The Unfabricated, The Deathless…

So again, in this talk, please remember I am painting a map and continuing with this kind of map of practice. And as such, you don't actually have to do anything with it. And for most of you, some of what I say tonight will just not be directly relevant to your experience now. And for others, it is. And that's totally fine. So in a way, you can, I hope, just sit back and sort of relax and enjoy my brushstrokes -- actually the Buddha's brushstrokes. [laughs] It's really fine on this retreat, I think, for everyone to regard at least some portion of what's being said, what's being taught, what's being listened to, as the planting of seeds. For everyone in here, that will be the case -- no matter where you are in practice, some degree of this will just be in the realm of planting seeds. And as such, it's still fantastic. It's still wonderful. Okay? [laughs]

Sometimes, I mean, in a way, I've spoken twice -- once on the opening talk and once on that other talk -- about relationship with practice, but I do think it's actually very, very key, what happens as we listen to teachings, what happens in the heart, what happens in the mind, what happens in the self-view -- very, very significant.

But when we consider a life of practice, a life on the path, we actually see that that includes a lot. It's a wide scope, you know, what it means to be on the path, what it means to live a life of inquiry, of dedication, of cultivation, etc. And so it includes many things. It includes learning to be with our experience. And for most of us in this room, that's where we start -- very much the foundation of insight meditation. Can I be with the experience, whatever it is -- physical experiences, sensual experiences, emotional experiences, cognitive experiences? Can I learn to develop this quality of presence, of mindfulness, of meeting life? You know, so beautiful and so crucial. And in that and through that, learning and coming to be more intimate with life, more intimate with experience, and connected. It's a huge, huge part, huge current in practice. And connected with what? Connected with oneself -- you know, so important. Connected perhaps with aspects of oneself, parts of oneself that one hasn't been connected to, that one's kind of shoved into a corner out of dislike, rejection, judgment, fear, fear of the disapproval of others, all kinds of reasons. But becoming, usually gradually, intimate with and connected with those parts of ourself. They can be all kinds of things, all kinds of things in the domain of our being.

Learning also, as part of the path, part of the breadth of the path, to be intimate and to know how to connect to others, other human beings, other animals as well. Learning the art and the skills of relationship -- you know, this is difficult. This is really difficult. Nowadays we put a lot of pressure on relationships, especially intimate, romantic relationships. They're supposed to be absolutely the bee's knees, be all and end all. And it puts a lot of pressure on them. It's a real skill to be able to be in that kind of relationship, or even just a friendship, and really make it work. It's a real art. Communication within that -- do we know how to communicate? Are we learning how to communicate -- communicate what's lovely, communicate what's difficult? So all this is part of the path. Connection as well, intimacy as well, with earth and nature, with life in the broader sense. Am I connected, am I open, am I intimate with life? And again, in that, through all that, with that, there is, again, usually gradually, an opening of the heart that happens. It's like the heart literally opens to life.

[5:02] And as well, very often for many people, there are different levels of healing going on -- at a psychological level, emotional level, physical level, healing going on. It's all part of the path. This is all part of the wide river of practice. And I would hope that, again, gradually, slowly, as part of the path, we learn, we develop our capacity to express ourselves, to express this unique manifestation of what I am, what you are in life. And we express that creatively, so there's a sense of learning, growing in our creative self-expression. And a wholeness comes in, a wholeness comes into oneself and one's life, a sense of integration, all these disparate parts -- parts that may be wounded, parts that may be dismissed -- integrated, integrated into the being. And even more, we cultivate what's beautiful. We cultivate the beautiful qualities of mind. Generosity, loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, the lists go on, patience -- really, really important. A huge part of the path is this cultivation of what's beautiful. And again, gradually and in time, we learn to explore the kind of range of the depths of consciousness and the sort of capabilities, the capacities of consciousness. What are the kind of openings and states of which consciousness is capable? So all that and more is part of the path. So to be on the path in our life is a very, very wide thing. It's so wide.

And then the Buddha uses this word nirvāṇa -- nibbāna in the Pali, nirvāṇa in Sanskrit. And if one sort of pays careful attention to the way he uses it in the discourses, what you notice is that he's actually using it sort of in different ways at different times, or more accurately, highlighting different aspects of nirvāṇa at different times. This is quite important. And within that, at times, he does talk of the Deathless, the Unborn, the Unconditioned, or the Unfabricated. He does. It's right there in the suttas, in the discourses.

Now, given all that, what I've said so far, at different stages on the journey -- and it's really not a linear thing, and all of what I've said may unfold, will unfold in a very individual order for everyone. So not everyone can do everything at exactly the same time. It's just impossible. There are periods in our journey, in our life practice journey, where different aspects of that width of what's available in the path feel more necessary than others. It's more where the heart is. It's more what we feel called for, and I would say that's actually totally appropriate and fine. And at different times on the journey, different aspects of the path, different strands of the path will actually pull more on the heart strings. The heart really feels drawn. Perhaps I really want to explore my creativity. I really want to re-enter into a relationship, which I made such a mash of ... [laughter] And kind of see if we can do a little bit better this time or whatever. Whatever it is, some ... Sorry. [laughter] I'll behave myself. [laughter] Whatever it is, the heart actually feels pulled in different directions at different times. And this is important, you know, and to respect that and listen to it.

It's very easy in a life of practice, even in the stretch of time of a retreat, to lose connection and lose touch with and lose sight of why we are practising, to lose touch with a sense of direction and aspiration that's meaningful for ourselves. Okay? So we can hear -- I might say something, John might say something, another teacher, you read this, you read that, the Buddha says this or that, and you say, "I'm practising for this." And it fits all the reasons, but actually it's not where the heart is. It's not where the heart is. And how easy it is for us to lose, as human beings, our meaningful connection. What is meaningful to me right now? What makes sense for me? Why I'm practising -- "This is what I want. I know what I want right now. And I know that practice is a big part of what can get me there." Do you understand what I'm saying? This I think is really crucial, because I see it all the time with practitioners, going in and out of losing connection with the meaningfulness of why they're practising. And it's really important to keep that alive and to nourish that. And it has to do with listening to oneself. Actually what right now -- at this stage of my journey, this period, these months, these weeks, these years -- what does have meaning for me? What is meaningful for me?

[10:45] But tonight, what I want to talk about is the Deathless, the Unfabricated, the Unborn, nirvāṇa in that sense. Now, we've talked about this Cittamātra practice and this kind of open awareness, the vastness of that and the beauty of that. And very common for that to get labelled -- that sense of vast awareness, that sense of spaciousness, silence, etc. -- for that to get labelled 'the Unborn,' 'the Unconditioned,' 'the Deathless.' Sometimes a person will come right out and say that: "That is the Unconditioned." Other times they're a little more (what's the word?) insinuating; it's not quite direct. Other times it's more just a statement like, "Awareness is the Unconditioned. Awareness is the Unborn, the Unfabricated." Other times someone might say, "The Now is what's the ultimate reality," etc. We've talked about all these in the last couple of days. I know some of it was difficult to understand, but we've explored that these actually cannot be ultimately real in any sense, or certainly any kind of finality. The Cittamātra space, again, is just a perception. It's a lovely perception. It's a very deep perception. It's a very freeing perception. It's still on the level of perception, and as such is fabricated. It's not Unfabricated, and one can go beyond it.

Some scholars around say that in all the Pali Canon suttas, which probably fills about a shelf-load, one rack of a shelf, that the Buddha only once, only once in all those teachings, refers to an Unborn, an Unfabricated, an Unconditioned. And there is no Deathless; it's a misunderstanding, a misperception; he didn't really say it, etc. And I'm not a scholar, but I've read enough suttas to know that's absolutely not true. And in fact I've jam-packed the talk tonight with ... [laughter] a million quotes from the Buddha just to show that. And I could have put way more in. I could have probably filled easily an hour straight of just quotes saying that. What I really want to point to, though (and this is important; it goes back to some other talk I gave), is the tendency of human beings often -- often, not always, often -- to pre-decide something, to pre-decide on the nature of a truth before they've actually, in this case, developed their practice to a depth where they actually know it firsthand. To me, that's a little, well, disconcerting, a little suspect. And it becomes just a defending of an intellectual opinion "because my teacher said so" or "because my tradition" or whatever says so. To me, this is a practice question. It's a practice question. Going to the other ridiculous extreme, if I'm a new meditator and I go to an evening class of meditation, I sit down for fifteen minutes and I [breathing loudly], and then I get up and say, "There is no Deathless because I just had a lot of thoughts!" [laughs] It's a little extreme. But it's a practice question. Okay?

Other people will say, "Emptiness and the Unconditioned are kind of mutually exclusive, and if you're going in the direction of emptiness, you can't go in the direction of the Unconditioned." I don't think they contradict each other, and hopefully tonight I can make some sense of that. Or people say, "Oh, it's only a Hīnayāna thing. It's only a Theravāda thing. The Mahāyāna don't really believe that." But actually here's a quote from Nāgārjuna, the Praise of the Supramundane text. He's sort of talking to the Buddha in his head, and he says:

You [the Buddha] have said that there is no liberation so long as the absence of representation is not realized.^[1]

In other words, so long as you've not gone beyond, the Unfabricated. In Mahāyāna traditions, more often, rather than the Unfabricated and the Unconditioned, the name more often given to it is dharmakāya. So you will probably come across that. I really don't want to get into this, but through history, that word has had different meanings. But now that's more the sense of what a Theravādan practitioner would call the Unfabricated, or some Mahāyāna practitioners would call the dharmakāya. But it's really this question of pre-deciding, and are we as practitioners pre-deciding something? I think it's really important.

[15:39] I mean, it might be interesting. I don't know, because this group has been together so long, but it's almost like -- it's too late for me to ask. But sometimes I feel like asking, "What do you want me to say about it?" [laughter] You know, if I just shut up for once, for thirty seconds, and just in the silence, like, I'm going to talk about it. What do you hope I say? Or you might be of the school, "I hope you say nothing, because you shouldn't say anything about it. You shouldn't go near it." Do you want me to say "There is" or "There isn't"? [laughter] You don't have to tell me out loud. But it's interesting. And so what I'm pointing to is, I think all human beings are going to have -- they're going to approach this with a slight emotional bias from the beginning: either I want it to exist or I don't. And that exists, and then the question is, how much integrity do we have? Are we just going to look for things that (what's the word?) justify that? Or are we actually going to really find out?

Let's try and trace it in terms of what we've done on this retreat. And I come back again and again to this idea and this fact of fading, which we've talked about several times. As we cling less, as human beings, sometimes as the clinging [less] goes deep, there's a fading. There's a fading of experience. As we identify less, as the self-sense gets less, there's also a fading in perception. There's a gradual fading in perception. As the kind of ignorance dies down in any moment, there's also a fading.

Now, I could say all that in the positive, in terms of, as we let go, the more we let go, the deeper we let go, there's a fading. The more we disidentify, there's a fading. Remember, if we go back to that talk on anattā or the three characteristics, near the beginning of the retreat, there are degrees of disidentifying. So we can disidentify with body sensations, and then thoughts -- a bit more subtle. And then things like disidentifying with consciousness -- quite subtle to do. Takes quite a skill to not identify consciousness as me or mine in that moment, just see it as, "It's just happening. It's just happening in the universe." And even beyond that, how about disidentifying from the intention to pay attention in any moment? You've got something in consciousness -- maybe a sense of stillness or brightness in the body or something -- and you're looking at it, it's steady, and you're aware of the attention there. And you can actually feel the kind of either throbbing of intention to be present -- intention, intention -- or a more steady sense of tension in the intention. And you regard that -- very, very subtle -- 'not me, not mine.' It's a very, very deep level of disidentifying.

So there's a spectrum with all this. Or seeing that something's empty and including, as we talked last night, awareness and time -- also very, very subtle things. Seeing those are empty -- that's a way of saying letting go of ignorance, having ignorance be less in that moment. And this fading, as we've said already, has a continuum to it. In other words, things might just begin to sort of lose a bit of definition, begin to be a bit softer in consciousness at one end, all the way down to beginning to blur, really fading a lot, disappearing, completely disappearing, even the thing that it's disappeared to beginning to disappear. So even a sense of space that might be there beginning to kind of -- that begins to fade. And then what? And then what? So there's a real continuum here.

Broken record excerpt number 147 -- this is really, really, really, really, really helped by samādhi. [laughs] Okay? And samādhi -- I don't want to get into it tonight, but I've talked with some of you -- there are different kinds of samādhi. But it's particularly helped by the kind of samādhi where there is a sense of well-being in the body, and the sense of some sense of pleasantness, or joy, even, or peace. That, more than anything else, cushions the being, cushions the consciousness from fear when things, when the world basically starts falling apart in front of you because you're seeing its emptiness. More than anything else that I know of, the samādhi will help that and really give a sense of permeating the being with well-being and reassurance and warmth.

There's another reason why samādhi is important -- and we actually haven't talked much about samādhi, but it's come up a little bit in question and answer periods. There are, as some of you will know, eight jhānas. So there are jhānas -- one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight -- of deepening sort of degrees. They're also, you could say -- I don't want to get into this too much -- but as you go deeper in the jhānas, you could say, you're also going deeper in a kind of fading. Okay? As you go deeper in each, in the level of samādhi, there's a fading of self and object as well. There's a thinning out of experience. So one's getting used to fading through samādhi, very deep samādhi.

[21:30] But another reason that my teacher pointed out years ago, I remember, is that some of these states -- we talk about the seventh, what's called the seventh jhāna, is something called the dimension of nothingness, and the sixth jhāna is the infinite consciousness, and infinite space is the fifth, and the eighth is neither perception nor non-perception. Now, some of these states, an insight meditator practising deeply will actually stumble into -- either completely suddenly finding themselves in one of these, or somewhere in the vicinity. It's like a state somewhat similar, maybe not completely absorbed, but somewhat similar to that. And it would be very easy for someone stumbling into one of these states to say, "This is the Unfabricated. I've found it. I've done it. Job done. Where's my cigar?" [laughter] Very easy. So one of the reasons my teacher Ajaan Ṭhānissaro would point out it's really good to actually explore samādhi in one's life -- remember, samādhi is a lifelong exploration -- is that one gets to know these states and knows what is not the Deathless, what is not. Because sometimes, if you just get -- it can happen; you're practising very intensely in insight meditation, and you just kind of get catapulted into a state of nothingness. At first it looks like absolutely everything has disappeared. And almost everything has disappeared, but there's still a sense of nothingness. There's still a perception of nothingness. As such, it's still in the realm of perception. You're perceiving 'nothing.' It sounds incredibly abstract, I'm probably aware, but there's still -- one is struck by, it's like nothingness is really in your face, nothingness, the fact of nothingness.

The other reason, or the other thing that's important here with the fading as a continuum (and I threw this out at some point, and I can't remember when), is that we also gradually realize, because we're slowly, gradually understanding that things are empty -- so the fading and the understanding of the emptiness go together. And what we realize is, "I can let go of this. I can let go of that. I can let go of it all because actually it's empty." So understanding of emptiness is deepening: "There's nothing really real that I'm losing." And that's also a huge reassurance to the being. It enables us to let go.

Here are some quotes:

Monks [so the Buddha's talking to some monks], that dimension should be known where the eye [or where vision] stops and the perception of form fades. That dimension should be known where the ear stops and the perception of sound fades. That dimension [etc.] where the nose stops and the perception of aroma fades ... where the tongue stops and the perception of flavour fades ... where the body stops and the perception of tactile sensation fades ... where the mind [or the intellect] stops and the perception of ideas [mental images, mental phenomena] fades. That dimension should be known.^[2]

I don't know how more clearly he could say it.

Yogi: Which dimension is this, Rob?

Rob: This is what I'm talking about: the Unfabricated, the Deathless.

Yogi: I'm not clear what the Unfabricated is. Are you talking about lack of inherent existence, or nirvāṇa, or ...?

Rob: I'm talking about an aspect of nirvāṇa. Okay? So let's separate two things. Hopefully it will be clearer in the talk. One is an understanding of lack of inherent existence. And one is what happens to the mind and perception as one goes deeper into that understanding, and that's what I'm calling the Unfabricated.

Yogi: Oh, so this would be somebody who's -- the direct realization of emptiness, and you're deepening as they go along ...

Rob: Yes, in the Gelug -- exactly, yes, exactly that, exactly that direct cognition of emptiness, precisely. So I'm just using slightly different language to say the same thing. Okay?

Another sutta, he talks about going beyond perceptions of the four elements -- earth, air, fire, water -- beyond any sense of the totality of perceptions and senses, beyond all the jhānas.^[3] Another time he's talking to a seeker and he says:

By knowing the destruction of what is fabricated, be a knower of the Unmade.^[4]

What happens is, this continuum is basically just that: a continuum. And it gets deeper and deeper. And as we were talking last night, at a certain point, the subject-object-time sort of triumvirate, tripod thing, collapses. It fades. And it's a gradual thing. The whole thing, as we were talking about, gets quieter and quieter, and less and less substantial, less and less present until it breaks. It goes beyond that.

Now, sometimes we talk about this subject-object duality or subject-object-time ... triality? Tri-thingy. Sometimes a person says, and you hear, "I was doing this thing," "I was washing the dishes," "I was rowing my boat, and I had an experience of non-dual awareness," or some language like that. And when they describe it a little bit, what they actually had, it turns out, was an experience where the mind just had a lot less chatter and a lot less sense of distraction or distance from the objects. So there was much more sense of really kind of being absorbed in what they were doing. Which is lovely, but it's a very different level than what I'm talking about.

They usually say, a person like this having that kind of experience usually says, "There was no self there. The self was just gone. The subject-object duality collapsed, and there was just what I was doing. There were just the dishes," or "just the rowing," or whatever it is, or "just dancing," or just whatever. But as we've talked about, the self-sense has a spectrum to it, and if one's not used to this, one, again -- it fades a little bit, the self-sense, and one assumes it's completely gone, because one hasn't got one's eyes used to the subtle, more subtle senses of self. So actually it hasn't gone, and all that's happened is it's a lot less distracted, a lot more present, a lot more in the moment -- lovely, but still quite a long way from the level that the Buddha's talking about here. There isn't, in that experience, the understanding of this mutual dependency that I was talking about last night, and there isn't that sense of fading.

[28:35] If I talk about or we read about an experience of the Unfabricated, if we use that language, it's very easy at a certain point for a practitioner to start chasing that experience, especially if one's quite used to a lot of fading, and this fades and that fades, and then one gets the sense, "I can ..." [sniffs, laughter] "I can sniff it, and it's right there!" And one, almost without exception, starts gunning for it, pushing, pushing for it. Very natural, very normal -- put it that way. Shooting oneself in the foot, totally shooting oneself in the foot to chase the experience. And it's something that, you know, even me saying it, I would need to repeat it to a practitioner. Very strong tendency to go into that relationship to it. What's much more important is the understanding, and the understanding of emptiness and dependent arising. So that's what's coming out of all this fading business. It's not about a particular experience so much, although I wouldn't throw out the experience, but it's much more about the understanding, and particularly about dependent arising and dependent cessation. So hopefully, the experience brings more understanding, and hopefully, the understanding leads towards the experience. But it's the understanding that's important.

What's going on? In dependent origination (John talked about and I talked), we have these factors: ignorance, saṅkhāras, consciousness, perception, etc. And when ignorance is less, or when clinging is less, the whole -- I think I used this analogy one time -- it's like piles of poker chips, and they just, the whole thing gets less. As ignorance is less, your pile in perception (which is part of nāmarūpa), your perception of the world gets less. As ignorance fades, as clinging fades, as selfing fades, the whole thing goes down. When they get more, the whole thing goes up. So we talk about dependent origination and dependent cessation, and it's just this movement.

The Buddha uses the analogy of building, and there is this real sense that our experience of the world is built. And this is what we're exploring with dependent arising, that we build our world, we build our perceptions, we build our reality. That's what's, in a way, so radical to realize, that that's what's going on. And I think I've said this at one point as well -- when the Buddha was enlightened, he uttered this spontaneous poem: "Housebuilder, you've been seen. I see you. Your ridgepole has been shattered. Your roof-beams have been cast aside," or something.^[5] And that's what he's talking about: this whole deluded way that we build reality and then fall for it, and build more reality in response to that reality -- that whole thing.

So when the Buddha's talking about insight meditation, he talks about seeing form, seeing vedanā, seeing perception, seeing mental formations, seeing consciousness, and knowing (quoting again):

Such is form, such is perception, such is vedanā, such is its arising, and such is its disappearing.^[6]

Now, to me, what that "such" means is not just that it arises and disappears and is therefore impermanent, but how. Such is its arising, this is how it arises, this is how it ceases -- in other words, dependent on clinging, ignorance, selfing.^[7] It's not just pointing to impermanence. Something much more complete and profound being pointed to there.

Here's Sāriputta talking to another monk, and he's actually using this image that we've talked about a lot, of two things relying on each other. He says:

It is as if two sheaves of reeds stood leaning against one another. In the same way, from nāmarūpa [remember, nāmarūpa is form but also the processes of the perceiving mind] as a requisite condition comes consciousness.

In other words, from these processes of the perceiving mind, they actually give rise to consciousness. Dependent on perception is consciousness.

From consciousness as a requisite condition comes nāmarūpa.

Dependent on consciousness is nāmarūpa. So it's exactly that mutual dependency at a very deep level. And then once you've got nāmarūpa, once you've got all the perception, then you've got clinging, then you've got this, then you've got that, and he says:

This entire mass of stress and suffering [comes from there]. If one were to pull away one of those sheaves of reeds, the other would fall; if one were to pull away the other, the first would fall. In the same way, from the cessation of nāmarūpa comes the cessation of consciousness. From the cessation of consciousness comes the cessation of nāmarūpa. From the cessation of nāmarūpa comes the cessation of [everything else and] the entire mass of stress and suffering.^[8]

A little bit, what I've done on this retreat is point to that that mutual dependency is actually more pervasive than is hinted at in that quote. Actually, it's a principle throughout of dependent arising. As I've said, the dependent arising is not linear. It's not this, and then this, and then this. It's mutual -- everything is mutually reinforcing everything else. And remember, in these passages, 'consciousness' means knowing of the six sense spheres, objects. That's what 'consciousness' means.

Okay, another one if you can stand it -- this one's a little bit complicated, so I'll read it first, and I'll explain, but:

Would a practitioner whose fermentations have ended ...

'Fermentations' means ignorance, attachment to sense pleasure, attachment to being and becoming, or to non-being, a rejection of being, or attachment to views. So those four things: ignorance, attachment to sense pleasure, attachment to being or to non-being, becoming or non-becoming, and attachment to views. If those are extinguished in a person, would that person then build something? Would there be a building, a fabricating, a saṅkhāra-ing coming out of that?

Would they fabricate something wonderful? Would they fabricate something not so wonderful? Would they fabricate a lovely state of whatever? ...

With the total non-existence of fabrications, from the cessation of fabrications, would consciousness be discernible?

So actually, he answers the first question: would they fabricate anything? No, they wouldn't. If there's no ignorance, no desire for sense pleasure, it's like that movement, that intention to build something doesn't -- it doesn't arise.

With the total non-existence of fabrications, from the cessation of fabrications, would consciousness be discernible?

Would it manifest? No. And then he says:

If consciousness isn't there, would nāmarūpa be there? [Would this be there? Would that be there? All the rest, up to] Would ageing and death be discernible?

No. And just kind of cutely at the end, he goes -- he takes them through all these questions, and they keep saying "No. No. No, lord. No, lord." And then he says:

Very good, monks. Just so should you construe it. Just so should you be convinced. Just so should you believe. Do not be doubtful; do not be uncertain. This, just this, is the end of suffering.^[9]

In other suttas, what he -- it's hard to find a sort of sense of what that is, this fading, this Unfabricated, this direct cognition. Another passage, he says:

If we neither will nor determine nor are occupied with anything [in other words, if we're not trying to make something, trying to build something, struggling with experience, trying to do this or that -- if that's totally and thoroughly not present, even at very subtle levels, then he says], there is no arising of an object [so this is this complete fading] for the persistence of consciousness [for the persistence of knowing objects]. There being no object, there is no foothold for consciousness.^[10]

Again, so consciousness kind of resting on an object -- it needs a support. I've got this book, which I haven't started reading, but it's absolutely massive and very encyclopedic and scholastic, so I'm keeping it in a corner. [laughs] But it's about different cultures, and specifically about the Dharma moving though different cultures. And I was just flicking through it, and one of the things it said is that the Indian culture, going back thousands of years, has a love of the negative formulation -- in other words, "not this, not that, it's not, not, not," which is actually shared with a lot of mystical traditions. And the Buddha is quite similar, actually coming from that culture, talks a lot in negatives about nirvāṇa, so it's "not this, not that, not, not, not." And I've used this quote too -- the Buddha says:

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

Now, that we can understand, actually, because language is basically, is resting on concepts of subject and object. And we have that as sort of grammatical structures -- "I did this. I am looking at this" -- and the notion of time. So when all that ceases, how are we going to even attempt to put that into language -- something completely beyond the conventional sort of ways of relating and thinking?

But he does occasionally do that, and he talks about, again, building and fabricating being a bit like painting a picture, painting a picture on a wall or a canvas with different colours, painting a picture of a man or a woman. And he says: "If there's no craving for things, no desire for contact, etc., then" -- this is quite interesting. He's beginning to speak in a more positive way. He says, "Just as if there were a roofed house" -- so imagine a house or a roofed hall -- "having windows on the north, the east, and the south." Okay, so it's square and three of the walls have windows. "When the sun rises in the east and a ray has entered by way of the window, where does it land?"

And I think it's Ānanda, and Ānanda says, "On the western wall."

And the Buddha says, "And if there is no western wall?"

"On the ground."

And the Buddha says, "And if there is no ground?"

"On the water." [laughter] I assume they're on an island or something here.

"And if there is no water?"

And then Ānanda says, "It does not land."

And the Buddha says, "In the same way, when there is no craving for things, no craving for consciousness, no craving for contact, no craving for intention" -- then you're not building something. You don't build an object. And "consciousness," he says, "does not land or grow. Consciousness does not land or grow. That, I tell you, has no sorrow, no affliction, no despair."^[12]

Yogi 2: Can I ask something? In the previous quote that you read ...

Rob: Yes, which one was that?

Yogi 2: One of his questions was, "Would there be death?"

Rob: "Would it be discernible? Would death, would ageing and death be discernible or manifest?"

Yogi 2: Yeah, what does that mean, exactly?

Rob: It means, would -- well, it's a bit ... It's actually a big question. We could take -- depending on how you are with this whole future lives and past lives and rebirth, etc., it could mean there's no future rebirth, etc. It could mean that one has seen the emptiness of death, so that death is no longer a thing for consciousness. And so I'll leave that to you where you land with that. But this is a big question, and I actually don't really want to go into it.

There's another passage in the Saṃyutta Nikāya where the Buddha lists -- I think it's thirty-seven synonyms for nibbāna, which is quite interesting. And some, a lot of them are not so positive, but sometimes it's like, "the truth," "the subtle," "the very difficult to see," "the unmanifest," "the sublime," "the amazing."^[13] So this consciousness not landing, we could put it in other words. We say "consciousness without an object." What does that mean? Consciousness without an object. Again, we say "knowing," but without really knowing any thing in the conventional sense of things that we're used to knowing.

So again, if we say, "Even space is a knowing. Even nothingness is a knowing. Any time there's a sense of a present moment, there's a knowing," what does it mean for consciousness to be there, but it's not being bound, it's not wrapped up? Usually, consciousness or knowing is wrapped up in an object. It's wrapped up in knowing something in a time, the present moment. So I hear, I know the sounds, I know a sight, I know what I see, I know this or that. Consciousness and object and time wrapped up, as we talked about last night, in this kind of mutually bound together -- what is it for that to be unbound? Consciousness without an object. This way of putting it, the Buddha here is actually more positive. It's not just a "not this, not that, not, not, not" -- more positive. Not the same, as my teacher once -- actually, the first time I met him, I said, "Is that consciousness knowing itself?" And he glared at me and said, "No." [laughter] So something different -- it actually doesn't even know itself. It's completely unbound and released.

It's interesting, this thing about Indians and the Indian culture liking the negative, sort of "not, not, not," and the attraction of that for especially mystical language. As I mentioned one time, what happened when the Dharma moved to cultures like China and Japan, which are very non-transcendent cultures -- they have, on the whole, no interest in a kind of going beyond the senses. And any of this language would be very sort of anathema to that culture -- one of the reasons why Buddhism was very difficult for it to land there. So usually, that culture is much more about the sort of pristine directness of this phenomenon, the ephemeral touch of this thing or that thing. And there's real beauty in that as well. But there's one -- there are probably a few Zen teachers who actually go for this. It's quite rare in that tradition. And Huang Po is one of them. I absolutely love his teaching. But he's not a very popular Zen teacher, as far as I can tell, partly because he seems to be leaning in a different direction from most Zen teachers. But he has a very beautiful passage:

This Pure Mind [this knowing that doesn't know anything, we could say, this consciousness that doesn't know] ... the people of the world do not awake to it, regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows as mind [in other words, this mind that we call "mind" -- only that]. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of [that truth].

Again, note the word 'spiritual.' So it's not luminosity in the sense we were talking about, whenever it was.

Realize that, though Real Mind [though this mind] is expressed in these perceptions, it neither forms part of them nor is separate from them.^[14]

So even him, it's like he can't help but use the language of negatives, can't help but go to negatives, something so beyond the realm of conceptuality and conceiving.

Yogi 3: Could you read that again, please?

Rob: Yeah.

This Pure Mind ... the people of the world do not awake to it, regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows as mind. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing, they do not perceive the spiritual brilliance of that truth.

And later he says:

Realize that, though Real Mind is expressed in these perceptions, it neither forms part of them nor is separate from them.

Yogi 4: That's very different.

Rob: It's what?

Yogi 4: That's very different from what the description of the Buddha ...

Rob: Is it? Let's hear. I'll read a couple more of the Buddha, and see what you think. This is from the Buddha in the Pali Canon:

Consciousness without feature [a better way of translating that is 'non-manifestative consciousness' -- in other words, consciousness that's not manifesting an object], without boundary, luminous all around: here water, earth, fire, and air have no footing. Here long and short, coarse and fine, beautiful and ugly, name and form [again, the mental processes of perception, the perceptions of form] are all brought to an end. With the stopping of [the six sense consciousnesses], each is here brought to an end.^[15]

And there's another passage where it says almost exactly the same thing, but just, similar to the Huang Po, that very similar passage, but then he adds: "This partakes of nothing at all in the phenomenal world."^[16] It's not what knows this or that, so it's something else.

Yogi 5: Rob, I'm getting really confused.

Rob: Okay, let's take ...

Yogi 5: Can I ask a question?

Rob: Yeah, go ahead.

Yogi 5: I don't understand what the difference between non-manifesting consciousness, this pure mind, and -- I must have missed something. How is that different from, say, when you were talking the other night -- consciousness, non-dual consciousness?

Rob: Okay, the other night, we were talking about consciousness not having inherent existence. This is similar to Annie's question a little bit. We can talk about the true nature of things -- not having inherent existence. Now, typically, as human beings, we see things as having inherent existence -- so bodies, carpet, the whole, the whole shebang, including mind. When we start letting go and contemplating the actual emptiness of those things, then it's like something actually begins happening to our perceptions and consciousness. And one can arrive at a state that's a non-perceiving of the usual things. What I want to point out is, it's not different than this notion of objects fading when we begin to contemplate their emptiness, and it's just a spectrum of that fading. Does this ...?

One is, whether we see it or not, the quality, the fact of things is that they're empty of inherent existence. And then it's possible, when you actually start meditating on that, to kind of go into that emptiness, and that's what I'm talking about tonight. So one's a kind of fact -- whether I acknowledge it or not, it's just how things are, actually. And the other is what happens when I actually penetrate that meditatively. Yeah?

Yogi 5: Yeah, but it's like, when we were having these Dzogchen discussions, and it was like the consciousness is non-dual, so ...

Rob: Well, no. Consciousness, I would say, depends on an object.

Yogi 5: Well, I understand that. I went along with all that. But now you're saying that consciousness doesn't have to have an object.

Rob: But this now is a different, different kind of consciousness. Yeah, this is difficult, so I'm not at all pretending this is easy to understand. What we usually think of as consciousness always goes with an object: "I know something. I know this. I know that." And they go together and are mutually dependent. When I start contemplating that in meditation, the whole show begins collapsing and fading slowly. And one can arrive at a place where either you don't put any words to it at all -- now, a lot of people just do that. They just talk in negatives, just leave it. Sometimes the Buddha talks, and sometimes other people talk, in positives, in the sense of it is consciousness, but it's consciousness without an object. Now, as such, it's a very different -- same word, 'consciousness,' but it's a very different thing than the kind of consciousness that we're usually used to. It has no sense of time in it, no sense of an object, no sense of subject.

Yogi 5: Okay. So how is that, then, different from when they talk about non-dual consciousness?

Rob: Well, you have to remember, like we talked about, people use a lot of this language in different ways at different times. So like I said, someone would come, or I read ...

Yogi 5: Could be the same thing.

Rob: Could be, and it could be different. It could. It definitely could be the same thing. But you know, the other day I was reading about this guy rowing, and he said, "Yeah, opened up to the non-[dual awareness]." And it turned out, actually, all it was, as I said, he was just a little bit more present. So ...

Yogi 5: So the answer is find out for yourself?

Rob: Basically, yeah. And just be aware that people use -- language gets so tricky. Either we can just throw up our hands in the air and say, "Oh, pfft. You know, might as well go down the pub or whatever," or actually try and grapple with it. But be really aware that we have to be so, so sensitive to the subtleties of language and the implications, and the fact that, you know, I might say something and someone might understand something different, or they might mean something different.

Yogi 5: Yeah. Thanks.

Rob: Yeah, difficult, difficult.

Yogi 5: Okay, that's good, explained to me. Thank you.

Rob: Good, good. [laughter]

Yogi 6: Does Buddha make use of the term 'non-dual'?

Rob: Oy. The Pali Canon Buddha? [laughter] He uses the language of dualities that I can't dredge up exactly. But yes, at times, yeah. I can't exactly find what that is.^[17] More the language of dualities and what is based on dualities, and rather, not language of non-dual awareness, yeah, as far as I can tell. But in a way, when he puts things in positives, a little bit like this in the Pali Canon, that's a little bit what he's pointing to.

Here's another one, and this actually, for a different reason, is one of my favourites. And he says:

There, I declare, is no coming and no going, no stopping, no passing away, and no arising [in other words, in this state, in this dimension]. It is appatiṭṭhaṃ, without foundation. [It's not established. It doesn't have that support. With that] it has no object, anārammaṇaṃ [no support of a mental object. And then the thing I love about it:] It is appavattaṃ.^[18]

It means it doesn't continue. It doesn't continue. I think it's from the Sanskrit pravarta, something -- to continue in time; it's ongoing. It's not ongoing. What he's basically saying is, it doesn't exist in time in the way that it -- at that point, the sense of time is not, there's not a sense of this thing being an eternally lasting thing or even a momentary thing. It's just, it's ... Leave time out of it. Okay?

Yogi 7: There can't be time if there's no object.

Rob: Exactly, as we spoke about yesterday. Time is dependent on object, and so without object, there's no support for time. And so, in that dimension, whatever you want to call it, no subject, no object, no time -- not even the sense of a present moment as such. So not something eternal in the sense of lasting forever -- something quite different, of a quite different order is being pointed to and kind of invited here. So ...

Yogi 8: [?] [laughter]

Rob: It's okay, yeah. The night is young. [laughter]

Yogi 8: I was just thinking, you know, it is so different. And like you say, it's really not a dimension, so it's a transcendence?

Rob: I would use that word. And again, that's a word that's really not very popular any more. It's not very popular at all. And in fact -- some of you were there, actually -- I gave a talk at Sharpham nearby, and I can't remember what I titled it. I think it was called something like "Is this it? Or has transcendence gone out of fashion?"^[19] And it was basically exploring what has come to be our relationship with the notion of transcendence in the Dharma. We're at a very interesting juncture in the Dharma in the West right now because we have all these streams from different traditions around the world, plus our own kind of Western tradition of the way we relate to things. And what happens to notions like transcendence, I think, is very, very interesting because it actually has massive implications, massive. Like, it's not just this little intellectual curiosity about this word 'transcendence' or this kind of stuff. It actually has huge, real implications on the way people practise, and the way we think about practice, and what we're kind of directing our practice towards. I think, at a certain level, it's colossal.

Yogi 8: I didn't realize transcendence was so out of fashion. Somebody like Ken Wilber leads into that direction.

Rob: I don't know too much of his writings. I'm talking more about in the Dharma world as the sort of circles ...

Yogi 8: [?] ... Dharma, right?

Rob: Talking more about Insight Meditation tradition, yeah, and Zen traditions, and the sort of world that I guess I tend to move in. No, transcendence -- it's like, it will never go completely, totally be eradicated from human consciousness. There will always be something in human consciousness that yearns for the transcendent in some people. It will never die. It's something so deep in the being. And there will always be the opposite -- something in some people that rejects transcendence and moves towards just the phenomenal as being, you know ... And so, that's a kind of polarity that's always going to be there.

Yogi 9: When you say "transcendent," do you mean beyond the conventional ...?

Rob: Beyond conventional reality and beyond the perception of what we typically take as our world and the world of the six senses. Yeah, yeah. Okay? Now, the question becomes, at a certain point, what is the nature of this thing? What is this exactly? Does it kind of exist, or does it not exist? And again, to be really wary of this pre-deciding and this kind of pull one way or another.

So at some point, a monk asked Sāriputta, who was foremost in wisdom, second to the Buddha only in wisdom, and he says, "With the remainderless stopping and fading of the six sense spheres of contact" -- so, in other words, when all this fades -- "is it the case that there's anything else?" In other words, is something else there?

And Sāriputta says, "Don't say that. You can't really say that."

And he goes, "Okay, can we say that there's nothing, then -- that there's not anything else?"

And he says, "Don't say that either." [laughter]

So, in a very, very Indian philosophical fashion, he says, "Is it both there is something else and there isn't something else?"

And Sāriputta says, "Don't say that." [laughter]

And then he says, "Okay, is it neither that there is nor that there isn't something else?"

And he says, "Sorry, you can't say that either. To say any of those would be" -- he actually uses the word papañca -- "to papañc-ize, to complicate, to proliferate what is actually free from papañca, free from proliferation."^[20] In other words, again, the conceptual mind cannot go there and say it is or it isn't. It's beyond notions of existence and non-existence.

So, going right back to -- I think it was the first kind of introductory talk on emptiness in the first few days, and I said 'emptiness' is actually an adjective. It's actually an adjective in the sense that, strictly speaking, we say, "Some thing is empty." So this thing or that thing or consciousness or blah-di-blah-di-blah is empty. And as such, emptiness is relative to something. It depends on something. So as such, emptiness, too, is empty. I think John has touched on this with you. He's talked about the emptiness of emptiness, which actually isn't -- it's not like the final, you know, the final ... It's just actually saying something that we can say right away, that emptiness is actually an adjective, and as such, it always goes with some thing. It's always dependent on some thing that is empty. You know, without that thing being there, there's no emptiness of that thing. But still, for a practitioner, if there is this really deep fading, and it does go to that point or around that point, there's this total fading, I, like Sāriputta, one would, I feel, be really uninclined to say it exists or it doesn't, to say it has inherent existence or it doesn't. It's almost like there's something in there that you just are reluctant to say, or reluctant to rush in and say there is no Deathless, or it does or it doesn't or this or that. And again, going back to what I said earlier, it's one thing to sort of make statements about this without that degree of fading, and it's another thing to experience something and have that sense of really not wanting to make a verbal statement about something.

[1:01:47] This is a very charged area, this whole notion of transcendence and phenomenalism or whatever the opposite of transcendence is, immanence, and this whole notion of whether there is a Deathless, etc. It's actually very charged in the Dharma world. For 2,500 years, people have been butting heads about it, and they still do. There's a lot of sort of backbiting, and all kinds of stuff going on. But again, what I keep saying is, are you pre-deciding it? Are you pre-deciding it?

So one of my teachers, Ajaan Geoff, that I keep mentioning, he has a translation for nirvāṇa as 'unbinding,' which actually is a really, really skilful translation. It could be translated in a number of different ways. One is the kind of blowing out of a candle. Vāṇa is related to 'wind,' like vent. But unbinding, nirvāṇa -- something like, as I said, subject-object-time, bound together, and it's unbound. And then rather than saying, "It's this thing," you're talking about unbinding, which again is a negative. But it's the absence of the usual binding. At first -- this is sort of from speaking -- how to say this? It might well be the case that someone opening to this at first would take it as a kind of object. But still, I would say, that's an improvement over just deciding that there is no such thing when you're nowhere near experiencing it. Even to be near the experience and then take it as an object is still ... Do you understand what I'm saying?

Just to end, and to repeat something I said, the understanding is more important than the experience. The understanding is more important than the experience. There's a continuum of fading, and you can say it goes towards this Unfabricated. But it should, this fading should bring the understanding that all things are empty. It should bring this understanding that emptiness is the nature of all things. The lack of inherent existence is the nature of all things. And with that understanding, another quote from the Buddha -- he says someone who understands that is "free of conjuring." He is "conjuring-free."^[21] So it goes back to these references of it all being an illusion, like a magician's trick.^[22] Someone who's seen that or seen it to the degree that they're totally free (because you can see it and it frees to a certain extent), is "conjuring-free, does not submit to conjuring, does not submit to this cycling of time."^[23] So they're free of all -- you know, they know that this conjuring is going on, and they're not buying it.

Yogi 10: [?]

Rob: 'Conjuring' means to, like, make an illusion. To conjure, to make, like a magician making a trick.

Yogi 10: How do you spell that?

Rob: C-o-n-j-u-r-e, 'conjure.' So what that means -- the understanding is more important than the experience -- it means for us all in this room that all this practice that we're doing is good. And actually, to go right back to the beginning of the talk, all that width of practice and wherever, whatever it is that's -- so I'm aware, I give a talk like this, and for some people they think, "That's not really interesting to me. Pffft, you know, I don't know. It doesn't ... It doesn't ..." And that's totally fine. It sounds, like, not only not interesting, it might even sound like, "Actually, it sounds horrible. I don't want to go anywhere near it." All of that range of practice is good. All of it's beautiful. And if we talk about understanding emptiness, any level of the emptiness seen is good.

So, you know, one might see, "Oh, I feel trapped in this relationship or this job situation." And then I see, actually -- going back to stuff we've talked about -- "Here's the mind, connecting those dots and sticking them all together in something solid." And then I see, "Oh, it doesn't have that solidity that it seems to." That's understanding emptiness at a certain level. And that's wonderful, lovely. And there's the possibility of developing, developing and deepening that understanding. All this, all the cultivation we do, all the samādhi, all the insights into all kinds of stuff, all the insights into emptiness, and the deepening and deepening of that -- all of them, the whole path is in the service of being able to let go. That's what it's all for. So in different ways, the cultivation, the samādhi, the insights, the emptiness insights -- all of that bring the capacity to let go. They feed and nourish the capacity to let go. And out of that comes freedom and comes also love. So all of this is in the service of freedom and love. And it's all available to us as practitioners. It's all kind of there as this offering for us.

Okay. So let's have some quiet together.