind of arising out of nothing and disappearing back into nothing. Did anyone get that sense a little bit? No? Is that ...? Yeah? Good, good, great, okay.

So it's really, really helpful to see that sense of things arising out of nothing and disappearing [into] nothing. It really helps the anattā practice, really helps letting go, and letting them go back into that nothing, letting them belong to that nothing. It's a very helpful way of seeing. Strictly speaking, it's not true, because things don't arise out of nothing. Now, again, teachings on emptiness, even within the Buddhist tradition, you get it talked about -- we'll talk a lot about this in the next week sometime -- you get it talked about as emptiness is this big nothing out of which everything arises, a sort of ground of being or big space of awareness, etc. That's not actually the truth of things, but it's a very helpful way of seeing, a very, very helpful way of seeing.

I heard this thing. I don't know where it was from. You know, things don't have to arise out of -- we don't have to see things arising out of anything. So when the wind blows, who is blowing? You know, when the thought arises, who is thinking? It's just thinking. It's just something happening. That's not true -- well, not ultimately true -- but it's a very, very helpful way of seeing.

More ultimately true, or more accurate, more precise, is that everything arises, all things, all things arise out of conditions. Conditions come together, and something arises out of those conditions. This is one of the things I didn't get time to say last night. This is a really good practice as well. It's a different take on anattā, to see things as arising out of a web of conditions. So let me give you an example. Or rather, usually, the self takes responsibility, takes over-responsibility for everything, absolutely everything. And so we end up blaming ourselves for a lot, and then all the pain of that.

For example, to me, because I see it all the time, a really good example is giving a Dharma talk. So it may seem to you -- actually, not in this group, because people keep interrupting me, but ... [laughter] Usually ... [laughter] It's always like that in this retreat, which is one of the lovely things, but it ends up that we've gone over an hour. But it's fine. Usually, if I give a Dharma talk, it's mostly me talking. And to most of the people in the hall, it seems like Rob is giving a Dharma talk. And it seems like -- and I'm sure different people think, "He is really boring," or "He is really intellectual," "He hasn't quite got it right," or "He's funny," or "He's this," or "He's that," or da-da-da-da-da.

My experience of giving a Dharma talk is that it's totally contingent on who's in the room and how they're listening. So it's a totally mutual process. You guys are giving the Dharma talk as much as I am right now. Okay? Now, I really feel that when I'm doing that. Some of you might have performed music, etc., with an audience, and you really see this back and forth. Or even if you're telling a friend something vulnerable and intimate, and they start ... [laughter] "Sorry, sorry, yeah! Sorry!" [laughter] Or, you know, looking at their nails or something. It's going to have an effect on what gets expressed, how it gets expressed. The energy of, you know, two people making love, and one person starts yawning. [laughter] It's like, of course it's going to take the wind out of the sails of the other person.

Things are a dependent arising. We tend to make others responsible and make ourselves responsible. So I know, when I give a talk and it feels a certain way, sure, it depends -- am I tired, or am I not? You know, can I even read my little, tiny handwriting? [laughs] Mostly it seems to depend on the energy in the room and the quality of the listening. Now, the quality of listening of course is dependent on what I'm putting out; there's a mutual dependency here. So you give off certain signals, and when there's a quality of real aliveness and presence sometimes, that affects what I say and how I say it, etc. Same -- sometimes opening talks are really funny. They can feel so frigid sometimes because -- you guys weren't like this, but oftentimes ... [laughter] Sometimes people are just in a state of shock when they arrive on retreat. And it's, you know, people don't know anything, and it's very -- the whole thing hasn't kind of been lubricated and softened up, and so it feels quite heavy and staid, etc. Why? It's just a dependent arising. Do I feel like I'm boring because ...? No. Maybe I should, but no, I don't. But we see this, and you can see it in all kinds of ways. What are the conditions that give rise to something, in the moment, also in the past? So we blame ourselves for things. Maybe I was tired. Maybe in some interaction the person was placing huge pressure on me, or judging me, or being really critical, and that affected how I spoke and what I was able to access in that moment, how I expressed myself or not.

So we can understand, you can understand what I just said intellectually, and say, "Oh yeah, I see that. That's really clear." The habit of delusion will be to keep seeing in terms of self, keep seeing in terms of self, blaming self, and holding self responsible. So over and over and over again, we need to practise -- again, the golden word -- seeing things a different way, seeing things in terms of, "It's a web of conditions that gives rise to something. What conditions gave rise to that?" When we find ourselves blaming ourselves, actually to inquire, look back on the experience, say, "What was the web of conditions that gave rise to that not being so great in whatever way it was?"

I'm going to leave a bit out because it's getting quite, quite late. Unless you guys are still okay? I don't know, how's the energy? All right, great. [laughter] No one asked me how I am. [laughter] A lot of times it's -- I'm enjoying the fact that all you guys seem very receptive. You probably wouldn't have signed up for the retreat if you weren't, but sometimes in other retreats, and I put out some of this stuff, and I suggest that people might practise in some of these ways, and oftentimes there's a lot of resistance or reluctance on the part of people to practise in these ways. And it's coming from different reasons, but sometimes it's because people are either horrified or just reluctant to engage in a kind of 'doing' in practice. So I'm 'doing' this contemplation of impermanence. I'm 'doing' the anattā practice. And that feels like that can't be right, or it feels like it's too much, too much doing. There's a resistance and an objection to doing. Okay? And one would prefer, a lot of people would prefer non-doing. But putting a lens of anattā on, or a lens of impermanence, or a lens of letting go of the clinging, you have to see something: actually it's a non-doing. So usually what we do is 'me, mine, me, mine,' cling, reject, want, push, pull. We're doing that all the time, and we're just completely used to it. It's completely a habit. We're completely habituated to it. And we take that as normal, and then when someone might suggest letting go of that doing, we feel that that letting go is actually a doing. All it is is just interrupting a very ingrained habit of doing. And it feels like a doing at first. Soon enough it will feel like a non-doing.

All these three characteristics practices, you could say, borrowing a term from the Christian mystics, it's kind of practising what they call a "holy disinterest," a holy disinterest in phenomena. It's ... not really opposite, but usually when we talk about mindfulness, it's about being very interested in experience and giving a lot of attention to our experience. And what we're actually doing is a kind of just, 'not interested, not interested, not interested.' But it's holy, in the sense it's coming from a deep letting go, and it's coming with a deep spiritual intention. It's a different quality from just being kind of spaced out and not interested. It's a holy disinterest. There's a beautiful -- some of you will know this from Dōgen, the Zen Master, if I get it right:

To walk the Buddha Way is to study the self [I think it begins. Then he says:] To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. [Then he goes on. He says:] To be enlightened by all things is to drop mind and body of self and other.^[8]

To drop mind and body -- that's what we're doing, kind of dropping mind, dropping the preoccupation with things through seeing them a certain way. It's a holy disinterest.

The Buddha sometimes can sound quite judgmental, sometimes, but he says:

See them, floundering in their sense of mine, like fish in the puddles of a dried-up stream. [Harsh image.] And seeing this, live with no mine, not forming attachment for states of becoming [for states of being].^[9]

He goes on. He says:

Comprehending sense contact with no greed ... the enlightened person doesn't adhere to what's seen or heard. Comprehending perception, the sage, not stuck in possessions, crosses over the flood ... and lives heedfully, with arrow removed [with suffering removed].

That word 'comprehending' means to see that things are not-self, to see them as not-self. But it also means to see that they're empty of inherent existence. And these practices of the three characteristics -- we're just starting them, but I'm just pointing to where they're going -- as I said, they unfold. And eventually, they reveal the emptiness of inherent existence of all phenomena. We go with them, as I said, as avenues that unfold, that lead to their own kind of insights.

Okay. Lot of stuff. Let's just have a minute of quiet together.