The Freedom of No-thing-ness

So, again, not at the risk of but definitely sounding like a broken record, just to throw the question out, are you taking care of your heart? Are you taking care of your heart on this retreat? It's really important, and I started the opening talk with it, and I brought it up periodically. Night after night, we come in, and we talk about emptiness. And sometimes for everyone, that's going to be exciting, there's going to be joy with it, etc., and sometimes not. Sometimes I cannot stand another blooming word. [laughter] Because there's so much to say, ideally this retreat would be much longer, and we would have it sort of mettā and emptiness, or samādhi and emptiness, something like that. But I said right at the beginning, you all, individually and together, in a way, are responsible for the juiciness. You're responsible for taking care of your heart. And so, please just to check in and make sure that that's going on in all the ways I've talked about, and other ways: the gratitude, the appreciation, the love of the Dharma, nature, etc.

Sometimes, the mind is not happy. What often happens on retreat and in our lives is actually, these hindrances, these five hindrances, it's almost like the consciousness, the being -- this is just a metaphor -- is throwing them up, like a fountain of the seeds of the hindrances all the time. And these little seeds of (1) sense desire, greed, (2) aversion, (3) restlessness, (4) sloth and torpor, and (5) doubt, it's like their seeds come up, and they have little hooks on them. They have little hooks, and they're hunting to sink these hooks into something, some issue. Then they sink it in, and they pump in energy, and they agitate that issue. And then we've got an issue on our hands, an issue about the retreat, or about oneself, or about someone else, something. And that then begins to eat away the happiness, it eats away the sense of well-being. It's like a cancer that spreads and destroys the sense of well-being. Unfortunately, most of us as human beings need to see that I don't know how many times, a gazillion times, before we actually understand the process. The problem is not in the issue. The problem was in this stream of seeds, them hooking something, and then shaking something up, making the issue, and believing it. So in a way, when we say taking care of the heart, it's watching out for that, watching out and learning about that process. Part of deepening in meditation is exactly that. It's the dark and ugly underbelly of deepening in meditation. And the other part of taking care of the heart is investing in the lovely, inclining towards the lovely.

I was debating the ordering of talks, and I don't know if it's right or not, but tonight will be a somewhat analytical talk, somewhat analytical. And tomorrow night, what I want to talk about is what all this has to do with love and healing and a little bit about karma. But tonight's a little bit analytical. Now, please remember again -- broken record excerpt number 154 -- not everyone can possibly ever do all the approaches. It's just not possible -- not in this amount of time. It's just not possible. All the practices and approaches that we're throwing out -- so some I'm going to be throwing out tonight. And remember, you can take on board some of what I say, or it can just be planting seeds. You can file it for later very consciously. That's all fine. And there are a lot of people in this room, so everyone will be taking a different piece. And it's really, really, really okay. It's just as I said in the opening talk, just to take one or two strands, and file the rest for later.

Okay. So there's a quote -- I think it's from one of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, and it says:

To see nothing [to see nothing or to see no thing] is to see rightly.

And actually, even before that, in the [Udāna] of the Pali Canon, the Buddha says:

For one who sees there is no thing.^[1]

There's nothing. Tonight I want to go into a little bit of understanding, or a little bit of different approaches on seeing the emptiness of things. Actually, first, I want to just very briefly review something I said a couple of nights ago about these dualities, because I thought I could have been a bit clearer. We believe in the inherent existence of one pole or both poles of a duality, as if left exists independent of right, as if up exists independent of down, as if long exists independent of short. So we believe in the inherent existence of a pole called 'mindfulness' as opposed to the other end of the pole called 'distraction,' of a pole called 'calmness' or 'samādhi' as opposed to 'agitation,' of a pole called 'non-tiredness' as opposed to 'tiredness,' of a pole called (what do we want to say?) 'togetherness' or 'romantic union,' as opposed to 'loneliness' or 'abandonment' or something like that. They exist as dualities. And that believing in the inherent existence of one -- "I believe in this image of romantic union," whatever, as something inherently existent -- what that does is it primes the perception, okay? This is what I want to ... [background noises, laughter] It primes the perception. So, actually just then, when there's a lot of emphasis on the silence, how much that sets ... [laughter] Because the mind is giving this emphasis ... [more noises, laughter] All right, you're all in detention! [laughter] [yogis talking]

Okay. Are we all okay? What happens through that process, believing in one pole, is that the perception gets primed. So if I come to retreat and I say, "Samādhi, calmness -- that's what I want," how many people show up saying "calmness"? That very setting up of that pole primes the perception. It sets up the perception to notice what? Non-calmness. That's what will stand out to the perception. Do you understand? You're setting yourself up to notice more non-calmness. I just wanted to mention that, because I felt like I could have drawn it out a bit more clearly the other day, but ...

Okay, then I want to pick up a little bit on sort of something Faith was beginning to say in the question and answer period. We could say, "Well, what actually exists when I point to a chair, or a chariot, or a human body, or whatever?" Where actually is it? Well, it's right there. But where is it? Technically, we say -- and this is very technical language -- we say the chariot, the chair, the body, is imputed in dependence on its bases of designation. That's very technical language, which basically means that the mind -- I look at the chair. It's got legs, it's got this crossbeam, it's got this cushion thing, it's got a backrest -- the parts are the bases of designation, of the mind designating "chair." The same with the body -- it's got hands, it's got limbs, it's got legs, it's got a torso, etc. And we say, "body," or "chariot," or "car," or whatever.

And so we say, "Okay, well, the parts are there, and so somehow they're making this thing-ness called a chair." But actually, when I look for the parts, can I find the parts? I say, "Well, the parts, let's say, the parts of my hand are dependent on -- rather, the part of my body that is a hand is dependent on the parts of the hand." To be a hand, it needs fingers, and a palm, and a front, and a back, and knuckles, and all the rest of it, and joints, and bones, and skin. And then I go, "So, okay, what are those parts dependent on?" Well, they're dependent on smaller and smaller parts of the parts, all the way down to molecules. Molecules can be broken up. Molecules are dependent on parts. Down to what? Can I have a partless part? Can I get so small that some subatomic particle or something doesn't have sort of a part that's more up or more down or more left or more right? Can I get down to partless parts? If I can get down to partless parts, how am I going to join those partless parts together to make up any thing that takes up space in time? Because there won't be a left and a right of this partless part. So how will I know which side to join to which side of the next part to make up ... Do you follow this? [laughs] So something weird's going on -- yet again! I can't arrange them in space if it's partless parts.

Now, actually when we say, I look at a chair or I look at that, it's not really the case, although we can say things depend on their parts. Absolutely, without parts there's no thing. There's no thing without the parts of that thing. Anything has parts, and it needs those parts to make the thing. But in the perceptual process, it's not that there's this kind of infinitely small, kind of endless regression down to really small parts. It's not that that's going on. Rather, what's going on is the cognition of the whole and the cognition of the parts -- whether it's body or whatever it is -- are dependent and rely on each other. The perception of the whole and the perception of the parts rely on each other. They're mutually dependent.

[11:08] Now, as I said, I prefer to get away from chairs and all that kind of stuff. So let's look at this in an area where we struggle with, an area where we struggle. Let's look at things like anger, fear, physical discomfort, whether it's actual pain, or a sense of blockage, or pressure, or something in the body, illness, something like that, any mind state, any emotion, or any bodily condition. We could also extend it to any situation you feel difficulty with, so, bad weather, an oppressed situation in some way, a state or time of busyness, a difficulty in relationship -- all this is going to apply to all that. What we see is, the whole, the sense of the whole of that situation or body condition or emotion, again, is imputed on the parts. This is technical language. What it really means is getting down to this dot-to-dot thing that the mind does.

Let's take it in time with something like anger. Okay, so this anger is lasting in time. Or fear. And the mind is joining these dots of experience together. How do I know that? Well, what happens, again, as a sort of thought experiment, what happens if I, here in my stream of fear, if I take out a few moments of fear, and I just take them out of that stream, how many moments would I have to take out, and yet I still see the fear as a whole as the same thing? Do you understand what I'm saying? Or let's say I'm just sitting in meditation, and I have tummy ache, and somehow -- or I just feel the energy is all blocked around here or in my head or something. Again, it's covering an area. How many little pieces of that, you know, pieces of sensation, could I take out of that sense, and I still feel there's pain in my tummy, I still feel there's pain in my lower abdomen or something? The mind is making this dot-to-dot thing, and we say the whole is imputed on the parts. Now, that whole is not an inherently existing whole. It's an imputed whole. It's a supposed, concluded whole, because it does depend on the mind doing it. I could leave a lot of them out, and the mind is still joining them together that way. How many could not be there, and it's still experienced as this thing, this situation, this pain, this contraction, this fear, whatever it is? The mind imputes, perceives, conceives of the whole, okay?

So the whole, we could say it's empty. It lacks inherent existence. What about the parts? The parts, then, the little parts of this tummy ache, the left part and the upper part and the part at the edge, or this moment of anger -- you can do it in time or spatially -- those are then given more significance because of the sense of the whole, because of their sense of being a part of a whole. Or in a situation, we feel burdened by the whole of the situation. This moment of the situation, it's been interpreted and given significance as a part of an oppressive whole. And the two feed each other. So the whole is empty, and the parts are empty. You've got two empty things leaning on each other. This is a principle we'll keep coming back to.

Yogi: Can you say again, so about the parts, and ...?

Rob: Yeah. So let's take a stream of -- well, let's take a tummy ache, okay? Here's this area of my abdomen, and then I start to see that this part here, if that just existed by itself, this minuscule little part, I wouldn't say I had a tummy ache. But this part there is actually given significance when I have a feeling of a whole. But we've already said the whole is empty, so you get these two concepts that the mind is throwing into the situation are then supporting each other to give this sense of solidity, both to a part of it, either in time or spatially, and to a whole. Yeah? So we're interpreting it something like that. Again, we can do it either in moments that are given more significance and then drawn out in that. That significance is drawn out because of the burden of the whole. Also with something fantastic -- and we talked about lunch being, you know, the fantasticness of lunch (sorry, Galen) is also empty. To a certain extent, the mind gives it that. Or we can do it spatially. So you've got this odd thing: if we think about the parts of something, the parts of some experience, either we go down and they depend on their parts, which depend on their parts, which depend ... and you always end up with a partless part, or you go the other way and say it depends on the whole, but that's already imputed on the parts. Either way you go, it's empty. Get it?

Now this -- if you get the hang of this, I find it's very quick, very easy, and cheap. [laughter] You can plug it in very quickly, once you get the hang -- so all these analyses, you need to reflect on them a bit and reach that point of conviction. And then right there with the tummy ache, right there with the knee pain, right there with the fear or the anger, you can plug it in. See what happens. The thing begins to lose its sense of inherent existence and actually, usually, dissolves right in front of you. As I said, this applies to lots of situations. Now, this can apply, of course -- what I want to say is, you go away and use this. Go away and use it. Use it in, you know, there's this situation with your work job here, or this or that, or whatever. Take it apart. Take it apart, and see its emptiness.

[17:09] Sometimes we do that -- we analyse whether it's a chariot or whatever it is, or this way -- and we still feel that the thing is a problem. Sometimes we then need to go and kind of take apart the sense of the 'I' that still wants this thing or still is aversive to this thing or fears this thing. If the first kind of taking apart that we did was thorough enough, it takes care of everything. And even if we then went to the sense of self, you'd find that that was kind of seen as empty as well. So there's something, if you're going to use analytical methods, about being as thorough as you can with the steps, and it's almost like going through every step and really making sure it's there. And it can get very quick, but if you don't kind of draw out the implications of each piece, it won't have any impact, or much less impact, put it that way.

It's interesting, this principle of mutual dependency - what's being refuted, what's being kind of disproved there, is the inherent existence of things as kind of separate things. But somehow, in the mutual dependency, it's also affirming -- in a way, it's affirming all the phenomena of the world, in a way, but just affirming them through their interdependent relationships. In other words, left is left because right is right in relation to left. There's a kind of affirming, but not of inherent existence. I think I threw it out one time as an example, talking about, you know, if you get a handwritten letter -- people don't even do it; well, notes like here -- a note, and you sort of squint at it and stare at it, and it's like, "What is that word?" Well, some of the handwriting is, you know, an 'A' doesn't look anything like an 'A,' but we pick it up dependent on the context. We pick it up, that part dependent on the whole. Or even the parts of an 'A' might not all be there, but we see from the whole. There's a dependency on context. Again, how many or how much of the parts need to be there for recognition? Okay? This is arbitrary. It's very interesting.

Let's take the human body. We could do what we just did, and I began to do it a little bit, on the human body, and actually see that the body is also -- we could take it down to its partless parts, its subatomic particles, "And then what?", kind of thing. Or we could, again, see this mutual dependency of the parts of the body on the whole of the body. I want to go into that. I want to talk a little bit about seeing that the body, too, has no inherent existence. Not only is it 'not me, not mine,' but it also lacks inherent existence. I think this is either from Stephen Batchelor or Thích Nhất Hạnh, I'm not sure, but when does the water that we drink become the body? I drink a glass of water. When does it become the body? The air I breathe -- I take it in. At what point does it become the body? Where are the boundaries between what's so-called not the body and the body? Where are the boundaries there? Or I don't know how many people have porridge in the morning. Porridge is a good example because it's very gooey. And you put the porridge in. At what point does the porridge become the body? It's kind of osmosing through the intestinal lining. [laughs] At what point does that become 'body'?

Let's consider this body for a second. I'm sitting here, and I start chopping off bits of my body. Chop off my hand, and you look, and I throw my hand out the window. [laughter] And you look, and you say, "Still a body." Chop off the other hand, chop off my arm, chop off the other arm --
"Still a body." Chop off my legs. [laughter] "Yeah, okay." Chop off more of the torso. Chop off the head. At what point does it become not-body? Again, the mind is imputing it. No one can say, "It's at this point. This is the definition," because then someone who loses a finger through an accident or gets their leg amputated, you would say, "Well, they don't have a body. There's not a body there."

Yogi 2: Is arbitrariness the same as ...?

Rob: Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm using that word in the best way. What I mean is that it's up to anyone's mind in that moment to decide it, you know, and different people, or you at a different time, are going to decide a different thing.

Yogi 2: [?]

Rob: No, it's a little bit different. It's more saying that the mind decides something in a moment, to define something in a certain way, or see its thing-ness in a certain way.

Now, that chariot meditation -- I know some of you are doing it and enjoying it. You could also do that, not on the self but on the body. And again, a body has parts. Is it findable in its parts? Is it different than its parts? Does it possess its parts, etc.? Usually we get caught around something like "The shape of the parts is the body." But again (I think I threw this out at one point), what would happen -- I can't remember what I said -- but if my ears sort of started descending and ended up, you know, on the soles of my feet, and all the hair in my body gathered in one place, and my nose started going, you know, to down here? At some point, again, you say, "That's not a body" -- at some point. So again, it's this kind of arbitrary ... [laughs] Play with this in the imagination. I find it very useful, as well as being entertaining ... [laughter] It's also useful because you really get the sense, as something's moving, of not being able to say when it is and when it isn't. And you see that it's this mind imputing, this mind imputing, which is a lot of what we're putting the emphasis on right now. But a lot of what we'll -- well, actually that's probably the best explanation of shape. Just wondering about time.

I'll just say something more, actually. It's a little bit more subtle, but does the body have one shape or is it many shapes? So for the shape of the body to be something -- for anything to be inherently existent, it has to be one thing or many things. In other words, the mind decides in this moment, is it many or is it one? Is it one shape or many shapes? So again, I can say, "Well, my hand -- part of the body -- it has its own shapes. And then those parts of the hand have their shapes." And again, you can go down to partless parts, and you begin to get the sense that 'shape' also is something kind of projected onto something. It's quite subtle, but the mind projects the notion of 'shape' of something onto something.

Sometimes we talk, and I've already mentioned very early on this retreat, about the subtle body. And some people like that way of working and thinking, and some people don't, and that's fine. But what about this subtle body business? Sometimes in meditation you're sitting there -- the body as this kind of solidity seems to have really dissolved a little bit or lost its boundaries, and you just have a sense of a subtle body that's much more (what's the word?) permeable, amorphous, less defined, more open. Where does that subtle body end? Like, "This is me, this side of it, and the rest of the universe is all out there." You notice it more with the subtle body. It's just quite a permeable, amorphous kind of division between 'me' or 'body' and the rest of the world. And we think, "Well, is this subtle body -- is it the same as the gross body? Or is it different? Or what's going on there?" So what we're moving towards is saying that all the aggregates, all the five skandhas, all the five khandhas -- body, vedanā, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness -- all of them are actually empty of inherent existence. So it's not just that they're 'not me, not mine,' but they're actually all empty.

And this actually is, funnily enough, one of the sort of distinctions between Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna, which I won't go into. But Nāgārjuna in the Precious Garland says:

As long as a conception of the aggregates [of the skandhas, as inherently existent] exists, so long does a conception of [the self] the I [inherently] exist.^[2]

In other words, we can kind of feel like we're getting rid a bit of the sense of inherent existence of the self, but if we still give the aggregates inherent existence, it's almost like it's very hard for it not to come back to having a sense of inherent existence of the self.

So we talked a bit about the body. We talked about vedanā as well, and how vedanā doesn't have an existence. We've seen this. We talked about this fading. It depends, it depends. Perception -- we've talked about that already, as well, and the notion of fading and dependency. We talked a couple of nights ago about grasping as one of the mental formations, and the intention to hold on or to push away, those being inseparable from vedanā -- you actually can't separate what is the unpleasantness and what is my rejection of it at a certain level. Mind states, again, are part of the fourth foundation, you could say, mental formations. We've already been through this, but just for the sake of filling it out again. Something like discomfort or tiredness is actually unfindable. I mean, it seems like such an obvious thing, but when I look for it, it's actually unfindable. And again, we say it's imputed on the bases of the sensations and perceptions, and those on their parts, and those on their parts, down to partless parts or moments. Or as we said earlier in this talk, the parts and the whole are mutually dependent and mutually empty. We also see, with something like tiredness or difficulty in the body, that the appearance is dependent on the way of looking. So standard, agreed-upon conventional way of experiencing it is, "It's a pain. It's a pain. Just that's what it is." But if you're contemplating impermanence, it becomes just some flickering atoms of sensation. Which is the real one? Or if you're doing the Cittamātra, the big awareness, it's just an impression in awareness. Which is the real one?

I can't remember if I've talked about it in here or not, but have I talked about dependency on labelling? I don't think I have in here. Okay. So this is very interesting, and it's quite interesting, again, with something like fear or pain. Sometimes when you're quite quiet, you might notice that it's almost as if the object, the sensations of fear or pain are there, and you can catch the mind putting the label 'fear' or 'pain' on it. And if you can begin to see them as kind of two separate processes, it's almost like you begin to catch that for it to be 'pain,' it needs the labelling to kind of fix it and demarcate it and solidify it. For it also to be 'fear' -- when does it become 'fear'? Partly it's the labelling that gives it its thing-ness and its substance, substantiality, and definition for consciousness. So one way of doing this is just to begin to separate out those two processes. Actually, in the moment that fear or pain is going on, just to see the mind doing that, and just see one thing as labelling and one thing as sensation. And then what begins to happen?

We've also talked about, the other night, about the inseparability of a mind state from my reaction to it. I can't find, let's say with fear, what's the fear of the fear? Or with anger, what's the aversion to the anger? I can't find the separation there. It's inseparable from my reaction to it.

So body, vedanā, perceptions, mental formations -- we'll talk a bit more about mental formations -- that leaves consciousness. Now, we've touched on this a little bit, and I'm not going to go so much into it until next week. Why? At the moment, we're mostly, or at least I'm mostly emphasizing this process of how things and objects are dependent on the mind, or how the mind is kind of -- I keep saying, mind's creating the world, mind's creating the world. When I say that, I don't mean to imply too much of a one-sidedness, as if there's something called 'mind' and it's creating the world. It's rather just that it's easier to see that dependency. It's easier to see that things and objects depend on the mind, at a meditative level. That's easier to see than to see that the mind is dependent, meditatively. And that's what we want. We want to be able to work with this meditatively, so we actually begin to feel the freedom of things in the meditation. So definitely it's about mutual dependency, but I'm just emphasizing one angle of that right now, for the most part. Intellectually, for some of you -- I know some of you already have picked up on, "Well, awareness must depend on the object," etc. But if it's just an intellectual understanding of how the mind is dependent, that won't bring that much freedom. We can see that intellectually, but the degree of freedom that it brings won't be as strong as if we're actually able to see things kind of fade, as I was talking about the other day, in meditation -- because when we see things fade, or blur a little bit, we're actually, the fact of dependent origination and dependent cessation is being imprinted very, very deeply in the awareness. We're seeing it right in front of our eyes, it's dependent, rather than just, "Oh, I see that it must be the case that da-da-da-da-da."

So what would it mean (we touched on it; we haven't really talked), what would it mean to see consciousness fade? What would that look like or be like? In another Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, it says:

The Tathāgata [the Buddha] teaches that one who does not see forms ... does not see feelings [vedanā] ... does not see perceptions ... does not see mental formations [and intentions] ... does not see consciousness [mind or mentality] sees reality.^[3]

It's one thing to understand intellectually, and that's important. As I said, it's the first part. But right now, I'm emphasizing the thing is dependent on [mind]. That's actually meditatively easier to see that way. But eventually all things, and we do see their fading, and that fading is important.

All right. What it turns out, with the aggregates -- all this stuff, as I say, it takes time. And at first we learn to kind of separate out the aggregates: "Ah, that's that, and that's this one, and this is that." Eventually what you see, and this really does take time, eventually what you see is the aggregates actually arise together, and they're dependent on each other, and they're inseparable. They're not separate. So we talked, I think, within a question and answer period -- I can't remember -- about perception and feeling, perception and vedanā, not being actually separable. You can't have a moment of experience and take out the vedanā, take out its fact of unpleasantness, pleasantness, or neutrality, and leave the perception as it is. You can't take out the perception of what it is and leave its unpleasantness, pleasantness, and neutrality. They're actually inseparable.

And we touched on this a little bit -- where does, for instance, consciousness/knowing begin, and the perception end? Are those two things, or two ends of a stick, or ... you know? We'll go into this more. Attention and consciousness -- are they separate or different? Intention to pay attention and consciousness and intention -- are these all separate things or the same thing? They're not quite the same, but they're not separate either. We also see that the aggregates in the present are not actually separatable from the aggregates in the past. So we talked a lot about this business of reacting to an unpleasant vedanā or reacting to a pleasant vedanā with aversion or clinging. That aversion or clinging, we've seen, actually creates and shapes the next moment's vedanā, you could say. So here's a moment of unpleasant vedanā, and it's somehow making the next moment of vedanā and the reaction in the next moment. Where are the boundaries here? Is it actually separatable into discrete moments of, "That's that moment of reaction. This is [this]"? I'm just going to leave you with that, actually. It's not, perhaps, possible to find separatability with all of this.

But we have this habit to want separatability. The mind wants this separability of things. One of the things we want to separate is cause and effect, or cause and result -- so as two separate things, or as inherently existing things. We say, "Well, if they do exist as inherently existing things, either the cause precedes the result -- cause comes before, cause exists before the result -- or the result exists before the cause, or they exist at the same time." Okay? That pretty much covers all the options. If the first one was the case, if the cause existed before the result, you couldn't really call it a 'cause' because it's not causing its result, and something that doesn't cause its result, doesn't produce results, you can't call it 'cause.' It's not performing its function of a cause. If the result existed before the cause, what would have caused that? It wouldn't have been the cause that caused it. If they exist simultaneously, if they come into being at the same time, there's no time for this cause to be a cause of that result. There's no time for that to happen in. What are we going to do with this? [laughs]

So again, we have this tendency, the mind has a very deeply ingrained tendency to separate out inherently existing cause and inherently existing result -- inherently existing this and that. As someone was saying today in an interview, what we kind of push out of the picture is this whole infinite web of causes and conditions. They're actually not separatable, so for anything to come into being, it actually relies on a whole infinite series and breadth of causes and conditions, and we tend to isolate something in there. And through that, we get into problems. Thích Nhất Hạnh talks a lot about this -- how, in a way, the whole universe is present in any thing, and so in that sense, emptiness is actually a kind of fullness.^[4]

Last thing -- let's consider something like walking. The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is the sort of seminal text that really, really got this ball rolling about emptiness, from Nāgārjuna. And the second chapter is -- I think it's called an 'examination.' It's either an 'examination of walking' or an 'examination of motion.' But again, if you consider walking, it seems to be it's obvious what walking is. But while you're doing the walking meditation, if something begins to soften, and kind of open out in the heart, and open out in the seeing, begin to see that the walking is actually dependent on and inseparable from the causes and conditions and parts of it. So walking is inseparable from body -- no body, no walking. Walking is actually inseparable from the earth. Can I separate walking from earth? Can I separate walking from gravity? Can I separate walking from the intentions to walk, or the perceptions of walking? In a way, sometimes, when the mind gets quite quiet and open in meditation, you almost see the whole of the universe is involved in taking a step, that it's right there. Or moving the hand through the air -- actually it involves the whole universe. I cannot separate walking from these things.

We also talked at some point about things existing in opposition to something else, in relativity to something else. So walking exists in relationship to what? To non-walking, right? Walking stands as something in contrast to non-walking. When does walking become running? Again, you see ... [laughs]

Yogi 3: What about ... [?] [laughter]

Rob: Is that true? In that moment, yeah, it could be jumping. It could be jumping, or falling, or skipping, or ... you know. If you try walking in your walking meditation, just moving faster and faster and faster, at what point do you consider it's no longer walking? Again, you get this sense of it's moving along a scale, and it's -- I'm sure it's the wrong word in English -- this arbitrariness of when the mind imputes it. Or the other end of the extreme -- walk really, really, really slowly, and at any point just drop in the question, "Is this walking right now?" Walking so slowly you're barely moving, and "Is this walking? Is that walking? What is not walking? Is there a moment when I'm not walking? Where is the walking?" And in everything that's going on in the time of walking, what is the mind kind of, again, shunting to one side, cutting out of the concept of walking?

So actually a whole totality of experience is going on, and the mind is getting rid of some of it and saying, "This is walking." But actually it's not even clear that it's doing that, clear what it's defining. What is the mind cutting out to form the concept of walking? Again, there's a sense of actually walking being something infinite, in the most beautiful way. You can get the sense sometimes in walking meditation -- it's infinite. It's actually infinite. Every step is a kind of infinity.

And again, all this is easier seen the less clinging there is, and the less identification. So with everything, as we talked about when we talked about fading, as the self-identification gets less, as the grasping gets less, the thing-ness of things gets less too. Their definition, their solidity, their appearance gets less. And you can actually feel as you're walking, it's almost like you don't perceive the walking. It's faded from consciousness dependent on clinging or the release of clinging. It's like walking disbands, kind of disbands.

Yogi 4: The actual experience of walking or just the concept you're holding ...?

Rob: The actual -- the perception of walking. Well, first the concept -- that begins to fall apart. And then if you go deep enough -- and I'm talking about a very deep level now -- the actual sense of walking begins to just -- it dissolves as a perception. It can dissolve as a perception.

Let me read you, I think -- it's one of the verses from this Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, so it's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, something like that, it translates as. Has anyone read or read parts of this text that's Nāgārjuna?

Yogi 5: Stephen's.

Rob: Stephen's translation. Yeah, there are lots of different translations, and it's very, very -- some of the verses are very, very cryptic and hard to understand. It's beautiful, and incredible richness of sort of reasonings for emptiness. But one of them says this. He's talking about walking. So imagine a walking path. You're walking up and down on the lawn outside or in the walking room:

On the path that has been travelled, there is no moving. On the path that has not been travelled, there is no moving either. And in some other place besides the path that has been travelled and the path that has not, motions are not perceptible in any way at all.^[5]

Do you get this? Can everyone see that? Yes?

[Transcriber's Note: A diagram might be helpful here:

{width="5.9743055555555555in" height="0.6159722222222223in"}

Section A Section B

End of Transcriber's Note]

So there's a white piece of something wrapped on one ... Let's just assume that goes all the way to the end, so one half of this is white, and the other half is wood-coloured. This is my walking path. I walk from one end, and let's say I'm here. When I'm in the middle, at the end of that white bit, I'm in the middle of my walking path, there is no movement in the path, the part that I have traversed. There is no movement in the path I've yet to traverse, because one is gone and one is yet to happen. Between the end of this and -- it's like, between that part of the path and this part of the path, there's nothing else. They, together, section A and section B, fill up the path. Where is the walking going to happen? [laughter] Now we can do this ... [laughter] There's no other part outside of this A and B.

We can do this not just spatially, but we can do it with time. Okay? If motion or walking exists, there has to be a time at which it exists. Okay? If something happens, it has to happen at a time. So if motion exists, there has to be a time at which it exists. And when we talk about something happening, or talk about motion or moving, motion -- we say, "What does that mean?" It's a change of placement, a change of position over time, right? That's what motion means. But the present has no duration. The present moment has no duration. The present moment has no duration. So that means that motion or walking or movement has to exist either in the past or in the future, which means that nothing is now moving, now.

And you say, "Well, all right, but really that's just playing with language, because then it was moving, or then it will be moving." But that implies that actually all motion is in the past or the future. Right? It's then. Now, let's say I have three points in time, point A in the past, point B right now, and point C in the future. And I'm saying there's nothing at B, it has to be at A or C. But if I go to A, the first moment in the past, that actually becomes another present, so I could always say this at any point in time, that motion is always in the past or the future.

Yogi 6: Can you just say it's always in the present?

Rob: Or never in the present. How long is the present? Is there time to move in the present? The present has no duration. The present has no duration other than the duration the mind gives it in its perception. I'm going to talk about time next week more.

[47:43] One more thing about walking, or motion, or change, actually. This goes to any process of change, in fact. You can extend this, these kind of reasonings. But let's take the example of walking. When does walking begin? Here I am at the beginning of my mindfulness walking path with complete, pristine, pure mindfulness, totally alert to the moment. When does the walking begin? Does it begin in the stationariness? It can't, because stationariness, by its nature, is stationary, so it can't be the beginning place of walking. It's not moving. Or does it begin when there's movement already? It can't, because it's already begun. I can't have a moment that's both moving and stationary. That's a contradiction in terms. And I can't have a moment that's neither moving nor stationary.

What Nāgārjuna does in this book, and it's a whole book of very cryptic -- not always cryptic, but very sort of terse and short reasonings in verse form. It's an incredible, incredible sort of outpouring of genius. And what he does is to take any kind of concepts that we build our reality around, any concepts, and say, "If these inherently exist, it would naturally follow ..." And he fills out the consequence, and always the consequence is illogical and absurd and kind of ridiculous or doesn't fit together. So that gave rise eventually to what's called the Consequence school, the Prāsaṅgika school of emptiness, which is universally considered the highest school. But it started with Nāgārjuna and these kind of reasonings that if something inherently exists, actually, it doesn't add up to any kind of thing that makes sense at all. And they're supposed to leave the mind in this kind of stunned, "Uh, uh, uh ..." state, but rather than that being the goal of the meditation or the path ... [laughter] It's rather that we want to extract ways of working in meditation and have them kind of portable and shorthand that you can plug in as you're walking, or as you're sitting, and you've got this pain -- as I talked about with the parts and the whole, etc. -- and actually use them. And rather than a kind of frustrated perplexity, they actually bring a sense of freedom, because you realize, "Well, the thing I have to let go of is actually the belief in inherent existence." And then one lets go of that.

I can't believe I finished under an hour! [laughter] That's something! Please remember what I said at the beginning: not all practices, and no one is going to do all of this. You might take nothing from the talk tonight, and that's absolutely fine. You might take one piece -- totally fine, and file the rest for later, whatever. If you're going to do analytical or reflective meditations as part of your practice here, careful, watch out that we don't get too kind of -- the thinking mind doesn't begin to run away with itself, and then sooner or later we're thinking about all kinds of stuff that has no business being thought about on this retreat. You know, the mind's just gone off on a kind of tangent. So just be aware of that. Whatever we do in practice, there's a potential pitfall, whatever we do. And just be aware of the mind sometimes getting a little bit out of hand, and then just come back to samādhi, mettā, something very, very simple -- simple, non-thinking as much as possible, and just being there in a very simple way, like that. And then when you feel ready, going back to that.

Eventually -- and again, this is a 'slightly dependent on the personality of mind' thing, but it's actually possible to have a state of some real relative samādhi, calmness, clarity, stillness, and within that, use the reasonings, use a little bit of this parts and whole business or whatever, and it doesn't upset the samādhi. So in the -- I think it's the Gelug tradition, they have this image of the samādhi being like a still ocean, the still ocean depths. And in those still ocean depths, little tiny fish are darting around. But they barely cause a ripple in the stillness of the samādhi. And not everyone gets on with this, but for some people, it's quite possible to have quite some stillness of mind, and actually the mind is thinking in a very delicate and directed way that doesn't upset the samādhi. So for some people, that really works. Other people kind of have to go back and forth between thinking and samādhi. And reflective meditation is just not everyone's cup of tea. And if it's not, leave it. Okay? Just leave it, not a problem.

Okay. Is there still some consciousness? [laughs] Actually, that's all I'm going to say. Let's sit together for a minute.