Integrity and the Poetics of Unknowing

I want to explore a little bit more, again, a slightly different area of our attitudes and views and preconceptions around and in all this stuff, and practice, and the path, and our life, and reality, and all that. And it's an area that I find myself getting more and more interested in the longer I teach, just meeting so many people, and seeing in my life and in my practice, but because of teaching so much, seeing so much in those who I'm in contact with, how much our attitudes and views and preconceptions affect our life, and affect the way it unfolds, and affect our practice. And just seeing that inevitably, what a profound impact those things have. Most people in this room, on this retreat -- not everyone, but most people -- their sort of background in practice and meditation is, very loosely speaking, from the Insight Meditation tradition, very loosely speaking, or Zen, but some kind of tradition that gives a prominence and predominance to awareness, and the sort of simple presence and being with and mindfulness towards things. And along with that, this sort of primacy of mindfulness and particularly bare attention, a simplicity of attention to things, along with that is a certain relationship to thought and the thinking mind.

Most people in this room have spent years of hard work trying to look at thought and kind of let it go. And often, in that, it's very easy to see thought and the thinking mind as a nuisance, a problem, a thorn in one's practice, something which, in a way, we become suspicious of as a distorter of truth, a coverer-over, etc. And some of you I know are not from traditions like that, but most of you are. Most of us are. And we've had a lot of practice at, over the years, learning to put down thought, to not get pulled so much into thought, not to believe it so much, etc.

These two pieces -- the primacy of mindfulness and bare attention, and the relationship with thought -- are actually quite central to our history as practitioners over the years. And again, with the bare attention piece and the mindfulness piece, we've spent years practising this. Most people in this room have spent years practising. It takes a long time to develop this capacity to meet the experience in a very simple, open way, with presence, and the beauty of that, the real beauty of being able to do that, and the awareness being touched by life in that kind of direct way. And in a way, again, for most of us in this room, that has been and should be the foundation of our practice. So our ability to do that -- when there's a grief going on, or a fear, or anger, do we know how to meet that directly? Do we know how to be present to looking and to hearing and the wind on our face? Do we know how to meet it directly? Our ability to do that is really at the foundation of Insight Meditation practice and some Zen practices. And so we should, hopefully, be able to do that. And one never really, as a practitioner, abandons that. It's always like it's the basis. It's the basis. One never abandons that as a way of being with and a way of relating to experience.

And in doing that, in giving bare attention to experience, in being able to meet the experience with the simple openness of sort of direct presence, beautiful mindfulness, there's some degree of kind of going underneath the concepts, some degree of going beneath the concepts of life and the sort of complications that the mind has. And I know that you're all familiar with that from practice. The mind's making something very complicated, and the mindfulness, the bare attention, just kind of goes underneath and meets the experience directly. There's some degree of letting go of concepts -- to some degree. But the real question for us on this retreat -- and I'm talking about emptiness, etc. -- is, is it enough? Is it enough? Do bare attention and mindfulness -- will they, on their own, bring enough of a breaking through and breaking of the sort of attachment and binding of conceptuality?

[5:38] Oftentimes when a person begins doing these kind of practices with mindfulness and bare attention, what happens -- I remember this, and people report it -- is there's a sort of increase in the sense of vividness of life. So with the sort of build-up of mindfulness, it's almost like the grass actually does look greener, and the sky does look bluer, and we start to taste food. Everything begins to come alive and be very present and sort of sharply defined, beautifully defined.

We have a problem, though, in terms of emptiness and liberation, etc., because the problem is that we accept appearances. We accept appearances. So here's an appearance that it's such-and-such a time, we're in a room, someone's giving a Dharma talk, and I am listening, etc., this is the floor -- all this is the realm of appearance. And our problem, as far as the Buddha is concerned, is that we accept the reality of those appearances. Now, a non-meditator accepts the reality of those appearances. Sometimes, what a bare attention does, a little bit, is actually make appearances more vivid, and so kind of more believable, in a way. And this is quite important. There's a word that probably everyone's heard, I think: 'suchness.' Have you heard that, come across this word, 'suchness'? It's a very interesting word. It's actually present in the Pali Canon, in the original teachings of the Buddha, and there it's hard to say what the Buddha's getting at. But it seems to be pointing towards a sort of beyond, something or someone, someone's mind being beyond what you could put into words or concepts. It's a beyondness.^[1]

Later, as time went on in the Indian tradition, as the sort of Mahāyāna and emptiness teachings began to grow, the word 'suchness' became a synonym with 'emptiness.' 'Suchness' meant 'emptiness.' But I remember reading -- and some of you might have read this book -- The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. I remember reading it as a teenager and, you know, wanting to explore different states of consciousness in an easier way than ... [laughter] sitting through all this knee pain. And I think, if I remember -- I mean, it's years since I read it -- if I remember, he uses it there. And it seems to mean the sort of existence of something just as it is in itself, the sort of innate beingness of something. It came to mean, somehow, in a popular sense -- that's often how it's used in Dharma circles nowadays -- it's come to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant. The sort of ... [taps on something] You know, this thing, in and of itself, it's suchness. That's how it is. It's just like that. If I can get to this, if I can scrub clean, in Aldous Huxley's, scrub clean the doors of perception, I get to the suchness of the thing. I see it as it is in its sort of primal beingness.

I'm not going to go into this, but I find it very interesting: something happened as Buddhism was transplanted away from India, and particularly to China and Japan, which were cultures that had a lot of emphasis on the sort of momentary (I don't know what the word is) phenomenalism of experience. In other words, the precise texture of this unique experience was very fundamental to Japanese and Chinese culture. The Indians had a much different feel for things, and it was about going beyond things in some way, going beyond things. So you had these completely radically opposed cultures. Buddhism was born in India. If you read the original teachings of the Buddha, it's very hard to get away from the sense of going beyond things. And that met the Chinese culture, and at first they were like, "Go home!" [laughter] "We don't want it." It took a long time for that to take root, and when it eventually did, it was -- I'm not going to go into this, but -- via Taoism, and a lot of stuff had to happen. And when it originally, when it finally settled, it was quite radically altered in terms of its relationship with things, and this notion of the suchness, the beingness of things, and not going beyond things.

I'm mentioning all that -- well, partly it's just interesting, but partly because it has profoundly influenced, then, how the Dharma moved from the East to the West. So we, now, have got a mishmash of all of that, in the last thirty, forty years, a mishmash of all of that. And somehow we're trying to make sense of all of it. And these things have profound, profound implications in terms of how we relate to the practice and the implications of practice.

In the teachings, you come across quite regularly this idea, similar to Aldous Huxley, that we're trying to attain a kind of purity of perception. We are trying to scrub clean the perception and arrive at this kind of, "This thing, and this thing," and seeing it as it is. And that's partly the idea of bare attention. I don't actually know if the Buddha even used this word, 'bare attention.' I don't know of any place in the suttas where it actually occurs. That seems to fit nicely with our innate feeling as human beings of the appearance of things being just indisputable, solid fact: "Here it is!" [taps on something] Ouch. [laughter] It's just -- this is it. How can you dispute this? The world is staring me in the face, and I bump into it every day, and it impinges on me. And everyone agrees on it. Everyone agrees on it. It seems so real! And then, yesterday, I was talking about what I know is, for many people, a very strange orientation to practice, using the logical mind, and it seems like the thinking -- that's the part that's unbelievable. But this solidity ... [knocking] That's believable.

The problem, as far as the Buddha was concerned, is deep, not in the thinking mind but in the perceptual mind, because we actually perceive appearances already as inherently existing, as real, as substantial, as solid. The problem is woven deep into the perceptual mind. The delusion, what the Buddha calls 'ignorance' and 'delusion,' is woven deep in there.

Again, how does this affect us as practitioners and in the way the Dharma comes to us? One of the things that becomes obvious as we practise, and as we bring this beautiful bare attention and mindfulness to our experience, one of the first things that begins to stand out is impermanence, is change. We've talked about this. It's obvious. You just get a little bit mindful, and impermanence is staring you in the face. And then we hear about impermanence in the teachings. It's there in the teachings. It's very present. It would be easy to interpret the teachings and the Buddha's message -- and we hear this; it's present in the Dharma culture -- as saying, "See that everything's changing. And because it's changing, don't hang on. Let go. Go with the flow. Go with the flow." And obviously there's some wisdom in that. Obviously, obviously, obviously, there's some wisdom in that.

But it's not what the Buddha was pointing at when he was talking about awakening and enlightenment. It's not just seeing that things are impermanent, that they change, and therefore we shouldn't hang on, and let go. Have many people read the beautiful novel by Herman Hesse, Siddhartha? Yeah? Really lovely, lovely book. Again, something I read as a teenager many times, so touched by it. And again, years since I read it, but if I remember, his sort of peak experience was sitting by the river and watching the flow. And it's a very easy notion to kind of communicate and translate, because we can see impermanence. It's obvious. And it seems obvious: "Well, things are flowing and impermanent. Best not to try to hang on."

One of my teachers, Ajaan Ṭhānissaro, was a monk in Thailand for twenty-something years; now he has a monastery in southern California, abbot of a monastery in southern California. He wrote an essay a while ago. I can't remember where it was published. It's called something like "The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism."^[2] If you ever come across it on the internet, read it. It's really, really worth reading, in terms of how some of the ideas, notions in the culture have affected our relationship with the Dharma, and the way we see the Dharma, and the way we see the kind of project of the Dharma.

I can't remember who he quotes and da-da-da, but basically this idea of life as a flow, which we need to kind of open to and allow and go along with, is quite a Romantic notion, in the sense of the Romantic poets and all that. And it's easy for us to understand, because it's so embedded in our culture. It's so much a part of the sort of roots of our culture that we don't even know who the people are that started it. It's so much a part of the culture. But the Buddha comes along. In the teachings of the Buddha, my teacher's asking, is that a radical enough kind of goal of the path? Is that a radical enough understanding? Is it profound enough? I mean, I don't want to be cynical, but you could put that on one of those calendars, those kind that you get in the self-help section in WHSmith. [laughs] It's like, you could put, "Things are changing. Let go. So let go. Today I will go with the flow." It's easy. Okay, I mean, it's not that easy to do, but it's easy to kind of ... [smacks lips]

So emptiness is not just impermanence. There's more to it than that. Impermanence is a part of it, it's a stepping-stone, but there's more to it. Listen to this from the Buddha. He says:

The Tathāgata [that was another name he gave himself sometimes], when seeing what is to be seen, does not construe [an object] as seen [does not conceive or believe in an object as seen]. He does not construe an unseen. He does not construe an object to be seen. He does not construe a seer. [Then he goes:] When hearing ... [the same]. When [tasting, touching, etc., cognizing] ...

Whatever is seen or heard or sensed and fastened onto as true by others, One who is Such [an awakened one] -- among those who are self-bound -- would not further assume to be true or even false. Having seen well in advance that arrow where generations are fastened and hung -- "I know, I see, that's just how it is!" -- there is nothing of the Tathāgata fastened.^[3]

In other words, with no believing in a subject, you can't say, "I know, I see." We've touched on this already. We're going to go further in this retreat. With no believing, with no notion of an object, there's no grounds for "That's how it is! That's how things are!" It's pointing at something beyond impermanence. It's not even just that things exist momentarily. It's pointing to something beyond that. You can get the sense of, like, "Wow!" There's something very profound being communicated here.

Sometimes, again, in relationship to the change that we see in our life, you know, anicca, change, we say, "Well, you can't be in control of it all. You just can't be." Things can't be certain, as well, either. Our future is uncertain. What's going to happen tomorrow? How will things be in a few months' time? We don't know. We try, as human beings, often to control around that. And that's something we communicate as teachers: "Well, can we be with the unknowing?" But sometimes this notion of not knowing and being okay with not knowing -- again, it gets a little romanticized and almost elevated. And this notion of not knowing -- does it spill over and take up more ground than it should? In other words, that we can't know anything in life. (We're going to go into this in the talk.) Has it come to imply too much?

[19:06] So the problem is, or a problem with all this is, to move from "Everything's impermanent. We can't know what's going to happen. Maybe we can't know anything. Therefore let go!" -- to move from that to what the Buddha just said in that quote -- it's difficult. It's a difficult transition. It's a difficult growth and evolution of understanding. And it's difficult to explain. It's difficult to communicate. That's the problem -- that if one starts to do it, one is in danger of sounding very picky, pedantic, fussy, intellectual, mysterious, weird, whatever.

Here's a question. What I really want to do is -- I should have said this at the beginning -- is rather than me saying, "This is how it is, da-da-da," is rather for all of us to question, again, our assumptions, attitudes, views, preconceptions about all this. That's really what I would like to invite. And one of the questions is: am I, are you, infatuated -- that's a strong word -- but infatuated with simplicity in relationship to practice? Because it's very easy when ideas are simple and can be expressed quickly that we attach onto that.

Now, in our life, and especially as Westerners today, our lives are often very complex. And we're so caught up in the bustle and the complexity of things. When the teachings come along and something very simple-sounding is offered, it's like, "Yes! Thank goodness, relief!" Be careful. An idea that can be expressed quickly and repeated many times, or seems intuitive, can be very attractive. Now, there's a danger, certainly, in complexity. There's a danger in complexity. There's a danger in over-intellectualizing. There's a danger in trying to be really precise, definitely. But there's also danger in oversimplifying things or being attached to simplicity or imprecision.

A person -- and one hears it quite a lot -- could say, "Emptiness just means oneness. It means everything is one." And it's not quite right. It might be liberating and beautiful and freeing to a certain extent, but it's actually not quite right. So there's a danger here. And again, what's interesting is people's backgrounds, because (I don't want to generalize, but) most people -- this is a generalization -- but most people involved in Insight Meditation or Zen traditions actually are quite attracted to simplicity. That's what I come across quite a lot. Just to be aware what my background is here. Another person might have a different background. It's actually a lot more hassle to be precise with all this. It's a lot of hassle. It can be a lot of harder work, and in a way, it takes a lot more integrity. But what's the price of not doing that? So it might feel like a hassle, it might feel uncomfortable to be picky and precise, but what's the price of not doing that?

Sometimes in teaching, you know, and talking about deep stuff and difficult stuff, I could, or another teacher could -- and I actually do sometimes -- speak in a very simple way or a very poetic way, a way that actually leaves things quite open. It doesn't say, "It's like this," but more like gives a hint of something, with a bit of mystery, and just the intimation of something. And in that, I know when I've been, when the teacher's been speaking that way, the heart is actually touched by that. It's actually oftentimes touched more by a simplicity than a precision. It's touched more by the teacher leaving things open and mysterious than it is by the teacher being quite precise. But which leads more easily to the end of suffering or more truly to the end of suffering? I might speak in an open and more mysterious and poetic way sometimes. But then, is the listener clear about how to practise in the way to see the truth? It's a difficulty. It's a problem with all this. I grapple with it all the time.

So as human beings, and again, in our culture today, there's quite a big attraction to -- and our Dharma culture as well. So talking about Dharma cultures, and we talked already, but there are different Dharma cultures present, and it's quite interesting to move between them. There's quite an attraction and emphasis on intuition and the intuitive knowing, and living intuitively. And partly what I question is, what's that in opposition to? Because things are in opposition. Intuition as opposed to what? Thinking? Usually it's the thinking mind that gets placed in opposition to intuition. That's not a distinction you find at all in the Buddha, in the teachings of the Buddha. He just doesn't talk about the intuitive mind, or intuitive knowing, or intuitive living, etc. It's just not there. It's not a distinction he's particularly interested in. Again, it's something that comes more out of this Romanticism of the teachings. And it might be that the thinking mind and the intuitive capacity, they both exist for us as human beings, and maybe they're kind of equally good and equally bad, and they both have their place.

The distinction that the Buddha is always more interested in making is, what's coming from wisdom, from compassion, from generosity, from goodness of heart, etc., and what's coming from what are called the kilesas, from greed, from aversion, from delusion? That's the distinction that's important, not intuition versus thinking. And similarly, not spontaneity versus sort of planning things. So again, spontaneity, together with this going with the flow and the kind of Romanticism, gets a big hype in the culture today. And I really want to repeat: I'm not coming down on one side or the other. What I really want to do is shake up and kind of expose for all of us, how have I been approaching this? How do I approach this? Shine a little light on this. And what have been my attitudes, views, preconceptions? Because, as I said at the beginning, they have an enormous effect.

So I might plan something. You know, tonight with the talk -- I spend a lot of time with talks, going through, "What's the best order? What do I want to communicate? What will they -- what's a good thing to put in right now? How shall I say this?" Another teacher just comes in and starts talking. And I'm not saying one is better or worse. I'm not saying that at all. I don't want to come down on either side. But the question is more, from the Buddhist perspective, is the planning that I do in life coming from fear? Because often it is. Planning does come from fear. And if it's fear as such, it's a kilesa, it's aversion. It's coming out of aversion and delusion. That's the question. And I might be spontaneous and acting on impulse. But if the impulse is coming out of greed, aversion, delusion -- well ...

So partly I said this series of three talks, of which this is the third, kind of go together. And last night, a lot of logic and all this business, and it's funny with that, you know. By the way, last night was quite a complex sort of reasoning, as I'm sure you found. We will be introducing a couple more, but they'll be much less involved and complex, so the worst is over. Breathe. [laughter] But there's something about reasoning and the relationship with reasoning, which is this -- if I say, like I said yesterday, one has to be convinced that the self would have to exist in one of those seven ways, that's a very decisive ... You're just like, pshew! That's it. There's a real faith in reasoning there. There's decisiveness, and it's that that's troubling to us. We're like, "Oof, I don't know, because it seems so solid, and it just, well, you know, I'm not sure, maybe the thinking, you know, we hear rationality can't really get to the things." And we feel nervous about being decisive about the reasoning. And so it seems like we have reality on one side and the thinking mind on the other. And sometimes, you know, young kids at a certain age actually have a sense of the emptiness of things and the sense of the appearance of things actually not being that solid. And somehow, they start questioning and sort of pestering their parents. And eventually the parents just kind of, "Shut up," you know, and they lose that questioning capacity and just agree on the conventions.

So in terms of the reasoning mind, this relationship to emptiness, it does have -- or rather, it can have its place, very much. And in terms of the kind of things we were talking about last night, there's a sūtra, a Mahāyāna sūtra called the Pile of Jewels Sūtra. And the Buddha's talking to Kāshyapa, and he's talking about how it works to use the thinking mind to go beyond concepts. And he says,

Kāshyapa, it is like this: for example, fire arises when the wind rubs two branches together. [Obviously not in a climate like Devon.] Once the fire has arisen, the two branches are burned. Just so, Kāshyapa, if you have the correct analytical intellect, a Superior's [rather, a Noble One's] faculty of wisdom is generated. Through its generation [the generation of that deep wisdom sense], the correct analytical intellect [the reasoning] is consumed.^[4]

It's burnt in that fire of non-conceptuality, but you have arrived at it via conceptuality. So there is for most of us in our culture and our Dharma culture -- well, maybe not in our culture, but certainly in our Dharma culture -- the pull, the heart-pull to abandon concepts. Now, another part of us might feel very nervous about that. But something speaks to the heart of wanting to go beyond concepts. But the pragmatic, compassionate question is, are we abandoning or might we abandon concepts too early, too early in the path? This is really, really important, because if we do, if we abandon concepts too early, what happens is we just go back to default concepts. We just go back to default concepts: everyday concepts of here and there, and now and later, and past and present and future, and space, and all the rest of it, me and you.

So this abandoning of concepts does happen. A person gets fed up with concepts or sees that they're kind of, you know, not evil, but kind of a problem in the path, something to get rid of. And the abandoning of concepts can happen at a gross level. So we do meet people sometimes who just say, kind of quite glibly, "It's all empty! There's nowhere to go, and there's nothing to do." And it's very easy to say that, but then you look a little more closely at the way the person is living, and that level of insight has not translated into the life, certainly in terms of ethics and compassion. But there's actually still the kilesas running through, running through the life. So one is using, in that case, a kind of language of completion, completion of the path, but there isn't really any completion there. The whole abandoning of concepts hasn't gone deep enough or subtle enough.

[31:57] I'm in a very privileged position as a teacher, just meeting and talking and hearing from so many people. And one of the very interesting things I do as a teacher is participate in Dharma discussions -- not just here, but elsewhere. And then, it's different than in an interview. I actually hear people's opinions about a lot of stuff, whereas interviews, sometimes people tell me their opinion, but more often it's just sharing their practice, and me sharing my opinion. [laughter] But Dharma discussions, they're interesting because I actually get to hear people's opinion about all this kind of stuff, and it's a real privilege, and it's absolutely fascinating, because those are the things that have enormous clout, enormous clout in how our whole sense of life and practice unfolds.

What all this is getting at in terms of teachings of emptiness and all of it, and this retreat in particular, is that notions and concepts, all of them, all of them, all of them, actually construct our very experience of reality. They construct the very objects that we feel like we're naturally coming in contact with. Concepts like this or that, or me and you, a subject and object, space, time, past, present, future -- all of those, as concepts, are part of delusion, and they end up actually building our perceived world. Okay? We're going to talk a lot about this on this retreat. But all concepts do that. Okay? And that's something that we really, really want to understand. If I jettison concepts too early, I run the risk of not really understanding that, because I'm still in the world of things appearing. I haven't really understood. I haven't seen their non-appearing, their non-fabrication, their non-building.

So conceptuality, meaning conceiving of anything at all -- so I might not have a name for something I'm conceiving, but it's just a thing or just an appearance of some thing in relation to this subject, subject and an object, present moment, etc. -- all that's conceptuality. And that is woven up with perception. It's woven together with perception. Conceiving and perceiving go together. Do you understand?

Yogi: Can you say that again?

Rob: If we talk, if we say -- we'll get into this more. I'm throwing something out now that's going to be central to the whole rest of the retreat. When we talk about conceiving, what's meant is believing in things, any things at all. So I believe in this lamp. I believe in this bell. I believe in my body. But even subtle, really taken for granted things, like I believe in the present moment. I believe there is a present moment. I believe in time. I believe in space. I believe in subject and object. I believe in me and you. All these are concepts. And conceptuality as such, even in its very subtle form, is so deeply woven in as delusion into the mind, it actually shapes our perceptions. Okay?

Yogi 2: Is 'conceiving' and 'concepts' the same ... [?]

Rob: Same, interchangeable, yes.

Yogi 3: Are you saying it's a problem that we do this?

Rob: It's a problem. It's a big, big problem. [laughter] It's the problem! Rather -- sorry, no. It's not a problem that we do it; it's a problem that we don't realize that we're doing it. So, thank you. That's good. It's a problem that we don't realize that we're doing it, and understand that then what we perceive is fabricated and not real because it's built by our conceptions. Okay?

Yogi 4: In terms of how I live my life, and all of that ... Who cares?

Rob: Who cares?

Yogi 4: I mean, what does ... Do you know what I mean? Like, if it's a chair or not a chair ... [laughter]

Rob: It's more like tiredness. Is it really tiredness? Or fear, or this person being mean to me, or this pain in my leg, or this heartbreak, or whatever it is, or my death -- if I believe in that really existing, if I believe in anything really existing, that thing can cause me suffering. In fact, it will cause me suffering. So it's the belief in inherent existence, the conceiving of some thing, that causes the problem for me. Okay? That's the central problem in life. It will still appear when I'm awakened, but I don't believe it. You understand?

Yogi 5: But you could still have pain even if you ... Can't you?

Rob: If what?

Yogi 5: I mean, pain comes, doesn't it? And if you don't conceive something as pain, does that mean you don't feel pain?

Rob: Eventually, in that moment, if you're able to go beyond the conception of it, or go beyond the conception of someone -- in that moment of reversing your innate conception of it, it will dissolve. We'll talk a lot about this on the retreat, but basically, yes. Okay?

So what this is saying is that we tend to believe that here I am, born into a world that just exists. It's just how it is. I'll be born into it. I'll go along, and at some point I'll die. The world will stay. But what you see, what we see through deep practice is actually that we're constructing our world and our reality all the time through this innate conception and ignorance. And that's a building process that the mind does. And the more we understand that -- I didn't mean to get into all this tonight, but anyway -- the more we understand that, the more you see that actually, there's a degree to which you can play with it and unbuild things. There's a degree to which that's possible.

When we talk about letting go of conception, it's not just about not thinking. The thinking mind is kind of one level, but you can have a conception -- I don't have to think "bell" every time I look at this. I don't have to think, "present moment," "present moment," "future moment," "subject," "object," "self," and all that. It just, it's going on all the time without a verbalization, without thinking. But some translations of things -- you get, "You just need to get rid of thinking." I think it can only be a mistranslation. It's the conceiving and the believing in the conceptual mind that's the problem. So I believe in moments. I believe in a subject and object -- that's what the Buddha calls "delusion," and as such, it's the seeds of suffering. That's the seed of suffering. Now, we could say, again, "We'll just let go of concepts." But as yet, we don't have the tools to do that. We may introduce some practices in that kind of vein at the end. But we also may not, because it's quite a lot to let go of concepts at that level.

So this is woven into consciousness at a very deep level as delusion, at a very deep level. And partly why I keep going on about developing practices, developing practices, because that's a habit in consciousness. It's a very ingrained habit to believe in the reality of things, to conceive of things, and subjects and objects, and time, etc. And it seems so true. It all seems so true, just completely unquestionable. It seems so true. And what we need to do as practitioners is see the emptiness of that over and over and over and over, and repeat it, repeat it. And at first, when we do that, it's actually not so powerful. We see emptiness, and it's almost like it doesn't make that big an impression on consciousness. It's like, "Well, okay. Okay." [laughs] But it's not that dramatic. It doesn't seem to make that much difference. It's a cumulative process, put it that way. Part of being on retreat is that we can actually have a kind of more sheltered environment where we can really build up that repeated seeing, and then take it out into the world and build it up.

[40:46] So with all this, I want to throw out another question -- I actually put it out last night and even before that maybe -- which is, when we're using the reflective mind to probe into the nature of reality, or if we do that, does the heart close? Does the heart close? Does it need to close? Is it necessary that the heart closes when we're probing in this way? Is that necessary? This is important, I feel. As human beings, we have both mind and heart. So we can talk about trusting the heart, and that's important. We can talk about intuition. But what is pulling us, and what are we pre-deciding? To me, these are very important questions. And what's influencing that? So if I feel a pull towards, "I don't like that kind of practice," or "I don't like that kind of teaching," or whatever, which is all normal and human and to be respected to a certain degree, but the important point is, again, this questioning of, what's influencing me? And how much is it my conditioning? And the Buddha talks about this. He says:

How could one led on by desire, entrenched in his or her likes, forming his or her own conclusions, overcome his or her own views? ... Entrenchments in views aren't easily overcome ... A person embraces or rejects a doctrine [a teaching] in light of these very entrenchments.'^[5]

What are we going to do with that?

There's another interesting thing, and again, it comes from having this privilege of being involved in a lot of Dharma discussions over the years. It's quite common nowadays to object to the notion of Truth, if we give it a capital T, or Ultimate Truth, or something like that. That's a concept that a lot of people nowadays would feel quite nervous about. And I've had people, you know, in Dharma discussions, say, "Whoa, I much prefer the language of 'my truth' and 'your truth.'" Or much better, they would say, even, "my view" and "your view," and "my opinion" and "your opinion." And there's an assumption there that they're all equally valid: "It's all fine, and we can all nicely be together and have different views together."

And you know, one wonders sometimes where that comes from in the culture, because it does seem to be quite strong. And it might be from the cultural history of religious oppression. We're coming out of a culture where there's a lot of, like, "This is how it is." It might be also an individual's background of feeling kind of oppressed when they were younger, growing up in a certain religious environment or whatever. It might be. It might also be, and I don't know about this, a sort of influence of postmodernism, and this kind of more intellectual idea of how everything is completely relative and contextual, etc. I don't know.

But oftentimes a person is not realizing, saying something like that -- "Well, there isn't a truth. There isn't the truth. Everything is like my truth or your truth" -- a person isn't realizing that in their life, they're taking so much as truth, as real, without even questioning it. Again, these notions of a self, things, time, all the rest of it. Not to mention the whole sort of gamut of social conventions of what we think is right and proper and appropriate. All that's been somehow taken on board and not questioned. And yet somehow, when we talk about maybe some other truth, can get very nervous.

So in one talk earlier -- I can't remember which talk it was, but I quoted from the Samādhirāja Sūtra, and I'm just going to read the quote again, just because the way it's voiced is relevant to what I'm talking about now. It said:

If the [emptiness] of phenomena is analysed, and if this analysis is cultivated in meditation, it causes the effect of attaining nirvāṇa.^[6]

And then for tonight's purposes the important thing is:

Through no other cause does one come to peace.

It's quite a "This is how it is" statement: "Through no other cause does one come to peace." And it would be common, I think, for someone to take offence at that.

Yogi 6: Read it again?

Yogi 7: Can you put it up on the board?

Rob: Sure. [laughs] The piece I'm interested in tonight is just the last piece, which is, "Through no other cause does one come to peace" -- in other words, the implication that anything else you might do, religiously, spiritually, is all fine and good, but if you want liberation, this is what you have to do. So it's a very, like, "boom!" statement. It's like, "This is the truth, and that's what you have to do." But it says:

If the [emptiness] of phenomena is analysed, and if this analysis is cultivated in meditation, it causes the effect of attaining nirvāṇa. Through no other cause does one come to peace.

Do you understand? Do you hear the dogmatism of it?

Yogi 8: Who said that?

Rob: Who? The Buddha. [laughter]

Yogi 9: How many ways does he say there are to liberation?

Rob: Well, there are what are called different Dharma doors. That's an interesting question. There are different Dharma doors, but they're arriving at the same truth, and they're arriving at the same -- basically, you have to see emptiness for liberation. You have to understand the emptiness of all things. I think. [laughter] I'm saying that because different people will say -- well, different teachers will say different things. But to me, that's what awakening means. We'll talk more about this at the end of the retreat, or towards the end of the retreat.

[47:01] But very often we hear the language nowadays, again, of, "Well, they're all different routes up the mountaintop," you know. And it's beautiful, and it's very inclusive, and it's very open-hearted. So again, I'm throwing this out to kind of -- not to agitate you, but to ... Hopefully that these aren't blind spots, that they're not blind spots in the way that we're approaching life and the path. And again, I've heard, you know, "Everyone has their own path." And some people tell me, "Dancing is my path." Or I've heard all kinds of stuff, you know -- beautiful. Dancing or juggling. Juggling. [laughs] "Juggling is my way to liberation!"

And even, in one Dharma discussion that I was invited to at a sitting group, we were talking about this. I can't remember what the subject or the theme was. And it was so much about this, "You can't narrow it down. It has to be inclusive. Everyone can choose their own." And someone finally said, "Even if a person was a serial killer, that could be their path to liberation." And one just thinks, "What's going on there?" What's going on? What's going on in the being that a person can say that or believe that? Is it that we're afraid of losing our individual freedom? There's something about our individual freedom to think and act or believe in a certain way? I don't know. We can feel, or a person might feel, if they have this, "It could be this. It could be that. It could be anything. My way is this, da-da-da," that there's a kind of bold questioning of all this: "I'm not going to go, I'm not going to get constrained by tradition. I'm going to ... da-da-da ... myself." Is it that? Is it a boldness of questioning? Or is it a lack of integrity and a sloppiness in the probing and the questioning and the thinking?

There comes a point in practice -- and I don't know; in a way, you can't convince someone of this. But it's like, there comes a point in practice when one knows what it is that brings liberation, and what is kind of irrelevant, and what actually moves one in the wrong direction. One's very clear, and you see. And the Buddha talks about sīla, samādhi, paññā. There has to be the ethics there. There has to be this -- we talked about samādhi a lot on this retreat -- learning to settle the mind deeper in that well-being and the steadiness and the depth of that. And there has to be this paññā, this prajñā in Sanskrit, this wisdom seeing into emptiness. And one understands that. And people can have all these different opinions, and it's just like, okay, it's nice. I'm not going to get into an argument about it, but basically it's just not right. Now, I can say that, and it sounds dogmatic, but I kind of don't know how else to -- there comes point in practice where one just knows that. I don't know how this is landing.

Yogi 10: What were those three names?

Rob: *Sīla, '*ethics.' Samādhi we've talked about. And paññā or prajñā -- one's Pali, one's Sanskrit -- means 'wisdom,' and I'm using it in this retreat specifically meaning 'wisdom understanding emptiness,' specifically.

Yogi 11: So do you sometimes turn around and say, "No, no, no, no, you're not right"? You're in a discussion. Will you actually say to people that "I'm sorry, but ..."

Rob: It depends on the context a lot, you know. It depends on the context, and what feels appropriate, and what people are ready to hear, and all kinds of stuff, you know.

So remember, the intention with this talk was not to come and say, "It's like this," but rather, as I said (it's the fourth time I've said it), to shake things up for everyone, and kind of make sure that the light is shining on all this in ourselves, in terms of, "How am I thinking about this?" As I said a few times in other talks, a lot of the views and ways of conceiving we have are not even fully conscious. And yet they have so much power. They're not even ones we would articulate to ourselves and others, and they have so much power.

Yogi 12: They probably have more power.

Rob: Absolutely, yes, good point. Another kind of quite popular place to land with all this is agnosticism. That means slightly different things at different times to different people. But I remember another practitioner, and he was sort of saying, "We're all stumblers in the dark." And he felt quite moved by that, and working with him, he was quite attached to it, the notion that there aren't really any teachings that can provide a path or a way to liberation: "We're all just stumbling in the unknown. No one knows anything more than anyone else. The Buddha didn't know anything. The Buddha had nothing that he could possibly give you. A person of some degree of realization had nothing that they could possibly give you in terms of finding your way. We're all stumbling in the dark." And it was interesting how attached, how much attachment there was to that view, as if, really want to -- it's almost like you can't question that.

[52:09] Sometimes a person says, "What I know is that I don't know. I know that I don't know." And again, that can have quite a pull on the heart, but that "I know that I don't know" is not the limit of our human understanding. It's not the limit of our possible knowing as human beings.

I said this in the initial talk on emptiness. I'm a little aware of time, actually, and I don't want to drag it. Is that okay?

Yogi 13: Just asking, what about [?] ... Stephen Batchelor?

Rob: Okay, I don't want to get into names here. It's not an appropriate way. I just want to talk about different kinds of teachings and different kind of -- agnosticism means different things to different people at different times. And I'd rather just say what I'm going to say, and -- well, we could talk about that at another time or something. I'm also just aware of the time. As I said, the word means different things, but if it's, "I know that I don't know," it's not the limit of what we can understand as human beings. I said in one talk, the important thing to know is that things lack inherent existence. All things lack inherent existence. That's what I can know. I can be absolutely sure of that, absolutely, completely, crystal-clear sure about it at a very deep level of the being. That's what I can know, and that's what's important to know. So there may be a God; there may be not a God. But if there is, that God lacks inherent existence. That's the important thing.

I remember -- I can't remember when it was -- a while ago, here, giving a Dharma talk, and talking about emptiness, actually, and either I wasn't clear enough or because it's difficult, the person got a hold of a little bit of the wrong end of the stick. And a couple of people afterwards came up to me and said, "How do you know if there's no self? How do you know if there's no soul?", etc. "How do you know?" And my intention was not to say there is or there isn't, but rather, even if we have an experience of the soul or the inner self or God or whatever, it's still that that thing lacks inherent existence, and that's what I can know, and that's what we can know. And that's a different statement than saying, "I have seen something that you haven't seen," or "I have seen that this thing doesn't exist."

Sometimes with the word 'agnosticism,' we have a sense of a self that doesn't know how things are in reality. There's sort of a world out there, but we can't know how it actually is in itself. But what we can know is that it's empty, that it lacks inherent existence, that everything is a dependent arising. So there's a difference between just saying, "I can't know something. I can't know it," and actually knowing that it's empty, it's a dependent arising.

There's another teacher, Dharmakīrti -- last night we were Chandrakīrti, and now tonight Dharmakīrti:

Without disbelieving the object of this [misconception], it is impossible to abandon [misconceiving it].^[7]

In other words, we have actually got to go right to the thing and disbelieve its seeming solidity and inherent existence. It's not just saying, "I can't know." We've actually got to go right to the inherent existence and see that it's empty.

As human beings, you know, living and trying to live consciously and trying to live with an open heart, we do at times -- we are, I hope, at times touched by a sense of the mystery of life. Here we are, and it's just, it's amazing. It's a mystery. And the heart can be deeply touched by that, and there is a kind of not knowing about a lot of things. And that sense of mystery, that sense of vastness, that sense of wonder can be quite freeing at quite a deep level. Instead of just being caught up with little things, it's almost like the heart, something in the consciousness opens to something vaster. And we can let go of a lot of stuff in connection with that. But will it lead all the way to the end of suffering? Is that enough? That sense of mystery, that sense of wonder -- is that enough?

The Buddha talks about knowledge and vision of things as they are -- 'knowledge and vision of things as they are' being where this is all leading, and that bringing release, and again, knowledge of release.^[8] And there were certain questions that he just wouldn't go into. They were what he called "imponderables" -- just not interested.^[9] Now, this phrase, 'things as they are,' doesn't mean what we talked about -- the popular meaning of the word 'suchness.' It means that they're empty, that they're dependent arisings.

Earlier in the retreat, we talked about this spectrum of the self-sense, and how the self could be really solid and built up, and much less so, and much less so, and much less so, all the way, and very refined. And that, we talked about, is dependent on the clinging. The more clinging, the more solid the sense of self. The less clinging, the less sense of self. The same is also true of the world and objects, and we'll get to that as the retreat goes on. But let's just stay with the self-sense. And I threw out a question at one point, and I said, "How much clinging reveals the real sense of self that's the real self?" Okay? If I cling a lot, I get a lot of self. If I don't cling at all, I get a little sense of self. And how much is real? And some people said, "All of it." You know, you can't say where it is. (You following this? We've been through it before.)

That doesn't mean that it is unknowable, that there's a real amount of self that's there that's somehow unknowable. It means that it's a dependent arising. It means the self is a dependent arising. The self-sense is a dependent arising. And more importantly, what we can know is how -- this is the really operative word -- how the self arises and ceases, how it gets built and gets unbuilt. And it's that knowing, the knowing how, that leads to the end of suffering, that brings the end of suffering. It's knowing how. So that's different from just saying, "Everything is impermanent. It arises and ceases." We're actually knowing how things arise and cease.

I just want to throw this in briefly in response also to Rose's question. A lot on this retreat, from now on, we're going to talk about how things get built and how they -- not just yet, but how they get unbuilt, so to speak. And we can talk, there's a case for saying that -- what's left when we don't build anything? The Unfabricated, etc., might be what's ultimately real. I'm not going to get into that tonight, because it's a very loaded question. I'll maybe come back to it right at the end of the retreat, so just sideline that.

Yogi 14: What do you mean when you say "built"?

Rob: In the sense that if I see that the self-sense is something built by my degree of clinging, then I say, "Well, which is the real self-sense? A big, very exaggerated self-sense, a very solid self-sense, or a light, refined self-sense?" And I say, "Which is the real one?" No?

Yogi 14: But there isn't a real self.

Rob: Well, exactly. So the self isn't real in that sense. If I completely let go of the self and I don't build the self through clinging, and it turns out, I don't build the world of objects through clinging, everything just kind of fades. This is coming way later in the retreat. Everything just fades. What's left then? There's a case for saying, "Well, that's real because you're not building it in any way."

Yogi 14: It's just causes and conditions.

Rob: No, I've gone beyond causes and conditions. We'll come back to this.

Sometimes, again, we hear, "The Buddha was not a mystic." And that word -- again, different words mean different things to different people. And there are words -- sometimes the word 'mystic' means, to some people it just means confused sort of mumbo-jumbo. That's what mystics -- it's like big, lots of smoke, and ... you know. But another meaning of it is actually knowing something in a way that's beyond the usual, conventional way of knowing things -- knowing a truth, or seeing and being in contact with something that's deeper than the usual, conventional way of seeing things.

It's interesting. Some people have a lot of mystical experiences. Some people never have mystical experiences. Oftentimes the people who say the Buddha was not a mystic are people who, by their own admission, never have mystical experiences. So it's a little loaded in that sense. But, again, the question is more, "Where am I leaning and pre-deciding with this?" I, for one, would never dismiss mystical experiences. The heart, the consciousness, the perception can open up in quite a different way than we're used to. And are we going to just dismiss that as irrelevant? We have a whole different sense of things. Are we going to just dismiss that? It doesn't mean that we have to chase those experiences.

Someone, for instance -- just to pick one kind of mystical experience that can happen -- someone has a sense of suddenly everything opening out, and that the universe is love. It's love in its texture, in its fabric. It's a love that embraces and holds all beings and holds everything that's happening. And a person finds themselves in this huge sense of love. Something's happening there, and the perception is changing. The perception is changing from the ordinary, humdrum, "Here I am, and life's pretty hard, and da-da-da." And again, the change in perception is implying something about -- because which is real? If you repeat that kind of mystical experience enough, eventually the question becomes, "Which is real -- my normal perception or the mystical one?" There's something implied about emptiness here, and also an understanding, how we fabricate certain realities. The normal, conventional reality is actually, funnily enough, more fabricated -- more fabricated than the perception and the mystical sense of love suffusing the universe and being the nature of the universe. It's actually more fabricated, the sense that everyone has and agrees on, just "I'm over here. You're over there. This is a solid world that doesn't really have any meaning in it."

[1:03:39] There's something about understanding this whole building process. As one goes deeper into all this, there is a movement beyond concepts. And the Dalai Lama was talking about someone when he was younger, studying in his monastic college, kind of saying, "Well, it's all just inexpressible. It's all just inexpressible." And people would laugh at this person, this monk.^[10] When the mind, as I said last night, goes so deep that it's mixed with emptiness like water in water, you can't actually express that. It's gone beyond verbal definition. As the Buddha said:

Where all phenomena cease, all ways of speaking cease.^[11]

The Buddha said that. But that doesn't mean that emptiness can't be reflected upon, and we can't talk about it and be quite precise in our journey towards that.

On this retreat we're going to be talking a lot about dependent origination. I don't know how much John has already talked about the links and stuff. Has he gone into that? No? Okay. He will, and I will. And I think, actually, in the next week -- we're taking slightly different routes, but he will be talking about it this week. But to remember, it seems, when you hear this dependent arising teaching in the classical sense -- "Ignorance gives rise to this, which gives rise to that, which gives rise to consciousness, which gives rise to name and form, which gives ..." -- it sounds like a linear process: "This goes to this goes to this."^[12] And it sounds like it's a series happening in time. And at one level, it is. But as you go deeper into it, it's actually not that. It's not a very fast series of moments. Something else is going on in terms of mutual co-arising.

Let's take this thing we've already talked about, the self and the clinging. The more I cling, the more self-sense. So self-sense is being built by clinging. But guess what? The more self-sense, the more clinging. They build each other. It's not like one comes first, and then the other comes. It's not a process happening in time. It's a mutual dependent co-arising. Understanding that really deeply is the -- how to say it? It's the hinge pin to really deep understanding of emptiness. It turns out that these elements of dependent arising -- ignorance, saṅkhāras, and consciousness, and name and form, and clinging, and this and that, and vedanā, feeling -- it turns out, even, that it's not a process happening in time. It's often taught like that and understood like that. It's not a process happening in time, strictly speaking. And the actual elements of dependent arising themselves -- consciousness, you know -- the Buddha's dividing something up into concepts. Those concepts, too, are empty. What you get when you follow this dependent arising, it's a bit like a snake eating its own tail, and it munches and munches on its own tail, and eventually it eats itself.

So dependent arising -- the Buddha's extremely skilful, because what he's doing is he's saying, take these concepts, because these concepts are exactly the kind of concepts that will -- if you use them, they will lead, they will swallow themselves and lead to the ending of concepts. They will go beyond concepts, whereas other concepts will just lead to more concepts, and a getting stuck in concepts. So something incredibly profound and kind of (what's the word?) genius, really, of the Buddha in terms of identifying these concepts that actually lead beyond concepts. There is the taking up of concepts in order to go beyond concepts. That's a very gradual process. In its final sort of, you know, when the snake has swallowed itself kind of thing, that meaning of things and the way the concepts have dissolved is very hard to understand. It's very hard to communicate.

The Buddha says, when he was talking, actually, in several places -- in this case he's talking to a guy called Vaccha, a seeker called Vaccha. And he's talking about this level of understanding, and he said:

Deep, Vaccha, is this Dharma [this truth, this teaching], hard to see, hard to realize [hard to fathom], peaceful and refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. For those with other views, other practices, other satisfactions, other aims, other teachers, it is difficult to know.^[13]

He was really in two minds about even trying to teach it, you know -- something very, very hard to see in the way that this thing kind of goes beyond itself. And as I said (I think it was in the opening talk or at some point), when we use concepts on this path -- the dependent arising and emptiness, etc. -- there's something in where that's moving that touches the heart so deeply. When one gets a glimpse of the way it goes beyond itself at the deepest level, it touches the heart so deeply that there's a kind of bowing to it. One bows to something there.

Okay. Let's have a minute of quiet together.