Two Talks: 1- Mindfulness and Emptiness - The Foundations; 2- The Ending of the World

1 -- Mindfulness and Emptiness -- The Foundations

What I actually want to just briefly touch on is the relationship of mindfulness and emptiness, okay? And this, I think, is very important because it's really the most basic entry point into emptiness, certainly for people with Insight Meditation backgrounds. Like I said last night, it seems to us that our experience -- outer experience, so-called, and inner experience, emotions and body pains and thoughts, etc. -- it seems as if all of that has a kind of solidity, substantiality, kind of independent reality.

Now, I remember doing a retreat last year, leading just a weekend retreat on equanimity. And it was awful weather, absolutely awful. It was a full retreat, so I kept sending them out into this awful weather to do their walking meditation. [laughs] And one of the retreatants, very lovely, came -- we had a question/answer period -- and came in and shared. She would go out. It was cold and rainy and very, very windy, and a lot of rain, and quite cold. And shared, as she went out onto the front lawn to do the walking meditation, the thought comes up very strongly, "This is awful! This is terrible!"

And then, long-term practitioner, and given the subject of the retreat, bringing in the mindfulness: "Is it really awful? Is it, inherently speaking, awful? Does this awfulness have an independent existence to it? What actually is the experience?" So the mind very quickly goes, "This is awful, and it's terrible," and colours the experience in a certain way, and shapes it, and builds it in a certain way. And all she did was bring the question up: "What actually is the experience?" And then bring the willingness to be mindful and actually meet that experience directly.

So this applies to being ill, having body pain, certain emotions that we struggle with. It applies to absolutely everything. What is actually awful here? And if, in the willingness to really bring the mindfulness with a lot of presence there, and a lot of care and precision, really, what you find is this whole big thing of awfulness, whatever it is -- getting a cold, da-da-da-da-da -- is actually just fleeting sensations of something, which the mind is glomming together like plasticine, sticking it together. And then it's got this big thing that it's struggling with. So the mind stitches it together and blows it up into something, and in that, gives it a solidity and then reacts to that seeming solidity, because then, instead of these little moments of something that are, in themselves, just a bit of unpleasantness -- instead of that, I've got, "Oh, this whole thing." Is that clear? Yeah? This is really, really important. And for an insight meditator, want to be probing this over and over again, any time there's a difficulty -- emotional, physical, whatever it is, environmental difficulty.

[3:21] The same goes for what we think is fantastic. Lunch -- I was talking about that on the same retreat. And the mind hypes it up -- not everyone, but the mind hypes it up: "Oh, what are they going to cook? Oh, I love the food at Gaia House. It's going to be ..." Or you go out to a fantastic restaurant, or da-da-da. And that's not knocking the beauty of food and all that and its place in our life, but to see how the mind hypes up, both positively and negatively, our experience, our belief about experience. And then, when, if one is willing to really bring that careful, precise mindfulness to the experience, what do you find with this lunch that's supposedly so fantastic? If you try it on this retreat, really bring, take a couple of lunchtimes as really, really careful, slow, meditative mindfulness sessions, what you notice is, I put something that's supposedly delicious in the mouth, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, a little bit of something, of a nice taste, and then it disappears. And then a few seconds later, there's another bit of nice taste, or I'm chomping, and it's actually quite neutral. But again, the mind stitches something together and thinks it's going to be fantastic.

What the mindfulness is doing is exposing that seeming solidity and substantiality as a fabrication. Okay? The mindfulness is the first way in, to an extent. So mindfulness alone is only capable of seeing a certain extent of emptiness. But for a lot of people this will be, a lot of people with Insight Meditation backgrounds, this will be the real beginning of, you know, demolishing the house. It's not the whole story of emptiness. But the question is like, what is really here? What is really here? In a way, that's the question of emptiness. What is really here? And so all this rests on a real willingness, a real willingness to pay attention carefully. One has to be really, really willing to pay attention very carefully to what we crave, and to what we reject, and what we struggle with -- everything else as well. And that willingness is crucial. That willingness is the most crucial piece, because oftentimes we just believe this solidity, and we suffer. We actually don't question it, and we just go along with, "The situation is terrible. This feeling is terrible. This ..." Or whatever it is.

Eventually, there comes a point when one really realizes that it's this solidity, as I was saying last night, it's this solidity and substantiality and concreteness and independent existence that the mind gives to things -- that's the root of suffering. That is the root of suffering. And that's what the Buddha discovered: he discovered the root of suffering. And when one understands at a certain level, you see how precious that is. It's almost like everything else -- because we can respond to suffering ... Look. This retreat, we could have not gone out, and just said, "Okay, I'll sit, have a cup of tea, mooch around in the library, sit again, da-da-da." No suffering there, in terms of the cold. But in a way, that's just a Band-Aid. That's just a Band-Aid. It hasn't gone to the root of the suffering. Does that make sense, the relationship? For a lot of people that will be the beginning, and very, very important way in, how mindfulness exposes some degree of emptiness.

2 -- The Ending of the World

[7:25] So one day, the Buddha was sitting ... around. [laughter] Hanging out with his monks. [laughs] And he said to them, "Listen, monks. You might have a stride -- your walking stride, it might be" -- I'm paraphrasing the story; I can't remember exactly -- "a thousand miles long. Each stride you take when you walk is a thousand miles long. And with that thousand-mile stride, you might walk for a thousand aeons, ten thousand aeons, a hundred thousand aeons, and vast amounts of time, non-stop walking, and you would not come to the end of the world." And he went on. He said, "But I declare that without seeing the end of the world, there is no nirvāṇa." And that's what he said to them. And then he got up, and he went into his hut, and he shut the door. [laughter] And it was left to poor old Ānanda or someone ... [laughter] Because the monks said, "Huh?" [laughs] And one of his senior disciples had to explain it.^[1] So this is what I want to begin going into tonight: the end of the world. What does that mean, the ending of the world?

We talk about dependent arising, and I know John's been talking about dependent arising. I've brought it up. We can talk about dimensions of dependent arising (that's just a sort of vague word), meaning we can go into it in terms of the classical formulation that John's been doing, the twelve steps, etc. And that's very important, and I'm going to come back to that, if not in this talk, in other talks. But there are also other, less classical dimensions of it and ways to approach it. And one of them is to do with the nature of dualities. So that's what I want to begin taking about: dualities or opposites or things that are relative to each other.

A text by Nāgārjuna again, Ratnāvalī:

When there is this, that arises [that's a direct quote from the Buddha], just as when there is short, there is long.^[2]

So the idea, the perception, the concept of 'short' brings with it automatically, right there and then, the idea of 'long.' Short and long go together. Similarly, left and right. There are lots of these kind of dualities, opposites. Now, note, the short is not the producer of the long, so it's not like short comes first and then it produces long. They arise together, mutually dependent, as a pair of relative opposites. Okay? And similarly he says:

When there is long, there has to be short. They do not exist through their own nature.

"They do not exist through their own nature," as we know by now, is another way of saying they lack inherent existence, which means they're empty. Now, we could list a whole slew of such relatives and opposites: here and there, beautiful and ugly, even things like the general and the particular. Remember, these are not products, in the sense of something coming together through causes and conditions and being an impermanent product, but they're dependent on conditions and conceiving in a slightly different way.

If we extend this a little bit, you see that in life, in our perception, the occurrence or the perception, the thing-ness of anything, actually involves a lot of aspects like colour, location, time that it occurs, pitch, temperature, weight, density, all of them relative to those same other aspects of other things. Part of the perceptual process has this kind of relativity as part of it. So there are obvious causes and conditions for something to come together, for this chair or this cup to come together, obvious -- you know, the fabric and the building, etc. But things are also what they are, kind of by virtue of what they are not.

Now, we can interact with things, obviously. I pick up -- I was going to pick up the chair. I probably can't. I pick up a lamp. I pick up this. I pick up whatever. I can interact with things, but it and we are never independent of the context. Things are always kind of inextricably woven in and part of a context, relative to a context. And as such, they don't exist independent of that context.

So let's come back a little bit to narrow it down to dualities. Dualities depend on each other, and it's through not seeing that dependence that we get caught up in one pole of a duality, liking one pole, not liking another; craving, grasping, clinging, the rest of it comes in. And through that, we actually bring out in appearance that polarity. We bring it out, we draw that polarity out to consciousness by our reactivity -- pushing away the pole that we don't like, pulling towards us what we do like. We draw that out to perception.

Think about -- whole list of dualities here, and these are the kind of things that we actually suffer about. But they exist relative to each other. And in the non-realizing of that, we pull that duality out to perception. So something like silence and noise -- usually not a big deal, but often on retreat we can get into suffering around this. It's a duality. They lack independent, inherent existence, and we draw one out so we actually notice noise more. It becomes more prominent to consciousness. Tiredness or brightness of mind, again, exist as a duality, like left and right. And through our believing in the inherent existence, the independent existence of each of those, we react and we draw out.

Happiness and sadness. These are very basic things that human beings suffer with, and they're all parts of duality. They're parts of duality. Agitated mind, calm mind. Mindful mind, distracted mind -- again, in this kind of environment, how much that becomes important to us. Illness and health, or illness and freedom from illness, non-illness -- also a duality, also something the mind, in its inherent believing, brings it out to perception. Pain and pleasure, or you could say, pain and non-pain. The stillness of the mind, the movement of the mind. Aversion and acceptance. All of these, dualities. Grasping and non-grasping. Even more subtle ones like conceiving and non-conceiving that we can get into kind of arguments about in ourselves or whatever. How about realization and delusion? How about wisdom and ignorance? How about freedom and bondage? All of these dualities, and we could go on and on. Those opposites are seized upon by the deluded mind, in terms of not seeing that they're empty, and then reacting with craving. And that actually draws them out to perception. I'm going to go into this.

[16:00] Well, actually, I could even give more examples. So when there's restlessness -- and you can see this in meditation, or outside of meditation -- when there's restlessness, the notion, the dualistic notion of here and there, is heightened. It's fed by the mind state of restlessness. I'm sitting in meditation here, and I can't wait to be there, wherever there is -- not on retreat, not at Gaia House, by the tea urn, whatever it is. Here and there are fed by the restlessness. Or now and then: I don't like now. I'm waiting for then, or I remember then in the past when it was better. So restlessness increases the sense of this duality in the heart, in the felt sense of them, and gives it significance, gives that duality significance, gives each pole of that duality a significance that it doesn't inherently have. And vice versa: these concepts of here and there, of now and then, whether it's future 'then' or past 'then,' bring with them possibilities of restlessness or fear. Do you see that if I believe in this duality, I'm going to invest in one over another?

Now, I wonder, could you even expand this to more seemingly complex areas of our life where we suffer? How about loneliness and togetherness? How about feeling rejected and feeling loved? How about feeling understood and feeling misunderstood? And you know, different (what to say?) personalities will have different ones of those three that I've just said, which are more things we typically struggle around. Is it abandonment and rejection that's quite a common, painful theme in your life? Or is it not being understood, or being lonely?

So we actually fabricate or manufacture dualities. They are made inside us, in a way. You could say, for instance, in our life off the retreat, or even on the retreat, the desire for security, something called 'security,' that desire for security, which we see in our life, that desire actually feeds feelings of insecurity. It's the desire for security that feeds the feelings of insecurity. It's the desire for more in life that feeds a fear of having less, having not enough. [18:49] These are the things that go on, you know. They run through our life, and they massively, at a very fundamental level, influence and determine how we are living our life, our choices, how we respond to life itself. We conceive of these dualities being real and then we live life based on that conception, on that conceit.

We might understand this intellectually, which is great. And as I said, it's the first type of insight -- very important. But we really need to bring it into practice. Find a way of practising with this. We can actually open up some sense of freedom. So practice, practice, practice, always about practice. In one of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras it says:

Do not see fault anywhere.^[3]

This is something that you could -- I'm just throwing this out as a possible way of practising -- you could actually take that as a kind of lens, in the same way that we take 'not me, not mine' as a lens, or 'unsatisfactory' as a lens. "Do not see fault anywhere" -- what would it be, in the moment, in meditation, sitting, walking, to just have that as a kind of non-seeing of fault, non-seeing of fault, moment to moment?

Many of you will be very familiar with the very famous Third Zen Patriarch's Faith in Mind, it's called. And the opening paragraph is very famous:

The Supreme Way is not difficult if only you do not pick and choose [or you could say, the Supreme Way is not difficult for one who has no preferences]. When love and hate are both absent [when grasping and pushing away, love and hate are both absent], everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction between things, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.^[4]

That duality is drawn out and stands, becomes more prominent to the consciousness, based on that distinction and giving of, supposing of inherent existence. So, what would it be, again, as a practice, to practise 'no preferences,' moment to moment, in quite an alert way? 'No preferences, no preferences, no preferences.' Or to practise not picking and choosing? And in a way, those practices that I've just kind of thrown out are actually just versions of this holy disinterest that I talked about -- I don't know when it was, a while ago -- in the talk on the three characteristics. They're just a version of holy disinterest with a slightly different angle in. They're just a version [not aversion]. [laughter] That's what we don't want. We don't want it to be aversion. They're just a version of relaxing the relationship with things. Can you see that, how that would be?

[22:08] Okay. So let's recap some of what we've done so far on the retreat. So far, we've been looking a lot at clinging. And what have we seen? We've seen that suffering is dependent on clinging. And I've asked you this, and everyone nodded, etc. [laughter] With a lot of prompting. [laughter] Suffering is dependent on clinging. What else do we see? Self-sense is dependent on clinging, right? This is review at this point, right? The sense of self, whether it's built or solid or exaggerated, or light and refined and spacious and kind of not really that strong, is dependent on the degree of clinging. And then we were talking about the Cittamātra, etc. The substantiality of objects, the seeming solidity of things [taps on something] also is dependent on clinging. Okay? So far, so good.

And then, the last question and answer period that I did, which I think was on Tuesday, I think it was Juha who brought up a question, and then it was sort of ricocheting around a little bit. Have you seen, or can we see (better), can we see in practice that also dependent on clinging is the definition of things to consciousness? We see that when we relax the clinging, things begin to get a little less defined, or a bit blurry at the edges, or a lot blurry at the edges, and then even begin to kind of fade from perception. So the definition and the presence of objects we can see is also dependent on clinging. Have people seen that a little bit? Has that ...? Good.

There's something here that's really, really crucial. Something there is such an important insight. And it's interesting because often people have that happen once or twice or even a few times, or even regularly in practice, and often say to me, "I never really thought much about it," which is understandable. Or, "Well, things are impermanent anyway. Well, of course they would fade." But it's not just that things are impermanent that we want to understand. We want to understand dependent arising, that the appearance, the perception of the thing was dependent on clinging. Okay? So the thing, the perception, is dependent on clinging.

Now, to say that is actually pretty radical, would you not say? [laughter] Would you not say? Do you see how amazing that is, to say that? We tend to think we live in a world that exists by itself. Here I am. The world gets along fine without me. I can be grumpy about it, I can cling, I can not cling, I can be over the moon about it, I can whatever, but the world exists independently. Now what we're saying is the thing and the perception of the thing actually depends on the clinging. The world does not exist independent of the way that I'm reacting to it and seeing it.

So I remember years ago -- I can't remember when it was, but it was in a sitting group, regular sitting group in the States, where I lived in Boston. And one of my friends in the sitting group -- lovely man, older man who was a doctor -- we were talking one time. I can't remember what we were talking about. We were talking about different kind of meditation experiences. And he was sort of saying, "Well, you know, meditation is obviously affecting your brain chemistry, basically, or affecting your neurology, which is why you get these distorted perceptions," which is understandable, because we live in a very science-based, materialist culture, where everything must have an explanation in the brain chemistry. But to kind of counter that and just say, actually, in this case, when I'm sitting in meditation, all I'm doing, all I'm doing is (A) paying attention, just paying attention, and (B) I'm letting go of clinging, which is a non-doing. It's not a doing. I'm just letting go of clinging. I'm not toying with my brain chemistry in any way, or even have to put secret mantras in that do something with the da-da-da-da-da. All I'm doing is being here and letting go of clinging, and the world starts to crumble, blur, and fade as I begin to let go of clinging in quite a deep way.

And I think it was also in the last question and answer period, and we talked about this being a real spectrum, okay? It's a real continuum, this notion of fading. And I think I used the example of a tantrum being kind of extreme clinging, okay? Extremely upset about something -- some thing is really a big deal. And then both the self and the suffering and the substantiality of the thing and the thing itself are all really prominent. They're all really defined in the state of a tantrum. And still staying at quite a gross level, have you ever tried -- and you can try this in meditation -- when you're bored, bored in meditation, try to get more bored. See if it's possible. Okay, you're bored. Make yourself more bored. What you'll probably find is it's actually not possible to increase your boredom level. Why? Because the state of boredom actually has aversion as part of it. And if I'm trying to increase the boredom, I'm actually, at that point I've not got aversion for it. I've got the opposite.

Same thing with fear, absolutely, same thing with fear. Sometimes, recently I've been saying to people in interviews, "Go on then. Try and make your fear stronger." You can't, because the very try -- fear relies on fear of fear or aversion to fear, and without it, as I try to make it stronger, I'm doing the opposite. So either I will see I can't make it stronger, or even more, it will actually begin to fade, because I'm relaxing the aversion by trying to make it stronger. So boredom and fear, etc., they actually need aversion.

[28:45] Let's take this word 'clinging' that we've been throwing around sort of liberally. On one level it means, as I think Faith asked last time, it means the push and the pull: pushing away what we don't like, aversion, rejection, and pulling towards us, grabbing on, trying to keep what we do like, push and pull. If we use that word 'clinging' in a much looser sense, we can also say that to say, to feel like something is me or mine, inner or outer, me or mine, that kind of appropriating of things -- that's also a kind of clinging: 'me-mine, me-mine, me-mine.' It's a much more subtle level of clinging, but it's also a kind of clinging.

Now, when I talked about the three characteristics practice and anattā, I also talked about the identification with consciousness being a subtle level of appropriation, of me-mining. And as such, it's also a subtle level of clinging. So if you're still kind of following that thread through of anattā, remember there's that level, as well, the possibility of letting go of identification with consciousness. It's much more subtle. We could say, I suppose, that to conceive of the inherent existence, say, of one of these dualities that I started talking about, that conceiving of it as having inherent existence is also a kind of clinging. It's that thing, and I'm packing it together. The left hand side of the stick separate from the right hand -- there's a kind of clinging there. I'm not sure if 'clinging' is really the right word; it's actually, that's actually delusion. But all of these -- clinging, identification at different levels, and delusion -- are actually builders of experience. They're builders of the perception. So whether we're clinging through push and pull, whether we're clinging through identification, whether we're clinging through conceiving inherent existence, they're all builders of experience.

I'm talking, again, about an avenue of practice that can deepen and deepen and deepen. And what potentially happens there? As there's less and less clinging and delusion in the moment, the object of consciousness gets less, fades, blurs, dissolves. And in a way, you could say we're engaged in a kind of unfabricating. So most of the time, as human beings -- this is the Buddha's word, 'fabricating' -- most of the time human beings are in a constant process of building: building things, building objects of perception, building reality, self and the world. And you could say, as you begin to let go of clinging, you're unfabricating. And we will talk at some point about what remains when you have totally let go of every scrap of clinging in that moment -- an Unfabricated. We'll come back to that.

As a practice, this is interesting, because one will see that if things don't fade, it's actually because there's a hidden clinging somewhere. You could be trying to do this, say, with relaxing the relationship, etc. But if things don't fade, it's because oftentimes, for instance, there's an identification with consciousness, because that's a subtle level of clinging. So you could be doing, let's say, the 'not me, not mine' practice. This pain in my knee -- 'not me, not mine, not me, not mine.' It doesn't seem to go. It doesn't seem to fade and dissolve, often because there are hidden levels of clinging. Could be very much that there's identification with awareness -- "I am the watcher" -- even not as a verbal, obvious, conscious thing. It's just identification with the witness. Or some other aspect of giving the thing itself inherent existence, not seeing its emptiness.

So with all that, the same question that I threw out when this first came up in relation to the self-sense -- I cling less, the self-sense gets less, and it's a spectrum. It's a continuum. How much clinging, how much identification, how much delusion reveals the real thing, the real world? Do you understand? No? Same question -- if I cling a lot, the object seems really strong and very defined and very there. If I cling less, it's less. If I cling even less, it's less -- less, less, less, less, less. It's a whole spectrum. Where on that spectrum of clinging is the real way the object is? It's like a movable scale.

Yogi: Hmm. Yeah, it is at the bottom end.

Rob: Okay. At the bottom end, nothing appears whatsoever. So are we going to say that it doesn't exist at all?

Yogi: Oof. [?] my head ... [laughter]

Rob: That's what I'm getting at. Actually, we can't. We can't say there's a real thing. That's what it means to say something, remember, lacks inherent existence. It's what it means to say this is the Middle Way. We're not saying it doesn't exist. We also can't really say it exists, or it exists like this, independently of the kind of clinging that we're relating to it with in that moment. Yeah? This is what emptiness means. This is what lack of inherent existence means.

Yogi: Can you say that again? Just that last bit.

Rob: This is what emptiness means. [laughter]

Yogi: I didn't quite hear it. I was listening, but I didn't get it ...

Rob: Okay, let's backtrack to the self thing. Right at the beginning of the retreat, when we started the three characteristics practices, and people were feeling this sense of more self, built-up, very solid self, less sense of self. Right? You were feeling that as you relax the relationship. Yeah? So I said to -- I threw it out: "Which one is the real self-sense?" Okay? And you said -- well, people said, "None of them," or "All of them," or people wouldn't touch the question with a bargepole, etc. [laughter]

Same thing here, but for things. So we're talking now about the emptiness of things. Now, if I completely and utterly let go of all clinging in any moment, nothing arises whatsoever. And then right from that zero point, all the way up to a very, very prominent, defined thing, depending on more clinging -- which is the real one? Okay?

Yogi 2: Can you clear it up, what you mean by "nothing arises whatsoever"? Is that during meditation, or ...?

Rob: I can't right now, because it will be the subject of other talks. And we can talk about the Unfabricated or the Deathless or the Unconditioned or going beyond the world -- I will come back to that, but I'd just take that piece, for now, on. Is that okay?

Yogi 3: What about, then, the saying that a tree is a tree, a mountain is a mountain, at the beginning when we see it with a lot of clinging, and then as we go into the practice, the tree fades or whatever, the mountain is no longer a mountain, and then at the enlightenment then we are back to a tree is a tree?

Rob: Okay. What do you think?

Yogi 3: Well, that's what John told us this afternoon.

Rob: Ah, okay. That's interesting. I don't know, I mean, all I can say is that things fade, and one -- I'll come to this -- based on that understanding, we understand the emptiness of the mountain, the tree, etc. Then you come out of meditation, and things appear again, but it's with a different understanding. It's with a very different understanding.

Yogi 4: [?]

Rob: I don't know ...

Yogi 3: For instance, after his enlightenment, the Buddha lived for forty-five years, so he walked around the trees and the mountains and he probably saw them as trees and mountains.

Rob: So, what's happening? Well, actually, if you remember that quote I gave before, I threw out -- "The Tathāgata does not construe a seer, does not construe an object seen, does not construe a seeing," etc. So he's seeing all that, but he's not giving it that kind of independent existence. Of course, if phenomena don't come back after they fade in meditation, how are you going to brush your teeth, go to the toilet, buy shampoo, etc.? It's impossible; you can't actually function. But it's very different to have that with that sense of the emptiness.

Okay. How much is the real thing? Can't say. Which I would say is a little bit different from saying a mountain is a mountain again, because it's not quite the mountain that it was in the first place. It's now a very empty mountain, a very, very compounded -- it's a fabricated mountain, which is a very different thing.

Yogi 5: I don't understand that last bit.

Yogi 6: Would it be non-fabricated?

Rob: No. When the perceptions come back, then I understand that to have that perception, there must be a fabricating going on. Without fabricating, I can't perceive anything. What that means is Buddhas and arahants, they fabricate, but they know they're fabricating. They know that process is going on. They're completely sure about it going on. But in the moment that they perceive something outside of their very deep state of meditation, they can enter into -- or even below those levels of enlightenment, you can enter into non-fabrication. But then you can't do business. You know, you can't do anything in that state because you're not perceiving. There's nothing arising in the conventional sense at all. Then you emerge from that with the understanding that any perception at all is fabricated. So if it's a mountain, if it's a tree, it's a fabricated mountain. But the knowing of that is what's important. I'll fill this out as I go on.

[39:24] So on one hand, we say we can't find a real point -- you know, set the slider, the fader switch on '5,' and that's the real point. And we see that without -- I mean, this is saying something about how the path develops. But without any clinging, identification, or delusion, nothing appears whatsoever. So things don't exist independent of my mind. Things don't exist as things independent of my mind.

Yogi 7: Can I just say -- to somebody else who hasn't reached those levels, they could see what you no longer see because you've let go of all clinging. So they'd see the chair, and you wouldn't?

Rob: Yeah, if their -- remember, a termite would see a chair very differently, so it depends on their saṅkhāras, their conditioning factors coming out of delusion and old karma. So as human beings, we share a lot in terms of the saṅkhāras that condition our seeing in a certain way.

Yogi 7: So we do see an [?]. We'll see the same thing.

Rob: We'll see the same thing because we share that karma and that stream of conditioning, yeah.

Yogi 8: But if you haven't reached that level, you may not see the chair, but you would see some sort of object there, even though you aren't putting the label 'chair' on it?

Rob: What you see at any time will depend on what's colouring the mind at that time. I can't speak for Buddhas, obviously, but ... [laughter]

Yogi 3: That would be a dangerous thing to be in, if you didn't see the chair.

Rob: Okay, so, good. Well, let's make a distinction. I don't know why this is getting so complicated. Let's make a distinction between meditative fading and walking around in the world with wisdom about emptiness. Walking around in the world with wisdom about emptiness means knowing that things are appearing, but they lack inherent existence. They don't exist that way independent of the mind. So I can do this [knocking] and I feel the solidity there, and da-da-da. But that knowing isn't there. What that knowing does is frees. Okay? And then available to one is the reinforcing of that knowing, and the meditative freedom of sinking into that non-manifest or less manifest thing. Yeah?

Yogi 9: What happens if you ... [laughter] [?]

Rob: Sorry, what?

Yogi 10: Going back to the chair, if you're sitting on it, and it fades ... [laughter] What happens? Do you fall to the ground?

Rob: No, no. We're just talking about what appears to perception. So, you've had an experience, Rose, of your body fading in meditation, as many people have in here. What happens at that point? Does everything ...?

Yogi 10: No.

Rob: No. And if I'm in the front of the meditation hall leading a session and I open my eyes, I'm not seeing people kind of disappear here, you know, and say, "Oh, what happened to Juha?" You know. [laughter] To the mind, in that moment, there is a fading. It might bring up fear, and I will talk about this in a minute, but generally things are just fine, actually more fine, in the fading, more fine, just "Ahh," letting it go, you know? So things don't exist independent of my mind. Okay?

Meister Eckhart, really a wonderful Christian mystic, said, "The creature does not exist," the 'creature' meaning that which is created -- not just animals and things, but anything at all: thoughts, moods ... The creature, that which is created, does not exist.^[5]

So if we move for a second to the classical sort of formulation of dependent arising, you've got these twelve sort of links, the root one being ignorance or delusion, another one being taṇhā -- John's talked about all this, right? Yeah? Another one being taṇhā. When I think of each as a kind of pile of chips -- like those poker chips you play with, okay? A pile of chips. When I in any moment have less taṇhā, less push-pull, that's influencing everything else. It doesn't just go round in a circle; it's actually like a web that's influencing everything else. Have less chips there, it makes less chips in my pile of nāmarūpa, one aspect of which is perception. Okay? Less chips in the clinging, less chips in nāmarūpa. Less chips in ignorance, in delusion, less chips in clinging, less chips directly from ignorance into perception. They're like, each one is, you could conceive of as like a pile. Is it really strong right now -- a lot of ignorance, a lot of clinging, etc.? Or is it much quieter, much quieter? As this one becomes quiet, it affects all the others. And so you've got these twelve things kind of rising and ... Do you understand? So perception, vedanā, etc., they're all dependent on the presence, in that moment, of delusion (or its opposite, wisdom), in that moment of clinging*, da-da-da*. It's not a process that's happening this, then this, then this; it's actually a totally, mutually sympathetic, mutually interacting system, where everything's affecting everything else.

Going back to that chariot meditation that I threw out at some point, and I talked about when you really develop that, a voidness appears. The emptiness of the self or the emptiness of the chariot appears. Same thing, because at that point you've reflected on it in enough that the delusion is less, and so the appearance, the perception -- part of nāmarūpa, perception -- gets less.

Hui-neng -- I think he was the Sixth Zen Patriarch, one of the really great Zen masters:

From the first not a thing is.^[6]

In other words, nothing ever existed inherently. All these statements that don't have the word 'inherently,' they're taken as implicit. But to say it without it gives more, like, oomph and shock value.

Again, I want to just, I do want to paint a little map of where this is possible to go. Eventually, what can happen is, let's say you're working with relaxing the relationship or the anattā, either one of those, or the 'not me, not mine.' You do it, you do it, you see the fading, you do it again, you see the fading, you do it again, you see the fading, five thousand, ten thousand times you see the fading -- at a certain point, the coin has fully dropped: things are empty. They depend on my relationship with them. They depend on my identifying, my identification. And that becomes a conviction.

That insight, as I was talking earlier at some point, about how insights develop and get consolidated, that insight that a thing is empty because it depends on my clinging and/or it depends on identification -- that gets consolidated. And eventually, one doesn't need that first practice of 'not me, not mine' or relaxing the relationship. One can actually just look at a thing in meditation and say, "You're empty. I know you're empty." And that becomes your meditation practice, or can become your meditation practice.

The whole thing, as I was talking about, these avenues unfolding based on developing the practice and consolidating -- we have enough experience of things fading, and seeing the connection, seeing the dependency over and over again until it's crystal clear: "Look, I do this movement, and this is what happens. Or I don't do this, and this doesn't happen." And eventually, you can just go, "You're empty. You're empty." And that becomes the meditation in the sort of fully phrased version -- as the Buddha put it, one sits or walks in meditation, stands in meditation, and regards anything that arises as "empty of self and empty of what belongs to a self."^[7]

So that doesn't just mean empty of belonging to me. It means of itself, empty of itself, and empty of belonging -- anything about that is empty of belonging to itself. Okay? It's just like saying, "You're empty. You're empty." Or we can, again, take a stance in meditation -- sitting, walking, standing. This is really after -- this takes a while, obviously. Does anyone remember Blue Peter? [laughter] I had this one already prepared. [laughter] It's a bit like that. [laughter] The other option is to say, "Anything that comes up, just a perception. You're just a perception. You're just a perception." The subtext of that is, "You are built. You are fabricated. I have seen how this perception is fabricated. You're just a perception. You're just a perception." Very, very powerful meditation, very -- you're really at a deep level of meditation when you begin to do this.

And they bring a fading. Again, if there's the conviction there, if it's not just empty words -- "You're just a perception" -- although, actually, try it, because sometimes it's just amazing what happens. You just rabbit on at something that it's "just a perception," and ... you know. But anyway, mostly it should be based on a conviction and the consolidated insight from previous sort of stages of that avenue of meditation. And there's a fading. And actually, those two end up leading to the seventh and the eighth jhānas, for those of you that are interested.^[8] They will lead to the dimension of nothingness, 'no thingness.' So basically things disappear, and space arises, and then just awareness, and it goes beyond that into a sense of absolute nothingness. Or even beyond that into what's called the eighth jhāna, what's called neither perception nor non-perception. The mind isn't even landing on a sense of nothingness. That's a technical aside. But basically, this fading, it happens and is possible.

Now, it's also possible, to a degree, when there's something unpleasant going on, to do the same thing, to know that it's empty, it's built, it's fabricated based on my relationship, based on identification, and actually, believe it or not, look at something unpleasant -- here's this pain in my knee -- and look at it, and dissolve it, and replace it with the pleasant. To a degree -- that's a lot more possible than we would think. Here's some pain, here's some unpleasant sound, here's some whatever, and one actually -- because it's empty, it's malleable. It's malleable, and one can learn to do this, with a lot of practice, to replace something unpleasant with something either pleasant or neutral. Again, the implication is that the vedanā itself, the unpleasantness, is not independent of our reaction. Vedanā, in general, are not independent of what we make of them. In other words, we need to make something something. For something to be a thing, there has to be a making of that thing into a thing. Yeah? We make things, all day long and all night long -- make, make, make, make, make.

So that fading can be what the Buddha would call a skilful and wholesome abiding. In other words, you can develop this so that you can just hang out in states where much less is going on. The whole impact of self and the world of things, of the world of things, is just much, much less impactful. And there's a sense of freedom, of space there. So it's a very skilful, wholesome abiding, and certainly skilful when you've got pain, or other difficulty going on, or a difficult situation. But more important than that, it's the insights, the insight about the emptiness and the dependent arising.

Now, as always, this comes with some warnings. It's not a practice to try and get rid of things, because then it's just aversion dressed up in sophisticated spiritual language. It's just aversion creeping around the back door. So we actually have to really watch this, because it's very easy for it to come in. You're just kind of smashing everything over the head with a hammer. Basically you're saying, "Go away! I hate you!" [laughter] But you're dressing it up, "You're empty." [laughter] Can we come at it more with the attitude of curiosity about dependent arising? Can that really be what's driving things?We're curious to see this relationship. I think that's very possible.

The other thing to be wary of and to be vigilant about is, very easy -- you know, I say something like this, or you hear someone else saying something like this, and very easily, we want to have that experience, and it's almost like the ego wants to get that badge: "I want to have that experience, those stripes. I've got my fading stripes." Or we don't want to feel like a failure, and so we want that experience. Again, don't be chasing the experience. It's the understanding. I mentioned this kind of thing before, but it's so easy with teachings like these -- and we're talking about very deep stuff -- it's so easy for, among our intentions, there to be different intentions around practice. And the ones that are about getting the badge or the ego feeling good about itself or not feeling bad -- it's easy for that to hijack the practice, and actually hijack the whole retreat. That can be quite a strong motivation for all of this. I'm not going to say any more about that.

[checking time] Yikes! Okay. So if one, if this is happening, something fades a little. Perhaps, as people say, it just blurs a little bit, or it dissolves a little bit. Its edges get less defined. And with that, there will be, usually, some more freedom and space, etc., more ease. And we can just enjoy that, just hang out and enjoy that, or as I said right at the beginning of the retreat, filter out the samādhi from it. Filter out -- it's like, as things fade, there will be a niceness around that you can filter out and just rest with as a kind of samādhi. Or you could keep going. You could keep going. Here, this thing's lost its edges. Well, keep doing whatever you were doing. Keep 'not me, not mine'-ing it. Keep relaxing the relationship. Keep regarding it as empty, whatever. Keep going, and then it fades some more. And maybe it's just become, I don't know, a space, or a stillness, or whatever -- keep going. It just feels like an emptiness -- keep going. It just feels like peace -- keep going. With all this, you know, at one level you could say the true nature of things is peace. You could say that. But peace as a thing for the mind, a state of peace or an object of peace, is not the real true nature; it's still a thing for the mind, which you can also regard as empty.

I'll say a word about fear, and this came up in Marika's question on Tuesday. So there can be at times fear, you know, with any degree of meditation on emptiness, any degree at all. And we've talked a lot about the importance of the samādhi and the importance of the mettā as kind of cushions, but also the importance of familiarizing oneself, ourselves, with states of less self-sense and less kind of thing- and world-sense, and really getting familiar with that. And that helps. That familiarity really helps with the fear, so it's not a big jump from a really solid world into some complete emptiness; it's a gradual movement that comes through familiarity

[56:45] But as well as that, in relation to fear, something else begins to go on. I don't think one really sees it at first. But it's that gradually, gradually, we're understanding more. Or the understanding comes more into the heart, in really a felt understanding, that what we're letting go of when things fade, what we're letting go of -- the self, the world, the objects, the perceptions -- they are actually empty. They're actually empty. So in a sense, we're not losing anything with this fading. And sometimes, when it gets very, very deep, and you really sense you're going to go completely beyond everything, there can be a sense of fear. But the knowing deep in the heart that you're not losing anything real, helps a lot to abandon things. Anyway, the self and the world come back. They come back, as we said before. They come back.

So to say that we're letting go of what is empty becomes something actually that really enables us to let go. It doesn't bring with it a kind of rejection of things, or "Things don't exist," or "They're completely worthless." That's not what the lack of inherent existence means. Remember, this is the Middle Way. And I feel there's something really touched in the heart about this. They sort of exist, but they don't really exist. There's something about seeing their dependent arising deeply that really is -- it's absolutely not just an intellectual thing. The heart is really involved, and there's a real beauty in it, and a being touched.

To touch on what was coming up in the questions earlier, half an hour ago or so, one could go all the way, all the way. And going all the way, beyond any sense of appearance whatsoever -- I'm talking about probably a long, long time of developing this in meditation, but a possibility. We talk about, and the Buddha talked about cessation. Now, it's possible -- and again, this is one of the things in the richness and diversity of views that are around in the Dharma these days -- it's possible that you will hear, and people say, "Cessation's irrelevant. It's irrelevant. That kind of experience is irrelevant." It's not a particularly fashionable thing these days. When the Dharma first came to the West, especially with certain traditions from Burma, it was very, very fashionable. Everyone was like, "Cessation, here I come!" [laughter] And really going for it. Nowadays, it's almost regarded -- it's quite unfashionable, not completely. But there's a danger if we leave it out, because it may be that something is given inherent existence, like the mind in the Cittamātra approach, or like things -- haven't quite seen the emptiness of things, and we still kind of believe in impermanence as something real. Awareness, any kind of, even the most subtle form of awareness, is the final thing to fade. But again, it's not the experience. It's that we need to understand something about this fading business. So we need to understand something. The implication is that a thing is dependent on the perceiving mind's clinging and conceiving, or clinging and delusion. Going back to the quote I started with: "Unless you see the end of the world, you won't know nibbāna."

So I talked about things. What about grasping? What about grasping, clinging, push-pull, and all that? What we've said so far is that a thing depends on my relationship with it in that moment. It depends on the reaction. It depends on the grasping, push-pull. What does the grasping depend on?

Yogi 11: [Craving?]

Rob: Okay. It depends on quite a few things, but the thing I want to highlight right here is that the grasping depends on the thing. The thing depends on the grasping; the grasping depends on the thing. How can I grasp if there's nothing to grasp at? Two sticks leaning on each other, supporting each other. Sāriputta's image, two sheaves of wheat or corn or whatever, supporting each other.^[9] Things depend on grasping; grasping depends on things. Okay? Again, not just to see intellectually; at some point to really start working with this in practice, and bringing it into the practice in that moment. See what happens. Now, things depend on grasping. Grasping depends on the thing. But if the thing is empty because it's a dependent arising, that means the grasping, the stick, is leaning on another stick that's not even there. It's like leaning on air. It's leaning on a void. They are mutual dependent arisings.

This is a really -- I don't know if John went into this -- it's a really important aspect of dependent arising, that everything is mutual. Everything feeds each other both ways. In the most detailed description of his enlightenment experience, the Buddha, when he comes to the point where he realizes that consciousness depends on name and form, name and form is dependent on consciousness -- that mutuality, that's the point where he says, "That was it." Right? He keeps, he describes all kinds of different experiences, and it's that point of seeing the mutuality, the mutual feeding and dependent arising of things -- that's what brought the awakening.^[10]

So it's like a see-saw. Does this being up cause this to be down, or does this being down cause this up? Or a whirlpool -- another analogy. We talk about a left-hand side of a whirlpool -- clinging -- and a right-hand side: the thing. But the left and right of a whirlpool are just separated by convention, in a way.

When we go into it a little bit more, we could say there are actually no mind states that inherently exist, because we could talk about mind states of relative grasping. So something like equanimity is by definition a state of non-grasping or less grasping. We say "I'm equanimous about" or "There is equanimity in relationship to" usually something difficult or something fantastic. And there's equanimity. But with the equanimity, the non-grasping, the things fade. And so what was difficult becomes a lot less difficult, and what was fantastic becomes a lot less fantastic, a lot less exciting. So then what am I equanimous about? Do you see? The whole thing fades. The word 'equanimity' actually begins to lose its meaning as you go deeper into it.

Or if I have anger, anger is about something. I feel angry about a situation or about an object. That anger colours my perception of the object, clearly. But without the perception, without the object, I can't be angry. It's got nothing to lean on. I can't find a separate mind state, something called a 'mind state' separate from the object. In a way, when you really go into mind states, it's even more interesting, because all a mind state is is, again, perceptions and the appearance of a certain object in consciousness. So boredom, tiredness, anger -- they're the appearance of something on the sort of inner screen, and that's what we call -- that's, experientially, all a mind state is.

Yogi 12: I thought anger was a feeling -- I mean, an emotion.

Rob: That's what I mean: mind state, emotion. So yeah. Now, suffering is the same. Suffering also is an appearance. It's an appearance of things. It's an appearance of things to consciousness. It's a perception. It's empty. All of that is empty. Again, Meister Eckhart -- beautiful, beautiful -- he says:

God is revealed as fully in hell as in heaven.^[11]

Why? Because it's the emptiness of all this. It's the emptiness. So whether it's suffering or whether it's bliss, it's equally empty, equally just an appearance, a fabricated appearance.

[1:06:03] So we can go further, actually, with grasping. It's interesting. When we really look at what is actually going on when we're grasping, grasping involves the past and/or the future image or imaging of a thing. So when we're grasping at something, it's almost like wrapped up in that is, "Is it going to stay the same? I hope it stays the same," or "I hope it changes," or "Will it go and change on me?" We'll talk about this more in another talk, but that sense of the future, of a conscious or unconscious image of something drawn out in time -- that's involved in grasping, and that is actually not the thing. When we're grasping, we're not even grasping at a thing. A thing is ... where? We grasp at the image. Okay? We grasp at an image of a thing, elongated conceptually in time, this thing in time. All grasping at a thing is actually grasping, or maybe is actually grasping at what is not that thing. In the present, it's gone before I can even grasp it. I have to elongate something conceptually to actually grasp it. I compare it with the past: "It was so good in the past. I hope it stays," and I project that into the future. I'm creating and I'm grasping at the past and the future, which are not the thing in the present.

If I go back to right what I said in the beginning, and this notion of duality, aversion is relative to non-aversion. So aversion as a form of grasping or clinging, also empty in that sense. You could also say aversion is not separate from greed, because if I have aversion for one thing, usually implicit in that is greed for something else. "I want to get rid of this." It only means -- "I want to get rid of this pain" means I'm greedy for non-pain. I want to get rid of this agitated mind, I want to get back to that stillness that I remember or that I'm seeking. So aversion and greed are actually two sides of the same coin. They're not actually separate. Aversion doesn't have separate, independent self-existence. Greed does not have separate, independent self-existence.

Even more, it's weird -- we get into these kind of, you could call them 'chain reactions.' So for instance, with fear or anger, we have fear of the experience of fear, and aversion to the experience of fear. And very much with anger -- that's what makes anger so intolerable. Or rather, anger feels intolerable, and that's why we lash out, because I can't handle it here, and I'm aversive to the aversion, the feeling of aversion: "Ugh, I just want to blugh." So the original aversion is actually also inseparable from my reactions to the aversion. You can't find where one ends and the other begins. I actually can't have aversion without aversion to it. I can't have fear without fear of fear. I can't find anything separatable here, anything with any separate, inherent existence. So those things -- I'll just throw this out -- particularly with fear and anger, these indicate or suggest very, very helpful ways of working with them in practice, in daily life, because they give us an angle, a way in to kind of diffusing the whole situation.

There was a great Zen master, Lin Chi -- I don't know when he lived -- and he said:

Sometimes I take away the person. Sometimes I take away the thing. Sometimes I take away both the person and the thing. And sometimes I don't take anything away. [I leave everything there.]^[12]

So what he means is, he's talking about these possible ways of practising that can open up for us -- with a lot of practice. We take away the person -- 'not me, not mine.' Or we see that the person lacks inherent existence. When there is suffering, these are ways of approaching. Or in some of what we've been talking about tonight, I look at the thing, and I see that's empty. So forget about the person, but I look at the thing, and I concentrate on the emptiness of the thing. Sometimes I do both. And sometimes, and this goes back to right one of the first talks, sometimes the appropriate thing is a self with other selves in a world, and let's talk about it, because that's actually what's necessary, what's human and necessary to address suffering.

It's difficult on this retreat because, you know, twenty people sort of doing, moving together in a different ... Something that I say at one point might feel passé and obvious to someone and, you know, beyond where someone else is, etc. This is just what's inescapable if a group of people gets together like this. And so, really to have an openness of awareness about that, and appreciation and support and mettā for others. A thing that I talk about or John talks about at any one point might not be where you are exactly at that time. Might be, feel like it's a bit beyond or a lot beyond. Or it feels like, "Oh, come on. I've done this." Remember, there are lots of people here. As I said right in the opening talk, I'm putting lots of stuff out. It might not be that you get everything at exactly the right time for your personal, individual progress.

But this fading is actually, I think, really, really crucial. It's absolutely an indispensable part of really understanding experientially, meditatively, what emptiness is and the implications and the fullness of what it means. And we need to see it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, millions of times, thousands of times. And that insight then is consolidated: the thing is dependent, and so it's empty. And as I said, eventually you can just look at a thing and say, "You're empty," and that brings a fading, because your pile of delusion is less at that point.

[1:13:02] All this is actually possible. Like I said, I haven't met with you for a few days, but very, very possible. And I've worked with lots of people that travel this path, and they do it, and it works. And the understanding of emptiness is kind of etched and burnt deeper and deeper into the heart, into the cells, and bringing with it a deeper and deeper and fuller and fuller freedom, moving to really, really quite radical levels of freedom in life. The whole notion of life and death, and things, and the world, and my place in the world, and what will happen, and what won't happen, just begins to be really, really shaken at the root. So wherever you are, at least to know that this is definitely possible, absolutely possible, absolutely possible -- a path that's walkable.